Burridge Unbound (34 page)

I scream and Nito yells something a split second later, an animal shriek.
How did Velios get up here?
For a moment I’m stuck with the thought.
It should’ve been me
. I drop the flashlight and kick it in my confusion and it goes out, I have to feel on my hands and knees, crash into things, I can’t control anything now.
Breathe, breathe
. But I can’t, I have to get the flashlight first. Nito searches beside me, curses in Kuantij. Then I’ve got it again, turn it on, and hold it still with every muscle in my body. This beam carving in the darkness, as if we’re in a cave a thousand feet underground, everything not in the beam lost in irrevocable night. Nito walks towards the bathroom reluctantly, his limbs stiff with fear. There’s the body. No garbage bags. Why did they put Velios back into clothes? All this blood pooling in the bathroom.

Then Nito kneels, turns the body face up. It isn’t Velios. It’s Dorut Kul. The back half of his head has been blown off and something – brains? – are clumped in the blood on the floor.

I fight my nausea, step to the closet with the flashlight, leaving Nito for a moment in the dark with the body of Dorut Kul. There’s my suit jacket still hanging, untouched. Thank God! I reach in the sleeve – nothing. In the other sleeve …

“Come on! Let’s get out of here. Come on!” I yell, shining back on Nito, his face struck with horror.
“Now! Come on!”
I yell.

Out the door, down the stairs, two at a time, three and four, the light bouncing crazily off the walls, this endless, oven-hot
stairwell. They killed Dorut Kul. They took the video and the transcript. Savages. Bloody savages. I bash my knee against a post and then I trip, roll for a moment then right myself, keep going. Nito runs behind me. They shot Dorut Kul right in my bathroom. Because of what was on the video. They would’ve shot me. Yes? If I’d been there. No – they sent me out to Welanto to deal with the body of the boy they’re calling Velios. They did it to get me out of my room. So they could shoot Dorut Kul.

Slow, I think – slow. Your heart can’t take this. It’s too much. Everywhere I turn, nightmare. They shot Dorut Kul. Right in my fucking bathroom. Executed him and stole the video. It must be Sin Vello. He sent me out to Welanto then never showed up. Forever and ever these stairs, hot, airless, black as hell. Down and down and down, this one flimsy light with its narrow beam, bouncing.

Ground floor finally, no time to think, don’t
want
to think. “Car!” I yell at Nito, like a loud American tourist.
“CAR! GO!”
And I turn my hands as if on a steering wheel, make honking gestures and noises. I do know the right word but I can’t access it now, everything has to be dead simple or my mind is going to melt. He runs off and I wait, gasping, in suspended animation, a portrait of panic but with nowhere to go, nothing to do but wait for the car. What car? Where’s Nito supposed to get one at this time of night? I’ve no idea, but he must find one. There’s nothing else that can happen. I will it with every nerve in my body.

“What’s happening?” asks someone in the shadows. Sleepily, in casual English. It’s the older, grey-beard journalist, getting up from a couch in the lobby, his suit wrinkled. “What the fuck?” he says when he sees me.

“Do you have a car?”

“What’s happened to you?”

“Do
you have a car?”

“Are you hurt?”

“Answer my question or I’ll break your fucking neck. Do you have a car?”

Shakily: “I rented one. Yes.”

“Then give me the keys.”

“You have tell me what’s–”

“Give me the fucking keys!”

I’m in my cat stance. In two seconds if he doesn’t move I’m going to–

He hands over the keys.

“Where’s the car?”

He stands rooted, dumbfounded, till I bark at him,
“Take me there. Go!”

His feet lurch and I kick him in the back of the leg – a poor kick at that, off-balance, barely glancing him – but he whines like a frightened dog and hurries along uncertainly, my light illuminating just a few feet ahead of him. I don’t know what I’ve become but it’s something low to the ground, pure instinct and adrenaline, crouching in that murky space between killing and being killed. I haven’t room for thinking where we’re going, just for trusting that we’ll get there. My eyes on the light, on every step of his weathered shoes. No room for extra thought, for anything I can’t use.

The next thing I know, I’m in the car, driving in the predawn, alone. It’s been ages since I’ve driven myself, but my body knows, if I just surrender to it, submerge, it’s fine. But I can’t remember getting in the car. I don’t know what I did with the journalist. The flashlight bounces in the seat beside me.

