Deep Black Read online

  It made me wonder if shrinks just let you spout your bullshit, but have a good laugh behind your back at your self-delusion. Or maybe they did it over coffee and a sticky bun at shrink reunions in Vienna.

  And then I thought: Why not go? It wasn’t as if I had anything else to do, and I’d got a few hours to kill before the Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt.

  The carriage was about a quarter full, mainly families with tourist maps and digital cameras hanging round their necks. The kids looked excited, the mums and dads content. Shit, this was all I needed. George was right. I was lonely. But what he and Ezra didn’t appreciate was that I always had been, until Kelly had come along. Work – first in the infantry, then the SAS, then this shit – had seemed to fill the hole, but it never really did. It just helped me cut away from that feeling of exclusion I’d hated so much as a kid.

  Now? I was back to feeling like a kid again. I had the same feeling every time I lay on the settee in the early hours of the morning, watching people on TV having relationships, families doing family stuff. Even the Simpsons shared something that I didn’t have.

  I felt the same now as I had as a ten-year-old, bunking on the Underground all day to keep out of the rain, putting off going home and getting a beating from my stepdad just because the arsehole enjoyed doing it. It didn’t even get better if my mum saw him punching the shit out of me. She would simply deny it had ever happened and buy me a Mars bar.

  What had hurt most was not having other kids to play with. I was the free-school-dinners, odd-socks-and-Oxfam-clothes kid. I used to spend days on my own just walking around, checking the coin returns in phone-boxes, waiting for when I was old enough to leave home without the Social coming looking for me.

  Now I was back to square one. No work, no Kelly, and I’d closed the door on the only person I’d had to talk to, an ancient shrink with a helmet for hair. Anyone who’d ever come remotely close to being a friend had fucked me over or was dead. I looked down at Baby-G and played the break-dancer. At least now I had put a smile in my day.

  I came out at Dupont Circle and wandered around trying to find the exhibition. This was supposed to be the gay area for DC, but all I saw were groups of Somalians and students from the university. In the end, I stumbled across it. Art Works had once been an upscale shop. Posters across the glass frontage advertised the show; I could see bright lights through the gaps between them, and a very hip-looking clientele studying wall-loads of photographs.

  I pushed the door and went inside. One or two heads glanced in my direction. Very soon the main topic for the chattering classes of Dupont Circle was going to be the strong smell of margarine.

  I counted maybe fifteen people, all looking as if the only clothes shops they knew were Donna Karan or Ralph Lauren. Everyone had what looked like an expensive catalogue in their hands. I thought I’d give that one a miss: I only had enough on me for teabags and a few jars of Branston.

  No one was chatting. The loudest sound came from the air-conditioning unit that blew hot air down at me as I walked through the door. At a counter to the right, a woman dressed entirely in black was standing by a display of merchandise. Duplicates of some of the pictures were for sale. If you couldn’t afford the originals, you could take home a not-so-cheap souvenir. It made no sense to me. Who would buy it? There was nothing comforting about these photos. Bang Bang Bosnia was a collection of shots too honest to have made it into the Sunday supplements.

  Immediately in front of me I saw black-and-whites of men dangling from trees after being hanged, drawn and quartered. Dogs pulling meat from the bones of a human corpse. A group of Serb infantry looking like they’d come straight from the siege of Stalingrad, swathed in white sheets for camouflage as they fought from building to building in the snow. The faces were gaunt, covered with grime, blood and bum-fluff. The eyes had the same haunted, hollow stare of frontline soldiers from the Somme to Da Nang.

  I wondered about the kind of people who came to look at this sort of stuff. Suffering sold as art. It felt voyeuristic, almost perverted. What the fuck had Ezra been on? This wasn’t going to help me. Why would I want to see this shit? I felt myself getting angrier the deeper I walked into the gallery. But I couldn’t stop myself looking.

  Art Works’ walls and ceiling were brilliant white. Small halogen lights played on each photograph, caption and price tag. I walked down the first pier of frames giving each picture a cursory glance. Villages getting burnt to the ground. Armoured vehicles driving over bodies. Some of the killing done by Serbs, some by Muslims or Croats. It didn’t matter in Bosnia: everyone just slaughtered everyone else.

