"Bloody women drivers."
"There goes your no-claims, Ulcers."
Rob gave them a big grin and waved two fingers as he went in. They must have been former Marines; Ulcers was his old Royal Marines nickname, a play on the Rennie heartburn remedy, but Mike rarely heard anyone use it. Rob's callsign was just Royal. Any other former RM on the local radio net who wanted to use the generic nickname was out of luck.
"Is there anything you can't damage, Rob?" The site supervisor took the key to the Suburban and gave Rob a weary look, along with a sheaf of post-contact and damage report forms. "Go on, go see the medic. You as well, Mike. I don't want you two suing us for whiplash. You can't afford the lawyers anyway."
Rob just winked at Mike and took the forms. "Yes, Supe. Can we roster off, then?"
"Away with you," the supervisor said. "Good result, guys."
The supervisor didn't know anything about Mike's family. Few people he worked with ever did. He kept his connections quiet, and Rob, protective as a big brother, maintained the cover of ordinary guy-ness. For the first time since childhood, Mike had a really close buddy, the kind who gave him a nickname, ribbed him fondly in that way British troops called slagging, and always had his back. Rob treated him like a fellow grunt who just happened to have a few more bucks to his name. It was enormously liberating.
And we're a team. We stopped a massacre today. We did good.
At least Livvie wouldn't see it on the news. There was a plus side to being invisible.
Mike submitted to the medic and emerged with a packet of painkillers. He found Rob in the social club, a grim-looking demountable unit next to the canteen. Rob took a more home-remedy approach to analgesics. The joint security compound was officially dry, but that never seemed to stop him or anyone else from drinking liquor. He nursed what looked like a cup of coffee while he slumped in an armchair in the TV room, looking a little lost. A Thermos jug sat on the table in front of him.
"Is that decaf?" Mike asked.
Rob held a cup out to him to taste. "Dave's special blend."
Mike sipped it cautiously. It tasted like a half and half mix of brandy. "You know you get giggly and take your pants off after two beers."
"The curse of extreme fitness, Zombie. Come on. Skip the pills and join me."
They clinked cups. "Good day's work there, Royal."
"You too, mate. I didn't even see him raise the bloody launcher."
Mike was now in the pit of an adrenaline dump. As far as his body was concerned, it had been in a car crash and there was no convincing it otherwise. He spent the rest of the afternoon finishing the heavily dosed coffee with Rob, watching the sports channel in near silence.
"Brad keeps asking me to do yacht work," Rob said. "Fancy it?"
Mike shrugged. "I haven't done my maritime courses yet."
"If you're going to be siring Brayne heirs, you need to reduce your risks."
"It never stopped me before."
As soon as Mike said it, he felt guilty about Livvie. IVF treatment was no picnic, physically or psychologically. Did he have any right to keep putting her through this? It would be the thirteenth cycle. It wasn't the unlucky number that troubled him as much as the stress on her. All he had to do was aim into a container. She was the one who had to put up with the hormone treatments and endless tests.
He'd never missed her as much as he did right then. He checked the time.
"I'll be back later," he said, draining his cup. "I need to call her."
It was Mike's daily ritual. He'd prop his tablet on the small desk in his cabin and try to pretend they were having dinner instead of thousands of miles apart. Livvie's auburn hair was a little untidy, as if she'd just untied her pony tail and raked her fingers through it. They chatted aimlessly for a while.
"What's wrong with your neck?"
There was no fooling her. "Oh, rough-housing. So, one more IVF?"
"Do you want to?" She sounded tired. "Tell me straight."
She wasn't keen. He knew it. "Only if you want to."
"Okay, try not to widow me, then."
"I've got Rob watching my back. I can't lose."
The decision was made. Mike changed the subject and they chatted about the garden and plans for homecoming. It occurred to him that he might simply have been holding her up. It was too easy to forget that she had a job and a life while he was away, even if she was stuck on her own in her office. She never complained.
"I'd better go," she said. "I've got a live interpretation for a client in Paris in half an hour."
