Killing Time at Catterick

by Jan Needle

  The lady’s face was like a picture. Goughie, who’d gone pale and tense, was startled too. Christ knows what he was thinking. Christ knows if he wanted a fight, I haven’t got a frigging clue. All of a sudden he turned, kind of twisted on his heels, jinking sideways. He walked straight past me to the street, and his face was sort of churning. I smiled at the lady, but she didn’t smile at me. The lad behind the counter asked her for her order, but suddenly she didn’t want to buy. She grabbed the children and bundled them around and away from her, off towards the door. When they made noises she hissed at them, like a snake, it even frightened me. An older lady tutted. She looked at me with pure venom in her eyes, as if I’d done something, as if I was going to murder her, and she wasn’t afraid of me, no fucking way! And I’d done nothing. Nothing! I hadn’t done a bleeding thing.

  I didn’t want a pizza now, but I couldn’t let them see that, could I? So I ordered and waited, and I tried not to watch people watching me, and I tried not to feel embarrassed, let alone be it. I queued, I paid, I got me pizza and I went out into the street and turned my back on the road leading to the Perokeeto and I thought I’d walk away from it. All of it. The lot. I was up to fucking here with it, the whole damn boiling.

  You can’t ignore the sirens though, can you? Even Goughie couldn’t, because when I got back towards there I saw him standing on the fringes, looking in. It was like a magnet, and people were coming in from far and wide, they were coming out of the woodwork like creepy-crawlies. It was like the Roman circus, in that film.

  The fight had come out of the Perokeeto, and it was washing across the roads and pavements like a tide of dirty surf. No one was in uniform, but you could tell the squaddies from a mile off, or I could, anyway. Everyone was tanked up, pissed as arseholes, but we’re still the fittest, by a long shot. You could tell us by the way we ran, and did long sideways kicks up in the air, both feet in, three foot off the ground. You could tell us by the punches, and some of the killer judo jabs the lads were using. Not official training, but everyone gets to know them, you’ve got to if you want to live. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the fact that we were all tanked there’d have been some dead’uns, I would judge. People never realise that, when they sound off about “drink-fuelled mayhem.” Pissed punches usually don’t do much real harm. What do reporters fucking know about drinking? It’s a life-saver.

  I hadn’t really realised I was pissed myself, but as the adrenaline shot through my blood I felt sick again, it got me in a wave. It stopped me rushing in, and it made me want to heave. I’d been at it for nearly twenty-four hours in a way, except for when I was actually asleep, and me legs felt like lead with weights on for a moment. My mouth went dry, and I spat out a bit of pizza and chucked the rest away. The moment passed and I stood back to watch. Still felt shaky though. I needed Scotch or something. I needed to chuck up.

  It was a fucking riot, no argument. More and more blokes poured out of the Perokeeto, some to fight in the open, some to escape, who knows? But if they thought they’d find some peace outside they’d got it wrong, big style. Anyone who hadn’t found a target yet jumped on them like Homer on a doughnut, and anyone who was getting bored with kicking shit out of some half-dead corpse went for a bit of fresh. The weak and beaten stumbled into the new boys, lambs to the slaughter, to get another battering, and the tide of new blood made it harder to break free of the crowd. In fact in one surge, there were so many on the pavement that half a dozen got pushed up against a shop window till it smashed inwards. You could see them fighting inside, among the granny knitwear, some with bloody great big glass daggers. Cool.

  The sirens took a damn long time in coming, they had a hard time getting through in any case. This one-horse end of town had just the one main road, and by now it was pretty solid with jammed-up traffic and fighting blokes and screaming totty. And blood and broken glass and abandoned shoes and handbags, ditto. A couple of young hopefuls of the pikey persuasion were systematically upending them to look for money, and snatching others off of crying girls as well. And being kicked and cursed and monstered for their trouble. Oh, Saturday nights. Don’t you just love ’em?

