Mrs Corcoran paused to see my reaction. What did she expect – is there anyone who doesn’t want to think their parents loved them? ‘Yeah, Grace was an experienced shopper,’ I said. ‘She took everything on a sale-or-return basis.’
The old woman laughed. ‘That’s why I always liked you, Scott – you never let anything hurt you.’
I just nodded.
‘Anyway, the argument between them became increasingly bitter until finally Grace lost her temper. “You know your trouble, Bill?” she said. “You’re a porter – you see anyone with baggage and you’ve always got to help them.”
‘With that, she told him you’d be leaving in the morning, and headed for the house, claiming she was going to check on lunch. Nobody saw her for the rest of the day. Bill sat in silence for a long time, his eyes still fixed on you, then he said, “Scott will be staying at Avalon until he goes to college, longer if he wants. He’ll stay because the porter says so – and Grace will have to accept it.”
‘I didn’t know what to say. I’d never seen that steely side of him – I’m not sure anybody had. Then he turned to me and said the strangest thing.
‘You probably know Bill wasn’t a spiritual man – I never once heard him talk about God – but he said that every night he sat by your bed while you slept. “I think Scott was sent to us,” he told me. “I feel like I’ve been chosen to care for him. I don’t know why I think it, but I believe he’s going to do something very important one day.”’
Standing in the old house with so many years gone by, Mrs Corcoran smiled at me. ‘Did you, Scott? Was Bill right? Did you do something very important?’
I smiled back and shook my head. ‘Not unless you think finding a few lost canvases is important. But Bill was a fine man and it was good of him to think like that.’
From out on the lawn, we heard someone calling Mrs Corcoran’s name – she probably had to give a speech. She patted my arm, starting to go.
‘Well, who knows?’ she said. ‘You’re not old, there’s still time, isn’t there? Goodbye, Scott.’
But there wasn’t – time, I mean. I was still in my thirties, but my race was run. Only a fool would think it could turn out otherwise. So – say hello to the fool, I have often said to myself when I think back on those days.
Chapter Twenty-nine
THE SARACEN, NEWLY arrived in Afghanistan, was travelling fast, sticking to the sparsely populated valleys for as long as he could, always heading east. It had been almost fifteen years since he had been in the country as a teenage muj, but every day he still saw evidence of the old Soviet war: abandoned gun emplacements, a rusted artillery piece, a goat-herder’s hut bombed into oblivion.
Creeks and rivers ran along the valley floors, and they provided safety. The fertile strip on either side of the watercourses was planted with only one thing – marijuana – and the tall, moisture-heavy plants provided good cover from US thermal-imaging equipment.
Finally, however, he had to abandon the valleys and climb into the forbidding Hindu Kush mountains. In the steep forests he followed the tracks made by timber cutters, hoping the surveillance drones would see his packhorses and dismiss him as one more illegal logger. But above the treeline, every breath a labour because of the altitude, there was no cover and he had to quicken his pace even more.
Late one afternoon, in the distance, he thought he saw the mountain scree where he had brought down his first Hind gunship, but it was a long time ago and he couldn’t be sure. Toiling higher, he crossed a narrow ridge and passed shell casings and rocket pods of a far more recent vintage.
In the years since he had last seen the country as a muj, the Afghans had known little but war: the Russians had been replaced by the warlords; Mullah Omar’s Taliban had defeated the warlords; America, hunting Osama bin Laden, had destroyed the Taliban; the warlords had returned; and now the US and a coalition of allies were fighting to prevent the re-emergence of the Taliban.
The used ammunition told him he must be close to Kunar Province – referred to by the Americans as ‘enemy central’ – and, sure enough, that night he heard Apache helicopters roaring down a valley below, followed by an AC-130 gunship which people said fired bullets as big as Coke bottles.
In the following days he was stopped numerous times – mostly by US or NATO patrols but twice by wild men who described themselves as members of the Anti-Coalition Militia but who he knew were Taliban in a different turban. He told them all the same thing – he was a devout Lebanese doctor who had raised money from mosques and individuals in his homeland for a medical mercy mission. His aim was to bring help to Muslims in remote areas where, because the continuous wars had destroyed the country’s infrastructure, there were no longer any clinics and the doctors had fled.