She lived in a virtual world. After Mike rang off, he struggled to remember the last time they'd actually been to Paris. He reminded himself that this deployment would be over soon, and that military wives coped.
But we don't have to live like this. I don't have to be here. I've never needed to earn a cent.
The worst thing about compulsions was that even the apparently noble ones were no different to a drug habit for the people you loved. Mike couldn't blame his sister for trotting out the same line every time they had a fight – that he was playing at it, Marie Antoinette indulging in a fantasy of being a simple milkmaid while courtiers worked to maintain the illusion around her.
Livvie was chipper again for the rest of the week, but he couldn't shake his guilt. He needed to accept that he couldn't do this forever.
"Did she bollock you?" Rob asked. They were back on escort detail, with plenty of time on their hands to gossip while they sat in the Suburban waiting for trucks and buses. "You've been a sulky sod this week."
"No. I'm just fretting. You know what I'm like."
"Well, I'll bollock you, then." Rob rapped his phone on Mike's forearm. "You did it again, didn't you?"
"Ouch. What?"
"Fifty grand. You sent Tom fifty grand."
"Come on." The easiest way to give Rob or Tom anything was to dump it on them and beg forgiveness later. "My nematode of a brother-in-law spends twice that on a new car every year."
"It's not a book token, Mike." When Rob was serious, it was always Mike. He shoved the phone back in his pocket. "It's fucking serious money."
"I'd only spend it on polo ponies, and I can't even ride."
"Sorry, mate. I must sound like an ungrateful bastard. I just don't want Tom to get used to you bailing him out. I'm his dad. It's my job to support him."
"I haven't got any kids of my own to spoil." Mike wished he hadn't said that. It sounded like blackmail. "Humour me, Rob."
"I'll pay you back."
"You don't owe me a damn cent. Neither does Tom. You're family."
It was hard to tell if Rob had given in. He looked embarrassed, chin lowered. "I'd still be your mate if you were living in a cardboard box. You know that."
"Yes, I do. Which is why I do it."
The issue seemed to be settled. But a couple of days later, Rob tapped on Mike's open door and simply handed him his phone again. He didn't say a word. Mike read the message.
'Hi Dad. I've written a thank-you to Mike. But I'm committed to the summer gig now. We'll get together, though. Promise. I've put the money into my house fund.'
Mike didn't know what to say. He'd never seen that look on Rob's face before. It was a mix of pain and bewilderment.
"He's grown up." Rob managed a shrug. "They say it hurts to let go. Yeah, it bloody well does."
Mike still thought of himself and Rob as young men. But it was another reminder of mortality and all the things they might never do, no matter how fit they were, and that even if middle age now started at fifty, forty was still the halfway mark of a guy's allotted span. It was numerical certainty. And it sucked.
He shook off the thought by focusing on the fact that he'd be back home in days. It would strip years off him.
When they finally shipped out, the long flight with all its stopovers eased him gradually back into a world that ran by his rules and where he had everything he wanted. But it was an illusion, and he knew it. Rob never let him forget that any
way.
"Here we go. Through the looking glass." Rob stretched out in his first class seat across the aisle from Mike, unscrewing and sniffing the freebie bottles of toiletries. "See, civvies think they're safe because they've got rules and someone to complain to. But Nazani's the real world. Like Afghan. It snuffs you out, bang, just like that. No apology, no reason, and no compensation. It doesn't give a shit who you are."
"I wish I hadn't let you read Camus."
"Yeah, it was tough for a colouring book, but I stuck with it."
They managed to laugh. They always could. The alternative was to dwell on pointlessness and absent friends. Dibeg, at least, had some point to it, and there were too many dead to think of futility without feeling blasphemous.
When they landed in Bangor and picked up the rental car, Mike fell automatically into the routine of letting Rob drive. He counted down the familiar road signs and billboards on the route home.
"I'm stopping to for a leak," Rob said. "Coffee?".
"Sure. Let's find a diner."
