Worlds Apart

by Azi Ahmed

  ‘Don’t stop.’ Taylor’s voice was directly above me.

  I lugged my body down then back up. One … two – the tips of my trainers were sliding away below – three … four – then my arms began to burn.

  I could hear heavy breathing and groaning, not sure if it was me or the girls around – everything blurred into one.

  ‘Shut it! This is not a maternity ward!’

  Up … down … up … down…

  ‘And keep your arse down.’ Taylor’s foot suddenly pushed down over my buttocks.

  I froze.

  ‘Faster!’ His face slammed down to my level.

  My arms jolted into action, sending shooting pains up them. This wasn’t training, I thought, it was torture. A part of me wished I’d left when the other girl had.

  We were called to our next exercise. I pushed myself up off the ground and staggered over, stopping at the nearest tree to throw up. My eyes watered and it left a sour taste in my mouth. Adele pushed past, sending me flying in the wrong direction. I should get to the front, I thought, picking myself up and following her.

  Taylor had been watching me like a hawk all evening and I knew he had it in for me. He’d said he would get rid of half of us tonight and I had to be on his list because I kept coming in last.

  We stood in a semicircle, some with our heads between our knees trying to recover from the ordeal, others trying to act normal as their expressions told a different story.

  Wright looked at us with a bored expression. ‘Listen, ladies, when I tell you to come over, you don’t walk. You won’t get special treatment when you join the lads.’ He pointed across the park at some gates in the distance. ‘Leopard crawl to me.’

  I watched him run across the field. I couldn’t figure out what he meant and looked round at Taylor whose eyes were almost popping out of his head.

  ‘What are you waiting for!?’ He screamed at us. ‘Move it!’

  The girls dropped to their knees, then lay flat on the grass and began to slither like lizards. My heart slumped as I joined them.

  ‘Keep your arse down, Ahmed!’

  I dropped my bum as much as possible and dragged my numb body along the cold, muddy surface. Strands of hair fell over my face out of my ponytail, blinding my vision. I could smell dog poo, and it was strong. I wasn’t sure if it was on me but it was following us and making me heave.

  Liz passed my left, her muscular arms and legs gliding skilfully across ground.

  ‘They call this a warm up!?’ I whispered breathlessly.

  She looked round, her face dirty and exhausted. ‘You haven’t seen anything yet.’

  * * *

  ‘Walking to the station?’ Liz held the changing-room door open for me.

  I swung my sports bag over one shoulder and followed her out. I didn’t want to walk with her. I needed time on my own. The door slammed close and the noise from the girls inside cut out. My hair was still wet from the cold dribble of a shower, one of my big toes was killing me for some reason and I was walking like a geriatric.

  We headed out of the main gates in silence. Usually in these sorts of situations, I would say something to fill the gap but tonight I couldn’t. The last two hours had felt like three days. I overheard one girl talking about going back to Hyde Park tomorrow to do the same circuit. This place was full of nutters.

  ‘Good night, ladies.’ The security guide smiled at us both as we passed his Portakabin. I recognised him from earlier. He was the only person who smiled around here.

  I wondered about next week and how I would get through another torturous session. Who could I talk to about it? We were ordered not to talk to anyone about this training, but I guessed a few of the girls had told their boyfriends or family. My friends wouldn’t believe me, let alone understand if I told them I’d joined the army and signed up for this training. As for my family, there was enough going on there without this to complicate matters even further.

  ‘Fancy a drink?’

  Liz’s offer took me by surprise. I began thinking up an excuse but it was too late, she was already crossing the road.

  I followed behind, dodging the traffic. ‘Are there any coffee shops round here?’

  ‘Coffee?’ Liz rolled her eyes. ‘You’re really pushing the boat out.’

  We headed into Blushes Café opposite the barracks and grabbed a table at the front. I checked my phone; no missed calls from home or from Shazia. I didn’t want to call any of them to apologise. I hadn’t done anything wrong.

  The waitress placed a cup of coffee down in front of me and a large glass of red wine for Liz. I gulped the warm liquid, staring across at Liz slowly sipping her wine and looking out of the window, watching the other girls leave the barracks and head up to Sloane Square. I thought about telling her what I’d heard Adele say earlier in the changing rooms when I was coming out of the showers: ‘That Asian is a slacker’, said loud enough for me to hear. But I didn’t want to come across as weak and moany in front of Liz, so decided not to say anything.

  ‘When will they let us know if we got through?’ I asked.

  ‘You did,’ she assured me, ‘and whoever else decides to turn up next week. Female selection is voluntary withdrawal, which is harder than being kicked out.’

  I thought about it for a moment and realised she was right. I remember an incident when I was about ten when Dad challenged me to carry a sack of rice upstairs for fifty pence. After the second stair, my body couldn’t take it but I kept going for an hour. Not for the money but because I didn’t want to be seen as a failure by anyone, most of all myself.

  The waitress came over with another glass of red and swapped it for Liz’s empty one. ‘What do your parents think of you joining the army?’ Liz asked, holding my gaze.

