Hard-baked by the sun, the earth crackles underfoot like tinder. The rainy season has long passed. The riverbeds have receded, the muddied tracks have dried out and the earth has formed itself into strange eddying patterns so that the ground rises and falls in whipped peaks like freshly baked meringues. As he trudges forward, his boots crunch against the parched brown soil.
The strap of Max’s helmet scratches the roughness of his stubble. Sweat drenches his hair. Rivulets of it trickle down his forehead, into the corner of his eye sockets, down the side of his nose and then slip across the cleft of his lip into the corner of his mouth.
Johnno, the ‘Vallon Man’, is way out at the front of the patrol, sliding his metal detector left and right and left and right over the ground. Vallon is the name of the metal detector used to sweep for bombs. So Johnno, inevitably, is known as the Vallon Man. The army isn’t, after all, to be congratulated for its originality with nicknames.
It is just after 10am in Upper Nile State, South Sudan and here he is, an insignificant stick man in uniform in the middle of Africa, part of an eleven-strong search team, criss-crossing back and forth to clear a strategic mound of mines left scattered across the barren fields by insurgents. Every step they take is a step closer to getting it over with.
There is an abandoned village to the left of them, the ground blackened with the remnants of a recent fire. The huts are in varying states of collapse: one of them has lost its roof and half its external wall. The tightly padded clumps of straw and mud have started to disintegrate, leaving the half-formed hut standing like a rotten tooth against the low horizon. A goat lies dead underneath a mango tree, its scrawny neck still tethered to the trunk. A cloud of flies has formed around the animal’s stomach. There is an unmistakable stench of putrid flesh.
There are no children. No shouts or giggles or scamperings to alleviate the density of the silence, the thickness of the air around them. Normally, when they come to a village like this one, the wheels of their armoured vehicles throwing up clouds of dust as they approach, the children run out to meet them. They come with big smiles and pipe-cleaner legs, their feet bare, their bodies swathed in a raggedy array of clothes donated by faraway Western families: football strips torn and dirtied with age; a too-small T-shirt emblazoned with an image of SpongeBob SquarePants. They run up to the soldiers in a sudden swarm and ask for pens or chewing gum or packets of cigarettes they are too young to smoke. Usually, Max will drop to his haunches and laugh. He allows them to try on his helmet and gives them a few biros he has stashed in his pockets for just such an eventuality.
He is good with children. They like him; gravitate naturally towards him.
Hearts and minds, the army calls it. As though the two could be distinctly separated.
The children have no mistrust in their eyes. It is the adults who are wary: the village elders who hang back in the shadows with scowling faces and shifting gazes, attempting to work out what these foreigners want from them.
The insurgents are everywhere, hiding beneath the most unlikely carapace: the elderly man with the stooped shoulders and the baggy, wrinkled face or the young woman in the bright pink sarong with the high cheekbones and elegant neck. Max cannot trust anyone. Even the landscape, with its rugged beauty, once the preserve of adventurous back-packers and NGO volunteers, conceals deadly secrets.
It can be the most insignificant thing that gives a bomb away: the thin sliver of glinting yellow from the cooking oil container packed full of farming fertiliser, or the snaking length of electrical wire waiting to be pressed underneath a soldier’s boot or the tread of a vehicle wheel. You have to be alert, even when the heat saps your energy and your concentration. You have to remind yourself of the danger, just to keep your heart rate up, to keep the adrenalin flowing.
The Vallon Man stops. The search-team halts, momentarily. Max waits, his pulse rate quickening, his muscles tensed in readiness. The ten men around him do the same, their nerves stretched tight as trip-wires.
But it is a false alarm and, after a few minutes, they move on and resume the familiar shuffling movement forwards: one foot in front of the other, eyes scanning each peak and dip of the ragged ground.
After what feels like hours but is probably only a matter of minutes, they come to the edge of a dried-up river, the banks falling steeply on either side of the gulley. Johnno scrambles down first, clumps of soil breaking off in his hands as he manoeuvres himself gingerly towards the bottom of the natural trench. Again, he sweeps the metal detector over the surface, the movement of his hands rhythmic and steady. Johnno signals to let them know the way is clear.
Max steps forward. The tip of his boot makes contact with a piece of rock, about the size of a child’s clenched fist. As he shifts his weight on to his foot, the rock splinters into quarters. A blast rips through his body.
He is thrown back several metres, his body thumping to the ground, his neck twisted slackly. His helmet rolls to one side, the strap sliced through. It happens so quickly.
Cracked mud. Redness. Voices all around him, shouted orders and screams for help, each one registering at a different decibel, each one with its own jarring note of discord, a miasmic babble of noise.
‘Come on, Max, come on, you fucker, don’t you dare leave us now, don’t you fucking dare.’
Someone is kneeling beside him, sleeves rolled up, pushing down on his ribcage. Their bare hands pump up and down, blood spitting on to skin.
His eyelids flicker shut.
His heart beats frantically, trying to keep up, but soon there is too much blood and his heart seems to be drowning in fluid, like a rock sucked into the quicksand, and although they are trying, all of them, trying so, so hard to keep him alive, it is too much effort to take another breath. There is too much blood.
His heart stutters. Then it stops.
Was that how it happened? she wonders. Or was it another way?
Maybe he woke up that morning with an intimation of what lay ahead, a bad feeling, a sense of what fate had in store for him.
Maybe, in the moments just before the bomb exploded, he had been laughing, sharing a joke with his mates and not paying enough attention to where his feet were falling.
Maybe the blow was instant and there was no time to feel pain or hurt or sadness or panic or any of it – any of it at all. Maybe there was no time to think.
Maybe he was calm.
Or panicked.
Or resolute.
Was he convinced he was going to make it through?
Maybe he thought of her just before he died. Because isn’t your life meant to flash before your eyes? Isn’t death meant to bring you back to the moment of your birth?
Or maybe, instead of his mother, he thought of Andrew.
Or of Elsa.
Or even of Angelique.
But then again, maybe he didn’t.
Maybe he didn’t.
And maybe none of it happened quite the way she imagines, she thinks, shifting the car into gear, trying to remember the quickest way to the supermarket. Because how could it?
Because how could she possibly know?