Too fast. The sky lighter, a greyish tinge, another sunrise in
hell and I don’t know where I’m going. But I do. I’ve been there. I wasn’t paying attention but my body’s been there so it knows. If I just shut down my brain, think with my body. That animal in me that knows what to do. Life on this side and death on the other. Time immemorial. Part of me knows what it’s doing.

Again, no memory. Each moment passing one to the next but nothing sticks. But here’s the Pink Palace. I knew I could make it. I get out of the car, walk to the soldier at the gate.

“Commisi vertigas
, Bill Boo-reej! Suli Nylioko!” I yell.

An
AK
-47 levelled at my chest.

“Commisi vertigas
, Bill Boo-reej! Suli Nylioko!”

If I move like a flash I could bat away his weapon and break his neck. I know the move exactly. He’s suspicious, but scared too. The blood on my clothes. He knows who I am, but I’m not acting as he expects.

“Commisi vertigas
, Bill Boo-reej! Suli Nylioko!” I jump up and down. He’s either going to shoot me or let me in.

I want him to kill me. I’ll die with my hands on his throat. Come on!

“Commisi vertigas
, Bill Boo-reej! Suli!”

Either way it’s the same to me. I’m way over the edge. Fuses blown, kill or be killed. This is blood on my hands. My clothes reek of decaying corpses. They’re piling up. One of them should’ve been me.

“Commisi vertigas!”

I am just about to move. One lunge forward then that’s it. The soldier takes a step back. How does he know? As soon as his foot starts to move I’m nearly overcome with the need to crack him. That first sign of retreat. Why don’t I move? His eyes look away. Just for a moment. He’s lost. I know it. If I just stand still, don’t move a muscle, I’ve won.

It feels like the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I want to crack him. I want him to have to shoot me. Put me out of my misery.

Breathe and breathe and breathe.
I
love you too. Don’t really know what I think about that
.

Don’t really know.

He phones, comes back out of his little hut, his weapon still pointed, left hand patting the air as if trying to get a pit bull to calm down. Talking to me now in Kuantij, soothing words I guess.
Wait, wait
, he says. I don’t want to wait. I want to crack him so that he has to shoot me.

But I don’t move, just stand in my cat stance, left foot forward a bit, weightless, hands relaxed but ready by my waist. I could probably step and grab the gun right out of his hands. Then what?

Then what?

Several more soldiers arrive. They walk slowly, calmly, like men approaching a bomb. Their hands pat down on the air as well, silently soothing the beast. I hear myself snarl, feel the hair stand on the back of my neck. I can’t see them all clearly, but sense their movement, some behind me, outside my peripheral vision.

The first touch I’m going to explode.

But they don’t touch. It’s gentle phrases in Kuantij, with Suli’s name sprinkled throughout. She’s the one I need to talk to.

Their gentle sounds and my snarls. I want to lash out. I want to go down breaking someone. It’s the one thing I never did with the Kartouf, it would’ve changed everything. They would’ve killed me early. I would never have had to go through all this shit.

I love you too
.

I wouldn’t have–

Someone moves and I lunge and the blow to the side of my head doesn’t kill me. I have this distinct thought as I fall – I’m not dead. They hit me but I’m not dead.

F
rom far down the road I see Patrick running, chasing a red Chinese dragon kite so elaborate I wonder for a moment who possibly could’ve made it. It dips and swirls with the wind, swoops down, its magnificent head so well engineered that the jaws swing open as they get closer to the boy. He runs, laughing at the jaws, which do look funny in a way, gaping open and lurching, the tongue dangling out, hiding the teeth. From where I’m sitting I can see him perfectly, far better than I want to: the way his legs scissor forward, the ragged mop of hair, the undone shoelace, his hands grasping the string that isn’t restraining the kite at all. No, the dragon is well ahead of the string, swooping down on my boy, who isn’t watching properly, he never does – crossing the road, riding his bike, he doesn’t pay proper attention.