  Maybe I was wrong. Maybe if more people did come and look at this stuff close up, they’d stop thinking of war as a PlayStation game.

  The second pier was simply entitled ‘Children’. I wondered if this was what Ezra had wanted me to look at. I studied the first black-and-white, ten-by-eight plate under its perspex frame. A young woman, probably in her early twenties, held a baby in her arms. She was lying in the snow and mud at the base of a tree beside a road. It was obvious she’d been shot. There were bloodstained strike marks all over her, and splashes against the bark. Her eyes were wide open. She’d probably been sitting against the tree at the time she got hit.

  This particular execution had been carried out by Muslims. In the background was a group of women, some with small bundles of belongings, being helped on to a truck by a man. Somebody had painted a white arrow on the bark just above the blood splash, and daubed the words ‘Chetnik Mama’. It was hard enough wondering why they’d shot her, let alone stopped to paint a message. What was even worse was that the Muslims hadn’t killed the baby: hypothermia had. I kept my eyes on the girl, staring into her eyes for clues. Had she stayed conscious just long enough for her to know her kid was going to die as soon as the frost arrived that night?

  I rubbed a hand into my scalp and smelt it, wondering if the mother had been able to smell her child’s hair while taking her last breaths.

  I moved down the aisle, drawn to a particular plate four or five shots along. A drab image, with a flash of red in it.

  I stood in front of it and couldn’t decide if I should laugh or burst into tears. It was Zina, smiling at the camera, her arms out as she showed off her new jacket while walking along a mud track with a group of older women. Everything else was grey – the sky, the buildings behind her, even the old women and their clothes. But not her: she was a splash of colour and her eyes were bright as they looked into the lens, perhaps smiling at her own reflection.

  The caption simply said: ‘The Poppy’. The photographer was Finnish.

  Her full name was Zina Osmanovich, and the picture had been taken on her fifteenth birthday. Two days later she was grabbed by Serbs, it said, along with the rest of her village, and killed while trying to escape.

  Fifteen. I glanced down at Baby-G.

  I tried not to, but couldn’t stop myself looking back and staring into her eyes. The last time I’d seen them they were dull and glazed like those of a dead fish, her mutilated body covered in mud. Tears started to well.

  It had been nine years. What the fuck was wrong with me? I wanted to move, and yet I didn’t. In the end I just stood and gazed at her. I thought about her life and Kelly’s. How would things have turned out for them both? Would they have got married? Had kids of their own?

  I should have done something. They would both have been alive still if it wasn’t for me . . .

  What? What could I have done?

  I felt a hand on my arm.

  ‘I’m not surprised you can’t tear yourself away from it,’ a voice behind me said. ‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’ There was a sigh. ‘What I’d give to have taken a shot like that . . . Wouldn’t you, Nick Collins?’

  15

  I spun round to find myself face to face with a grinning, clean-shaven Arab, who had the whitest teeth this side of the Oscar ceremony.

  ‘Jeral!’ I shook my head with surprise and what I hoped looked lik
e delight. Pointless pretending I wasn’t who he thought I was: we’d spent too long together in Bosnia.

  We shook hands. His face was still creased in a huge smile. ‘It’s been a few years, hasn’t it?’

  Jerry still had a touch of Omar Sharif about him, even though he’d put on a few pounds. There were specks of paint in his hair and over his watch, as if he’d been having an argument with a roller. ‘You haven’t changed a bit, mate.’ I glanced at the holes in his faded black jeans, and the black shirt that had obviously been ironed with a cold mess-tin. ‘And neither has your kit . . .’

  He rubbed the thinning patch on his head ruefully before giving me the once-over. He looked as if he wanted to say I hadn’t changed either, but couldn’t quite bring himself to tell that big a lie. In the end he just rubbed his head again and his expression became more serious. ‘By the way, I’m Jerry now. Arabic names haven’t gone down too well around here since 9/11. And things in Lackawanna don’t help . . .’

