The Girl in Green Page 8

  He turned down the volume on the television, but didn’t turn it off as he took the call.

  ‘Hello?’ he said.

  ‘Did you see her?’ said a voice that was not Charlotte’s. It was a man’s voice.

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Come on, Ferris. Who do you think it is?’

  ‘Arwood?’

  ‘Did you see her?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘It was live on Al Jazeera five hours ago, then it was picked up by everyone. It’s on the Web. BBC, CNN, MSNBC. It’ll be on The Daily Show if anyone at the White House says something stupid enough about it. They’re playing it over and over on the news. The clip is too good not to show. You haven’t seen her?’

  ‘No,’ Benton said. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘No need to wait for the loop. Al Jazeera has it on the website. It’s on YouTube, too. You know what that is, right?’

  ‘Arwood … Christ. I mean, it’s been—’

  ‘Benton, listen, OK? The video. I need you to see her.’

  Benton rubbed his eyes with his free hand. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t read the papers.’

  ‘The papers. That’s quaint.’

  ‘You know what I mean. How did you get this number?’

  ‘You live in the same place and have the same job. Go watch the video. I’ll call back in ten minutes.’

  ‘What am I looking for?’

  ‘I’d hate to ruin it. Type in “mortar attack, Kurdistan, green dress, today”. You can’t miss her.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Ten minutes.’

  Benton sat at his workstation PC, which was old and slow and black. He turned on the speakers, expanded the image until it filled the screen, and sat back to see what had summoned forth the voice of Arwood Hobbes from the silence of twenty-two years.

  He was right: it was easy to find.

  More often than not, when the topic and locale are the Middle East, the screen becomes beige. It is a world of earth tones and browns, harsh lighting and harsher angles. When the story turns to the troops — to the Americans, the Brits, to the Iraqi regiments, or the irregulars — they move like matching and replaceable figurines in their dull clothes and camouflage. When the story turns to civilian life, though, their distinctiveness and humanity bursts to the fore in a tapestry of colour.

  Because of this, the girl in green shone like an emerald against this pallid earth.

  A newswoman stood close to the camera. It was a bust shot. Behind her was a line of refugee women and their children. Three-quarters of all the people streaming out of Syria and heading for Iraq were women and children. More than half those fleeing the country were children. Al Jazeera was making a point of it, to its credit.

  The date was 20 September 2013.

  The refugees had formed an orderly queue. The camera frame did not extend to the front of the line, so Benton could not see what they were collecting. It might have been water or cooking oil. It was a liquid, anyway. They all had buckets, or empty water bottles, or cooking pots — anything that could hold whatever they’d be given. The girl, though … she stole the scene from the camera, in part because she never tried to. It was the way she stood apart from everything around her. Even the most alienated people on earth seemed removed from her.

  The eye had no choice but to welcome her in and become transfixed.

  She did not wear a headscarf. Her hair was not black. It was sandy blonde — her complexion that of an Australian surfer. She stood on the balls of her feet like a child, and bounced as though she were cold and waiting for a bus on Oxford Circus. She bounced to a rhythm that was produced by a force deeper than her own heart. Her posture was unselfconscious. She stood as though unseen and unseeable. In this way, she captured the attention of the world for almost twenty whole seconds while performing the most fundamental of civilised acts: she waited her turn.

  That was when the mortar landed.

  Someone less familiar with acts of war might have missed it, but Benton’s eye was attuned. The presenter was standing in the right third of the screen. The girl in green was in the left third in the upper quadrant, and the mortar came down in almost the dead centre of the viewing frame.

  A mortar explosion is no larger than an IED, or an unexploded cluster bomb, or an anti-personnel landmine. But unlike the others, the mortar comes from above, and if the angle is right and the frames-per-second of the video are fast enough, you can see it drop. The Zapruder film that caught Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 ran at 18.3 frames per second. An iPhone runs at thirty frames per second. This one was at least that fast, and made it possible for Benton to see the thin black line drop from the sky.

