Bully

by A. J. Kirby

  ‘Something stinks here,’ snarled chewing gum breath.

  I resisted the temptation to inform him that it was he that was the one doing all the smelling in that room.

  ‘We know that, Chambers,’ said Tommy Lee. ‘He knows that. But for now, there’s nothing we can do. You heard the CO…’

  ‘Well, I’d like to thank you boys for coming visiting me so often,’ I said, grinning. ‘Without your friendly little chats, I’d have had nothing to look forward to in here.’

  Chewing-Gum Breath, or Chambers as I now knew him to be called, gritted his teeth. Tommy Lee cracked his knuckles. But neither of them said anything.

  ‘I don’t want to keep you boys from anything important though,’ I continued. ‘If there’s some paperwork you can be doing or something, just go ahead and do it… sirs.’

  ‘I’ll wait for you outside,’ muttered Chambers, and then he exited the room. I think he tried to slam the door after him, but because of the air-locking system, all that happened was it gave this muffled sound, like a whump.

  Tommy Lee continued to stare at me a while. He made a big show of straightening his tie.

  ‘My colleague might be a little hot-headed,’ he said, softly. ‘But he’s a good soldier, despite what you may think. One of the very best. Don’t think that your string-pulling is some kind of victory over us. You got lucky, is all.’

  I didn’t say anything. Continued to keep my hands clamped behind my head. After a while, I realised that this was what passed for an apology with those military police guys.

  When it finally came to the time that I could leave the hospital, I wasn’t sorry to see the back of any of it, apart from old Montaffian. He’d fought my corner all the way. He’d come down to the hospital foyer, still clutching my clip-board, still looking overwhelmingly tired, still my one and only ally in the place.

  ‘The MPs won’t come a-knockin’ again,’ he said, presenting me with a new set of crutches that he pulled from behind the reception desk. ‘They’ve now officially listed you as a survivor of the explosion at the, uh, cock-up mansion. You’ll be entitled to a full military pension, Gary.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘They came to see me a few days ago.’

  ‘Well, that’s good, isn’t it? I thought you’d be over the moon.’

  I wished that I could put my concerns into words, but it was impossible: ‘It just seems so…’

  ‘I know, I know,’ soothed Montaffian. ‘That’s what’s called survivor’s guilt, what you’re, uh, feelin’ now. But you’ll get over it, son. And remember, them military police were only doing their jobs… Mind you, it was funny the way they backed off so quickly. They were like a dog with a bone with you at first.’

  I tried to suppress a wince as I stepped forward. Oh sure, I thought, they’d been like a dog with a bone at first, but something had called them off. Something had caused them to trot off back to their corner, whimpering like scared puppies… And that something was surely not the British army. That something probably looked very much like my old friend Tommy Peaker. Now he was a man that could make things happen.

  Montaffian rested a hand on my shoulder. Looked into my eyes.

  ‘I hope you do eventually, uh, find what you are looking for. And I hope you, uh, find happiness in your life,’ he said. ‘Just don’t go looking for it in the wrong places, like the bottom of a bottle. I seen so many good guys like you go looking there after they’ve been signed out… Don’t let it happen to you.’

  ‘Don’t worry about me, doc,’ I sighed. ‘I’m ready.’

  Montaffian nodded, straightened up again and then started flicking through some more papers on the clip-board.

  ‘We’ve got you on the supply plane which flies west to Egypt, and from Cairo, you’re on a commercial flight back to Manchester, UK.’

  Part of me loved the way that he said Manchester, UK, as though I was going to get that Manchester confused with the one in America. Part of me bristled at the idea; twenty-five kilometres from Manchester, nestling in the foothills of the Peak District, was Newton Mills. And it was waiting for me to fall into its clutches again. Now I was really going back, I was starting to have second thoughts. I’d already lost a foot, for Christ’s sake.

  ‘Thanks, doc,’ I breathed.

