by Stephen May
‘We’re going to a funeral,’ says the woman.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ says Megan.
‘It’s OK. It’s not—’ she stops, looks over at Nigel.
His face is twisted in an odd little grin. He finishes the sentence for her. ‘It’s not anyone close.’
‘That’s right,’ says the woman, and she’s also strangely twinkly. ‘It’s only my husband.’
Afterwards, when the couple have driven off in their Lexus-Volvo-Audi thing, after Lorna has sat in the sticky passenger seat and wept for a while, without knowing why, and after she’s kissed Megan and told her how much she loves her for coming with her, and how much she admires her for always knowing what to do and say. For always having a Biro when one is needed. And told her how great it has been to see her do her thing at boxing and how ace she is at that and at everything else actually, and after Megan has told her to shut up, but in a way that tells Lorna she’s pleased and that the whole business with Linwood is forgotten about. After all that, and when they are driving back through the city, something occurs to Lorna.
‘She never told us her name.’
‘What?’ Megan has her grim traffic-face on again.
‘The woman who was with Nigel. She never told us her name.’
‘Do we need to know her name?’
‘I guess not. It’s a bit weird though.’
‘They were both weird. They were freaks.’
‘He was OK. Anyway, I bet they think the same about us.’
‘I bet you’re right. I bet they do think that. But that’s because they’re freaks.’ She clicks the radio on, a kooky girl is singing a funny little song over a scratchy guitar about wanting to be a bumble-bee. College folk. Kinda twee, but kinda fun. ‘Honest-ly . . . I’d be quite hap-py . . . Yellow and black is where it’s at . . .’
Lorna finds herself idly curious about what Jez is up to. Next to her Megan shifts in her seat.
‘Don’t,’ she says.
‘What?’
‘I know you’ve had a stressful day, but don’t do it.’
‘Don’t what?’
‘Don’t call the Fuckweasel.’
Spooky. Sometimes Lorna wonders whether Megan is actually a qualified witch.
And on the radio the girl sings: ‘. . . made out of fluff . . . life wouldn’t be tough . . . I wouldn’t need no clothes or go to fancy shows . . . all I want to be is . . .’ Lorna thinks that if she ever had a coat of arms it would feature a bumble-bee. The creature that shouldn’t be able to fly, but somehow does. Then she thinks that she’s actually the opposite. A girl that should fly, but somehow doesn’t. Well, fuck that. She’s going to start flying. And as soon as.
The rhythm is a sort of bossa nova. It reminds Lorna of Megan bobbing and dancing as she hit the bags in the gym earlier. Pha-pha-pha pha-pha pha-pha-pha
All people, thinks Lorna, are freaks when you get down to it.
Twelve
CATHERINE
She is in the kitchen making scrambled eggs and getting wound up by the radio. The presenter is quizzing some cabinet minister on the Today programme and not giving him anything like enough of a hard time. It makes her cross. They are reducing troop numbers again and the wars are not actually won yet. Imagine if budgetary constraints had led to the allied forces being cut in half three weeks after D-day. The liberation of Europe would have been a lot more tricky then. A war isn’t over just because an accountant in Whitehall says it is.
And it is stupid because soldiers are cheap. You can get a fully trained up squaddie for £25K a year. Peanuts – about the same as a teaching assistant, or some call-centre kid in a shiny Top Man suit. And all those laid-off soldiers, fit and knowing how to fight, are going to be hitting the streets angry and broke. Most of them suffering from PTSD. It’s a recipe for a shit-storm, anyone can see that, and here is this soft-bodied desk-jockey mumbling on about tough decisions and hard choices. Leave him alone on an Helmand hillside for twenty-four hours and then let him talk about tough decisions and hard choices.
And then it’s time for the bloody sport. Football and Rugby. Bread and flipping circuses more like. Spectacles to keep the population entertained so they won’t notice the mess they’re in. And this bread and these circuses are not even trying to entertain the whole population. Just the men. And how much do those players get paid? A million a week? And none of them would last a day in Afghanistan either.