  A falling mortar sounds like a small dropping bomb, which is what it is: the sound falling and the pitch dropping, like an ambulance pulling away and out of sight. We whistle the sound as children. SS … ssss … ssssss … boom. This is because Western children imagine themselves above the bomb.

  From below, it sounds very different. The air compresses. The bomb becomes louder and the pitch higher until the moment of detonation. BOOM. If you have heard it before and survived, you are primed to hear it again, at any provocation, for the rest of your life. And Benton was primed to hear it.

  There was a small flash before the audible explosion caused by the mortar landing on dirt. The dust kicked up into the blue sky, and smoke filled the screen. The girl — whatever might have happened to her — was obstructed by the debris. The film ran for forty-eight seconds.

  He watched it again.

  And again.

  And again.

  He learned the exact moment in the film when he could see her face most clearly. He paused it there. He leaned in to the screen. He stared at her. He stared at her until the phone rang again.

  Benton answered on the second ring. He didn’t say anything.

  ‘Are you looking at her?’ the voice said.

  ‘Yes,’ Benton said.

  ‘Miraculous, isn’t it?’ Arwood said.

  ‘It’s an uncanny resemblance.’

  ‘Is that what we’re calling it?’

  ‘She died in your arms.’

  ‘Yes, she did.’

  ‘It was twenty-two years ago. She was fourteen or fifteen. She’d be thirty-seven years old now if she were still alive, which she isn’t, because she died in your arms, and no one knows that better than you do.’

  ‘The dead don’t age.’

  ‘This isn’t the same girl. You know that.’

  ‘They’re saying the Kurds did it. The attack. It’s turning public opinion away from them. Plus Barzani’s been killing people, and the Kurds are infighting, and maybe this is the moment to pull back on some support.’

  ‘Who’s saying that?’

  ‘The news reports. You’re in the news business. You don’t know this?’

  ‘I’m off today.’

  ‘You don’t watch the news?’

  ‘I’m more relaxed when I don’t.’

  ‘They’re saying the Kurds are attacking the Syrian refugees coming into Kurdistan. This is their proof.’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense. The Kurds have no motive for that. It’s also not their MO.’

  ‘There’s a flight to Baghdad from Heathrow in twelve hours. You transit through Vienna. I’ve already bought you a ticket — business class. Pick it up at the counter. I assume your office can arrange the visa.’

  ‘Arwood, it wasn’t her. It was an unfortunate girl who looks like the girl from ’91.’

  ‘It was even the same dress.’

  ‘A lot of girls wear green.’

  ‘Personally, I think it was al-Qaeda,’ Arwood said. ‘I think they did it to pin it on the Kurds, undermine support, turn northern Iraq into a soft target. It would be helpful if a journalist were
to cover it.’

  ‘Arwood, listen,’ Benton said, sitting back from his computer. ‘Even if I boarded that flight, we couldn’t be there for three or four days, at best. I have to get to London, to Vienna, to Baghdad, transfer planes, make my way to the camp, and together we have to get to the site. She either died in the attack itself, was wounded and died later, was wounded and was carried off by others, or suffered one of the other horrible fates that befall children and young women over there.’

  ‘Come on, Ferris. Where’s that fighting British spirit?’

  ‘This story won’t even exist in twenty-four hours, and by the time we answer the question of who actually did it, a thousand other distractions and stories will have taken over. The fact of Kurdish responsibility will have worked its way into the popular imagination, and there’s no backpeddling in a culture with no interest in the past. We’d risk our lives in Iraq for a Twitter feed.’

  ‘Here’s an idea,’ said Arwood. ‘How about we set things right because we want to? Forget the big picture. You come over, cover the story, we visit the site, we go home. And for what it’s worth, I think she’s alive.’

  ‘You want us to go there? To Iraq?’

