Small Victories

By Sophie Buchan
1. Girl Walks Into A Bar
2. Saturday Night in Sarajevo
3. The Making of a Monster
4. Small Victories
1. A Girl Walks Into A Bar
1.

The exhibition was made up of artists from Sarajevo. It was mostly bad. I’d taken a friend who
could put on a brave face. But two exhibits struck me, one a photo of a man resoling shoes, the
other of a rock club. On the floor beneath that photo were crumpled wristbands, dribbled with
red paint. The notes said the club had stayed open throughout the Siege, and when I asked about
the shoes, I was introduced to the artist.

He hadn’t stayed in Sarajevo during the war but had heard a story about the cobblers in the Old
Town. Their street had remained largely open, it was sheltered from snipers and even in a siege,
people needed shoes. Especially in a siege, they needed shoes to be mended, very few could
afford new shoes. Two of the cobblers were good friends, and every morning they’d compare
the business they’d done the day before. If one had done more, the other would send customers
to the neighbour’s shop. Sometimes, when people came in, they would insist on the cobbler
they’d intended. And that cobbler would say ‘my neighbour is just as good as me, and he is in
more need.’ ‘But aren’t you in need?’ the customer might ask. And the intended cobbler would
say ‘yes, I struggle to feed my family, but today he struggles more’. The man in the photo’s son
died on the frontline a few weeks before the end of the war. After this he sent even more work
his friend’s way, there was one less place at his table. That’s why the photo was called Kindness.

‘But you don’t get a sense of that from the photo.’

He asked how he could have conveyed this in an image. I suggested he could have taken a
picture of the men, smoking and conspiring on the steps, one refusing, the other looking
emphatic. The focus should be on friendship not on craft. Couldn’t he have gone back and posed
them?

‘No, the other man was dead by the time I went to take the photo. Now they both are.’

‘But if you wanted to tell this story, couldn’t you have found other old men, to be the cobblers?’

My friend was by my side now. ‘Which ones are yours? The exhibition’s great by the way.’

‘The picture of the shoes, which doesn’t tell a story.’

‘Would you mind telling my friend the story? It’s very moving.’

He retold it, this time with more detail. The cobbler’s wife had got upset. She’d heard from
neighbours that her husband was turning business away. She had promised her daughter tinned
peaches for her birthday, and then she couldn’t afford them. The daughter had spent her
birthday crying about the peaches. The cobbler’s wife hadn’t eaten for three days to have
enough to bake a cake. And she was so hungry she shouted at her daughter to stop complaining
about the peaches. Which made her daughter cry more, so she’d sent the daughter to her room
because she didn’t know what else to do, she too was upset by these peaches her husband could
have bought. My friend was crying.

The artist turned to my friend. ‘She thinks you don’t get a sense of this from the photo.’

‘It must have been very difficult for you, as a child under siege.’

‘I wasn’t. I was in Holland.’

‘Still, that must have been very hard. To be away from the rest of your family.’

‘It was, especially when my cousin died, I couldn’t see her buried. She was eight. She’d heard
shelling start on one side of the house and gone to save her fish. My uncle and aunt were in the
kitchen and when they went into the living room to drag her to the other side, she wasn’t there.
She was in her bedroom, and as they got there they saw shrapnel go into her head. She dropped
the goldfish bowl – I don’t know why they still had a goldfish, there was so little water and food,
but she loved the goldfish. The goldfish survived but there wasn’t enough water, they had to put
it in a cup. After three days it died too.’

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ my friend and I said. A waiter came up. We all took a glass of sour, warm
wine.

‘Are you going to write about me?’ the man asked.

‘Yes… I… need to write about the exhibition.’

‘But will you write about me?’

‘Yes, let’s swap cards. I’ll ask you the follow-up by email.’

‘Lovely to meet you!’ said my friend. She took me to a corner. ‘Sorry, I just couldn’t listen to any
more. It was too sad.’

‘Yeah, I’d also pissed him off.’

‘How?’

‘Oh I just said, the photo of the shoes didn’t convey what he was trying to convey, he should
have taken a different photo. You didn’t even get it from the name, it was called Kindness. But
that implies a sort of artisan kindness if you don’t know the story. What else do you like here?’

‘I didn’t realise Susan Sontag went to Sarajevo.’

‘Yeah, she staged Waiting for Godot.’

‘And I don’t understand the rock club, it says it stayed open all the way through. Bit weird to go
out drinking and dancing. You’d spare a few of your lives for the water queue, surely?’

‘No, I saw a documentary about that, partying in defiance. We’d do the same.’

‘No, you’re on your own during The Great Siege of London. I’m staying in listening to vinyl,
getting through Duncan’s single malt.’

‘Okay, I’ll join, but when it runs out, we’re going dancing.’

And then a man came up to me. ‘You were talking about the club.’

‘We were.’

‘My brother was the guy who ran it. You should meet him, here’s my card.’

I pitched the piece and someone wanted it and I was touching down in Sarajevo.
2

The bar burst out laughing. I looked up from my laptop. A barman had tripped over a dog. Four
pints had smashed to the floor. The dog was going mad, trying to bite him. It was unusually cute,
this dog, a tail like a plume, a snowy, fluffed face. But it was vicious. It was covered in beer, yes,
but this was disproportionate. In trying to escape the small dog, the barman slipped and fell on a
Dalmatian. The Dalmatian looked world-weary. Perhaps it assumed the soggy dog would deal
with the human situation. But it was being hurried to a leash.

Instead of looking embarrassed, the barman bowed to the Dalmatian and then to the bar. He
looked as though Quentin Blake had been commissioned to draw a hipster. Or a children’s
television character, made out of pipe cleaners. He should have been mortified but he began
giggling, and went to get a broom. The regulars stood in his way, they were shouting something.
He laughed, ‘Ne ne ne!’ though he clearly wanted to do what they were asking. They realised the
Engleski was hysterical and one shouted over ‘if he want jump dog he learn’. I laughed some
more. So he hadn’t tripped, he’d been trying to clear the dog. Well, good for him.

The regulars lined their dogs up on the floor. ‘Ne ne ne!’ But, yes, he was going to. My beer was
almost full so I went to the bar, put it on a tray and handed him the tray. Heads were shaken. I
realised what this meant, a barman would never put a single beer on a tray. He took it in his
hand. There was an Alsatian, an oddly bulky black dog, so bulky it didn’t have a leash but a
harness, and something which looked like a Jack Russell. I guessed the Jack Russell would be the
main problem, it couldn’t stay still.

He cleared the Alsatian and we laughed. He cleared the black dog. It began barking but was
otherwise unperturbed. These hurdles were going surprisingly well. But the Jack Russell was
skittish, it darted away. Technically he hadn’t cleared it. But we allowed him this. He took a sip
of my beer then winked and handed it back.

I looked at the backlog of emails. Where was I? Where was I indeed. I’d been due back in London
a fortnight ago. Perhaps I could just not reply, disappear. I remembered a woman who ran away
from her life. She owned a gallery in America and one day she stopped replying to emails. None
of the artists she represented heard from her again. The building was closed, the bank couldn’t
explain her whereabouts. Where was June Davies? I’d never met her but every month, when I
opened my payslip, with every new and fading month, I’d imagine her as a waitress in Tangiers.
Or the waitress I once met at a diner in Nevada. My friend and I had been driving a highway called
The Loneliest Road in America. We hadn’t realised it was called that at the time, all we were
focusing on was the distance, and on not talking to each other. We’d had a row the night before.
Eventually we were too hungry not to interact and he mimed towards a diner. When the woman
came to take our orders, she was missing a hand. But the injury was recent, and the way the skin
pulled across the stump, the way it was patched, showed she had no health insurance. I imagined
her brother – yes, even though this woman was in her fifties it was her brother she had turned to
when she lost her hand – pulling a needle and thread. He’d come up with a scheme, he had a weed
farm, quite an industrial weed farm, and had made her run some machinery, machinery he’d
constructed. It had taken off her hand. I wanted to remain stoical but my friend broke. ‘Emmie,
her hand.’ Instead of saying what he was referring to was the absence of a hand, I just looked
white. We made up. Why was June Davies always a waitress? Maybe I wanted to be a waitress. I
was beginning to envy this barman his life.

I wished I’d looked up earlier and seen him suspended, felt the moment stretch. Already I was
feeling nostalgic. Did he think this way? No, he was moving, he was dancing, he was clicking his
fingers, leaning over girls. I was beginning to envy those girls. Then I realised I was sketching,
why was I sketching him? I didn’t, couldn’t draw, I was making a cartoon of a cartoon. A colleague
once described a person as a photocopy of a photocopy. I closed the notebook and went back to
the book I was meant to be reviewing. But then a shadow appeared. A shadow appeared, what was
this, a Gothic novel? I didn’t look up. Then I felt a hand on my shoulder. He motioned he wanted
to borrow my lighter. I realised I was shaking, and he was sheepish, and I’d been fiddling with my
lighter so the flame leapt up in a quite extraordinary way. It made contact with his fringe. An ex
of mine had no depth perception. He’d been trying to cheer me up, once when I was morose, by
pretending to set my hair on fire. And the next thing I knew he was punching me in the head, and
I was screaming, long guttural screams, he was my father and I was my mother, and the friends
we were with were trying to explain, but I couldn’t listen until a moment, a long time later, when
I smelled it. He’d misjudged and set my hair on fire, he was just trying to put it out. And of course
then I laughed. Later a friend told me that Bosnians were nostalgic for different eras of nostalgia.
That the people who couldn’t remember before the War were nostalgic for that nostalgia, that the
people who couldn’t remember the years immediately after felt nostalgic for that. The nostalgia
was better then.
3

‘They say in Bosnia that a story doesn’t have to be true, it just has to be entertaining. I find Bosnia
very liberating. Back in Scotland, we’re obsessed by truth and logic and rationale. Here, it doesn’t
matter.’

‘Are we?’ I said.

‘We?’

‘I’m Scottish, I just don’t sound it. I’m terrible with accents. I can’t even do my own.’

‘How peculiar.’

‘But back to these pyramids.’

The man had recognised me from The Bar, he was one of the regulars there. He’d spotted me in
this strange town, I was on my way to interview the man who invented the Pyramids.

‘What are you doing here?’ and I asked the same. He was going to the energy park. Well, how else
to spend your Wednesday afternoon? He didn’t believe in this energy, but it passed the time. ‘Let’s
have some beers after you’re done then I’ll drive you back to Sarajevo.’

Well, all right, that would pass the time.

And now here I was.

‘Well, that’s the thing, the locals want to believe it because it’s a good story. And the New Age
people who come here, they want to believe it too. They come here, they enjoy it. The locals are
poor, they make money from the tourists, the tourists buy trinkets and things. It doesn’t matter
whether these pyramids are real or not. Everyone’s a winner.’

We stopped talking and gazed at the fake pyramids. They were clearly just misshapen hills. But
no, they were the oldest pyramids in the world, constructed before the Pyramids of Egypt, a place
where energy poured from the earth.

I was still upset by the woman from the bus. When I’d got on in Sarajevo, there was one seat left.
The woman who was to be my seatmate was so fat it was uncertain whether I could fit. But she
took my hand and helped me, our thighs chubbing together in an odd, misshapen waltz. We
couldn’t communicate with words but we giggled, how we giggled. And once my wedging was
complete, she kept hold of my hand for the rest of the journey, occasionally pointing at things.
When we got off the bus, we hugged. I went to a café to get wifi, and she stood in front of a shop.
I could make out the display in the window, it was of Christmas decorations, the tackiest I’d ever
seen. They were horrible, the most tasteful thing in the shop was an inflatable Santa, but even he
was twisted in a pervert sort of smirk.

But she wasn’t just browsing, she was fixed to the spot, as though these baubles could answer a
question, change her life. I could see her reflection in the window, the longing in her stare. And I
imagined the son in Sarajevo who never called her. He’d come home every night, a day of middle
management adjourned, and see the light on the answering machine. It’s her, she doesn’t want to
bother him, she hopes she isn’t bothering him. She doesn’t want to bother him. But maybe he can
call her, she has news.

He doesn’t call her back. He takes off a polyester suit, smells the armpits, thinks one more week.
Then sits in a vest and off-brand boxers, Calvin Kline, one leg propped on a faux leather stool.
There are telenovelas to be watched, football too. He has a duty to this entertainment. He opens
a brand of western lager he’s been told to like.

She wants him to call her back so badly. She wants him to come home for Christmas, that sad and
silent day. If she bought these decorations maybe he would. At least for the day, he could return
to Sarajevo in the evening. But no, he wouldn’t do that, he would spend the day with his
girlfriends’ parents, in their new-build in an outskirt of Sarajevo. Because he was ashamed of her,
of her ways, her widowhood, her flesh.

Or maybe she wanted the baubles for herself. She wasn’t too poor, she was clearly well fed. And
this made it worse, if she could afford them but then a voice in her head, she didn’t deserve them.
Why was I getting so upset? So offended by these aesthetics, it was Christmas tat. I wasn’t
reviewing an exhibition, this was a shop window in a Bosnian town. A town famous for its made-
up pyramids.

But no, my mind went on. She’d send money to the son in Sarajevo, even though he had a good
job, or so he told her, she didn’t understand. And he would use it to buy dinner for his girlfriend
in restaurants with wifi and international food. Photocopies of photocopies of international food.
While she stood, transfixed by these baubles. I could no longer stop myself. I cried for her. Where
was this coming from, this strange new world of feeling? Perhaps I could give this feeling to my
parents instead, wrap it up in a package, address it Loch Lomond.

I typed the story to a friend.

‘Emmie, listen. Just run across the road and buy her something.’

‘Really? But she may take offence. She’ll think I think she’s poor. I don’t think that’s the right thing
to do here.’
‘Look, I don’t know Bosnia, but I think it’s exactly the right thing to do.’

So I sprang up. The owner thought the strange and weeping girl was trying to leave without
paying. I was miming that I was going to leave my laptop there, just run across the road. But this
confused him more, as though I was trying to pay for the coffee with my laptop. And when I turned
the woman was gone.

‘Are you okay?’ asked the Scottish man.

‘Yeah, I’m fine, I was just thinking.’

‘About the pyramids?’

‘No, something else.’

‘You’re a very strange woman, aren’t you?’

I laughed. ‘I suppose I am.’

4

The flame hit his fringe. He didn’t seem to have clocked that his head was on fire. So I jumped to
my feet but he was too tall and I was thrown by the juddering table, by the hit to my hips. I could
see what was going to happen before it did, but I couldn’t stop the motion of my hand. It connected
with his chin. He looked surprised.

There was still the fringe to deal with, though I’d dealt with nothing yet – dealt a blow, and oh
stop talking mind, just put the fire out. He managed to raise a hand to his forehead, there was ash
on his face, minimal damage to the mousy hair. But now there was the issue of what to say this
man – in a court of law would I be at fault, condemned for my lighter? And of course I’d punched
him in the face. Perhaps lighters were made to different standards here, this was an argument in
favour of EU regulation. After Brexit we’d all be on fire. I could not tell him this.

So I did something with my mouth. Something between mischief and apology.

‘Nista! Nista!’ He laughed and he hugged me. It was my first encounter with that word I’d hear so
much. It’s nothing.

Nothing.

A friend in London did a strange sort of art. He would ask people – he called them Subjects – for
a key moment in their lives. And he would stage those moments with actors, in rooms as faithful
as he could make them. He then filmed his subjects talking about how the stagings compared to
the event, or rather to the memory. How the staging made them feel. He called the actors
Understudies. I had asked to be an understudy but my face was never right. He would refuse to
film the recreations, no matter how much he was offered. That, he would say, was not the point. I
remembered the film of one man, he was grieving for his wife, he wanted to recreate their
wedding day. This man caused my friend problems, he’d go back and back, each time demanding
a different actress, a different inflection in the wedding vows voice. Strictly, this wasn’t against
the rules, so my friend would take the man’s money. It bought him a nice flat in the end.

The image changed on the screen in my head. That afternoon, I’d gone to a museum. It was a
collection of objects people had donated, to represent their experience of growing up in War.
One boy, or rather one man, he probably had boys of his own, had sent in a slip of jam, the sort
you get at buffet breakfasts. And there was a film of him talking about the jam. Every few weeks,
as well as rice, aid workers would deliver jam. When word got out that the convoys had jam,
whispers would spread from one estate to the next. And the adults would let the children jostle
for this jam. For years he, the smallest boy on the estate, would never catch the jam. And then
one day he did. For a good few minutes he kept control of the jam. The older boys were trying to
wrestle it from him, but he was keeping control of the jam. And just as he reached his front door,
he lost possession. He was distraught, he went to his mother saying she had to make it better,
she had to get the jam back. But there was no way she could, and he wailed for the rest of the
day. He laughed gently as he recalled this. For weeks he couldn’t stop crying about this jam. Now
when he went to the supermarket, he would always notice these slips of jam. But he would
never buy them, that would cheapen the memory.

I wondered if the barman had ever caught the jam. He was so tall he must have. He’d probably
wrestled jam from shorter boys, I couldn’t blame him for that. Perhaps from the boy in the
museum film, he’d been his main tormentor. I pictured him, his lovely smile as he stirred it into
his rice ration, oblivious to the wailing a few flats away. Or enjoying it. Maybe the boy’s distress
made it taste better. I could ask him. Or I could buy those slips of jam, throw them at him, test
his reflexes, see if he’d wrestle a barfly to the ground. Then I pictured us, alone in this picture-
perfect bar, the clock was striking two. The ceiling would open and jam would pour down. But
no, he’d be indifferent, he’d let the jam rain on us. Now there was no use for this jam. The
packets were light, they wouldn’t bother us, we’d brush them from our hair like leaves.

He’d gone back to his stool behind the bar. But I realised he was staring at me. I imagined the
moment in my friend’s hands, distorting and contorting. There would be logistical difficulties,
this man was like no one else I’d seen. It wasn’t just the hair, long and fringed and strangely cut.
It wasn’t just the facial hair, the beard, the odd moustache. It wasn’t just the physicality, every
move pronounced, an invitation to cast him in a silent film.

But I was being silly. This was nothing. Just a hug, a punch, a fire.
2. Saturday Night in Sarajevo
1

I was already an hour and a half later than I’d told him, too careless to read an email, a few lines
of text. I must have given him the time the connecting flight took off in Vienna, or perhaps there
was a glitch across the time difference in the email when I booked. But still I went to buy
cigarettes in the shop across the road. I was back in Bosnia, the vape I used in London looked
useless, offensive even, here. And I paused to smoke one. It was illogical, I was so late, I didn’t
have a phone, he may have been thinking I’d changed my mind, he knew so little about me, our
Christmas correspondence a series of emojis and photos and I missssss yous. The man could
never use a sensible number of consonants. I could have had a cigarette the minute I got inside.
Then an old man pursuing a terrier gave me a strange look, and I realised I was beaming,
chuckling almost, because this illogical cigarette had nothing on what else was afoot.

I noticed the sign on the building next to his, it read The Council of the Congress of Bosniak
Intellectuals, and I wondered what happened behind that door, why they needed both those
words, how my life had come to this. I had a second cigarette. This is where the film would end,
me in my big coat, on a street corner, with a suitcase – you needed a big suitcase for this sort of
thing and mine obliged, black and bulgy – in a city of hills, made for cinema, making a grand
romantic gesture, or rather replying to one in kind, a cigarette to clear the throat, then onwards
into the breach.

The breach was a bedsit by the river, a dusty breach, with looseleaf things on every surface:
looseleaf tobacco, poems, art. When pressed in London to class his art, I’d paused and laughed,
‘it’s of the not very good school, have you heard of it? A very important school of art, maybe I’ll
write a book about it’. But my friend had been losing patience with me for a while. She preferred
the emergent me, as she called it, who was smitten and cooed at cats. Eventually I’d settled on ‘a
sort of stoner futurism’. ‘And eggs, he paints a lot of eggs. And naked women. But not in a way
that should make you alarmed.’

I hadn’t meant to come back. I’d stopped myself from crying when he’d cried, that late December
day. But then in the taxi, the phrase ‘I’ve left my heart in a poet’s bedsit!’ began circling my mind.
I hated that phrase. I didn’t even like poetry. But I could picture it, like everything else in that
room, on the floor, and not as a love heart but a bloodied heart, the sort you’d see observing
open-heart surgery. The taxi driver had asked why I was crying, and when I told him the story,
he couldn’t understand why I couldn’t come back. I could do my job anywhere, I could learn
Bosniak, and I had an off-the-peg epiphany, a realisation which strained on me, a cheap
polyester skirt, catching my hipbones. I’d spent my life thwarting myself, packaging my refusal
to be happy as an against-the-world stance, alienating people who had found me charming,
running away. I imagined talking to a globe, in a book-lined drawing room of old, carefully
enunciating ‘it’s not you, it’s me.’ And I could still go running but this time I’d be running back.
Anyway, I’d thought, have a few beers on the plane and see how you feel in London.

I really should have gone to buzz his door, no name, last buzzer. But I was more nervous than I’d
wanted to be. This was Bosnia, a third cigarette in a row was nothing eccentric, and I was
already so late, he wouldn’t know I’d been standing smoking on the street, flights got delayed.
I’d planned not to tell him I was coming back, to surprise him, but then a friend had tagged him
in a picture of a quote. ‘If they want to leave, hold the door open’. It was something he’d said to
me before and I thought of him in that bedsit, pining. Or the wind rushing in and, with this a
string of Balkan women, mildly dishevelled but there in good faith. Then I hadn’t planned to tell
him my flights, to turn up in the bar, a closing time apparition. Maybe I should have done that
instead. Made a grand appearance, taken him by surprise. But even then I understood. Life could
not live up to that beginning. But Christ, just listen to yourself. Cross the road and buzz the
fucking door. The man with the terrier was back, he was more in control of it this time, he even
tipped his hat.

I crossed the road and buzzed the fucking door.

2

Back when he was an idea, a friend had come to visit. I’d told her I’d become obsessed by a
barman and had taken her to the bar. It was so funny, she thought, to see me, cold old me, giddy
and teenage about this man. To her, he held little charm. But she found it all so amusing, my
refusal to talk to him, barring the names of drinks, my insistence on wrapping this up in theory,
it wasn’t a crush or if it were it existed in relation to Chris Kraus, and when she asked who Chris
Kraus was, I envied her life, which wasn’t just theory and words.

I remembered the first time I went round to this friend’s flat, a flat she had bought or rather part
bought very young, scrimping and saving, doing odd jobs at the weekend. I’d laughed at the
motivational quotes she had by her desk – we used to joke about everything, we had the sort of
humour associated with men. This was the first time I’d seen her offended by something I’d said.

My friend was good at life, successful, she got things done. In the decade I’d spent getting cross
with London, spraffing on, she’d become successful in television. She really thought I should talk
to him. But then I explained the principle of I Love Dick, in fact I was writing an essay about the
book, for a journal, I was including him in my essay, I’m so meta. It was all about the muse,
reversing centuries of men being able to look at women without censure, men as vampires
sucking the life from their muse, and I was regendering this idea, making him my muse, and
besides, the point in the book where it goes wrong is when she engages with Dick in real life,
sleeps with him, because women are always at a disadvantage in such things. I wasn’t going to
make that mistake. And obviously I’d been partly joking, because the sort of person who doesn’t
partly joke about these things wouldn’t have the friends willing to take connecting flights for a
weekend in a city waking from starvation and senseless war. But I was joking less than she
thought.

‘Well do you not worry you’re stalking him?’

‘Stalking is a very loaded term. I work well here. It’s my office. They say I can get post here. I’m
not going to get a restraining order any time soon.’

After my friend left, I got a haircut, mostly because I hadn’t for a while, but slightly for him. The
first time I went there afterwards, he didn’t appear to notice. Well, this isn’t good, I thought. And
the next time, he pointed to my hair and said. ‘A problem’. Which really wasn’t good.

But then he came up to me. The reason it was a problem was because I couldn’t keep it behind
my ears, it kept falling on my face when I worked. So sometimes he’d sit next to me and hold it
back as I typed. And I thought how I’d behave in the Old World, if a man I didn’t know held my
hair, without comment or consent. But I liked this. And when I managed to work out how to
twirl up this hair with pens, he’d run up, pull them out, double over laughing. And then he’d try
to put them back. It hurt, these nibs on my scalp. I didn’t mind.
3

I had to buzz four times before the door would unclick. I would have so many problems with
that door. But just then I blamed myself. I couldn’t hear him, only a tickle of static, the
assumption forming that, already, I had pissed him off. This girl so impractical, she couldn’t even
open a door. Standing there, tugging that door, adding to the charge sheet of all the other things
she couldn’t do – drive, swim, cook, ride a bike. Perhaps it wasn’t him at the other end of the
intercom, perhaps it was an imposter, a policeman or a child, or perhaps his landlord, an old
man with a scottie dog who always carried a bag of oranges. Maybe he would be there, the white
dog on his lap, unspooling oranges, telling me in a language I didn’t understand that this boy had
never existed or had packed up this morning, he was gone, leaving behind only a few sketches of
a blonde, blue-eyed girl. And the landlord would throw up his hands, mutter that he was behind
on rent, say he couldn’t even sell the sketches because they were bad, because the girl was ugly.
Or perhaps the Council of the Congress of Bosniak Intellectuals had moved next door, I’d find a
stern collection of Tito-era men, Shostakovich swelling, discussing the issues of a nineteen
seventies day.

But then release, my case was snagging on the steps, bumping up, up, up, and through the next
door, down a few steps, into the courtyard. And there he was, his little face poking from the
doorframe, smirking. It was him and we just didn’t know what to do with the sight of each other.
I used to pride myself on knowing what to say. But now a daytime soap filled the silence from
the television, a boxy, grey, Balkan thing, and there was nothing to do except lie on the sofa
which was also his bed and hug, and hug and hug. My foot caught a bottle of what looked like Jif,
and even though I placed no store on cleanliness, even though I basked in the feeling of being
less feral, the fact he’d cleaned was almost heartbreakingly sad. And it was then that I noticed
his smell, or rather acknowledged the smell but yes, he smelled, in a way which would have been
unacceptable in The Old World. Then I decided that was lovely, it was so him, the mad self-
assurance of performing this reunion several days unwashed. I’d lived in London and Paris and
Berlin, and in this small, untidy bedsit, in this smell, I realised I’d never felt so at home. Then I
got maudlin and took the so out of the sentence.

After two hours of hugging, he needed to get up, he had to have a shower before he went to
work and as he dried his hair – in the Bosnian way he would dry his hair and keep drying it,
even when it was dry, superstition and fear of colds – I held him from behind, clung to him,
kissing the skin uncovered by his vest, chuckling at the fact this man wore vests. I said I would
come and find him later, I knew where he was, but no, he wanted to give me a set of keys. And
my carapace reformed. This was too much, this was terrifying, this was not something done in
jest. This was life. But he was so beautiful, so childishly happy at the kindness of his gesture.
I stopped resisting and took the keys.

Alone in his flat, in the cacophony of bad art, my face replicating on the floor, I remembered my
mother’s fatalism. Her sense that life was a horror not to be mitigated but endured, my creeping
feeling that on some level she enjoyed my father’s violence.

My parents were English. I never really understood why they left, they hated the Scottish almost
as much as they hated each other. From snippets of things I’d half understood, they’d left
London after a sort of failure, or perhaps the failure was written in them.

I emailed my friends.

Well, he’s even lovelier than I remembered. What the fuck is going on? I thought life was
meant to be about pain, suffering and disappointment. Maybe my mother wasn’t right
about everything [insert smiley].

Love, Emmie xx

But into this release, this conclusion, a feeling of jinx. I looked at the clock. Five minutes since he
left and, already, this. I felt as though I was in a play. A hidden audience was watching me,
wondering what the strange girl would do next. Would she go through his things? I felt no
impulse to go through his things. Was this wrong, a lack of curiosity? I would look at what was
on display. Nearly everything he owned was on the floor. Perhaps his poems were good after all.
One day this room would be a museum, everything left exactly as it was. I could make an
unofficial donation, knickers behind the sofa, a dried out mascara on the shelf.

But his things held little interest. And I didn’t know who was responsible for a lot of the art.
Back in the old month, I’d spotted sketches high on the wardrobe. They were good, I could
compliment these and I did, they were my favourites. But no, he hadn’t drawn them, his ex-
girlfriend had.

I went round the bedsit, pressing the walls, waiting for them to give. But they were sturdy, they
held. Should I play house? Should I tidy up, put on more make-up, do my hair? Cook a nourishing
meal? I hadn’t lived with a man for a decade. This was an odd place to start.

I looked at the photos on his pinboard, wondered who was who, who was an ex, who was a
friend. Everyone found it strange to see pictures of their parents when they were young. But I
allowed myself this: it was very strange for me. I’d only seen one picture of my parents together,
their wedding photo. I remembered a friend tweeting a photo of him and his girlfriend on a
bridge in London, ‘This is that photo, the one of your parents looking fun, before you were born’.
As though they were trying to anticipate the accusation, pre-empt it. But no they didn’t want
children, it was just a joke.

It was unclear how the idea had formed, for my parents to sequester themselves in a rickety
hotel on the edge of a lake, in a country they didn’t care for. ‘It was one of your father’s schemes,’
my mother would say, as though she was talking about tin pot trading, or training lame
greyhounds to race. Or a pyramid scheme. And now I chuckled at those words.

When someone asked where I spent my childhood, the first thing they would mention would be
the landscape, Loch Lomond indeed. And then they would move on to how cosmopolitan it must
have been, in a hotel, in a place where tourists came from all over the world. There must have
been so many interesting people passing through, cultures, languages, flirtations with sons of
French tourists, a Didier or Pierre for fumblings by the lake. But my father feared these things,
and the borders are my life were what I called The Wing. I had read too many books, of course I
called it The Wing. But sometimes, in the night, when everyone was asleep, I’d sneak down to
the bar, my father was often so drunk he left it unlocked. And I’d sit at a table, Tenants lager
stale in the air, practising for what came next. Thinking of the things I’d say when I escaped this
place, conversations I’d have, holding a cigarette made of air, a wine glass made of same.

But now I had access to the cigarettes, access to the drinks, access to the people, and still I
wasn’t happy. I stood on a stool, took down the Fanta bottle of rakia he kept on his shelf. I
wondered for a moment if it would make me blind, but love was blind, that’s what they said, so
perhaps this would help, it would make me love him better. I wouldn’t be this strange, conflicted
thing, minutes into her new life, thinking of what had gone before.
4

It was Saturday night in Sarajevo, the December before.

I’d gone to the bar alone. I’d spent too long with people. And I chuckled at the irony. Eighteen
years waiting for life to begin. Waiting for people, whoever they might be, to come flooding in.
And now I had retreated. To my house up the hill, to Saturday night with my laptop. But I liked
my theoretical obsession. I liked this spare new life. I liked my house up the hill, even though the
cats were dead.

That had been my first taste of Bosnia, of the melodrama to come. I shared the cats with the
other houses behind that courtyard door. But they preferred to sit outside mine. And sometimes
I’d sit with them and smoke, tell them things about life. I called them Batuman and Houellebecq,
Batuman after an author who had written a book called The Idiot. And this cat was an idiot, she
sat in a bucket all day. And Houellebecq, named for perhaps my favourite author, sneered at her
in the bucket, seeing in this the decline of western civilisation. Or so I hoped.

But for a week they had been missing, and when I bumped into my landlady I asked where they
had gone. My landlady sniffed. A name I didn’t understand had gone into the kennel of our
neighbour’s dog. ‘Just to say a little hello.’ ‘Bucket cat?’ and, yes, of course it was. I pictured the
dog, the first time I’d seen it, I’d thought it was a pony. At feeding time the owner would emerge
with a snooker cue for self-defence. So Batuman had entered the kennel and been mauled,
almost to death. As she lay dying in my landlady’s flat, Houellebecq had gone on hunger strike.
He was unable to contemplate life without his friend. And now Houellebecq was dead, the vet
unable or unwilling to treat a hunger strike cat. I pictured a stern vet. He’d no truck with
emotion, let alone Shakespearean feeling among cats. ‘It was awful, we just couldn’t feed him,
you will believe we tried, we tried everything, but he wanted to die. He wanted to die because he
loved his friend so much. And when you love a person maybe you want to die when they die. I
have cried so much since but now a child grows inside me so there is life.’

‘Congratulations!’ I’d said brightly. ‘I didn’t realise!’

‘No, only now we can tell people.’

It was almost eleven when he sat on my bench. ‘I hug you?’ I couldn’t say this is against the rules.
So I nodded. He put his arms around me and I looked over his shoulder, jaw tight, wondering
who was turning to look, what they were thinking. I pulled my face into a shape which said
strange things happened to me, that I had no agency here but this wasn’t the fault of my
feminism, I was respecting local culture. As though suddenly it was a custom to hug strange girls
in bars. I couldn’t make this man my muse then refuse to hug him. But no, refuse your muse. I
saw it on a billboard, a public health campaign. They were happy times and I wanted them to
end, but his arms stayed where they were, his torso penning mine. He was broader, stronger
then he looked. And finally he must have sensed my stiffness, my boredom, he disengaged, and
this was going to fine. If I’d learnt anything it was never get what you want. Think you want.

No, there’d be no more nonsense here. But he didn’t stand or speak, he looked into my eyes.
Then he leant in and kissed me. And I was kissing him back, I wondered why. But still I couldn’t
be in the moment, as those books said. I sensed the bar turning to stare, or perhaps it wasn’t,
perhaps he did this all the time, perhaps it was local custom, or there was a girl who looked
exactly like me, his girlfriend, they thought I was her. Maybe he thought I was her, our kisses so
similar he hadn’t noticed. I should tell him there had been a mistake.

I should tell him it didn’t work this way, there must be a catch. I’d spent a decade being loved –
intrusively, often – by friends I didn’t want. But the people I wanted didn’t want me. To be
honest, I’d add, beyond you, I’ve never wanted anyone (P.S. there’s something oddly compelling
about you and I do not understand). I only want people after the fact, after they dump me.
People I treat badly. People who become The Only Man I Could Ever Love. But maybe what I
wanted wasn’t him, it was his stories. His war, those heightened stakes. I remembered when I
went to Palestine, so many of the NGO workers had local boyfriends. They would wear them like
badges, pins nicking through their skin, dispossession in their blood.

Why was I still kissing him? It would have been better not to have kissed him back. A theory
floated through my head. People were made not by the things they did but the things they didn’t
do. I used to keep a list of books I’d bought. And what was interesting wasn’t the books I’d read
but the ones I hadn’t. Why had I bought them, what had changed between that moment I
ordered The Blackheath Séance society for a laugh, and the moment I decided my life didn’t
need that, or another Kundera? A friend of mine did a thought experiment, once. What would
happen if you were introduced to a room of the things you had lost. And the most interesting
thing about this room, he said, wouldn’t be the things you knew you had lost, not even being
reunited with things you’d mourned. It would be the things you’d forgotten you’d lost. So
perhaps what made you who you were wasn’t the things you’d done but the things you hadn’t
done. I shouldn’t have kissed this man back.

We were at a party now. I’d followed him, first into a taxi, then a long drive to a suburb I didn’t
know, the hills receding behind us, Tito era blocks, worn out playgrounds, betting shops. Then a
woman came out to find us – she laughed when she saw me, I didn’t know why, then we were
walking through a sort of wasteland. Into a stairwell, so many flights of stairs, me wordlessly,
mindlessly following, thinking about an estate I once went to in Paris, a party in Sarcelles, how
edgy we thought we were. And now into a room of people, lines of speed were being cut.
Everyone in the room spoke perfect English. His was worse than I’d feared. Films weren’t
dubbed here, they were subtitled, everyone his age spoke English. Why couldn’t he? His friends
took turns translating. He told me he was an artist, which would have been fine if he hadn’t then
shown me his art. He was a poet too, and instead of recoiling I asked which sort. I imagined a
school of poetry or comparisons at least, someone he admired. But he picked up his cigarettes
and pulled off the foil. A stream of words. Then his friend was explaining that poetry could be
anything, he could make the foil from this cigarette packet real just by poetry, he could make it a
poem and his poem could make it real, and I told him it was real and his words might not be,
and when the friend translated he looked sad. The minute he said about the foil, I knew it
wouldn’t work.

But there was nothing else to do. By now he had given me ecstasy and I had no phone. I’d been
downgrading phones for years, the iPhones becoming Blackberries, becoming a ten pound
Nokia I threw in the river, worrying I’d hit a duck. So, I couldn’t call a cab, and we were in the
suburbs now. Of course I could ask him to call be a cab but that wouldn’t have been in the spirit
of things. Why had I suddenly decided that this, of all things, was the spirit of things? I would
stay there until he left. Oh, us Orton women, we loved being stuck.

He kept trying to speak but the words barely came, and when they did they were inelegant. It
was like talking to a child. So I kissed him every time he tried to speak, we spent the next hours
just kissing, and in the end his friends translated that he had never been so happy kissing a girl.
And I thought of what they’d translated before. They’d been surprised, delighted that I was
there, that I was in his life now. Because for the past month he’d talked about nothing else but
me. I’d been ‘his muse’ since the night we met.

And when those words were spoken, when they said ‘muse’, I should have been pressed pause. I
remembered my favourite scene from Peep Show. One character tries to section another, the
other threatens he’ll section the first back. Then the kindly, exasperated doctor. ‘You’ve had
your fun with the sectioning, there’ll be no more sectioning today.’ I wished he were here right
now. ‘You’ve had your fun with the musedom, there’ll be no more musedom today.’ But no, there
I was with his tongue in his mouth, the kissing slow and elegant, as though we’d been doing this
all our lives.

I thought of the one time I’d erred, snuck to the lake with a boy from Belgium. What my father
did to my mother when he found out. But no, we were Facebook friends now, me and Guillaume,
no longer penpals, he had found me. And I thought, on this estate in Sarajevo, my father could
not change that. Or pull me away from this man.
Later, outside the window, there was dawn. The atmosphere was straining, turning yellow. I
went to window, pressed my hand to it. The towers were hulking dominos and I wondered if I
could topple them. Down they would go, families pinned, objects in new, jagged forms. Blocks
would topple from Sarajevo to Prague, through the Iron Curtain, on to East Berlin, to Saint
Denis, transmitters tilting at the Eiffel Tower. It would fall in turn, destabilising France, bumping
her into England; the destruction would start anew. Hackney would fall first, the estates in the
South roiling too, meeting at the Thames, then up to Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow’s Red Road.
I prodded the glass, waiting for it to give. He came up behind me, wrapped himself round.

Then the party was splitting up, and we were walking to the centre, still wrapped, six foot odd of
the joliest laid man I’d ever met. ‘He’s called The Silliest Man in Sarajevo,’ a friend would later
say. He clarified he meant silly as a compliment, and I chuckled because it was the highest one I
knew. Now in the light, I saw the age in his face, the drink, the drugs, the war. But I loved these
scuffed edges, these wrinkles, these bags under his eyes, this mottled skin around his nose.

I imagined a camera following us, the panorama, the dawn sun glinting off the snowy hills, the
houses on those hills like flightless birds, how beautiful this city was. But then the camera would
zoom in, and the cinemagoers would complain. They’d think there was a problem with the
soundtrack, that the speakers had gone, or the cinema had switched them off. The manager
would be summoned. But no, he would say, this is not a problem with our sound. I know they’ve
only just met, they should be talking, they’re nowhere near the silent lunches of ten years hence.
But you’re missing the point. The manager was exasperated now. They can’t understand a word
the other says.
5

‘At the beginning of the Siege we had seven hundred books. And at the end we had seven
hundred books. But why am I telling you this?’ I told my new friend I didn’t know. He was nice,
this man, he was a regular at the bar. He spoke perfect English, it made a change. I used to call
the bar in the hotel The Bar At the End of the World. And now I wondered whether I should
transfer the words. But no, we weren’t at the end of the world, though other people might think
so. The Bar at the End of the Line, perhaps. Because this moving back, it felt oddly final. My
friends had laughed when I’d said it was going well. That, the stunning absurdity aside, I’d never
felt closer to anyone. They’d decided I was the Tin Man, Sarajevo my Emerald City. And though
nothing gleamed here, though the buildings still wore war, though the country was paralysed,
though everyone wanted to leave, I liked it here. Then I wondered whether this was my latest
way of being contrary, moving to a country which was barely a functioning state. Explaining
several times a day that, yes, I had left London to come here. No, I didn’t have to be here, I wasn’t
attached to a project or an NGO. No, really, I have left this London you would do anything for.
For this.

My friend had stopped conferring. ‘My girlfriend was born just as the War was ending, she
doesn’t like that I talk about it all the time.’ But no, I wanted to hear the story of these seven
hundred books, and she looked at me as though in apology. Well, he continued, most people
burned their books – there was such little firewood, people were burning everything: furniture,
clothes, books. So they ended the Siege with no furniture, they even burned their shoes. But
with seven hundred books.

‘My mother said if we burned the books we’d stopped being human.’ I remembered something
else I’d been told. The National Library burned for three days, the Serbs had targeted it, it held
all the nation’s books. Without it, the country would have no history, and each time I was told
this, I wondered if that was true. Sometimes I’d even wonder whether that may have a good
thing. But no, the city was distressed by the loss of these books, a cellist played in the ruins. In
the course of these days, so many books were destroyed, they rained down in the air. I imagined
these fragments on the heads of my friends. What they may pull from their hair. Found poetry,
motivational quotes, the insides of fortune cookies. But no, they were just old books.

