We Are Now Beginning Our Descent by James Meek Page A

them by translating what they should have said. Kellas and Mohamed began to walk back to the car. Kellas looked round once and saw that Jalaluddin hadn’t moved. He sat still with his head bowed, looking at nothing, the money in his hand, while his neighbours threw bricks on their pile with exaggerated energy.
    Kellas leaned forward, pulled out the airline’s entertainmentguide and leafed through the films on offer. He took a glass of champagne from the tray offered by the attendant. Sweet Home Alabama . That had been kindly reviewed, Reese Witherspoon revealing a talent for mainstream romantic comedy. It’d been that night, the night after he’d gone to the village and met Jalaluddin, that he had lost his temper with the sentry boy and shoved him in the chest and screamed at him that it was his fucking chair. One of those moments of rage that seemed to come from nowhere, but couldn’t, since Kellas experienced them so seldom. He could still replay his shout exactly as it had sounded in the darkness, so loud as to be distorted in his ears, and remember how it felt when his palm touched the boy’s warm bony chest. If he’d taken up The Citizen ’s speculative offer of psychiatric counselling, shyly suggested by the managing editor like a father slipping a drugs counselling service brochure under his son’s door, he could have made it sound neat and sympathetic. Sensitive, liberal Kellas goes to the village where the careless executioner of war has carried out his fatal warrant. Kellas’s heart begins to bleed. His conscience swells to enormous size, pokes into his brain and turns it to poisoned mush. I had a breakdown, doctor. War is so cruel and my noggin is so fragile. I don’t know what came over me. I lost control. A cheap doctor nods and understands. A smart doctor would tell Kellas he was lying. How come, smart doctor asks, you didn’t lose control when the Taliban let three rockets off into the market in Charikar when you were there and there were body parts everywhere? If you were so frazzled that afternoon, what’s with you being fly enough to lie to Astrid about how much money you gave to Jalaluddin? If you were all cut up by the cruelty of war, what’s with sitting down that evening at your crippled desk to write your bullshit novel? Smart doctor sees into Kellas. Smart doctor says: I know you. You know I do. I don’t see you made berserk by bombing. The way you went for that Afghan boy was something else. Like a man in a mask and helmet and goggles looking down through a Perspex canopy at something far awayhe doesn’t understand, and the only way he can try to understand it is to hit it.
    Kellas had finished his champagne. He looked around for a refill. The woman next to him was coming back to her seat after applying a fresh layer of crimson lipstick, which contrasted appealingly with her pale skin and the perfect white of her suit. She smiled at Kellas as she sat down and picked up her book.
    ‘Don’t move,’ said Kellas.
    ‘What?’ The woman smiled again, less easily.
    ‘I remember,’ said Kellas carefully, ‘that when I was a child I used to play with my mother’s lipstick – don’t move! – not to put it on, I mean, only to make the stick come in and out of the tube, it looked like a robot’s tongue, and sometimes tiny flakes of it would fall off. I’m surprised now, thirty years later, that they haven’t got around to making lipstick that doesn’t flake – keep still, I’m nearly finished – there’s a piece on the lapel of your jacket. Don’t brush it off! You’ll smear it.’
    ‘I can use my fingernail.’ She had an American accent, and Chinese features.
    ‘No. I know a better way. This is how the vacuum cleaner was invented.’
    ‘You brought a vacuum cleaner on the plane?’
    ‘Wait.’ Kellas took a paper napkin from his table, peeled off a single sheet of the two-ply tissue, exhaled till his lungs were almost empty, and placed the tissue over his slightly open