  His face brightened. ‘We’ll miss you, son. You’ve been an example to all of the other patients. We need more men like you out here. Men that are prepared to put their insecurities to one side.’

  If only he knew, I thought. If only he knew.

  Presently, Montaffian’s name was called over the Tannoy. And as he walked away from me, he became the grim-faced doctor that I’d first encountered again. Suddenly, he stopped being like my father and became just another white coat fading away into the gunmetal grey background.

  While I waited in the hospital foyer for the taxi to the airstrip, I caught sight of my sad reflection in the glass double-doors. My eyes had heavy, dark saddlebags under them, just like Montaffian’s. They were watery-blue now, and had that faraway look in them that I always saw in the men that had been out in the desert for too long; too much time spent staring at the horizon. I’d also lost weight; quite a lot of it. My cheek bones, which had always been ‘sculpted’ or ‘angled’ as I’d once heard them described by some bird, were now too-prominent. And where once I’d been toned - the kinda guy that likes to wear tight tees just so that it looks like my muscles are going to break-on through the material like the Incredible Hulk – I was now more like a deflated balloon. But nobody would care about that any more. All they’d see was what was missing.

  The taxi driver, when he finally arrived, gave me my first indication of what life would be like for me. He came right on through the double-doors and virtually carried me to his smelly Mercedes cab, talking to me as though I was mentally deficient all the way; as though he thought that I’d lost my brain as well as my foot. Before he allowed me in the cab, he put down plastic sheeting on the leather seats in the back.

  ‘Just in case,’ he said, winking.

  I wanted to smash him in the face for his impudence. And why was he so proud of his fucking Merc? Everybody out here drove Mercs. They were like Peugeots in England. As I sat in the back and listened to him prattle on, I worked a hole into the back of his seat with my Swiss Army knife. As he talked about the hopes that he had for his son in this new country that the military were establishing on their behalf, I pulled some of the stuffing through the hole.

  ‘In this place,’ he said, ‘we have too much awareness of death. The young people lack ambition because of it.’

  Yeah, I thought, and it was the height of your ambition to drive a fucking taxi, was it? But I said nothing. Instead, I gazed dispassionately out of the window. I would not miss the place. Not because of the fighting and the pain and what had happened with Tommy, but simply because everything there was so undramatic. It was too sparse, over-cooked and limp. I wouldn’t dream of the place as I did the embattled majesty of Newton Mills.

  When I was deposited at the airstrip, we had a minor argument about my lack of a tip, as though the driver expected that his waffle about the geography and history of the place was some kind of paid-for service.

  ‘I’ve spent enough time here to know all about the history and the geography,’ I said, slamming the door. ‘I didn’t need no tour guide on my way home either.’

  On the first flight, I was so whacked out on sleeping pills that I hardly even noticed time pass. Groggily, I was helped off the plane by another returning soldier who couldn’t wait to tell me all about the ‘foxy young thing’ he was going back home to. In the end, to shut him up, I shared a few drinks with him in the departure lounge as we waited for our flights. It helped; the booze. It helped me come to terms with the naked stares of the Egyptians and the surreptitious glances from the English tourists. When one little boy came too close, I growled at him and he darted away, back to his mother in floods of tears.

  The flight followed very much the same pa
ttern. I was treated with an unholy mixture of concern, contempt and curiosity. Even the stewardesses were overly attentive with the contents of the bar, just so’s they could get a better look at my footless state. When one of them asked my name, I told her I was Captain Joe Jackson, in reference to the former baseball great, ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson; the doc’s hero, apparently. The poor woman didn’t seem to get my joke.

  As I downed the Lilliputian measures of Vodka and the dolls house bottles of whisky, I felt my mind starting to unravel again. I felt that stabbing pain in my chest, just to remind me that Tommy was there. I hammered my finger on the stewardess call-button constantly. I fiddled with the air-conditioning, trying to somehow stop myself from breaking out in a cold sweat. I twisted and turned in my seat and muttered and moaned to myself like a town drunk. In the end, when I fell asleep, it must have been blessed relief for my fellow passengers.

