The Touch of Innocents

The insanity of arriving back from the death camps of civil war scarcely three hours in almost any direction from Charles de Gaulle, in time to wash for Sunday lunch.

The anxiety when she discovered that from her ‘happy box’ of essential travelling supplies were missing the dozen clean syringes she carried to avoid the infected needles of a war zone, and the blind fit of anger with a two-year-old when she discovered Benjamin had taken from it the tiny compass without which she couldn’t guarantee locking onto the satellite. On such small things might hang her life and the story, although she did not care to ask which her editor valued more highly. Gambling her own wits against snipers from Beirut to Bosnia for an audience she knew was so jaded by nightly overkill they might just as well be watching their laundry spin and who thought the Golan Heights were a suburb of Cleveland.

Waiting on the sandy beach outside Mogadishu as the execution by machine gun of two army deserters was held up, even as they stood blindfolded and bound tight against empty oil drums, trousers fouled. Held up, not by God or a quixotic judge, but by a BBC cameraman while he changed his clapped-out battery.

Returning to receive not accolades or understanding but a relentless demand for more, more, more, knowing they were pushing her harder than anyone else, waiting for the little woman to plead cramps or hormones or simply to break down and make a mess of her make-up. The pigs.

Balancing the lust for a story against the demands of self-preservation, conquering your own fear and crawling that extra exclusive maggot-infested mile before remembering you were a mother with responsibilities back home.

Home. It was time to call her husband. Her nervousness, for which she had no explanation – or, at least, none she could remember – came flooding back.

A ring. An answer.

‘Joe?’

A silence. A long silence.

‘Joe, it’s me. How are you, darling? Have I interrupted you?’ God, it was pathetic. Sunday morning, what could she have interrupted?

Another long silence.

‘Where are you?’ he muttered.

‘In England, Joe.’

‘I thought you’d disappeared to Mars.’

‘Joe, please. I’m in hospital. There was a car crash. Did you hear me?’

He didn’t seem to have made the connection. His mind was blocked, struggling to find the things he wanted to say. ‘You gonna be there long?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe another two weeks …’

‘Anything broken?’

‘No, but …’

‘Give me the address.’

‘You’re coming over?’

A silence.

‘No, I can’t. I’m up beyond my butt in work. Just give me the address, will you?’

‘Joe, there’s something I’ve got to tell you.’

‘I’ve got something for you, too. Didn’t want to do it like this, but …’

A pause while he struggled for the long-practised words and failed.

‘Hell. I’ve had enough. Of you disappearing, of being left on my own, knowing that I come about as low on your list of priorities as root-canal work. I’m out, Izzy. Out. I want a divorce. I just hope we can make it quick and clean. Be mature, eh? For the sake of the kids?’

Perhaps he might have expected the silence that followed, but he showed no sign of it. ‘Come on, Izzy, it can’t have come as that much of a shock to you. Christ, it’s not as if there’s anything left between us. Let’s just formalize it so we can both get on with our own lives. I’ve got all the details prepared for you to look at. Just give me the address.’

‘You’re trying to deliver divorce papers to me while I’m lying in hospital?’ she gasped. There was a sudden avalanche of memories, of pain, exposing the hard rock-face that had become their relationship. She recalled it clearly now. The rows, his growing frustration turning to bitterness, a marriage that had become no more than an accommodation.

‘What do you expect me to do?’ he continued. ‘You left me with no option; I haven’t known where you’ve been for more than a month. Did you expect me to wait until you finished playing Marco Polo in your own sweet time?’

‘Joe!’ she pleaded, all the carefully considered phrases swept away. ‘For God’s sake, listen to me. Please. Bella. Our baby. She’s dead.’

There was nothing from the other end of the phone. The scalding of a man’s heart makes no sound.

‘Joe, she was in the back of my car when we went off the road. Benjy’s fine but … Bella’s gone, Joe. I’m sorry.’

The voice at the other end, when at last it came, had a strained, unnatural quality.

‘You killed Bella?’

‘Don’t, Joe, please.’

‘How did it happen?’

‘I can’t remember, I just don’t know. Joe, come see me. Grab a plane. Let’s not talk about this on the phone.’

‘Where are you?’

She gave him the details. ‘You’re coming to see me, then?’