  It couldn’t last, though, could it? I’d moved up to Gough by now – solidarity, who knows? – and though we didn’t talk we felt like older, wiser brothers for a moment. He pointed out our CSM, whose face was streaming blood and who looked so happy you would not believe it. Then we did a pick-parade of lads we knew, and there were tons of them. Geordie George booting someone’s head in on the ground, Timmo Hawes getting one right in the bollocks, then Corporal Martin swinging a lump of wood at some young gypsy guy and missing, typical. Then suddenly I saw Sha and Ashton, and they saw us as well. They burst through the crowd towards us, ducking and diving, and turned up full of smiles. Ashton, for some mad reason, was carrying a handbag. And then the police arrived. Two vans, three cars, and not a horse in sight. So much for the US Bleeding Cavalry!

  “Jihad!” yelled Sha. “Yippee, fucking jihad! Sack Granada! Drive out the fucking infidel!”

  “Granada?” said Ash. “What – are the TV here?”

  “Ash,” I said. “You’ve got a handbag, boy. Are you trying to tell us something?”

  “He’s stolen it,” said Gough, risking his face, in my opinion. But Ashton maybe didn’t hear.

  “I’m holding it for a lady-friend,” he said. “Leigh-Ann, remember? Someone squashed her nose.”

  “Thus making her strangely better-looking and attactive,” said Shahid. He left a beat, for comic timing. “To a randy twat like Ashton, anyway. Her face looks like a pink blancmange with raspberry sauce. I like eating white girls, but this is something else!”

  The police, to be quite honest, made it worse. They were a challenge, maybe. A common enemy, for pikies and squaddies both. They poured out of their vehicles, batons drawn, riot helmets on, and waded in like men demented. And women, too, some of them half my size, and I’m no giant despite me nickname. They laid about them left and right, cracking heads and kicking legs and arses in the approved manner, and I guess they must have been using sprays as well, because lots of people fell back pretty sharpish, which isn’t exactly normal in this sort of do. Then everyone regrouped and countercharged, and another shop window went in, and this one set off an alarm that boomed and brayed at a million bleeding decibels. Then two more vans turned up, from the opposite direction, with grills over their fronts, and they began to push into the crowds and some of the screaming changed into real fear, not just a jolly jamboree. I’m pretty sure I saw one girl go down under, and Sha made as if to run towards her, and Ashton held him back and shouted really loud at him.

  It was getting harder and harder to stay out of it, though, if only because of the spreading of the battle. But there were whistles now, and a sort of loudspeaker booming gibberish, and some serious beating going on from clubs and batons. I saw one of the smaller police girls – no helmet, no face visor, blonde hair in a bunch under her cap – lift a stick into the air and our CSM step out of the ruck and punch her in the face and knock her over. Then he went to kick her and the ginger SAS man grabbed his upper arm and put a hold on it I think, because it stopped him dead. He turned towards Ginger, but his face was excruciated, and he didn’t try to belt him or owt. The police girl got up, brave lass, and tried to stop her nose from pissing blood, but she was crying. The CSM didn’t hit her any more – he couldn’t – but he disappeared into the crowd damn sharp, I’m telling you.

  After that, though, the end was coming soon. First off came two army trucks, like bats out of hell, but not with reinforcements – they were empty, and the backs were down already. Two sergeants in uniform jumped out and started bawling at the squaddies to get in, and they weren’t looking for any funny answers, they looked fucking ugly. Ashton saw his chance and jumped for one of them, and we followed on like a bunch of rabbits. Gough and Shahid arrived at the tailgate simultaneously, and somehow Gough got tumbled to the ground, he slipped I think. Then Sha shouted: “Look
out lads, the RMPs are here,” and squaddies rushed up from every bleeding angle to get in. Just to put the lid on, pikey trucks had the same idea. A rattletrap collection of pick-ups and five tonners festooned with scrap and crap and children poured out of side streets and alleyways, and the gippo hardmen dived for them. Within two minutes our truck was bouncing off through the crowds and broken glass, horn blasting, people dodging every which way rather than get crushed. By one of them weird coincidences we saw Ally and Leigh-Ann right on the edge of it, and Leigh-Ann was all tears and snot, end of the world job, one shoe off and limping.

  “Yo!” shouted Ashton. “Present from Santa, baby!” and sent her handbag flashing through the air. She caught it with one hand – she should of played for fucking England! – and her piggy little mush was suddenly all smiles again. Funny, females, ain’t they? We looked back down the main street and the crowds were melting too, the fun was almost over. Our second truck was starting out, a cop was trying to stop the driver but wasn’t having any luck, and the rest were hammering the pikies with their batons as they joined the other rubbish on their flats and pick-ups.