‘But did you never resent it? You must have been freezing.’ Me, the bookish one. ‘I’d have burned
the books.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I agreed with her completely.’

‘But why didn’t you burn some, at least?’ He’d just been telling me one of the main problems
during the Siege was boredom. There was no electricity and it was so cold. When it got dark in
the winters, they’d go to bed at five. But sleep so often would not come, who could sleep at five?
So this is what they could have done, I said: they could have whiled away the hours grading the
books. An obsessive ranking, seven hundred down to one. And then they could burn them in
order, whittling the bad away. Leave the second best until they were numb. Kept the best one,
they’d still be human.

Perhaps, back in the Old World, I could have reviewed books like that – would I rather read this
or burn it to keep warm? I imagined myself, tossing these books into the fire, a smirk on my face.
Then going to bed at five. Not because of cold, because the days they felt too long.

‘And our little dog, the poor thing, it was so skinny by the end of the Siege.’

‘Wait, you kept your dog alive?’

‘Yes.’ He was confused by my confusion.

‘Because we loved it. We gave it as much we could. Lots of people kicked their dogs out, left
them to die.’

‘Well, this all sounds very civilised.’ It was a habit I’d picked up from moneyed friends, I always
said ‘that sounds very civilised’. As though he’d been telling me about a hunting party, not three
years of hell.

‘Oh no, we were feral compared to my aunt.’ My friend paused, rolled another cigarette. ‘You
don’t mind these stories, do you? We tell them so much.’

I did not.

‘Every day she’d dress up. A dress, suit jacket, heels. And every mealtime she would set the
table, as though it was the olden days, a soup bowl on a plate, two sets of cutlery, the finest china
she had. And then she would come out of the kitchen with that little plate of rice, and we would
cut it in three.’

Then I was struck by an awful impulse. ‘Do you ever miss it, the Siege?’

He paused. ‘Yes, sometimes I do.’

‘It’s brave to admit that.’

‘No, but it’s true.’ His girlfriend was listening now. Because every time you met someone on the
street, you wouldn’t just say “hi, how are you?”. You’d be so genuinely pleased to see them,
you’d have a moment. Because, have you noticed now, everyone says “hi, how are you?” but no
one listens, we all say the same, you say ‘good’ even though your firstborn’s just died or your
cat’s on fire. But, back then, we didn’t need these words with no meaning. And when you had a
mark in your pocket, just one mark, you felt like the richest man in the world. You’d buy that
cigarette or coffee. And the minute it touched your lips… Well, it was the best feeling in the
world.’

These words with no meaning, and I thought of me and Nino, the ways we tried to talk. Our
muddled ways. I thought of Susan Sontag, Godot in Sarajevo, and maybe this was us, filling time,
waiting for something to happen, realising nothing would. Perhaps one day I could sit there with
the script, read one of the parts, see if he’d notice I was talking oddly.

‘And how long did it take to wear off, that feeling I suppose of gratitude. Or do I mean contrast?’

‘I understand what you mean. It took three and a half years.’

6

I seemed to have cornered the market in writing about hoaxes. Bosnian hoaxes. And what a
strange corner this was.

The Barman was confused when I said I was going to the other side of the country, to
Medjugorje. He’d tried to warn me of something, but I couldn’t understand what he was trying
to say. And it was warm in the bed, I preferred this warmth to a trip to the laptop, perhaps then
a little meaning. I’d read the basics. In 1981, six children had run to the church after a walk in
the hills. They banged on the door, they’d seen a ghost, or perhaps it was Our Lady. And of
course it was Our Lady, the priest said. And now this small town in the south was the second
biggest pilgrim site in Europe, second only to Lourdes. An industry had grown around these
words. The town had forty hotels, streets selling everything you could possibly want: Virgin
Mary lighters, Virgin Mary travel pillows, Virgin Mary walking sticks. The fact they sold these
sticks tickled me. No one had realised how defeatist it looked.

I wondered for a moment, looking at the mountain road, whether I could have an epiphany.
Convert my little religion to a bigger one, a stronger currency. But I couldn’t concentrate, my
seatmate’s baby was wriggling on her lap. And I remembered a day back in London, those
strange Christmas weeks. I’d been boring on to a friend, telling him about The Barman,
wondering if it could work.

‘Well, the set-up sounds perfect to me.’ And I was confused, this man was holding his baby, a
baby he’d produced with a woman who was very articulate. Now I wondered why he thought he
deserved language. Yet I did not.

‘Well, if you think about it, isn’t this what all romantic love wants to be?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Well, you’re both mysteries to each other. And by the sound of things you always will be. Me
and Josie know everything about each other. Which is nice in some ways. And not in others.’

‘So is this the plan?’ I asked my friend. We were struggling with the child, we were both
impractical, it kept going for my wine glass. I tried giving it my bracelets to chew, but then it
almost choked, and I joked we should give the child some wine, and my friend looked so
tempted we both immediately pretended we’d been joking. Other tables were staring now, they
must have presumed I was the mother, and I wanted to tell them I wasn’t, I was just a friend
with a strange dilemma. I had nothing to do with this child. I would never have much to do with
one. I looked at it and thought eighteen years of unpaid labour. Then I made a mental note I must
stop calling children ‘it’. Another friend didn’t like it.
‘Where were we?’ asked my friend.

‘Oh, The Barman.’

‘Does he have a name? Or does it say The Barman on his birth certificate?’

‘He’s called Nino.’

‘Isn’t that Italian?’

‘No, it’s Bosnian too.’

‘Bosnian Muslim?’

‘Yes. He doesn’t like them Serbs and Croats.’

‘So does he know your guilty secret?’

‘My guilty secret? I didn’t realise I had one.’

‘What you sometimes do on Sundays.’

I knew it was dysfunctional, this churchgoing. A friend and I would sometimes sneak to church
in the morning, we used to joke that, among our friends, it was the ultimate taboo. That they’d
be less concerned if we’d been taking heroin. And one Sunday we went straight from church to a
birthday lunch. One guest revealed he’d taken heroin the night before. And once his
interrogation had ended – it felt like liquid gold was running through his veins – we mentioned
where we’d been.

At first everyone thought we were joking – it was a good joke, we had played it so convincingly –
but then the reality began to dawn. We had in fact gone to church. And not for the first time in
these East London lives. There was a silence, our friends were looking at us differently, as
though we were contaminated or deranged. So I went on the offensive, I asked why they had a
problem with this, after all, wasn’t religion just narrative and hope? And, though I didn’t like
many things, I was not averse to those. But they’d all read Richard Dawkins, they associated
religion with a lack of intelligence, with a dumbing down of thought, with priests’ trousers
bunching round their ankles. So I carried on, I asked the table whether, honestly, they thought
we were less intelligent now, lesser even, and one had the courage to say ‘yes’. The man who
was hosting told us to stop now, that this was boring, it was his birthday, and we turned to the
friend who’d taken heroin, and told him never to do it again.

‘Ah yes, one day The Barman asked me whether I was actually a Christian. I lied, of course I lied.
Or maybe I didn’t, I’m not sure if I am, or if I just flirt with these things. Maybe it’s my new way
of being contrarian.’
‘It’s a good one. But you should have been honest with him.’

The bus was arriving in Mostar now, I could see the giant cross the Croats had built on the hill.
They’d built it so the Muslim side of this divided city – the side they’d cut off and bombarded in
the War – would always be reminded of that. And I chuckled to myself, that in Britain
Christianity was seen as a dour do gooding thing. But in these parts, it was the aggressor, the
killer, the cross on the hill a goading. Then an earworm, Croats to the Left of Me / Chetniks to
the right / Here I Am / Stuck In the Middle with You.

‘No, I’d said to my friend. ‘You don’t understand how much they hate the Croats and Serbs. I
think they have the right to.’

‘I guess. And if it had been Muslims attacking Christians in Europe, we’d have intervened sooner.
But the other way round, we just watched it on MTV, surprised these people looked like us, did
the same things. I read your piece about the rock club. If only those Syrians were cooler, maybe
we’d get off our arses.’

And now a taxi to Medjugroje. I looked at the ruins of Mostar buildings, remembered the
lunchtimes when I worked in an office, googling pictures of Detroit. But then I discovered it was
becoming common for couples to get their wedding photos taking in ruined buildings. And then
I stopped the Googling, I drew the line at that.

But the impulse remained, to look at shell-scarred buildings with a renegade sort of lust. I
remembered a friend who was nice while sober. But every time he got drunk he would rant
about 9/11. It was the ultimate work of art. And even I would tell him to stop this, not to talk of
these things, but no, he claimed, he’d been absolved. He’d once been in a bar in Thailand. It was
the anniversary of 9/11, five years on. And he was bored by this narrative about the attack,
though drawn to the images still. So he shouted at the screen, whenever it changed from the
footage to survivors’ accounts. He shouted ‘this is boring’. A woman on the next table said she
worked as an air hostess for United. Quite a few of her friends had died in those attacks. And he
was charming, this man, he’d apologised so profusely that she’d said ‘it doesn’t matter, maybe
it’s silly I’m still emotional about these things’.

The ruins here were worse than Sarajevo, huge swathes of them, long blocks, forests sprouting
inside them, and I imagined a remake of The Secret Garden, but instead of that idyllic place, the
children were here. Having a picnic in the trees and weeds.

When we approached the outskirts of Medjugorje it was like entering a different land. Gone
were the shacks of village Bosnia, in their place an industrial complex. Pilgrim hotels,
restaurants, shops. I wondered what the village must have looked like in the seventies, before
the sightings. How words could make such a difference to the matter of a place. The words of
children, manipulated by a priest.

At one point I ran away from the man who was guiding me. I said I needed to eat alone, to take
in what I’d seen. And of course I hadn’t eaten, I’d gone to a restaurant, said is it okay if I only
have a glass of wine. I’d got up early that morning, half way into the glass I felt cushioned, dizzy
in a way I liked. When I looked up from my notebook, I saw a man in a wheelchair, counted
fourteen people with him. I thought of my little family, how rarely we were seen together. I was
oddly moved that he had eleven more. They were eating chicken shish, the man in the
wheelchair was smiling so much, everyone round the table was smiling.

They noticed I was staring and I worried, in my old and English way, whether they thought I was
staring because this man was in a wheelchair. And then it occurred to me it was not this, there
were so many injured people in this town, that was the point of it. They were staring because I
was beaming at them. And for a moment I didn’t care that this place was an obvious hoax,
perhaps even they knew that. What was important wasn’t that this man was cured, that he rose
from his chair. But that for a day they could pretend that he might, come together, eat chicken.

Nino still wasn’t back. I’d messaged him but he hadn’t replied, perhaps he was in the bar with no
signal. I could go there, or I could stay here, be a woman who waited. It was three now. I’d read
everything else on Medjugorje – read it funded a neo-fascist movement, read the Naples mafia
were involved, read the priest who oversaw the seers had been defrocked, read that the Catholic
Church had no truck with this place, even though it brought them many converts. I’d finished
the piece, written about the seer I’d met – she claimed she talked to Our Lady daily – given the
man in the wheelchair a cameo. All I wanted was for him to be back, lying by my side, making
the terrible noises he made in the night. I’d decided his snoring was an aural representation of
Goya’s painting. Then I hated myself for thinking that way, for the glib emails I sent to London,
mocking this strange and lovely man. But no, it wasn’t just snoring, there was terror in the
sound, and I wondered what film was unspooling in his mind. Sometimes the noises got so bad
I’d go to wake him, not for me but for him, to stop the film. He’d bat me away in his sleep, little
blows as he snuffled and screamed through wherever the night took him. But I didn’t want to go
to the late-night bar, I didn’t want to be a woman who fished men out of bars. I remembered my
mother dragging my father up the stairs, the smell of him, the times I had to help. At five I was
woken, a key unsteady in the door. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said as he curled into me, still in his coat.
‘Sorry no reply.’ And I said ‘nista, nista’ then pulled him from his coat. But now I knew he’d seen
the message, and suddenly I was my mother, waiting, always waiting, so I cried and when he
asked why I told him I wasn’t, then he cried, and I didn’t ask him back.
7

My friend was talking about bridges. He oversaw the building of bridges. Christ, he was boring
me. There were often problems with bridges, you began them from two different sides. Of
course the sides had to meet in the middle, and there was uncertainty there, an opportunity for
miscalculation.

We were sitting in a bar, another bar. But the bar was not insignificant. It was where The New
Thought had taken form.

I hadn’t gone home with him, the night of the party. It was six in the morning by the time we left.
Part of me queried this, that he liked his friends, his drugs more. If he’d spent a month thinking
about me, drawing me, devoted, surely we would have left before the party ended. But I didn’t
understand this country, the people in it. I’d looked as though I’d been enjoying myself. I had
been enjoying myself. And only at the end did I tell him through friends that I had to interview
someone the next day. He was so busy, this man, a politician, he could only meet one Sunday
afternoon. I didn’t mention he was a politician. Bosnians hated politicians.

The next day, talking to this quick-fire man, articulate through the come down, I realised this
was where I belonged. I remembered the Scottish man at the pyramids, the liberation he felt at
the lack of logic, of sense. But no, the land of reason was where I belonged. Not on a shell-
scarred estate, staring at cigarette foil, wondering what a strange man meant. We hadn’t
swapped numbers, I didn’t have a phone. I didn’t know his last name, he didn’t know mine.
These Bosnian names, their ridges of consonants, too impatient for vowels. I’d simply made a
promise to come and find him the next night. I had to come the next night, he’d said through a
friend, he didn’t work Mondays or Tuesdays. Yes, of course, I would come the next night. But I
hadn’t. Then it was late on Wednesday evening. And every time I thought of him, I could feel the
base of my spine. I messaged the friend who’d come to visit. ‘I’m going back.’

‘Well, about fucking time too.’

‘Do you understand?’ said the man with the bridges.

‘Yes, it does sound rather fraught.’

‘Fraught is exactly the word. Sorry I thought you weren’t listening.’

‘Oh no, I’m listening. Sorry, I have this thing where it looks like my mind is drifting. But no, I was
just thinking about what you’re saying.’

Oh goodness, that worked. I must be learning. When The Barman tried to speak English, I often
couldn’t understand. But sometimes I’d just know. It must be catching.
Yes, this project was particularly fraught. The bridge was to run between Croatia and Bosnia,
and the two contractors wouldn’t talk because they were different ethnicities. These Croats and
Bosnians still hated each other. There was no contact on the plans. So usually there was a
certain margin for error in terms of…

When I entered the bar, he’d run up to me, tried to kiss me, but there was to be no more kissing
here. The last time had been too strange, too distant. I was British, I was uptight, I didn’t kiss
unknown men in bars. Then it was closing time and when I went to pay I stood up. ‘Polacko,
polacko.’ Those words I’d hear so much. ‘Calm down, relax, stay, take it slowly.’ The motto of this
country which didn’t work. And me, a refugee from London, typing, talking, thinking, everything
too fast. But if I didn’t understand the words then, I understood I was to sit and stay. And I
obeyed.

Back in his flat, I felt like a visiting dignitary. I felt bad for him, for the shame he must have felt,
exposing me to his chaos, his mess. To this sad room without even a bed, to the motivational
quotes he must have known were crass – but no, he didn’t understand them, they could have
been fascist propaganda, Death to Jews, maybe I’d pretend they were – to the broken sofa bed,
so we only had the sofa to lie on, to scraps of poems, to rakia he poured from a Fanta bottle, to
the strangeness of his physicality, to the desperation when he took his trousers off, to the pair of
greying Y-fronts, the cock poking from this sad and Balkan cloth. Him, standing on his knees on
the scratchy sofa. I imagined it as an oil painting, instead of a loincloth, these Y-fronts. In the Old
World, I’d have laughed. But now it was a painted scene, a type of worship, piety ruined only by
a big, protruding cock.

And then it was done and I should have gone home. I was living just around the corner. I had
paid my visit to this strange land. I had sent my respects, compiled enough to file a report.
Leave, that’s what cool girls did, they fucked and went. And I was going to, we’d done our little
experiment. Instead of a candle he hadn’t lit, which I would laughed at, a Bunsen burner. There
was nothing left to say. There had never been much. A few more minutes in the hollow in his
chest, then back in my black car, diplomatic flags twirling in the breeze, clipping traffic lights.
But the silence wasn’t uncomfortable now. I wasn’t wondering what to say, tripping over the
awkwardness I’d felt as we walked from his bar to his flat, the broken talk reminding of my
schooldays, fishing for words. The saltwater stream of an awkward childhood. But now I was
wrapped around this man. A few more minutes, just a few. He didn’t look sleepy, he didn’t look
as though he wanted to sleep. He probably wanted me to go. Go back to his life, whatever it was,
and I wondered how he filled his non-bar hours: secrets societies, séances, stealing cats. He
didn’t look as though he wanted me to go.
Then I woke, I had no idea how long I’d been sleeping for. He was still awake, a film, Bosnian
subtitles on my laptop, his body crooked so as not to wake me up. I felt as though I was lying in a
pool of water, no, not all of me, just my face and neck. The night I’d gone down to the lake, lain
down on the shore, suddenly, inexplicably, lain my face in the shallows. But no, I realised what
this was. I’d been dribbling, all the way down his arm, his chest. And before any words could
come to mind, before shame, I realised I didn’t care. That he didn’t care and I didn’t have to
worry if he cared. There was no need even to confirm this, shake hands with neurosis, imagine
his thoughts – what have I done, inviting this girl to my bed, this bed which isn’t a bed, this
strange and gushing girl. We just giggled, he ruffled my hair, then we both made little gestures,
me to say do you mind me sleeping here, here in the hollow in your chest, him, do you mind me
watching this film, and no we didn’t mind, we didn’t mind at all.

Oh, how men could talk. In this other bar, with this engineer, I felt grateful they’d been raised
this way. But why was I here with this man I didn’t want to talk to? I’d spent December trying
not to make friends. Actively ignoring people, emails unanswered, mutterings of ‘sorry, I’m
busy’. And I’d decided this was why, already, we were straining. Because I lived in this odd way.
A girl without explanation, shunning people he knew and liked. So I would do something that
evening, something which wasn’t sitting working in his bar, or sitting working in his flat, or
sitting working in another bar, which sometimes made him cross. I’d gone for a drink with a
new friend. I hadn’t realised he could only talk of bridges.

‘So what’s the outcome going to be, in terms of the bridge?’

‘Terrible, I assume. But do you know anything about the Dayton Agreement?’

I knew an awful lot about the Dayton agreement. ‘Oh, not a single thing. We’re very ignorant, us
Brits.’

‘Well, the thing about the Dayton agreement…’

So I’d gone back again, back to the bar, to the twenty minute wait when everyone was gone.
Empty Chairs at Empty Tables. How many friends of his were dead and gone? But no, I shouldn’t
think that way. I remembered the first time I met him, my thoughts of jam. I motioned he should
stop clearing, stacking chairs, sit next to me. He motioned that the quicker he cleared this bar,
the quicker we could go. But I wanted to sit there, side by side on the bench, imagining that
scene, those slips of jam, whether he’d ignore them. We sat. No jam fell from the ceiling, of
course. He got back up, he emptied ashtrays.

‘No, I’m not clear on regulatory differences between the Federation and the Serb entity, you’re
right. Tell me more.’
It was the next Saturday night in Sarajevo. I’d gone to email my friend, the friend I’d taken to the
exhibition. If I’d never gone to that exhibition. I didn’t write about it in the end, it was no good.
I’d so many unanswered emails from the man who had depressed us. I had just left Him, I
couldn’t go back to his bar that night, there had been too many nights. I couldn’t be there all the
time, I had to keep a semblance I was someone when he wasn’t looking. Not just the mute thing
which came to him, welcomed his muteness in return. And, sitting at this table, the month
before, a glass of wine in hand, a second, I’d realised something had happened. That if I stood up
in a court of law and said it hadn’t happened, well that would be perjury. I’d read Kafka too
young, I was always being tried.

So I emailed a friend, the friend who came to the exhibition. I said I was feeling something I’d
never felt before. And perhaps, back in London for Christmas, we could discuss it. Her husband
specialised in the philosophy of language. Of course her husband did, this pseudish life of mine.
I’d begun to wonder, and I cringed as I wrote this, whether language was inherently obfuscatory.
Because I knew this man, I knew everything about him, I was sure. We could be weird twins,
come up with our own language.

I was drunk now. ‘Yes, it is very complicated. Do you blame me, as a Brit? Dayton, delays in
Western intervention, a country carved in two?’

‘No, you seem so nice. You have such big eyes, you listen. They say the eyes are the window on
the soul and…’

‘I do, I’m a good listener. Look, I need to go.’

‘You’re going to Vedran Smailović.’ I’d forgotten the place had a name. I just called it The Bar.

‘I am.’ There was no point to denial, in this city which was barely a town.

‘But you’ll take care, won’t you? There are lots of things you don’t know. About Bosnia. About
Bosnians. About this man of yours.’

Later, I would have pounced. Explanations, theories, retrospectives. But then I still thought I
knew. Or the things I didn’t, I was happy not to know. Whether he was a drug dealer or only
bought weed for friends. What on earth he wrote about. Why he painted naked ladies but kept
his clothes on in bed, so I would do too, in a room of naked ladies. I was happy not to know. To
be ignorant of what Dayton meant for bridges, what Dayton meant for me, what bridges meant
for Dayton, how countries fell apart and joined. Back then, I was happy. Just to write him in my
head, happy not to know.
7

We were lying around one afternoon. That was what we did, we lay around. There were inbuilt
problems when we left the bedsit. If we went for coffee or dinner, our options were stare
adoringly, or make broken, pigeon talk. Or take out my laptop, the eternal laptop, and the bar
would turn to watch the silent, tapping pair. Perhaps they assumed we were mutes, and
congratulated the universe on bringing us together. Because we looked good together, and I
remembered when I was recovering from a broken ankle, just off crutches, a friend had seen me
from afar. At first she hadn’t recognised me, with that pronounced limp. And, as she whispered
in the pub, her first thought had been awful, just awful, how could she have thought it? But she
had, how sad it was that this strange walk, which she’d assumed permanent, had befallen
someone pretty. So the fact of us being pretty mutes rendered us more poignant, the fact of our
togetherness, it would follow, an even greater cause of celebration. That we had found each
other – we even dressed alike, how adorable, the matching, pretty mutes – and tap our thoughts
in Word docs, every chat a play. Later, when things got fraught, I thought how useful it would be
to have a transcript.

But for now we would stay inside until his shift at four, me hushing my head’s little whines. Was
he depressed? Is this why he got up at two, and didn’t see the light? Was I, to use an awful word,
enabling him? Was I depressed, enjoying this routine? Was I making him depressed? Once we
set an alarm for half past ten. When it went off we laughed at how stupid we’d been, the utter
folly. We went back to sleep. But there was no point to these questions. I was happy lying in this
bed, enjoying the indolence, thinking of the breakfast meetings I was always late for, the hours
of my best friend’s life, dictated by a small, pre-verbal thing. So I’d just joke he was a vampire,
and he’d give my neck a little bite.

But while I was happy enjoying his skin, pawing him, thinking whatever I thought, he sought
entertainment. He would spend hours scrolling through his Facebook feed, looking and liking,
me making up stories when something was so noteworthy he showed me his phone. Sometimes
he’d announce ‘I look at Facebook now’ in a tone which implied this was the stuff of national
importance, that he was about to nuke the Korean peninsula. We’d played each other all the
music we’d ever liked, every film he liked. He’d want to watch my favourite English films, but I’d
put a stop to this. He’d always ask me to explain. And it was hard to mime Haneke.

I’d think back to the interrogations of Freshers Week, which films, which music? How I had no
answers to those questions because, yes, I played the cello, but no one was expecting me to talk
about Shostakovich. Sitting in my room alone one night after a party, wondering if this was all
people were, a heap of second-hand tastes, a signalling.
But – oh! – he had an idea of something we could watch. He giggled. He would show me a music
video he’d starred in a few months before. I’d already seen it, stalking him on Facebook before
we’d spoken. It was so terribly sentimental. I remembered thinking language would have to
expand to describe the horror of this film, the word cringeworthy or cheesy or naff would have
to deepen in meaning. Currently there were no words. I’d weaponised this video against my
friends, it had become a competition, how much of it could they watch without having to switch
off, put their hands in front of their eyes, climb behind a sofa, slice their side with a bread knife,
eat their own colon. As he pressed play, I knew I had to think about something else, watch
without watching. In London I’d got into trouble for this. I was utterly unable to control my face.

A memory struck me and I grasped at it. It was the time I went to Poland for a friend’s wedding.
I was staying in a Communist era hotel in Gdansk, the only one left. It was a desolate place on
the edge of the shipyard, but of course I had insisted on staying there, because I liked history
and I liked my history bleak. The friends arriving the next day had agreed, to appease me. And
so I was watching the General Election alone with beer, trying to follow whether someone I’d
hated at university might get in. A constituency I had no interest in was declaring, so I went to
the toilet. And when I came back something odd happened. What was on the screen was the
view from my window. The very view. How had this glitch happened, that the television was
replicating what I could see? How had reality got so broken when I was in the loo?

And then it cut back to the election coverage. I realised now that there was sound. I wasn’t
aware that the sound had come on suddenly, so I must have missed the sound, caught in the
moment’s strangeness. I should have been listening. But now Andrew Neil was talking about the
swing in Dorset South, as though the world hadn’t clicked out of place. I sat there, wondering
who to phone, what to do? Could I do that even, call a friend and tell them that I was sitting
alone in an industrial wasteland in Poland, and the television in my room had begun
broadcasting the view from my window? I’d sound at best drunk but, more likely, insane. I sat
through more analysis, more babbling men in ties, wondering whether I could ever come back
from this moment, whether one part of my brain would stay in this dingy room. Or whether by
tomorrow night, in the company of friends, I would find it funny, something to add to the list,
the list of strange things that happened to me. I tried to focus on the results, things were
beginning to look unexpectedly bad for Labour, but I couldn’t focus on swings and predictions,
graphs and charts. Back then I’d been arrogant enough to assume the problem was with the
world and not my head.

But then the coverage changed again. It was the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War
Two. And the view from my window was of the Solidarity Memorial. It had already been dark
when I’d arrived. I hadn’t noticed. World leaders had gathered there. I’d been tired, too
incurious, too short-sighted to really notice what was going on down there. And all of a sudden
the world was legible again.

The clip was almost over, the dying scenes I knew. He and the blonde girl are laughing and
skipping, blowing bubbles on the balcony of a light and airy flat. And it was only then that it
struck me. In the clip, a girl comes into his bar, a different bar, the one he used to work in. He’s
drawing her, he’s writing poems about her, falling asleep in his vest, looking longing, his
notebook clutched to his chest. And he’d watched me in his bar, he’d drawn me, I wasn’t sure
about poems, I hoped not. Did this film predict us, had it maybe even caused us, seeding an idea
in his mind, a script he’d follow? Or maybe he did this all the time, falling for ideas of girls, cross-
hatching their hair and faces. ‘A girl walks into a bar.’ Was this life the punchline to a joke I
wasn’t in on? I could hardly ask him.

But, now, instead of mocking the bubblegum world I realised I wanted another glitch. I wanted
the bedsit to be the flat on the screen. I wanted the man next to me to be the caricature, the
kooky, adoring artist. Not the stoned, adoring, troubled, troubling man. The man who had to
smoke so much to get through the day, to hide from whatever he was hiding from. I’d spent my
life campaigning for reality, long monologues on the perils of fiction, of happy endings, of
believing and wanting this shit. Far better to know that life was long and hard, that images
deceived. And now I wished I wasn’t lying in his sweat. I wished we weren’t going to a lunch in
the arse end of tower block Sarajevo, with his grotty friends, faces lined by the rollies they’d
started at ten. They’d offer me cheap speed and I’d take it because there was nothing else to do.

I realised he was looking at me, awaiting a response.

‘Like it?’

‘Yes,’ I said and smiled. ‘I really liked it. Clever boy.’

8

We had gone to a party. It wasn’t that I didn’t like his friends, I just didn’t like their idea of fun.
That by putting on a wig and glasses, then having your picture taken, you were having fun. I was
going to think about the signifier and the signified, but the drugs reached my bloodstream just
in time. He loved having his picture taken, doing silly faces – but that was fine for now. It took
longer for me to resent the time he spent posing for the mirror, how long it took him to get
dressed, rejected waistcoats floating to the floor. But still I was bored of everyone else, even the
ones making the effort to talk in English.

I had already been asked where I was from five times that night.

‘Scotland!’

‘Where?’

‘Loch Lomond!’

Then some iteration: it must have been idyllic or pretty or lovely or nice.

‘Not really!’

If I’d learned anything in London, it was how to shut down a conversation. There was nothing
irrational about asking a person where they were from. Or what they were doing in a place so
far from there. But I resented it. And the more the booze and drugs hit me, the more I did.

The sixth time someone asked me where I was from, events took a different turn. I should have
just said I came from London, my accent could pass, and I knew London better than I’d known
Scotland. But the last time I’d done that, it had provoked something strange. The man I was
meeting said he was worried about a friend. The friend had just moved in a Scottish girl he
didn’t know, and couldn’t talk to, and who might be suspect, maybe mad, perhaps I knew her,
British and freelance as I was? And instead of shutting down the conversation, putting up my
hand, I found I enjoyed talking about myself in the third person, preferred it even. I loved the
weird dichotomy between the sensible person my new friend thought he was talking to, and the
Chinese whispers me, suspect and mad. I assured him I knew her a little – given my capacity for
self-awareness I decided this was not an outright lie – and she was a bit eccentric, yes she
clearly had her problems, but she was neither suspect nor mad. And she seemed to adore him.
My fun had, I developed a terrible paranoia. What would happen if the three of us wound up in
the same room? Which we did, a week later. But he was coming round to The Barman’s for
drinks, and the world dealt me a kind hand. I had gone to open the door, and when saw it was
him I simply winked. He had a sense of mischief, he immediately understood.
Still, I had resolved not to repeat this. So the next time someone at this party asked where I was
from:

‘Scotland!’

‘Where?’

‘Near Glasgow!’

‘Scotland must be beautiful!’

‘No! It’s a terrible place!’ I widened my eyes, which were already too wide before you factored in
what must be happening to my pupils. I lowered my voice, over-enunciating to the music: ‘Bad
things happen there.’ The man looked scared.

‘Just going to the loo! That’s what Brits call toilet. Loo. L-O-O.’

‘I thought the American was restroom. And British people said both toilet and loo.’

‘Well, yes, but I’m not sure that’s strictly relevant here.’

‘But Brits call it toilet too, right?’

‘Yes, of course we do. Can we have a ceasefire? Of conversational host…ilit…ies.’

I stuck my nose in the air like a haughty Dalmatian, about to trot off. But I couldn’t trot. I was
beginning to realise the drugs weren’t working, or rather they were but they weren’t what we
thought they were. I had no idea what they cut drugs with in Sarajevo, now thinking of ground-
up mortars, a dead child’s ash. I stumbled through plastic glasses, which were obviously waiting
for me, their holders standing to block my way, to make me spill them, the room conspiring to
impede me, to make me look absurd.

After so many sorries, I found a fire escape. I didn’t want him to see me in this state. So I rocked
back and forth feeling gold in my veins but something like a bullet in my head. I couldn’t let him
see me in this state, because mixed in the adoration there was contempt. I tried to focus on the
houselights on the hills, they looked like stars, the mosques, beautiful on the hillside, and this
would pass, it all would pass. Oh when would this end, this dialogue, these conversations with
friends? This fussing over love and language. My mind was twitching now, there was something
I couldn’t place. Something about looking into the night. A curtain being drawn in my head,
clumsy fingers poking in my brain – leave some! I need my brain! It’s all I have! – and the grille
of the fire escape was hurting my bottom. I sat on my hands but that was worse. I wondered
how he was, if he was in the same state. Then I forgot who he was and remembered the story I
wanted to tell myself.
‘Your father is a bad, bad man.’

The Nightly Peep!

Every night my mother and I pulled back the curtains in my room. We called it The Nightly Peep.
‘Shall we have our nightly peep?’ ‘Let’s have our nightly peep.’ ‘It’s time for our nightly peep.’ We
sat looking at the loch, ripples, owls. Then she laid on my bed and said my father was a bad, bad
man.

That was it, every night she told me why her hair was so thin! ‘Your father’ would drag her
across the floor. By the hair. ‘Your father’, fucking up her hearing, punching her ears. Told this
every night. Christ, I hadn’t thought of this for years. That thin, witchy hair. ‘Eh, eh, speak up
Claire, I can’t hear you!’ But then – yes! – she’d blame it on me, I couldn’t talk properly. The night
before my Oxford interview, ‘you won’t get in Claire, no one can hear you, they’re going to
laugh.’ We were in the car park of a carpet shop!

I kept offering to cut her hair. She wouldn’t go to the hairdresser. I realised I wasn’t allowed to
cut my hair either. That waist-length, ratty hair. Hair, hair, hair. First day at university I cut it all
off. Why hadn’t I rebelled? Rebel Claire! Go back and rebel!

My hair started falling out when I was fifteen. ‘Get over it, stop being vain!’ Hair, hair hair. So
much hair in that house. Pulled hair! Fallen hair! Why were we going to the carpet shop? We
didn’t need carpets, we had hair! Finally I was taken to a doctor. He was mystified! What the
fuck was there to be mystified about, living in that house?

‘Your father is a bad, bad man.’

The hair tickling her nose when he threw it in her face – yes, she’d always repeat, he threw it in
her face! Mummy, maybe you could have glued it back on!

‘You okay?’

‘Oh… No…. You?’

‘No. The…’

We couldn’t find the words for ‘these drugs have gone badly wrong’. But we could say it.

He fell into me.

‘You no say name. I say your name, always. Emmie, Emmieeee, Emmieeeeee. You no say my
name.’
I couldn’t talk now. The stars were slipping from the sky, they were falling, and I wanted to tell
him that the sky was collapsing and someone might get hurt. I looked at the mosques, raising
minarets hands to questions I hadn’t asked. Or had I? Only later would I realise what I’d been
trying to think. That in forgetting my childhood, hadn’t I forgotten everything? And maybe that
was why I knew nothing of past relationships, of anything, really. Why I’d placed so much store
on him. But as he held me on that fire escape, and stroked my hair, all I could think was I’d never
felt closer to anyone in this strange and burning world. We’d known each other in a past life! No
we hadn’t. He was still saying my name. I dribbled down his front. He put his mouth in my hair,
noises from his throat. Was he being sick? I didn’t care.

He pulled me closer, we were a snail! We weren’t a snail.

‘Say name.’

I was saying his name.

‘You need to come inside! It’s freezing!’ The people who had a suspect idea of fun lifted us up,
my armpits tickled. They’d even gone to the trouble to simultaneously translate, and I thought of
interpreters at the UN using exactly these words, to drugged up diplomats. Back to the warm
inside. They fed us water. I don’t know what happened next but then we were behind a sofa,
collapsed on each other, breathing, so much breathing, beer and rot, the aftertaste of ecstasy.
But I liked this. I liked this very much. And when we woke up the next morning we giggled, were
told there was no need to apologise, it could happen to anyone, and we were cute. The taxi
driver found us funny.

He was mine, for now.

10

I hadn’t asked him about The War. I’d resolved I wouldn’t. He owed me no explanation, he owed
me no pain. But I had a growing feeling I must seem uncaring, unconcerned by his past. And I
wished there was a handbook for this sort of thing, how to talk to your new boyfriend, who you
live with but can’t really talk to, about childhood trauma. When you’re a ghoul tourist, over
twenty years too late.

Tonight was the night.

He was smoking more than usual, very, very stoned, even more expansive in his movements. He
announced, quite formally ‘I tell you of War’. He was talking this time, he wanted to talk, so
there was a lot to the story I didn’t understand, so much clarification I had to ask for, so much I
didn’t ask for. I began to fixate on whether I was interrupting too much, whether it was better to
let him continue, failing to understand, or not to smile and nod, to fully understand. Well, as
much as I ever could. So I instigated a system whereby I would ask every second time I didn’t
understand. In the end, this is what I understood:

He, his brother, mother and unborn sister had fled to Croatia, to an island where there was an
old prison. And they slept on the floor of this old prison, his sister was born on that floor. They
had relatives in Austria and eventually reached them, this involved a drive through a forest and
a criminal gang. But after six months in Austria, where he was happy, they were doing well, he
was learning German and going to school, his mother missed his father too much. He had stayed
to fight. So they broke back into Bosnia, into a war zone, a place I later learned was a famine
zone, for the last two years of the war. He couldn’t talk about this part. ‘All I say is “it was shit”. It
was very, very shit.’

‘You were taken back into The War? What the actual fuck? That’s… oh my god you poor lamb.’

I’d heard so many terrible stories here, and I knew that perhaps objectively this one wasn’t so
bad. Everyone had survived, and physically unscathed too. He was less scarred than me, a
hairless little patch of shiny skin on his thigh, nothing more than a nice place to rest your palm,
enjoy the contrast with the rest of the leg. But the fact of knowing you’d been safe, that your
presence in a war zone was unnecessary, that you were essentially gatecrashing a warzone, my
thoughts turning to London parties I would no longer be on the guestlist for, snapping them
back. I knew enough to know it must have taken quite a lot of effort to get into Bosnia in 1994.
And I realised I could comprehend this even less than the dying, than the children lying limbless
in horrorshow wards. What would it have felt like? I had no answer to that question. Hoped I
never would.
I got my laptop out. ‘Do you blame your mother?’

He shook his head.

I shouldn’t have asked, that was a therapy question, it had no place in The New World, this place
of family and unconditional love.

I looked at his face. I couldn’t decipher it.

Throughout the story I’d been so aware of my reactions, of how I was holding myself, of what I
was saying. And I realised what this meant, that I cared more about me than about this twelve-
year-old boy, who must have been even more boyish than the thirty-four-year-old boy. And now
all I was doing was smiling and holding his hand. I thought of Common People ‘But she didn’t
understand / She just smiled and held my hand’, the time I had rewritten the song for my
friends, about Sarajevo and The Bedsit, having had it as an earworm ever since he’d taken me to
a supermarket, how I was making a note of the fact all I was doing was smiling and holding his
hand, so I could later satirise myself, my inability to deal with this situation, in an email to my
friends, wishing this noise would stop, wishing I didn’t have this impulse to narrativise, to
anecdotalise what didn’t belong to me and could not be understood.

So I kissed the back of his neck, the loveliest place in the world, lifting the greasy hair, breathing
the smell of skin three days unwashed. This lovely souring smell where I felt at home, thinking
pheromones didn’t exist here, they existed only in The Old World, not this grand new feeling’ed
place.

By now he was stoned, so beautifully stoned, lolling and giggling. He’d had enough of talking
war. Eventually I realised he was asking me to tell him a story about my childhood. But a curtain
went down, a heavy, fire-retardant curtain. My mind seemed to have borrowed it from a local
theatre. I’d spent my life telling these stories – to friends, at comedy nights, to a therapist, in
notes for novels which disappeared. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. I loved telling these
stories, the validation the suffering gave me, the control I must have had, the intelligence, the
humour, the coolness not to be scarred, to even get laughs from it. But now I had nothing to say,
just the memory of a lonely girl, a story that was nothing special. It would have been obscene to
complain to him about my childhood. We had written our own dysfunction, we hadn’t been
shelled or starved. In the absence of material threats we had gone to work fine-tuning our
hatreds, our propaganda, our language of violence, its shit grammar. But, the voice in my head
said, hadn’t his mother made a choice? A terrible choice. There was no point in me thinking this,
he didn’t think that.

‘Oh, I don’t know, I…’ I said.

‘Ha, ha, good story, happy story.’

‘I… can’t.’

‘Story, I tell you story, you tell me story.’

‘Er…’

‘Story!’

But it was almost as though I had stage fright, perhaps on some awful level I saw childhood as a
competition, a competition he had won outright, a seven-letter word on a Triple Word score. I
really hoped it wasn’t that.

He went to my laptop and, slowly, from a clumsy, stabby finger, the words ‘who are you?’
emerged. I laughed and typed a story about being descended from selkies, which I thought
might be funny to someone stoned. He’d always been suspicious of my touch-typing, as though it
was a form of witchcraft. But no, that wasn’t the problem now.

He shook his head then put it in his hands, all stoned jollity gone. I was feeling something almost
like anger now, it was so irrational I knew, at this imposition of an obligation, this information
being owed. I remembered a good friend dating someone inexplicable, and when I asked what
she saw in him she replied: ‘He knows exactly what he wants in life’. She said these words as
though they weren’t the most depressing words to be uttered. And there I was at the other end
of the scale from that boring man, with no idea what I wanted from this life, no idea how to even
deflect a question, just an impulse to be buffeted around, to be absent, to drink life in.

I knew my case was failing, I knew I was in the wrong. This man had shown so much trust, keys
to his flat after seven days of mute adoration, a basic ticksheet of my facts: age, nationality, most
recent city of residence, the fact I could laugh myself crying at the smallest of things, that I had
no brothers or sisters, that I couldn’t cook a single dish, or at least had no desire to, that I spent
my days doing incomprehensible things on laptop. But it was my nature to go on the defensive,
to think the rules did not apply.

