Pieces of Me Read online

  I learnt early in life that in the pursuit of purpose, sometimes sacrifices had to be made. As a doctor, my father often worked long hours and would be called into the hospital at odd times of the night. It wasn’t unusual to wake up for school and find his place at the breakfast table empty. He never complained. My father was not a religious man, but the faith he did possess was an unwavering belief in the importance of doing the right thing.

  “Some people, like your dad, are put here to help,” my mother told me on my eighth birthday when I refused to blow out my candles because my dad was late home from work. When I was finally cajoled into puffing over the cake, I made the wish that I would become someone “who helps” one day. I wanted to make him proud.

  After he was gone, I clung to that wish. I studied hard at university. When other people were in the bar, I was in the library. I went home less and less, even during the holidays. My mother and sister would call me, concerned, and the more they called, the less I would phone them back. I stayed on to do extra reading, extra assignments. And all the while, I was planning my escape.

  When the job in Baghdad came up, I jumped at the chance. I dived right in, ready to sacrifice myself for my work, but it was not long before the long hours and the strangeness of compound life began to take their toll. Eventually my manager took me to one side.

  “I know this place is tough, Emma, but you need to find an outlet, some way to relax here,” he said. “Otherwise you’re going to burn out fast and we need you too much to let that happen.”

  I did not so much hear his words as feel them. If I burnt out, I became useless to them. I would have failed. I needed this job as much as they needed me. Perhaps more.

  The first Friday I went to the pool I didn’t even own a swimsuit. I had to fashion swimwear out of my gym shorts and a sports bra that I bought from the PX, the military store on the compound. The Turkish shop sold swimsuits too, but the cheap Lycra was notoriously bad at surviving the combination of Iraqi sun and over-chlorinated water.

  Around the edge of the pool were sun loungers, which I navigated awkwardly with my towel wrapped tightly around me that first day. I walked past the private security guys who were busy flexing and slathering themselves in tanning oil and past the women from the State Department who drank wine and watched from behind their expensive sunglasses.

  I found where my colleagues were sitting and joined them, accepting the beer that was handed in my direction. Everyone seemed completely at ease with being partially clothed in front of their colleagues. I settled on a sun lounger, took a sip of the beer and hid behind my book. It wasn’t long before I started to sweat.

  The heat became too much and I moved to sit tentatively at the edge of the pool. I dipped my feet in and gasped as the cold water rushed between my toes. I pulled my feet out and glanced around guiltily. I imagined the faces of the Iraqi family I had interviewed that morning, shaking their heads in disappointment. But the moment of repose felt like a drug and I kept going back for more, until eventually I was there every Friday. Just like everyone else.

  By the time I met Adam I had swapped my shorts and sports bra for a normal bikini I bought on R and R. It was Anna who introduced him to me. She was the only other Brit in the office, a couple of years younger than me, and had embraced the social side of compound life far more easily than I had. Within a few weeks of arriving, she had become a regular fixture in Baghdaddy’s, the US Embassy bar, but our friendship was slower to form.

  The first real conversation I had with her was a few months after she arrived. A group from the office were in Baghdaddy’s one evening, sitting around a small table and discussing the latest episode of Sons of Anarchy. Whenever a new season of any major programme came out, it was the talk of the compound. Outside of war, there was little else going on.

  Anna went up to the bar to order for the group. While she waited for the drinks, she spoke to the man next to her, who had headed over from the pool table at the other end of the bar. He had a shaven head and a thick neck and was probably ex-military, but none of us paid much attention. It was only when Anna slammed down the drinks and marched out of the bar that we took notice.

  “Damn liberals,” we heard the guy mutter as he returned to the pool table with his beer. I wondered for a moment if anyone was going to follow Anna and quickly realised that all eyes were on me, the other British female. I scraped my chair back and followed.

  I found Anna leant against the wall just outside the bar, palms covering her face. When she peeled away her hands, I noticed for the first time how exhausted she looked. Her tears had left streaks in her foundation, revealing the raised bumps of a breakout on her skin. I was shocked at not having recognised her fatigue sooner. I had been there myself.

  “God, I’m sorry,” she said, trying to regain her composure. “It’s just… God, he was just being such a dick.”

  I didn’t need to ask what he’d said. Comments from men like that tended to be sexist or racist or just generally ignorant and weren’t worth repeating.

  “These people can’t live in the States with such violent inclinations. It doesn’t fit with our culture,” one man in the Green Beans café had told me after finding out my job. I didn’t bother reminding him about the levels of gun crime in the US, nor that these people were the ones fleeing the violence not spreading it.

  I searched my handbag for a tissue to give Anna, but found only a squashed cereal bar and a broken ID badge holder. Anna wiped a hand under her eye and dragged mascara across her face.

  “Uh, do you want to come up to my room?” I asked awkwardly. “I can make you a cup of tea or something.”

  I wasn’t expecting her to say yes, but she nodded silently and so we started walking towards our accommodation block, East End.

