The Girl in Green (45 page)

When he does sleep, he does not suffer nightmares. He does not dream of the mattress soaked in his own blood, or of the light coming through the black hood. He does not dream of Abu Saleh's face — so that was his name — or his voice, or the gun that shot him.

What he does dream about is the other girl in green — the girl from 1991 who crouched with him by the truck as Samawah was assaulted. In these dreams, he talks to her, and she talks back to him. They sit together by the giant tyre, and chat as though she were a niece or the school-age daughter of an old friend unseen since a baby.

He asks her about school, and she shrugs in the way fifteen-year-old girls do.

‘What subject do you like best?' he asks as the bombs fall around them, the shots resound, and the buildings burn.

‘I'm good at maths,' she says. He is glad to hear her place the
s
properly at the end of the word — proof the British were there first.

‘You like solving riddles?'

‘I like it when there's a right answer and I can find it,' she says, drawing a picture in the dirt with a small stick. She isn't much for eye contact. She's shy.

‘I like that, too,' Benton says to her. ‘But I'm not so good at maths. I'm not so good at finding answers.'

‘What are you good at?' she asks, not looking up.

‘I'm better at finding the right questions,' he says. ‘Are you in high school?'

She nods. She's a freshman. She started this year.

‘Do you have a best friend?' he asks.

‘Namira.'

‘What do you like about her?'

‘She's funny. She always makes everyone laugh. She's good at maths, too. She says she wants to be an astronaut when she grows up.'

‘That sounds exciting,' Benton says. ‘Do you want that, too?'

‘No. I don't know what I want to be yet.'

‘That's OK. There's a big world out there,' he says, as a tank shell explodes into the hospital, and a wall of black smoke approaches them.

‘Can I be anything I want?' she says, looking up for the first time.

‘No,' Benton says, as the sky grows thick with smoke. ‘No, you can't.'

When he's awake, he watches television. He has no focus for reading. The pulsing in his leg and his head dissuade him from trying. The TV hangs in the corner of the tent. It is tuned to Al Jazeera, which is occasionally in English. What he watches is the war that is still not called a war.

The Iraqis have attacked, and continue to attack, ISIL positions in and around highly populated areas. They hide there, thinking they can use the population as human shields. Sometimes they are right. Usually they are not. The news says ISIL claims to speak for the Sunnis, and they want to establish a caliphate state in al-Anbar. They assassinate and murder the Shiites, some of whom have taken to changing their family names so they can better blend into Sunni society, and hide there, or at least signal their surrender. Other Sunnis are offended by the beheadings and the killings, and the arbitrary exercise of punishment that is claimed to be sharia law. It is a position these people can only maintain by willfully ignoring 1,400 years of Islamic scholarship, early interpretation, and legal rulings. And so that is what they do.

Benton watches a report about an attack in the northern city of Mosul. A suicide bomber has blown himself up in a market. The Iraqi Red Crescent was the first to arrive. It was a motorcycle medic, because they can navigate the crowds and debris. Once a critical mass of rescuers appeared around him — a hirsute man with delicate hands — an ambulance arrived packed with explosives. It detonated, killing the emergency rescuers and those who tried to help. There is footage of a mangled motorcycle, with its front wheel spinning in maudlin fashion. Later, after the dead were washed, the mourners were followed to the funerals, where they were met with another bomb.

Benton turns off the television when there is a knock at the door.

‘Yes?'

A nurse opens it. ‘Are you awake?'

‘Yes.'

‘You have a phone call.'

‘Who is it?'

‘Your daughter. She is insistent.'

‘Yes. I'll take it, thank you.'

The nurse is Portuguese. She is reserved, and does not talk much. Benton suspects she has been here a long time. He takes the mobile phone from her.

‘Charlotte.'

He has anticipated a long lecture and is braced for it, because he deserves it. Her voice, however, is not accusatory. She does not speak quickly.

‘I've been trying to speak to you for so long,' she says, ‘that I've forgotten what I wanted to say.'

‘That's OK.'

‘I was told you were shot.'

‘In the leg. They say I'll make a full recovery.'

‘And you have a broken nose, and severe dehydration, and bruising on your ribs, and abrasions on your knees—'

‘I'll make a full recovery, and they are being very nice to me.'

‘And yet,' she says, ‘there's the story of how you got that way.'

‘Yes, there is.'

‘Mum's been staying with Vivian Bray.'

‘Where are you now?'

‘I told Mum it's time she moved back home. She says the choice isn't hers.'

‘I'll talk to her. You're right.'

‘What are you doing there, Dad? How could you have run off like that, when we're falling apart here?'

‘I've been asked that many times by many people in the last few days. All I can say for now is that I feel as though I've passed out of a tunnel that I've been walking through for over twenty years, and while there's no bright light at the end, there is fresh air. And stars above.'

‘I wish I knew what that means,' Charlotte says.

‘What it means in effect is that I very much want to talk to you, too. Is that enough for now?'

‘We'll meet you at the airport. I'm told you'll be home in two days.'

‘I'll email the details. And Charlotte? Can you pass a message on to your mother, please?'

‘OK.'

‘Tell her that what I said over breakfast that day, it wasn't true.'

41

Thomas Benton married Vanessa when he was twenty-seven. She was twenty-five. It didn't seem young at the time. It started with a near run-in between her, in her late father's sports car, and him and his brother, Edgar, out for a ride in their new, co-owned 1973 MGB Mark III. It was 1978. They'd just bought the car from a friend of a friend of someone their father knew by chance in Launceston, in east Cornwall. They'd paid too much money for it, and they didn't care. They were splitting the cost, and each would have paid double for his share. The car was in British racing green, with beige leather. The chrome glistened. The exhaust note could have recited Yeats.

