‘No problem,’ he said. ‘That’s where I’m going anyway. It’s where we live. I have our armoured car parked round the back.’
Janis laughed and caught his arm, started him walking.
‘An armoured car? That’s what I like to hear. I’ll stick with you.’
She laughed again, and let her whole weight swing for a second on his arm. It was as if he didn’t notice.
‘There are some men,’ she intoned, ‘that Things were not meant to know.’
5
The Fifth-Colour Country
The armoured car was smaller than Janis had expected, low and angular, its black so matte that it was difficult to get an idea of its exact shape: a Stealth vehicle, she thought. Inside, it looked old. Cables joined with insulating tape hung in multicoloured loops under the instrument casings. The two leather seats at the front were frayed. Two even more worn seats faced each other in the back. What appeared to be windows were wrapped around at head-level in the front, but showed nothing.
Kohn demonstrated how to strap in, and then leaned back in his seat. He reached up and flicked a switch. Nothing happened. He cursed and flicked it again. The wrap-around screens came to life as the car began to move: the effect, uncanny, vulnerable-feeling, was of riding in the open.
The vehicle was waved through the exit gate. The traffic was heavier now on the main road, and as the car slipped through it there were moments when Janis thought it was actually invisible to other drivers. Kohn seemed unperturbed.
They stopped at her flat long enough for Janis to pack a few bags, shake her head sadly over the mess, and leave a note and a credit line for Sonya. Kohn fumed and fidgeted, making a big thing of checking every room and watching from windows. Back in the car, his choice of route baffled her.
‘Why are we stopping?’ Janis felt irritated that she sounded so anxious.
‘Won’t be a minute,’ Kohn said.
He jumped out, leaving the engine running and the gun on the seat with its muzzle pointing out of the door. Janis kept looking around. Gutted houses, boarded shopfronts, incredible numbers of people swarming along the whole street. Braziers glowed; weapons and teeth glinted in the shadows of weird crystalline buildings among ruins.
Kohn returned and dropped a package by her feet. The armoured car moved slowly down the street, avoiding children and animals. Janis looked at the package: white paper, blue lettering.
‘You stopped there to buy a kilo of sugar?’
Kohn glanced at her. ‘Don’t put it in your coffee.’
They passed through a checkpoint (Kohn paid the tax in ammo clips, which struck Janis as entirely apt) and then they were out of Ruislip and back on the A410.
‘Afghans,’ Kohn said, relaxing. ‘Don’t want to sound racist or anything, but you let them move in and bang goes the neighbourhood.’
Janis looked at the soaring towers of Southall away to their right.
‘It’s hardly their fault that the Indians had better antimissile systems. I saw it on the tel, back home. Manchester. It looked like a horrible firework show.’
Kohn switched to auto and leaned back, hands behind his head. Janis tried to ignore the road-tanker wheels rolling beside them.
‘Never happened,’ Kohn said flatly. ‘There was no missile exchange between the Afghans and the Indians. It wasn’t even the Hanoverians did that damage, another version I’ve heard, including from locals. No, it was the fuckinyouenn, man.’
‘The fucking you…? Oh, the UN! The Yanks.’
‘Yeah, the great Space Defense force, the peacekeepers. Hit them from orbit, not a damn’ thing they could do.’
‘And it got covered up?’
‘Nah! They announced it! Your local tel station must’ve had reasons of its own for lying about it.’ He shrugged. ‘There’s no conspiracy.’
Janis fought down a helpless sense of chaos, a reverse paranoia.
‘How did things get this way? Don’t you people have theories about history, about why things happen?’ She looked at him sharply. ‘Or is your guess as good as mine? Was it all wrong what I learned in school about Marxism?’
Kohn fingered the controls unnecessarily, staring straight ahead.
‘I have my own ideas about the answer to the first question,’ he said. ‘For the rest it’s yes, yes, and probably. We’re in the same ship as the rest of you, burning the same air. Burning it up.’
There was not enough violence on television, Kohn thought as he crouched behind rubble and waited for the order to attack. On television and in films the shots followed the shots, the picture gave you the picture. It was just not good enough, no preparation for the real thing. A bad influence on the young. Most of the time you never saw the enemy, even in house-to-house fighting. Most of the time you were lucky if you knew where your own side was.
He’d fought before, but that had been scuffles, rumbles. This was a real war, even if a tiny one. Somewhere in those burnt-out houses two hundred and fifty metres away were men who wanted him dead. His first fight was against unreality, the what-am-I-doing-here feeling. There was some sound political reason for it, he knew: the Indians were being backed by the government in their dispute with the Afghans, and several leftist militias were fighting on the Muslim side out of conviction. The Cats had joined in for the money.
Johnny Smith, the young Hizbollah cadre beside him, looked up from his computer, poked his Kalashnikov over the rubble and let loose a five-second burst.
‘OK, guys,’ he said quietly over everyone’s phones. ‘Last one dead’s a sissy!’
He jumped up and over the wall, waving Kohn to follow, and sprinted up the street. Kohn found himself, without conscious decision, running after him. The gun was making a hell of a noise. Then he hit dirt behind an overturned car and glanced around to see what the rest were doing. Oh Gaia! They were running on past him! A mortar round crumped into where they’d been seconds earlier. Rubble thudded around him. He changed magazines and ran forward again, firing. This time he ended up slammed into a gutted shop doorway. Another figure hurtled in almost on top of him. Their armour clashed together. They fell apart. The other flipped up a visor to wipe sweat away from her face.
Her face. It was an amazing face and it was grinning like a maniac’s. Kohn suddenly realized that he was too. His cheeks ached. The visor came down.
‘Come on,’ she said.
Kohn saw out of the corner of his eye the corkscrew contrails spiralling lazily in—
‘NO!’ he roared. He caught her arm and pulled, then ran straight out to the middle of the street. The ground bounced under their feet and the building came down like a curtain. A couple of klicks to the north Ruislip was going the same way.
They stuck around long enough to cover the retreat. Later Kohn remembered lugging about two-thirds of Johnny Smith towards a Red Crescent chopper and then looking down at what he carried and just dropping it, just stopping. It wasn’t that there was nothing left of the man’s face except the eyes – maxilla, mandible, nares blasted clean away – but that those eyes were open, unblinking, pupils not responding to the searing flashes overhead. Blood still bubbled, but Johnny Smith had been brainstem-dead for minutes. Anything worth saving had gone to his God. The organ-bankers could have the rest.
The woman had been with him when they were airlifted out through the dense smoke. And there had been another mercenary in the Mil Mi-34, one who chewed coca leaves and held on to his shattered right arm as if waiting for glue to set and kept saying, ‘Hey Moh, why do they call us Kelly girls?’
They swung on to the A40. Troubled by his sudden silence, Janis glanced at Kohn sidelong, and saw his face had taken on again that look – of inhuman acceptance of some deeply fallen knowledge – which had startled her when he’d come out of the trance back in his room. It passed, and the harder lines of his features returned. He was still looking at the traffic.