Authors: Sam Baker
‘Turn it up,’ someone shouted, and the Iraqi behind the bar obliged.
On the screen was a photograph of a small boy, so beautiful and so serene.
His eyes were closed and he was curled as if in sleep, a plastic toy in his hand. There was no sign of the talking head now, but he could still be heard, explaining how I took the shot in the immediate aftermath of a car bomb. The photograph faded to be replaced by another shot. The boy from behind. Because the newsfeed was neither British nor American the shot was not pixelated; the back of his skull pierced by shrapnel, a little of his brains lay in the dirt. The things you didn’t see from the front. Then a third shot, the photograph I took of the boy on my way into the quarter, my hair hidden by the headscarf my companion provided, my T-shirt under a maid’s dress borrowed from the hotel.
The boy sat on a ruined doorstep half in sunlight, half in shadow, squinting shyly at the camera and holding out his red Power Ranger.
By the time the major stormed into the bar tears were streaming down my face. At the sight of a woman crying he stopped, appalled. Just as quickly he regrouped. ‘You,’ he said unnecessarily, pointing at me. ‘We need to talk.’
When I returned fifteen minutes later, the others were talking quietly, the Iraqi barman had changed channels and Art was still at the bar, where I’d left him, at the bottom of his third beer bottle.
I almost didn’t go back to the bar, to be honest. Many times since I’ve wondered how things might have turned out if I hadn’t. If I had just done what the major ordered me to do, gone to my room and packed. Instead I decided to get blind drunk. I had my picture, I had my story and I was being shipped out of there in the morning. Tonight I could do what the hell I wanted. And I already had an idea what that might involve.
‘You could have ruined everything,’ Art said conversationally, indicating the empty stool next to him. His hair was even more tufty, like he’d been raking his hands through it as he digested the news.
‘They’re not shipping you out,’ I scoffed, taking my first gulp of the beer he’d just handed me. ‘Only the bad girl.’
‘But they could have done,’ he said. ‘Come on, Lawrence. You know this game only works if everyone plays by the rules. What you did—’
‘I got the story, is what I did. Isn’t that why we’re here? You think your uniformed friends are going to give you anything that isn’t homogenised, sanitised and hand-delivered?’
For a second a shadow crossed his face, hooding his eyes. I recognised it suddenly for the look I’d seen in London eight years earlier. Although I didn’t realise it then, it was one I was to see many times in the future.
Then it passed. His brown eyes softened, tiny lines radiating outwards where the skin was slightly lighter from his sunglasses.
‘Too true, Lawrence,’ Art said. Grinning, he drained his bottle and signalled for two more, even though I’d barely started mine. ‘But then, from what I remember, you never were much of a team player, were you?’
I frowned.
‘Admiral Duncan?’ His smile dropped slightly.
‘What a memory,’ I said. ‘I didn’t recognise you until this morning.’
He looked taken aback, but let it pass.
We talked all evening. It was one of those nights when one beer turns to five and seven o’clock turns to midnight in the blink of an eye.
There didn’t seem to be anything we couldn’t talk about. Art seemed interested in me. More interested than anyone had been in a long time. And the result was intoxicating. I found myself telling him things I hadn’t told anyone since Tom. Stupid things, significant things, tiny details. He knew quite a lot about me already, as it turned out, could name several of my pictures, knew what I’d been doing since that night at the Admiral Duncan. His irritation at my insistence that I hadn’t immediately been able to place him passed as quickly as it flared.
It was as if he’d taken off his other self – the competitive, angry, brooding, resentful one – with his flak jacket. This was the real him, I decided. The one under the reporter’s armour. He was divorced, he said. He’d met his wife at university, they’d split up, got back together, there’d been others for both of them, and then she’d got pregnant and they married. He was twenty-five and she was twenty-four, his daughter was fourteen, almost fifteen, his son twelve. The kids lived with their mum. He didn’t see them as often as he should. He gave me an abashed look and told me he knew what I’d think of that.
