We Are Now Beginning Our Descent Read Free Page A

dried. He studied the faces of the delivery boys, seeking signs of contempt in their eyes, but he saw only fear, or nothing.
    When The Citizen came to him a few weeks later and asked him to travel to Afghanistan, to relieve a reporter north of Kabul, the editors made the offer in voices brimming with grandeur. They were grave about it, as if they were practising a tone to use for his next of kin, and they were excited. They wanted to be sure he knew he was to be both grateful and solemn. It wasn’t the first time they’d asked Kellas to write about a war for the paper, but it was the first time he’d seen his editors so cherishing of each place on the roster. In other wars, fought between dull foreigners, Kellas and his peers would hack out their despatches and fling them homewards, fragmented lumps of narrative that lived and died in a day or two. What Kellas was being offered here was the privilege of slipping with hisstories into a greater story, a baton-twirling lit-up marching parade of a story that belonged to a mighty nation of storytellers, myth-makers and newscryers, America, but which other, foreign storytellers might attach themselves to. The fabulous thing was that it wouldn’t matter whether he or anyone else in the great onrushing parade was shouting qualifications, or yelling in a different accent that events were occurring in an altogether other way. America’s big loud story would jostle their little stories on together with its own, and his voice would add to the general din, and the general din would give his voice power. He could stay with the parade, or pipe up alone.
    Kellas refused to go, and his editors told him they understood, although he didn’t give them reasons. They guessed that he was drinking heavily, and the guess became procedure. They gave him the mixture of respect, fear, latitude and contempt that the letters trade gives presumed alcoholics. They knew he was shaken up by events, even if they didn’t know that Osama bin Laden had stolen his idea for a book, that his closest friend was confined in an attic room writing about hobgoblins, and that he hadn’t expected his lover to leave him. It was true that he didn’t like Melissa, but she’d given him to understand that she was fond of him. She responded to his desire with her own, until the day she withheld, and never gave again.
    What had changed Kellas’s mind about going to Afghanistan, what had made him go back to his editors and persuade them to send him after he’d turned them down, was something he heard in the pub.
    ‘Don’t blame you for turning the Afghan gig down, mate,’ the reporter said. ‘Fucking scare the shit out of me.’ He raised and lowered his glass and the lager suds drifted down from the brim. Kellas had nodded slowly, finished his drink and gone to look for the foreign editor. Like many others before him, Kellas found he wasn’t brave enough to be thought a coward, and he had flown to the war.
    A revised version of his opportunistic thriller had been gestating in him, like a well-loved grudge, ever since he arrived in Jabal os Saraj, until tonight, when it began to unload itself onto the page, with the help of the new furniture. Originally the house had no furniture, only carpets and mattresses: an Afghan house. Meals were served on a plastic sheet laid out on the floor. None of the Americans, Europeans or East Asians staying there had challenged this arrangement until a Spaniard, already marked out by his preference for comfort and his loathing for the eight o’clock rush to the mountains, who spent the morning lying on his back and wiggling his toes, one hand holding a novel above his face and the other supporting his head, who ambled out of the compound for a couple of hours around lunch and, when he came back, would be seen writing something for his newspaper without reference to notes, his thick heavy fingers striking the laptop keyboard as if it were an old typewriter prone to jam – this