The voice on the phone was like the hissing of a serpent. ‘The only thing you’ll get from me are divorce papers. You killed Bella, you irresponsible … selfish … bitch!’

She did not know how long she lay back on her pillow, eyes closed, the tears forming twin cascades that soaked into her hair. She did not cry for her lost marriage; even with her scrambled memories she could not persuade herself she had lost something of irredeemable value. The tears were for the loneliness and sudden sense of vulnerability which settled around her like a marsh fog of autumn, for the frustration and anger as thoughts and memories collided within her head to undermine her sense of self-control, for the lack of familiar landscape in a world which in a few weeks had been shattered almost beyond recognition. But most of all she cried from aching guilt. The guilt which insisted that she might, after all, have been responsible for the crash. Her fault that Bella was dead.

Her eyes opened. She could look back no longer, not when it meant grappling with memories filled with so much pain. There was only one way – forward, no matter what, and build something new and brighter for herself and Benjamin, if she could.

She picked up Jules Verne. Her long-loved friends were still unrescued, on the very edge of disaster as they clung precariously to the balloon’s basket. She threw them in the wastebin.

Devereux sat in the corner of the New York bar and watched with a practised eye. The bar was on the lower West Side on one of those blocks where the street language was Spanish and sunlight never reached the pavement. He liked these type of places, where he could get away from it all, the officials, the papers, the constant flow of formality and urgent business which dominated his other world. This was so different: classless, outgoing, utterly un-English. A challenge. And he enjoyed a challenge.

He’d flown to Washington on his first overseas trip to flex his muscles on the Duster. The US Administration wanted this project, wanted it badly. The hot breath of Congressional concern was gusting through the basements of the Pentagon; the project’s proponents were anxious to embrace any good friend they could find and Devereux was one of the few. The deal was not yet done, there was still more juice to squeeze from the lemon, but already he had made his mark in the capital of the most powerful country on earth.

And now he had escaped. Some shopping in New York before he flew home, he had explained, letting slip the shackles, sliding away from the pathways of power to this bar, where he was no longer Minister but Man, where there were no middle class moralizers, Protection Squad heavies or Fleet Street hacks. Nothing but a good, old-fashioned challenge.

He watched as an elderly and hugely overweight woman entered the bar, dragging a plastic sack behind her and jangling a large bunch of keys suspended around her waist. She had come to restock the vending machines, wheezing as she crossed the room, pausing only to take a long pull at her cigarillo. Her jaw dropped like a fish as she gulped for breath before taking yet another pull.

Wheeze, gasp, puff, jangle, wheeze; the sounds punctuated her slow progress. In a querulous voice she announced that she had to have her back operated on again. She appeared to invite a general conversation but only the barman responded, and that after a delay of several seconds.

‘Your back again, eh?’

Another delay. Like Ground Control to Mars.

‘Not until New Year.’ She began attacking the cigarette machine. Wheeze. Puff. Jangle. ‘Not getting laid up over Christmas.’

The barman offered no response, forcing her to continue the conversation on her own. ‘I guess I’m gonna go one of three ways. Lung cancer, cirrhosis of the liver or a broken heart.’ She paused to catch her breath. ‘Think I’ll give up men. Too damn dangerous. Hell, I’m only sixty-four. Lotta life left in me yet.’ The guppy jaw dropped several times while she hitched up her sagging support tights through the folds of her woollen cardigan. The barman polished glasses.

‘They better have a cigarette waiting for me at the door of the hospital. And a drink. Going in and coming out.’

The barman raised an eyebrow; she heaved her sack and her tights slipped once more. She paused to light another cigarette from a second pack in her pocket, not a cigarillo this time but menthol. Her attempt at safe smoking, cutting the risks. Then she dragged her sack in the direction of the condom machines in the men’s toilet, barging through the door without knocking.

As her sagging frame disappeared, Devereux laughed inside. Not at her, but with her. She knew she was ludicrous, spicing her nicotine with the occasional menthol in the pretence of delaying or avoiding the inevitable process of consumption inside her lungs, but she was doing it her way and would go out on her own terms. Unlike most politicians. Unlike his father.

