Correspondents by Tim Murphy

Author:Tim Murphy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760786632
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

CHAPTER EIGHT

EXILE, PART 1

Almost exactly one week later, boiling with rage and humiliation, Rita was sitting on a South African jetliner flying from Baghdad to Amman, avoiding the glances of her fellow passengers, the homeward-bound private contractors and CPA hacks and a few other journalists, none of whom she was close to, thankfully. Flights into and out of Baghdad were notorious for their corkscrew takeoffs and landings— gut-churning spiraling ascents and descents that dispensed altogether with straight angles in a bid to avoid rocket-propelled grenades fired from the ground. Rita had heard many a tale of passengers losing the contents of their stomach in the process, clutching vomit bags with white knuckles, crying in shaken relief as the plane either touched ground or finally straightened up at a safe altitude.

And here was the takeoff. She gripped the arms of her seat. She’d lived through the corkscrew before, on her brief breaks out of the country. It was wild, even perversely enjoyable if you knew what to expect; it felt a bit like being hauled up the first steep ascent of a roller coaster with no subsequent plunge, your back and head smashed down deeply into your seat as the plane thundered straight up into the atmosphere before righting itself. Then everyone on the flight settled back, relaxed. The worst was over. They’d all escaped hell without insurgents having shot a fireball into the plane’s underbelly, and this meant that in ninety minutes they would each be in the utterly secure, anodyne confines of Jordan, having a burger and a beer before subsequent flights took them back to D. C. or Atlanta or Dallas or wherever they were going.

Sitting by the window, Rita looked down as the whole sorry, bitter, brown and tan expanse of Baghdad unfurled before her. She felt no relief, only frustration and fury. She’d left a job, a story, a whole population unfinished. She’d hung in there with Rick and Claude and their fucking hardworking Iraqi colleagues who’d risked everything. They’d been a family, a crew, muddling through day after day under life-threatening conditions, and now the Standard was doing this to her? I cannot believe this is happening, she thought. Tears rose in her eyes, but she gulped and pushed them back. She would die before she let anyone on this flight see her cry.

Part of her anger was directed at herself. If she’d only had not quite so much Maker’s Mark that night, even just not had that final glass alone in the dark before the laptop, she might not have hit “send,” and all of this could have been avoided. Pathetic, garden-variety drunkenness, of the sort displayed by the Irish side of her family, had set her downfall in motion. She cringed, massaged her forehead.

That following day had not begun well, obviously. She woke in her clothes, hungover and headachy, horrified to realize it was eleven o’clock. Cracking open her bedroom door, she heard the hum and chatter of work going on down the hall in the front room.

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