The Best British Fantasy 2013 Read online

  I nodded. Then I showed him my gun again. ‘One gun,’ I said. I nodded at him and his fellows. ‘No gun,’ I said.

  I could see their minds working, it was that slow. Something like a silent communication passed between them.

  ‘One . . . Osama,’ the man said at last, speaking for the group. He pointed, vaguely, in the distance, at an easterly direction. ‘Many . . . Osama,’ he said, hopefully.

  I shrugged. I was only being paid for this one. ‘Mine,’ I said, simply. The man’s shoulders slumped.

  ‘Here,’ I said. I opened my saddlebag. They looked up at me but made no move. I pulled out a packet. I opened it up slowly, showing them. Half a loaf of bread, a lump of hard yellow cheese.

  ‘Food,’ the man closest to me said. The others echoed him, one after the other, that single word going around in a circle. ‘Food. . .’ The sun was setting fast. The Osama was breathing quietly on the ground.

  I closed the packet and threw it to them. The man closest to me caught it. ‘Food,’ he said.

  ‘Go,’ I said.

  He nodded. I nodded too. My head inched at the lying Osama. ‘Mine,’ I said.

  ‘Yours,’ the man closest to me said. I waited. The man shrugged, then spat on the ground again. Then he and his men dispersed, ebbing away from the lying Osama, walking slowly, heading to the setting sun. I waited until they disappeared. I got off my horse and approached the Osama. The gun was pointing at it. It opened bright eyes and looked at me. I couldn’t tell what was in his eyes. Hate or bemusement or resignation. Eyes too alien to read. ‘Turn on your stomach,’ I said. He didn’t move. ‘Do it!’ I kicked him. He rolled over. I grabbed his hands and pulled them behind his back and tied them with the rope that was lying there. The noose was still on the Osama’s neck. I tied his legs together. I stuck a piece of cloth in its mouth. Trussed up, I lifted him up. He was light, they were all so light. I put him on the horse, behind the saddle. I climbed on. The horse neighed. I patted it.

  We rode on, into the night, me and the horse and the Osama.

  The town was called Ninawa. It wasn’t much of a town. The buildings lay half-formed, the life had been shelled out of them. An Osama was hanging from a tree as I approached the town. Buildings were burnt and shelled and broken but amidst them some rebuilding effort had taken place, and a major artery had been cleared through the rubble where wooden houses rose over the old broken concrete. There was an inn and a hand-painted sign showing a man being swallowed by a whale. I rode into town. On wooden porches men watched me uneasily. From the windows of the brothel I could see the curtains twitch. I rode on. I came to the sheriff’s place. A single star on the door, and a crude crescent moon beside it. The sheriff came out to greet me. He was a fat man, in a torn military uniform that had once been clean. He spat when he saw me. Chewing tobacco. His teeth were stained.

  ‘This the one?’ he said.

  I nodded. He didn’t look that interested but he came over. He lifted the Osama’s shirt and checked and found the mark and nodded, and spat again. I got off the horse and pulled down the Osama and left him in the dirt in front of the sheriff’s place. The Osama looked up at me, silently. The sheriff went back into his office and returned with a small leather bag and threw it at me. I heard coins jingle. I caught the bag and put it away. The sheriff opened his mouth to say something then seemed to change his mind. He nodded. I nodded back. I got back on the horse and rode to the inn and tethered the horse there. I went inside and ordered a drink.

  The proof copy of Osama arrived yesterday morning. I held it in my hands and opened the pages wide and put them against my face, and smelled the pages. They smelled like paper. I wrote the earlier part of this story in Jaffa, but I am now in a place just outside London, in Surrey, and there’s a fox on the low rooftop of the garden shed, just standing there, watching. The air is much cooler here, the relentless heat of Jaffa dissipating like it never was. I was here when King’s Cross went, E——— would have been travelling to work that day but had been out of the city for an interview. My friend S———, also a writer, had come to London that day too, for a conference. He said his plane kept circling in the air, and they weren’t told why. When they landed the captain said it was a stormy day out there, and passengers were advised to use umbrellas.