  I looked away, wishing I’d gone home now. I knew this would come up because my surname was Muslim. What was I meant to say? They don’t know and I never intend telling them? I didn’t want to get into a full-blown debate about religion, women and culture. I was sick of having to justify what I did in life because of the family I was born into. Why couldn’t people take me at face value? Why did everyone seem to think there was some big drama attached to anything different that I did? I didn’t want to be a special case with the army and give them an excuse to tell me I was useless.

  ‘They’re fine about it,’ I lied. ‘I just didn’t say which unit I was in.’

  Liz went on to ask a ton of questions; where my family lived, what my parents do, whether any of my siblings were in the army.

  She was sizing me up, I concluded. I wasn’t a ranking officer, had no military experience and didn’t speak with a posh accent. The only thing I could do was to glamorise my dad’s time in the British Indian Army by describing him as an officer, although I had no idea if this was true. I quickly changed the subject by asking if she was joining the others at Hyde Park.

  ‘I’ve got to work,’ she replied looking around the room. ‘But you should go.’

  She was right, I had to get fitter – much fitter – but I wasn’t going to gatecrash the girls’ club. I had to devise my own training regime.

  The evening ended with Liz giving me a rundown of the unit and what she knew about female selection. The colonel heading the training turned out to be the man I’d met at my interview. I suddenly realised how lucky I was to be a part of all this. Everything I’d achieved over the years wouldn’t come close to this if I got through. It was the chance of a lifetime and I had already decided I would be going back next week.

  The next day I crawled out of bed, my stomach muscles hurting as I breathed in and out. I checked for bruising but there were no signs of last night’s ordeal. It all felt like a surreal dream now, including Liz. I started to think about how I was going to train – I could hardly move my body let alone do a three-hour circuit tonight, and there was no chance of wearing heels to work today.

  The week didn’t get any better, especially as Wednesday crept up on me. I got mood swings, couldn’t sleep
at night and lay awake thinking about how much fitter the other girls would be than me and how I would cope with another beasting.

  On Wednesday, I was up early and prayed to Allah to get me through the training that night. In the office, I spent the morning staring at the computer screen, couldn’t eat my lunch then mentally argued with myself not to go in. The afternoon dragged torturously and by then I just wanted to get the evening over with.

  Five thirty finally struck and I was out of the door. I lied to people in the office that I had a doctor’s appointment. Usually I wouldn’t leave the office before eight. On the way to the barracks, I grabbed some fries from McDonald’s and sat at a table of noisy kids, forcing them down. My stomach was acidic from the two cups of coffee I’d had that day.

  Twenty minutes later, I was back in the dark courtyard wearing sports kit. Liz was standing in the front rank. I couldn’t thank her enough for saving my life tonight. With all the faffing around this morning, I had forgotten to pack my jogging bottoms. Luckily, she had a spare pair of shorts.

  Staff Wright was stood at the front, counting us with his eyes. ‘We’re five short, any more to come?’

  The response was silence, so he led us out once more.

  My eyes skimmed the blackened skyline as we entered Hyde Park. A memory floated to the surface of my mind – my first summer in London as a student; strolling across the green, passing an array of romantic couples, Arab families and teams of people playing rounders and football. My head was tilted towards the warm sun. I had smiled to myself, thinking what a different world this was to the kebab shop.

  Staff Wright’s screaming broke into my dreamy consciousness. Three torturous hours later, after the same circuit as last time, we were back in the barracks courtyard. We got down to press-up position. My fingers had turned white. I couldn’t feel my body and my stomach felt like a big hole had been cut out of it.

  Ten press-ups turned to twenty, then forty, then eighty…

  I closed my eyes and tried to block the pain, but it kept coming back. My senses became blurry and a strange humming sound went off in my head. Just as I thought I was about to pass out, we were dismissed. I dashed to the changing rooms, grabbed my bag and headed out, still wearing my soggy sports kit. I needed to be on my own for the training ordeal to sink in. Liz said something to me as I passed her but I ignored it. A part of me wanted to make an excuse not to come in next week, but the reality was that I didn’t have a choice. I would be failing myself, which was harder to live with than getting through this training.

  The week flew by and I was back at the barracks. Most of my paperwork for becoming a member of the Territorial Army had gone through and I was given an army number. My security clearance was taking longer to come through than the others’; I didn’t question it but it did play on my mind. The army number was like a new identity, a sense of belonging to an establishment, which I didn’t feel when I received my national insurance number. I’m a squaddie, I thought proudly. No I’m not, I corrected myself, I don’t burp or fart in the company of others, nor do I have a partner with peroxide hair, which most of the male squaddies have. I’m a private – Private Ahmed.

  Getting the number somehow changed my mental state. I got tougher with my training regime. I walked into work every day carrying a rucksack weighed down with books to strengthen my legs. I trained every day in the gym except the evening before barracks, when I gave my body a rest. Liz started taking me to kickboxing and got me punching so hard I could hardly uncurl my fingers afterwards. She said I wasn’t aggressive enough and tried to teach me to switch off my emotions, which became a challenging exercise.