  He came from a steel town in upstate New York that had become part of the rust belt. His parents had been among the hundreds who’d emigrated from the Yemen to work in the factories, but were probably now existing on welfare. Lackawanna had been in the news quite a lot in recent weeks. Six Yemeni-Americans who’d been arrested for attending an al-Qaeda training camp in 2001 came from there – the first Made-in-the-USA Islamic extremists. If I had, I’d have changed my name too.

  I’d liked Jerry immediately. There was something that set him apart from the two distinct camps of journalists I’d come across in Sarajevo – the manic, gung-ho kids who’d turned up from all over the world in the hope of making their name, and the establishment figures who rarely risked leaving the basement of the hotel.

  The night I met him in Sarajevo, I was having a quiet beer at the bar of the Holiday Inn while waiting for another job. It was the only hotel still operating during the siege. I stayed there because it was where the media hung out, and I wanted to keep up my cover story.

  Jerry was arguing with a group of newsmen. He’d just made it back from Serb-occupied territory while some of the people around him hadn’t made it further than the front door. They just went down into the basement each morning, climbed into a UN APC, and hitched a ride to HQ. There they’d pick up a press release, take it back to the hotel, pad it out with a few quotes – usually from other journalists – and file it as from the front line. Jerry was one of the few guys I’d seen who chased the real stories.

  He’d broken away from the argument and come and sat next to me at the bar.

  ‘They got their heads up their asses, man.’ He took another swig of cat’s piss lager. ‘This isn’t one war – it’s hundreds.’

  I looked shocked. ‘You mean there’s more to this than Serbs versus Muslims?’

  For an American, he was quick on the uptake. His face lit up. ‘Just a little bit. I’ve heard there’s a Muslim-Croat thing going on, and Croat versus Serb. And as for Mostar . . .’ He let it hang. He was testing me.

  It was my turn to smile. ‘Versus the rest of the south. Tuzla?’

  ‘Versus the rest of the north, man. Like I said, hundreds.’ He extended his hand. ‘Hi, I’m Jeral. You with the networks?’

  We shook. ‘Nick Collins. Anyone with a chequebook.’

  Over the next couple of bad beers I’d discovered that, although he looked like Omar Sharif’s kid brother, he was born and bred in the States and couldn’t have been more apple pie if he’d tried. And he was the only fluent Arab speaker I’d ever come across who’d never been anywhere near the Middle East. Come to that, he’d not even been out of New York state until he was nineteen. He spoke Arabic at home with his Yemeni parents and some Saturday classes at the mosque, but English at school and in the real world.

  Art Works was like a library. Jerry leaned closer to keep the noise down. ‘Why you here? What’s your story?’

  ‘I was just passing and I saw the sign . . .’

  There was a pause. Neither of us seemed to know what to say next. It had been nine years; as far as he knew I’d just been in Bosnia to take pictures, and that was how I wanted to keep it.

  I was keen to get away from here and hoped he felt the same, but he just stood there, smiling at me. ‘What are you doing nowadays? Still clicking away?’

  I shook my head. ‘That’s all changed, mate. I’ve been doing some advertising stuff until recently. Boring, but it paid the bills. Now I’m just taking a break. What about you? Any of these yours?’

  ‘Actually, they’re good, but not that good, apart from that one.’ He pointed over my shoulder at Zina. ‘And one other.’

  Two of the Donna Karan gang stood behind us, wanting us to move on so they could tick Zina off in their catalogue. They looked us up and down, and one of them sniffed rather pointedly into her handkerchief.

  Jerry had more contempt for them than he could hide. ‘Nick, come and have a look.’

  ‘I’ve got to go, mate, stuff to do.’

  I needed to get away from him. He belonged to Nick Collins, not Nick Stone. But he wasn’t taking no for an answer. ‘Come on, two seconds. This is the other one I wish was mine. It’s going to be really famous one day.’

  We walked back to ‘Chetnik Mama’. He scanned the image, his face alive with admiration.

  A woman wandered past, fanning her face with her catalogue.