So I sat there in silence and he went to the fridge, returning with a tin of sardines and a tub of
strawberry yoghurt, the realisation growing that he intended to eat these items together, on the
same plate, not just that, now intermingled, spreading the yoghurt on the sardines, the yoghurt
separating under the oil, me looking on appalled. ‘What on earth are you doing?’ I asked then
mimed disgust. He looked at me and shook his head so I laughed to lighten the tone, pointing to
the pink sardines, the dreadful liquid underneath. ‘Why are you eating that?’ But he was happy
eating that he said. ‘You no lived through war’. I remembered the times I’d laughed at his
elaborate methods of food conservation, how much he must have bitten his tongue. So as soon
as he’d finished I made a point of kissing him, kissing him more deeply than I thought I knew
how, tasting the rancid oil and oversweet yoghurt together on his teeth and tongue. It was like
eating a Cornetto in an abandoned fishery.

I began to think that for me the trauma wasn’t the violence, it was the fact of having been kept
so apart. And so, by knowing nothing of life, I had created the wrong expectations; idealised
what people could be, created them in theory, known them in novels. But, no, I didn’t even trust
novels, I’d realised there was some sort of glitch, announced to my mother that I didn’t want to
read books with happy endings, I didn’t like happy endings, they were silly. And now, here was a
man I adored, inexplicably adored, my ultimate boy, and still, lying back now on the banquette,
his hands in my hair, kissing, always kissing, I couldn’t stop this train of thought, that other
people had learnt the reality of other people early on, for them the world wasn’t that faraway
place, built up too much, overhyped, and as he put his hands under my top I knew I shouldn’t be
thinking any of this, at the very least I should be thinking of his story, about the Croatian prison
floor, sleeping twelve to a room, which wasn’t the correct word, the correct word was cell, this
lovely, gangly thing on a cold stone floor, waking up to a view of a barred sea, and as he moved
on top of me, I thought, while better than that floor, what scant consolation I am, a girl too proud
or stupid to answer ‘who are you?’ And all I wanted to do was give this twelve-year-old boy a
hug but I couldn’t think this now, because he was inside me, nor could I think how much I
wanted to shout at his mother, so I squeezed his silly little bottom and waited for it to end.
11

I was tidying up one afternoon.

‘Ne ne ne!’ He ran after me, taking the poems from my hands, the sketches too, throwing them
back on the floor.

‘I…’ I turned to the computer. ‘I do not feel comfortable walking over these things.’

I’d heard what he was going to say before. The Poundland anarchism.

‘I say you… Poesie and art are for...’ He pointed to the floor.

I wondered how best to explain that yes, he may have his theories about the democratisation of
art but, my bourgeois squeamishness aside, I didn’t like treading on my own face. I found
treading on my face odd. The last time I’d trodden on my face was in Edinburgh. I’d taken a
comedy show there, it had been a mistake. And on the last night, walking through the Old Town,
I had looked down at the flier I was stepping on, impacted on wet cobbles, and read through the
sludge my face.

But I had an idea. I picked a poem back up off the floor and pointed to the computer. We… Talk
about was the wrong phrase. Definitely not analyse. We… I went to type. ‘We put poem in
computer’. Was that going to work? I imagined feeding the laptop, a Mac powered by poetry,
munching through the rhyme – did he rhyme? I hoped he didn’t rhyme – the cable now useless
in the mess. We could pretend it was a snake. No. Symbolism, Emmie, symbolism. Oh, that had
worked, he was happy, he was taking the sheet, opening the Bosnian to English tab. I would
rather just have lain there with my arms round him but this was safe. I didn’t like poetry. Poetry
was impossible to translate, even by the best humans. It would never come out a way I would
enjoy. However bad the words, they may not be his fault.

The words came out.

‘First I tell story.’

‘This is poem?’

‘No, story first.’

‘My former girl.’ The words flickered into life. ‘She bought Dalmatian.’

Was he trying to dump me for a woman with a Dalmatian? I’d fallen in love with a Dalmatian,
Zappa, in the bar. I’d steal his owner’s table, so he’d come and sit next to me, looming over my
screen like a haughty fact checker. His head was so silky, I’d type one-handed so I could rest the
other on his head. I’d probably dump me for a woman with that Dalmatian.
‘She bought a Dalmatian and called it after me.’

A strange tale began to emerge. After he left her, the woman would take her new dog Nino to his
bar. This way she could sit calling his name, telling Nino to come back to her, to stop sniffing
other dogs’ bottoms, to get off women’s laps. I’d assumed, as I often did, that Translate was
malfunctioning. But after a long time it seemed irrefutable that a woman had bought a large dog,
with the express purpose of taunting and degrading him. While appearing, herself, deranged.

‘It look like Zappa?’

‘Ne ne ne ne ne!’ He shook his head violently. In Bosnia they must take the aesthetics of
Dalmatians seriously. Perhaps there were different factions, internecine war.

‘Is Zappa.’

‘No, no, the Dalmatian your ex-girlfriend bought. I just... wanted to know if it looked like Zappa…
never mind.’

‘She go crazy. Selim buy dog, call it Zappa. Nino becomes Zappa.’

Oh, nothing in this country was ever simple. ‘Does he still answer to Nino?’

‘Answer to?’

I shouted his name and pretended to be a dog, trotting to the bar. But, no, this story made no
sense. Because people were always shouting his name, shouting for drinks, so the dog would
respond every time. How had he been trained to forget?

‘He beat dog. If dog get up to Nino. It work.’

And, oh no, I was laughing, laughing more than I control. This poor animal, bought out of spite,
beaten for a name it never wanted. And still I laughed. Why didn’t people behave sensibly after
break-ups?

‘Why didn’t Selim keep the name? Instead of… beating the dog?’

‘A sniper took his. He had Dalmatian during war, it look the same. When he first see dog, he
think it is Zappa. He want new Zappa. So Alijanja go mad and he buy dog. He bury dog by law
faculty, every day he and Zappa go to grave.’

So there were two identical dogs, one decomposing underground, the other above that ground, a
visit every day. I always imagined Zappa as human, he had such sad eyes, and now I couldn’t
push the thought from my mind that he knew all this. Knew he’d been a substitute first for Nino
and then for the dead dog. That he’d lie awake at night, knowing he’d never been loved for who
he was. He’d pick up his pipe, sleep so distant now, and go back to the Tolstoy by his bed. The
word simulacrum would flash through his mind. I am a canine simulacrum. Perhaps I would
decondition him. Whisper Nino in his ear until he reacted then instead of a beating, a caress.
And every time someone called over to Nino for a drink, the dog would get up, act up, knock
over drinks.

I was tired now, tired of this country which never stopped talking, telling me things that made
no sense.

I remembered that film people liked. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Did that work for
countries? Everyone had a three year gap on their CV. They’d go for coffee and discuss this. ‘Isn’t
it funny,’ none of us can remember where we were?’ But they’d chuckle and blame it on drugs.
Or perhaps everyone would be too embarrassed to say they couldn’t remember three years of
their lives – who would confess to something so mad? The museum with the boy who lost the
jam would have to close. Officers from The Department of Memory would come with a warrant.
But no, he way typing now. The first lines and oh, I had to look away. I had to go to the toilet. I
looked at myself in the mirror.

He’d looked so childishly happy.

I returned. It was all there.

‘In English now, you read…’ I could do this, Emmie, you could do this. Ceremony, I should create
some ceremony. I stood up and began.

Van Gogh

The stars are out

There are many stars
Big ones.
Made of paint.
Although it is dark and I am naked, I am not afraid.
Standing in this field. Looking at the stars.
There is kindness in the swirls.
Painter man you made it so.

Now another field.

This has corn and crows.
A lot of crows.
Honking and cawing.
I fear they will bite me, naked in this field.
But they do not bite.
They are painted too.
I am happy, naked in this field.
Painter man you made it so.

I see a chair.
It is wooden but with a seat that is like straw.
If I sit on it I will splinter.
My ass will carry the splint.
No, I sit, there is comfort.
The chair is paint as well.
Comfortable and naked, not ashamed.
Rejoicing in my chair.
The chair of the painter-man.
Who made it so.

Next a room with small bed.

Bed is narrow and small.
It is a skinny bed.
Do I wish to lie on the bed?
I am already undressed.
Inviting bed, so warm.
I am large to get inside.
Without fear I cuddle myself.
Lying in the bed.
The bed is from a painting.
The painter man made it so.

He drew these things for me.

The holy painter-man.
I look upon his face.
I would kiss it if was girl.
It is a ginger face.
It does not have one ear.
You do not need ear to paint.
Although useful for holding brush.
He looks upon my nakedness and does not feel afraid.

The painter-man is dead.

He killed himself with gun.
He did not know he is alive.
Will always be alive.
Speaking just to me.
I live inside his work.
Naked and comfortable, without dread.
Naked in the fields.
Why did you shoot yourself?
It must have been a mess.
I will continue for you. I will write your paint with words.
And together we will dance. Naked in the paint.

I wondered what had happened, was happening to my face. Once, I had to do a reading at a
wedding. A terribly sentimental reading, a poem about True Love. And I’d controlled my face. I
was congratulated by everyone afterwards, drunken uncles touching my arm, patting my
bottom, saying how good I was to say those words without giggling, without looking too stern.
And laughter wasn’t the problem now, I felt appalled, that while I had been writing this man,
teasing out his contours in my head, filling in the blanks language left us, he had been writing
this. And why was he naked in this poem, for this artist, he barely ever was for me? But wasn’t
this why I loved him, he was the opposite of irony.

He was just gazing at my eyes, had he seen?

‘Computer made no good.’

I beamed, turned back to the computer.

‘It’s very difficult to translate poetry. Even people can’t translate poetry. But it was interesting,
what I read. I liked the stuff about Van Gogh.’

The stuff about Van Gogh, think Emmie, think. The whole poem was about Van Gogh. So I got up,
and picked up his Starry Night mugs, poured the coffee we were drinking into those, and he
giggled. This could still be fine. I motioned he should lie down on the sofa, and I went to his
artist’s pad. I googled the painting of that narrow bed. He still didn’t understand what I was
doing, and this made me angry, it should have been obvious to anyone intelligent, anyone with a
sense of fun, which meant I did the thing I was trying not to do, we were in distant land, I should
not be so forward, but I began taking off his clothes. He didn’t try to stop me but, yes, he looked
confused. I tugged him out of them like a sleepy child. And I wondered for a moment whether
there had been a terrible mistake, that he wasn’t naked in that poem, in every fucking verse, that
he was genuinely confused by why I was making him lie there, undressing him, a clichéd
painting on my screen. But no, it was fine to like Van Gogh, even I liked Van Gogh, just because
something was popular didn’t mean it was bad. As I took off his boxer shorts, he looked alarmed,
so I said ‘like poem’, and why was I insisting on this, the girl who didn’t, couldn’t draw. I had to
go through with it now, there was nothing else to do. And, those five minutes as I drew, I knew
he was experiencing them as a sort of violation. I remembered the part of the country he was
from. It was religious. And what would I do when I had to draw his cock, his naked ladies were
abstract. Those excruciating minutes without speech, perhaps he would write a poem about
them one day, the London girl who stripped him, dethroned him as The Only Artist in The
Bedsit, made a terrible sketch of his poem. And I wasn’t sure what I was trying to achieve,
except doing something, anything through our muteness, or was it that he had shown me his
terrible poem, so I wanted to say ‘this is fine, I can forgive this, watch me make something
terrible in return?’ But in the end the sketch wasn’t bad, and then he had to go to work.
12

Over Christmas, he’d sent me pictures of my empty seat in the bar. ‘Nooooo same, no
Emmieeee.’ Now I was in that seat with a growing feeling he didn’t want me to be there. And
part of me found this funny, because part of me didn’t want to be there either. And part of me
was experiencing it as a sort of catastrophe. I should have turned up out of the blue, perhaps if
we still had that to cling on to, that silent film scene. But there were no words to express this
thinning. How absurd I was to leave the things people hang their lives on – a flat, a job title,
meetings, parties, friends – then complain when the hanger was gone and the dress was
crumpled on the floor. So I was messaging a friend – the friend who’d come to Sarajevo, the only
one who’d seen that he existed – to remind myself that I existed, once.

‘Naomi, you there?’

‘I am. How’s it going with the love that cannot speak its name?’

‘Oh, it can now!’

‘Let me guess, you’ve learnt Serbo-Croat out of love?’

‘I wrote to the Just 17 problems page, they advised exactly that. No, no, still a lazy old fuckwit. So
he says, very formally, I teach all Bosnian now. As though the whole language is going to come
pouring from him.’

‘Steady on.’

‘Little sperm with dictionary entries… somehow pinned on them.’

‘I don’t think you get big sperm.’

‘Or like a mother bird. Chewing up the dictionary and spitting it into my mouth.’

‘You try to cough some back up. You have given me too much! Now, within these borders, I will
always be Will Self!’

‘Not quite that bad. So he says I teach you most important! Most important. Say volim te. Volim te.
I say always, you no say. Yeah mate, I’ve only just learned it, how could I have said something I
don’t know?’

‘Perhaps in Bosnia you’re born with words.’

‘Well, these would be good words to be born with. What does it mean? I say. He refuses to tell
me. Ne, ne, say volim te. So I say it again and again. He’s pointing to his eyes, I should look in his
eyes. He goes from finding it sweet to finding it funny. He’s so cute when he chuckles.’
‘Oh god, what was he making you say?’

‘So I assume it’s some sex thing. Eventually he lets me go, I go to the laptop. It’s even worse.’

‘Now you’re his property and must bear him eight children?’

‘Okay, not that bad. But he has tricked me! Into saying I love you!’

‘Hahahaha.’

‘Obviously I acted appalled but… But yeah, now I’m in a position where all I can say in Bosnian is
‘hello’, ‘beer’, ‘white wine’ [not red, I just can’t pronounce the word for red, too many
consonants, but that’s fine, as happy drinking white], ‘thanks’, ‘nothing’, ‘everything’ [don’t ask],
and ‘I love you’.

‘Not bad vocab for a booze-soaked romantic. Christ, the idea of you as a romantic. Perhaps it’ll
become totally self-reinforcing. All you can do now is drink and declare. You’ll fall in love with
every barman in Sarajevo. In an all or nothing sort of way. I’m going to ask.’

‘Well, he does this thing of just staring at me. I don’t like it, it’s like I’m a fucking shop window.’

‘But the eyes are the…’

‘Stop! He’s scribbling! Maybe he’s writing bad poetry about precisely that. I think very
interesting thoughts on the male and female gaze while this is happening, by the way.’

‘I’m sure you do.’

‘So I say “what?”, “what?”. He really doesn’t like me doing that. And he says “nothing” but now
he’s taken to saying “everything”.’

‘So things are going well?’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t go that far. We had a great row this morning. I was having a go at him because
one of this friends was groping me last night.’

‘That’s not good.’

‘Yeah, he didn’t intervene. I got really upset, I’m so bored of being a woman. Suggestions I may
have been encouraging it because I’d danced with this friend earlier.’

‘That doesn’t sound good at all.’

‘Well, I’ve had a bottle of wine with a mate and decided I’m just going to forgive anything. Look
at him, he’s so… lovely.’

‘Maybe if you learn the word for lovely you’ll keep finding him lovely.’
‘He’s monologuing at someone. I can imagine what he’s saying is so much more interesting than
it is. The other night his friends came round and had this big discussion. After an hour, the
curiosity became too much. What have you been talking about? I ask the Anglophone. Love?
Life? Death? Animal husbandry? No, they’ve been talking about the quality of dental care in
Bosnia. Anyway, maybe I’ve spent too long thinking about feminism. So I’m just going to be nice
from now on. Attribute any nastiness to PTSD. This, my dear, is my working strategy.’

‘It doesn’t sound like a very good one. You know, you don’t need to live your life as a series of
experiments?’

‘I know, but it bores me otherwise. Oh dear, he’s not talking to me.’

‘He can’t talk to you!’

‘I’m going to leave a TripAdvisor review. I went to Caffe Vedran Smailović for a quick coffee one
afternoon. The barman made me move in with him even though we’d known each other seven
days and couldn’t talk. I have now lost my sense of self, alienated all my friends. And turned
down a lot of work because all I do now is sit around bars wondering whether or not language is
inherently obfuscatory. Furthermore the toilets aren’t clean. The lemonade is overpriced.’

‘You haven’t alienated all your friends. We’re finding this fucking hilarious. We sit around The
Bell wondering whether you’ve gone mad or the sex is just really good. Anyway, your romantic
woes are far more diverting than people telling me they’re going to move to Bristol. And they
never do, do they? What was the row this morning?’

‘Well, we were still arguing about last night. Then something extraordinary happened. We were
trying to, you know, actually talk. He keeps shouting but you say for the sex I am not your mother.
You say, you say, you say.’

‘So you’re over your mother issues then?’

‘Oh, perfectly. Anyway, I go very quiet. What is this now? Had I been asking him to role play as
my mother? No, I’d been telling him not to, the initiative must have been his. I know we drink
too much, but this is really fucking with my head. What would a metaphorical take, maternal
sex, even involve?’

‘Perhaps he was trying to birth you. A symbolic rebirth. And you chickened out because you
enjoy being so dysfunctional.’

‘Hahaha. Enough of the pop psych. Eventually, he begins to mime. Putting socks on my feet. And
it clicks, he’s not saying sex, he’s saying socks. They can’t do vowels here but by fuck they can do
consonants. It’s this Bosnian thing, they’re obsessed by not catching colds. He’d tried to put
socks on my feet the other day. And, oh I don’t know, have we talked too much about men telling
women what to do? I really don’t know what to think any more. I’d got cross and told him he
wasn’t my mother. Hence him thinking I could look after myself with the gropey man. Anyway,
that’s the Freudian Field Day for you. Oh dear, it’s closing time at the bar. Empty chair at empty
tables. I sense trouble, brewing like a fine pale ale.’

‘Now my friends are dead and gone.’

‘Oh god, I used to sing this in school choir. There’s a grief that can’t be spoken, a pain goes on
and on.’

‘My friends, my friends forgive me. That I live and you are gone. Fuck, you better not play this to
him.’

‘On a lighter note, second date with the boy scout?’

‘I did not tell you the best part. He only works part time for the boy scouts. For the rest of his
working life he is a clown. An actual clown.’

‘Oh, I hate those actual clowns.’

‘A sentiment in no way borne out by your love life. Oh god, that I Love You thing’s quite sweet.’

‘Isn’t it just? I feel as though I’ve been lobotmised. It’s rather nice.’

‘Oh, god, AirBnB guy’s drunk and shouting. Be right back.’

It was our ritual, I would sit there as he packed up the bar, sometimes helping, more often not,
bashing away on the laptop. Oh look at me, part of the Knowledge Economy. But don’t call me a
digital nomad, now that I do not like. Later, I met an American who was outraged that bar staff
here would wash by hand. Labour was so cheap the owners felt no need to buy dishwashers. He
would talk about the alienation of labour, he was a Marxist. And he had a soft spot for The
Barman, he said it was demeaning to see him wash by hand. I told him I didn’t think he minded.

‘He’s sitting there with six cheeseburgers and a bottle of Veuve Cliquot.’

‘I think he may be the one.’

‘Right, before this situation degenerates further, we must come to Item 2 on next week’s agenda
for The Bell. Apart from the obvious, what do you two actually do together?’

‘What was Item 1?’

‘Whether you were going mad or whether the sex was very good. Both currently inconclusive.’
‘Oh, there’s not much of the obvious to be honest. I suppose we come up with little riffs, or he
draws and I work, or he plays me things he likes, and I realise I don’t like anything. It’s a bit like
what we do with Laura’s kid.’

‘Do you think he has any idea how awful you are?’

‘I think he’s beginning to cotton on. To be fair to him, with me the clues are mostly linguistic.’

‘Yeah, you’re quite sweet looking apart from the eyes.’

‘And he likes the eyes. In a novel the bad teeth would be a clue. But it doesn’t work here because
everyone smokes so much and, like, lived through war. I probably look virtuous having a full
set.’

‘Fucking hell, my AirBnB.’

‘Let me guess, the experience of being an AirBnB host is showing you the joys of other cultures
and the true meaning of connectivity in this small, small world.’

‘I was looking at your AirBnBs reviews the other day, I was bored, wondering if I’d ever host
you.’

‘Stalker.’

‘They’re really good. Everyone seems to love you. They think you’re so tidy and polite.’

‘Oh, it’s all part of this culture of niceness. I got a great private message from someone who
claimed to love me. Let me dig it out… Here we go: Are you okay? You were great guest, we
didn’t notice you were here. But maybe that is problem? My brother say you stayed in basement
so long, did not go out. I know this of course from him only. He is very confused and depressed.
As I tell you, the rest of family moved to Croatia to escape him. But I work for American
company in Sarajevo, must stay. He is sometimes burden to guests so maybe he not right that
you are not okay.’

‘Good double negative. What did you reply?’

‘Well, after deleting several drafts of ‘takes one to know one’, I said I was perfectly okay and her
brother seemed a nice if troubled man, although in balance him shouting in broken German that
I must eat his cucumbers, while not disturbing to me, might disturb other guests. There were
actual cucumbers by the way. He wanted me to eat these actual cucumbers. He thought I had to
put on weight.’

‘Eating cucumbers, that famous way of piling on the pounds. Do you think my guy’s going to
leave a terrible review?’
‘What AirBnB or the boy scout?’

‘You can’t leave reviews on Tinder.’

‘Depends what just happened. Did you bottle him then put the wrappers on his body like a
shroud?’

‘I was sorely tempted. No, he just wanted to know where the nearest offie was. I told him the
truth.’

‘Did I tell you I was once in an Irish pub, and a man announced to me he was going for a drive to
sober up?’

‘Ha ha. Did you try to stop him?’

‘No.’

Oh no, someone else had come in. He was pouring the man rakia. I motioned I wanted one too.

‘You know what, maybe I’m not in love with The Barman, maybe I’m in love with this bar.’

‘Go on then, hump it.’

‘It’s such a kind place. There are these men who were artists or writers or actors and now
they’re fucking shells of men, pardon the pun, and not just The Barman, the other barmen too,
they look after these men. They feed them booze and listen.’

‘Okay, I can just about cope with you being in love, but if you start spraffing on about
community, I can’t suspend disbelief.’

‘But I used to see it as a sign of weakness, that he’d spend his time drinking with these men. He
should have been writing or drawing. Get the collection published! Your first exhibition!’

‘You’re about to say something dreary about the nature of art.’

‘I’m working up to it.’

‘How long till you have to go and be loving?’

‘Oh, it’s fine, one of the PTSD crowd’s come in. They’re drinking rakia and I’m… drinking rakia
with you.’

‘Item 3 on The Bell agenda. Tell us about freedom.’

‘Oh, I wrote something brilliant about this the other night, let me dig it out. God I was drunk.’
I would like to say I google myself to remember how I existed. But it is more correct to say I google
myself to remember I used to exist. There are links to professional websites, photographs of me
looking nothing like I do now, giving – of all things – advice. There is conferred authority, even in
the pictures where I am young, beaming, and clearly in a bar.

‘Pissing myself.’

‘This is what I do when you aren’t looking. I write terrible prose about how abject I am. It goes
on.’

It wasn’t that I had failed to consider the dangers of freedom. I remember a documentary about
women who left their husbands in 1950s France, after reading Simone de Beauvoir. Their
liberation from their husbands had left them penniless and alone, in hovels haunted only by their
smoke. And I had imagined those lives, the morning grasp for a low-priced beer, sour and flat, on a
splintered table just beyond their reach. The yellowed pillows, shed hairs conspiring in a tangle, the
right angle turn to put feet on a dusty floor, littered with receipts for transactions long forgotten,
the silvery insides of packets long since smoked. I had imagined that.

‘Never write a novel.’

‘Christ no. It goes on.’

I had thought I had the fight – I remember now, the fight – not to become one of them. But I look at
my hands, which have a dirty sort of tan; then inspect the yellowing on the fingers of my right. I
write: ‘To live nowhere is to live everywhere’. Then I hate myself for the platitude, for my trussing
up of hope.

There has been a movement to discredit the word ‘fight’ when talking about people who are
diagnosed with cancer. There is no scientific basis for a positive mental attitude yielding clinical
results. I remembered that from a book I’d once reviewed.

‘I can see you’re in a good place.’

‘He just brought me more rakia. He looked as though he loathed me.’

‘You are sometimes more pleasant company passed out. I really don’t know what to do after
Pete. Do you remember when it just was the two of us? Two little journalists with no
connections trying to make their way in the world. You had such a mad confidence.’

‘Oh, don’t. That person left a long time ago. The lights went out.’

‘In the bar?’

13

I was hiding in a basement. Or rather not a basement, a floor below the house. But the house
was on stilts so there was light. I would have drawn the line at sitting in a dark and sweating
room. I hoped. No, there was nothing to see here. Just a girl in an unfurnished room, a room
awaiting renovation. Oh, this striving for space. Perhaps they could renovate me, make me into a
window, mummify me in the walls.

But there was something charming about this room, an industrial quality, and my thoughts
turned to pop-up bars in railway arches, to conversations with friends. A memory had been
eluding me and now, here it was. A friend of a friend told me his parents didn’t speak the same
language. He would have been twenty-five then, so they hadn’t for twenty-six years. At least. I
remembered where we’d been even though it was a long time ago, the words so shocking in my
ears, echoing against cocktails, against corrugated iron.

I didn’t ask the right questions. I think I made vague enquiries as to how it worked, and he said
they preferred it that way, they did their own thing. But he was a glib man, the marriage must
have been troubled. He’d grown up in a world of international schools, but it was unclear where
these had been, how many countries. Had his parents learnt the languages of these international
places, just not the other’s own? I wished I could go back to that moment, six, seven years ago.
I’d be armed with a ticklist. Were they happy? How did they talk? One was Spanish, no Italian,
the other English, I think. Was this refusal a stubbornness, was it part of a game? Or had the
friend of my friend invented this? Because he wanted to seem more interesting. More sexual
perhaps, to be born of people without words, only bodies. But no, I never thought the right
things, I never asked the right questions. Then I remembered that I was paid to interview people
and I laughed a hollow laugh. There, under the railway arch, I’d just felt a pat sense of shock. An
outrage on behalf of my worldview, that people were personalities, not limbs and bits.

That morning, he’d told me his parents thought I was very quiet. The tone implied a problem.
Oh, the things I wanted to say.

 But they can’t understand me so why should I speak?

 And you can’t understand me, this impatient English lilt.
 You can understand some of what second-language speakers say, you can understand
Americans, people without nuance, and you resent the fact I don’t use these short and
simple words. But who would I be without those words?
 Why do you want a girl you can’t understand?
  And why is this the Bosnian way? To keep talking to someone who cannot understand?
It’s a form of aggression. It’s a waste of words. But no, there were not a finite number of
words, they could talk to me and have leftovers.
 Have you noticed that I don’t like your mother? What she did was child abuse.

But of course I knew the problem. Even in London I seemed aloof. A sneer here, a sneer there, a
sneer everywhere. Old MacDonald had a farm, ee I ee I oh. And on that farm there was a smug
girl, ee I ee oh. With a Bof Bof here and a Bof Bof there, here a Bof, there a Bof, everywhere a Bof
Bof. Old MacDonald had a farm, ee I ee I oh.

And now I was in a village at the end of the world, haunting rooms of doilies. By a lake, of course
I was by a lake. I remembered my mother’s doultons. How much time we devoted to those
doultons. How much thought. Shopping for doultons, looking at doultons, wondering whether
we could justify another doulton. Deciding we could not. Then the instructions not to break the
doultons, a decade and a half of constant fear, the calamity the time I broke a doulton. And then I
remembered the woman by the window, just off the Visoko bus. I gave myself everything I
wanted, and even though these wants were cheap – Bosnian cigarettes, yet another glass of
Sarajevo beer, unwashed men – I gave myself these things.

A duck wandered in. I could practise on the duck.

I cleared my throat. ‘Hello old friend. What’s it like being a duck?’ The duck cocked its head, not
an expression of interest. But it could have been interpreted as such. If I was mad and
delusional, which I wasn’t, fully, yet. I liked ducks. I used to talk to them as a child. They’d pootle
on the edge of the lake. I’d tell them stories about how I wasn’t my parents’ child. I was adopted.
A music teacher once told me I looked Scandinavian, as a child I was very blonde, he joked I was
probably adopted. And I clung to this, I was with the wrong family, it was a terrible mistake. One
night the North Sea had frozen over – but I still couldn’t work out the logistics.

Perhaps I could reprise my monologue at this duck. Or perhaps he already knew the story, he
had learnt it from a Scottish duck; my misery genetic memory for these poor ducks.

‘Once there was a girl, and she lived on the edge of a lake. There were …’ But there were
footsteps now. I should probably stop talking to the duck.

‘You no here.’

Oh, I’m here, I’m just not there. But instead I told him I was sorry. And because the laptop was
elsewhere I didn’t add I just need some time out, I’ll be okay in a minute, I’ll go and play with his
niece. And I won’t tell her she shouldn’t be playing with pink dolls, or hoovers or kitchens. I will
accept she likes these things. I’ll help her stir fake eggs, prepare her for a husband who likes
eggs. I’ll just play with her, and be nice to your parents, and talk, say things they cannot
understand. Noise, I will make noise.

I took his hand but it was hesitant. It didn’t squeeze mine back.

‘You very, very quiet.’

This is how it would end. With planks and paint, unfinished surfaces, a girl not half formed, a
third at best. A work in progress, barely started. Then a minibus back to Sarajevo, rain on the
windows, and instead of the woman from the Visoko bus, a skinny, mirthless thing.

But no, not the bus quite yet. It would be tomorrow’s bus. This morning, I’d had to take an
urgent work call. A phonecall without a phone, so a Skype call then. I was having to improvise.
But there was wifi in the house, they had so many rooms, I could take the call anywhere. No, I
had to go for a walk first, to prepare, collect my thoughts, and as soon as I escaped I went to the
village motel. Yes, they had a room. I didn’t book the room, it seemed unlikely this availability
would cease. Who would come here and stay in a motel? Then I went to the village bar, the
drunks already shouting. I wondered what they were shouting about, what could ever matter
here. How could I possibly explain that this shouty room was a better place to take a call? But oh
this village was so small. I’d have to pretend to take this call, word might get back.

I opened my laptop and ordered a coffee, hoping the barman would make a mistake, a beer for
my greedy little mouth. I would protest. But I would drink it because it had been poured and I
was polite, sensitive to waste. During the war there must have been such little beer. Not to drink
this would be to deny that experience, a smug and western stance. It wouldn’t be the first time a
barman from this place had made a mistake. Placing a morning beer in front of a woman who
really, genuinely, only wanted coffee… Well, that was a better mistake to make than his old
schoolfriend’s. Moving in an angry little slip of a thing, a girl he didn’t know and couldn’t talk to.

I put my earphones in, at least I’d brought them. I wouldn’t have to ventriloquise the other side.
And finally I laughed, because, yes, if I hadn’t happened to have had these earphones, I would
have had to do silly voices. I would have had to interview someone French, my French came
from deep inside my throat, it was a strong accent, a good accent. Perhaps I could do it without
moving my lips.

But no, these earphones had saved me. I only had to invent one side of a conversation. Perhaps
this could be fun.

‘Hello! Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me.’

It would be my artist friend from London, the one who remade the past.
‘Tell me a bit about your art.’

‘Do you ever feel as though you’re taking liberties with other people’s lives, warping their
memories?’

‘How very fascinating.’ My voice more pseudish with every word. ‘But in a sense, isn’t memory
art?’

‘But we curate our memories, exhibitions in our head.’

In the pauses I thought of the evening ahead, sitting in this seat, now released from being The
Girlfriend, The Woman. I could be terrible, I could be myself. I could line up beers, tell men what
their problem was.

He took his hand off mine. He looked broken.

‘Go see Zlatko now.’ I thought this was a command, an idiom for dumping, the dismissal of
choice in village Bosnia. So I stayed sitting and gave him one last hug, my nose expecting
sourness from his T-shirt. But no, his mother had washed his clothes the night before. She
hadn’t done what he did, leave them in the machine for days. I resented her for this, for this last
memory of a lovely smell. But he pointed at us both. ‘Me, you. Zlatko speak English.’

So no, he was doing something kind. He’d realised how trapped I felt in this wordless, senseless
house. And maybe Zlatko could teach me something, maybe Zlatko would be just like my
London friends, and I could show myself, a side Nino had never seen. This side would disgust
him, because I’d be loud. I’d crack jokes, I’d laugh the low, dirty laugh I had in London. It
sounded like a walrus machine being gunned to death. So someone told me once.

‘The British girl is here! To think, to think, a British girl!’ He winked at Nino, who smiled his
lovely smile. But something caught in the smile, a moment’s palsy.

‘Nino has told me where you live!’

‘Oh, I live with him.’ I realised I’d done the wrong thing, it was so religious here, I couldn’t live
with him. But no this was not the problem, and Zlatko said ‘where you used to live’.

‘Oh, yes, in London. Have you ever been?’

‘Yes. I have also been to Liverpool. I was a sailor once. Liverpool is the most beautiful city in the
world, to be in Liverpool forever! It is more beautiful than Portsmouth even, than Southampton,
and Dover.’ My thoughts barely sniggered because I liked the man. Part of the reason I liked this
man was the way he was pouring rakia. Liberally.

‘Have you been to Liverpool?’ he demanded, like a test of courtly love. ‘Yes, I’ve been once, I
really liked it. My best friend comes from Liverpool.’

‘Your friend comes from Liverpool and you have been only once!’ I was straining the man’s
credulity.

‘Yes, but it’s a lovely place. I really enjoyed it when I went.’

‘But how can this be? That you enjoy a place and do not go back. Britain is not so large, it is an
island. Like the island in the middle of our lake.’

Oh, this bloody lake. How proud they were of their lake.

‘I come from a lake,’ I said, then realised how that sounded. I couldn’t be bothered to correct
myself. Perhaps it was true. My parents had told me so little, they wouldn’t have let on if they’d
fished me from the lake.

‘Oh, I know, and this is why I must talk to you.’ Ah, so the man had summoned me. How wrong
I’d been, thinking it was Nino’s plan, to give me conversation.

He wielded a clear plastic folder with print-outs inside. His wife appeared, she was carrying
more plastic folders. I tried to introduce myself to the woman but she did not say her name,
perhaps she had forgotten it. She took the folder and began transferring each page to a separate
plastic folder. Nino was looking uncomfortable, his Sarajevo confidence gone. It was as though
he was regretting what he’d done, that he was scared of this man, of his office supplies.

Nino finished his rakia and went to pour some more. Yes, Nino was scared of this. Perhaps
Zlatko was a village elder. He could sentence Nino if I gave the wrong answers, a game show to
the death. Perhaps he had brought this man other girls, girls who couldn’t speak to his parents,
and every time they got a question wrong he was punished. The scar on his leg wasn’t from the
War, it was a punishment, administered by Zlatko. A heated circle of metal, the lid to Heinz
Baked Beans. Singeing the leg hair, but no, enough with the singed hair, you were the one who
singed his hair.

‘There is a monster in your lake!’

There was a monster by my lake, I called him my father, ‘No, no! You’re talking about Loch Ness.
I come from Loch Lomond. And anyway, the monster, it does not exist.’ Why was I talking in this
strange and stilted way? The man could understand me. I would stop. I would throw myself at
him in words, all the syllables I couldn’t use with Nino, they’d coming pouring from me like the
rakia now hitting the bottom my glass.

The print outs had now been transferred to separate folders. His wife handed me the first. It was
a sighting of the Loch Ness monster. They all were.

‘I do not understand,’ I told him. ‘You mustn’t believe these things, they are Photoshopped, not
true.’

‘But yes they are true. And we have a monster too.’

I thought I should humour this man, and ask about his monster. It was only polite. He’d read so
much about mine. I imagined the small talk we could make on the street. ‘Hello, how are you?
And how is your monster?’ ‘My monster is very well, thank you. He hasn’t appeared for a while
but that is fine, he is not contractually obliged to.’ ‘How are you and how is your monster?’ ‘I am
very well and my monster, too, has been elusive of late. But he is in good health, I am sure of it.’

‘You have a monster here?’

‘And you are a journalist. You are going to write about our monster.’

I looked at Nino but he hadn’t understood. He didn’t understand what I did, and there was
something pleasing about that. All those years of leaning in, of defining myself by commissions
and connections. And here was a man who couldn’t give a fuck.

‘Have there been… sightings of your monster?’

Zlatko paused. ‘Yes of course I have seen it.’

‘You and only you?’ It sounded like one of those songs on the radio. You and only you. I wanted
Nino to burst into song, to serenade me.

Zlatko looked at his wife. ‘She has seen it too, of course.’ The nameless woman stared ahead.

‘And what did it… look like?’ But I’d stopped focusing on this man Zlatko, I was more intrigued
by what Nino thought was happening, by what he looked like. He was different in this light, so
out of place, with his hair and beard and waistcoats.

‘It looked like your monster.’ Oh did it now? How convenient. He gestured at the hand-outs, this
strange and frantic man.

I leant in close. Now, let’s give Nino a little show. Be gone this small and passive thing. ‘My
monster doesn’t exist, and I don’t think yours does either. Let’s be clear here.’ And the eyes, the
eyes he liked so much, perhaps they were the window on my soul, but my soul was callous and
threatening. I remembered a man telling me I looked deranged ‘when you stare’.

‘I think it’s dangerous to tell lies.’

Zlatko was angry now. ‘You say I am a liar.’

I could have waited a beat, I could have backed down. I could have done anything else. But
instead I stepped towards him. I wasn’t tall but I felt my extra inch.

‘We don’t need to make up monsters. We already have our own.’ The rakia was in my veins now.

Nino took my arm. I handed back the printouts like a script I’d gone off.

I’d tried so hard not to be in this village, the words garbling through Google Translate. ‘To bring
home a girl they can’t talk to is one thing. To bring home a girl you can’t talk to is quite another.
It raises questions, questions to which we have no satisfactory answers.’

Back in the house, we sat in his kitchen. He had given his parents a long explanation. That I had
offended Zlatko, I presumed. I remembered the last time I had been in a sad and silent kitchen. A
sad and silent kitchen which wasn’t this or his. It had been in Srebrenica.

An old woman had cooked us lunch, there were no restaurants in the town, our guide said. I’d
spotted one, perhaps it was just too sad to eat out in Srebrenica. The woman had lost her
husband, two brothers and a son. Her teenage granddaughter was translating. The girl paused,
refusing to translate the next words. ‘You have heard enough,’ she said.

Maybe the grandmother was about to talk about the cousins she had lost, the uncles, the men
twice removed. Twice removed. Well they had been here. First from their families and then from
their graves. The mass graves had often been disturbed, to make them less traceable, muddling
bodies and bones. And perhaps this went without saying, there was no point to these words. But
no, the granddaughter was saying her grandmother shouldn’t be talking about these things, that
this family was not part of the tour, that we had stopped there only for lunch, there were no
restaurants in Srebrenica. We had no doubt heard enough and she, the granddaughter, had
heard enough. We had wanted to be fed, and we had been, burek with double cream.

The widow chainsmoked. It was unusual here, an old woman chainsmoking, but what else did
she have? There was no word in English for a mother who’d lost a son. Was there a word in
Bosnian? Perhaps they’d made one up. Events dictated that… But no I couldn’t ask. I wanted to
hit this teenage girl, this censor. I remembered the museum of objects, there was something
similar there. A woman had donated a swing, and in the text she expressed concern. She wanted
to talk about the war, of what she’d been through, to her daughters. But her daughters were
tiring of these tales, and was she burdening them too much, she wondered.

He was making tea now. His parents had hugged me before they went to bed. Perhaps they
didn’t like Zlatko. Perhaps they were stunned that I could speak.

He motioned we should take the tea to bed. We lay there under the covers of what could have
been his childhood bedroom, I didn’t have the energy, the words, to ask. In The Old World, it
would have been a museum: footballers, popstars, women he couldn’t have because they were
famous and he was a child. He sighed, and suddenly the word sighed was silly, loaded. He hadn’t
sighed, he had just let air from his face. If I could somehow take away that meaning, everything
could be fine. I was willing him to take off my dress, but he didn’t move so I went to kiss him. He
didn’t respond, he was looking at the ceiling. I wanted a little pick axe, to chip away at his skull,
pull out the thoughts on a piece of string. And out they’d come like bunting, every thought a
bright triangle. Against a yellow background: ‘who is this woman and what have I done?’
Against the blue: ‘what did Zlatko want with her?’ Or maybe he didn’t think normal thoughts,
Bosnia was not a land of logic, the man at the Pyramids had said. Maybe he was thinking ‘I
wonder, at this current moment, how many houses in the world are on fire?’ ‘

And if no one had a pick axe spare, I’d find a claw hammer. We liked claw hammers in my family,
the time my mother had been driven mad by my father’s violence and chased him to his room.
He’d locked the door in time so instead she took the hammer to the door, made eleven holes. It
was of a sort of flimsy plywood.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘Nista, nista.’

This time he didn’t mean it. And when I pretended I was asleep – I was good at this by now – he
went to the window and smoked and smoked and smoked.
14

I was too thin and he was too thin, but I, in particular, was too thin. So his mother thought. And I
wanted to object, how nice our thinness was. When I’d lain in bed with other men, we would try
to sleep intertwined. But that ended in death, dead arms and legs and hopes. Oh, come now, not
dead hopes. Scratches on a fantasy. But Nino and I could sleep so weightlessly, wake with arms
under backs. Of course we hadn’t done this for weeks. But it was still a possibility.