She beats the eggs carefully, adds them to the pan where the shallots and chopped green-finger chillies have been frying in butter. She puts the bread in the toaster.
Catherine thinks that politicians shouldn’t run armies, it should be the other way round. Look at Greece – the economy was fine when the generals were in charge and turned to shit when the politicians took over. Same in Spain. Not that she would necessarily trust British generals, most of them are like politicians anyway. And that’s not surprising given that most of them have been to the same schools as the bloody cabinet. They’re probably all related, or have touched each other up in the dorms after lights out.
Catherine had been in the Army ten years when she went to Afghanistan. Ten years of having to prove to everyone, including herself, that she was better than the blokes. Better at everything. Better at running. Better at the assault course. Better at shooting. Better with a bayonet. Better at swearing even. Proving that she could carry more, further, faster, than anyone else could. Ten years to progress from hoisting arseholed grunts out of dodgy clubs in places like Colchester and Aldershot as part of the military police, all the way to getting her commission in 2001. By that time she could fly helicopters and gliders, she was an accomplished sniper and she could kill with her bare hands. She knew she could because she’d done it, more than once. In Iraq and in Bosnia.
And then, in Afghanistan, months after 9/11, the rules of engagement changed and female officers like her weren’t allowed to give orders to men in public. The idea was that a woman ordering men around would infuriate the local population and so encourage resistance, which was debatable but it meant that when out on patrol even the most Neanderthal private had more status than she did. It was crazy. Can any other army in history ever have taken the sensibilities of their enemies on board in this way? Could you imagine the Red Army doing it? Or Genghis Khan? Or the Spartans? And just as well the Iceni didn’t worry about such things when they put Boudicca in charge. And what about Queen Elizabeth I at the time of the Armada? What about Joan of frigging Arc?
She’d argued – ranted even – to anyone who would listen, regardless of rank or gender and, in the end, she took a Hercules home. She had to. When the head of land operations asks whether it’s the time of the month just because you’ve expressed some disquiet about the way the war is being fought, then you really do have to get out. And yes, she bloody well knew that Joan of Arc and Boudicca both lost in the end, but that is hardly the bloody point. They didn’t lose because they were on the blob, did they? They lost because the bloody men did everything they could to shut them up. They bloody burned Joan of Arc. Burned her. That’s how much some men hate a stroppy woman.
She folds the eggs gently and turns the heat off. That’s the way with scrambled eggs, they should still be quite runny when you take them off the gas. If you do that then they are cooked to perfection as the heat disperses. They don’t go rubbery. Scrambled eggs should retain a hint of warm egg-nog about them. She folds in a little cream. Just a drizzle. She adds grated double Gloucester.
The toast pings up.
She puts both slices on a plate, scrapes a thin layer of Marmite over them, tips the perfect eggs on top and sprinkles on a pinch of cayenne. Superb. She is, she thinks, very possibly the queen of scrambled eggs. She gets herself some juice. Catherine long ago decided that grapefruit is the only proper breakfast juice. It is wake-up juice. Orange juice is acceptable as an alternative but really it’s for the slack, for people who don’t really want to wake up. As for those who like apple or cranberry juice in the morni
ng, you just know they are weak. Masturbators and adulterers. People unlikely to last a minute under interrogation. No, a fast early morning run in hard country in the rain, a scalding shower followed by eggs, grapefruit juice and fine strong black coffee – Rwandan if poss – that’s the best way to come alive. Catherine feels her mood begin to lift. And then she thinks about how she has to go back to America and her spirits droop again.
Catherine is a conscientious professional and she hates making mistakes. The news that this latest trip was a screw-up really pissed her off. Now she is going to have to go back to the States. She’s going to have to squeeze it in before heading off to Abkhazia, and that means the usual stressful hassle that goes with flying and with hotels.