‘That marriage was a mistake from day one,’ he told me. ‘That’s not just me saying that. Angie would agree. Well, maybe day two. Textbook fuck-up. So here I am, nearly forty, two kids, one ex-wife and maintenanced up to my eyeballs. How about you?’
I shrugged. ‘No kids. No ex. No maintenance.’
‘Come on, Lawrence,’ he snorted. ‘No one? Don’t give me that! There must be a trail of broken-hearts in your sordid past.’
I laughed. ‘Not really. Nothing serious. Not for a long time, anyway. Ever since then, ever since I picked up my first camera, I’ve been married to that.’
‘Know what you mean,’ he said. ‘Sometimes there just isn’t room in one life for two great loves.’ He paused, eyes locking on mine. ‘Or that’s what I used to think …’
Somewhere between the beer and the vodka, the bar emptied and Art and I moved to a booth. Around about the fourth vodka I noticed his hand had slipped from the shelf of the banquette and was resting lightly on my back. Somehow it had found its way under my shirt. I had no interest in removing it. It was hardly professional, but I was leaving in the morning and since we hadn’t found ourselves assigned to the same city before, it was unlikely we would again. It had been a while and I was lonely. I needed to lose myself in someone else’s body. And I’d decided that body would be Art’s.
There was another reason, too. I didn’t want to sleep, and I certainly didn’t want to sleep alone, because I knew every time I closed my eyes I would see a small boy, huge brown eyes staring at me. In his hand a red plastic Power Ranger.
It was gone midnight when the barman started turning off the lights around us. Art got up, tugging me with him, and led me towards the lift.
‘Uh-uh,’ I said, heading towards the stairs instead. ‘I don’t want to be stuck in a brown-out with you.’ He followed me into the stairwell, letting the door clang shut behind us. The silence was absolute.
‘Really, Lawrence?’ he said, his whisper echoing off concrete. ‘I can think of worse things.’
‘Helen.’ It came out almost a gasp. My cover, such as it was, blown. ‘Not Lawrence. Helen.’
‘Helen?’ His face collapsed into a smile. It was, I realised, the first time I’d seen him really smile.
I let him manoeuvre me into the corner behind the door, so our bodies were wedging it shut. Not that we were likely to be interrupted. Vodka coursed in my veins and all I could feel was the heat of his fingers through the thin cotton of my shirt as he clasped my arm; firm, proprietorial. His physical proximity. Taller by five or six inches. Broader. Warm, strangely. That was my overriding impression. Heat. Then he put his other hand on my other arm, pinning me to the wall, and stepped in close.
He dipped forward, brushing his lips against mine, his breath hot on my face. ‘I can think of worse things. Lots of them.’ When I didn’t resist he moved back in, his lips harder now, his tongue easing my mouth open as his hand grazed my nipple.
‘Like what?’ I managed, feeling my body make its decision long before my brain.
‘Come and get in the lift,’ he said, releasing his grip slightly, my skin still prickling under his touch. ‘And I’ll show you.’
When I woke the next morning, sun blazing through half-open curtains, head pounding and my mobile vibrating relentlessly on the desk to tell me the taxi for the airport was waiting downstairs, Art was long gone. Fifteen minutes later, so was I. I can’t honestly say I expected to hear from him again. One-nighters weren’t a frequent occurrence. But they had happened before, and part of me expected this one to follow the usual pattern.
One long, steamy night thousands of miles from home.
A memory, for when the need arose. Another part of me hoped it might be more. I was thirty and there’d been no one who mattered in over ten years. No one, really, since Tom, my first and last almost serious boyfriend. As my family never tired of reminding me. So when Art called a fortnight later and invited me for a Friday-night drink that turned into two that turned into dinner that turned into a whole weekend, we fell into a routine.
It wasn’t what my sister would have called a relationship, at least not at first, but it worked for us. We were both away a lot, we both had our own places (although Art was always on at me to move in with him), but when we were both in London, we were a couple.