When we returned from the village, we sat on his banquette. The motivational quotes loomed
behind us. ‘Yes, I talk to myself. Sometimes I need someone intelligent to talk to.’ ‘Smile at the
world and the world smiles back at you.’ Perhaps, even though he couldn’t understand them,
these things were true. I should try them. When he went to the toilet I beamed a big beam. I said
‘Emily, what are you doing here? Can you explain? Perhaps you can explain to your childhood
self, what happened to that career, that life you always wanted.’

The toilet flushed.

‘You were on phone?’

‘Da.’

He set down my tub of burek, it was even bigger than his. I knew the trying had to start. There
were bits of spinach but mostly it was grease. He smiled insincerely, he put on music. I wanted
to switch it off, shout no, this is insincere. We created this silence, and with this silence we must
live. But no, language deforms us, obscures us, all that crap I’d said in London. I changed the
music. ‘All I’ve Ever Wanted, All I’ve Ever Needed, Is Here In My Arms / Words Are Very
Unnecessary, They Can Only Do Harm’. He didn’t understand these words, it was a game I liked
to play. The burek, this endless burek.

Sometimes, when we ran out of words to mangle, sometimes when we ran out of skits,
sometimes when we’d got up from the sofa and eaten and had nothing else to do, then he’d pick
me up, a fireman’s lift, and charge around the bedsit. But there was none of this now. And how I
longed to be upside down, all the blood in my head, ready for him to drop me, break my neck. It
was surprising he hadn’t already.

And perhaps because I was eating so much, willing this grease to end, I thought of a phrase, this
gruel-thin life. This gruel-thin life, here, on the banquette. Where had this strange adoration
come from? He was on Facebook again, he was always on Facebook. When he wasn’t in front of
the mirror. I hated him, this superficial thing. So proud of his godawful poetry, his godawful art.
I adored him more than anyone.
I got out my computer. ‘If we spoke the same language, I’m not sure we’d even like each other,
we might not even get on. We’re such different people.’

He paused and paused and paused. I imagined a butterfly sweeping over a salt flat, tourists
taking a comedy picture, the way they did on salt flats, me pinched between the fingers or a
friend, receding, so small! And no this tub of burek would not help. It was coming now, and
there would be relief. This is not working. It’s not me it’s you. Oh no, it’s definitely you, whoever
you are… Who are you? What did I do, that late December day? You could have stolen my
possessions, killed me in my sleep. You once joked about killing me in my sleep, that’s the sort of
thing you find funny. Because you’re sick. I remembered a joke from my old stand-up routine.
When things were going badly in a room – they did, and not infrequently – I would pause and
say ‘French philosopher and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre used to say that literature was essentially
meaningless, because it could not bring back a dead child. And you’re not laughing now, you’re
not laughing at all, but my stand-up has one advantage on literature. Because my comedy, while
patently unable to bring back a dead child… Can at least approximate the atmosphere in the
room…. immediately after that child died.’

He still wasn’t typing. It was like that time in his friend’s cafe. He hadn’t spoken for fifteen
minutes so I did a thing I hated. I asked ‘what are you thinking?’. We stared into the tab, he was
struggling with the words, even in Bosnian. And then they flickered into life. There was such an
odd pause between each one.

I kept imagining how the sentence was going to change. Because Bosnian was a complicated
language and sometimes when we talked like this, the root of the sentence would change with
every letter he typed, slow, stubby hits on the machine.

Razmišljam – I’m thinking

Razmišljam o – I’m thinking about

Razmišljam o čemu – I’m thinking about something

Razmišljam o čemu da – I’m thinking about something

Razmišljam o čemu da razmišljam – I’m thinking about what to think

He’d looked so pleased with what he’d typed. And I wondered for a moment whether he was a
genius. Or had sustained a brain injury.

But this line was even better.

‘But we don’t, so is fine.’

I wanted to argue, this was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. But I liked his strange logic,
it was the sort of thing I’d say, joking, finding it all such a laugh. From now on I’d walk around
wearing earplugs, soundproofing myself against Bosnian, ensuring this awful scenario would
never come to pass. In which we understood each other.

I giggled, and he giggled. He took the tub of burek away. He winked as though to say, it is not
very good. Was this the ultimate crime a Bosnian man could commit, to cast aspersions his
mother’s burek? But no, he would not get tried. Only I got tried.

‘Now I tell story.’

It went on for an hour.

After The War, he was really fucked up. And NGOs came to his village, NGOs with lots of money.
They said they were helping, but they were only pretending, the village didn’t need computers,
it needed food. These NGOs, they had desktops and VCRs. One night, he and his friend were very
stoned. They would go and steal, the friend said. And he said ‘ne ne ne’ but eventually he said
‘da’. They did and no one caught them.

So they carried on. They stole for a year. They stole not just for themselves, they stole for the
poorest family in the village. Their father had died, their mother had gone mad, there were eight
children to be fed. They didn’t just steal from the NGOs, they stole from the bakery, from the
cigarette shop, they stole everything they could.

I was oddly taken by this new information. You didn’t get this with Oxbridge men. The
suspended sentences, the shades of Robin Hood. He hadn’t been able to say suspended sentence,
but he’d managed to mime. And we worked out that, because Bosnian society was so broken
after the war, many people did not go to prison for their crimes. The prisons they had were for
war criminals, not seventeen-year-olds with lovely smiles. His father was very angry with him,
he had brought stolen things into the house, given them a television. Nino had said the television
was a gift from an NGO worker. At first his father had been embarrassed that he hadn’t been
able to provide a television, the duty fell to his charming eldest son. But he enjoyed the
television so much, he had scraped these thoughts from his mind, it was good his family had a
television. He had to give it back.

I thought back to Paul Celan, to language dying after the Holocaust. But maybe language hadn’t
been killed, maybe it was given a suspended sentence, allowed a few years of rest. Then it could
return, the prodigal son.
The prodigal son, now so loved by his village, loved by his family. He’d shown me a video of a
reading he’d done in the village, just before we’d met. And everyone was cheering, cheering him
at every line. I hoped it hadn’t been the poem I’d stood up and read, a lifetime ago.

No I wouldn’t dump him, as I had planned. I would feel this flush of love.

‘They thought it was the Zenica mafia. So many criminals in Zenica, no believe it was us.’

He was stoned now, stoned and chuckling. He was so proud of this crime, and I was giggling too.
He kissed me and he meant it.

The phrase Zenica mafia had struck me as comic. So I came up for air and put a finger to the tip
of his nose. ‘My little Zenica mafia.’ But he didn’t understand.

‘What? What?’

Oh dear, I got the computer, I typed ‘From now on I’m going to call you “the Zenica mafia”.’

‘But it was not them.’

He sighed now. ‘No want laptop. No… Cannot talk all time on laptop. You say my English bad.
Emmanuelle and Jinxy, they say I speak English.’ I thought of these girls, French party girls, their
limited vocabulary, their love of him. And what would we do now? Would we mime? Perhaps
when I got back to London, I’d be so good I could go to Covent Garden, make tourists part with
cash.

‘No, it was a joke. Never mind. Maybe it wasn’t funny.’ Oh, I was losing so much here. If there
was one thing people agreed on, even people who disliked me, it was that I was funny. At least
while not on stage. And now, I was disappearing, into useless spirals of thought. In the past
week, I’d begun to keep a tally sheet, tenderness given and tenderness received. I couldn’t stop
myself. Because I’d begun to notice a tendency. That I was the one who initiated everything,
kisses, hugs, the taking of hands. No, not everything, but a trend was emerging, and I would be a
diligent statistician. I thought back to that week in December, when I’d swatted him off me,
embarrassed by the constant pawing, the stares, the public kissing. How quickly the wind
changed.
15

I type:

‘Let us consider this waiter in the café. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a
little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a
little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the
customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some
sort of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tight-rope walker by putting
it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes
by a light movement of the arm and hand.

‘All of his behaviour seems to us a game. He applies himself to chaining his movements as
though they were mechanisms; the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice
seem to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is
playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can
explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café. There is nothing there to surprise us.’

‘But you said he wasn’t even a very good waiter. That he’s always falling over.’

‘Ha, no that’s the point. Or maybe not the entire point. I’m still trying to work that out.’

‘Right, don’t take this the wrong way but… are you okay?’

‘I’m fine! I just remembered that passage.’

‘It’s by someone else? Sorry, I thought you just wrote it.’

‘It’s Sartre!’

‘I thought you’d lost it.’

‘I don’t know what to say. I should be flattered you thought it was me. But I’m not. I’m worried
now. Is Sartre okay? Maybe he should call The Samaritans.’

‘Calm down, sorry I said anything. It’s just… it’s not as though you’ve been behaving normally
recently.’

‘But there’s an interesting wider point. With a name, a man’s name, it’s canon. With me it’s The
Case Against. A Case For The Derangement.’

‘I still don’t understand why he took you back.’

‘I don’t think he understands either. I think he’s increasingly confused by his decision.’
‘I think you should come back home.’

‘Oh, let’s stop this thinking.’

Earlier that day, I’d gone to see a friend. I was complaining about Bosnia, that everyone here
was unreadable, insane. I kept repeating ‘you’re the only sane person I know here, you’re the
only sane person in Bosnia’.

My friend began laughing, quite hysterically. He got up and went to his dresser. He still couldn’t
explain what he doing, he was laughing too much. But he collected some paperwork from this
dresser, then laid it on the table, a big, beige file. The words were in Bosnian, I couldn’t
understand them, but I could make out inky bureaucracy, heavy stamps. Once my friend
stopped laughing, he began to explain that he was in fact clinically insane. And this was the
paperwork to prove it.

But perhaps The Barman wasn’t the waiter, perhaps I was. I was exaggerating my movements as
I wrote, performing, I was writing in bad faith, sighing theatrically, gazing into space, wistfully,
or so I thought. Barely writing a thing, trying to enact the girl he’d found attractive, the girl from
his sketches.

I remembered London, my constant battle with time. Because I preferred what had gone before.
But every time I had to do something difficult, I would leave it till tomorrow. Tomorrow,
tomorrow, I loved feared you tomorrow. Every night I when I went to sleep it was clear – certain
even – that I would wake up someone new. Someone capable, who wouldn’t start the day with a
cigarette, judge people on the tube instead of catching up with emails. I deferred, because
tomorrow would be different, I’d be better then. But also, I was better in the past, the woman
Nino loved. He was looking at me strangely. I wondered if he was reading my mind, thinking:
there’s no linearity here! Your theories make no sense! You should change in one direction. It is
a cop out that at any given moment you’re your worst possible self. You’re romanticising your
past self, you’re shafting your future self. I do not like this at all.

Why had I dumped him then gone back, created a past I wanted and a future I wanted too? But a
present which made no sense? It was Oliver’s fault. Yes, I’d blame Oliver. The man up the
mountain. Who kept the club open all the way through the Siege. He’d told me his house was
listed on AirBnB and so I emailed him to ask if he had a guest and he said no, I should come and
stay. And this would be nice, a half hour hike from Sarajevo. Up in the air. I was up in the air. I
could think.

And the minute he’d come to pick me up from town, he had said ‘this is about a boy.’ He was so
perceptive this man, I liked him. And then he’d decided he wanted to marry me, he’d come into
my room in the night, shouted that we should get married, threatened me almost, and suddenly
Nino did not seem so strange, Nino seemed like a refuge in this life I shouldn’t be leading, this
life I’d chosen on a whim.

So I’d lied to Nino, said I needed a photographer for a travel piece I was writing, the editor had
said my photos were no good, I had to find a professional, take the photos from my fee. His best
friend was a photographer. I’d emailed him asking if he could recommend one, and he hadn’t
just said the name of his friend, he’d said come round to the Bedsit the next day, he could find
one for me. And we had five awkward minutes on the banquette, him making coffee in his
drawn out way. Then, when I went to plug in my laptop, at the charge point near the sofa, he
followed me. He lifted me in the air, said Emmieeeee, Emmieeeee, and even though this was so
silly, this worldless reunion, ignoring what had gone before, the reasons I’d had to leave him, I
kissed him back. After we’d reconvened on the sofa, we sat chopping in silence, making chicken
soup. That soup would haunt me. Why did we make that soup?
16

It was closing time at the bar. I had no idea if he wanted me there, how life had come to this.

‘You drunk,’ he said.

I pretended not to understand his English. I didn’t want to engage. Why was he allowed to be
stoned all the time, even to judge me for not being stoned, yet I was not allowed these little
comforts?

But he was insistent, he could see it in my eyes, he said. ‘No. I had a glass of wine with a friend,
that is all.’

He’d handed in the takings, and we were walking down the street. I put my arm round his waist,
the way we used to. Back then the height difference didn’t matter, the fact that walking like this
sent us in an odd, lopsided waltz. Back then it was funny, the fact we needed to be so close we
walked like this, the impracticalities, our coats dragging off our shoulders, then, rewinding the
film in my mind, that late December night – it was snowing, minus seventeen, we were walking
back from a club, and we couldn’t walk without kissing, but then it became impossible to walk
while kissing, we kept walking into things, veering into the road, so we had to stop to kiss,
knowing we were freezing, that we shouldn’t be stopping in these temperatures to kiss on the
street, that the sooner we stopped, we’d be a nice warm bed. I wondered if we would freeze this
way, statues locked at the lips, a cautionary tale. But no, he had an idea. So we could still be close
without this stopping, he led me in a dance. We danced back to The Bedsit, slipping in the
uncleared snow, him running off on every street to write my name on a car window,
Emmieeeee, Emmieeeee, Emmieeeee. And when we got back that night, my thoughts turned to
novels. If I’d read that scene I’d have laughed, scoffed, thrown the book across the room. Pitied
the idiot who’d written it, a mawkish, needy thing who’d watched bad films, knew nothing of
this life.

He manoeuvred his way from my arm. ‘Who are you?’

‘You know who I am.’

Again, more forceful now, who are you? ‘You are no here and then you are, in my bar, and then I
kiss you and you kiss me back, and you come and you go.’

Back on the banquette, the drunkenness receding, he said I had to tell him about my family. Why
did I, I wondered. He would not like what I had to say. He was Bosnian, if there was one thing I’d
learned here, it was a family deserved love, unconditional love. I wondered for a second what I
should do, invent a tale, write myself someone new.
‘I grew up in a beautiful place, there were ducks and fish and owls. But no monster, as your
friend Zlatko thinks. We were happy, my mother and father and I. They wanted more children,
desperately, because they were so happy together, so happy with me. But they never could.
They soon got over this. And because of this, they lavished all their devotion on me, but not in a
suffocating way, or a way which left me spoiled. It was lovely there, with all the people passing
through, the tourists telling me things about the world, broadening my horizons.’

But no, I couldn’t be punished twice, and if I was, I could not want this man. I would tell him the
truth. This should not be how the world worked, that I suffered once, and now I will suffer again,
because I am not like you, I hold charge sheets against my parents, against the way that I was
raised.

‘I don’t speak to my parents,’ I said.

It was as I had feared, he looked completely uncomprehending. He asked me why and I said
Britain was not like here and he looked sad, then angry, and he kept on asking why, and I said
my childhood had not been happy, and he told me that they were my parents, as though I’d
somehow forgotten, or this had never occurred to me.

‘In my defence,’ I said, ‘my mother did not talk to me for eight years,’ and this only made it
worse, for him this dysfunction was now steeped in my genes and maybe, in fact, it was.
17

I’d come to the bar just as it was closing. I hadn’t wanted to come to the bar. I’d been talking to
friends who loved me. They’d said not to go to the bar. I’d gone to the bar.

I ordered a beer. He came back not with a drink but a piece of paper. It took me a while to
realise what it meant.

Scottish girl, with eyes so large and strange

Like mad jewels
You came into my bar
Where I stand, watching crowd
Sometimes filling a glass
At other times washing a glass
Often giving change.

You came in bar of mine.

To look at you I smiled.
Rejoicing at the girl.
With pens in hair and eyes of jewel.

You came to my embrace.

It was warm circle.
Stronger, because two.
I do not wish to spoil this
This is precious thing.
To change it is to let in darkness.
Which must stop.

You came into my home.

There is sofa to lie upon, free from terror.
The dust is rug for me.
We get it on our hands.

Hugging in my room.
There are so many hugs.
Not just with you.
Before.
Many girls wish to hug.
So very many girls.
It pleases and makes scared.
All of them.
Contorted pretty face.
I cannot recall their names.
But there are a lot of them.

And from you I must go.

It is not a choice of mine.
I am carried, like leaf on sea.
Making a little boat.
I do not wish. I must.

You tourist me.

As if was famous bridge.
Or memorial for war.

Except this is not a war.

Memorial is love.
18

I woke, it was midday. And instead of getting up I lay there, thinking I had not been kind.
Perhaps I could read a book, it would teach me how. Or no, the idea was forming.

I walked down my hill to the Old Town, to the streets of artisans. The director I was living with
had asked where I was going. I had said I was going to interview a man, and she said ‘good. I’m
glad you’re doing something, not just thinking.’

The man’s son ran the cobbler’s now. Of all the ways I’d misused journalistic credentials, this
was the oddest yet. I’d told him I would write about his father. And, surely, there was no way of
placing this. It was as though He had become my profession. I was turning down work, doing
nothing but talk of Him. And, surely, my friends were tiring of me.

The workshop was dim, there was a piano in the corner and a loom. I didn’t know what function
either served. Because I was feeling so melancholy and strange, I asked the man, the minute I’d
said hello, whether I could play the piano. And then if he minded if I played something sad. He
smiled at me, he was oddly taken by this strange thing, perhaps I did have eyes of jewel. Of
course I could, he said. I imagined he’d said that assuming I’d play something short, a novelty
tune, but the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata became the second then the third. After
twenty minutes, I stopped. He looked at me as though time itself had stopped.

‘So, as I mentioned in my email. I met an artist, in London, he told me a story about your father.
That he used to pass trade to his neighbour during the Siege. The artist called the photo
Kindness. I’m writing an article about kindness, about kindness under extreme circumstances.’

The man was not behaving the way he should have. Then I remembered I couldn’t judge him for
this, that I had played the piano at him, twenty minutes of empty space. ‘But there are things you
must know about my father. Things the artist wouldn’t have told you, things he didn’t know.’

I thought how much I didn’t know about my parents, how in a novel this would be my quest. I
should look for The Truth. But then the fact I didn’t care. I wanted to know as little as possible,
worried the knowledge would seep into me, change my bones.

‘He humiliated my mother, first by giving custom to Irfan, and then by the affair. He used to love
the story of how he passed custom Irfan’s way. He’d love to tell it, and one day he met an NGO
woman from Germany and told her the story. They began an affair. He wanted to leave my
mother entirely, to move to Dusseldorf, but he couldn’t, he was banned by my grandparents and
me, his one remaining son. I used to call myself his one remaining son. To give him a guilt… what
is the word?’
‘A guilt trip.’

‘Yes, a guilt trip. We shouted and insisted, he could not move to that German town.’

I started sobbing, there in the workshop, in this town with three gods. None of whom appeared
to care.

The man looked alarmed. I wanted to say I am crying at the wrong thing. You think I have
empathy. But I’m crying at my own life. Even if we were at your father’s funeral, at your funeral,
if the whole town went up in flames, I would still be crying at this. I remembered the only
funeral I’d gone to as a grown-up. A friend from university, killed by carbon monoxide. But I’d
just been dumped by a boyfriend of three years. I was in a bad state. And I’d tried not to go to
this funeral, even though he was a good friend. I must have had integrity then, I thought I
couldn’t go this funeral and cry incorrectly. And another friend told me to fuck off, I had to go.
No one else would know what I was crying at. The point of the funeral wasn’t us – yes, we
grieved this friend but not as much as his parents who had lost an only child, senselessly, in a
cheap hostel in Beirut, him gulping for this flawed air. And if I cried too loudly, they would take
solace. From this love their child deserved.

The cobbler’s son put his hand on my shoulder. I wondered whether I should accept the gesture
or lift it up and leave. I would become a story he would tell. The British journalist so
overwhelmed by his father’s betrayal, she stood up and left. This being Bosnia, there would be
more detail, my hand was clammy, cold. She didn’t even say goodbye. But I felt something when
she touched my hand to lift it. It was as though she wasn’t there, as though she’d never been
there, as though she were fading. We never saw her again.

‘I’m sorry for your pain.’

I tried to look confused.

‘Tell me what’s happened. You’re not crying at what I said.’

‘No.’ And I wanted to add ‘how very perceptive of you’. But those words only existed in The Old
World.

‘I’m sorry, I’m not crying at what you said. Or the first story, the one from the photo.’

‘We don’t choose our tears.’

‘Yeah,’ I said and laughed. ‘But it’s pretty embarrassing to be sitting here, hearing all this, crying
over a boy.’

‘Why is that embarrassing?’

‘Because you’re telling me about your family, and your dad who’s dead, and your mother, who
was awfully betrayed, and now I’ve come to find you, thinking your father was kindness
personified. And here I am, thirty-two years old and crying about a boy.’

‘But you don’t understand,’ said the boy in front of me. I was talking about family and death.
Betrayal and grief. How else could these things come to pass? If a girl didn’t like a boy or a boy
didn’t like a girl?’

And then we laughed.

19

I whispered in the dog’s ear. Nino, Nino. I stared into his eyes. There was no recognition. I
touched his silky head.

Nino, Nino.

And now a flinch. But he could be flinching at anything. He was a dog, after all.

I remembered being on a panel once. Another panellist was talking in the strangest, most
abstract terms. He kept saying he was the Korean Beckett; that English books were pulp. I didn’t
know what to do with this man so I was largely quiet, trying to look dismissive in a way which
did not imply cultural insensitivity.

But then, at the end, a woman raised her hand and said ‘I still don’t have a handle on what your
books are actually like, could you explain them to me?’ When the words filtered into his
headphones, the man looked aghast. He started talking breathlessly, but there was a long pause
until the interpreter put her words in ours. He apologised profusely, he was so embarrassed he
couldn’t describe his work; he’d got everything wrong; he’d explained it all wrong. It’s like this,
he said, or perhaps he didn’t, I will never know. ‘I went round to the house of a lady-friend. She
had a dog. A sausage dog. And I went round to the house of this friend, and her sausage dog had
ears, remarkably pliant ears. So I folded the ear, and I unfolded the ear, and I folded the ear and I
unfolded the ear… All along, she was telling me terrible things which were happening to her but
I couldn’t listen, I was too busy folding and unfolding the dog’s ear. I folded the ear and I
unfolded the ear; I folded the ear and I unfolded the ear. Eventually, she screamed that I had to
put the dog down, get out and never see her again. I never saw her again.’ Then the man paused.
‘I hope that gives you a better idea.’

I looked at this dog’s ear. It hadn’t been designed to provide metaphors. Then I wondered: what
if I had been the only person in the room who hadn’t understood. What if it were obvious, if it
did give a better idea, that perhaps his writing was a refusal to listen, a distraction, a turning
away from people and things. And I was focussing only on the silliness, the absurdity, my own
remove. Perhaps this country was legible after all. Maybe he had been. All I’d had to do was ask.

Or was I the friend of this man, the woman who wanted to talk? Shortly my London friends
would all have sausage dogs, folding and unfolding their ears, folding and unfolding, as I
repeated he was the only man I could ever love, that I shouldn’t have dumped him, moved up
the mountain with a psychopathic music promoter, that was the beginning of this trouble. I’d be
back in December, running around with my theories of language, ill expressed and badly
formed. I could have given it all up, all my previous unhappiness, if I’d been happy rejecting
words, my fancy words.

‘Hmmm,’ they would say, distracted by the dogs.

If I couldn’t tell him who I was, I could have stopped being that person. I could have put the
fucking laptop down, accepted his scattered words as English – Emmanuelle and Jinxy did! –
talked back in kind. And when he asked me who I was, I could have said a girl who likes books
and art! I could have showed him paintings I liked, music, told him the plots of certain books. He
wouldn’t have understood, but he would have been happy I trusted his English.

‘Hmmm.’ I would be beginning to resent those dogs.

I could have showed him pictures, taken him through my Facebook history, these moments a
better me, a me I would become by looking. Instead of nights in old man pubs, wondering who I
was and what I did, whining to friends about the falseness of London, gentrification, street art,
street food, all that was wrong with the world, I could have been holiday smiles and weddings
parties. And when he asked about my family, I could have said my parents were still well, they
were in good health, I could have said that without the webpage, he would have been happy and
smiled.

‘Hmmm.’ Those fucking dogs.

Then, further back, he liked the webpage. Once, when I was trying to end things, telling him to
find a Bosnian girl, a girl he could talk to, a girl who would cook him meals, even though he was
happy cooking for me – I second guessed these men, of course I did – he had paused over the
keys, he must have been looking for Happiness Has Google, but found Happiness Is Google
instead, and though I wanted to mock this, that Google couldn’t even translate a brand
endorsement, I’d found it oddly sweet, abandoned this dumping.

Then I’d scream at them to put the dogs down, to never see me again. Well, this staking out
Sarajevo, my senseless presence here, it was at least a start. The beginning of an invitation never
to see me again. Maybe we wouldn’t even need dogs.

Nino, Nino.

His owner was looking at me now, I wondered if he’d overheard. I wasn’t sure I cared. The night
before, I’d thought of this dog, of his ex before me. I’d come back to my flat, hazy and vague
through a night of dark beer, and stopped just before I stepped on something which I registered,
even on the messy floor, should not be there. It was a pigeon, a dead pigeon. I had left my
window open but still it made no sense. Had the pigeon come here to die, or had it died
accidentally, given my wall a Glasgow kiss?

‘Dead pigeon in flat! What do I do?’ I emailed my friends. But I knew what I wanted to do with
this pigeon. I wanted to take it to his bar, and when he went to the toilet, I would sneak behind
and leave it on his seat. Instead, a friend who had a cat emailed straight back. I was to find a
dustpan and brush, she did this all the time with mice. I could find a brush but not a dustpan, so
I used a platter, a tarnished silver platter which came with the flat. Perhaps I could leave it in the
bar like this but no, I wasn’t his ex-girlfriend, I didn’t have her flair, I was just a sad and lonely
girl in this city which didn’t need me, standing tipsy in the half light, a pigeon on a platter held
aloft.
20

I was walking down the street the bar was on. The barman ran out and called my name. Not
Him, the other one. Early Shift, I called him. There was a letter for me. A letter! Well, how and
why and who? Scottish Emily c/o The Bar, X Street etc. He laughed and I laughed too.

So I sat down and ordered a coffee. He wouldn’t be on shift for hours, I didn’t have to worry. I
would delay this pleasure. Who could it be from? Well, it must be from my friend, the friend who
came to visit. I told her I went to the bar so often they joked I could get post there. She must be
trying to amuse me. And what would this letter say, to me, the friend who had disappeared.
Congratulations, you have become a cautionary tale! Perhaps there were greetings cards for
that. Now I existed only in the imaginations of my friends, in their fantasies. I could be twisted to
suit. If they wanted to escape, they’d imagine I was having a terrible time, drunk in the morning,
drunk and confused. Because they wanted to escape and I had. And if, deep down, they didn’t
want to leave, they’d twist me into a fun and flightless thing. We fucked with ourselves like that.
In the same way I’d written him, now they were writing me. I was their June Davies.

How long could I wait until I opened the envelope? Or perhaps it was from my penpal, the only
time I’d erred. A Dutch boy I’d kissed one night, sneaking down to the lake when my father was
in Glasgow on some business.

I made a little rip.

It wasn’t a letter, it was a postcard. Or rather a photo, with writing on the back. I knew the
landscape. You could see the surface of the lake. And on that lake there were ripples, something
sticking out. Was it a black dot, was it a head, was it the smudge of a thumb? Oh, Zlatko, you are
spoiling me.

‘To Scottish Emily. I thought I would send you some evidence. You are welcome at any time in
my home. As you can see, there have been some recent developments. Historical evidence has
resurfaced too.’

Then an address in Luka.

Of course I wouldn’t go. I couldn’t, shouldn’t go. Why was this man so adamant I must see his
monster? Maybe when I turned up, I would be K in The Castle, summoned then shunned. I
wondered how he’d managed to stage the photo. I took a picture of the picture, emailed it to my
friend.

‘It’s a very crude PhotoShop job. Let me guess, you’re investigating Nessie as a sideline.’

‘Stranger still,’ I said. ‘I got a letter. Even though I don’t have an address.’
‘Emmie, Sarajevo. Does that do the trick?’

‘Well, almost. He sent it to the bar!’

‘Right, you’re going to have to explain. Who is your weird correspondent. And what the fuck are
you doing in that bar?’

‘I didn’t go on purpose! I was chased down the street!’

‘Right…’

‘Do you remember the man from the lake?’

‘Oh, everything’s so mythic with you. The Man From The Lake? Oh yes, from The Night We Can’t
Talk About. Remind me, you offended some village elder?’

‘It’s from him.’

‘You never told me what you fell out about?’

‘He told me there was a monster in the lake. A sort of Loch Ness Monster. And he wanted me to
write about it. I decided the time was right for a drunken confrontation. The world has enough
monsters. We don’t need to make them up.’

‘Maybe you can help make this monster up. Instead of The Making of a Murderer…’

‘… The Making of a Monster.’

‘Well, I don’t see how you can degrade yourself further. Why don’t you go and see him? Review
the evidence.’

‘You’ve seen the evidence, it’s bad PhotoShop. Though he did say that historical evidence has
resurfaced. ’

‘Resurfaced eh?’

‘Resurfaced. I wonder how his English got so good.’

‘Perhaps he sucked the English out of Nino. In the village, there’s only so much to go round.’

‘Hmmmm.’

‘I think you should go and see this guy. Reckon you can still milk two thousand words on truth
and imagination. Anyway, you need to get out of Sarajevo. Promise me you’ll get out of Sarajevo.’

‘Well, this won’t look odd at all, me turning up in his village.’

‘It can’t be worse than the Make Love To Me thing.’

Oh, the Make Love To Me thing. Two days after he left me, I’d gone for a drink. A quick drink, but
no it was the night before Bosnian Independence day. If this country had never wanted this
independence, my life would be different now. My friend and I drank rakia, everyone was
drinking rakia, the bars were open late, no one would work the next day.

And then, it must have been two or three, his shift must have ended, and in he piled to the late
night bar. He would not meet my eye. I wasn’t used to drinking spirits, or rather drinking them
all night. I went up to him, to say hello, and then my memory failed. My friend was concerned, it
was like ‘the lights had gone out and no one was home’, he later said. And I was angry,
infuriated, I kept babbling that he spent so long fucking staring at me, making me uncomfortable
with this staring, and he couldn’t fucking look at me now. I wanted him to fucking look at me. So
my friend left, he was drunk too, there was no way he could resolve me. I’d gone back for round
two, I had no idea what I did, only that the curtains came down, that he and his friends were
leaving now, and I wasn’t sure if they were leaving because of me, or leaving anyway. The
curtain then lifted when I was back in my flat, a glimpse of me going to The Bedsit hot in my
mind, buzzing the door. So angry. I’d never lost time like this before, and I lay on my bed now, it
was four and I had clarity, I had to leave this town. I had threatened so often to leave this town,
when I was with him, drunk and trapped. So when I woke the next morning, it was with a flight
confirmation, in three hours I had to go to Armenia. I’d always wanted to go to Armenia. I said to
my flatmate, a girl I had no time for, ‘do I really have to go to Armenia?’ She didn’t look at me as
though I was strange. ‘How much extra work would you have to do to write off the cost of this
flight?’ and I said, a day, and suddenly I wouldn’t leave this place because of him, because of a
gap in memory, I would leave on my own terms.

A week later I was still in Sarajevo, sat next to a table of Nino’s friends. Two of them had been
there on that night. They were pointing me out to some other friends, which wasn’t so odd, my
presence here was unusual. ‘Emmie’, ‘laptop’, ‘Nino’, ‘Engleski’, these eternal words. I was
almost a local celebrity, the British girl who moved to Sarajevo, not to work for a company here,
but choosing to live in Bosnia when she could have been anywhere. But then the cadence of
their talk changed, one switched into English. The words: Make Love to Me, Make Love to Me.
Bosnians often switched into English, films or words from songs. Perhaps they were talking
about something new, now, perhaps they were quoting a song, they had left the Engleski behind.
But then, two minutes later I realised something awful. This friend – a friend who’d been there
that night – hadn’t just switched into English, he’d taken his voice up in pitch, to the pitch of a
woman. And the accent hadn’t been American, that language of songs, he had gone into a British
accent. I googled the words, googled them with ‘lyrics’ but no, nothing of any use. And it began
to dawn on me that he might have been quoting me, something I said that night. It was absurd,
the phrase was not in my vocabulary, but then I remembered the difficulties of talking to Nino,
his love of love, and perhaps my mind, which had switched off, had thought this the best way to
achieve whatever it was I was trying to.

There would always be that gap.

‘Do you think I should try to find out what happened that night? I could ask his friends.’

‘No, I think you should file it under embarrassing and misadventure.’

‘Do you remember when you came out?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘No, I meant what a joke it was, what a laugh.’

‘I can never tell with you. What’s real, what’s a laugh.’

‘If only I knew myself.’

3. The Making of a Monster
1

‘Welcome, welcome!’

And there I was, back in Zlatko’s kitchen. I kept looking to my side, to where Nino had sat that
night. I tried to see his outline as a negative. I wondered at his volume, how much water he’d
displace. How I’d never ascertained that, never put him in an overflowing bath. He didn’t have a
bath, but there’d been a bath in his parents’ house. I could have explained to his parents why
there was so much water on the floor. ‘I was trying to measure the volume of your son!’ I would
write that, in Google Translate. ‘But I’m not a very good scientist. I’m not a very good person. I
failed to factor in a catastrophic lack of measuring equipment. That water would fall on the
floor. This scenario is indicative of a lot that’s wrong with me.’

‘But why!’ they’d exclaim, ‘were you trying to measure the volume of our son! What sort of
scientist are you?’ And I would explain that, while I was not particularly nice to their son, in fact
a not insignificant part of me was treating his affections as a game… no… I would delete these
words… as an experiment! … I knew that it was doomed. And soon he’d realise too. I’d become
maudlin. I’d fixate over strange things. Like whether I’d ever measured his volume in a bath.
‘Yes, yes, I’d type, this will happen, really. I’ll come back to this village. Because Zlatko learned to
use PhotoShop. Or really, I doubt he has, his sons, then. And I’ll sit in his kitchen, speculating on
the volume of your son.’

But how would I have persuaded him to get in the bath? It would have had to be the night we
went to bed with tea. He got up in the night, and smoked out of the window, smoked and
smoked and smoked. So by the time he got back into bed, he couldn’t move his limbs, he landed
on me, a strange and flightless bird. I thought of the dead pigeon I had found in my flat, that
Gothic, squidgy thing.

But that night he would have been high enough. He wouldn’t have asked the terms of the
experiment. And if he had I could have cited the numbers of days unbathed, bundled him into
this bath, limb by limb, a service to public health.

‘But!’ the refrain would go. ‘What would you have done with this information, even if you’d
collected it? We do not understand.’

And then I would have realised how tired I was. As tired as I was now, tired of lying awake,
wondering where he was and could I somehow conjure him.

‘Are you okay?’

‘Yes, sorry, I’m just tired. I didn’t sleep well last night.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. I hope the room we have made up for you will provide all the comforts
you require.’

‘I’m sure it will. In fact I’m quite convinced.’

Why was I talking like this? An old friend of mine was severely dyslexic. And partial to a prank.
So another friend and I coordinated a list of spellings which were incorrect. And every time we
messaged him, we would spell according to the approved list. Because we were arts students,
and literate, he trusted us. He adopted these spellings. In the course of a year, his terrible
spelling became catastrophic. Later, I’d relayed that anecdote and my listener was appalled. ‘But
no, I kept on saying, he found it funny, he’s been dining out on it for years. People are entitled to
find what they like funny. We knew he’d find it funny. He’d admire our commitment to the
prank. Our ingenuity.

Perhaps I should keep talking in this mad and stilted way. Then these people would believe this
was how English people spoke. They’d copy me, other villages would copy them, my way of
talking would spread.

‘Your things have been taken to your room. Would you like to go and unpack them? Or Mirna
can.’

‘Oh, please do not trouble yourselves with my unpackings.’ Christ, I was going for this.

He was pouring rakia, the eternal rakia.

‘I would like to propose a toast. To your arrival in the village. This is your real arrival. We forget
the rest. Nino was always a strange child, did you know he was a thief? Perhaps not. But he is a
strange man, he is often like a child. And sometimes children will not play with the best toys, the
toys you have saved for, they will play with dirty, tatty things. Like sticks! A party will be held
for you this evening.’

We forget the rest. Well, if he could, maybe so could I. I imagined Nino, playing with a stick. I was
the shiny Christmas gift, I was a princess castle. But he wasn’t inside me, he was dragging a stick
through some shit. This thought pleased me. I had no strategy for when I saw his parents. Or his
brother, or his brother’s wife, or their daughter. I could tell them I was writing about the
monster. I could tell them that I was sitting in Zlatko’s kitchen, drinking spirits, imagining Him
playing with a stick.
2

I’d spent so long wondering why my mother hadn’t upped and left. Perhaps it was just fear, of
the initial bump of loneliness, an empty room, the moment she sat down on her new bed, the
slow drop of her head into waiting hands, the moment they connected, wondering whether the
gesture had come naturally, or was just a signalling.

The party had been quite something. Nino’s parents had been there. Why had they come? His
mother had looked at me fondly, his father had looked alarmed. Perhaps this was the highlight
of the village social calendar. In twenty years, they would reminisce on the party held for the
British girl. On the quality of the cold meats, the musicians who played in the corner, the strange
dancing at the end. Zlatko had tried to lead me in a dance, but I couldn’t follow the steps. So I
tried to remember Scottish dancing, Burns Night ceilidhs in the hotel bar. But my limbs had
become corrupted, the movements which came were of club nights in London, the underground
bar where Nino and I would take his drugs. So I had moved in a strange and frantic way. The
village had asked whether this was Scottish dancing, and yes, I’d said, it was.

I looked at the clock. It was four in the morning, I hadn’t been able to sleep for hours. I pulled
back the curtains. The Nightly Peep, but solo now. I wondered what my mother would have
narrated if she’d been here this evening. She’d have kept looking at the door – there were no
locks here. There were no locks on our doors in Scotland. Which was ironic, in a building with
twenty-five locked doors. But those were only for people apart from us. So instead she’d stay
awake, a nighttime animal, surveying the exits and entrances. I’d lost that habit now, of looking
at doors, wondering whether they’d open, whether she’d come in with some new injury.

Then I thought of Zlatko’s sister-in-law. The moment I’d seen her at the party, I’d seen the
bruises, badly covered in a sort of waxy foundation. And I saw in her eyes that she knew I knew.
But then Zlatko was coming towards us, introducing me as Britain’s leading investigative
journalist, the woman who would bear witness to the monster in his lake. And instead of
protesting, that no I was just a small thing, a women who wrote about books and art – look at
me, I don’t even write about real things – I’d accepted the statement, did a modest sort of shrug.
His brother had come to shake my hand. Both he and his wife spoke English with a strange
Midwestern accent. They bristled when I asked why, they didn’t tell me much. Only that they
had lived in America and now they did not. They had tried to make a life there and had not.

Why had my mother suffered all those years, why had she not left? But then I thought back to
the film about women in France, the film I’d written about while drunk. These women, penniless
and alone, addled, addicts, because they’d left the smoky chambers of French marriage. On the
advice of dear Simone. Not realising it would be difficult for them to get jobs, to live anywhere
but the projects which stretched to the north. That sometimes the cost of freedom was too much
to bear.

I would be tired tomorrow. I saw a ripple in the lake. I imagined my mother next to me, whether
she would have noticed the way the water moved, whether she’d have remarked. And then a
memory. Some Japanese tourists had come to stay. They had wanted to find the Loch Ness
Monster but it had got lost in translation. My father had been drunk one night, the tour guide
had been getting angry that the booking was non-refundable. Now they would have to stay by
the lake for seven days, a lake with nothing in it. My father had listed all the birds he watched,
given them a guide, they could repurpose their binoculars. But no, the tour guide had insisted,
this was not what they’d wanted, this talk of birds. And my father had taken the man by the
collar and shoved him against the wall. I chuckled, perched on the window sill, when I
remembered that phrase. A lake with nothing in it.

Then more tourists came to my mind, another story I’d been told in The Bar, by the aid worker
who’d come for the Siege and never left. Everyone would joke he was waiting for the next war,
that he liked these wars. When the Siege broke out, a group of Japanese tourists were staying in
the Hotel New Europe. The staff kept shouting at them to leave, telling them a war was starting,
they had to get to the airport. But they didn’t understand, they stayed, they missed the last flight
out. With hindsight the story made little sense. Why weren’t the staff more forceful? Booked
them a taxi to the airport, mimed guns and bombs. But then I knew what could fall through the
cracks these languages left us.

I leapt off the sill, hugged the spare pillow, wondered if I could make it Nino. Then a strange
impulse to draw his face on it. I remembered reviewing a book about Japanese culture. It
mentioned a festival of wishes. The people who came to Temple would be given paper, tiny slips
of edible paper. Almost like Communion wafer. These people believed that if you wrote your
wishes on this paper, then ate them, they’d come true. For a moment I entertained the notion.
That I should sneak down to Zlatko’s study, write A Monster on a Post-It note. Swallow it whole.
But no, I wouldn’t write A Monster, I’d write Nino. Maybe I could chew up the sketch of him in
Van Gogh’s bed. I’d swallow this scratchy paper, I would get extra marks for effort, not the thin
Communion wafer but a thick and A3 sheet. And there we’d be in the painting, but there would
be two of us in the bed. Yes, first I’d go back to the drawing, add my body curled round his. And
when people went to the gallery, they would wonder why the painting had changed, who these
people were, in such a narrow bed, a bed made of paint. But we wouldn’t mind, there was too
much room in the bed I was in, and as I began to drift I saw a starry night, a hug, a punch, a fire.
3

I had to escape, had to take another phonecall in the village bar. I wondered who it would be
this time; a painter, a singer a priest. But the imaginary call would have to wait. I had just met a
man, him picking up my garbled accent. He’d come over to my table and asked if he could join
me. He didn’t look Bosnian. He had the English of an American.