Know thyself, and thy weaknesses, the better to understand and if necessary to exploit the weaknesses of others, he muttered. The old woman was a hag, but no broken reed. His father, at his bitter end, would have envied her.

Devereux turned the whisky around in his glass. Life was full of challenges and risks; it took an exceptional man to confront and vanquish them and, in vanquishing, to become great. He was an exceptional man, and would become great. He wouldn’t be his failed father’s son forever.

But one challenge at a time. He finished off his drink, ordered another, and gazed with interest and anticipation at the two women who were arranging themselves at the next table.

Izzy was pissed off. Deeply pissed off, in the way that gets you out of bed in the morning in spite of hospital routine.

Every day she would find herself waiting with growing anticipation for the videotapes of yesterday’s WCN newscasts, and this morning she’d set it up, punched the appropriate buttons and settled back in her chair.

And seethed. The tape had included a major slot from the new Mafia corruption trials in Palermo, the one involving a cardinal, an actress and two former prime ministers. Her territory. Now being squatted by that testicularly challenged little jerk of a producer.

She was jealous, hacked off with the producer, but mostly with herself, surprised that even from a hospital bed it could matter so much.

The door to her old world was beginning to open a fraction. Then K.C. Craven arrived and kicked the bloody thing off its hinges.

K.C. was black, doe-eyed and had flown in that morning from Washington DC. She was Eldred Grubb’s assistant, by far the finest of his few redeeming features. In her first week at WCN, with innuendo sweeping the newsroom as to why the foreign editor had hired an attractive mahogany-skinned assistant who was both taller and graduated from a far better university than he, she had been asked to explain her name.

‘Katherine? Connie?’ a colleague had enquired.

‘Why, bless you child. No,’ K.C. had responded in a mock Southern drawl, lashes fluttering. She enjoyed being theatrical; the entire newsroom was listening. ‘I was named K.C. ‘cause my mamma said she conceived me during an unscheduled time-out with a basketball player during play-offs in Kansas City. Best time of her life, she said. So even if she forgets who, ain’t never gonna forget where.’

Later Izzy discovered that K.C.’s father was a much-respected doctor in Minneapolis and her librarian mother had never been to Kansas City in her life, but Izzy was sworn to silence. K.C. was a good friend and the first enjoyable recollection to come alive for Izzy from what seemed like another, distant life.

‘It’s great you could come,’ Izzy said, not for the first time, as they walked arm-in-arm through the gardens.

She was making her first trip outside the hospital walls and Izzy had found the air unexpectedly damp, her mind still unadjusted to the lost weeks and changing seasons. The last few days had been frozen crisp, clean, the leaves on the old oak guarding the hospital entrance hung limp in the still air. But a storm was on the way, heralded by a tumultuous sky that seemed as though Turner had thrown his entire palette of paints across the heavens.

K.C. wrapped herself more tightly in her cloak. She had been careful to explain that Grubb had sent her, she couldn’t stay more than a few hours, yet to Izzy it was as though her friend had trekked alone across the Antarctic.

‘You’re the first thing from my life before the accident which hasn’t brought me pain. The divorce. Bella. Watching Fido pretend he can do my job.’ Even as she spoke she realized that her life was still a jumble of conflicting priorities. That, at least, had not changed.

‘What do you feel about the divorce?’

Izzy shook her head. ‘What’s to feel? Not angry, just – empty. I’ve always known he was unfaithful, got his brain in his boxers and his privates forever on parade, but funny thing is I’m finding it hard to be bitter. The marriage was a mistake, I think I can see that now.’

‘How a mistake?’

‘I was feeling pressured. Well into my thirties. The clock was ticking, the tubes beginning to get tired. Time was running out on me. I didn’t know how to handle it; everything else in my life had been planned, set into neat periods. College, grad school, internship, climb the ladder, PA, producer, correspondent … but this wasn’t going to be so tidy. The hormones were nagging away: do your bit for posterity, time to stretch the flesh. The job meant everything to me, yet suddenly … it wasn’t enough. I wanted the job and the kids. After Gaza it became something of an obsession.’

‘What happened in Gaza?’ K.C. pressed, wrapping the cloak still more tightly around her. As the day and its more spectacular hues began to fade, the wind was creeping in to claim its place. The storm was gathering.