London 2010
For the first couple of years everything seemed fine. We were successful, we were in love, we were greater than the sum of our parts, as Art never stopped telling me. We were golden. My career, which had been on the up before Iraq, went stratospheric. I had more commissions than I could cope with and the awards came thick and fast. Art had had his moment several years earlier in Afghanistan, but still, he was enough of a name for it not to be a problem.
Or so I told myself.
The pregnancy changed everything.
I was sick as a dog the whole time I was in Haiti. In itself the nausea wasn’t that odd. It had been coming in waves like a migraine’s outriders since Iraq. So much so, I’d been put on medication that wiped me out almost as much as the attacks themselves. But this felt like more than that. On my way back through Heathrow, I bought four pregnancy tests in Boots and went straight to the Ladies in Arrivals. But once there, with the packet in my hand and my knickers round my ankles, I couldn’t face it.
Instead, I stopped for a long overdue skinny latte in the Starbucks round the corner from my flat, and peeled the foil from one in the loos there. As I hovered over the bowl, I hesitated and looked around me. Not here. The floor was slightly sticky and the basin needed wiping. Do it at home. Talk about delaying tactics.
That was why the first one gave a false positive, I told myself. Carrying it home in my coat pocket, it had become contaminated. The second one? Well, it might have been faulty. I knew it wasn’t. Just as I knew the first one wasn’t contaminated. I was pregnant and I didn’t need a test to tell me. But still I did another, just to be safe; to try to convince myself that what I already knew to be true was a lie. No, not a lie, simply a mistake.
‘I don’t know how it happened …’
I tried the words aloud for Art, my voice puzzled, a little shocked, almost apologetic. I don’t know how it happened …
It was true; I didn’t know how it had happened. We’d stopped using condoms years ago and, thanks to our schedules, hadn’t seen each other for a couple of months. But it was his, no question. I hadn’t slept with anyone else since we’d met, and the last time we had sex I’d had a migraine the day after and must have thrown up my pill. Thanks to the migraines, I was always throwing up.
It didn’t help that we’d argued just before he left. I’d been setting up a small exhibition at a gallery in Shoreditch, my first. Art had been sent to Afghanistan to cover the elections and wanted me to go to Heathrow to see him off. I thought it was obvious why I couldn’t. He thought the only thing that was obvious was how selfish I was. ‘I thought we were supposed to be a team.’ Those were the last words he said before he slammed the door.
Then Haiti had happened and a week later I’d been on a plane out myself.
Art’s emails, usually frequent, were infrequent in the weeks we were away. The few there were, were cold and brittle. My replies were friendly at first, coaxing and cajoling, and then cool and finally as terse as his. Until he wrong-footed me by sending me an essay he’d written on refugees. There was no indication who it was for and I wondered if it was on spec, something the agency had suggested he do. I made as many suggestions as I dared, said how much I liked it, how unlike his other pieces it was, but how I’d really liked those too, and got an email almost by return saying he was flying home at the weekend and was looking forward to seeing me.
Would I be back by then too?
Did I mind coming to his? he added. He’d probably need a bath, a shave and long sleep, but then I would too. He didn’t mind where he was so long as he saw me.
‘Your place is fine,’ I replied, adding more xxxx after the H than I’d done in a while, already suspecting I was pregnant and wondering too late whether it was safer to have this conversation on home territory or neutral ground? Maybe, for something like this, I should have suggested we meet in Antonio’s, the Italian place in Soho we used to go to in the beginning. Art’s concession to my intolerance of the scene at whichever restaurant was of the moment this month, and the way his cronies at the Groucho Club slapped him on the back and looked right through me, unless I dressed up, in which case it wasn’t my opinions or talent as a photographer that drew their attention.
‘Your face,’ Art would say, half-affectionate, half-mocking.
‘They’re important,’ he’d add occasionally. ‘They can help you.’
I just grimaced. Said nothing. I’d helped myself this far. I didn’t need their help now.
The problem was, I knew that if I suggested he drop off his luggage and come on to Antonio’s, Art was more than capable of suggesting we go to the Groucho instead. So Art’s flat it was.