‘Shall we take these drinks outside?’

‘Yeah, why not?’ The air was thick, shadows of old men snuffling in the corners. It was Ramadan,
only the most desperate still drank.

As we walked out to the terrace, the barman started screaming at this man. He screamed back. It
was only then I noticed his height. He must have been six foot five but, unlike British men, he
could wear this height. There was no stoop, no apology, just a sense it may come in useful.
Which, in this interaction, it was. Eventually the barman marched to the back room and
emerged with a pair of tea cups. The man laughed and raised his arms, and I thought of the
wingspans my father observed, I was expecting him to take off. There was more shouting then
resigned acceptance as the bartender poured as much of our beers as would fit in the teacups,
then plonked the bottles on a nearby ledge. The man shook his head and led me outside.

‘What happened there?’

‘It’s fucking Ramadan. You’re not meant to drink outside. But he’s said we can drink outside if it
doesn’t look as though we’re drinking outside. Bosnian logic.’

So if he didn’t know this already, he mustn’t live here. He must be visiting from America. The
beer tasted unexpected, from a teacup.

‘Where are you from?’

‘Here.’

‘And where do you live?’

‘Here.’ He couldn’t stop laughing and sweeping his arms across the village. ‘The bar guy, he’s my
cousin. He doesn’t like me.’

‘I sensed that.’

‘Calls me The Buddhist With The Man Bun. As you can probably guess, these things don’t go
down well round about here.’
‘Excuse me for asking, but why do you live here? Why don’t you… live in Sarajevo at least? And
why don’t you know the drinking thing?’

‘Your first question, well that’s a story for another time. Of course I know the drinking thing. I
just like winding him up.’ He laughed, and I couldn’t decipher him at all. Was he grinning at the
absurdity of his life, or was it the grin of a man who had done bad things and found them funny?
He took our teacups back inside. But suddenly there was a far more pressing matter. By fixating
on his perfect English, I’d missed something.

He came back outside, now with four tea cups. ‘I really like tea.’ He handed me a cup of beer and
a cup of rakia.

‘How old are you?’ I asked.

‘Why?’

‘Just… I can’t place you.’

‘Thirty-three.’ A year younger than The Barman, who had been kept back at school. And they
were both so tall, they couldn’t have escaped playing basketball, not in this place. For the tall,
competitive basketball was like military service. There was every chance they could be good
friends, best friends. No, they couldn’t, they were so different.

He filled my pause. ‘So how’s the war criminal hunting going?’

‘What?’

He couldn’t stop laughing. ‘Come on, you’re among friends. What else is an English girl doing
here, on her laptop, pretending to do god knows what you pretend you do. You’re the talk of the
town, I’ve heard about the little soiree. Come on, this confused English girl schtick, it’s even
worse cover than pretending to work for an NGO. Though more imaginative, I grant you that.’

Later I would learn there were uncaptured war criminals in this area. But I’d been too fixated on
Sarajevo woes to have time for politics or war.

‘I’m not… hunting war criminals… I’m… Oh fucking hell, I’m not going to explain this but please
be assured that if the British government wanted to send someone here to hunt war criminals,
they could find someone far more competent than me.’

I could explain The Barman stuff. I should explain The Barman stuff. But I was oddly taken by
this man.

‘I don’t think your government places much emphasis on competence in foreign policy.’
I thought he was about to start talking about The War, about delays in western intervention, but
he laughed at my confusion and said ‘Boris fucking Johnson. You wouldn’t be the first bumbling
blond the British government sent out into the world.’

‘Bumbling, eh?’ I was trying to work out whether I found this man attractive. He had a garbled
face, a broken nose, a girly mouth, eyes which couldn’t sit still. And that terrible bun. Perhaps it
was just relief. That someone was talking proper English, funny English, provoking me in the
way of London friends in pubs.

‘Yeah, you do bumbling so well. I was almost taken in.’ He stood up again, gestured for me to
finish the teacups and marched back inside.

There was more shouting, the man emerged holding an old drunk. He looked at me, confused.
Then looked around and manoeuvred the old man into a chair at our table. As he went back
inside, presumably for teacups but who knew in this strange, strange place, I wondered if the
man was dead. If I was sitting in rural Bosnia drinking with a corpse. While my friends talked
books and the merits of Jeremy Corbyn. At least this dead Bosnian wouldn’t talk to me about
Jeremy Corbyn.

‘Is he…?’

He went to check the man’s pulse and looked alarmed. ‘Shit, I think I’ve killed him.’

Then he doubled over laughing. ‘You, my dear, have an overactive imagination. He was being a
nuisance. I told my cousin I’d deal with him.’ Nuisance. These long-lost words. Did I really find
this man attractive because he used words like that? Back to the UK, would I find anyone barely
literate attractive? Maybe we could play sexually charged games of Scrabble.

‘But you don’t like your cousin? Why are you helping your cousin?’

The old man pissed himself. He moved his hand to his crotch, I wondered whether it was
modesty or to enjoy the warmth.

‘You say you’ve been in Bosnia for two months. If there’s one thing you should have learned it’s
that we have a fucked-up sense of family.’ I thought back to The Barman, his mother breaking
them into a war.

‘Is…’ I pointed to the man, ‘he okay?’

‘He’s fine. I can’t be bothered to carry him home. He should be able to walk by the time we’ve
finished. I intend to be here for a long time and think you should be too. Cheers!’

‘Cheers.’
‘You know I come from a family of war criminals?’

He was testing me. ‘Of course, it was all in the briefing.’

‘So you know about my uncle’s camp, the Croats who disappeared in the lake?’

I had no idea what to say.

He went back inside. What would he come back with this time? He couldn’t top a corpse.

It was a bottle of rakia. Closely followed by a cousin, more shouting, pointing at the old man, the
mess he had made, a wallet was being waved but it was unclear who it belonged to, then a
keyring, but the cousin took both back inside.

‘If he’s going to make me be his heavy, I’m drinking outside.’ I didn’t point out we were already
drinking outside.

‘Anyway, every Friday night, because my uncle ran the camp, the guards would let me and my
friends come inside. To watch The Treatment. We loved watching The Treatment.’

‘What was The Treatment?’

He shook his head. ‘You really don’t want to know.’

Why was he telling me this? Why was my next thought was The Barman one of these friends?

‘Then we’d go and torture kittens.’

Well, what was happening here? I asked myself the same question when I woke up the next
morning, a body by my side. In the end, his story couldn’t wait for next time. He told me he’d
spent a decade in Sarajevo, working in music, but then there was no work so he began teaching
English online, to Japanese people. They thought he was a man from Idaho called Glenn. So here
he was, he could teach online anywhere, but his mother couldn’t be ill anywhere, and he was the
only one left, he couldn’t take her to Sarajevo to die. So here he was, replaying his childhood, not
just the things done to him, the things he did. So here he was in this place ‘like something out of
a Stephen King novel’, his only consolations in cracked tea cups. ‘I think I’ve turned out quite
well, considering,’ he’d said with a wink.

After we dropped off the old man we followed the path by the lake to his house. There was no
discussion, just a lolling sense of carpe diem, our being outsiders in this place where he was
born. And now there he was, arguing himself into clothes, a Skype with a salaryman about to be
missed, sprinting to the next room, motioning I should let myself out.
4

‘I hope you appreciate what I’ve done here,’ Zlatko said.

Well, what a spectacle this was. Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, The Tower of London, a double
decker bus, a Beefeater with a hole in his crotch.

‘And this has brought you many tourists?’

Zlatko paused. ‘Well, of course we still have a lot of work to do in that respect. We need to put
this village on the map.’

I nodded and took the golf club. ‘Where do we start?’

‘Hole One is The Tower.’

‘I hope no one’s going to get beheaded.’

‘Your head is quite safe here,’ he said. I wondered if that was true, imagined my little head
lolling in the lake.

‘I will try not to lose my head.’ I laughed at my own joke. I wanted to point out that I hadn’t
bought a Dalmatian. I hadn’t even left the pigeon on his seat! ‘Is there much of a tradition of
Crazy Golf in Bosnia?’

‘This is the very first course!’ Zlatko beamed. I read in a book…’ he placed a strange emphasis on
book… ‘that this is what the British did. I went to London, once, and I saw all your sights. I
simply had to recreate them.’

‘Where in London were you?’

‘I saw nearly all. I saw Wembley, I saw Southall, I saw that… place with music, candles and
drugs.’

‘Ah, Camden then.’

‘I bought many candles. The more you bought, the cheaper. I didn’t like them in the end, though,
I left them in my friend’s house.’

‘And, excuse me for asking, but where did you read about the crazy golf?’

‘Let me tell you about life,’ he said then motioned I should play first. I was good at golf, it was
one of my rare competences. Not quite a hole in one, but I was close.

‘There is a type of fish called the zebra fish. They have, like zebras, stripes. But they live in
muddy waters, so no one can see the stripes. Even the other zebra fish cannot see the stripes.
But still, they have stripes, and that is a fingerprint… no a blueprint… for how we all are. Not just
the zebra fish, all of life.’

‘I see,’ I said. ‘But there must be some evolutionary reason for the stripes. For mating.’

‘No, it is not that.’

His ball juddered over the top of the Tower. Every day, I used to walk past The Tower of
London. I imagined his ball, in Shadwell now, teleporting to Cable Street. The psychogeography
of it all. I wondered why only men were allowed to be psychogeographers, what it even meant.
Every day I’d walk that route to work, the length of Cable Street.

And sometimes I would tire of all this walking. But I knew it was for the best. Do some exercise,
Emmieeeeeee! That’s what people do, people who don’t want to be depressed. But when the
walk got boring I’d change the filter in my mind, imagine Cable Street as Sniper Alley, I
remembered it from my last visit. Without returning, I’d become a little obsessed. There was
probably a simple reason why: because I wasn’t clear I wanted to be alive. And during The Siege
people were.

But on this street, this long street which deposited me at work, I’d pretend I was on Sniper Alley,
fear and destruction in the air, waiting till the very last minute to cross the intersecting roads,
just when the light was changing. I’d never told my friends in Sarajevo this, I’d used your hell as
a video game.

Zlatko was still struggling with the hole. All I wanted to do was talk about Nino. He must have
been a sweet child. I’d seen photos of him as a boy but there was a sadness to this, to knowing
what came next. The years when there would be no photos. Or perhaps there were, holiday
snaps from the prison island where his sister was born. The sun, the sky, the deep blue sea.
Perhaps his mother had watched Life Is Beautiful, she pretended they were on holiday, yes, it
was a holiday camp, a resort. A good opportunity to meet people his own age. Were there girls?
He was eight when it started, twelve at the end, maybe at the end, did sex stop for war? All the
things I’d never asked him. I wondered what would happen to these questions in Google
Translate. Kissing Was There In War.

Zlatko was still struggling with the hole. He was onto his sixth shot now, apologising for what he
called his cursing.

‘Nino never told me he was a thief. You said he was a thief.’

‘Yes, he was a thief. But I never knew why he wanted those things. I don’t think he ever did. To
think, a British girl and a thief!’
‘But it was long ago, and people change.’ I was struck by an odd impulse. I remembered sitting
with a friend, a good friend, and I wanted to grab the earring she was wearing and drag it
through her lobe. Of course I didn’t want to do that, but because the idea was so appalling, I
couldn’t stop my brain from seeding the thought, so I could then be appalled by my plan, feel a
terrible shame. People I knew had spoken of the same, the moment the thought flits through
your mind. Push your friend in front of that train. And I was struck by a similar impulse now. I
liked this Zlatko man. So I’d tell him Nino hadn’t changed; he’d laughed when he told me the
story. He found it hilarious, he spent an hour telling it, giggling, stoned on the drugs he dealt,
expecting me to find it funny. And not only that, I’d say, widening my eyes, my response was
worse. I immediately felt more attracted to him. Oh yes, Zlatko, I did. I liked the fact this man
had stolen from your village. I liked the fact he found it funny. I’ve been away from do-good
London too long. I’ve been away from feminist London too. Here was a man who had done
something cool, something manly. The hours I’d spent converting people to My Feminism – the
differences between men and women were so small as to be almost negligible, especially in how
they thought; gender is a construct. I’d sold them down the river for an unwashed thief. Oh
Zlatko, he doesn’t regret it and I loved him more. I’m not the proper girl you think I am. I’m
trivial, amoral, mean.

Instead I said ‘Shall we not count this hole? Perhaps we could got to Buckingham Palace, have
tea with the queen.’

And Zlatko said ‘jolly good’.

5

The turtles were lovely. Up and down they went, down and up, scooping the water. Zlatko’s wife
had a name after all. She was called Mirna.

Mirna couldn’t speak a word of English, and this embarrassed her, with a husband so fluent.
That was why she hadn’t spoken that first night. Zlatko had explained, she’d never really had the
chance to learn. By the time they’d met his English was already good, he would turn off subtitles
to make it better. On BBC dramas, which made him talk in this strange and British way. So she
would look after the children and he would watch his dramas.

Every morning, Mirna and I would sit and watch the turtles. I wondered whether turtles could
have saved us, me and him. I could have redecorated the bedsit, every wall an aquarium. And
instead of those gruel-thin hours on the banquette, we could have stared in wonder: piranhas,
sharks and eels. We’d throw meat in, meat from the market famous for the shell attack,
seventeen dead, fifty-four injured. Then I wondered whether this woman could become my
mother, this woman who washed and ironed my clothes, who sewed the worn seams. What a
hypocrite I was, accepting this female labour.

I remembered the first time I had been to Sarajevo. Shortly before, I had been instructed to ‘find
my critical fish’. It was an odd instruction, delivered by a comedian and then housemate. He told
me my comedy was too baffling and surreal. The only way I would become a good comic would
be to ‘find my critical fish’. We were in the pub – he was drunk and didn’t like me. And when I
queried his logic, his attempt to fight surrealness with surrealness, that in fact he was enabling
me by setting me off on this whimsical quest, he told me I wasn’t very good at life. I needed to
find my critical fish more generally.

The friend who took me to Sarajevo, eight years before, decided my critical fish would be found
in this city of hills. In the first bar, on the first night, there was a very handsome goldfish. We sat
and watched its tail swish, we used the word baroque. The bar was named after the goldfish,
Goldfish Bar. We thought this goldfish terribly wise, perhaps it was my critical fish. I later
discovered that Nino had worked in the bar at that time. I asked whether he would be sent to
buy a new goldfish when the old one died. No, he said, the owner would buy the new goldfish.
Then he asked why I wanted to know. Trying to translate the story would not end well. The
critical fish made no sense. Nino, I was looking to improve my alternative comedy – no, I wasn’t
even looking to, someone suggested I did. Someone I didn’t like. And I thought I may get
guidance from a fish. Yes, from a fish! No, we didn’t seriously think this, it was a joke. But I don’t
think you understand my humour.
Instead I asked if he at least fed the goldfish – then he could have been responsible for keeping
my critical fish alive, there could still be meaning here. But no, the owner did that too. He didn’t
have anything to do with the fish. Did you ever give the fish names? But he didn’t understand
the impulse to name a fish. He shook his head.

I pointed at the turtles. Then I pointed at myself, I said Emily. I pointed to her, I said Mirna. Then
I pointed at the first turtle, she said Mirna. I pointed to the second and she said Zlatko. She
beamed at the turtles then she beamed at me.

It was still unclear why I was in the village. Had they sensed my weakness, known they could
adopt me, take me to the crazy golf, feed my love of whimsy, feed me? Get whatever it was they
wanted from me. Zlatko would have known that Nino had left when he sent the postcard. Or
stayed exactly where he was, on that brown and scratchy sofa, me moving in with ex-pats from a
Facebook flatshare group. People who wanted to save Sarajevo with amateur theatre, bad art.
And not even that, just get something worthy on their CV. I thought I was above them. At least I
was honest. I didn’t pretend I wanted to save this place, I wanted it to save me.

But I couldn’t write about the fake monster. I’d explained this to Zlatko. Yes, I’d written about
the fake pyramids, the fake sightings of the Virgin Mary. But those were proper fakes.

‘I will convince you of our monster,’ he’d said and winked. ‘Stay another week, you will see it
with your own eyes. Your eyes are so big, you can see a lot. Perhaps more than other people.’

Would the monster stick to its deadline? Zlatko sounded quite assured. It was regular. It was
punctual. And I thought of the period that was running late, ova sprinting for a bus, and how this
would be one more thing to resolve, an abortion in rural Bosnia, no, don’t be silly now, a trip to
Sarajevo, an article’s worth of cash to a cold and judging woman at the American Hospital. I
imagined me on my laptop, reaching the word count of the death of this child.

But the idea we could have conceived a child seemed so unlikely. We couldn’t do anything,
couldn’t speak, could barely leave the house. At the bar he often got so stoned he couldn’t count,
struggling to add if someone had more than two drinks, which everyone did, always. And all the
things I couldn’t do: swim, drive, ride a bike. How could we have managed this creation? I
couldn’t buy a test, here in the village, everyone would find out. It may get back to him or, better
still, it would get back to him, and also Edin. It would be the stuff of village wager: is the father of
this child The Prodigal Son, or the one who returned to care? Yes, The Prodigal Son, he did
return, to do a reading at the village hall, did you attend? I did not understand the poem, the
nudity was strange, I don’t like that Van Gogh, he cut off his own ear, that’s not a normal thing to
do. But Nino, he returned that night, we like him more, even though he swanned off back to
Sarajevo.
No, don’t try to buy a test. Leave it, the period will come. Do what you always do, sit on
situations knowing they’ll get better, feeling surprised when they don’t.

Well, what a child it would be. It would grow up in Sarajevo, bilingual, of course. It would
interpret for us, a successor to the people at the party the night we’d kissed. This poor child,
what would it make of us? Because it would know both our minds, and it would grow up
bewildered, think was this the point of love? People like the sides of my friend’s bridge, which
would not, could not meet. It would act as a broker, as I did for all those years. Could you tell
Your Father we’re out of milk? No, tell Your Mother she must buy the milk, I am bored of buying
milk. Could you remind Your Father that I don’t drink milk, have no use for this milk, I drink my
coffee dark and bitter. I will leave him to fill in the joke. And, when the child came of age, when it
had watched films and read books and met friends’ parents, he would sit us down on the
scratchy brown sofa and say ‘this has to end, you do not realise how stupid you have been’. All
the times I told my mother to leave my father, all the times she never did.

But, no, I would have to remonstrate, his films and books were the problem, they got us into this
mess. You won’t believe this, my son, but Your Father and I used to dance through the streets,
have snowball fights, it was a cold winter when we met, he’d run around writing my name in
snow on car windows. We’d fallen in love at first sight and, oh god, I’d remember the events. It
involved a spark! An actual spark. Yes, a spark from my lighter, can you think of anything more
crass? Or perhaps my memory would be skewed by then, perhaps I’d tell a different story, one
that didn’t happen, or access a detail I wasn’t dwelling on now. I’d tell this son the first night we
met I knew this wouldn’t work, that there was strange talk about The Muse. Then he talked
nonsense when I asked about his poetry, something about cigarette foil. He showed me his art,
that sort of stoner futurism. I couldn’t hide what I thought.

Zlatko had come to join us now, a coffee for me, no milk. He insisted I had to stay, that the village
liked me. And I liked the village, he said. I had not denied this. I hadn’t packed and left. I hadn’t
stopped sitting with Mirna, watching these turtles. I hadn’t stopped going on his little trips.

Perhaps I had nowhere else to go. I could stay, listening to stories, a ghoul cloaked in jumpsuits
and RP words. I was losing work, I wasn’t in the right place to do things. Even the things I could
do from here were dwindling. I wouldn’t reply to emails, I’d hide from things, I’d go for walks
themed around Nino, wondering what he thought of these places, wondering where he played
as a child, where he and Elma went for what I quaintly thought as trysts. Perhaps now I had
nowhere else to go. I didn’t want to be back in Sarajevo, I had lost my little bar, possibly my
friends there, and what did my friends do? All they did was tell me sad stories. I hadn’t caught
the flight to Armenia. I didn’t want to be in London, caring about things people cared about
there. Conversations I couldn’t engage in, floral settings for wedding tables, house prices,
perhaps the actual price of fish, dover sole at a fishmonger on Broadway market. And I thought
about my mother, another woman trapped on the edge of lake, or pretending she was trapped.
When all that happened was life disappointed her.
6

‘I guess my, as you put it, presence here… It is illogical.’

‘I think it may be even more illogical than my marriage.’

‘Your marriage?’

‘Oh, I thought I told you the other night.’

‘No?’

‘So I spend all my time banging on about how Bosnia is my jail.’ He put on a revolutionary voice.
‘I’m a captive! It’s my jail! Bosnia is my jailor!’ He beat his heart.

Oh, this man amused me.

‘Well I met a Finnish woman in Sarajevo. We got married. It wasn’t a passport marriage per se.
We’d been together two years. There was a passport element, to make it easier for us to see
each other. But yeah. We got married and I was on track to become a Finnish citizen. But not for
long!’ He lowered his voice to a stage whisper. ‘I left her after three days.’

‘So you broke back into your jail.’

‘Yes sir, I broke back into my jail.’

‘Why did you leave her after three days?’

‘I felt trapped.’ He giggled, rocking back and forth.

We were back in the bar at the end of the world. I wondered why I felt such kinship with this
man. Then I saw the obvious: we both had a habit of doing incredibly stupid things. Then finding
them funny.

‘I panicked at the idea I was married. We had a row and I went to the airport, after three days.’

‘The poor Finn. I bet she doesn’t like you now.’

‘She doesn’t like me at all. She changed jobs because it involved being in Bosnia. She can’t bear
to be in the same country as me.’

‘I can just imagine her sitting in a sauna, crying. She’s sweating but she’s not understanding.’

‘She wasn’t really into saunas.’

‘No, she’s flagellating herself with a birch branch. To relieve the anger and confusion. Now she’s
chasing you across Europe, with the birch branch. As we speak. You’d better hide.’
I was beginning to feel sorry for the woman.

‘But enough about me. Let’s go on the assumption that you’re not hunting war criminals, that
you’re just an English fuck-up, a… god you have a phrase for this, I can’t remember… Gardens.’

‘A common or garden fuck-up?’

‘Yes, a common or garden fuck up, a girl with no problems who’s decided to create some. Why
are you in Bosnia?’

Oh, I’m just going to go and say it. The cousin was jolly today, there were no dead men, there
was slightly less rakia.

‘I met a man. It’s quite funny, he didn’t speak English. We decided to move in together after
seven days. It didn’t end well.’

‘As I can see. Who was this man?’

‘Someone in Sarajevo.’

‘How very evasive.’

‘It wasn’t my finest hour.’

‘How did you communicate, apart from the obvious?’

‘Via third party machine translation software.’ I had borrowed that phrase from a friend who
worked in IT. I remembered the words Happiness Is Google, the way I screenshotted them to my
friends, the way I judged him later. Why did he happily write these words? Why didn’t he have
an opinion on corporations taking over the world, changing our brains, narrowing our thoughts
into hashtags and likes. So we all lacked nuance in the way we lacked it, me and him. But maybe
he was just happy in this world – I remembered my Christmas delusions, thinking how modern
we were, talking only in emojis and old-photo-likes. We were just the endpoint. But remember
the television, Emmie, that analogue thing, how you looked at it and thought you’d come home.
Would I still be thinking about that day if I hadn’t written it to my friends, made the connection
with my mother, if I hadn’t tried to create meaning, naff childhood links.

I realised he was looking puzzled. ‘I mean Google Translate.’

‘Oh, okay. I don’t believe in love.’

‘That’s probably for the best.’

I felt an odd relief. None of this could carry any weight. I had tired of all the weight. And the less
weight I could feel about him, the less I would feel about what I was doing here, whatever it was.
Those songs on the radio would stop making me cry. Why the fuck did those songs on the radio
make me cry? I was thirty-two, I’d never had that.

His cousin was back, with a very angry man.

‘Christ,’ he said. ‘Let me handle this.’

The man grabbed my bag but it wasn’t my purse he was looking for. Instead he took two
notebooks. Edin grabbed him then looked at me, as though surprised by his size, the fact he
could restrain this small and broken thing. I wondered how much of the man’s complexion to
attribute to anger, how much to local beer.

He took the notebooks from the man’s hands and laid them on the table. I wondered what they
contained, what of value I’d ever thought. Why anyone commissioned me to write, because I
wasn’t even a good critic, my mind was made only of tangents, useless spirals of thought. Then I
remembered one contained notes for a piece on The New Misandry, long since filed. I wondered
what this old man would make of these notes. If he put on his glasses and put them through
Translate. Women against men. Not even women being insubordinate, women hating men. I
imagined that scared and quiet kitchen, him reading the results to his wife. Who, through the
garbled syntax, would hear a call to arms, a pan bubbling over on the hob. I wanted to
communicate to Edin that the man should take that notebook. Perhaps he could take the other
too. It was just things I’d scribble when drunk.

Edin let him go.

The man walked off in the direction he’d come from, shaking himself. Like a dog just released
from the sea.

‘What was that about? He didn’t want my purse, he wanted my notebooks.’

‘You really don’t understand, do you?’ He was exasperated now, not sitting but pacing. ‘People
here, they must think you’re a war criminal hunter. That’s the only reason you westerners come
here. And you sit around looking at people, making notes. I don’t know what you’re doing here,
and to be honest I don’t really care. I’m not in the habit of defending war criminals. But you have
to realise… He thought they were evidence. He was trying to make a point.’

‘If I was here to find war criminals, I wouldn’t sit around looking at people, making notes.’

‘I can’t even bear to think this through… How many bluffs?’

‘I guess just two. The classic double bluff. Though maybe me saying that makes it three?’
We looked out on to the lake. And because there was nothing left to say I said thank you, and I
should go home and stop causing him problems but, no, he said, stay, it made a change. I
certainly made a change. There were more stories and more tea cups. I liked him, there was now
an element of investment. So when we went back to his house, things were different. I was so
aware he wasn’t The Barman. In every gesture and touch. His arms were different, both more
and less curved, the muscles in some context. I remembered a line a university tutor had said:
‘You have a gift for self-sabotage.’ A drunken memory floated by, of the last time I slept with
him, how my child mind had disguised measurement as touch, checking him against handspans,
against my thumb trying to meet my middle finger, against a man who might have been his
friend. ‘But no! I said to the old tutor, I’m being good here. His cock is different in a nice way! It
has a flat asymmetry. Exactly the same girth, unless my fingernails are different lengths, which
is perfectly possible. But even then, we’d only be out by a factor of millimetres. I’ve never cut
them much.’ Once, I dated a man for three years. I was young enough for that back then,
impressionable. A few weeks after he left me, he came back to Oxford to do a stand-up gig. We’d
decided to pretend we were still going out, not to sleep together because he was dating the
woman who would become his wife, but have a day of doing whatever else we did. It seemed so
interesting to rewind, indulge this fake reality. In his taxi back from the station I realised I had
no conscious memory of what his back felt like, the keys of his spine. I wanted to ask but by then
the day was gone. I played a sonata I used to know on Edin’s spine.

It was good sex, I’d go as far as to say very good sex. I remembered a phrase I’d overheard at a
party. ‘It was a happy time and I couldn’t wait for it to end.’ It was strange to think I used to go
to that sort of party. When my friend finished the conversation moments later, I went up and
quizzed him. What had he meant? It was such a good phrase. But my friend was drunk, he didn’t
remember having said it. Was it maybe about your childhood? No, he didn’t have a happy
childhood, he’d hated his childhood. And I was relieved he said that because I’d wanted the line
to be more ambiguous. Having a happy childhood but wanting to escape into the big world, that
wasn’t interesting enough.

And I wondered, as I lay there, though I didn’t want this to end, that the reason he’d wanted
these good times to end had a counterpart, that there were bad times he wanted instead. Sitting
on the banquette, that gruel-thin life.
7

It was strange to think what this building once contained. I didn’t know what I had expected,
what I thought would happen when I walked through that door. That perhaps I would feel a
chill, a shiver in the air.

But no, it was just a big shed.

I wondered if I should make my own memorial, find a can of spray paint, write names on the
walls. I didn’t know the names. I imagined no one did. Unless I went to Croatia and knocked on
all the doors. Excuse me but did you ever lose a relative somewhere near Luka? It’s for an art
project. And eventually someone would say yes. ‘We left our child there once. We’d stopped for
petrol in Luka. For thirty kilometres we forgot we had a child. And when we remembered we
thought, for a terrible second, that we shouldn’t return. We could keep on driving as though
we’d never had a child. We could go to the cinema! To bars! And we were punished for this
thought. Because when we returned, our child was not there. But thirty years later we were in a
café in Zagreb. And a man walked up to us. He said ‘you are my parents’. At first our son had
been abducted then he managed to escape. But he had no memory of where he was from, he’d
been too young, he didn’t know his parents’ names. Another family had taken him in. It was a
happy ending, he’d had a happy childhood, he had grown into a happy man. He was wearing a
pressed shirt, sipping an espresso on a terrace.

But by then I would have tired of the story, I hadn’t meant lost in that sense.

How did people disappear? ‘They disappeared into the lake,’ Edin had said. It sounded so
simple. They weren’t in the lake and then they were. I remembered my first day in Zlatko’s
kitchen, wondering how much water He’d displace. But these bodies, these fifty bodies? How
large were the ripples, did the lake overflow? I remembered a line a poet friend had written,
remaindered books washed up on the shore. It was meant to be a comment on the uselessness
of writing, that no one bought books, and certainly no one bought poetry. These books his
publisher couldn’t sell would end up on the shore. Why hadn’t Nino realised?

Would I ever buy the paint? Would I ever write those names? Why did he write crap about Van
Gogh? Why did he paint eggs and naked ladies? When there was so much here. I could do a
Google search, typical Croatian names, find one hundred. No, fewer, a little repetition for
reality’s sake.

‘Where was the camp?’ I’d asked Edin, and he’d refuse to say. But surely the building was still
standing. I remembered Srebrenica. The buildings were still there, the buildings where the men
died. Not memorialised, not repurposed. But there. I was sure this one was too. So every
morning on my walks, I’d try to work out where. The village had quite a few abandoned
buildings. And it was difficult to think about size. Because I’d known no real pain, my scale
would be off. When I imagined a building which fit fifty people, my first thought was a hotel. Of
course it was a hotel. Or at least fifty rooms. But no it wasn’t a building fit for one hundred
people, it was a building to fit fifty people. Even I knew camps didn’t come with travel kettles. A
building for fifty people could be very small. I had a shortlist. So I took Edin on a walk, a little
tour. I looked at him as we passed each one.

He wouldn’t be good at poker. He did a tell. He saw me looking at one building. And he looked
back at me, spooked, a line in his eyes. You Will Never Know These Things. So here I was.

But there was nothing here to see.

Walking back, I remembered a story a friend loved to tell about Auschwitz. His boss at a law
firm was a terrible man. His wife was decades younger, Polish. His boss would boast about how
they’d met. The man had taken his sons to Auschwitz, an educational visit, and their tour guide
became his wife. For years, I wondered at this sequence. Regardless of how terrible this man
was, it was quite a stretch, from being a terrible man to picking up your Auschwitz tour guide. I
imagined future tours of that big shed, couples kissing in the corners, making vows.

Perhaps the village could make money from these tours. Medjugorje could have its fake virgin,
Visoko its fake pyramids, and here the ghouls could come, to an unmarked place of death. But
no, Zlatko didn’t want ghoul tourists, what he wanted was a monster.

He was still up, and that surprised me. The light was on.

‘Where have you been?’

‘For a walk,’ I said.

‘And it was a nice walk?’

‘A very nice walk.’ And, because he was looking at me strangely, the lights out apart from a lamp
in the corner, his face odd in the half light, I said, ‘I think I have a plan.’
8

An ex-boyfriend tacked things on his wall, even though he had made a dent in his twenties. His
degree certificate, an immodest first, tickets to concerts, football games at White Hart Lane.
Sometimes, when he was in the shower or kitchen, I would fantasise about taking them down.
Not ripping them up, but moving them from this pinboard, perhaps to my flat, breaking the
forcefield. What would happen to him without them? Would he would fall apart, limb by limb,
the stitches coming undone? Or perhaps it wouldn’t be sudden, he wouldn’t notice the loss at
first. His hair would fall out, his skin would come off in chunks, and then he’d realise his totems
were gone. But no, that man was good at life, he knew what he wanted, internships in school
holidays, the connections of family friends. None of these principles, none of what my other
friends would do, give up their principles in their thirties, when the damage had been done. To
their lives, their careers, overtaken by those who knew when and where to start.

Who would he be if he hadn’t gone to that Cup Final would he be the same man now, saying the
same things? Or perhaps there was a moment that changed him, seventy-two minutes in, a
corner had been missed and he knew he could have scored it, then self-assurance, faith. But
what was this undergraduate philosophy? Just breadcrumbs of Sartre on the floor of my mind.

Oh these books that I had read. I thought back to K, Kafka’s Castle. The outsider arriving in the
impenetrable village, thwarted at every turn. He was never taken to play crazy golf. Or perhaps
he was and Kafka left it out.

But maybe this ex had the right idea, this was how to live. How I would live. I tacked up the
picture of the monster, the one Zlatko sent me in The Bar. I tacked up a sketch I had stolen from
Nino, that weak likeness of my face. And then I made a sign. The Office of Misinformation. I had
promised a monster. And perhaps I could deliver one.

I thought of fake news sweat shops. A lot of them were in these parts, in Macdeonia. Spotty
teenagers skewing elections in distant lands. Far bigger lands. Spending the money Google ads
PayPaled them. On BMWs, vodka Red Bulls, expensive girlfriends.

A few years before, I’d written about secret societies, the gap between the reality and the
mystique. Did this link back to the Council of the Congress of Bosniak Intellectuals? It was odd
that the most intriguing sign in Sarajevo was right next door. Was it a secret society? Well of
course not, it had a sign. But could it be a cover? Perhaps Zlatko and I were a secret society? At
the party, we’d looked so in league.

I thought of my friend who staged the recreations, what he might make of this.

Jon,
As you may have heard, I’m in Bosnia for no apparent reason. [Yes, still.] You well?

Hope you don’t mind an odd one. If you had to invent a monster, a monster in a lake, how would
you go about it? A bit like the Loch Ness monster, you know how I like my lakes.

Cheers,

Emmie

Then I thought back to East London. The area I lived in had been Turkish but then the art school
crowd moved in. Corner shops and galleries in an odd, misshapen waltz. Some friends of mine
wanted to address this – I laughed now at the phrase address this – by leasing a property and
recreating a Turkish shop. They found suppliers in Ankara – these people were rich, of course
they were – and set up gaping shelves, importing dust from a friend’s squat.

But a friend of mine had a foot in both camps. She was an artist and a Turk. So she knew that the
Turkish shops in Dalston were mostly not real shops, they stocked nothing, not even milk. They
were a front; they laundered money. My friend clung to the wonder of this, that these art school
kids were copying shops. Which, themselves, were copying shops.

But no, this would not help me. I sat on the desk, imagined myself as an accessible newsreader.

One of my favourite artists was Belgian or Dutch – I could never remember which. In any case
he lived in Mexico City. He didn’t make anything tangible, he could never sell his art. Never even
show his art, in a traditional sense. What he did was he created stories. He did things, things so
strange they became embedded first in gossip and then in local myth. Once he pulled a giant ice
cube through Mexico City, melting as it went. And people wondered at this man, he imagined
people would not assume it was art, just a crazed gringo of unknown purpose. Around this, they
would make up their own stories.

Was this what I was doing here? Something innocent, perhaps. Artistic, even. Contributing to my
body of work, which began with the sketch of Him naked, lying on a Jpeg of Van Gogh’s bed. I
still had that, but I could not tack it up. I had drawn his cock in the end. Perhaps this monster
was no different from the gossip I’d created in Sarajevo. Make love to me, make love to me. From
the proxy Dalmatian. Maybe his ex was the real artist. Oh, I missed that poor, poor dog.

I looked around this room, at the things I had pinned on the wall. I didn’t have any photos of me
and my friends. That was what people did, after all. They tacked polaroids on their walls, to
prove they had a life. Perhaps I could go down to Zlatko’s home office – I had made mischief,
told him it wasn’t his study, it was his ‘home office’, that was more British – watch the past
unspool in pixels, laminate them.
But no, I needed to focus. How could we do this? I picked up my notepad. I remembered the
beginning was traditionally a good place to start.

- Date of first sighting

On the postcard, Zlatko had said historical evidence had resurfaced. He hadn’t mentioned it,
presumably because it didn’t exist. And I hadn’t pressed the matter, hadn’t wanted to engage
with this.

- What does the monster look like?

It couldn’t just be a blur or a PhotoShop smudge. Stories would have to corroborate.

- Who has seen the monster?

Well, it couldn’t just be Zlatko and his wife. And it couldn’t be me now, could it? I thought back
to the night of the party when I’d lain awake, that ripple in the lake.

I went into the kitchen. I mimed where is Zlatko and Mirna mimed I should wait, she would
fetch him. Then she pointed to the tray of burek and it was good, not like Nino’s mother’s, so I
sat down with a plate, scooped on double cream, went to Google Choke Valley.

A friend had gone to write about it, he hadn’t filed his piece. He was sectioned a little while later.
We were never sure what had happened there, or whether the two events were entirely
unrelated. But no, someone else had written a book about the valley, I’d found the book
description:

On 21 August 1986, between nine and ten o’clock in the evening, 1,744 people, 3,952 cows, 82 dogs,
3,404 chickens, 8 cats, 552 goats, 337 sheep, 7 horses and 2 donkeys died in the Nyos Valley in
Cameroon. The cause of their deaths remains a mystery to this day. Twenty-five years later, X went
in search of stories told about the disaster by scientists, missionaries, locals and intellectuals. Aside
from the question of what happened, he wanted to know what people say about it.

He found three parallel but different stories told by eye-witnesses and researchers… How do stories
emerge and when do they become myths? Can myths be traced back to facts from the past? And
what are the personal motives of the main players: ambition, conceit, empathy, mistrust, political
calculation, missionary zeal, superstition, religious ecstasy?

‘Emmie! You have come to find me!’

‘Well, not a long way, admittedly.’

‘Oh Emmie, I like your British jokes. We do not make jokes like this in Bosnia. Shall I tell you a
Bosnian joke?’
‘Of course you shall.’

‘During the Siege, Sarajevo largely had no power. Can you imagine, a Sarajevo winter, minus
twenty, two metres of snow, your windows are UN mesh. Can you imagine that?’

‘Zlatko, I cannot, I’ve tried.’ I thought back to the seven hundred books. It wasn’t my story to tell.

‘The people of Sarajevo would make a joke. That they would rather be in Auschwitz…’

I looked to Mirna for a clue how to react, remembered she couldn’t speak English.

‘… because at least in Auschwitz they had gas!’

I paused. ‘That’s good actually.’

‘Why did you come to find me?’

‘I just remembered, you said on your postcard historical evidence has resurfaced. You’ve never
told me what it was.’

‘I will not tell you,’ he announced with a smirk.

Well of course you won’t, it doesn’t exist.

‘Instead I show you.’

He took me to his brother’s house. On the walk, I remembered the last time I was led to a house
in Luka. To Zlatko’s house. The relief that Nino hadn’t dumped me, even though I’d wanted him
to, the strange elation when I felt it brewing, the strange elation when he didn’t, liking the fact
he’d taken my hand, wondering why he hadn’t warned me of the brambles. But perhaps they’d
just been sense memory, evasions he’d always known.

His wife came to the door, the wife I’d known was beaten the night of the party. The bruises on
her face had almost healed, a tinge of green under the foundation, but there was something new,
slotted on the fold of her collar bone.

‘We take you in,’ she said. And I wondered for a moment whether I was moving here, but no,
Zlatko was showing me to the lobby, to a sketch. It was framed. It was of the lake, and there was
something there, a neck emerging from the water.’ I tried to hide it from myself but, yes, I was
impressed. Not by the fake but by the impulse. Luka, 1948. Broad brushstrokes in the bottom
corner. And then I wondered whether I had been too much of a cynic. Whether I could believe
these things after all. I had such little faith in Nino, in his art. And, after all, wasn’t I trying be
kind?
So I said, ‘well this is a turn up for the books’, and Zlatko beamed, and his brother, whom I
should have hated, beamed.
9

We were rowing out into the lake, or rather he was rowing out into the lake, I’d been away too
long to insist on doing half the rowing.

‘I know why you’re here,’ Edin said when we got to the middle point. He stopped rowing, we
were still. I could see his face so clearly in the moonlight. I couldn’t read it.

It had seemed like a good idea, this going rowing. It made a change from the bar, it was pretty.
But now I realised I was in the middle of a lake and I couldn’t swim and this man could throw
me overboard with such little effort.