But it isn’t just the hassle, there’s something else. There is a word in the Army – Snafu. Means ‘situation normal all fucked up’. Only things getting fucked up isn’t normal for Catherine. For Catherine things don’t go wrong. And if they do they are not her fault. And yet yesterday she’d had to endure being mildly bollocked by Madam, with her sanctimonious jolly-hockey-sticks voice. Oh, she’d kept it all very light, all very don’t-worry-these-things-happen, but Catherine knew she thought it was her mistake. And that’s why she’d sounded so cheerful. Madam’s wanted to catch Catherine out for years, feels threatened by her or something. God knows why. Catherine isn’t after her job. She doesn’t want to sit in an office pushing paper, counting pencils. And they are both women in a world of men, so Catherine feels they should stick together somehow, however naïve that sounds.
And there was the sneaky way she’d mentioned a forthcoming organisational review right at the end of the conversation, just to unsettle Catherine a little more.
But, as she eats her eggs and drinks her juice, Catherine knows it is more than hurt pride and office politics affecting her here. There’s grief too.
She knows bad things happen in wars, of course she does. Sometimes it turns out that you don’t zap the bad guys but their nice neighbours instead. Sometimes those vicious fighters who pop up in your sights running for their RPGs, turn out to be farmers, or a wedding party or a bunch of kids playing whatever the Afghan version of Knock Down Ginger is called. Sometimes the vicious Pathan with a sniper rifle turns out to be a boy with a stick playing cowboys.
So she knows these things are bound to happen. One of the things that makes the bad guys bad is the way they hide their badness among the skirts of their wives and daughters and obedient servants. All of which means that it is even more important, in her kind of struggle, to try not to make those kinds of mistakes. To check. But it seems she has fucked it up this time. Some ordinary Joe has paid the price for somebody else’s crime.
Of course, he was probably still a bad guy. Or at least an accessory. And even if he wasn’t, people die all the time. They die crossing the road, they die falling off things or under things or into things. They die because there’s no antibiotics or no water or no food. They die of overwork and they die of broken hearts.
And sometimes they die young. And even a long, full life is only an instant looked at in the proper historical scheme of things. A human being dying isn’t a big deal. The wrong person died in the wrong place at the wrong time: boo fucking hoo. It happens. And this civilian, whoever he was and whoever he was working for, he died painlessly, quickly, and without fear. And these are things of real value. He was lucky in that way. Catherine knows all this and yet still it bugs her. It especially bugs her when Madam tells her to put it behind her and move on.
And now, right on cue, the radio moves on to Thought For The Day. It’s the earnest Sikh guy and so Catherine stops to listen. She likes him. He has a nice voice. Deep and rich. It’s the Christian speakers that annoy her, they remind her too much of school assemblies. Their voices always sounding like those of deputy head teachers.
The guru is talking about the problem of living Chakar Vati, that is how to live in the modern industrial world without being a slave. He is talking too about how big business often makes its profits from stirring up the five evils – by which he means ego, anger, greed, attachment and lust. The fate of those vulnerable to the five evils is, he says, separation from God. This separation can only be cured by devotion and study. But it is possible, he said, for all of us to come to union with God. That is, to live a life free from illusion, free from oppression.
And this is where Catherine and the guru part company. In Catherine’s view once the five evils have really begun their work, then no amount of study or devotion is going to cure it. And also, she doesn’t believe most people are anything like ready for a life without illusion. Illusion is pretty much the only thing that keeps them going.
Thought For The Day gives way to the weather. Easterly winds. Rain for most of the country for most of the day. At least California will be warm.
Catherine finishes her breakfast, wonders briefly whether to have another slice of toast, but that’s how the five evils get you. It begins with extra toast at breakfast when you don’t really need it. And anyway there is, for Catherine, a sixth evil – procrastination. The thief of time. We’ve got so little of the stuff over the course of a life that to waste it really is the ultimate crime.
With a sigh, Catherine begins to clear up her breakfast things. She’ll get her flat properly and completely cleaned the way she always does before a trip, then she’ll work on her story for an hour, then she’ll do all the tiresome flight stuff – the printing off and so forth – then she’ll pack. Then she’ll meditate.