  ‘It’s one hell of a photograph. But that’s not what’s going to make this famous. It’s him.’ He tapped on the perspex where the man was helping the women in the background. ‘You know who this is? Go on, have a closer look.’

  I moved in. It was Beardilocks, I was sure of it. Leaning forward, I studied his face, my eyes just inches from his. His pale skin was smooth, stretched over high cheekbones below deepset eyes. He needed to put on a bit of weight to fill out that shirt collar. What struck me most was that, even in the midst of all the death and destruction, his nails were perfectly manicured and his long dark beard neatly clipped.

  ‘No.’ I pulled back from the frame. ‘Not a clue.’

  ‘Exactly. But one day you will. His face will be on as many T-shirts as Che Guevara’s. They wanted some of my stuff here, but fuck ’em, man. I’ve had two exhibitions of my own. I’ll let them have what I want, what I think is important. Not just some stuff to fill this wall or that.’

  One of the staff, a woman with blonde hair over a black polo-neck, came over to us. ‘Could you please be quiet? Images like these deserve respect, you know.’

  Jerry shook his head slowly in disbelief. ‘C’mon, Nick, you want fresh air?’

  We walked outside into the sun. Jerry put on a pair of mirrored wraparounds. ‘By the way, Nick, you look shit. But it’s still good to see you, man. A beer for old times’ sake?’

  We turned left, looking for somewhere. I’d have one beer and go.

  ‘You’re married, then.’ I nodded at the gold band on his finger.

  The smile hit maximum wattage. ‘We just had a daughter. She’s three months old. Chloë. She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.’

  I grinned back at him. ‘I guess she must take after her mother . . .’

  ‘Funny. You?’

  I shook my head. I didn’t want to talk about Kelly. That was private stuff. Even Ezra only got the abridged version. The full story was the only thing I had that belonged just to me.

  We went into a designer bar with low lights and leather settees. There were soon two Amstel Lights on the table between us, and the conversation continued. I found myself enjoying it. He wasn’t the sort of person I would normally get to know: he was a lot better than that.

  He’d been just twenty-three when we met at the Holiday Inn. His plan had been simple enough. Fly to London, buy a Hi-8 video camera to join the 35mm his mother had bought him as a graduation present, then hitchhike to Bosnia and take pictures that told the truth. He was going to sell them, once he found out how. By the sound of it, he’d done both.

  ‘You cover the Gulf?’


  ‘You kidding? With skin this colour? The last thing I need is to get on the wrong end of some friendly fire . . .’

  His big challenge now was how to balance work and family. I told him I wasn’t exactly the world’s leading expert on that, but knew it wasn’t going to get any simpler.

  Jerry nodded. The three of them had moved from Buffalo less than a month ago, and Renee was nesting big-time. ‘Maybe another child next year, who knows?’ He went a bit dewy-eyed again. ‘Good things, Nick. Good things.’

  He ordered another beer, and I heard myself doing so too. We got back to talking about the exhibition. ‘You know what?’ His voice wavered. ‘I’ve spent all my working life managing to block out the horrors I see through the lens so I can project my message through the image, but since Chloë everything’s changed. You know what I’m saying?’ He swallowed hard. ‘Like, the tragedy of that mother trying to protect her child, knowing that she herself had only seconds left to live. Hoping desperately that someone would look after it . . . Looking at my stuff, it takes on a new meaning now. What a waste . . .’ He took a long swig. ‘It’s all bullshit, isn’t it?’

  I rubbed my hand into my hair again and wiped my face with it. I felt a sudden pain in the centre of my chest and hoped I wasn’t making it too obvious. I guessed I felt the way he looked; he brushed away a tear that fell slowly down one cheek. ‘You’re right, mate, it’s all bullshit.’

  He stood up with me. ‘Come home with me, come see Renee and Chloë. We’re not far.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I—’

  He just wouldn’t give up. ‘Come on, my car’s just round the corner. I’d like to show you some of my work. It got a whole lot better since the last time we met.’

  I hesitated as we reached the door.

  ‘Come on, man. Come home. I’ve told Renee a hundred times about that day . . . She’d never forgive me if I didn’t bring you back.’