Free End of Manners by Francesca Marciano

know.”
    I had started talking like Nkosi and Jonathan. It felt good to use the jargon.
    “Basically, what you’re saying is they teach you how to
bribe
guards at checkpoints, yes?”
    “Well, basically, yes. If necessary,” I said, defensively. “Should the situation get hairy.”
    It annoyed me that my father, of all people, wouldn’t see the point of this. Wasn’t he supposed to be Mr. I Know It All on coup d’états, guerrillas and tribal clashes?
    “But, Maria, it sounds more like an acting class than a training course to me. More like you’re playing danger,” he said. “I’m just wondering how this is going to help you once you actually find yourself in the situa—”
    “Afghanistan is one
huge
checkpoint.”
    “Right,” said my father skeptically.
    “What?”
    “Nothing, it just sounds a bit sinister, at least from where I’m standing. Besides, I know how impressionable you are. I wouldn’t want you to—”
    “No, I’m fine, I promise you. The first couple of days, maybe. But now I’m getting into it.”
    Perhaps he was beginning to feel guilty for having pushed me into this, now that he could see how the adventure was taking shape in all its gruesome details. However, at this point I didn’t need him to remind me how ill-suited I was to all this. Not now that I was beginning to cope. Not when I’d just managed to shut Obelix up.
    Even the first-aid classes had taken a different light. All that talk about blood and amputations didn’t freak me out as much as it had two days earlier. Something had shifted in the last forty-eight hours. I had acquired an unexpected faith in the resistance of the human body now that I had begun to see it in a new way, as a solid chunk of flesh and bones, or better yet, as sausages. It seemed that, after all, everything could be fixed up with a snip here, a few neat stitches there and a good, tight bandage.
             
    At dinner, Liz Reading had commandeered a position at Nkosi’s table and was now sitting between him and Jonathan Kirk, laughing and tossing her thick dark hair as Jonathan poured her a generous glass of wine. Bob Sheldon, the Australian journalist—a corpulent, hairy man with a gentle, bovine air—had joined them. I waved at Nkosi as I waited in line holding my plate in front of the shepherd’s pie and the cauliflower au gratin, but quickly turned away again, fearing he would ask me to join them. I could already hear Jonathan’s booming laughter as, heedless of the volume, he was telling a funny story about meeting once with Chavez. I headed over to Mike, the quiet, balding rebel, who was sitting at a table at the back all by himself.
    “How’s it going?” I asked him.
    He put his book down.
    “I guess the novelty wore off.”
    “Who did you have as a victim today?”
    “Alan, the one with the blue eyes. He was wounded in his thigh. An arterial hemorrhage.”
    “Ah!” I said. “Was it difficult to handle?”
    “Oh, I gave up straightaway. He kept squirting blood in my face with that pump thing, and he just wouldn’t stop. They do it on purpose. It’s their private joke. They pick one victim and then laugh amongst themselves afterwards. I wasn’t in the mood to play along.”
    He snorted and went back to his roast.
    “You mean you just left him lying there on the ground bleeding to death?”
    “Yes. Anyway, I didn’t have a clue what to do with all that blood spurting on my glasses.”
    He’d gone on strike. Incredible.
    “You see, I’m only an accountant for an NGO. We do work for refugees,” he explained. “I sit all day in an office with air-conditioning and a doorman. I don’t think I’ll get too many opportunities to save someone with a severed artery. If anything like that does ever happen, I think I’ll call an ambulance with my cell phone and let them deal with it.”
    I took a better look at Mike. Glasses with silver frames, sagging eyelids, lusterless hair; the texture of his clothes was soft,