  “Good night out,” said Ashton. “Yeah, very good night out.”

  “Yeah,” said Sha. “What a dump! What a gang of wankers. Makes you proud to be a Muslim!”

  Gough’s pasty face said balefully: “You shouldn’t say that, Khan. You live in England. You should be proud of it.”

  There were at least two dozen racists in the wagon. There had to be, it was an army truck, it stands to reason. And every one of them who’d heard the mealy words just fell about.

  Race relations in reverse. Sha was a hero. We got back to camp in time to have a few more pints.

  Until the morning, everything was champion.

  Eight

  Martie’s revenge took a fair time coming, but when it did it hit home good, and it was me that took the brunt of it. Maybe that was because I’d not backed them in the Perokeeto punch-up, but why I should have thought he’d let us off the hook in any case I can’t imagine.

  First problem in the morning was the hangover, next problem was it’s Sunday. I came round slowly, and I really thought I might have died. There was no Martie in the room this time, thank fuck, and no Dave Hughes neither – he must have deposited the lance in his proper bed for once. Sha was beside me as per, and the other two were Ashton and Wasambu, which made me a racial minority for the first time in my life. As I lay there willing me eyes not to explode, Sambo got up, ebony and silent, slipped on some clothes, and buggered off. Wouldn’t see him at service, neither – he had exemption. Sha said he carried his God around in a wrinkled leather bag between his legs, which was probably a joke but who was checking?

  The hangover worried me a bit, because I’d never got one till I joined the army. I drank enough, God knows – my mum worked on the principle that kids only go mad about stuff that’s banned or rationed, so I spent most of my school years smashed. Me and my sister used to raid her spirits too – we both got dead smart at adding water to the bottles, which is quite an art – and we learned the other trick, to lie and lie and lie. My sister was brilliant at this. I saw her cry once, real tears, when she was accused of nicking brandy, she just “could not believe you don’t believe me! I’m your daughter! I do not tell lies!!”

  She told me afterwards she’d been so pissed-off that mum suspected her that she almost ran away from home, “to teach the cow a lesson.” She also told me that she’d nicked it. Well, of course.

  But hangovers were different, they were new. Which either meant I was getting old and past it, or I was hammering it too much. I’d enjoyed the army once. For the first six months I’d almost loved it, I thought I’d found my fucking slot. Just wars. Killing mad Muslims for the good of all, including them of course. Now my eyeballs were about to burst and I wondered what the fuck. Yeah. What the fuck.

  Shahid was excused services as well as Sambo, obviously – but he never missed. It was him and the only other Asian that I ever met inside, a lad called Jamal, that made me realise what a prat I’d been at first for saying no. Jamal went to services for a quiet life, the way he rode all the other punches and all the other insults from the English lads. Then he quit, with depression, and everybody laughed their tits off, which just goes to show, don’t it? He’s probably a terrorist by now, who knows? I would be.

  Funny though. Canon Fodder (as we called the padre, ho bloody ho) couldn’t persuade me, and he used every underhand trick known to men of God. First time, in the first week after intake, would you believe, he bowls into the lecture room, unannounced, and stands there looking at us like we were meant to know something. We weren’t, of course: that was the technique. Every morning since we’d got to Catterick there’d be something new sprung on us, and we were meant to be confused. Sometimes weapons, sometimes the rules of combat, sometimes HIV. Then one day it’s this dude in a major’s uniform (that was a guess; at this time I still didn’t have a clue) and a dog collar. That was the giveaway. He looks all round the room, and smiles the smile, and parks his fat arse on the table at the front.

  “Good morning, men,” he said. “You all believe in God, I trust? Any Moslems here? Any Jews? Any Hindus, Sikhs, or Parsis? Well, we all believe in God, don’t we?” Joke coming: “Even Catholics! There’s only one God, even if we give him different names!”

  There was something about him that got right on my tits. Even his crack about the Catholics, which was aimed at the Scousers I imagine, didn’t win me over, although I’d already had a dose or two of Scouser medicine since I joined up. I felt like saying “how d’you know He’s not a She?” but I couldn’t be arsed. It’s a line my mum and sister used to kick about when Vronnie (that’s my sister) was small enough to half believe. “I believe in God and Germaine Greer,” she said once, and it brought the house down. Germaine Greer was old some Aussie dyke apparently, back in history.