He lay back in the boat, me registering with surprise that this barely caused a ripple. He spread
out his arms, his fingers skimming the water. He knew how to create a scene, a sense of theatre.
I wobbled down to sit on the bottom of the boat, an act of surrender. I rested my head on this
shins.

‘How silly I feel, thinking I’m above village gossip.’

‘You are silly in many ways.’

‘I am, I am, I am. You know I’d decided you were writing a book? Oh, I shouldn’t be too harsh on
myself, it really wasn’t obvious what was happening here.’

‘It is far from obvious.’

‘You know he was my best friend?’

‘I’d hazarded this sort of worst case scenario.’

He laughed. ‘You don’t seem to be the sort of person who hazards worst case scenarios. You
seem entirely reckless.’

I didn’t disagree.

‘During the war, when there was no food, we used to run electric currents into this lake. It
stunned the fish, it made them easier to catch. And another of our friends didn’t realise the, shall
we say, inherent problems of mixing water and electricity. He almost died, walking in with a live
current.’

‘Did he recover?’

‘Yes! He was appalled by almost dying in such a stupid way. He’s one of Bosnia’s leading
physicists now, because of that.’
‘That’s lovely.’ But what did it mean? Was it a sort of allegory? I remembered a story a friend in
London told me. That she had met a man online, she really liked him, he was Swedish. She was
obsessed by Scandinavia, she kept asking him questions about his Swedish home town, about
Sweden more generally. They were dating for months. And then he disappeared, he wouldn’t
reply to her, so she turned up to his flat. He gave her a cup of tea and sat down to tell her
something.

‘Once there was a boy from The East. And he moved to another country, a country which was
hostile to him, where no one liked people from The East. So this boy invented a story where he
came from a Northern Land, and he met a girl and the girl believed him. Every night he would
read about This Northern Land, so he could answer her questions. And then one day he realised
he didn’t have to.’ Why did he tell me this as an allegory? she’d thought. Then she’d said she
didn’t mind that he was Romanian, she had no prejudice at all, in fact she understood why a
Romanian in London might do that, people here did have strange views. And she had learnt a lot
about Sweden. But no, he’d said, even though she was willing to take him back, they simply
couldn’t, he had told six months of lies, you couldn’t come back from that.

Maybe that’s why I was remembering this story, I couldn’t come back from these lies. But what
did he mean with these physicists and fish? I realised my head was still on his shins, his leg hair
was tickling me. I sat up.

‘Did he ever mention me?’ he asked.

‘He told me stories from his childhood. But I can’t remember names. Were you in on the
robberies?’

‘Ha ha, no. It was funny, he was the good kid. He’d never come to watch The Treatment. Then I
was the good kid, and he was out stealing and I was just reading. I needed to know this wasn’t
the world.’

‘But you got into the world? And then you ran back.’ I laughed, because it was so nice and
familiar, laughing at someone. When I’d laughed at Nino, he wouldn’t understand, he’d take
offence, my teasing was something to be endured.

‘Oh don’t. Is it funny? I’m not sure it is.’ He joined me in the bottom of the boat. How could he
move so weightlessly?

‘I can’t swim, by the way.’

‘Ha ha, now you tell me. But you grew up on a lake.’

‘Yes. You must have felt shit the day you came back.’
‘You have no idea how shit I felt.’ He pulled out a hipflask.

I’d never seen him serious. What was he going to do? The idea he’d kill me seemed absurd now
but there were no signs he wanted to return to the shore. I imagined a mother and daughter
peeling back the curtains for their nightly peep, binoculars catching on this pair, the tall man
and the British lady, sitting in the bottom of a motionless boat, passing a flask back and forth.
What were they doing? A suicide pact? A conference. Would they guess the nature of the
confrontation? He hadn’t mentioned the monster.

‘Did he tell you how they got caught?’

‘Yes, I didn’t really understand. But the other guy got them caught, right?’

He giggled. ‘No, that’s not true. You know what’s he like. Actually, maybe you don’t. He was so
excited, he kept taking photos of what they’d stolen. He kept showing them to people.’ I could
picture him a decade later posting these on Facebook, laptops not VCRs, three hundred likes.
‘His father shopped him to the police, he had to, it was really bad.’

‘Yeah, that story doesn’t have quite such a good ring to it.’

‘He stole from me too.’

‘What did he steal from you?’

‘A girl called Elma.’ He put on the voice of an old folk singer. ‘Oh, Elma, Elma, Elma, with your
deep blue eyes and jet black hair.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that. I’ve heard about Elma, she sounded fun.’

‘She was too much fun. It was disastrous for our basketball season. The two star players couldn’t
look at each other let alone pass properly.’ I was picturing a medley from an eighties film, a
basketball showdown leading mysteriously to a dance-off, jazz hands then break dancing, Elma
on the sidelines of this shelled-scarred court.

He gave me the hipflask. ‘You know the worst thing about all this?’

‘Go on.’

‘I like you, despite myself. You’re clearly trouble.’

I’d been called trouble so many times in London. Once by a drunk psychotherapist at a party. He
followed me around the room for hours. You are trouble, he whispered in my ear.

‘You know what, I’m not going to ask about you and Zlatko.’
‘Good. I thought for a moment you were going to kill me.’

‘Nah. I’d assumed you were a strong swimmer. I just wanted to sit here. It’s the only place where
I can think.’

‘How’s your mother? Sorry, I never ask.’

‘Oh, the usual. Dying. It’s funny, I learnt about this from a woman on her deathbed. I really
should keep in the loop. His mother came round to visit, and said his British ex-girlfriend had
pitched up but no one knew much about it, it was one of Zlatko’s schemes. Edin, do you know a
British girl here? There’s a British girl here! It’s the most exciting thing that’s happened for years.’

I laughed. ‘She hasn’t spotted my visits, then?’

‘No, but every time I sleep with you, I imagine she’s dying at that exact moment.’ He smiled.
‘That she’s too weak to reach the bedside table.’ I remembered the time I thought it would be
funny, as Ninp was going to sleep, to say ‘I tell you why I here.’ Looking back, I had no idea
whether talking in broken English helped. But instinctively it felt right to. ‘I killed man [stabbing
motion] in his sleep [two steepled fingers on the side of my head].’ He hadn’t found this funny.

‘That’s quite dark,’ I said.

He giggled. ‘The Croats who disappeared. We think my uncle dumped them here. Maybe if your
scheme works, someone will find the bodies in the lake. They can be buried properly. Christ, I’m
drunk now.’

‘Do you want me to row back?’

‘No, I want to stay here and look at sky until I need a piss. Unless you need?’

‘Nah, I’m fine.’

He leant in to me. ‘We used to hide under bins during the war. We’d put bolts on pieces of string
and try to kill pigeons.’ I couldn’t imagine this man as a child. Whenever I imagined him
sneaking in to watch The Treatment, he was his adult self, smoking a cigarette, even though he
didn’t smoke. The only man in Bosnia who didn’t smoke. Dressed in a leather jacket. He didn’t
wear leather jackets. And as I ashed into the lake, I imagined the ash not floating but sinking, the
bodies coated like the ashtrays The Barman left unemptied. I felt self-conscious now, ashing into
a burial site. So I put my cigarette out on the boat, slipped the stub in my pack. He took the pack
and threw it in the lake. ‘Disgusting habit.’

‘And now here you are, with all your education, and two men who’d hide under bins. We
managed to kill a pigeon once. But we just didn’t know what to do with it. Imagine us looking at
a dead pigeon, wondering how to pluck it. We gave up. We felt bad, we put it in the bin, we went
back to feeling hungry. We’d killed the pigeon for no reason.’

‘I had to deal with a dead pigeon once. It flew into my flat to die.’ Why was I telling him this? It
was so trivial compared to his talk. ‘Maybe the pigeon was your marriage.’

‘Ha ha. You know you can talk about your stuff, don’t you? I get a sense you don’t want to, you
think only we can.’

‘It’s boring and complicated and far away. Do you need to get back to your mother?’

He checked his phone. ‘No, it’s fine. Did I tell you about the time I shot myself in the foot? ‘We’d
borrowed some guns from my uncle. Trying to see who could shoot closest to their feet.’

‘You know the English phrase, right? To shoot yourself in the foot.’

‘I don’t.’

I explained.

‘That’s actually a phrase?’

‘That, my dear, is an actual phrase.’

And because we were laughing so much we both realised we needed a piss. He rowed back to
the shore.
10

I had bought a test. Taken the bus to Zenica. It wasn’t so far away from Luka but it was a town. A
big, industrial town. And every time I saw a man, I wondered if he belonged to the Zenica mafia,
my little Zenica mafia.

It was strange being back in Sarajevo now. I imagined bumping into Nino. ‘Hello, you are back.
Why are you back? I thought you were living in my home village, with a man I introduced you to,
for reasons which are at best opaque.’

And what was at best opaque? His introduction or my going then to Zlatko? I would resolve not
to ask, I would be babbling now. ‘Oh Nino, yes I am, and I will be again. This very evening. I have
returned here to kill our child. It will be straightforward, and I know it’s for the best. I won’t ask
for half the charge, the economics here are skewed!’

Perhaps there was a code of Bosnian honour. I remembered his views on family. So when I
mentioned the child he would take my hand. He would kneel on the street, he would beg me not
to. He would propose. We’d dance back to the bedsit, dervishes on Sniper Alley. There was no
snow now, but he’d have an instinct for unwashed cars. He’d write my name in windscreen dirt.
He’d rub ointment on my belly. Later, when he went to work, I’d put the label in Translate.

Or perhaps he’d insist on coming, on paying. And I would have to say ‘no, no, it is fine. I have
written two thousand words on a new book, a revisionist interpretation of Kafka. It will pay for
the death of this child.’

And he would protest and I would say I am talking figuratively, I have savings after all! I’m just
oddly taken by the equivalence of these words and the death of our child! It feels symbolic,
somehow.’

I remembered a French book. The character was obsessed by a man who had left her. And she
hoped he had given her AIDS, not that he had AIDS necessarily – I think, the book was so long
ago, I couldn’t remember the author or the title. But she hoped this. So something of him
remained in her, a presence, a reminder.

I imagined taking myself back to London, this thing inside me, this piece of him. And I
congratulated myself in a way. Because no part of me wanted this child.

But still I took detours. I walked past his flat. His bar. He wasn’t on shift – of course he wouldn’t
be on shift, I knew that already. But perhaps afterwards I could drink in his bar. And he would
walk in, read in my face what I’d just done, sit behind the counter, write a poem, a eulogy. Then
he would read it out, an impromptu open mic, and the bar would turn to me. My favourite song
would come on. ‘Those were the days my friend.’ I would look melancholy, he would address
this poem to me, to this absence inside me. ‘Once upon a time there was a tavern.’ He would be
crescendoing now, making some sort of point, the audience would be rapt. ‘If by chance I’d see
you in the tavern / We’d smile at each other and we’d say:’

It’s dead now.

But the clock was ticking. I had gone to his bar after I left the American Hospital. And there were
fifteen minutes before he walked through the door, fifteen minutes before I saw him for the first
time since he handed me that poem. I remembered the pigeon, that strange thought to leave it
on his seat. I could have asked for the foetus, tiny as it must have been, perhaps the hospital had
takeaway containers. For this very purpose. The usual, polystyrene things. And I would leave it
on his seat. He would open it, thinking it was the burger he’d just ordered from the place across
the road. Then he would look at this thing, confused by what it was. He’d march across the road,
to the pub which delivered his burgers, he would complain. I hadn’t googled what a foetus so
small would look like, I imagined a smear of ketchup, a grisly bit of meat. He would shout and
shout, until a waiter, whose wife had miscarried quite recently, would come and intervene. ‘This
is a dead child.’ He’d march back across the road, the dead child still in polystyrene, angry,
unsure what to do.

He’d ask round the bar if I’d be here, or perhaps by now there would be many options. A list of
names, a memorial wall. Then in the dog would trot, the dog who was named for him, and he’d
shake his head and wonder why no one behaved sensibly after break-ups. But by now, the dog
would have smelled the flesh, the dog would have rushed up to him, knocked the polystyrene
from his hand, eaten the contents in a mouthful. And Nino would push from his mind what had
happened, sighed, remembered the first night we’d met, when he’d tripped over the small dog,
fallen into this one, and he would sigh and sigh and sigh, because how could he have been so
stupid, not to realise how strange and cold I was, how drunk, how damaged. He would fetch a
mop, the mop he’d used that first night, and he would wipe the floor where Zappa had eaten his
child, then go back to his life.

‘Emmie!’

It was the other barman, chasing me down the street.

‘You haven’t paid.’

‘Oh, I’m terribly sorry. Sorry, a lot on my mind. In Britain we pay for drinks when we order. I’m
so sorry, I didn’t to mean to run away.’ I paid for the rakia and ran for the bus.
11

‘I have brought Elma to you,’ said Zlatko.

Elma! Elma whom Nino stole. I wondered who would be prettier, me or her. Back in The Old
World, I wouldn’t have cared, would have judged anyone who did. But Nino, oh Nino, you made
me a shop window.

It wasn’t Elma, or if it was she had aged terribly. She looked seventy, with a stoop or even a
hunch.

‘Elma has remembered seeing the monster. I thought I would surprise you.’ Zlatko was beaming
with pride. Well good, I thought. We’re changing people’s memories. They’re believing outright
lies. How very ethical of you, Emmie. But I, too, felt an odd sense of pride.

She had brought her grandson to translate, and though my landlord was protesting, of course he
should be the one to, I insisted this grandson stayed. ‘So it isn’t a wasted journey,’ I said to
Zlatko. ‘He’ll enjoy it. I can’t imagine he gets the chance to talk English very often.’ And Zlatko
agreed, seeming not to understand I had an agenda here. I did not want his embellishments. I
wanted some element of control.

Mirna brought the grandson a glass of Fanta with a straw. Then a carafe of rakia, glasses for
Zlatko and me. Oh, I liked this place, how it suited me. ‘It was in the nineteen seventies,’ said the
grandson, who was spotty and gauche. ‘One day, she had gone to see my dead grandfather,
down by the water. He was a man who caught the fish. She pointed at something in the lake, a
head and a neck, but no one else had seen. She kept shouting Didn’t you see that, how did you
miss that? but they had seen nothing and she believed not they could have seen nothing. To her
so clear.’ Did Elma really believe this? Had she told no one else before? The husband was dead, I
couldn’t ask him if he remembered her seeing something no one else had. And even if the other
men were still alive, they would be so old now, hazy on their breakfast, let alone a woman
shrieking back in Tito’s time.

The grandson was choking now, and Zlatko explained that he had asthma. I indulged myself
with the thought this woman was The Elma, pictured first Edin then Nino stripping off her veil,
her thin, greying hair, her corrugated neck.

I motioned to Zlatko that I wanted a cigarette, and he should want one too. The choking boy was
an excuse to go outside.

‘He will not die,’ said Zlatko. It sounded oddly sinister.

‘But I need to ask you, Zlatko, what shall we… do with this new information?’
‘Well we shall tell everyone. We shall cry to the town, as you say. And we will put it on our
website.’

The website, yes. I had asked a friend to create a website, London was useful that way. A forum
for people to post pictures of the monster, share their experiences. Of course no one posted
there. But Zlatko was proud of this website.

‘Okay, we’ll ask the grandson to post it on the website?’

‘Yes. I think this will make all the difference,’ said Zlatko. And back into the breach we went.

The boy had stopped his coughing, more Fanta had been produced. While no one else was
looking I gestured did the boy want some rakia, and he did. I slipped mine in his glass.

‘Can she tell us more about her sighting? More detail, perhaps.’

The woman and her grandson conferred.

‘She has problems with her eyes now, cataracts, but back then she could see well.’

Zlatko was shaking his head, an I Told You So reproach.

‘No, not her sight. The time she saw the monster. If she can tell us more about that day. About
what the monster looked like, how big it was, the effect it had on the water, about how it made
her feel.’ How it made her feel. Christ, just listen to yourself.

‘It was a long time ago,’ the grandson began. ‘And entirely fictitious,’ I thought.

But no, there was someone else at the door now, and what a surprise it was. It was Edin with a
man his age, a man I found attractive. After a decade in London, fancying nothing and no one,
what was happening here? There were welcomes I did not understand. I wondered briefly
whether, at a formative point in my sexual development, the BBC had aired a documentary
about rural Bosnia. Perhaps teen delinquency in rural Bosnia. In this very village. Nino in court
for the burglary, Edin shooting himself in the foot. And perhaps this man, doing whatever it was
he did after years of senseless war.

But who was the man? And what was Edin doing here? I didn’t realise he was on dropping in
terms with Zlatko. He hadn’t come to the party.

There were welcomes I did not understand. And then Edin, with a strange look in his eyes.
‘Emmie, remember I told you about a physicist guy? The currents in the lake.’

‘Yes.’
‘This is the physicist. He’s seen your monster too.’ And then as everyone turned to fawn over the
physicist, one of Bosnia’s great and good, Edin mimed shooting himself in the head and went for
the flask of rakia.

The physicist held out his hand.

‘I have a name, Selim, I’m not just the physicist guy.’

‘Emmie. I was told the story. I mean, the one about the current.’

‘Yes, and now we will hear another one.’ The grandson was looking anguished now, as though
he’d been upstaged. And Elma, yes Elma looked concerned too. Were these people competing
with their sightings? Perhaps I should say something to mollify our first interviewees. But no!
I’d thought of something now. Think, Emmie, think! The boy from the museum, the jam which
never rained from the ceiling of The Bar. We had to film these people talking! So I asked the
physicist whether he had an iPhone and he looked at me as though I was strange. Of course he
did, and why the hell didn’t I? What with my passport.

‘She threw her phone in the river,’ Edin said. ‘She thinks she killed a duck.’

‘It’s a lake,’ said the physicist.

‘No, back in Sarajevo. Don’t listen to him, I didn’t kill a duck.’

The physicist passed me his iPhone and caught his reflection in the dresser, then ruffled up his
hair. I was beginning to dislike the man, maybe I should throw the phone at this ruffling thing,
he could be my duck. What was he doing going along with this? This man must be capable of
critical thought. I remembered a man in Sarajevo, a friend of a friend. I’d asked him what he did
and he’d said ‘nothing serious’ and then I’d asked what was this not very serious job. He said
‘I’m a nuclear physicist’ and I was taken aback by this strange land, where nuclear physics
wasn’t taken seriously. I’d burst out laughing, he’d asked me what was funny, and I said it was
rather worrying if nuclear physicists didn’t take their jobs seriously. But this man had no
humour, and patiently explained that Bosnia didn’t have a nuclear programme, so his training
was as good as wasted, all he had to do here was test radiation levels on incoming meat. But the
job had its perks, sometimes after they’d tested the meat, they’d spit roast it. Perhaps the man in
front of me wasn’t a very serious physicist, couldn’t tell a monster from a fish.

He had stopped ruffling now and I motioned for him to sit. He removed the doilie from the back
of his chair and I replaced it. This should look authentic.

‘Should I speak in Bosnian or English?’ and before Zlatko could say he would translate, I said
both, we would lead with Bosnian.
‘But no!’ said the grandson, he had homework to do, and his throat was closing up. Could they
not go first. The physicist looked peeved and Edin told him to stop being a dick, and yes of
course, I said, the boy and his Elma could go first. Perhaps Edin wanted to spend more time with
his geriatric lost love.

The woman spoke in Bosnian, haltingly. The boy said he would talk now, there was no need for
the woman to talk again, pausing between each sentence but, no, I wanted her to talk again, for
this to look authentic. Of course the story would change, it always changed. ‘But remember what
I said before,’ I told the boy. He was looking drunk now, he’d gone bright red and, oh, oh no, he
was hiccupping, which was triggering more fighting for breath, and for a second I thought Edin,
looming behind him, was about to perform a Heimlich manoeuvre.

‘Is he okay?’ Zlatko asked, and I couldn’t say ‘I gave him my cup of rakia, you fill very large cups,’
so I said ‘I think he is. He’s just affected by the emotion of his grandma’s tale.’

So Mirna bought him some tissues and I saw him gulping, and Elma insisted on taking him
home. I turned to the physicist. Well, in the absence of other options, let’s start with you.

‘When I was a boy, the war broke out. There was no food here, this part of the country was
officially a starvation zone. All we really had to eat was fish from the lake. And, to make them
easier to catch, we often ran currents into the lake. Electrical currents. I didn’t realise electricity
and water didn’t mix, I waded in holding a live current.’

But I know this already, I thought. How does it relate to this monster of mine?

‘Time fell apart. I realised I was outside my normal experience, but it wasn’t until I felt the
needles that I realised something was wrong. Yes, the needles. There were needles everywhere,
stabbing my skin. I was being electrocuted. I came round in hospital two days later. I had
terrible burns.’

He didn’t look burned. But then I realised he’d just waded, and he wasn’t wearing shorts. What
horror lay beneath that denim?

‘The first words, when I came round were “I saw something”. Yes, I had seen something. And I
had felt its presence.’

What was this man up to, I wondered. This was not proof. He was a physicist, he should know
about proof. The monster wasn’t real. In the same way the needles weren’t. And then I
remembered what I’d read about Medjugorje. Because of the geography of the place, it got very
hot. Fifty degrees in the summer. Of course people are susceptible to fainting in this heat. To
hallucinations. Impressionable people, people who want to see Our Lady. But the people who
believed in Medjugorje would never factor this in. So perhaps The Physicist’s account could
work after all. The first time Edin told me the story of how his friend reacted, how he’d become
a physicist, I’d been oddly moved. The story was heart-warming, it was uplifting. I remembered
the faces of my friends in London. When I told them that after thirty years of being cold, of never
loving anyone, I’d had a romantic awakening. The looks on their faces were lovely. The story of
the currents, of the burns, of the redemption. Well, this could be lovely too. Who wouldn’t trust
this man who was an authority, this man who’d seen it too?

When the filming finished, Edin suggested the three of us went for a drink.

‘What are you doing here? In Luka. I don’t understand, it’s illogical.’ Well this is a bit unexpected,
dear Selim. Your sudden talk of logic.

‘I wanted a little rest and relaxation.’

Edin was clearly pleased with himself. He’d engineered something I didn’t understand, or was
he looking pleased with himself for a different reason? Well, I was just about to find out. The
physicist was going to the loo. Edin was leaning in, confidentially.

‘So how was Sarajevo?’

‘Good.’

‘And your interview? It was with Srdan Zahirovic, you said? The sevdah singer’

‘Yeah, he was interesting. I should have read up more about sevdah, before I went. There were
some things I didn’t understand.’

‘You just don’t realise, do you?’

‘Realise what?’

‘I haven’t always been this way. The strange village man.’ He made jazz hands. I pictured the
man from yesterday, the white gloves on his hands. That was how they did jazz hands, in the
days of silent film. With white gloves. ‘I know people. I used to work in music. I mentioned you
to Srdan. He’d never heard of you. He definitely didn’t meet you yesterday.’

I felt weary now. ‘No, I was aborting a child. Don’t worry, it was Nino’s.’

‘Christ.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t say it was particularly pleasant.’

‘No, I mean you’re so glib. But sorry, I thought your…’ Air quotes now. ‘… secret mission was
something to do with the monster.’
Then this man, this man accusing me of being glib. He burst out laughing.

‘I would have come with you, you know? It wouldn’t have been the first time I’d taken a girl to
Sarajevo for that reason.’

‘How very Don Juan. Who’s being glib now?’

‘Oh, I didn’t mean mine. I meant his.’

‘Christ. Elma?’

‘No, this girl called Irma. We… Don’t worry, I didn’t have a thing with her too. She was just a
friend and I’m… relatively competent. We decided Nino wouldn’t necessarily… be good in that
sort of situation.’

The Physicist was back now.

‘What are you talking about?’

I said ‘sevdah’ and he said ‘death’ and Selim said ‘I suppose there’s a lot in sevdah about death’
then he began explaining Schrodinger’s cat. The man could only talk about physics. And I began
thinking of the child, thinking of the night before. When I’d come back, I hadn’t felt well at all.
Mirna had noticed. I remembered the first time I’d come to Luka, the day I’d hidden in the
basement. Whining to a duck that his parents talked to me too much, talked to me in a language
I did not understand. And now there I was, telling Mirna everything, telling her because she
could not, did not understand. Perhaps, if I hadn’t done that, hadn’t told Edin, it would be
Schrodinger’s child. Existing only in my mind, in a medical record I would never see, a payment
on my card, a bill I could shred, an essay in a magazine, but I could forget that link, I could
remember a false version, why I pitched to write about Kafka. Because I was an outsider in a
village, ignorant to my purpose. And I would never break into the hospital, never seize the
record, I wouldn’t know how to begin, so it would only exist in my mind, and I was good at
forgetting. I remembered how much of my childhood I’d forgotten. I was good at this. But now
I’d talked and this meant the child really had existed, couldn’t live in the Physicist’s little box.
12

We were driving to Jacje. Zlatko and his brother had some business there. I hadn’t told them I’d
been to Jacje eight years before. That I had seen the waterfalls before. That I didn’t care for
water features. No oh no, never had. Take me to Niagara Falls and still I’ll smile and nod. Those
sounded like lyrics. Maybe I would write a song about my relationship with water features.

‘You will love Jacje,’ said Zlatko’s brother.

‘I’m sure I will.’

‘My daughter told me you were wonderful.’

‘I thought she was wonderful too.’

The day before, Zlatko had sent me to his sister-in-law. I was always being sent places. And
everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go. All those years in London being bolshy,
being strong. I’d read in a book that women should. And now I was trotting around the village, a
little lamb.

A young woman came into the room. She was beautiful. She hadn’t come to the party.

‘Hello, I’m Emmie.’

‘Jasna,’ she said.

‘This my daughter,’ said Zlatko’s sister-in-law. I could never remember her name. ‘She’s going to
London. Zlatko said you can teach her how be British.’

‘But first I make tea,’ said Jasna. ‘You can test my tea, teach me how to improve it.’ Fucking
Zlatko. First the monster. And now I seemed to be running a finishing school. I didn’t even drink
tea.

‘How did you get those bruises?’ I asked when Jasna was in the kitchen.

‘A cow.’

Well that was novel, my mother had never blamed a cow.

‘The cow attacked you?’

‘Yes, it ran at me.’

‘Which field were you in? I will avoid it.’

And then a note of panic. ‘By the lake.’ Well, that narrowed it down.
Jasna returned. She was standing very straight and for a moment I wanted to put a book on her
head, one of the seven hundred books. Or maybe all of them, a tower on the poor girl’s head. ‘But
no,’ my friend and his mother would cry, ‘that is not why we did not throw the books on the fire,
that is not why we spent three years cold.’ I realised I hadn’t commented on her tea.

‘This is perfect. So, Jasna, what are you going to be doing in London?’

Without letting her daughter speak, her mother said ‘she will be an au pair for good family, a
good Bosnian family.’

‘Well, that’s lovely. What would you like to know about Britain?’ And she said she wanted to
know how to make money, and how to buy a house, and how to meet a man. I’d chuckled that
she’d thought I’d know how, made my excuses after half an hour. Zlatko was in the garden when
I came back.

‘You like British culture, British values,’ I’d said. ‘Don’t you?’

‘But of course. I love the British values.’

‘Let’s bring them to the village then, shall we?’

‘Of course, perhaps you can teach Mirna how to cook a roast.’

‘No, I mean tell your brother to stop hitting his wife.’

And now we were approaching the town. I don’t know why I lied that I’d never been there
before. But it was good to be leaving Luka, it made a change. I remembered trying to leave Edin
the night the man tried to steal my notebooks. And he told me to stay, I made a change. I
certainly made a change.

Zlatko and his brother had some business in the town, but they pointed me in the direction of
the waterfalls. And as soon as they were out of sight, I went to a café and ordered wine. I had a
view of the waterfalls, I would let myself off on a technicality. I remembered the first night I’d
spent in The Bedsit. How I’d woken up dribbling on him. And instead of embarrassment, an
unencumbered sense of peace. I imagined the waterfalls as my saliva, a giant model of him
floating in the river below. A giant model of my face tethered to the rocks. Then I wondered
whether I’d hit on the reason I missed this man so much. In every other relationship, I’d tire of
the things men would say. But with him, I couldn’t have that problem. Even if what came from
the computer was mad or trite, I could blame it on faceless engineer in San Francisco.

And then I burst out laughing. There was something I’d forgotten, something key. The last time
I’d been in Jacje had been New Year’s Eve. My friend and I had gone to a barn playing turbofolk.
Of course our presence there was notable. No sir, I was never where I should have been. ‘But
what are you doing here, two German girls, in Jacje. Of all evenings, on New Year’s Eve! Did we
know it was New Year’s Eve? Yes, we did, we had basic awareness of the calendar. Of how time
works! Day follows endless day. And then we die! A joke from an ex’s stand-up routine. Yes, I
can time travel. In a purely linear, chronological way.

The friend had been unhappy in her relationship. They’d been going out for years. Later she
explained it in terms of time. That she’d put so much time into being wrong about this man, if
she acknowledged she’d been wrong, she’d have to write this time off. So instead of cutting her
losses, she would keep on going, not in the hope he would change but in the hope her awareness
of how wrong she’d been would diminish.

So she was unhappy enough to kiss a man she’d found in a barn in Jacje. But not unhappy
enough to renege on this investment, on all this time. She’d told the first man we met in the barn
that we were German, her German was fluent, mine so bad they must have wondered what I
was, a German girl who couldn’t speak German. And I went along with it because it was funny, it
was a good prank, making me spend New Year’s Eve talking a language I couldn’t stand.
Everyone wondering what was wrong with me. But eventually I tired of this, I’d exhausted third
language speak. I said to the man who had unofficially become our guide that we were lying, we
were English. ‘Why did she do that?’ Our guide was hurt. ‘Why did you go along with that?’ I
explained it was a joke, muttered British humour.

Then the questions intensified. But why are you here in Jacje, in this barn, you could be in Fabric
or The Ministry of Sound. Yes, they had heard of Fabric and The Ministry of Sound. They were
world travellers, they were cosmopolitan. They hadn’t been, but they’d been to Croatia, they’d
been to a festival on the coast. They’d drunk beer, they’d taken ecstasy.

I’d only been to Fabric once. They looked at me agog, how could I not have been there more?
When it was close by. And I pictured them, so fixated on Fabric they would walk there, walk
across Europe, pilgrims with glo sticks, refugees from bad beats.

And now, in English, we talked properly, me expressing my views in quick, spirited talk. He
asked if we could go back to German, he preferred me in German, I was nicer there. Why had I
not remembered this before? Maybe on some level I had. But no, the memory got better. It gave
more.

This man had tired of talking to me. But he felt sorry for me still, this girl who could have been in
Fabric, The Ministry of Sound. And instead had been abandoned by her friend who was kissing,
still kissing in the corner. I told him I didn’t mind at all. Usually, I was the drunk one, she would
have to deal with me, listen to my rants, call cabs, prop me up. It was only fair she took a turn,
she’d been lovely all my life. But still he wanted to help, he wanted to entertain me. He knew I
didn’t have a boyfriend, Christ knows why I hadn’t lied, here in this barn of men. So he said ‘with
your passport, your London’ – my London, as though it ever belonged to me – I could have any
man in the room. I was to pick one, which did I like best? And I refused, I wouldn’t engage with
this.

But eventually the idea began to tickle me, it was somehow oddly feminist, that with my
passport I could adopt the prerogative of men. I could watch and pick, pursue without being
pursued. The man I picked, he looked like an artist. My new friend laughed and laughed at the
man I’d picked. He was a farmer, he said, they laughed at him for being backwards. And when he
took this man to me, to be presented, it was like a ceremony. Everyone turned and watched,
even my friend came up for air. ‘Hello,’ I said, then tried to talk in English but he didn’t
understand. I tried in German, still no. Most people in this barn spoke English, German too. But
he couldn’t, he was a farmer. This is silly, I said, we can’t talk. Then, not knowing what to do, I
dismissed him in a way which seemed curt. My guide had laughed, we didn’t have to talk, talking
was not the point, and how silly, how silly this seemed.

Eight years before I had known how to live. I had put my foot down. What had I lost in these
years? Because I went along with it, that Saturday night in Sarajevo.

And then the thought: despite my passport, despite my London, despite all the eyes on me in
that barn, I couldn’t keep the man I wanted. I imagined telling this story to a racist back home. I
didn’t have a racist uncle, I didn’t have an uncle of any kind, but I was sure I could find one. Get
my recreation friend to cast one. This racist uncle would stare in shock. A double whammy, a
Muslim and from the East. And still I couldn’t keep him. There must be something very wrong
with me. I would then mention to this uncle that I was living in Bosnia illegally, an alien here, a
refugee, I had used up the allotted three months in six. Oh, this country’s new visa regime. I
remembered reading about a performance artist. He was Italian, and he swam from Italy to
Albania, entering it illegally, going the other way, Italy with its hordes of Albanians, but there he
was, trying to make a point about immigration. I couldn’t remember what the point was. He was
arrested and returned, that was all I remembered. I would tell this story to the racist uncle, and
he would tell me The Turner Prize was a pile of shite, that a five year old could do better than
most of the things I liked. And as I stared at him, I would will him to choke on his chips.

It was almost time to meet Zlatko. I read the Jacje Top Attractions on TripAdvisor, so I could give
him an account. But as I went to pay I realised he was already in my eyeline. A man was pushing
him against a wall, and now his brother was intervening, and then a van parked in front of them
and I couldn’t see the rest.
13

I didn’t know why I kept coming to the shed. I thought of the friend who visited me in Sarajevo,
her insistence on going to the sniper houses on Trebevic, these now grafittied shells. She’d
wanted to get pictures of the graffiti, pictures fit for Instagram, fit for likes.

I had seen an exhibition once, photos of sniper houses. Serb positions on the frontline, before
the city tripped down the hills, villas at strange angles like flightless birds. The photos took me
by surprise – they weren’t of guns and faces. Not the view from the outside, eyes and barrels
poking out. They were of interiors. What the snipers were doing between their shifts. Drinking
coffee, playing cards. Being a sniper must require a lot of concentration, I’d never thought of that
before. I imagined them saying goodbye to their colleagues of an evening, and what was for
dinner, what would they watch, were their wives enjoying the war? Was there still television on
their side, a potential choice of food? There was no fighting there, just in Sarajevo, suspended
below the mountains. A portrait of the town as sitting duck.

Then I remembered the day I’d returned to Sarajevo, the way his face poked from the
doorframe, the smirk on his face. Karadzic, the man who’d led the onslaught, he’d been a poet
too. People said one of the things which caused the Siege – or at least made it so bad, and I
wondered now, at the glibness of this bad – was the warlord’s rejection by Sarajevo’s poets. He
was a provincial, they thought, he was no good. And I wondered what would have happened if
the War had come later, whether Nino would enact the same revenge.

By that point he’d have published the Van Gogh poem in a journal. The break-up one too. And he
would recall the criticism inflicted on these poems, he’d learned his reviews by heart. He would
have gone to bed weeping one evening, the lines catching, catching on his heart.

‘These poems are callow and trite.’

Tak. Adis Susjnar, twenty-nine, an engineer. Down on Sniper Alley.

‘It was never clear why he wanted to dance naked with Van Gogh.’

Tak. Enida Asotic, 47, a widow as long as her son lived. Down on the street by the river.

‘His intentions in the break-up poem are muddled. It would not have been obvious to the
recipient until too late in the poem. This device does not seem to be intentional.’

Tak. Haris Hadzic, 52, a Bosnian army chief, back for his first leave in weeks. Down in the water
queue. His son had wanted to kill himself before the war. Afterwards he did. He was haunted by
the fact his father hadn’t let him go for water that morning. His father, who wanted to live.
But no, Nino was a kind man, he didn’t deserve these thoughts. I sat down, raked my fingers
through the dirt, wondered the worst thing that happened on this ground. The possibility of a
hierarchy. Out of all the war stories I’d heard, there was one I came back to. Serb fighters had
come to cleanse a village. I didn’t know where. They had come to cleanse the village, but first
they would torture and rape. Of course they would torture and rape. And in between the torture
and the rape, they would hit on a new idea. They would take a woman’s newborn. And they
would put it in her oven. They would turn the oven to full, restrain the woman so she faced it.
They would, an hour or so later, return the baby, make her hold him. I remembered reading a
version of this in a history book – or was it an article? I couldn’t remember the detail. Only the
words baby and oven and Serbs. I wondered how much had been embellished by the man in
Sarajevo, whether the woman had held her charred boy. Or if the story was worse, he’d wanted
to spare me. There was an interlude while the baby was cooking. They’d all raped her. And I
remembered the phrase a bun in the oven, wondered if the phrase existed here, if she ever
thought of that. Then chastised myself for these words, for thinking just of words.

But as far as I knew this woman had lost one child. The woman in Srebrenica had lost two more.
And her husband and her father. I didn’t know how many other men. So why was my main pity
for the woman with the baby? Was I being mawkish? But no, she’d gone mad, I’d heard this from
my friend in Sarajevo. She’d gone crazed, there was something relating to a fire, had she tried to
jump into a fire? Or had I made that up, because it fitted? And I had gone mad too. I was here in a
village, making up a monster. When nothing much had happened to me. Madness was not the
way of keeping these scores.
14

‘You’ve got mail!’ Zlatko announced. I teased him for knowing this film, for cheating on his
dramas. ‘Is it what I think it is?’

And yes, dear Zlatko, it was. I motioned for him to open the package. He ran his fingers over the
tarnished cover, turned the yellowed pages one by one. And when he found the pages we’d
inserted, he looked at me in awe.

I’d been looking in his library one day when I found a little pamphlet. So Bosnia hadn’t lost all its
old books in the fire. Some weren’t ash on the scalps of Sarajevans.

‘What is this?’ I’d asked that day.

‘It is only a small book. About long gone things.’

But I understood the illustrations. It was about the tobacco smugglers in the first half of the old
century. The tobacco in this region was the best in Bosnia. I’d watched a documentary about the
smugglers, recreations of men trudging through the snow, their body weight on their backs.
They’d walk hundreds of miles to the main towns, the government paid so little for the
collectivised crop, this was their only real option. But they had to take back routes so policemen
didn’t catch them. Walk through forests and mountains, over frozen lakes. I thought back to
Nino, to the drugs he dealt.

‘It’s about tobacco smuggling. I watched a film about it, in Sarajevo.’

‘I do not understand why this interests you. It is just something my father did. He never enjoyed
it.’ As though enjoyment were the point. ‘Sometimes as a child I would ask him to tell me stories,
for a time I found it exciting, the idea of walking the country, smuggling things. But no, it was
just long and hard.’

I looked at my hands. They had never seen work or cold. I supposed I’d had some workplace
injuries. Sometimes, when I’d read a book before publication, it would be sent in manuscript
form. Unbound pages. And sometimes I’d get paper cuts.

‘But Emmie, I do not understand your meaning, I do not understand what you want with this
book.’

Well Zlatko, one of my friends has a strange profession. He’s a bookbinder, which is not strange
in itself. But he specialises in making old books from scratch. Props for films and plays, books
which have the illusion of age. And though there is often nothing printed on the pages, or
perhaps a page or two, we could ask him to do something unusual. We could ask him to print a
new copy of this book. And it wouldn’t just have all the pages. It would have two more.
‘I still do not follow your meaning.’ But Zlatko, I thought. It’s just like your sketch.

It took a long time, but I managed to explain. We would update the book, add two more pages.
The tobacco smugglers feared the monster. I would write about an encounter with the monster,
how the smugglers would take detours to avoid the lake. He would translate them. We would
scan the pages to my friend, and he would reproduce them. There was software for this now –
and I laughed at the phrase, there is software for this now. Those gruel-thin days stabbing into
Google Translate. They hadn’t invested much in their Bosnian service. Oh, the nonsense that
came out. Once I typed something perfectly normal. It came back ‘And then I was burned down
by ducks.’ I told a friend who worked for Google, she didn’t work in the Translate department
but Google had a very open policy with internal feedback. So she told the people who ran the
Balkan section that they ‘had ruined a perfectly good relationship.’ Which wasn’t exactly true.
What would we have done before that? Would we even have tried? Perhaps I could pitch a piece
about technology and love.

But no, Zlatko was looking at me expectantly, and I explained my friend could scan the pages
and then reproduce the font in our new section. There was typesetting software for this now.

‘And next, what happens next?’ He looked uncertain.

Well, the British girl was interested in the tobacco smugglers. She was thinking she could maybe
write about them. So The British Girl would do some research. The British Girl would find the
book. The British girl would sit with Zlatko and ask him to translate it. And they would find a
mention of the monster.

Zlatko’s eyes widened. ‘You are a genius.’

And now, a visit from the postman. A visit which meant that I was, beyond a shadow of doubt, a
forger. An actual forger.

‘I’m good at these things,’ a friend in Sarajevo once told me. He had stopped to join me for a
drink in the Bar, he was middle-aged and Belgian. He smoked thirty unfiltered cigarettes a day.
He’d almost died of throat cancer. He’d returned to Belgium for treatment, and of course the
doctor had told him to stop. He really had to stop. But The Belgian didn’t believe the cancer was
linked to his smoking. So he’d gone to a doctor, a Bosnian doctor on his return. It was a fourth or
fifth opinion. And no, the Bosnian man had said, your cancer has nothing to do with this tar.

‘I wish I’d come here sooner,’ he said, the next rollie coming to his lips.

I thought I’d misremembered. ‘I thought you came in 96, when did you come here?’

‘I did. I came in 96.’

I was fumbling now. ‘So I don’t understand. You wish you’d come here sooner?’