  There were three of them and they’d been waiting for me. The bar had a long wooden counter and it was dark inside and it smelled of spilled beer and stale smoke and stale sweat. There was a flag on the wall with too many stars on it. The walls were stone and it was cool inside. There were low wooden tables but only one man sitting down, his back to the wall, his face in the dark. I sat down at the bar and ordered my drink. The man behind the counter had one eye and his hair grew long over the one that was missing. He brought me a beer in a none-too-clean glass. I passed over a couple of coins and he disappeared back into the shadows without comment.

  I took a sip from my beer. Then another. I didn’t move when a man sat down beside me. Did not look sideways. Took another sip. Waited. Felt his attention on me. I was calculating my next move – swinging the beer glass into his face, breaking it, rising, kicking the stool from under him, pulling out my gun. I took another sip. The bartender didn’t come back. The man beside me on the bar said, ‘We wondered if you had a minute.’

  I turned my head at that. His hair was cut short, he was greying at the temples. He wore a uniform and his shirt had been recently ironed. There was sweat on his brow. The bar was very quiet. I heard footsteps and a second man appeared, walking towards us. He was zipping up his pants as he walked.

  ‘This him?’ he said, nodding at me.

  ‘We just want to have a chat,’ the man sat down beside me said, patiently, ignoring the other one. He had a softer accent, I realised. And there was a crown and crossed swords on his badge. ‘A friendly chat, Mr. Longshott.‘

  ‘This the guy?’ the man standing up wiped his hands on his trousers. Looked me up and down. His nails were dirty. ‘You an Osama sniffer? You catching Os, cowboy? Shit -’ he made that last word drawl. ‘Fucking cowboys,’ he said.

  ‘A chat, Mr. Longshott,’ said the one with the soft accent, softly. ‘We have a job we think you’re the man for.’

  I took a sip from my beer. It wasn’t a very good beer. I stood, pushing the stool away. The man standing up jumped, just a little. The man sitting down never moved.

  I looked at them both. Then I turned around and looked at the third man, the one in the shadows, the one with his back to the wall, sitting on his own at the one occupied table. I nodded, once. He nodded back. I walked over, not hurrying, and the two other men followed me like shadows.

  I stopped before the table. The man sitting down pushed a chair towards me with his foot. It scraped loudly against the stone floor. When he moved, leaning towards me, his face came out of shadow and into the light. He had a long face and thick grey hair and he smiled easily and without humour. I knew his face almost as well as I knew Osama’s, or my own. Once his face had been everywhere. Recently, not so much. His teeth were white. He said, ‘Mr. Longshott.’

  I nodded again. ‘General.’

  ‘Please. Sit down.’

  I sat down. I put my beer mug on the table. The other two men remained standing.

  ‘I’m listening,’ I said.

  ‘One of our Osamas is missing,’ the old general said.

  In any of the great Vietnam War movies – Apocalypse Now; Platoon; Full Metal Jacket – the Vietnamese never speak. This is not their story. It is the story of a war and the soldiers who fight it, against a nameless, voiceless, faceless enemy, an alien enemy. The Vietnamese in those movies are the alien Bugs of Starship Troopers. They are without humanity, Charlie-devils in the jungle-hell.

  I wrote Osama in Laos. In Vientiane, across the Mekong from Thailand. ‘Why Vientiane?’ Joe asks, at the end of the novel. Because it is the middle of nowhere, and everywhere, I
could have told him. The setting of another war. It was safe, in Laos, to recall the other incidents, Nairobi and London and Ras-el-Shaitan. To contemplate the war from the other side. US forces have dropped over two million bombs over Laos in the Vietnam War. Kids would go looking for scrap metal and come back without a leg, or an arm.

  In Vietnam, they call that war the American War.

  I once had a drink on the Mekong with a UN volunteer who specialised in making artificial limbs. His previous posting had been to Afghanistan.

