“They say that the Garden of Eden was around here,” Faulkner said as he turned onto the main road heading into Basra. “Joke, right? Maybe once, but I don’t know about now.”

Beatrix looked out. In the hazy distance she could see gas, the by-product of bringing oil to the surface, being flared. Other places might store that gas and use it, but here, with oil so plentiful, they just let it burn. The road was badly pot-holed, the traffic disorganised and disorderly, the motorists using the verge whenever a queue developed. As they passed into the fringes of the city, shops on the side on the road offered everything from construction materials to car repair. Small herds of sheep hovered around feeding troughs and waited to be sold. Camels crossed the road, seemingly oblivious to the peril that they were in. There were carcasses of dead vehicles, pools of fetid, stagnant water and more litter than Beatrix had ever seen in one single place. There were piles and piles of rubble. Beatrix remembered that from previous visits. The Iraqis never cleared rubble. They moved it to the sidewalk and left it there.

As they drew closer to the city, the number of soldiers increased. There were roadblocks every few miles on the road, but as they approached Basra, these became much more frequent. Iraqi soldiers stood behind reinforced concrete baulks, backed up by armoured cars with fifty-calibre machine guns. Everyone had to stop and show their papers.

“Been to Basra before?” he asked her as they pulled away from the latest checkpoint.

“No. Never been this far south.”

“It’s a total shithole. We never really got control of it. One thing about it, and it’s pretty crazy, but you’ll be able to tell the time just by opening your window and sticking your head out. You’ll know it’s seven in the morning from the explosions as the Iraqi patrols get hit by the IEDs that the insurgents planted overnight. It’s like a fucked-up alarm clock. After that, you get the suicide bombers. And in the afternoon you’ll get the mortar teams who like to lob bombs into the city itself. End of the day, you’ll hear the small arms fire from the Iraqis going out on ops and the extra-judicial killings.”

“I’ve been in war zones before,” she said. “This won’t be any different.”

“If you say so.”

Basra wasn’t quite as bad as Beatrix had expected. They passed one of Saddam’s large palaces with the outsized domes and the ceremonial battlements. There were Ba’athist statues, large and declaratory, surprisingly spared during the upheaval of the invasion. The streets were arranged in neat and ordered lines, the traffic within them surging forward with little regard to rules. Beatrix remembered the Iraqi standard of driving from Saddam’s time. The main imperative was to keep moving, and if that meant driving on the wrong side of the road, going the wrong way around roundabouts or, occasionally, on the pavement, then so be it. It was anarchic, and Faulkner became quiet as he concentrated on avoiding a collision.