  I was woken up by the air stewardess’s shaking my shoulders. I still felt the old pain there where Tommy’s claws had sunk in.

  ‘Sir; are you all right?’ she asked. ‘You’ve been screaming in your sleep. You’re scaring the other passengers. Would you like to come up to the front of the plane and sit with us for a while?’

  Meekly, I allowed myself to be led up to the part of the plane that was curtained-off, where I was doused in strong black coffee and spoken to in the soft, reassuring manner that one would choose to speak to a poorly infant. What they couldn’t stop me from doing, no matter how many itchy blankets they draped over my shoulders, was shivering. And when the captain’s voice crackled over the Tannoy, telling us that we would soon be descending into Manchester, these shivers only became worse. I was going home; unavoidably, unquestionably, I was going home.

  Chapter Seven

  “Oh, and there we were all in one place,

  A generation lost in space

  With no time left to start again.”

  The taxi driver from Manchester Airport back to Newton Mills couldn’t have been more different from the one that dropped me at the air strip out there in the desert. This guy sat low in his seat and virtually drove the car with his huge beer belly, so much did it protrude onto the steering wheel. His car was the old Sarcophagus model; the colour purple, which I’d never seen on a car before. The interior stunk so much of cigarettes that I reckoned that he probably ignored the proliferation of ‘no smoking’ stickers which were plastered over every surface. Indeed, the man was so heroically impolite in his manner that I began to think that his behaviour was his own well-practiced routine for grabbing tips from his jet-lagged passengers.

  My driver had perfected the art of looking unmoved by anything. He’d not said anything about my missing foot, but neither – a true rarity – had his eyes. He simply threw my pack in the boot and got on with his job, which appeared to involve driving to Newton Mills using the longest route possible, although he did seem to avoid nearly every traffic light, so careful were his manoeuvres around deserted council estates and down unused country lanes. For some reason, his silence made me want to talk. I wanted to tell him a horror story which would make him think twice about doing another airport run. I didn’t. I simply stared out of the window and watched as we drew inexorably closer to Newton Mills.

  There were a number of different ways to get to Newton Mills from Manchester, most of which I knew like the back of my hand. So it surprised me when he took a sharp right turn, apparently up someone’s driveway, and ploughed up what was little more than a farmer’s track up a steep hill.

  ‘Umm… where are we going?’ I asked, suddenly worried that this remarkably fat man might be some kind of agent that Tommy had employed in order to drive me off a cliff or something.

  ‘Short cut,’ he coughed. ‘Over this hill’s Grange Heights.’

  Grange Heights; the memories flooded back thick and fast. And indeed, as we passed over the brow of the hill, there it was, in all its glory. It was an old viewing point. A bench had been erected there so idle ramblers could stop and take a lingering look over the panoramic view of the Peak District. A small, gravel car park had been laid in order that lazier sightseers could get up there too. But as the town of Newton Mills had grown, so less people had wanted to go up there to take a look. Newton Mills was not a pretty town. The youngsters hadn’t minded though. Driving up to Grange Heights, up past the last of the pubs, you could gain the kind of freedom that you couldn’t have anywhere else in the town. It was where we’d come to drink and smoke and where some had come to do something more, in the back of their rusting shit-can cars.

  I felt a sudden yearning to experience the calmness which was Grange Heights in the day-time. It would allow me to collect my thoughts, and would, of course, delay the inevitable for a little longer.

  ‘Would you mind dropping me here?’ I asked, as the driver navigated around a particularly troublesome pothole.

  Not at all sir; but sir, if you wouldn’t mind me asking; how are you going to get down that hill with… well, no foot?

  My driver didn’t care. Instead of finding out how his crippled passenger planned to walk down to the town, he simply screeched to a halt, pulled down the sun-visor and pretended to stare at the knot of figures and fares which was sellotaped on the back. It was all for show; he already knew exactly how much he was going to charge me. I was obviously coming back from the war after all – my uniform and injury would have told him that – and would be full of money that I couldn’t spend out there and the army payout.