‘Oh, I’d have been fine during the Siege. I’m good at these things.’

I almost laughed. ‘But what do you mean by “these things”’?

‘Well, the things you have to do in a Siege. I’d be good at those, I’d have been fine. I wouldn’t
have lost a leg or anything.’

I said I still didn’t understand. That even if he’d emerged unscathed – from a physical point of
view – he would have seen things he didn’t want to see. Lived that fear and hunger. Seen friends
killed. And even if he’d escaped without PTSD, without clinical PTSD – he couldn’t have
dismissed this as something he ‘was good at.’ He was the son of Belgian industrialists, feted
ones, and when I asked what would have prepared him for ‘these things’ he told me he’d been
disinherited. He’d known suffering as a young man. He repeated he knew ‘how to deal with
these things.’

I’d ridiculed this man to my friends. But no, perhaps this was me. A woman who believed she
could deal with something big and unspecified. On the basis of nothing at all. Zlatko was still
holding the forgery, he was so moved he could barely speak. And then he took the original from
his shelf. He was clearly wondering what to do with it.

‘And now we have this book, do we need the old one?’

I hesitated to think of the book in his bin or perhaps in his shredder. ‘Zlatko, this is not my call to
make. It is an old book, it belonged to your father. It was about what your father did. You should
think carefully before you throw it away.’

He smiled and then he winked. ‘But now this book is not correct. It would be wrong to keep such
lies.’ And I thought back to my friend in Sarajevo, to seven hundred books escaping the fire. How
much energy would they have produced, how many joules, how many Kilowatt hours? How
much would this pamphlet produce, if we burnt it in the fire? And, as though Zlatko was reading
my mind, he turned to the fire. No, I thought, we shouldn’t do this.

‘But Zlatko, we’ve talked about this before. Other people may have this book. It makes better
sense if there are two editions. You can say you have both editions. That one edition was made
without the chapter on the monster. Because back then, people feared the monster. Or…
something.’

But Zlatko’s eyes were gleaming. ‘I think we should throw the book on the fire.’ I thought of the
last time I had started a fire. In Nino’s fringe. Well that, at least, produced something. I looked at
Zlatko and said ‘yes, let’s burn the book.’ So we did.
15

I tried to resist the thought the room smelled of death. It was too obvious, surely I could have
found something else to think. But it did and, as a place where a woman lay dying, it had the
right to. I remembered the time I’d been to Las Vegas, drunkenly saying to my friend not only
was the place terrible, it became more terrible in the sense every thought on its blank horror
had been thought before. He corrected me to written. ‘Or said,’ I said. I’d read or heard
everything I’d been thinking, and this made it worse. My friend had been in love with me for a
long time, and mixed in this friendship was a sense of hatred. ‘You just can’t cope without
having your own take on stuff, can you?’ No sir, I could not.

It was like the room of an old Scottish neighbour, all florals and doilies. Doilies. I could almost
taste the dust on that word. ‘Hello, I’m Emily.’ There was nothing else to say.

I held her hand and motioned as to whether I could sit on the bed. He nodded. I put my hand in
her thin and greasy hair. A strange thing had happened these past few months. I had become
tactile, the sort of person who touched and held. Not just reluctantly, overcoming her
Britishness, but in situations where it wasn’t expected or even appropriate. I remembered
sitting one day on that banquette. Nino was at work. I was wondering where this new
tenderness had come from. Then the phrase went through my head, ‘he’s taught me the
vocabulary’. I laughed so much at the thought. But perhaps it wasn’t just Nino, perhaps it had
come before. From the hand of the woman on the Visoko bus.

I had judged that man so much, the man who invented the pyramids. But at least there was
something there, something solid. Not just an absence in a lake. At least he had his pointy hills.

I kissed his mother on the cheek. He looked terribly surprised. She murmured in Bosnian.

‘She says a girl like you…’

He was laughing now. ‘A girl like you shouldn’t be in a village like this. But also, everyone loved
him.’

‘Zlatko?’

‘No, the obvious.’

I had no idea how he could understand these words, they were so guttural and soft. Like a death
rattle. If it wasn’t so bloody obvious.

‘And often she wished he was her son instead!’ He giggled.

I sat and held her. She had tired herself out, expressing her wish that her son was my ex.
Would I ever have this scene with my mother? She was old now, older than the woman here.
One night a friend and I decided we had to sort out our mother issues. Once and for all, we’d
said. So we’d gone to a bar famous for its vodka martinis and had a talk. The deciding question,
or so we thought: ‘if she died tomorrow, would you regret not talking now?’

He was motioning I should sit on the floor, outside her eyeline. He poured me a teacup.

She began to speak again.

‘She’s talking about the monster. A visitor mentioned it to her. She says some of the fishermen
she knew died. There was no reason for them to die. They could swim, they were experienced
fishermen. There was always something odd about the lake. She remembers her mother telling
her when she was young. To be careful by the lake.’

And yes, this village was poor. But not as poor as the town with the pyramids. Visoko had
always relied on industry, the factories were destroyed by the war. They could never be
resurrected, those hulking shells of things, there was no demand. But surely this wasn’t what I
was trying to do here? I imagined myself in the dock, my lips flapping, the mouth of a fish.
Mi’lord, I was only trying to help the local economy. The sound of someone mumbling
underwater. Perhaps I’d invent a more grandiose excuse. That I was trying to atone, for the fact
we sat back and watched. While people who were now my friends ducked and fought. I thought
back to Nino. That he had brought me here, and here I still was, my British wages poured into
glasses, stubbed in messy ashtrays. And then the gaggle of French girls who loved him. Part of
me suspected that was why they stayed, to sit in his bar and flirt. I imagined a chart, Bosnia’s
sources of foreign income. It began with their main export, gravel. Then their second biggest,
sand. In third place, The Peculiar Charms of Nino Tahirović. ‘Tell her I’m very sorry about the
fishermen.’

‘She says she understands.’ He rolled his eyes. She kept on talking and he kept translating her
halting words. ‘Even when he was stealing, he would steal for the poorest family in the village.
He would steal the baker’s bread, but the baker’s family was richer than this family, they had six
children and the father had been killed in the war. Their mother had gone mad with grief. She
could no longer provide for the family or cook, and he would leave fresh bread on their doorstep
every day. The mother didn’t understand and thought it was an act of Allah. Even when they
were convicted, she thought it was an act of Allah.’

I wondered which family this was, whether I had walked past them on the street. Or whether
they’d all fled, perhaps to Sarajevo. And Nino would lie when he said he was going to hand in the
takings at the end of the night. Instead, when he’d run up the stairs to the flat I never entered,
he’d put bread in their mouths like Communion wafer.
‘By the way, she’s saying son, son, oh my son. I don’t know which one.’

‘You only have a sister?’

‘Haven’t you been listening?’ He giggled.

I wanted to comfort him, but my main feeling was being short-changed. His very mother was
saying these things. How could I be expected to take this man seriously, to think this was good,
this was nice, we had a language, when his dying mother wanted Nino as her son? It was a
travesty, an injustice. I hiccupped. I’d found the one person I liked. I’d fucked it up. And now I
was in conniptions. Was I in conniptions? It was something my mother used to say. I’m in
conniptions! It sounded like a foot disease. She was always at the chiropodist and she’d come
back with her pills for her conniptions! But no, they were for her corns.

‘She’s wondering if you’re okay.’

‘Yes… I just have the hiccups.’

‘Oh dear.’ He shook his head. ‘Her uncle’s cousin died in the lake, she says, and she remembers
his friend seeing something… I guess the best translation is… elongated.’

The woman motioned for me to stand up. And then, when I sat on the bed beside her, she took
my head and put it to her breast. Was it the diseased one? Or perhaps they both were. I had
never asked where the cancer was.

The year before, a man I was sleeping with told me a story. He’d had a one-night stand with a
girl, and thought he’d felt a large lump in her breast. But they’d been drunk, they’d passed out
before he had the courage to tell her. She’d left the next morning before he woke up. He couldn’t
remember her name. And now he lived in fear there was a woman in London with breast cancer
but she didn’t know and only he did. He could have told her but he hadn’t. She was too young for
screening, so she may well have to have the breast removed, or she may have to die. ‘She may
have to die.’

‘But what did you know about the girl?’ I’d asked the man in London.

‘Only the pub where we’d met. I kept going there to work, kept dragging mates there on
Saturday nights. We’d met on a Saturday night. It was really out of the way for everyone. I never
saw her again.’

I was still pressed against this dying woman. I could feel her kindness on my skin.

‘She’s saying she understands.’

I mouthed What does she understand? And he didn’t know. It could have been why I was
making up a monster. It could been how the fisherman died. It could have been why I was here.
It could have been who I was, though I didn’t seem to know. He’d seen what I was thinking. He
whispered ‘Perhaps the priority isn’t to ask dying a woman follow-up questions.’ And I agreed, I
agreed with that wholeheartedly.

She lost consciousness. We went into the next room. He lay down on the sofa, put his hands
behind his head.

‘You okay?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Sorry about all that Nino stuff.’

‘It’s not your fault. There is a bit of a problem though.’

‘Go on.’

‘She told me something earlier. She mentioned her visitor. Well, some of the fishermen want to
stop fishing. They’re afraid of the monster in the lake. The father of a fisherman came to visit, he
told her that. He may be senile though, he’s old. To be honest, it makes little sense to me. But the
people here. They’re superstitious.’

‘Oh dear. Zlatko didn’t tell me.’

‘Maybe he doesn’t know. She’s barely coherent, she can barely repeat things. You tell different
people different things.’

I motioned for him to budge up, another man from this place, another sofa. We stared at the
ceiling. I imagined us in Van Gogh’s bed, a starry night unspooling on the ceiling.

He turned to me. I could feel the tickle of his breath on my eyelid. ‘You know what your problem
is? Now you’re somewhere else you don’t have one. It’s like the ethnic cleansing here.’

When I was small, I’d look up at the ceiling and think how exciting it would be to live there. It
looked so pure, so full of possibility. Plain white, troubled only by cornices. And then, hours
later, I would wonder how it would feel to be on that ceiling looking down at the floor. To a
three-dimensional world where you could sit on a chair with your feet on the carpet. Where you
could feel that new dimension: pick up ornaments; kick the edges of sofas; talk to people,
perhaps. I decided not to tell him this.

‘I’m not sure I understand.’

‘Well, we - the Croats, the Bosniaks – we needed the other to define who we weren’t. And then
when we managed to get rid of each other. We didn’t know who we were.’

‘I still don’t understand. But It’ll be fine with the fishermen. I’ll go and talk to them. You can
come translate?’

‘And what are you going to say?’

‘I don’t know. That fishermen still fish on Loch Ness. They must continue in that spirit. Maybe
something about Braveheart.’

‘This is all such a joke to you, isn’t it?’

‘No. But I should talk to the fishermen. I can make something up.’

‘And that, Emmie Orton, may be the only true thing you have ever said.’
16

‘Emmie, what have you done now?’

‘Edin, you’re going to have to tell me. There are so many options I can’t narrow it down.’

‘I’ve just bumped into one of your countrymen. By the lake. He had binoculars. I asked what he
was doing. He just smiled and tapped his nose.’

‘But you must have talked to him. If you realised he was my countryman. There’s not a Scottish
way to tap your nose.’

‘Oh, I asked where he was from.’

‘What did he look like?’ He wasn’t my father. He couldn’t be my father. Or had there been a
terrible coincidence? To the best of my knowledge he had no idea I was in village Bosnia. But
perhaps he’d heard good things about the birdwatching.

‘Tall. Lots of red hair. A flushed complexion.’

Well at least it wasn’t him.

‘He has nothing to do with me. Directly. Mind doing a shift in the bar? The motel bar. Drinks on
me.’

Edin was late. I kept looking at the television, willing it to play something strange. The view
from my window in Gdansk. Or perhaps the video Nino was in. But it stayed on some tired and
Balkan news. So instead I had to think. Think, Emmie, think.

I could leave the village tomorrow. But where would I go? Back to Sarajevo? I could set up shop
in his bar, work there like I used to. Perhaps he’d get me barred. Was this my life now, sitting in
bars, waiting for men? It was infuriating and strange. Could I go back to London? At least here I
was creating not destroying. In London I’d destroy everything that crossed my path. Books,
exhibitions, my own liver. Oh, I was famous for my hatchet jobs. And then I remembered the
book I’d burnt with Zlatko, the rakia we gulped. This turnaround, it was not fact.

Oh, London. My mind skipped to a gallery opening I’d gone to with a friend. Not the one which
caused this, another. My friend had taken along her assistant, he’d been twenty-three and sweet.

I’d been hectoring him. ‘You know the problem with this life?’ And he was terribly sorry but he
didn’t. ‘You can go through your twenties, and life can be so exciting and strange.’ I noticed he
was wearing a waistcoat. ‘And then you turn thirty, and you can’t do those crap clichés about
turning thirty, you kinda like it, the irony of the wasted potential.’ I lit another cigarette. ‘You
look in the mirror, you’re no longer pretty, you looked forced, you’re an acquired taste. You like
that more. If you’re a woman you go from kooky to eccentric.’ I pointed out he wasn’t a woman.
This man was looking uncomfortable. He took my glass and went to get refills. He was so polite
he thought listening to his boss’s friend musing was part of his job.

‘But imagine you don’t buy into any of this.’ You widened your eyes. ‘Having a kid, buying a
house, finding a husband or wife.’ The neighbouring conversations had gone silent. I was on a lot
of cold medication. My friend was eying us, she was talking to someone important but I couldn’t
make out whether she was trying to communicate with him or me. I suddenly wondered
whether bringing along your mad friend, who’d tell your assistant life was meaningless, was an
HR-able offence. I persevered. ‘And if you don’t buy into this, and Craig maybe you do now, but
deep down you don’t or if you do you won’t. If you don’t buy into this you turn thirty one and
you go crazy. I bet you care about going to Pop-Up restaurants.’

‘I do go to Pop-Up restaurants.’ He adjusted his waistcoat.

And now here was Edin, ducking to get through the door.

‘Sorry. Mother wanted to talk. She thinks she remembers seeing the monster. But she also
thought you were Princess Diana. She’s not in her right mind.’

‘Oh yeah, I get the Diana thing a bit.’

‘Such sad, blue eyes she said.’

‘I guess she did visit ill people.’

‘So is our plan for the evening to sit here and accost your Scotsman?’

‘I don’t have any other plans.’

‘And we don’t have Zlatko to thank for this?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘God, how do you survive it here?’

‘Well, sometimes I make up little stories about where else I could be. In London, our offices
moved next door to an investment bank. A good friend from university worked for that bank.
Lots of my friends did that, they became bankers. I thought maybe the contrast would give me
purpose. I began imagining myself as a successful banker. Just imagine me that way: I’ve shiny
hair, white teeth. I’m in a tailored suit, it’s black. I’d look down from my corner office on the girl
jogging in late. Always mistimed, nine thirty-eight. But it didn’t take long for the fantasy to flip.
Banker Me begins to envy her Doppelganger. The junk shop clothes, the messy hair, the late
nights in smoky cellars. Obviously there aren’t any in London. EU regulation. Banker Me would
be in her corner office, thinking about the gym she’d just been to. It smells of cavities. She’s
thinking of the cocktail bar she has to go to later, to prove she’s still friends with a girl called
Julia. Julia keeps her Blackberry on the table, she doesn’t make eye contact, she keeps her eyes
on the red dot. I suppose the reversal should have pleased me. Validated me even. But I was left
with the sense everyone was wretched. And that made me feel even worse.’

‘God, you even talk like a Bosnian now. These weird monologues. I’m not sure you’ll ever be fit
for London again.’ Well, quite, I thought, well quite. ‘What does your friend make of… what
you’re up to here? The one who worked in the building, not the imaginary one. ’

‘I don’t know, she jumped off the roof.’

The barman came to take his order. I remembered the first night I’d met this strange man, the
fight over the teacups, the drunk I thought was a corpse.

‘It’s funny, your idea of the other life.’ He picked a cigarette from my pack, took two puffs. Then
he look confused by this thing in his hand, and stubbed it out. ‘Well, you know what mine is?’

‘You could be in Finland, eating pickled herring. By a fjord.’

‘Think outside the box.’

‘Oh, I’m happy in my box.’

‘Well, just think, if I’d been born six or seven years earlier.’

‘You’re changing the rules.’

‘But it’s more interesting this way. I’d probably be a war criminal. I wouldn’t have been
watching, I’d have been doing. I’d have joined the family business.’

I wondered whether I should take his hand. But I’d never taken his hand, not in public.

‘Well, I hear the Netherlands are lovely at this time of year.’

‘I could be sending you postcards, Wish You Were Here.’

‘But we’d never have met.’

‘Oh no, I’ve read about you British women. You like befriending killers. You write to them in jail.
You’d have read about me, seen my mugshot. You’d have written me letters, we’d be engaged.’

And then our man was here, a cagoule, a backpack, a stoop. He sat down at the bar and ordered
a whisky. They didn’t have whisky so the barman poured rakia. I could see the man’s confusion,
the liquid was clear.
I was behind him now. ‘Let me get this. Welcome to Luka.’

The man looked concerned. And he had every right to be, accosted by a British girl with large,
strange eyes. And the man who’d probed him earlier.

‘Emmie,’ I said.

‘Tony. Tony McKay.’ He shook my hand too forcefully.

‘Edin.’ And now that Edin was getting to his feet, the man looked even more concerned.

‘Come join us. I haven’t heard a Scottish accent for a long time.’

‘You English love us Scottish,’ said Tony McKay.

‘She’s Scottish,’ said Edin. ‘She’s so bad at accents she can’t even do her own.’

Tony leant in confidentially. ‘So you two are hunting too?’

‘No,’ said Edin. ‘We met on the internet. We’re going to get married the minute my mother dies.’

Tony looked alarmed. ‘I am both sorry and happy to hear that.’

‘But…’ Edin was enjoying himself now. ‘You said you were hunting. There is very little game in
the area. You must tell me what you are trying to hunt. If there are boars here, we may revive
the local economy. You have come so far, after all.’

‘You’ve not heard about the monster?’

‘Of course.’ I was leading now. ‘The people here have always known. They just like to keep their
secrets.’

‘Tell me more.’ Tony McKay could barely contain himself.

‘We’ll tell you everything. But first, tell us about you.’ I could sense he was one of those men.
Those men who had to talk, life stories spilling on the table like upended gravy. But still, I hadn’t
expected such a comprehensive account. This man lived on the shores of Loch Ness. He had for
twenty years. He’d given up a partner and house to live there in a van. The only happy days of
his childhood had been a week in Loch Ness. His parents were separating, they’d given him a
book about the monster to entertain him in the car. Then he decided to move there, to be close
to Nessie. He’d never seen him. But he believed. I wondered for a second if we could make the
monster here a she. A feminist gesture.

‘What is the probability of a sighting, do you think? I have booked a flexible ticket. But my
models will be missing me.’
‘Your models?’ Edin was struggling not to laugh.

‘Yes, that’s how I earn my crust. I make models of Nessie. I sell them from my campervan. But
what are my chances? If I stay, say, two weeks.’

I remembered a trip to see the Northern Lights. A friend had been commissioned to write about
them. I’d tagged along for free hotels. We were worried they wouldn’t show – we were only
there for five days. We worried this strange sense of purpose would affect us too much. That if
the lights didn’t show it would become a metaphor, a symbol of our luck, perhaps we’d even fall
out. Oh, the pressure of these Lights. But the opposite happened. Within fifteen minutes of
arriving, they came out. We were sitting at a table with other Lights hunters, our host said:
‘She’s here. Aurora.’ They kept coming out, these lights. And every time they did we realised
how fake the photos were, how pointlessly enhanced. To the extent people who came couldn’t
feel anything but a terrible sense of disappointment. But of course no one would say that, people
were never honest about these things. I remembered the dead-eyed streets of Las Vegas. But no
one went back to their office, their friends, and said they hadn’t liked Las Vegas. Then they’d be
no fun. The lie had to be replicated. My friend wrote that the Northern Lights were the most
disappointing experience of her time as a travel journalist. There was a large online backlash. At
best, she wrote, they looked like a Chem Trail.

‘But you’ve never seen Nessie. Do you have to see our monster to believe?’

Tony looked perplexed.

‘Perhaps your binoculars don’t work. My best friend is Bosnia’s leading physicist, he’s run sonar
into the lake, he’s detected disturbances. Strange disturbances.’

‘Sonar, you say?’

‘Sonar, I say.’

‘Who are you?’ I thought Tony McKay was addressing the question to me, the way Nino used to.
But he was looking at Edin. And Edin was thinking of the strangest thing to say. ‘You sound
American.’

‘Oh, I’m Luka through and through. I grew up with the monster. Refills?’

In the moments when Edin went to the bar, I wondered what to say. I was fighting the impulse
to tell him to go home. To tell him that giving up his life to live on the banks of Loch Ness… Well
it was more normal then what was happening here. Go back and write your blog, make your
models, sell them. But I had to tell Zlatko about this man. The village was so small.
It was only now that I realised how drunk Tony was. He must have taken a hip flask to the lake.
He looked into my eyes. ‘Your name is Emmie Orton and it is no accident that you have come to
find me. You’ve written about other hoaxes in this place. The pyramids, Mejugorje. This story
about you two meeting on the internet and marrying… It makes no sense.’

‘You’re quite right.’ Edin, with a bottle now. ‘We didn’t meet on the internet. It just sounds
better. She’s in love with my estranged best friend. Sees me as a sort of consolation prize. It’s
very complicated.’

‘That is very complicated,’ said Tony McKay. ‘I loved a woman once.’

‘Tell me about her.’ Anything to stall this man, to stop this talk of monsters.

‘It wasn’t the woman I lived with, the one I left for the Nessie. It was another woman. I was a
student still. Did I tell you I studied? I have a first class degree in Peace Studies from the
University of Dundee.’

Edin was spluttering. I gave him a kick.

‘She was older than me. She’d married a man then left because he hit her.’ Oh dear Scotland.
With your big, wide lakes. And a quarter of the female population who’ve taken a hit.

‘She’d left a boyfriend for the man who hit her. And every time she drove past him in Dundee –
they often took the same route, she would drive and he would walk – she’d be sad. I met his
man, he had lovely hair. I don’t know why she wanted to but she did. She used to put his hair in
rollers. He never minded, he found it fun. So after she left her husband, when she found me,
she’d put my hair in rollers. It made no sense. As you can see, my hair is curly. Then she left me.’

‘The man who knows most about the monster is called Zlatko. I’m living with him. I can’t live
with Edin, his mother is dying.’

‘I understand,’ said Tony McKay.

‘I can take you to meet Zlatko tomorrow. Would you like that?’

And yes, oh yes, he would like that.

17

I remembered a strange thing from my childhood. I lived for months in a state of perpetual
shame. It revolved around an anorak from C&A, pink and yellow. The pockets were deep, and I’d
put all sorts of litter in them. It made no sense, the shame I felt at these things in my pockets,
sweet wrappers, tissues, sheets torn from notepads. At any point I could have emptied them into
a bin, but whenever I saw a bin I’d wonder if someone would be looking, would see the mad
volume of what I took out. It had gone on for months, the pockets were bulging with litter. I had
such a mental block about emptying them, they expanded like a child full of gobstoppers. Every
time I’d have to sit with someone, I’d worry they would notice. And every time it got so cold I
had to put my hands in my pockets, it’ll feel that skirm, that grime. After six months I emptied
them when no one was looking, as though I was doing such a secret, shameful thing. And I
wondered why I hadn’t done that before, it had been so easy in the end. There was an obvious
metaphor here. And then I discovered one more obvious still. About my drinking, about the
function of a hangover. It linked the new day to the last. The burden of the past day weighing on
the new one. Yes, there was something symbolic there. There was something rather wrong with
me.

My mother was a hoarder. It wasn’t just the old clothes. It was the newspaper lying two feet
deep. In every room except her bedroom. It was three feet deep there. That was why I was so
messy. That’s why I didn’t mind the bedsit mess. I’d spent my life wading through newsprint.
Wading into it, like a physicist with a live wire. A lake to conquer, a shoal of fish. I’d grown up
with this mess, I didn’t notice it. So the superficial mess I made, it didn’t register. And it was only
then that I made the connection. Between what she did and what I did. I wondered if, in those
eight years of silence, she’d read what I’d written. And if she had would they have gone on the
floor? I pictured her walking through the things I’d tried to say, the ideas I thought were new. Or
perhaps I was being unfair, perhaps they were all in a scrapbook, kept behind lock and key, the
grand door of a bank vault turning on her command.

Why had his voice brought this back? It was the lilt. Because Tony McKay had grown up in the
Lowlands. An Edinburgh accent could sound deceptively English. But there, grafted on top, was
the cadence of the West Coast. Of lakes. It was almost how my mother spoke. I wondered for a
moment how the voice of the lake would sound. I was underwater, drowning, then a rumbling,
gurgling sound. It was trying to tell me something.

‘Zlatko!’ I’d said the next morning. ‘We have our first tourist!’
‘But no, you are our first tourist. The tourist zero.’ He laughed at his own joke. But no, I hadn’t
been a tourist, I’d come here for a task. I’d come here to appear sane. Instead I’d hidden in a
basement and ranted at a duck.

‘No, a Scottish man has come here! I don’t know him but he goes by the name of Tony McKay. He
is obsessed by Nessie and has read about our monster. He wants to know more. I have told him
you are the authority on the monster.’

‘Oh Emmie, Emmie. You have done so well! You have met him already, then?’

‘I have, Zlatko, I have. My friend Edin spotted him by the lake, peering through binoculars. Edin
asked him where he was from. And he said he was from Scotland! We found him last night in the
Motel Bar. I didn’t want to tell you earlier. I didn’t want this to be an anti-climax. He could have
been here for birdwatching. Or even to watch the ducks.’

Zlatko looked perplexed. ‘There are no ducks here. NATO stole them.’

‘NATO stole the ducks?’

‘They did. And not just here, throughout Central Bosnia.’

I didn’t know what to say. Several times a day I would see these ducks. I decided this wasn’t a
priority.

‘But you will meet this man? His name is Tony McKay.’

‘I can imagine no greater pleasure.’

So as soon as our coffees were finished, I walked round the lake to the motel. I was oddly happy
that morning. The sun was shining, I kept picking up pebbles, skimming them on the lake. I’d
received an email from an old friend. She was a novelist. She’d been published quite a lot
abroad. Her last book was about a failed love affair, it was autobiographical. The man had
dumped her, it had taken her five years to get over it, she’d said. But it hadn’t, we all knew she
was still obsessed. Her publisher in Latvia said they’d only publish the novel with amendments.
‘What would these amendments be?’ she asked her agent. And the agent paused. ‘Oh, it’s not
worth it. The changes would require you to write two more chapters. To rewrite the ending
from scratch. It’s not worth it, there’s only five hundred pounds on the table.’ But no, my friend
was intrigued, what did this publisher in Latvia want? ‘To make it a happy ending. You get back
together with James. Really, it’s not worth it, it’s only five hundred pounds. And it would be
strange to have two different books in the world. Especially given how close you are to the
subject matter.’ My friend had paused, said ‘you’re just saying this because it’s not worth the
correspondence for you. You’d only get seventy-five quid.’ ‘But no,’ the agent had said. ‘The
whole point of the novel is that you don’t get back together, that you don’t get over him for at
least five years.’ My friend had emailed me, the girl who reviewed books. ‘Emmie, do you think it
would be absolutely crazy for me to accept this offer? It’s not for the money. It’s just that there
are going to be ten different versions of this book, ten different languages, and it would be funny
for one to have a happy ending.’ I thought about the economics of this, two new chapters for
four hundred and twenty five pounds. It wasn’t so bad. And it piqued my sense of mischief too,
the idea there would be one happy ending to ten unhappy ones. ‘I think you should go for it.’ So
my friend agreed to what the Latvian publisher had proposed. She wrote an ending where she
and James got back together. The book did well, her publishers were right. She was invited to a
Latvian literary festival. And the minute she got off the plane, she said she felt a sort of bubble.
That within these borders, she would always be with James. A mutual friend had reported that
she kept going back to Latvia. That this was concerning. She’d become the writer in residence of
a university there. I wondered what she felt the minute she stepped out of the plane. Was it a
cerebral thing, or a tingle in her spine?

And now she was organising a festival. She’d emailed to invite me. She’d read what I’d written
about the Pyramids, about Medjugorje. And all of a sudden I wasn’t an adjunct of Nino. I was
some old self. I could go to Latvia, I could talk.

Tony McKay was in the breakfast room. ‘I do not think much of the spread here.’

‘I will take you to the bakery,’ I said and winked. ‘My treat.’

The bakery which Nino robbed. Leaving bread on the doorstep of the poor family. When I
entered the bakery, I felt an impulse not to pay. To take the burek in my hands then stage
whisper to Tony. Pssst. Run! We’d run through the streets of Luka, those few and disperse
streets. Waltz, even.

Mirna had made more burek.

‘Zlatko, do you mind if I record this?’

And, before my landlord could speak. ‘Come now Tony, we are among friends. You can record
what you want to later. But for now we are merely having breakfast.’

Tony looked chastened. ‘And that we are.’

‘How did you come upon our monster?’ Zlatko asked. I imagined Tony coming in the lake, an arc
of sperm.
‘So you know this Macedonia thing?’ Zlatko looked at me, I looked back. We didn’t have the
faintest idea what he was saying. There was pastry stuck to his acne-scarred cheeks. It looked
like herpes.

‘You’re implying we’re in league with Macedonia?’ I was trying to buy time.

‘But you are Emmie Orton. I’ve done all my research on you. I am very thorough in my research.
You write the news. You must read the news.’

Zlatko was looking strange. As though he had stage fright. ‘Perhaps you should leave the men to
it.’

And for once, I wanted nothing more than to leave the men to it. I went to smoke by the well.
Stage fright? Eh, Emmie.

My mother had come to one of the plays I’d directed at university. When the audience came in to
the theatre there would be a body on the ground. I’d been democratic then, so instead of finding
an extra to play the body, I’d done it myself. Everyone knew their lines, there was nothing for
me to do in the thirty minutes before the play started. At seven I’d lie down on the stage in the
middle of the theatre. We were in the round. I was spotlit to three hundred people. My being a
body had gone well for the past four evenings. And now it was Friday, only two nights left. My
mother hadn’t told me she was coming. I heard a voice in the front row.

‘That girl on the ground, she looks like your Emmie.’

‘That’s not Emmie!’

‘Well it’s her play and it really looks like her.’

‘She’s too fat to be Emmie!’

I recognised the other voice now. It was a distant relative from London. Edla I think it was.

‘No I really think it’s Emmie. It’s her play, remember?’

I later read that, from a physiological point of view, it’s difficult to play dead for half an hour.

‘It’s not her. The face isn’t right. And she’s too fat.’

‘No, but Emmie isn’t acting, remember? She… what’s the word? She might be doing that.’ I heard
the clack of needles. My mother couldn’t knit. They must have been Edla’s.

‘But no, it’s not her face. It’s not her.’

‘Sorry, you should know. Are you okay?’

‘I worry about her. She’s not… what’s the… in control. Has these notions. But I think the problem
is her voice. She can’t speak. Edla. She can’t speak!’

Ah. It was Edla, I was right. I was trying to deny the cramp in my leg. I stopped trying. It was
seizing up and I remembered an article which said bananas were good for cramp, the potassium.
I wanted to time travel, sit down with a plate of twenty-five bananas.

‘But Lizzie, she can speak.’

‘Edla, there’s something so strange about her voice. It’s too soft, it’s too low. You know she had
to sing with the boys in choir?’

‘With boys?’

‘I cannot hear a word my daughter says. We sent her to a speech therapist, he said she was fine.’

‘So there we go.’

‘She doesn’t realise. No one can hear a word she says.’

‘But Lizzie, you’re deaf?’

I hadn’t realised I had so much willpower. I’d never felt pain like this. I could just about
counteract the spasms, just about keep still. But I had no idea if anyone could see.

There was acid in my calf, and more acid was pouring in every minute, I could see the beaker
almost, watch it tilt. I had no idea how much longer I had to lie there. At one point in the future,
the lights would go up, and my two leads would put a blanket over me, lift me by the feet and
shoulders, carry me off stage. Was that twenty-eight minutes away? Or three? I’d been so good
the other nights.

‘It’s just… she’s not what I expected.’

‘Children never are. My Jimmy, he has a girlfriend from Luxemburg. I never thought I’d go to
Luxemburg.’

‘I just wanted a child who would… you know…’

‘Oh, she could be worse, she has her Oxford and her plays and that.’

‘No, let me tell you something about Emmie.’

The cramp was reaching my thigh now. I was galvanising my whole body to react against the
twitching, to counteract it. Then two men were putting me in a blanket, carrying me off the
stage. They put me on my feet. I stumbled and they held me. It was 7:12.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said to the actors. ‘I was cramping.’

‘You were what?’ I looked round, my best friend. Why was she backstage? I hadn’t realised she
was coming this evening, thought she’d leave it till the last night.

‘Yeah, I got this terrible cramp in my leg.’

‘No one noticed. What, you were cramping all that time?’

‘Yeah. But why… Why have I been carted off then?’

‘Emmie, I was sat in the front row. Next to a woman I realised was your mother.’

I took my friend’s hand. I kissed it. She kissed me on the head.

‘But for fuck’s sake take your clothes off. You need a fucking body.’ And of course I was wearing
black and she was dressed in normal clothes. We swapped. The play was overbooked that night.
She was dead until seven thirty seven.

‘Emmie! Emmie!’ Zlatko was alone. ‘He thinks we are Macedonians!’

‘And why?’

‘It is a long, sad story. They did not let the Clinton Lady win. They set up websites, against her.’

‘Ah yes, the sweatshops of fake news. Where has Tony gone?’

‘To the lake!’

‘And I should go to him?’

‘Emmie, you told me something very important the other night.’

‘And what was it I told you? I. Sorry, sometimes I don’t remember. What with this rakia.’

‘You said the key to making people believe was to make them doubt.’
18

‘Tony, I’m really not sure this is appropriate.’ He still wasn’t listening to me.

‘No, no,’ said Zlatko. ‘It is fine. The more the merrier, as you say.’

I couldn’t go to the funeral. Women in these parts weren’t allowed. Instead we were to stay in
Edin’s kitchen and make burek. But Tony McKay was dragging a comb through his hair and
looking for his cagoule. Mirna rolled her eyes and took me by the hand, hurrying us to Edin’s
door. He and Selim were drinking at the kitchen table. It was too early even for me.

The night before last I had gone to the village bar. Zlatko had some business in Jacje and Mirna
had gone to her sister-in-law. She’d invited me, but I didn’t want to see Jasna, didn’t want to talk
to her hope. Edin was sitting on a stool behind the bar. And what, oh what, was happening here?

‘Is what you like?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You drink like what?’ He pulled a strand of hair across his upper lip. ‘Sorry, Barman no speak
English.’

‘Moje pivo.’ ’

‘Beeeeg, small?’

‘Big.’

He looked at me oddly as he pulled it. ‘The doctor thinks she’s going to die tonight.’

‘So what the hell are you doing here?’

‘Hiding, same as you. Oh, and covering for my cousin.’ For a moment I willed him to say ‘because
his wife is about to give birth.’ So there may be some balance here. But his cousin’s wife wasn’t
pregnant, to the best of my knowledge she never had been. ‘He’s getting his car fixed.’

‘How long have you been here for?’

He checked his wrist. There was no watch. ‘Twenty minutes.’

‘You need to go back.’

He got down from the stool, put his elbows on the bar. ‘Yes, but I don’t want to watch her die. I
want to sit here and pull pints. Maybe I’ll write some terrible poetry about you.’

‘I’m manning the bar until your cousin gets back.’

He sighed and looked at the floor. Whatever he wanted to say required effort. ‘Will you come? I
mean, once he’s back?’

And yes, I said, I would. I jumped up on the stool, began sketching one of the drunks on the back
of a receipt. I wondered whether I should go and hug him. Play Nino, that Saturday Night in
Sarajevo. Perhaps I would go to kiss him, stick my tongue in his rancid mouth, push back veiny
lips for yellow teeth. But no, I just stared into space, remembering. The cousin was surprised
when he returned. I said ‘Edin. Mother. Die now.’

I’d never watched someone die.

‘Em…’

‘Emily, yes, it’s me.’ He translated. She smiled. ‘Mate, why isn’t there a doctor here?’

‘Well, she’s just dying.’

We sat for the next fourteen hours. We got through the teapot of rakia, we got through the
brandy his cousin gave me when he understood. She could barely speak but she wanted to talk.
Sometimes he’d be able to understand and other times he’d shrug.

‘Where’s your sister?’

‘Holland. She says she can’t afford the flight back.’

‘But, what happens in terms of the funeral? Do you want me to send her money to get back for
the funeral?’ Oh god, that sounded crass.

‘No, it’s fine. She works as a security guard, she earns a decent wage, I just don’t think she
wanted to come back for… this.’

‘And let me guess, she was a good engineer here.’

‘A primary school teacher.’

Sometimes I’d get up and try to hold his mother’s hand but that distressed her more.

So mostly we sat on the floor. We leant against the wall and sometimes he’d misjudge where his
head was. A bleached watercolour would go askew. They were mostly of the lake. I’d reviewed
an exhibition by the Chapman Brothers once. They’d bought a series of paintings by Miro,
grafittied them with crude moustaches, cocks. I wanted to take the biro from my bag, and deface
these drawings, cover them with lies.

She was dead by nine.

Mirna was by me now, motioning towards the oven. I was meant to be keeping an eye on the
burek. It was burnt.

‘Izvini.’ I actually was sorry.

‘Nista, nista.’ She smiled.

Then something else, she was giggling. And her sister-in-law, in that strange Midwestern accent:
‘She says however will we find you a husband!’

And instead of objecting to this, of making a speech about emancipation, I just laughed and said
‘the poor man will need a lot of patience.’ And I laughed again, because it was true.

The funeral must have ended, the men were coming back. There was something strange in
Edin’s gait, he’d told me he was bringing a hipflask. As they crossed the threshold, Tony McKay
tried to take him by the hand. Edin shrugged him off and Tony sidled up to me.

Then, in a stage whisper: ‘Emmie! Would you like to know everything?’ I imagined him as an
anthropologist, a man in a pith helmet, reporting from a strange and distant land.

‘Tony, let’s talk later.’

‘I have learnt so much more about the monster. There are things you don’t know.’

I felt a tingle at the base of my spine. Was this how the children felt when the priest told them
that, yes, they’d seen Our Lady? How the man from Visoko felt when he’d first looked at his hills,
traced the outline of Giza in his mind?

I remembered the shame when Elma came to speak. When Edin’s mother killed the fishermen a
second time. There was none of that now.

‘Perhaps you are not as good as me, at getting people’s secrets. They have told me so much!’ Oh,
it’s a competition now. Well, let me hear your facts about my figment.

I mouthed hipflask to Edin, and led Tony to the room where the woman had died two nights
before. We sat on the floor. Tony coughed. I could still smell it.

‘Well, tell me what they told you. Perhaps they told you more shocking things. They wanted to
spare a woman.’

‘I spoke to a man called Samir. He said his mother was the first to see the monster.’

‘Was she called Elma?’

‘She was.’
‘But she wasn’t the first person to see the monster. Did Zlatko not tell you about the book?’

‘The book?’

I leant in confidentially. ‘I was researching an article about tobacco smuggling in Central Bosnia.
This is part of the reason I stayed with Zlatko. His father was a tobacco smuggler.’

‘Was it like Whisky Galore?’

And I laughed at this old reference. ‘Yes, but with less whisky.’ I passed him the flask.

‘But what was in the book?’

I took another glug of for luck. ‘Wait here, I’ll show you.’ I ran down the street and returned with
the book and my laptop. I remembered the mornings I’d spent running down Cable Street,
pretending it was Sniper Alley. Occasionally, I’d even ducked.

Tony tried to pick up the book but I motioned he was not allowed to. ‘Sorry, it’s old and
precious. We think it’s the only copy in existence. The rest were in the National Library in
Sarajevo. The one which burned to the ground.’

Then, the screen once more, Bosnian to English. I typed in the words from the book, making
sure Tony could check them over my shoulder. He looked as though he was seeing a vision.

‘And this dates from the nineteen thirties?’

‘It does. It’s the first recorded sightings of the monster. There’s also a painting, dated 1948. You
can see the monster there.’

‘But this… this is extraordinary.’

‘Zlatko and I are still trying to piece this together. But the first recorded sightings were in the
thirties, we know that from this book. And then in 1948 or at least in the forties – perhaps the
artist did not paint immediately – there was another sighting. Then Elma. That was in the
seventies. And then… oh, I’m not sure I should tell you this.’

‘Emmie, tell me everything!’

‘But it may not be true.’

‘You must tell me!’

‘This information comes from Edin’s mother. I spent a lot of time with her when she was ill. She
kept mentioning fishermen. Fishermen who died in circumstances which made no sense. The
fishermen of her youth mentioned the monster. But of course these things have not been
recorded for posterity. And now she’s dead. They could have been delusions.’

‘But you’ve written so cynically about other things. And you believe in this.’

‘A friend of mine in London specialised in oral storytelling. On how stories get passed down
through the generations. On which are credible and which are not. I haven’t run the stories here
past her. I don’t want to implicate her in any way. She’s very rigorous. It would be wrong to ask
her opinion when she hasn’t been in the field. But we used to talk about oral storytelling a lot,
back in London. It’s a subject which fascinates me.’