  ‘Benton, we never left. Don’t you realise that? Gulf War, Operations Provide Comfort, Northern and Southern Watch, Iraqi Freedom, and New Dawn. There has not been a day since ’91 we haven’t been in Iraq. Not a day. So, yeah, Iraq. That’s where the party is. Also, I think you owe me. I think you were planning to go into Samawah, and you got me to think it was my idea. Right?’

  Benton did not answer quickly enough, though he had had plenty of time to think about it. Arwood took this for the answer it was.

  ‘The thing is, Benton, I now understand that going in was the right thing to do anyway. You had to go. It just didn’t turn out well. You still owe me, though. So how ’bout you be a stand-up guy, get over here, file an interesting story for your newspaper, and just maybe we set things right and save that girl’s life? I mean, why not? You busy?’

  ‘Iraq feels very far away from where I’m sitting,’ Benton said.

  ‘You’re a war reporter with thirty years on the road. This is nothing more than another flight and another drive in the desert — nothing you haven’t done a hundred times before. I’ve followed your career. How about you retire with a bang?’

  ‘All right,’ Benton said. ‘I’ll come, but not because I believe it’s the same girl or that she’s alive.’ And as an afterthought, he added, ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m already here, man. I’m in Dohuk. I’m already here.’

  10

  Benton walks back from the football pitch to the prefabricated container that has been set up by the International Refugee Support Group as a satellite office in this section of the camp. For a few steps, he accompanies the long line of women in their evening procession to the nearby town where they collect water, night after night.

  The refugee camp was outfitted for fifteen thousand people. It is now home to more than fifty thousand. By day, the bright blue-and-white tents undulate and glimmer in the intense and cloudless sky south-west of Dohuk. Beige and brown stone buildings squat low and solid on dirt roads. It is remarkably flat here. The sky is enormous. Children are everywhere.

  Following a small path between tents, he passes women who are busy cooking, cleaning, stacking, carrying, organising, and talking through events with other women, building local strategies to survive. The men, though — who knows what the men are doing all day? Complaining, mostly. Arguing in the way that fish in a bowl might debate the future of the seas. They cannot accept being helpless. Deals are being struck. Lies are being told. Hope is placed on a hook as thin as breath, and in their desperation men bite for it. Still, the camp is calm. Neat, if not clean. Beneath it, in the talk and whispers and the meetings, a new future is being negotiated, but Benton knows the outside world is deaf to it.

  Benton finds the IRSG container easily enough. It is where Arwood said to meet. It has a flimsy steel door on hinges, two windows on the side, and two wooden steps leading up as in a trailer without wheels in a park. The IRSG logo is stencilled in orange on the door.

  There is no obvious reason to do so, but Benton knocks. He hears a chair immediately scrape across the plastic floorboards, and then heavy feet advance to the door.

  The latch turns, and the door opens. A hand is extended from a man with a familiar smile but different eyes.

  ‘Twenty years,’ Arwood Hobbes says.

  ‘Twenty-two,’ Thomas Benton says.

  ‘Still punctual,’ Arwood says.

  ‘I’ve been told I’m incapable of change.’

  ‘Come on in.’

  Benton releases Arwood’s grip and steps into the office. It is a spartan place, with a sheet-metal desk and a black office chair, and facing the desk are two folding chairs for visitors. A round meeting table sits in the middle, surrounded by bright-orange plastic chairs. There is a public relations calendar set onto the wall, but it is too small to adorn it. Below, a bright-orange power cable runs along the edge of the back wall with three outlets, and each one contains an extension. An expensive uninterrupted power-supply unit, which could power the computer and peripherals for hours if the electricity went off, runs under the desk.

  On the wall to his right, across from the desk, is a UN High Commissioner for Refugees map of the region, a map of the camp, and various printouts from the UN Mine Action Service with indications of unexploded and abandoned ordnance. Arrows and circles have been drawn all over them. On the far wall, across from the entrance, are a few posters from the NGO itself. Discreetly, someone has also pinned up a Dilbert cartoon strip with Catbert shouting, ‘It’s not in the budget!’