  He was going on, though, and I suddenly realised we were going to have a prayer. Just like that, on a Tuesday morning in a dump in Catterick. A sort of taster, before we got down to the nitty-gritty. No one had denied that they believed, no one had said “hang on, no way, fuck off.” Or anything.

  “We needn’t kneel,” he said. “It’s strictly non-denominational, and we don’t want to mess up your new finery. But let’s close our eyes, shall we? And clasp our hands.”

  Shit! I couldn’t do it! I didn’t want to do it! I’d even raised it in the recruiting office, the religion thing, and they’d fell about and said no way! Another of their little lies.

  “Sir!” I gabbled. “I’m sorry, sir – I don’t, sir! I mean, I don’t... I ain’t got no religion, sir! Excuse me!”

  “He’s a conshie!” someone shouted, and the others fell about. Not Canon Fodder, though. He waited till the noise died down, and he looked as if I’d laid a toolie underneath his nose.

  “Forgive me, men,” he said, “if I don’t join in your mirth. This…gentleman...” He stopped. Everyone was silent. “Name?” he asked me. “Rank?”

  “Hassan, sir. Andrew. Um...” I didn’t have a rank I knew of, and damn well he knew it too. “Er. Recruit, sir. Soldier.”

  “I doubt that,” he said. “What platoon? What section? Who’s your sergeant?”

  There was a good long pause. I didn’t fucking know, did I? My mind was blank.

  “Please sir, I can’t remember, sir,” I said. They called him Big Knob, my sergeant at induction. He called himself Big Knob. I couldn’t say that to an officer, could I? Least of all a bleeding reverend.

  “Can you remember why you don’t believe in God?” he said. “Or is that beyond your intellectual capacity also?”

  I was blushing, I felt like shit. But if I had a passion, if my mum had brought me up with anything like that at all, it was a belief that God did not exist, or if he did he was a bastard. (Or she. Let’s hear it for little Vronnie, eh?) I’m not the most best-speaking sort of person normally, I come from Blackburn, for fuck sake. But I could play th
e parrot sometimes, and today it came out good. My mother talking. Years and years and years.

  “It’s a jerrybuilt construction, sir,” I said. “It’s something men dreamed up because we’d be terrified to be just animals clinging to a ball of... er... rock in nothingness. It’s a baby’s dodie, sir. A comfort blanket. A dummy tit.”

  I think he’d geared himself up to be furious, but he was overwhelmed by my mates. They weren’t mates at all, they were just would-be’s like myself. Poor lost bastards who’d do anything for a laugh, and laugh at anything, an’ all. They fell about. They howled. They went hoarse.

  “He said tit, sir! He said tit! Can he say that, sir, you’re a vicar, sir! He said tit! And we was praying, sir! Oooh, sir!”

  That was him fucked, too. That was the two of us. But I realised I was fucked for good; he wasn’t. And nor was Shahid, neither, who’d joined in mocking me and was a blatant liar obviously, because whatever else he was, he wan’t no bleeding Christian. Later, when I got to know him (and his name), I found we had a lot in common on the God subject, and that he chose to go to church an’ all that bollocks quite deliberate, like he ate proper food and not the special shite the cookhouse did for Muslims and the other “mad minorities.” Not like poor Jamal. They wrecked him in nine weeks.

  When the shouting had died down, Canon F had got it all worked out again. The crazy bastard didn’t dismiss me, he suggested that everyone should pray for me, to “help me to enlightenment.” That got to me I must say, although I tried my hardest not to let it, and it got to the others as well, because there probably wasn’t one believer in the whole damn lot of them. They was screwed as well, see, and they couldn’t slide out now, could they? They were officially believers, ganged up against the lousy heathen – me! So every church parade from here to Kingdom Come had got them on the list, and the padre could tick all the boxes when the questionnaires came round. Atheists? We don’t have them – our men believe. Like the army don’t have racists, and the army don’t have bullies, and the army don’t have crackheads, and the army don’t have gays. Like fuck they don’t. Like fuck.