‘So you think it’s real?’

‘I think it’s real. But you haven’t told me what you learnt. You said you heard things at the
funeral.’

‘Yes, about the bodies. But do you think it has anything to do with the bodies?’

‘The bodies?’

‘There was an old man at the funeral.’ Well, that narrowed it down. ‘He told me there was bodies
in the lake. From the War.’

‘That much, I think, is speculation. Shall we concentrate on our monster for now?’

‘But they also told me about Nato and the UN. The anacondas.’

‘The anacondas?’ Dear god what was happening? ‘Tony, are you okay?’

Edin was in the doorway now, mouthing for the flask.

‘Edin, I was just telling Emmie here about the –‘

‘What’s happening here? The Annual General Meeting of Insane Scots?’

I said ‘yes’ and Tony said ‘hardly.’

‘Tony was just… telling me about anacondas.’

‘Oh for goodness sake! Don’t listen to this shit about anacondas!’ He was pacing now.

‘Edin. Why are we talking about anacondas?’ I was becoming hysterical now. Emmie stop! I
couldn’t get the phrase from my head, you’re corpsing at his mother’s funeral.

He leant against the doorframe. He looked more attractive than usual in this black suit. I
wondered whether I should joke that he should go to funerals more often. But no, he was
banging his head on the doorframe. ‘Right, it used to be common, I guess it still is, to blame
NATO or the UN for all kinds of things. There were mad stories about them introducing
crocodiles, anacondas, deadly insects… you name it. People here thought the West was trying to
kill us slowly, it was a conspiracy against Muslims. There was even an idea that NATO was
stealing ducks.’

I was gasping for breath. ‘Sorry, Zlatko mentioned. Sorry, I’m just imagining NATO officials on
the bus from Mostar to Dubrovnik. With ducks on their laps.’

He was trying to be calm now, to bring his wayward children under control. ‘I suppose it’s
common in other countries to blame things on migrants. And since we didn’t have any migrants,
we decided to blame The Foreign Soldier.’

Tony said ‘So NATO introduced the monster?’ and Edin shook his head in despair. ‘Tony, I
suggest you go back to the wake. Emmie, wait here, I just need to say goodbye to someone, I’ll be
back in a minute.’

I thought back to Sarajevo. At the end of my time there, there’d been the first wave of refugees.
These refugees had been locked out of Hungary, of Serbia, of any usual route. So they ended up
in Bosnia. And Bosnians would joke that they were better than people from other European
countries. Because at no point did they speculate that these people were economic migrants.
That they weren’t bona fide refugees. They trusted these people were bona fide refugees. They
trusted them implicitly. Because things must be pretty fucking desperate back home if Bosnia’s
your promised land.

‘Emmie, I’m bored of this.’

‘Which part?’

‘I overheard, you were showing Tony a book.’

‘Guilty as charged.’

‘What’s your deal? No, what’s your problem?’

I remembered that night in Nino’s kitchen. I imagined a parrot on his wall. ‘Who are you? Who
are you?’ And every time Nino left the bedsit, his parrot would ask me this. So this time I would
talk. I summarised my childhood but only briefly. It was his mother’s funeral after all.

‘So all this dysfunction. And you weren’t even…’ More emphatic now. ‘You weren’t even
physically abused? Let alone sexually abused. I just assumed your father…’

‘No he only hit my mother.’ And just as I was about to say ‘fuck you’ he began to sniff.

‘I’m sorry.’
I took his hand.

‘I’m sorry… I… Please forget I ever said that. And let me confess something in return.’

I wondered what it could be now, in this country that made no sense. That he didn’t exist, that
he’d lied about his age, that he’d worked in the camp? That he’d planted anacondas. That he
would pull off a mask and it would be Nino underneath, they were the same height, he might
have changed build in the month I hadn’t seen him, that month of moping in the shadow of the
hills.

‘I made Tony come.’

For a moment I imagined them in a naked embrace, the contours of the painter man’s narrow
bed.

‘But… how?’

‘I posted a link to your little forum. In a Loch Ness forum.’

‘Ah.’

‘I wanted to see how gullible people could be. Or maybe I wanted to make mischief. Or maybe I
wanted to outplay you in a strange, strange way. I’m not quite feeling myself.’

‘Well, I can’t say I am either.’ I took down his hair and let it fall on mine.
19

‘The main problem for me has been the model.’

‘The model?’ Zlatko asked. And for a moment I pictured Tony on the arm of Naomi Campbell. Or
Cindy Crawford.

‘The model.’

‘But you make the models?’ Even Zlatko was tiring of this man. ‘You said, you make them out of
wood. You sell them from your campervan.’

‘No, the model, not mine. A prankster made a model of a Nessie. He planted it in the loch. It
discredited a lot of what I’ve striven to achieve.’

‘A scale model?’ I asked.

Tony confirmed.

‘I hadn’t realised.’

‘Yes, it was revealed as a hoax. It caused me a lot of problems. In terms of my plausibility.’

‘But why, you’ve never said you’ve seen it?’

The week before, my friend Jon had emailed back. The man who performed the recreations.

Dear Emmie,

How odd to hear from you. And with such an odd request.

I’ve been well, thank you.

I’m not going to ask about the lake. Or about the monster. But I’d recommend a simple fibreglass
model. I asked my usual supplier for quotes and have attached a breakdown on the basis of 15
feet by 10. Shipping it to Bosnia may be problematic but I am obviously unsure as to where you
want to plant this monster. I hope not to Scotland. I remember you once passing out muttering
‘bad things happen there’. You were drooling on my lap, it was sweet.

Emmie – can I tell you a secret? You know that, despite everything, you’re the only person I can
talk to properly. I don’t know why. I suppose that when we first met I had a sense of class and
superiority. I had my Eton and you just had your sadness, your lake. You were so unformed.
Perhaps our roles are now reversed. You’ve never dwelled on the past. I do very little else. I
couldn’t eat without it.
But yes, my secret. Once I told you I was going to an artist’s residency in Belgium for a week. I
didn’t. I went to see your parents. I lived with them in the hotel by the lake. Do you remember
how you called your childhood ‘Lorca’s long lost play’? They told me everything. All the things
you didn’t know. You know your mother had been engaged to your father’s brother? And then
he’d died. Your father had a brother, maybe he’d mentioned that? And he was the one your
mother loved. He died in a car crash aged eighteen.

I’m not sure why I’m telling you this. Laura told me you’d finally fallen in love. All she said was
that he’s a barman. I hope he pours you extra measures.

But perhaps I have another confession to make. Your strange email made me wistful, or do I
mean nostalgic? When you turned up at university you were so unformed. You knew nothing.
No music, no films. You had your books, your art. But even then I sensed you didn’t like them. I
like to think of you as my first artwork. Remember the nights we used to spend with your friend
Naomi? What’s she up to these days? She was fun. But, yes, on some level I like to think I formed
you. Maybe one day I’ll stage an exhibition. Emmie Orton. Polaroids in Whitechapel Art Gallery,
playlists, programmes. The music I introduced you to, the films and plays. The feelings, I’d
almost say.

Sorry Emmie, I’m drunk and sad.

My love,

Jon

Dear Jon,

Thank you for the breakdown, sorry, I wasn’t expecting you to go into so much detail or to so
much effort.

I don’t really appreciate your words. I’m not going to get into a dialogue as to what makes a
person. But I’m willing to entertain the possibility I was one before you.

Cheers,

Emmie

I’d never shown Zlatko the email, the cost was prohibitive. But I wondered now why Tony
resented this model so much.

‘Emmie, are you okay, you seem distracted?’

‘Oh Zlatko, I’m fine.’

‘I will leave tomorrow,’ said Tony. ‘I have seen enough.’

As Tony was leaving the next morning, Zlatko asked me to play the piano. Jasna and her mother
were summoned. There were no more bruises in sight. I felt an odd sense of pride. I wished the
woman from the Visoko bus could have been there, it was like something from an Austen novel.
Instead of rakia, Zlatko produced a bottle of sherry he’d ordered from the internet. And when I
walked Tony to the bus station, I asked him if he’d be okay, going back to his lake without seeing
our monster. To his camper van, his models, his rain. I wondered if he’d miss Luka. He looked
into my eyes and told me to take care.
20

I opened an email from a friend of a friend. He wrote for Vice. He had got wind of the monster.
He wanted to talk. This man, Matthew, wanted to come to Luka to report on the monster. And
wasn’t this exactly what I’d wanted? So he had come, he had checked into the motel. And now
Zlatko was hosting a party, it was like the night I first arrived. At ten o’clock, Matthew dragged
me into the garden.

‘Sorry, I know you can smoke inside. I just… had to get away from that man. The ‘Painter and
Poet’.’

And it would have been so easy to join in, but was this all I had, my remove? So no, no cattiness,
but I couldn’t be completely sincere. A wry smile. ‘That’s the love of my life.’

‘Ha ha. No, seriously, that Edin guy said you had a Bosnian for a while.’

‘Yeah, him. He left me with a poem.’

‘Ha ha, you’re so convincing. You’re funny. I can’t believe we never met in London. Gonna
message Dan. I can’t believe he didn’t introduce us.’

I took out my earring, put the sharp bit in my arm. ‘I can swear in blood if you fancy.’

He looked scared. ‘I don’t understand how this works.’

‘You don’t believe about me and cigarette foil man? He’s come home especially, to meet the
foreign journalist.’

‘Cigarette foil?’

‘He didn’t talk about cigarette foil?’

‘No, he was talking about eggs of chaos.’

‘Same thing. If you think about it.’ I looked knowing.

The man was bewildered now. Oh fuck, I’d forgotten the ear lobe thing. I should have dragged it
through my lobe. ‘Anyway, you didn’t believe me. I’ve sworn in blood. You can have some if
you’d like. To… I dunno. It means whatever you want it to mean.’ I threw my fag butt in the well.
I shouldn’t have thrown my fag butt in the well. Maybe Nino had made me better. I tried to
imagine a world where I hadn’t spent these months in Bosnia. Where this man and I had met at
a London party. We’d have run off, gone to a pop-up bar. He’d have made noises about how
terrible the party had been, even though he’d enjoyed it all, weak negronis and post-ironic
strippers. Then a few cocktails and back to his in Dalston. Some joyless sex. I remembered my
life in the village was better.

‘We should go inside. Look, he’s a lovely man. I can’t talk to him because of some… don’t ask…
but play nice.’

‘Props for learning Serbo-Croat so quickly, though.’

‘Oh I didn’t.’

Edin was very drunk. ‘Getting on with your journalist?’

Matthew was tapping me on the shoulder. ‘You know what I don’t get.’

But, before I could respond, Edin. ‘Emmie, why are you bleeding? From the arm.’

‘It’s just something I do. Do you have a problem with that?’

‘No… It’s just... Vaguely curious.’

The Physicist now. ‘It looks like a puncture wound. You haven’t been exposed to dirty needles,
have you?’

And it was then I realised the journalist hadn’t been scared by me, he’d been oddly compelled.
He took the hoop from my ear. I stayed still, the way he plucked it from my lobe was rather
tender. He began stabbing it into his arm.

Zlatko was looking over, concerned.

‘Matthew, another cigarette?’

‘But what I don’t understand is this. I write about the East European crazy, that’s my job.’ I
wondered what was on his business card. ‘And you write about books and the arts. Why is your
ex trying to cultivate me?’

‘He had no idea what I did. I found this very refreshing. From a feminist point of view.’

‘I’m just wondering. How odd she is.’ Edin was tilting into him now. ‘By British standards.’

But the journalist wasn’t listening. ‘So why is he pretending not to speak English? You must have
talked.’

‘Edin!’ Zlatko now. ‘My son. My long-lost son.’ His long-lost son? My blood didn’t coagulate
properly. It wasn’t full blown haemophilia, a tendency towards. I realised the journalist was
bleeding vaguely. I was bleeding rather a lot.
‘You bleed now,’ said Zlatko. And the irony of those words, the blood when I’d returned from
Sarajevo. An Always curling with the weight.

Edin giggled. ‘Zlatko, they’re stigmata!’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Edin. But you have lost and deceived us.’

The Physicist now: ‘We are all lost and we lose in our turn.’ They were the words from an old
sevdah song.

I was surprised by the sound of my own voice. ‘In turn, we deceive and are deceived.’

‘Exactly,’ said Zlatko.

Mirna was here with tissues now. She wiped the blood from us.

I peeked into the next room. Nino had left.

‘I want you to take me to the lake,’ Matthew said. I asked ‘really, now?’ And yes, he wanted this
now.

I looked at Zlatko. ‘I will take Matthew to the lake,’ I said. ‘In case there is a sighting.’

Zlatko looked at me as though he was inspired. Inspired by what I did not know, but there was a
madness in his eyes.

Matthew and I stumbled down the path, he had picked up a bottle of wine.

‘Do you know why I came here?’ he asked. And beyond the obvious, I did not. He would tell me,
he said.

When he was young he had perved on this war. He’d seen it on MTV, heard shells instead of
music. He was obsessed by the country. He hated himself for it. Then he’d read what I had
written. About Visoko, Medjugorje. He’d wondered why Dan had told him about me in the pub.
Told him I lived in a village by a lake. A village at the centre of strange rumours. He’d wondered
if he might find a strange scoop.

‘Sorry I slagged off that Nino guy. He’s got a certain something’.

‘Oh he’s charming.’ I lay back on the beach by the lake. I remembered the night Edin had rowed
me to the centre, the way he lay back in the boat. Crucified without nails. I was doing that now. A
photocopy of a photocopy.

‘Perhaps I can help,’ Matthew said.

‘I very much doubt that.’

Then he looked into my eyes, moonlight sparking off his irises. ‘If you were me, knowing what
you know I know, what would you write?’

‘I don’t know what you know.’

‘I interviewed Zlatko. The painting’s an obvious fake. The book I don’t get. The oral testimony.
Well… It’s just mental. And now a Scottish nerd’s decided Zlatko’s a warlord hiding in plain
sight.’

‘You know the joke here? Everyone thinks I’m a war criminal hunter.’

Matthew took a glug of the wine. ‘Do you have any idea how strange this place is? I got Edin and
his physicist pissed earlier. The physicist has clearly never run sonar in the lake. I’m not even
sure he knows what sonar is. I think he might be clinically insane. And Edin. Like, Edin’s clever.
A bit odd but clever. Do you know what he told me?’

‘I have no idea what Edin told you.’

‘He said the UN had sent an anaconda. As a sort of envoy. And it’s mutated in the lake.’

I giggled. ‘Yeah, you don’t get this sort of shit in London, do you?’

The lake was lapping on the shore. I remembered an old assistant, a man there for his
connections not his words. He’d once filed a piece I had to edit. It ended ‘the winds of change
were lapping on the shore.’ How my friends and I laughed.

Matthew turned to me. ‘But, if you were me, what would you do? You’re clearly in on this.
Somehow.’

‘Just denounce me, I reckon.’ I took the bottle, poured some down my throat. ‘Hoax finder goes
hoax. It could be quite clickbait.’

‘But, I don’t want to. I want to see it.’

So I pointed to the lake and told him he was seeing something. I described a round of ripples,
described a neck, the sounds of birds disturbed, the tweet of an owl. I told him to write what he
wanted, I didn’t care. I was too exposed, too far in, too tainted. But no, Matthew said, go back to
what you were saying before. It was true, there were ripples now. More than usual, the
fishermen hadn’t fished for a week. And I imagined this was the Nightly Peep, that instead of
Matthew it was my mother by my side, and when I cried he held me.
21

If I’d had a phone it would have kept ringing. But I didn’t and I only opened one email. It was
from Naomi.

Calling Emmie Orton,

PLEASE get in touch. I think I can do some damage limitation but you need to fucking talk to me.
Explain what the fuck’s been going on. Get your arse onto Messenger right now.

‘Hi.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘Good question.’

‘I’ve had to send a team out, I couldn’t not cover it.’

‘Yes. I… didn’t mean to put you in a difficult position.’

‘I just… this is baffling. I have no idea what’s going on and everyone expects me to. And you’re
not answering so now I have everyone you’ve ever met calling me asking whether you’re really
involved. I don’t know what to say.’

‘Sorry, I should have given you an exclusive.’

‘Fuck off. You said you were working on a quote unquote Village Project.’

‘I was.’

‘I’m trying to… So I spoke to Tom, he’s trying to somehow get the Mail to stop running it. But for
fuck’s sake Orton, he’s not going to be able to stop them. There’s one picture of you taking coke,
he might be able to stop that. But he’s not even a section ed.’

‘I don’t think any of you guys should be putting yourself out my behalf.’

‘Do you have any idea how clickbait this is? Blonde, blue-eyed British girl. No not just British
girl, former president of the Oxford fucking Union, making up Nessie Junior to hoax the world?
Don’t you play the I was try to help card. Do you have any idea how much is wrong with you?’

‘I probably don’t know half of it.’

‘You just… fucking ricochet through life. You expect other people to pick up the pieces. Even just
answer your fucking emails! I’ve had your parents on the phone to me! And instead of thinking
“poor Naomi, she’s trying to air a news programme while fielding my fucking parents”, I bet
you’re thinking “Oh no! My parents! My terrible parents!”

‘Guilty as charged.’

‘Can you just get over yourself for a second and try to engage with this. I don’t understand how
the Vice guy could have set you up so badly. And how he got the Buzzfeed guy to publish that
piece about the monster, just so he could take it down. But this Matthew guy’s at two million
hits and you’ll never work again.’

‘Well, I’ve been a bit silly. I think we can agree I’ve been a bit silly.’
22

And finally, ‘Naomi, I appreciate this so much, but it’s not your problem, please stop trying to
help. I don’t deserve it.’ Then I’d closed my laptop and gone to the shed. It was the fifth night in a
row I’d come here. I imagined the conversation as though I was in a bar. ‘Do you come here
often?’ / ‘Yes, in fact I do. I am unsure as to my motives, but perhaps some meaning can be found
here. I think I am bearing witness and perhaps I am. Or perhaps I’m confused by how I have
suffered in life. Have I suffered too much, or not enough? Where do I lie on the hierarchy? Am I
valid? Why had I frozen the night Nino asked me to tell him about myself? Was it fear that he
had won? That with this man I could not play the childhood card, could not excuse myself that
way? Or did I want the suffering in this shed to lend me something? A sort of majesty?’

There had been cameras at the door. Zlatko had sent Mirna to visit her sister. So I’d left by the
back door, climbed over a gate.

And then a noise from behind me. I flinched. It was probably an animal, a stray cat or dog. But
no, footsteps now. I couldn’t make out who it was until I heard his voice.

‘Emmieeeeee, Emmieeeeee.’

‘Hello.’

‘Why do you keep coming here?’

So he knew. ‘Have you been following me?’

‘I have.’

I was scared. But instinctively I knew he wouldn’t harm me. I had no idea what to say. I
stuttered. I never stuttered. My father was the one who stuttered. ‘I know what this was.’

‘And how did you find out? We keep our secrets.’

I was burbling now. ‘I was clever. I took Edin for a walk. He’d told me about his uncle.’ Why was
I making this worse, implicating Edin? ‘He didn’t tell me where it was. He refused to tell me. I
think he was confused. By why I wanted to know.’

‘I do not understand this walk.’

‘Well, I’m good at poker. I thought when we walked past the building he’d do a tell. And he did.
He did a tell. I’d made a shortlist of empty buildings, I took him for a walk. Do you understand a
tell? He flinched.’
‘I do Emmie, I do. But there is something I do not understand.’

‘Go on.’

‘Emmie, are you hunting me? Is this all a strange scheme?’

I thought of the story the aid worker had told me, back in the days of The Bar. That Japanese
tourists were given repeated warnings when the War broke out. That they missed the last flight
out. And yes, I was those tourists. Repeated warnings had been made. I had ignored them.

‘I am a woman of very little purpose. I am who I say I am.’

‘Emmieeeeeeee, let me tell you something now.’ He was wearing a sport’s jacket. My father had
worn sports jackets, I used to marvel at the name, it implied something casual. Yet it was a
formal sort of jacket. ‘I was the man who ran this camp. And not just this one.’

He sat down on the ground. He was wearing linen trousers, they’d be dirty now.

‘No Edin’s uncle ran the camp. Edin. He told me.’

Zlatko raked his fingers through the dirt. ‘He was my number two.’

‘No, it was Edin’s uncle who ran this camp. He was convicted, he’s still in jail. Are you drunk?’

I couldn’t see his face now. All I could see was the tip of his nose, reddish in the moonlight.

‘I am. But this doesn’t a change a thing. Emmie, this happened a bit in Bosnia after the war. The
government said they would try their own criminals. As a gesture of cooperation. So what they
did was try the number twos. Edin’s uncle didn’t run the camp. I did. They spared the high-up
men.’

I said the stupidest thing I could have. ‘Well, it was a pretty high risk strategy, inviting me into
your home.’

‘I know, I know, I know. But the Hague trials are over. So there was a chance, a possibility you’d
been hired privately. Sometimes camp survivors, the ones who moved to America, would hire
private investigators. I was convinced you weren’t one. But then I followed you. You keep on
coming here.’

‘I suppose I do.’

‘But you hadn’t guessed. The men who did what I did… You picture us as thugs, perhaps as
Arkan’s tigers. Can you imagine me with a gun?’
‘No. I’m having strange thoughts now. Did you go home from a hard day’s torture, put on a
period drama?’

‘They hadn’t reached us yet. But a lot of the men in these parts…’

‘Were thinkers and poets.’

‘Yes, Karadzic, he was a poet.’

‘I sometimes wondered what Nino would have done. If he’d lived then. If he’d been rejected by
the great poets of Sarajevo. Would he have become a sniper? I imagined him in one of the
lookouts up Trebevic, remembering a review. Criticism that something didn’t scan. Another few
people on Sniper Alley, toppling to the ground.’

‘You, my dear, have an over-active imagination.’ The very words Edin had used. I wondered if
they’d conferred on me, if Zlatko had stolen the words from Edin. Or the other way round.

‘Oh, Nino’s poetry.’ He chuckled and I couldn’t stop myself chuckling too. I was so adrift I felt the
need to crack a joke. ‘Nino’s parents never liked me. Maybe they thought it was funny, seeing me
move in with a genocidaire.’

‘It wasn’t genocide, Emmie. The Serbs, the Croats. They killed so many more. It was self-defence.
It was our nation. The things that were done to us. Did you hear about the baby in the oven?’

I said had. And I knew these facts, that the war crimes were so weighted, that the Bosnians
killed and tortured so much less. Yet I had found a man who had. A man I liked.

‘But Edin told me about The Treatment. You ran a torture camp.’

‘Oh Edin. I didn’t realise he was such a gossip. What were your words? A high risk strategy. Yes,
it was a high risk strategy, telling you that. Because there are things you don’t know about Edin.
Every Friday night, he’d come and watch. He and that man you call The Physicist. Then they’d go
and torture kittens, pull them apart limb by limb. They were practising for when they came of
age. The war stopped before they did.’

‘He told me all of this.’

‘He told you? And still you… I know where you used to spend those evenings.’

‘I appreciated his honesty.’

‘What a strange man.’

‘People change.’ I wondered if I could have said anything more banal if I’d tried.
‘And do you think I’ve changed?’

‘I can’t answer that.’

And I was laughing now, laughing at the absurdity of it all, laughing because I could not take this
in. ‘To think, we spent so long inventing a monster. When there was already one here.’

‘Emmie, I wanted you to absolve me. I thought… You do not understand what men do in the heat
of war. When your people are disappearing, when you’re attacked from two sides. When babies
die in ovens, when women are raped in front of sons and fathers. At first I merely fought, I was a
commander of men. The camp came later.’

‘I know. But… I don’t understand how I could have absolved you. I… I’m irrelevant.’ And then I
almost laughed at the irony. That I had been, till ten short hours before. ‘Zlatko, you know I can’t
absolve you. No one can absolve anything. Let alone me.’ And then, stupidly, as though I was
asking her view on a coat of kitchen paint: ‘What does Mirna think?’

‘Mirna is loyal. You know, she sees you as the daughter we never had.’

‘I see her…’ I couldn’t finish the sentence.

‘But you’ve seen how I have tried to atone. I have tried to put the village on the map, to bring
things here.’ And I marvelled at the absurdity of it all, a crazy golf course versus fifty bodies in
the lake.

‘Emmie, I have arranged in advance that you spend the evening in the village motel. I hope you
don’t mind. I have prepaid. I imagined it would be odd for you to spend the night under my roof.
After I told you this. I took the liberty of going into your room, finding your passport and cards,
just in case you worried they may be taken. He handed me an envelope. I didn’t look inside.
Stupidly, crazily, I was thinking about the drawer they were in, on top of the drawing I’d made of
Nino in Van Gogh’s bed. What he must have thought when he found that.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘Come see me tomorrow, we will work out what to do with this monster of ours.’

So I walked to the motel, and no, they couldn’t serve me, the bar was closing. So I put fifty marks
on the counter and, yes, they would keep it open for as long as I liked.
23

Did I have to go and tell someone? Or could I sit here and think of Nino? If could make it right
with him, this would not be happening.

I wasn’t refusing to go back the morning after we’d first kissed. I was going back. Why care that I
was interviewing someone later? We were giddy that morning, there would have been none of
the awkwardness we felt the next time. And I wasn’t going to fixate on language. I was going to
make a joke of it. I’d take him in my arms and whisper I wish we spoke the same language. And
he would understand the words, or if not at first, then I would say ‘Engleski’ and ‘Bosanski’ and
do a sweet little mime. I’d make myself small for him. Then I’d giggle and say that not speaking
the same language left more time for other things. And I’d kiss him, maybe suck him off. Instead
of resenting his gaze, I’d stare back. I’d tell him he was beautiful, not get angry at the early
worship, a charge sheet of objectification forming in my mind. I would remember the phrase
The Object of My Affections. I would give back in kind. They’d cancel out, my gaze and his. I’d
already have heard what the cobbler’s son said. ‘But you don’t understand. I was talking about
family and death. Betrayal and grief. How else could these things come to pass? If a girl didn’t
like a boy or a boy didn’t like a girl?’

We’d be lying on that sofa, and instead of the silence being fraught, it would be funny. By trying
to be funny I’d made everything fraught. Instead of looking round the flat that first night, pitying
him that mess, I’d remember what had followed. Back then, no one was dead.

Oh Emmie, stop thinking about him, a man is dead.

But no, just five more minutes in this room, five more minutes before I could face what had
happened. If I thought about Nino, I wouldn’t have to think about the dead man. There was a
love story I needed to write. Everyone got three chances to meet someone. The first time you
make mistakes, mistakes connected to your past. The second time you overcompensate, take
things too far in the opposite direction. The third time you calibrate everything perfectly, the
iteration works. Everything goes right.

I pressed rewind again. I imagined these countries slotting back into place, the colours on the
jigsaw merging into one, Yugoslavia returned. Tito rising from his grave, taking his children in
hand, telling them to pipe down. There would have been no war.

My phone rang again. It was my mother.

‘It’s your mother here. Your friend said you’re in trouble.’ She began screaming and crying.

‘Please don’t make this about you.’

‘Emmieeeee, you were my only hope.’

‘I know… I’m sorry.’

‘It’s my fault you never got married, isn’t it?’

‘This has nothing to do with marriage.’

‘Well it does, your friend Naomi said you shacked up with some Muslim, that’s why you’re in
Bosnia. ’

‘My friend did not say “shacked up with some Muslim”. You’re the one saying that.’

‘I looked them up! On the internet!’ She was hysterical now. ‘It’s my fault. If it wasn’t for me and
your father, you would have got married. You would have children. You would have said yes to
that man, remember, the man I liked, the one who loved you, the one you went to America with.
He’s a lawyer.’

‘He was a lawyer.’

‘Oh, what’s he doing now?’

‘It doesn’t matter. This isn’t… about any of this…’

More crying now. ‘This problem is entirely unrelated to my marital and childbearing status.’

‘Where did we go wrong? Tell me where we went wrong?’

Oh, let me count the ways. ‘Nothing went wrong.’ I would get off this lie on a technicality, on this
passive tense. ‘I don’t want to get married… That has nothing to do with what’s happening here.’

‘But it’s my fault!’

‘Mum, you didn’t speak to me for eight years. Then you pretended that hadn’t happened.’

‘You blame me.’

‘I don’t Mum.’

‘See you’re getting upset… This is your problem, you get upset. I say something and you get
upset.’

She was hysterical now. ‘Mum, I need to go. I’m putting down the phone.’

‘See, you’re upset with me!’

I thought back to the woman from the Visoko bus, the sudden rush of feeling. Me wondering
where this kindness had come from, this empathy, whether I could divert it back to where I
came from.

But no, I could not. And now I really, really had to deal with the fact there was a body in the
room.
24

It wasn’t the first suicide I had contributed to. I hoped it would be the last. I thought back to
those weeks Alex and I spent in America. To the woman in the diner with no hand, to the
Loneliest Road in America, our silence for its length, to that night in Las Vegas where I couldn’t
think anything which had not been thought before. To the decade he spent in love with me, to
the note he left, to the police, to his parents at the funeral.

I went to find Edin. When he opened the door he looked sheepish. ‘Well, well, well.’

‘You didn’t tell me. You knew.’

‘Of course I knew.’

‘So why didn’t you tell me? I don’t understand.’

‘Well either you knew. Or you should have figured it out.’

‘But Nino, did he know?’

‘Of course Nino knows.’

He led me through to the room of doilies. ‘And his parents must have told him I was staying
there. I mean, we’re still friends on Facebook. Admittedly an odd message to send: “excuse me,
dear mad ex, but you appear to have moved in with a war criminal”. But it would have been
useful nonetheless.’

‘Everything’s about Nino with you.’

‘That’s not the point, it would have been a basic courtesy. Either of you could have said.’

‘You think you know everything. There’s so much you don’t know.’

‘Well clearly.’

‘But, okay, Nino. He decided you were a war criminal hunter.’ He was pacing now. ‘Or maybe a
spy. He said nothing about you made any sense, you seemed to have no back story, there was
clearly something off. And then you moved in with Zlatko. Why else would you do that? It’s so
fucking odd.’

I had no back story. How funny, these words.

‘But you knew I wasn’t.’

I knew I would never speak to this man again, I don’t know why, I just knew. So I guided him to
the sofa, put my head on his lap.
‘I wasn’t sure what to believe. You’re very opaque. He’s right by the way, nothing about you
makes sense. He’s not the most perceptive man but he has his moments.’

‘But I thought you weren’t in touch. You fell out over Elma.’

‘You assume so much that isn’t true. That was seventeen years ago. Elma’s dead.’

‘Elma’s dead?’

‘She got into heroin. Lots of people did, after the war. She’s been dead for years. She came up to
me on the street once, in Sarajevo. She had scabs on her face, she wanted money. The funny
thing was she was almost unrecognisable. But she was the one who didn’t recognise me. I asked
if she remembered me, then if she remembered Nino. She said she didn’t. I said we were all from
Luka but she didn’t seem to know the name. I told her she was born there but she looked vague,
and then she fell over and started muttering. “Yes, Luka, I remember that.”’

Why was he telling me this? Now of all times. But no, he wanted to carry on.

‘Of course we found out when she died, she’s buried here. And Nino – your lovely Nino – well he
was the one she first took heroin with. He bought some when he was selling that stuff he stole.
She was such a sweet girl before. I think I was the only person who knew about him and the
heroin. I promised I’d never tell anyone. But here we are. I think I needed to.’

‘I think you did.’

‘What about you? I imagine you’re not feeling great.’

‘Well, my reputation’s in tatters, I’ve essentially spent months colluding with a war criminal in
gross deception, a war criminal I liked, and now I seem to have materially contributed to his
suicide. So yeah, I’m not feeling great.’

‘What are you going to do now?’ He sat up.

‘Go back to London, see if I can stay in a friend’s spare room. See if I can still get a job as a
waitress.’

‘You’d be a terrible waitress.’

‘Well, work in a pub. I always envied Nino his little life. How about you?’

‘Well, Sarajevo.’

‘Shout if you fancy a passport. I mean obviously not a marriage marriage.’

‘Yes, but that would still involve being legally married to you.’

‘Less than ideal, I admit.’

‘Maybe you’ll become like that Wolf of Wall Street guy. Make a fortune off your story. Books,
lecture tours, motivational talks. Look at me I’ve changed!’

‘Was I really that bad in the first place?’

He smirked. ‘Yes and no.’

‘Just imagine if I’d never met Nino.’

‘Mate, you need to get over Nino.’

And how I laughed and laughed and laughed.

4. Small Victories
1

Naomi was waiting at the airport.

‘You look well,’ she said. ‘Ironically.’

‘I haven’t drunk for weeks.’

‘You know, you were always better sober. I never understood why you drank so much. You don’t
need booze. You’re mad enough sober.’

‘I know. I think it was just time. It went so slowly without it.’

‘Okay, you look well, but you don’t look okay.’

‘Just give me a minute. I just need a minute, this is all very strange.’ The car park now, the
machine was eating her ticket.

The morning before I’d gone to Edin, Mirna had returned from her sister’s house. I was still in
the Motel, I was helping the police with their enquiries. It was a bit complicated, the fact I’d been
mentioned in the suicide note. They’d asked if I’d wanted to go back to Sarajevo to help them
with their enquiries. And I’d said I would be happy to do it wherever they liked. But there was
something I had to do before I left.

She came to the door in black. I hugged her and she hugged me back. Then we went and
watched the turtles, Mirna and Zlatko, Zlatko and Mirna. I wondered which was which. I was
almost surprised there were still two.

There was nothing else to do. I couldn’t have asked Edin to come translate. I’d briefly
entertained a strange idea. That I should find Elma’s grandson, get him so drunk he’d forget
what we said. But no, the only option was the laptop.

‘I am so very sorry, Mirna. You have showed me so much kindness. I did not mean for this to
happen. How are you?’

She looked at the words unspooling in a strange and complicated way. She didn’t understand
how people could talk like this.

So she put her hand on mine and stood. She led me to the lake. Her hair was billowing. We sat
there, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand.

And I thought of all the things I’d left unsaid. First to Nino. ‘I was crying that night because I felt
so trapped. I don’t know why I did that, why I cried and told you I wasn’t. It would have been so
much better if I’d explained I was a strange creature who always felt trapped. I could have taken
his hand and laughed and said I would change. Then to my parents. ‘I am unsure why you had a
child, cast a new character in your strange play.’ It was illogical. And why hadn’t I rebelled?
Stopped what my father did, at the very least.

I realised that, though we would never have the words, Mirna didn’t blame me. Her hair caught
on my mouth, and now her sister-in-law was joining us. She took my face in her hands.

‘This is not your fault. Zlatko was a strange man.’

We were on the road from Gatwick now, these odd London sights.

‘Naomi, can I be sincere for a moment? I know it’s unlike me.’

‘Christ. Go on.’

We were in Streatham now, cartoon chickens flashing past us.

‘Well, I know something now. I know I… Oh god, this is so embarrassing.’

‘Okay, just say it. I’ll forget immediately. Scout’s honour.’

‘You and your scouts. Okay… Fuck this is so sincere but… I know I want to live now.’

‘That’s… good? Christ this is awkward. I don’t know what to say. But that’s good.’

‘I guess it’s a small victory.’

Car horns now. We hadn’t seen the lights change.

‘But Emmie, promise me one thing. You need to write this down. All these people, all these
stories. For fuck’s sake just write a book.’

I had been tempted. But when Naomi said that, something hardened in me, some resolve.

‘No.’ And now I meant it. ‘These stories don’t belong to me.’
2

Five Years Later

After I left Bosnia, my friends from the bar got in touch. They appreciated my infamy, they found
it funny. They’d asked me to do one thing. Every month to send a postcard to 11 Radiceva. And I
did. I never left a return address, I just kept sending postcards from wherever I was. Sometimes
they’d post them on Facebook. I didn’t ask how they were, whether the man who kept seven
hundred books would do that again, whether the bridge had met in the middle. And they asked
nothing more of me, just the postcards.

The thought struck me now that I should go back. I’d been banned from the country for five
years. Not for the monster. But because I’d never registered, I’d overstayed my time by months.
Of course the monster didn’t help. But I think the Bosnians liked the fact they could ban a British
girl who’d lived there illegally. And, good for them, I’d thought. It was the year before Brexit was
cancelled. On some level I found it funny too. That I, from a country drunk on ego, could be
banned from this small and fractured state.

But the five years had passed. And the documentary would be shown at Sarajevo Film Festival.
Who would be in that room? I couldn’t imagine how the documentary would work. I wasn’t in it.
And Zlatko was dead. Had Edin agreed? Had Selim? Was Elma still alive? I thought back to the
documentary about the tobacco smugglers, long recreated scenes of men trudging through the
snow. Had they cast someone to play me? I wondered for a moment if they’d cast the other
Elma. Then I remembered she was dead.

The trailers were ending. I wondered whether I should leave, what exactly I was doing here. But
I wouldn’t leave. I’d remember the interview I’d read with Tony McKay. He’d been using the film
to promote his models. I’d remember Naomi sending me a link to Matthew’s Twitter. He was
cited as executive producer. I’d have been lying if I’d said I wasn’t intrigued. So I stayed right
there, on that red velvet seat.

The Making of a Monster.

It wasn’t going to be a very good documentary. The opening shots were just of the headlines
when the story blew up. I didn’t feel much as I saw them. But the first talking head took me by
surprise. He’d aged. His hair had been straggly at thirty-five. But in a charming way. Now he
must have been forty and it was too thin. It was still the same length, long but not long enough
for a pony tail. But he needed to have it cut off. And his fingernails. I could see the smoking on
them, it was more pronounced. He was subtitled. He still couldn’t speak English, then.
I left her then she went crazy. I was confused by how the subtitles were working, then I realised
my expectations were wrong. That I associated him so much with Translate, I’d been expecting
the words to come one at a time. For the meaning to change as the sentence progressed. But no,
these were just subtitles.

I didn’t know anything about her. But I trusted her. She was British and I could see in her eyes
that I could trust her. I could see it in her eyes.

Why was he in this film? He didn’t have anything to do with the monster. Then I chuckled to
myself. Of course he did.

He was explaining that he was a poet and a painter and I wanted to shout to the cinema. This is
irrelevant! I’d have preferred him as a barman.

There was footage of the lake now, a quick cut to a man who had barely aged. To a man called
Tony McKay. He was in his campervan, surrounded by his models. It was pissing down behind
him.

‘It has been difficult for me, these past five years. Because I believed in the monster of Luka
Lake, people don’t trust me. I do believe in Nessie, still. What happened in Bosnia was a
calculated deception engineered by a woman of unusually high intelligence and a man of pure
evil. None of the lessons of Luka apply to Loch Ness. In Nessie I still believe.’ He stroked the neck
of a model. There was something empathic in that stroke.

Tony McKay had misremembered several things. He said he’d first met me by the lake. That I
had come to say hello as he was peering through hi binoculars. But of course I hadn’t. Edin had
seen him first, then we’d gone to wait in the bar. He said Zlatko was the one who showed him
the book. Not me, at the foot of a woman’s deathbed.

It cut to footage Matthew had shot at the party. I hadn’t realised he was filming. There I was,
with blood on my hands. Because I’d stabbed myself in the arm to swear I’d loved Nino. And it
had never occurred to me that the blood had run down, or rather it had, from a practical point of
view. But I’d missed the symbolism. I actually had blood on my hands. He wasn’t as stupid as I
thought he was. He’d noticed that, he’d made a record.

And there was Zlatko. Mirna was in the background, hovering as she did, as women often did,
wondering if everyone was cared for, if everyone had a drink. I was crying now, and the man
next to me asked if I was okay. He must have thought I was very odd, a thirty-seven-year-old
woman, crying in a cinema. Crying at a little documentary about a hoax.
And then yes. Edin had agreed to take part. He looked exactly as I remembered him, his hair still
full, his skin still so pale.

‘Because nothing about Emmie Orton made any sense, I thought she was here on false
pretences. That she wanted to catch Zlatko Sofić. Of course Nino Tahirović comes from this
village, so I thought that initially she had become associated with him as a way to get close to
Zlatko.’

Why did Zlatko invite me into his home? I still had no idea how much he’d intended to do what
he did.

He paused and laughed. ‘Because otherwise, it made no sense. Why would she move in with a
man she didn’t know and couldn’t talk to. Nino, I mean, not Zlatko. Because she was a cold
person, all she cared about was words.’

The man next to me turned again. He was even more confused now I was giggling.

‘It really wasn’t obvious what was happening. Because why did Zlatko invite her into his home
when, at the time, it seemed so obvious to me what was going. Of course the truth turned out to
be even stranger.’

I was at the door of the cinema. I’d save the rest for Sarajevo. I booked a flight and found a
tourist shop. It was just off Leicester Square, it still sold postcards.

Dear The Bar,

See you at 6 on Tuesday,

Love,

Emmie xx
Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following people, who have given me an immense amount of help in
the process of writing this book, in terms of advice, edits, information, inspiration and stories.
You’re also excellent people to the last, and very fun to drink with.

Thank you to:

Christoph Baumgarten, Julia Buckley, Sara Carroll, Amer Duzic, John Doyle, Matt Greene, Duncan
Harris, Danilo Kreso, Alexander Larman, Rob Palk, Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal, Paul Stark, Olivia
Schelts, Arzu Tahsin, Pia Talbot, Srdan Rodic, Denis Zmukic.

And to my family – the Charleses, Chloe, Felicity, Georgina and Janice.