‘It was during the Intifada, just before your time. The Palestinian riots had flared up again and I was over there with Dan Morrison from NBC to get an Arab’s-eye view. Interviews with local leaders, mullahs, the teenagers who were causing the trouble, that sort of thing. Lots of pictures of the rioting from behind Arab lines as they were throwing stones, petrol bombs. Nothing we hadn’t done a thousand times before.’

‘Dan Morrison?’ K.C. puckered her brows. ‘Was he one of us?’

‘That’s one hell of an epitaph,’ Izzy rebuked. ‘But you’re right. What do any of us leave behind? That’s really my point. Dan was like a big brother to me, we’d covered so many stories together. Never once got out of hand, the closest I got to his bed was the times I laid him out on it when he’d got blind drunk. Which was pretty often.’

She tried to smile at the memory, but there was no joy in her face.

‘Dan and I were shooting from pretty much the same location, great position where the camera could see it all over our shoulders, the Arab kids throwing stones and burning barricades right up to the Israeli lines beyond. Someone had to go first, we tossed a coin and he cheated. The sonofabitch was always cheating me, but only on silly things. Said he liked getting me riled, best entertainment he could find in a foxhole.’

She drew in a deep breath full of sorrow. ‘So, he stepped out half a pace to give his cameraman the full perspective and started to roll. He was talking about religion, about how both sides invoked divine justice and from their knees proclaimed their devout interest in peace. So long as it was their peace, of course. Then, they shot him. Through the back of the head. A single bullet; he was still talking as he fell. I helped drag him back and he died right there in my lap.’

‘Who were ‘they”? Who shot him?’

‘Who knows? It was an Israeli rifle but the army said the bullet was fired from a stolen weapon, intentionally to stir up anti-Israeli feeling in America. Either way, didn’t matter much to Dan.’

She sighed, there were no tears, she was too professional for that. Although sometimes tears help.

‘OK, so it’s the risk we all take. Could have been anyone. Would have been me, if Dan hadn’t cheated. But it got me thinking, what do you leave behind? What did Dan leave behind after all those years of screwing and drinking his way around the world? Of finding the back doubles to every airport and putting his neck on the line so some armchair producer back in the States can fill in the airtime between the sponsor’s messages? What? A better world? All Dan left behind was a grieving mother, a busted Chevvy and an empty apartment in Greenwich Village on which he still owed fifteen years’ payments. And I didn’t even have a mother to grieve, K.C., so I knew I had to get on and have those kids or I’d end up just like Dan. Does that make sense?’

‘Does the sun rise, stupid?’

She shook her head wistfully. ‘So I panicked. Married Joe. I’d known him for more than two years, although I realized later that in all that time we’d spent less than three months physically together. And I understand why he wants out. It’s an occupational hazard in my job and his. And men change after kids, you know. The first one is a mystery to them, a mixture of fascination and terror; by the second it’s simply a matter of mechanics. Your plumbing gets torn and twisted, you end up running on a damaged undercarriage and you find that once-passionate lover starts approaching you with all the sensitivity of a mechanical shovel.’

‘And only one gear.’

‘Joe was lousy about pregnancy. Resentful, jealous even. The baby had taken my body and his place beside it, and the more I swelled and the baby wriggled the more he simply moved away from it. From me. Like his life had been invaded. With Benjy he was bad, with Bella even worse.’

A silence hung between them. For the first time, as she found the words to describe her husband’s reaction, she knew without doubt that it was over. A chapter now closed, one she had never dared read out loud before.

‘But somehow I can’t find the energy to be angry. Hell, I’m almost relieved. I’ve been trying to balance Joe and the kids and the job for so long I was feeling like a bridge too far, slowly cracking in a hurricane; this simplifies things, one less weight to carry.’

The frost-dried leaves were beginning to chatter on the trees like the dying rattle of the day, falling around the women like the tears Isadora had been unable to shed.

‘How long are you going to be here?’ K.C. enquired.

‘Everyone seems delighted with my progress. Maybe just another two weeks. Then perhaps I’ll take a month off to get Benjy straight, sort things out with Joe. He’s bitter at the moment, but he’s not a bad man, he’ll come round. I need time for myself, too. I haven’t even been able to say goodbye properly to Bella.’ The voice, so used to talking of death, was steady but very quiet. ‘No tears yet, no mourning. They cremated her, did you know that? An unidentified little baby, no claimants, so they cremated her. I can’t even bury my baby.’