  East End was about mid-rung in terms of the compound’s accommodation hierarchy, which dictated not only the relative comfort of your living quarters but their safety level too. Diplomatic staff had their own kitchenettes and shatterproof windows. The CHUs (containerised housing units) were close to the edge of the compound and offered zero protection in an attack. These were for third country nationals who had lost the passport lottery and were shipped in for the logistics of running a war. East End was somewhere in the middle. We didn’t have windows but we did have privacy.

  Inside my room, Anna sat down on the flowery bedspread I bought on my first R and R, after I realised the only ones available on the compound were green and scratchy. I also brought back a magnolia-coloured table lamp and some brightly patterned cushions so the bed could double as a sofa, as it was doing now. They were small additions, but they made it feel more like a bedroom and less like a hospital room or prison cell.

  I filled my travel kettle with a bottle of plastic water and rinsed out the spare mug I’d been using as a pen-holder.

  “PG Tips? Wow, I would’ve cried in front of you sooner if I’d known,” said Anna as I pulled out the teabags. I laughed.

  After I made the tea I sat down on the bed next to her, my head resting back against the photos taped to the wall. One was a printed-out photo of my dad, holding a very young version of me upright in a paddling pool. Another was of my friends at our graduation, our faces shiny from achievement and a Prosecco breakfast. The third was a photo of a painting, with a blue sky and a small pond and splashes of red and pink flowers.

  Anna and I were quiet at first, both adjusting to the unexpected intimacy of being in a location that was neither the office nor the bar. Eventually I spoke.

  “Some days here just suck.”

  She sighed.

  “Usually I can deal with it, but, I dunno, it just hit me today…”

  She trailed off, unsure of where the boundaries of our fledgling friendship lay. I nodded, assuring us both that she should go on.

  “I… I haven’t slept much this week,” she said, and took a sip of tea.

  It had been a tough week for everyone in the office. Two of our Iraqi staff had left and we were struggling
to get through the number of interviews needed to stem the ever-growing backlog of applications. However hard you worked, there was always the worry that the speed of the process was failing the people who needed it. I should have realised that Anna was suffering too.

  “You can always hang out with me in here if you need a break,” I said. “We can drink tea and talk about the royals and do all the other stuff people assume us Brits must bond over.”

  Anna smiled. In the awkward confines of my windowless room, our desert friendship was formed.

  *

  When Anna came over to me at the pool a couple of months later, I knew it wasn’t to talk about work. We didn’t talk work by the pool. Anna and I had grown increasingly close over the past months, our friendship extending beyond tea into gym sessions, lunches, coffee breaks and even an R and R vacation to Thailand. We interviewed visa applicants during the day, drank gin and tonics together in the evening and lay side by side under our desks amid dusty computer cables whenever the mortars fell a bit too close.

  Relationships in the compound intensified in a way that would be deemed unusual in the outside world. Sometimes now, this friendship from Baghdad is the only one that feels real. Anna knows parts of me that friends and family from back home will never know. Adam knows Baghdad Emma too. Even when I am not out there, he keeps that part of me alive.

  Anna sat on the end of my sunbed and I lowered my magazine.

  “Hey, Em,” she said. “How’s it going over here?”

  There was a forced casualness to her question that made me suspicious.

  “Fine…”

  “Good. Cool. Hey, Em, I have a bit of a favour to ask. There’s someone I want you to meet.”

  I rolled my eyes at her and lifted the magazine back up to my face. Although our friendship had developed, Anna’s interest in socialising still extended far beyond mine. She hadn’t been dissuaded by the many stories going round about secret wives and awkward office dynamics and the occasional chlamydia outbreak. The only difference was that now Anna tried to rope me into her compound escapades too. She pulled my magazine back down.

  “I know you’re not interested, but Ryan is here and he brought a friend. Help me out this one time, please?”

  Ryan was Anna’s current infatuation. I wasn’t sure exactly what his job was, but he turned up at the International Zone every couple of weeks to do something at the embassy.

  “It’s hardly just one time, Anna. I’m practically your designated wing woman at the moment,” I said, then raised my head slightly out of curiosity. “Where are they anyway?”

  Anna pointed towards the entrance of the pool. Two men stood uncomfortably next to the glistening water. Ryan had taken his sunglasses off and was wiping them vigorously. The other guy was staring at his feet.

  “God, I’ve never seen soldiers look so out of place in a war zone,” I said. The military bases where most soldiers lived were different from the International Zone. I suspected that the only women Ryan and his friend saw on a daily basis were wearing military uniforms or cargo trousers and loose shirts. No wonder they didn’t know where to look at the embassy pool, where girls in bikinis sipped beer from their sun loungers in all directions.

  “They need to get the Rhino back up to VBC in an hour,” Anna said. “So they wanted to go to the chow hall first and grab some food.”

  We slipped easily into the odd vernacular of the International Zone by that point. The Rhino was the Baghdad bus service, in the form of a giant armoured vehicle. It delivered military personnel and contractors between VBC, the military’s Victory Base Complex, and the IZ, the International Zone.

  I wasn’t pleased to abandon pool time, but women tended to move around in pairs in Iraq. Personal safety was something drummed into us. It became normalised. There was even a “personal safety awareness” cake in the chow hall one day, although they didn’t need much excuse for a themed cake out there. We referred to it from then on as the rape-cake day, although technically I suppose don’t-rapecake would have been more accurate. The joke doesn’t seem so funny now.