  ‘Nescafé?’ Arwood asks, starting a white kettle with an orange button.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘A lifetime, right?’ Arwood says, opening two brown tubes containing instant coffee mix, and looking in the drawers for some creamer and sugar.

  ‘At least the one.’

  Arwood puts his feet up on the desk like a colonial magistrate bored with the natives. ‘Look at you, all here in Iraq and shit. Was it something I said?’

  ‘How’ve you been?’

  ‘It’s like Joe Walsh said, “I can’t complain, but sometimes I still do.”’

  ‘Not even a hint?’

  ‘No wife, if that’s what you mean,’ he says. ‘Had a three-year relationship with a nice girl named Rebecca when I was in my thirties. That’s long over. No kids. I never really settled into a normal life. I did join the Columbia Record and Tape Club. You know, where they send you a selection every month and you need to say no to it if you don’t want to pay? I never said no. Never paid them either, come to think of it. That was kind of normal, kind of Everyman Americana. Then I joined Alcoholics Anonymous, where you need to say no to drinking when people give you drinks. Never said no to that either. I liked the meetings, though. I liked to introduce myself by saying it’d been eighteen minutes since my last drink. The tight-arses got pissed off, but other people laughed, and the girls wanted to be near me just to smell my breath. Happy times.’

  ‘You look OK,’ Benton says.

  The kettle pops sooner than Benton would have suspected, and he takes that to mean the water was already hot. Arwood must have been a few cups into his stay here already.

  ‘Time will tell,’ Arwood says, then smiles. Benton smiles, too.

  Arwood was twenty-two when they last met. He’s in his mid-forties now. His face remains boyish, but he carries the years in his eyes. He is still lean. His body is taut. It is not the body of someone who drinks and smokes all day.

  ‘So how is it we’re getting to use this space?’ Benton finally says.

  ‘I know the programme manager. She’s an old friend of mine. We have a free run of it. These are our digs until we make the flatlands out in Ninawa tomorr
ow.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Not telling. Not yet. It’s my only good surprise.’

  Arwood hands Benton a coffee. Across his left knuckles is the word LESS.

  ‘Tattoo.’

  ‘Oh, this? Yeah. My first was ‘Death Before Dishonour’ — put that on my shoulder when I joined the army in 1989. But then, you know, I came back from Desert Storm not dead, and all dishonourabilised.’ Arwood makes two fists, and puts them next to one another for Benton to admire. His knuckles are cracked from the dry air. They say MORE and LESS.

  ‘You like them? I think they make a good matching set.’

  The tattoos are in a serif typeface. They have faded, as though the concepts themselves have been overused.

  Benton uses a white plastic teaspoon to take sugar from a kilo sack, and stirs it into his mug. ‘I’ve seen GOOD and EVIL,’ he says, ‘and LOVE and HATE. Never those.’

  ‘Yeah, well … I know what these mean,’ Arwood says.

  The Nescafé is hot, and tastes the same as it does everywhere else, which is its virtue.

  ‘So there was this other guy in the tattoo parlour at the time,’ Arwood continues. ‘Same deal. Across the knuckles. Guess what his said? YOUR NEXT. Can you believe it? What an arsehole. Didn’t even spell it right.’

  Night falls beyond the shatter-resistant windows like a carnival shutting down. It is best not to be out at night. Teenagers have nothing to do here. These are the world’s newest street-corner societies. This is when it gets dangerous: when something new is being formed.

  Arwood takes a cigarette from a soft pack. He taps it a few times on the table, and lights it as though it should have been lit already.

  ‘I’ve got a car and driver,’ he says, leaning the plastic chair back so it is now on two legs. ‘A local kid named Jamal. Works for the IRSG. They’re gonna loan him to us for the one ride — there and back. I figure we top him up a hundred bucks, and make it worth his while. It’s a week’s wage around here, if you’re lucky. There are only one or two stops to make.’