‘That’s … barbaric,’ K.C. shook her head in disbelief.

‘No. Just bureaucracy. Mindless bloody bureaucracy, as it is all over the world.’ She fashioned a smile of defiance. ‘Don’t worry, Izzy Dean will be back, I shall insist on it. I need just a little time for the bruises to heal. New Year.’

K.C.’s eyes grew large and swam with tears. ‘Oh, shit,’ she stammered. Leaves rustled round their ankles like rattling leg chains.

‘I’ve had a crack on the skull, K.C., but I haven’t lost all command of my senses. The Great Grubb doesn’t hand out trans-Atlantic air tickets like cups of coffee. You’re here to do a job, his job, I’ve known that ever since you arrived and I’m sure you’ve come bearing more than our beloved foreign editor’s best wishes. But you are also my friend, I won’t forget that. What is it?’

K.C.’s eyes begged apology. ‘You know the pressure he’s under. The money people have moved in, they’ve laid off another fifty staffers, the newsroom looks like the Alamo.’

‘Before or after Santa Anna arrived?’

‘Izzy, you’re the best we’ve got, even Grubby has to admit that, but it also means you’ve got one of the best foreign postings we have and there are fifty people sniffing around to see if they can take it from you.’

‘That’s a compliment.’

‘Even your little pimp of a producer has put in an official request to join the reporting staff, based on what he’s done in the weeks he’s been filling in for you.’

‘How long is it now?’ She furrowed her brow and tapped her forehead. ‘God, there are still things in here which simply don’t connect.’

‘We’re into December, Izzy. Nearly six weeks since you last had anything on air. And they’re building up for a civil war in Ukraine. Grubby wants you in Kiev not …’

‘Not flat on my back with my feet up in some part of the world he’s never heard of.’

‘You’ve got it.’ She hesitated. ‘You’ve also got this letter, Izzy.’ She reached inside her shoulder bag and retrieved an envelope. ‘It says three weeks. It says be back in three weeks, by Christmas, or they are terminating your contract. That taking off without letting anyone know where you were going was a hanging offence. That in the last three years you’ve clocked up more sick leave than anyone in the office.’

‘Being pregnant is not an illness,’ she replied testily.

‘Izzy, I’m sorry.’

‘I know you are.’

‘You’ll be back. Please say you’ll be back. Don’t let those miserable men with the clammy hands push you out.’

The night was silent. The wind had dropped as the rain began to make itself known, the storm was almost upon them. They were back beneath the great oak, but the leaves had stopped falling. They were all gone. The tree stood stark and bare. Winter had arrived.

‘My baby. My husband. And now my job?’ Izzy replied at last. She shook her head. The words of her award-winning report from Gaza, unscripted, the camera no more than a blur through the tears, the blood of her friend still damp on her hands, were forcing their way back into her memory.

‘In this land there are no victors, only victims. No children who are not soldiers, no difference of view which does not make enemies, no freedom which does not mean the persecution of others, no justice. In this land the utmost barbarities are committed in the name of God and love by extremists on all sides. And tonight they have claimed one more innocent victim. His name was Dan Morrison. He was my friend.’

In a green and pleasant land many miles away from Gaza, the tide of personal injustice seemed to have become a flood and about to carry her away as just another helpless victim. The rain began to fall, heavily, trickling down her face.

‘I’ll let Benjy decide. I’ve still got him. I’ll let Benjy decide.’

But it was not to be.

Michelini slammed full into the wall, the impact driving the breath from his lungs and forcing the taste of bile into the back of his throat. His heart hammered against his aching ribs, a searing pain like a razor-cut stretched from his left ankle all the way up to the back of his knee. He thought he might vomit. He was about to slump to his knees but knew that in doing so he would concede not only the game and the ten dollars but also his sense of virility. He would die standing up, not on his back. On second thoughts, dying on his back offered amusing prospects, but not during a game of squash. Instead of expiring, he settled for a slow and methodical retightening of his shoe lace. He had found himself retying his shoe laces a lot recently.