He doesn’t even see me. I look his way, but I’m in a strange position. I can’t yell out, he’d never hear me, and I can’t raise my hand, I don’t know why. I just can’t. And it gets hard to hold him in view. One moment he’s racing just ahead of his dragon kite and then when I look again …

When I look again he isn’t there. I wait, because Patrick and the dragon should come into view. I’m moving and they’re moving, it’s a matter of angles. Soon enough they should come into view again. But they don’t, and I have that sickening feeling. As I round the corner they should come back in view.

But nothing.

Nothing.

Slowly I fade back into this version of reality. I’m in the back of an army truck, the cover up because of the rain. Not tied, not bound, but it’s as if I’ve been encased, in a sense – my body doesn’t feel as if it can move without permission. Two soldiers are sitting with me. One keeps his eyes fixed on my sorry frame; the other’s head bobs as he lurches in and out of his own sleep. I don’t know how long we’ve been climbing, but it seems like yet another version of eternity. The road behind is mud-slick from the rain. I can just see a receding bright circle of it out the back opening of the truck.

Still in my bloody clothes. I’ve had a chance to wash a bit but don’t have my meds, they’re back at the hotel, in that other world I can’t return to. Doors have closed, it’s better to run for now. I should be fine for a couple of days. And then, who knows? It all feels oddly remote, except for the heartburn. I shouldn’t have had the papaya and pineapple they offered at breakfast. Maybe better simply not to eat.

We’re climbing, climbing, I can only look backwards through this receding hole. I have a vague notion that they’re taking me to see Suli. I don’t know why we have to go this way, so far into the mountains. The gears labouring, one soldier staring at me in his own trance. I could reach across, seize his weapon, and kill the both of them, I think dully. Only I
couldn’t possibly move fast enough. My arms would float as if in water. Heavy as sausages. I’d never make it.

This is my last trip into the mountains, I think. Whatever happens. Either I’m going to make it out or not, but I’m not coming back.

I have an odd thought of Nito’s face after I’d left him in the dark with the body of Dorut Kul. The shock, like in a bad movie, but soundless and forever human. Nothing we could ever get used to. Alone in sudden darkness with the cold and heat of death. On our way down the jaws of the beast.

The village appears gradually, down below us for some reason, peeking between trees and clouds, the road having taken us along mountain edges higher than we needed to go. With each switchback of the mountain road I see clouds and the tops of trees far below the cliff edge, sometimes the skeletons of old trucks abandoned at the bottom. I think of something I read about ages ago – the Indian army driving from Kashmir to occupy Ladakh, a long line of trucks proceeding so cautiously in the fog, following the rear lights of the troop truck ahead … twenty of them shooting off into the abyss with military precision and passivity into soundless doom.

Soundless Burridge, as if my vocal cords have been cauterized by the shock of the past few days. Wrapped and still and soundless, no anger left, no fear.

No fear.

It doesn’t feel like what I thought it would. It feels less alive than before, when I was a mass of fears. It feels dead but not quite gone, hovering, impassive. Like Joanne’s lost boys in Sudan. Maybe. Numb from shock. Bodies shutting down. Low gear, slowly, slowly down the slope.

Stopped finally. A shock to move my legs and arms, to rise and crouch in the back of the truck, then have to step down into mud. My legs trembling still from climbing all those stairs in the Merioka.

The Merioka.

Dorut Kul lying in his own blood and brains.

And now Suli here to greet me, her face sombre, her bare feet and the hem of her
saftori
spattered with mud. “I am so sorry,” she says, embracing me like a mother.

“I have some questions,” I say, trying to remember my lines.

“Not now. I must clean you.” Not a request, not an order, but a statement of reality for which I’m grateful. I need statements of reality. She folds her arm into mine and we walk along the mud of a pathway, soldiers ahead of us, some villagers as well, looking at Suli and the bent foreigner. The rain has stopped and the clouds for a time look like they might clear; the air feels fresh after the long, confined ride and the city smog. It isn’t much of a village, it seems, just a collection of huts on stilts surrounded by trees, perched on the side of this mountain. Hardly anyone around, either – no children that I can see, a few elderly women tending chickens.

“Can you climb?” she asks, and rather than speak I step onto the broad ladder and slowly draw myself up into the hut. It’s surprisingly spacious and airy, with a thatched roof, woven bamboo sides, a sturdy plank floor worn smooth, I imagine, by generations of bare feet.

“What is this place?”