  ‘Twenty-five, fifty mate,’ he said. And for some reason, the additional fifty pence annoyed the hell out of me. He’d simply tacked it on the end there so I’d be forced to give him thirty notes and then say keep the change while he fished around interminably in his big grey ‘loot’ bag.

  I fished through my wallet for the exact change, forced to count up coppers in the end, but refusing to budge. As I handed it over, the driver sighed as though I’d short-changed him or asked for a discount. As I tried to climb out of the side door, I made sure that I allowed the edge of my crutch to clip him on the side of the head.

  I hated the driver and everything he stood for, but as he drove away, scattering loose gravel into the grassy banks at the side of the narrow road, I almost wanted to call him back. For now he was gone, it was just Tommy and me; Tommy and me and Newton Mills.

  I lurched across the car park and made for the bench. It was surrounded by flotsam and jetsam; ten years-worth of empty beer cans, white cider bottles and cigarette ends. I almost became nostalgic for some of the old names: Thunderbird, Mad-Dog Twenty-Twenty, and Ice Dragon. Some of these discarded bottles may have been drunk by the much younger, much prettier Gary Bull in his heyday.

  I slumped onto the bench and allowed myself to see my town; the place that corrupted my bloodstream and gave me the desire to drink at the age of thirteen. I hated and loved the place. I knew I’d have been a completely different person if I’d been brought up somewhere else. I knew that I’d probably have had a far better life, but still, when I looked at it, and my own history inscribed into the landmarks, I couldn’t help but smile. I cracked open a new deck of cigarettes, making sure that I didn’t add any more litter to the site but instead crinkling up the cellophane wrapper and sticking it in my pocket.

  The Dorchester and Grey felt strange between my lips. I’d long grown used to the army’s standard brand and the cigarette felt thinner and more tightly packed somehow. But longer, always longer than standard cigarettes. I drank down the sulphurous smoke.

  Newton Mills was built in the bottom of this deep gorge. That’s how it got its name in the old days, on account of the river which ran through it and powered the massive cotton mills. Grange Heights overlooked all of this, and stood in judgement of the factories and the industrial estates which had started to spring up. The town was intersected by a railway; on the one side was the new town with its garish red brick, but on the other was the town I knew. In the old town, most of the houses were built from the local stone and w
hen it rained, seemed to take on the water and darkened from light grey to almost black.

  Now, Newton Mills was shadowed by threatening clouds and the place looked depressing; lifeless even. But I knew that life teemed within it; within the small dome of the school library which glistened with wetness and the corrugated metal sides of the new leisure centre and the main street and its countless pubs.

  But more than anything else, what this aerial picture of Newton Mills showed me was the graveyards. Hell, even the damn taxi driver would have spotted the fact that there was a graveyard at the end of virtually every street. There were scores of them; grey gravestones pebbledashed the town. I remember when I first came up here and I felt this slight chill creeping up the back of my neck when I tried to count them all.

  I don’t know when I first noticed it. As a kid, you don’t really go around comparing and contrasting towns. Measuring the number of shops or restaurants or houses and then coming to some kind of conclusion about the nature of the town was not really anything any of us ever paid any mind to. Newton Mills was simply home to us, and we wouldn’t have had it any other way. It was a known quantity, a given. Even when changes occurred, such as when a shop came under new ownership or new houses were built, we never thought of it as change. It was on the periphery of our vision, and as long as the shop that changed hands wasn’t Burt’s sweet shop, and as long as the new residents of the new garish redbrick houses across the tracks were not going to be introduced into our classes and clubs, we simply didn’t care.

  But one day the understanding had washed over me. I suppose it was as though I’d finally given voice to that silent knowledge which I’d always known, deep down. Newton Mills had an unnatural amount of graveyards. And I mean there were a lot; miles more than such a town that size should have had.