Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals by Jesse Armstrong

Author:Jesse Armstrong [Jesse Armstrong]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2015-02-24T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 23

ROUND THE FIRE, as the afternoon started to click and buzz about us, the CO pulled out a bottle of the local plum brandy, slivovitz, and some washed-out plastic yogurt pots to drink from. His face was full of an effortful melancholy, like someone had drawn a sad face on a cauliflower. He must have been forty or more and wore British Army camouflage, while the other mercenaries had a collection of weird odds and sods. His pronounced overbite sent his lower jaw jutting out like a battering ram and meant his sentences got all spliced up with spittle.

‘Do you mind me asking,’ Sara asked him, once we were all sitting back round the fire, ‘do you mind me asking what you actually think about the war?’

‘It’s bollocks, isn’t it?’ Bev said, looking round at Chapstick and Jonno and Mad Mike and finally the CO, who remained impassive.

‘I wish I wasn’t here,’ Chapstick said. ‘But no one else is sorting it out, so it’s muggins’s turn, isn’t it? Buggins here.’

‘But you’d rather not be here?’ Sara went on.

‘Oh no, I love it, don’t I? Living in a fucking tent using a hose pipe for a shower, what do you think?’ Chapstick got laughs for this from his fellow soldiers and also smiles from Von, Christian and me who found ourselves involuntarily drawn into the alliance of men. But not Juso. He was staying quiet – although he whispered something into Shannon’s ear.

‘But you could go home?’ Onomatopoeic Bob said.

‘They don’t want to go home, do they?’ said Sara. ‘They like it here, killing people.’

‘Sara, we are here asking our friends for a favour.’ Shannon held her gaze. Sara’s lip quivered, on the brink of saying something beyond the pale of normal human interaction, until, unwilling to lose face, she just made a little noise that signalled disgust with the world and in particular its most corrupt invention: all of us.

Even the soldiers seemed a bit embarrassed. Bev looked into the flame appearing and disappearing under the aluminium kettle and said, ‘You all live safe in your houses, but who’s keeping you safe? Fuckers like me?’

‘And what if you went home?’ Sara asked.

‘And leave it to someone else? Some poor other fucker? No thank you, that’s not my game.’

Sara stood up and stared down towards the river.

‘End of the day, I don’t give a fuck, to be honest with you. They’re all Russians to me. The lot of them. It’s their bed they’ve shat, so they can roll around in it,’ said Chapstick.

‘I’m all about the money,’ said Jonno.

Juso looked at Shannon and smiled secretly from within his big beard, as though something had been confirmed. Bev clocked this and poked at the fire with a twig. ‘The money we’re on, we’d be crazy to do it for the money,’ he said.

‘So look,’ Shannon interrupted, ‘what we want is an escort to go down to Bihac.’

‘What about the the Knobheads? The Helmets?’ Bev asked.

‘The UN?’

‘Yeah?’

‘We’re not accredited. We don’t have the blue cards.

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