  ‘I’m still listening,’ I said. The general leaned forward, across the table, his face half-masked by shadows. The man with the soft accent came forward then. He was holding a file in his hands. It was made of rough brown paper. I saw my name written across it in bold black letters, handwritten. Mike Longshott.

  ‘Longshott, Mike,’ he said, that same soft, almost apologetic voice. The other one, the one with the dirty nails and the bad manners, snorted. ‘Fucking cowboys,’ he said, to no one in particular.

  ‘Served with decoration in the second war and again in the third one. Discharged in -’ he named a date that meant nothing. ‘Current occupation, various, but predominantly bounty hunting. Osama captures: fifty-seven.’

  The man with the dirty nails whistled, sardonically.

  ‘Osama kills,’ the man with the soft accent continued, ignoring him, ‘unknown.’ He coughed, apologetically I thought. ‘But presumed high. Mr. Longshott, you have an impressive record.’

  I took a sip of beer. Waited him out. No one seemed inclined to talk. I took another sip. The room was very quiet. There was no sign of the bartender. I sighed and put my beer back on the table. ‘I wasn’t a member of the original team,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t in Abbottabad. I wasn’t a part of Neptune Spear.’

  I felt I was talking too much. I was the only one talking. I saw them exchange glances. I wondered what else my file said. Abbottabad was a long way away, beyond the mountains, and in another time. The compound, helicopters approaching, men dropping, machine guns firing, we stormed up the stairs and there he was, at the top, looking down. He went back into his bedroom and that was deemed a hostile action. When we burst in he was standing behind two veiled women who were trying to protect him. We pushed them aside. Then we shot him, kill shots in the head and chest.

  ‘Mr. Longshott.’ It was the general, speaking. ‘We need a man to go up-river and catch us a son of a bitch.’

  ‘What do you need me for?’ I said. ‘You have -’ I gestured with my hand, not completing the words. The remnants of an army, I thought but didn’t say.

  He said, ‘We believe this is not just any Osama.’

  I remembered the Abbottabad Compound, the gunshots going into his soft body, and the explosion. Like a cloud of insects, rising . . . I felt a tightness in my chest. The old general nodded. ‘Play him the tape,’ he said.

  The man with the soft accent put a device down on the table. He pressed a button and a voice came out of it, disembodied. I felt a shiver run through me when I heard his voice. I had forgotten it, or hoped I had.

  ‘We fight because we are free men who don’t sleep under oppression.’

  There was a scratchy quality to the recording. His voice never wavered. ‘No one except a dumb thief plays with the security of others and then makes himself believe he will be secure -’

  The man with the soft accent pressed a button and there was a sped-up sound and then he pressed a button again and Osama’s voice resolved again, somewhere else in the speech, some terrible recollection, and he said, ‘Blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises demolished over their residents, rockets raining down –‘ the man with the soft accent pressed another button and the silence returned.

  ‘You will travel up the Euphrates,’ the old general said. ‘You will locate the Osama and you will destroy it. All of it.’

  ‘Blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises demolished over their residents, rockets raining down.’ He wasn’t talking about Al-Qaeda, he was talking about an American-aided Israeli invasion of Lebanon, one that he witnessed. My dad fought in that war, that invasion.

  It is so quiet here, in the room overlooking the garden, with the sun out, and the radio playing in the background. Here in an England whose people cheerfully divided up the Middle East and went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq and who genuinely had no idea as to why they were being attacked. Outside women in burqas walk their children to school and their white neighbours complain in low voices about immigrants, and those Muslims, and how can they treat their women this way and they should go back to where they came from – to the places we bomb. The places we continue to bomb.

  Osama comes out in two months. And I am hoping to finally put an end to it, this occupation of my life, this invasion of my mind. I remember Nairobi, the Hilltop Hotel on Ngiriama Road, the narrow bed we lay on, the terrorists a floor below. I remember the shell of the American embassy, the ring of soldiers surrounding it, uselessly, now. I could not not write Osama. Not with the ghosts, and their whispers in my ears.