  Over the weeks, I felt my body change; it became stronger but I wasn’t putting on any weight. In fact, I was losing it, now weighing 6.5 stone. My appetite increased, though I still had difficulty eating breakfast, which had been a problem since childhood.

  I began to leave the office early on a regular basis and received the silent treatment from colleagues, but I didn’t care. They would never understand what the army meant to me, how it enriched my life more than this job. I began to view life differently. No longer did I feel the need to please the people at work.

  Over the weeks, the number of girls dwindled down and the training became more intense, with less chatter in the changing rooms. Then something terrible happened, Liz didn’t turn up one week. I sent her a couple of text messages to meet up but all I got back was radio silence. I was gutted. Training wasn’t the same without her but I had to keep going, female selection was almost complete.

  I got to know the other girls from a distance. Adele turned out to be not only scary but loud as well. She reminded me of my mum’s friend Auntie Pataani but without the rolls of fat and laughter. I learnt to accept her blanking me. The only time she would say something was when she had an audience to criticise me in front of. Sometimes when we stood in a long line, on parade awaiting training instructions, she would look round at me to check I was in position properly then roll her eyes at the other girls.

  Then there was Specky, who had been in the army for quite some time, chewed gum and wore glasses that made her eyes looked massive. She talked openly about her previous training and ‘survival tactics’ that involved killing animals, cutting them up and eating them, which made me feel sick. She was good friends with another recruit who looked the most experienced and oldest of the group. I called her Blondie because I never really got to speak to her or find out her name. She was in her late thirties and was very quiet.

  Andrea was the ‘it’ girl who worked in the military as a medic. All the girls were nice to her because she was engaged to a man in the regular SAS.

  I came to realise that most of the girls were of officer status. Some, like Liz and Kate, didn’t make a big deal about their achievements, but others wanted to shout about it and remind the privates what rank they were. Caroline was tall, intelligent and stuck up and wore a Cambridge University sweatshirt that had seen better days. She hung close to another officer who had a lot of clout – I had no idea what her name was but she never smiled so I named her Ice Maiden.

  Then there was Jenny, who drank pints of Guinness and drove the big four-ton army trucks. She didn’t seem to take the training seriously: I only saw her there for two weeks then she didn’t turn up again.

  Finally, if there was one girl we all knew would get through, it was Becky, the South African international champion rock climber. She was the fittest of us all and every girl knew it.

  Every now and then, my mind would wander back to Mum and how I had left it with her the last time I was home. It wasn’t her fault, she didn’t know what was going on in my life and was only trying to do what was right. I swallowed my pride and called her. I was relieved to hear her voice, though the demand to return was still there. I stayed calm by switching off. I only cared about getting through female selection, a feeling no one would understand. I was waking up in the morning thinking about it and closing my eyes at night dreaming of it. It was emotionally torturous, the effect was like a drug, but it was now my world.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE OTHER WORLD

  THE TRAIN PULLED into Manchester Piccadilly station and I was up before everyone, clutching my small bag and making a beeline for the doors. I hated this part of the journey; the walk to the bus stop, waiting ages for the bus, then the hour-long journey back to my parents’ house.

  Nothing changed around here and my mind switched modes accordingly. I was back home, things slowed down, life became simpler and I needed to behave more subserviently.

  I looked out of the window as the bus drove past the familiar shops and roads. There was a pub on every block, something I hadn’t noticed when living here.

  What surprised me about the army was how the drinking culture was engrained into their daily lives. It was both a means of bonding and an outlet for socialising. It took me a while to get my head around it but realised it was similar to the social gatherings we had growing up, of which chai, r
ather than beer, was the main component.

  A few women with screaming kids got on the bus looking bad tempered, their clothes and hair worn carelessly. This was a daily occurrence when I lived here but today it felt like a distraction. I watched them throwing the prams into the luggage carrier, talking loudly as they took their seats, and then I suddenly recognised one of them from school. I felt embarrassed for thinking she was a woman, as I still saw myself as a girl. More surprisingly, I remembered her being one of the clever ones in our year. She would sit at the back of class messing around but then flew through her exams without much effort. She could have become anything she wanted. I wanted to go over and say hello but wasn’t sure where the conversation would go. Would she be happy to see me or still too annoyed with her kids to spark off a conversation? I knew for sure she would be shocked if I told her I lived in London and still wasn’t married. It was a given that Pakistani girls got married off as soon as they left school. Maybe she wouldn’t recognise me out of my school uniform, I convinced myself, and decided to stay put.

  I was wearing a pale blue shalwar kameez under my Puffa jacket. It was free flowing and comfortable. My training shoes beneath looked unfeminine but my feet were too sore for girly ones. Nowadays all my clothes hung off me and I worried that Mum would notice the weight that had dropped off my face. I’d caught her looking at me strangely a few times in the past few months. If anything, I should be putting on weight coming into my late twenties, but I seemed to be going the other way.

  Perhaps it was the stress; there was a lot going on and my head was buzzing. I thought about my training, the business and my future. Part of me wanted to walk away from the company because work colleagues had noticed my attention span dwindling in the office, which was not good for morale. However, at the same time, the sentimental side of having set it up from my bedroom and then watching it grow had made me cling on.