Catherine is a big believer in meditation. It’s another thing she and the Sikhs have in common. She always makes time for it, wherever she is. Catherine discovered meditation early on in her career and that and yoga are two of the things that keep her sane. In fact Catherine has five virtues of her own to counteract the five evils: meditation, yoga, reading, writing and exercise. And they are all linked too. Do one well and all the rest go better. And they are all things that let you bend time. Get lost in any one of these things and you can disappear into a long journey, come back and find you’ve only been away for an hour or so. Each of these things does more than just help you relax, they take you to a little personal Narnia.
Of course, if you just want to chill then decent wine will do the job, but fine wine is Tough’s way really, not hers – he’s a connoisseur – but the problem with booze is that it speeds time up, puts the days and nights on fast forward, and Catherine is very much in favour of having more time not less.
Thirteen
NICKY
My favourite fictional funeral is in Richard III. King Richard has had his rival murdered and uses his funeral to get off with the guy’s widow, Lady Anne. And not only does Lady Anne know he’s the killer – and also the killer of her father by the way – but Shakespeare’s Richard is not some good-looking brooding hunk. No, he’s disabled, his body as twisted as his mind. In fact his mind is, in Shakespeare, twisted because his body is all messed up. Given his disadvantages it’s quite a big ask for Richard to get the girl, but he does it. A combination of traditional bad boy I-don’t-give-a-fuckness, plus bambi-eyed vulnerability and, crucially, a nice line in chat. These are what do the business. We all know the nice girls love that particular combination. It’s a hard lesson we nice, shy boys have to learn on the first day of puberty.
Actually, maybe it’s even earlier than this – doesn’t the tousle-haired kid who chases the girls in the first year of infants, the tyke who pulls their hair and then cheeks the teacher – doesn’t he get an undue amount of attention? Don’t the teachers – most of them women – work hardest with him? Every little terror of the infants gets a queue of Lady Annes in the end. And if they’re good with words too, why that queue can stretch round the block.
Russell was popular in this way. Always a monstrous platoon of squealing pinafore dresses after him in playground kiss-chase. Always a big-bosomed matriarch smiling indulgently as she told him she’d swing for him one of these days.
It wasn’t l
ike that for me. And it won’t be like that for Scarlett. It’s just not like that for little girls. They can wrap their dads around their little fingers but they can’t do that with their primary school teachers. And especially not the little girls who can’t speak, who can’t walk normally. Girls who may never be able to stand up straight. Do we think Scarlett will ever have boys queuing up to take her out? Do we think she’ll ever be asked to the prom by the football captain? We do not. But hey, that could be a good thing even if she never sees it that way.
Anyway, bollocks to all that. That’s the difficult unknowable, unforeseeable future. What about now? What about this solemn laying to rest of that unlucky kiss-chase loser Nicky Fisher?
This funeral is boring in every way, but that means success of course. It’s what we’ve hoped for. It’s what we’ve planned. Boring is absolutely the theme here. We’re definitely not about to put the fun in funeral.
In your average real-life burial, you get all these people together, people that for very good reasons haven’t seen each other in years, you put them and all their grief and, more importantly, all their seething resentments, jealousies, rivalries and bitter memories into one room and then stir in unlimited alcohol. No surprise then that sometimes it kicks off.
And there’s usually sexual tension too. After all, everyone at a funeral has had to come face–to-face with mortality. And – reflexively self-absorbed species that we are – this means someone else’s death goes straight to our own loins. In the midst of death we want to create some new life. Everyone is kind of on heat, at least a little. And I do mean everyone, not just the nubile and the virile. Every grandad and every spinster aunt feels it too. In real-life funerals even the most unbending of people are more tactile than usual, less buttoned up. Sometimes quite literally. Conversations are saturated with sex talk, the way a good trifle is laced with cheap sherry. You can smell it. Taste it.