Edgar was older by three years. He couldn't drive on account of his gammy left leg. He had climbed a tree on holiday when he was nine and had fallen off it. The village doctor was incompetent, and had set the leg badly. It never healed properly, and, from then on, Edgar had chronic pain. He walked with a limp and was unable to work a clutch, but he could still feel the wind in his hair. Thomas drove; Edgar navigated, often too late. They weaved about the roads like madmen. The idea was to drive home south through Bodmin Moor and breathe fresh air, see the green countryside, and have a pint.

The early autumn of 1978 was mild. For years, Vanessa had had the idea of driving her late father's beloved Jensen Interceptor westwards, through the moor out to Penzance and then back to Exeter, where she'd grown up. Her dad had died eight years earlier, in 1970, when a hammer had fallen from a shelf and struck him at the base of his skull. It was a meaningless death that meant everything.

Year by year, the car rested under a tarp in the garage, where she would sit with a torch to read and try to remember what he smelled like.

Eventually, she and the car fitted one another, and she had the money to have it repaired, if not properly restored. The garage that towed it in was run by Phil Goddard. He was in his fifties then. The car needed a new battery, of course, but a near decade of inactivity had rotted most of what was rubber, and it needed work. A drive like the one she proposed was a good eight hundred kilometres if she took the most direct route — which she didn't plan to do, as that route was charmless.

Vanessa paid a crushing bill, donned her father's leather jacket, which she cinched at the waist, rolled down the windows, and fired up the distinctive V8.

It was to be an overnight trip. She carried an Italian leather duffel filled with clean clothes, a camera, two new paperbacks — one called
The Thorn Birds
, and the other
The Shining
— and a toothbrush.

She had driven through Dartmoor from Exeter, and decided on an indirect route that would skirt the scenic southern road on Bodmin Moor. She was looking forward to it, as that road was loved by bikers and drivers, who weaved and bobbed gently through its meandering turns trimmed by hedges and modest homes. People in other impractical cars waved to her, and she waved back. It was a road of flowers, and fences, and the occasional reminder to go SLOW, painted in tall, white letters on the road. Everything promised to be green and blue. But she never made it to the road.

As she travelled west into Upton Cross where the moor began, Thomas and Edgar were travelling south, planning to make the same turn. At that moment, Edgar was trying to prove — by way of demonstration — that Benton's aural cavity was precisely the same diameter as a steaming chip he had left over from lunch. Benton was complicating Edgar's proof by swiping wildly, which caused the car to swerve as they approached the intersection.

On reaching the primary school on the corner, it looked to Vanessa as though the driver of the green convertible was being terrorised by a swarm of hornets, and the other man was trying to pluck them out of the air, one by one. Watching these men, these gestures, this car — all of this was distracting. In that distraction, she failed to brake hard enough before the turn, and entered it with too much speed. She froze, and drove directly into a red public telephone box.

The impact was modest, breaking only a panel of glass on the phone box, ruining the grille of the car, and puncturing her front wheel. But it gave her a serious fright.

Vanessa was therefore in a very fragile state of mind when she turned to find the green MGB pulled up beside her, along with the two men who had caused her accident. The first thing she asked Thomas Benton was not the first thing she had expected to say.

‘What's that in your ear?'

‘It's a chip.'

‘Why?'

‘To see if it would fit.'

‘Are you going to leave it there?' she asked him.

It was Edgar, though, who replied. ‘I think it's an improvement, don't you?'

‘Are you all right?' Benton had the wherewithal to ask, ignoring Edgar, and making his brother immediately wish he'd asked the same.

They bought her lunch, and called a garage to tow the Jensen, which — after they were married — they would keep for over a decade before relenting and buying a practical car. Edgar, who passed away in 2011 from colon cancer, never failed to remind his brother that Vanessa was a gift, and to not cherish her was to mock every decent man who would never have such an opportunity. Thomas knew that Edgar meant himself. With his leg and his feelings about it, he never managed to marry. He also never stopped loving Vanessa.

Vanessa and Charlotte collect Benton at the airport, and board the train that runs to Fowey every ninety minutes. The trip takes five hours, and Benton and his two women are silent most of the way. They talk of small matters. Charlotte keeps glancing at his leg.

When they arrive in Fowey, it is raining, in a persistent and steady drizzle. The school year has started. The kids don't mind the weather, having been raised in it.

You can drink it from the sky here
, Benton thinks.

The house is empty and dark when they arrive. It is as he'd left it. Vanessa has been staying at her girlfriend's house down the road. He suggests to Charlotte they not come in immediately — he can see them later. Charlotte says she won't return to Bristol until they've talked. And she is going to stay with him. He can keep his preferences to himself.

He puts on music when they come home:
Well-Tempered Clavier
by Bach, played by a Korean woman named HyeKyung Lee. Hers is smoother, rounder, more affecting than Glenn Gould's, and more soulful than Daniel Barenboim's. There are others on the shelf — Maurizio Pollini and Sviatoslav Richter — but he hasn't listened to those. Vanessa went through a period a few years ago of buying numerous performances of the same pieces of music to try to understand better the relationship between composer, arranger, and interpreter. He never understood the theory. He only knew what he liked.

He bathes, with the music playing from the other room. He drinks a beer, and sits there until the water becomes cold.