Deep Black

86

At least two very cold hours must have passed with me listening to the wind and Jerry shivering and fidgeting constantly to get some kind of feeling back into his limbs. I wrapped him closer to me, for my benefit as much as his. ‘Listen, with that camera of yours fucked, it’s pointless you carrying on. Why not get down the hill to SFOR?’

He shook his head. ‘Fuck, no. Why give up now, when we’re so close?’

‘You got no reason to go now, and you’re in shit state.’

‘So are you. Besides, I can still interview him. You ever thought I might want to know who killed Rob?’

‘That’s not the only thing I want to talk to him about.’

Despite his misery, Jerry managed a brief smile. ‘What, like expenses?’

I looked down the hill. I still couldn’t see the barns. I watched the top of his shivering head for a long time, wondering whether to tell him. But why change the habit of a lifetime? Even as a kid, I’d lied about where I’d been and what I’d done – not just to my mum; to everyone. I didn’t want people to know things about me. It made me feel vulnerable. My stepdad would just use it as an excuse to fill me in. Why give people the rope to hang you with?

In the end, I just thought why the fuck not, as long as I left out who I really worked for. Perhaps if I carried on talking, I’d keep our minds off the cold. Jerry got everything, from the time I arrived in Bosnia to the time I left. I told him about the Paveway jobs. I told him about watching Nuhanovic at the cement factory, and listening to the screams of the girls being raped.

And, finally, I told him about Zina.

‘She knew I was there, she just kept crawling those last few feet to the hide, her eyes begging me for help, but I couldn’t do anything.

‘I could have saved more lives than even Nuhanovic. At least he had the bollocks to intervene. All I did was watch, put the job first . . .’

‘That’s why you want to see him? You feel guilty?’

He looked at me for a long time, shaking and trembling all the while. ‘You can’t beat yourself up about that sort of shit. Believe me. I mean, do I grab the girl who’s burning with napalm and try to put out the flames or do I take her photograph?

‘When we were here in ’ninety-four, I was a kid: Mr Idealism, Mr Humanity. I told myself I was a human being first and a photographer second.’ He gave an ironic little laugh as the rain fell down his face. His stubble had been washed clean. ‘It took me three fucking wars, man, to understand the answer to that question. I’m the guy who presses the shutter, nothing else and nothing more. The world needs those images to jolt people out of their cholesterol-lined comfort zones. That’s my contribution to humanity.’ He leaned forward. ‘You’re no different, man. You had to keep your distance; if it had gone right you would have saved a lot more people than you saw killed. This making sense to you?’

It was, but it wasn’t making me feel any better. I still wanted to square things with Nuhanovic.

‘You remember that Kevin Carter shot in my apartment? You know, the kid and the vulture?’

I nodded, realizing that I’d just rubbed my soaking hair and sniffed my hands like some kind of addict. It was a while since I’d done that stuff.

‘Three months after taking it, the poor fuck connected a hose to the exhaust pipe of his pickup truck and took a few deep sucks. The problem for Kevin was he wasn’t able to tell the world if that girl survived. He was honest about it. He admitted he sat there for twenty minutes, just hoping the vulture would spread its wings. When it didn’t, he took the picture anyway – then he sat under a tree, crying, talking to God, and thinking about his own daughter.

‘When he got back to the States, he started getting midnight hate calls for not helping the girl. Even one of the fucking papers wrote – I’ll never forget it – “The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering might as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene.” The girl began to haunt him.’

I knew how he felt. I couldn’t get Zina’s mud-and blood-covered face out of my head, and I couldn’t get the smell of Kelly off my hands.

‘It wasn’t fair to attack him. If I’m zooming in on someone dying, I’m composing an image, maybe even a work of art, but inside I’m screaming, wanting to go cry under a tree. Thing is, Nick, these suburban do-gooders, with their Gap and flat-pack lives, saw one little girl. Kevin was surrounded by a famine, and that kid, she was just one of hundreds he’d seen dying that day. If he hadn’t taken that shot, not one of those fat fucks back home would even know where the Sudan was.’

We lay huddled a while longer as the rain lashed down.

‘You know what, Nick? I wanted to get Fikret into the car and put him on a plane to the States – but what do you do when you see hundreds like him, everywhere you turn? I still think about that little fuck, wonder if he survived. Maybe he’s playing soccer right now. Maybe he’s lying in a mass grave. It tears me apart some days.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I think I can imagine what you went through, you know. Just don’t beat yourself up over it.’

He placed a hand on my shoulder. ‘The whole world is fucked up, man. You did what you felt was right. Hindsight is for those fucks who’ve never been out there, never had to make those kinds of choices. Since having Chloë, I’ve done a lot more thinking about that shit.’

‘Tell me about it.’

He looked surprised. ‘You got a kid?’

I rubbed my frozen hands together. ‘Her name’s Kelly.’

Maybe Ezra had been right. Maybe there was a right moment for everything to come out; maybe I couldn’t have stopped it if I’d tried. It certainly felt that way.

I started to tell him everything.

‘Her mother and father were my friends, my only friends. Her little sister was my goddaughter. Kelly was only nine when they were killed, in their house, just outside DC. I was too late to save them. Just by minutes. Kelly was the only one left. I didn’t realize it at the time, but she was all I had left too.’

The rain started to ease a little while I fumbled my way through the day I’d discovered the bodies, and the weeks Kelly and I were on the run together afterwards, and how she’d ended up with Josh and his family in Maryland. ‘He’s a minister now in some happy-clappy church . . .’

I told him about me being shit at the job of looking after her, totally inconsistent, and how I felt a bit of me died when I signed her over permanently to Josh’s care, convincing myself it was the best thing for her.

Shivering and shaking, Jerry seemed to understand. ‘How do you ever recover from something like that?’

‘She never really—’

I felt a hand touch my shoulder. It must have taken a lot to move it from the warmth of his armpit. ‘I mean you, man. How the fuck do you hold it all together?’

Good question. Fucked if I knew the answer.

We lay there in the rain for maybe another twenty minutes. I checked Baby-G: 16:28. The rain had eased just enough for me to make out the headlights moving down the valley back towards Sarajevo. ‘Not long till last light, mate. Maybe we’ll get a fire going in the barn, even boil up some water. Then it’ll be smiles all round.’