We Are Now Beginning Our Descent Read Online Free PDF

Kellas had given his money to the loadmaster and Astrid had put hers back in the pocket of her jeans. She’d shouted in Kellas’s ear: ‘I’m not coming. Don’t call me’, grabbed her rucksack and jumped out of the open door. Kellas made it to the edge after her, with the loadmaster’s hand squeezing his upper arm and yelling in Dari, and saw her already fifty feet, sixty feet away on the flattened grass below the rising helicopter, sprawled where she’d fallen, getting up, hoisting her rucksack on her shoulders and walking to the cluster of drivers and officials without looking back, the tails of her headscarf writhing in the last of the helicopter’s downdraft. Then they were atoms of colour on the sliver of green and mulberry groves by the tilted blade of the river, and the mountains pressed in around the gasping aircraft like the hands of blind giants seeking a dragonfly by its hum, and the loadmaster half-flung Kellas to a place away from the door. That was the last time he’d seen or heard from Astrid, until a few hours ago, when he’d picked up her email begging him to come to see her immediately.
    She’d been strong for a skinny-armed, thin-shanked woman, the way she toted that rucksack. It would sit upright on the ground, sagging at the top, and she would bend at the waist to hoist it. Her wrists would poke out thin and white from the sleeves of her too-big anorak, her fringe would hang down and her jaw would come forward a little way. A sound would come from her lungs as she held the strap of the rucksack and took its weight and swung it onto her back. One time he had offered to help and she shook her head. She would notice him watching her. Sometimes she would smile and sometimes she would not, but she would never look him in the eyes until the rucksack was up on her back and the straps were tight. More than once in Afghanistan Kellas had caught himself thinking about the sound, the exhalation with voice, which came from her involuntarily as the weight pressed on her. He thought of the air in her breast, and the rush of it in her larynx, and the bones containing them, and the flesh around them. He’d recognised the thing of which this tiny sound was the centre: a fascination. A fascination was what came about when a single life wasn’t enough to contain the presence of someone else inside him. He needed to be running two or three lives at once. Not even words had made the fascination, just the flex of her limbs and the tiny sound as she took the strain of her pack. Just those things had crossed into him, and faint as the chances were, he wanted to follow them back to their source.
    On the train Kellas’s skin prickled. He had no idea where his bag was. He began to get up from his seat, then remembered he had no luggage, only his passport, wallet and mobile and the clothes he was wearing, a black linen suit, a white shirt with a bloodstained right sleeve, and a pair of black leather boots, city boots, with smooth soles and side zips. He’d abandoned his coat at the Cunnerys’ and spent the night at a hotel because he’d been afraid to go home. If he’d gone back to his flat in Bow and picked up Astrid’s message there he would have packed a bag of some kind but still, flying across the Atlantic without anything to carry wassomething he’d never done. He’d imagined it like this, that he’d be travelling alone, answering an urgent call, discarding all burdens, walking away from things he should attend to if duty were the only consideration. He’d imagined that he wouldn’t have to worry about money on the journey, and this, too, had come about. A publisher was offering him an advance of a hundred thousand pounds for world rights to Rogue Eagle Rising , the thriller he’d begun in Afghanistan. The book was finished.
    Just before going to Central Asia Kellas had been to stay for a few days with M’Gurgan and his wife Sophie in Dumfries. They had a two-storey Victorian terraced house faced in