  I pulled on my clothes and followed Anna over to where Ryan and his friend were standing. The friend was wearing dark Oakley shades and stood with arms folded across his chest and feet apart in an unmistakeably military stance.

  Ryan gave an awkward close-range wave as we approached.

  “Hi Emma,” he said. “How’s it going? This is my buddy, Adam.”

  The friend lifted his sunglasses to reveal impressively green eyes and extended a hand.

  “Hi.”

  He was polite but detached and I mirrored his disinterest. To me, he was just another soldier. To him, I was probably just another compound chick, lazing around the pool while other people got on with the business of war.

  “Hi,” I replied.

  Adam and I walked side by side to the canteen. Anna and Ryan were ahead of us, their arms brushing occasionally against each other. Neither of us spoke, but I sensed Adam taking in the compound bar, the people walking back from the pool, the relaxed Friday atmosphere. I assumed that there was disapproval on his face, I had felt it myself after all, but I didn’t bother commenting.

  Inside the canteen, Anna and Ryan continued their flirtation as we queued up at the food station. There was something distinctly school-like about the whole situation. Anna’s giggling, the chicken nuggets being spooned into our partitioned trays, me being left with the sullen friend. I couldn’t believe I was in Baghdad and still dealing with this kind of thing.

  I took my food and sat down at a free table. Adam sat opposite me. I waited for Anna to come and save us with her dimples and laughter, but when I looked for her, I saw that she and Ryan had gone to sit somewhere else, alone. Adam followed my gaze but returned to his food, saying nothing. I silently swore that I would never help her out again.

  “So, uh, it was Alan right?”

  The fork that was being raised towards his mouth froze mid-air.

  “Adam. My name is Adam.”

  “Oh right. Sorry, Adam.”

  He shrugged.

  “You live on Camp Victory then?”

  “RPC.”

  I racked my brains for the words behind the acronym but came up short. He sensed my hesitation.

  “Radwaniyah Palace Complex.”

  “Oh, I thought that Anna said you guys were waiting for the Rhino back to Camp Victory.”

  “We are,” he said, not giving anything away.

  “But you live on RPC?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, um, that would be…?”

  “Connected to Camp Victory. The other side of Liberty and Slayer.”

  “Ah, right okay.”

  I pushed lukewarm chicken nuggets awkwardly around my plate.

  “What do you do here? Other than hang out at the pool of course?” he asked.

  “I put together special visa applications for Iraqis,” I replied. “People who have somehow or other been involved with Americans and now need to leave. What is it that you do? Apart from generating work for me of course.”

  When I looked up, I caught him examining my face with a strange look that could almost have been a smile. I looked down again quickly. He took his time to respond to my question. He was a man who was comfortable with silence.

  “I do a bunch of different stuff,” he said. “But at the moment I mostly train Iraqis.”

  There was an unexpected softness to his voice when he said more than a few words.

  “What do you train them in?” I asked. I knew that sometimes US and Iraqi soldiers worked together, but I didn’t understand enough about the inner workings of the military to know what kind of unit that would be. From Adam’s broad shoulders and muscular arms, I assumed he was the kicking-down-doors type, but training local forces was something different; something interesting and more considered. It pointed towards creating a sustainable solution to the insecurity and the almost inconceivable dream of a smooth handover and withdrawal.

 
“Y’know, military stuff,” he replied.

  I tried again.

  “Which Iraqi forces do you train?”

  “It’s not something I can really talk about.” It’s a phrase he must have used a thousand times before. He gave me an apologetic shrug and that half-smile again. I noticed for the first time the small fleck of a scar above his left eyebrow.

  “Right,” I said, smiling back despite myself. I’d been in these dead-end work conversations before. I knew there was no point pushing further.

  We sat quietly for a couple of minutes. He ate carefully – cutting his food into small precise mouthfuls. It was oddly delicate and I found it endearing. I was used to brash men here; big men with big personalities who grabbed the chance to regale a female audience with their war stories (although the ones that bragged the most usually had the least to brag about). There was something different about Adam.

  He finished his food and raised his eyes again, catching my gaze. I pretended I was trying to catch Anna’s attention from where she was sat a couple of tables behind him.

  Outside, I could see the compound being bathed in the pinkish glow of late afternoon, the most beautiful time of day in Baghdad. It was my one chance in the week to enjoy it and, even though I was more intrigued by this man than I cared to admit, I wasn’t going to miss it. I pushed back my chair decisively.

  “Well, enjoy your Rhino trip back, Adam,” I said. “I’m going to catch the last bit of sun by the pool.”

  “Have fun, Emma,” he said. “It was good to meet you.”

  He looked up and for a moment I almost considered staying.

  “You too, Adam,” I said, picking up my tray and feeling his eyes still on me as I walked away.

  4

  As I exhale, the low grumbling of my stomach draws my attention away from the view at the top of the Incline. The sweat that saturates my T-shirt now feels cold against my skin. It is time to go down. I cannot wait to tell Adam about my success.