Diners were comforting, a rare treat. Dad had always told him that he should never be too proud to eat in one. The diner that Rob stopped at smelled and tasted of Mike's childhood, and some elements even looked the same. A couple of tables away, a little boy was playing quietly with a toy soldier in DPM and body armour, walking the figure along the edge of the table and lost in his own thoughts. It seemed such an ancient, natural instinct for boys. The child's father was absent-mindedly stroking the child's hair, gazing out of the window at the passing traffic.
Mike nudged Rob. "Did you have one like that as a kid? GI Joe?"
"Yeah." Rob glanced at the boy. "Ours was called Action Man, though. I bet there was an MoD civil servant version called Inaction Man. Real grasping hands and interchangeable shiny arses."
"Is that what made you want to be a Marine?"
"What, to grip Barbie? Pervert."
"Seriously, how do you bring up a child and let them find their own way?"
"They find it whatever you do. You can't steer a kid by deciding whether he should have Action Man or Unshaven Feminist Barbie."
"Give me the benefit of your unedited advice," Mike said. "Am I pushing Livvie on IVF? Should we call it a day?"
"I can't make that decision for you."
"Just talk some sense to me."
"Jesus, look at me. Forty going on sixteen."
"What would you do?"
Rob looked away at the kid playing with his toy soldier. "Okay, Livvie's stuck in that big empty house on her own, year in, year out, and when you're home she's on hormones that make her feel like shit. Just give the baby thing a break and focus on her. It's you who wants a kid most." Rob could be brutally frank and kind in the same breath. "You'll drive her away. Don't end up on your own like me. It's fucking grim. "
Mike didn't know if it was what he wanted to hear or not, but it was what he needed to hear. His heart deflated slightly and he felt it would never be full again.
Yes, it's me. Might as well face it.
He tried to look away from the little boy. "You're right."
"Think about adoption," Rob said. "You'd have to beat them off with a shitty stick. Even kids with families would run away from home to get a billet at Zombie Towers."
Mike nodded. It felt painfully final, but it was easier to hear it from Rob. "I'd worry that it'd be like buying an accessory. Celeb style."
"Not to the kid you give a home to. It'll be a lifeline. And you'll love them like your own flesh and blood, believe me."
Rob had the ability to switch into profound mode in a heartbeat and pronounce universal truths. It was one of the things that made him so reassuring.
"Come on." Mike put a tip on the table. "Let's go. I'm a weird bastard, aren't I? I'm sorry."
Rob followed him out to the parking lot. "Zombie, humans always want more than they've got. If you've got everything money can buy, and you're smart, you're bound to want things that have meaning instead."
He opened the car door to let the hot air out and start the aircon. Mike tried to imagine Rob forming any kind of friendship with some of the guys he'd known at school. Rob would probably have punched them out within five minutes and not felt remotely minimized by the experience.
Before they drove away, the little boy with his GI Joe came out of the diner ahead of his dad and ran into the arms of a woman who'd just parked. Mike didn't need to know anything about them to put the story together. The little boy was the spitting image of his mom.
But it didn't need to be that way, did it? Rob said so, and Rob was always right.
DUNLOP RANCH, ATHEL RIDGE, WASHINGTON
JUNE.
A FedEx truck trundled up the track, as exotic a visitor as a camel train as far as Ian was concerned. The ranch didn't get many deliveries. He watched from the barn as Gran signed for the package, which was probably more dollar bills.
Last time the money had arrived by DHL, the time before that had been via UPS, and occasionally Gran went to the post office in Athel Ridge to collect it. Whoever sent the payments liked variety. Ian knew enough about the way the outside world ran to realise that things like pensions and donations didn't arrive that way, so while this was regular, it wasn't routine. Gran didn't trust banks. She was strictly cash-only.
"Here, Ian." She sat at the kitchen table, counting banknotes like a teller and bundling them into small wads and rolls with elastic bands. "Stow this away."