  A day’s ride out of Ninawa and I was alone, alone under the stars. The river came into view. It was not the same river. The river was life. You say Euphrates, but it was not Euphrates, not exactly, not since the world changed, not since they picked it up like a toy and shook it, shook it hard until it fell sideways and into pieces and when it was formed again it was different. There were high mountains in the distance, and beyond those mountains there was nothing any more, not since the Compound, not since the spores. ‘You’ll be going into the wild lands,’ the man with the dirty fingernails told me. We were outside. My meeting with the old general had been concluded. ‘The lands where the wild Osamas are.’ He laughed without humour, hawked on the ground. ‘Bring us the head of Prince Osama,’ he said. He looked at me and shook his head. ‘Fucking cowboys,’ he said, compassionately.

  I left him there and felt his eyes on my back as I rode out of town. As I left I saw them hauling the Osama I’d caught up on the gallows.

  I made a fire by the bank of the river and watched the stars. The Euphrates was dirty brown and the water running fast. The wild lands, the man with the dirty fingernails said. But everywhere was the wild lands now. I slept and in my dreams I was back up those stairs, and bursting through the closed door of his bedroom, pushing aside the veiled women, and then I was pressing the trigger, once, twice, three times, bullets hitting soft flesh, chest and then head, and then the explosion. They were still running the war in the world, the world was war, and the old Euphrates travelled in and out of space and time, it travelled through Uruk and Avagana, it was everywhere and nowhere and he was at the end of it, they told me but it couldn’t be right. Osama Prime.

  When I woke up it was early morning. I saddled up and rode again, the sun low on the horizon, climbing, like a beetle, climbing.

  As I travelled the landscape changed. Low hills, occasional settlements. I skirted the villages. There were men in the world and the things that had once been men, and there were Osamas. Several times I saw fresh tracks. Wild Osamas. I kept thinking of his voice on that tape. ‘You were a soldier,’ the man with the soft accent told me, before I left. ‘But this is no job for a soldier.’

  I followed the river. Seagulls cried overhead. Several times I smelled smoke, cooking fires. Twice I came across the bodies of men. They had been torn apart. I waited, but when the attack came it still caught me by surprise.

  They came out of the water. Their skin was a grey-green, like a diver’s suit. Their hands extended into flippers or claws or human fingers, depending. They rose out of the water and the water fell from them. They had once been human, perhaps they still considered themselves so. I shot the first one in the gut and he dropped, flopping on the ground. Seal-men. The others were upon me t
hen. They shed remnants of their humanity like skin. They clubbed me like seals. They bit into my skin, tore chunks of flesh from my arms and thighs. I shot another one and the shot went through his skull and I kicked out at another, uselessly: they were heavy and slippery on the ground there in the night under a crescent moon.

  When the world changed and compressed and all there was was war, the moon, too, changed. It had stopped shape shifting. It was a war moon, a constant moon, a crescent moon. I tried to fight but they were too many and I felt myself growing weak. The irony of dying like this made a laugh like a cough work its way out of my bruised lungs. I fell under their weight. I was doing knife-work now, cutting through blubber, trying to reach vital organs, trying to take as many of them with me as I could before I went.

  Then there was a terrible, high keening noise. It cut through the air and for a moment I thought it was the sound of my death, the sound of a heart, stopping. Then a tearing barking noise and the seal-people fell back. I turned, I was on my back, I wiped blood from my eyes, the weight on my chest had gone and I felt lighter. I blinked in the light of the moon. A wild Osama was standing above me.

  It was an old Osama. An Osama having gone through all the life-stages of an Osama. His beard was white and his turban was dirty grey. His skin was wrinkled, his lips bloodless, but his eyes were still the Osama eyes, that clear, penetrating gaze. The seal-folk moved away from it. They growled but if they had language, they had forgotten it. The ancient Osama advanced on them, his feet bare on the ground. I turned my head, and saw.

  Behind him, ringing me in a half-circle like a moon.