It was part of the emergency plan. Gran hid the cash around the ranch in case some disaster stopped them from accessing a central location. Ian had seen enough storms and forest fires on the news to understand how easy it was to lose everything you had in a matter of minutes, so it seemed like a reasonable precaution. He'd given up asking where it came from years ago. Gran said it was all legal, a regular gift from someone she'd done a very big favour.
Well, she knew best. She'd raised him and he thought she'd done a good job. But he was eighteen, and he'd begun to accept that Gran was also getting older and wouldn't be around forever. He couldn't bring himself to talk to her about it. She was fit and well now, perfectly capable of looking after the ranch, but she was in her sixties and her health wouldn't hold out forever. He had to be ready to take care of her. He couldn't think beyond that to a time when he'd be completely on his own.
How will I cope?
Ian felt like two separate creatures, a grown man who was old enough to vote and had girls on his mind most of the time, and a useless, scared little boy who didn't know the first thing about dealing with the wider world. He had to shape up. He wasn't too crazy to shoulder responsibility.
But I don't even have a driver's licence.
Gran went on counting. "We'll have to talk about this and plan for the future," she said, not looking up. "I need to make sure you won't need to worry about money or a roof over your head."
It didn't sound like she meant right now, but at least that opened the door enough for him to feel okay about mentioning it the next time. He took some of the rolls of banknotes and placed them around the ranch — the pantry, the gun locker, the grab bag in the hall, the steel tool cabinet in the barn — and then went to weed and water the vegetable patch at the back. If he kept busy, he wouldn't waste time worrying about things he couldn't even imagine. He needed his routine. It helped him pretend he had things under control.
When he scrubbed up afterwards, he steeled himself to use the mirror that was usually folded out of sight. He ran the clippers through his hair and tried to remember if it was still the same dark brown that it had been three months ago, which might have been the real colour or just his imagination. He had no way of knowing. He kept staring, waiting for the inevitable distortion to kick in, but nothing happened. Even the hair on his forearms stayed the same. He felt quite pleased with himself for braving the reflection.
People learn to cope with mental problems. OCD. Panic attacks. I've seen it on TV. Maybe I'm getting this under control.
But wh
at if it's neurological? Something wired wrong in my brain, like face-blindness. There's nothing I can do to cure that.
Gran had a doctor friend who came to see them every few years, a guy about her age called Charles Kinnery. He'd always check Ian over as a favour, because Gran didn't trust physicians or dentists either. Yeah, I can ask Kinnery. When's he coming again? Ian had never had the nerve to ask the guy before, in case Gran hadn't mentioned that he was crazy. Maybe it was time.
He shook the hair from the clippers into the toilet bowl, flushed it, and folded the mirror back against the wall. It hadn't felt quite so bad this time. Perhaps he'd been doing this all wrong. Maybe he could teach himself to accept what was really there just by forcing himself to look every day rather than avoiding it. Willing it to stop hadn't worked at all.
When he finished the chores, he settled down to watch TV, his only glimpse of a world he'd probably never be part of. It was also his sole guide to how to behave around the kind of people he'd never met, like girls, police, bullies, and bartenders. Wasn't that how normal people learned to fit in as kids, though, by watching others? Ian rehearsed his lines, mimicking the actor as he offered to buy a woman a drink, right down to matching his accent.
Normal people probably didn't notice that kind of detail. Ian knew he had to soak it up, every bit of it, every pause, every rise in pitch, every mannerism, because he hadn't spent years absorbing it gradually by mixing with others.
"What are you having?" He tried out the words. Maybe everybody needed a script in real life. "What are you having? So what can I get you?"
Well, that was how impersonators did it. He'd seen a comedian interviewed about how he got his impressions right by watching videos of celebrities for hours on end, dissecting every blink and syllable. As far as Ian was concerned, there was no difference between working out how to talk like the President and learning how act and sound like a regular guy.
Perhaps he could play the role of a sane person long enough to make something of his life. This wasn't a life. Life was the thing he saw on TV. Some of it looked as bad as Gran said it was, but the rest seemed to be the things he wanted, necessary human things – friends, interesting places, movie theatres, ball games, girls.
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