by Mark Dapin
I started to change when I was about fourteen. I got into a bit of trouble, fighting at the football. We used to defend the East Bank against the away fans. It started off with fists but ended up with knives and bottles. I got nicked and fined and that was it. I never went again. But they got worried about me at school because I never used to be a bad kid, and the teachers thought that maybe I needed a bit more direction. I obviously wasn’t going to do well in my GCSEs, so the careers master suggested I should learn a trade. I told him I liked writing and wanted to be a journalist, but he said I should probably think about joining the army, which usually took the boys who got arrested at the football.
At home, of course, my old man was saying the same thing. But he knew a lot about the army that the teachers didn’t. Everybody thinks it’s all pig-thick Geordies and Scousers who just want to fight, but the army’s full of blokes who are good at their trades – if you’re a mechanic or an engineer, it’s life or death – or crap at their professions. It’s a rest home for useless dentists, lawyers and vets, people who’d never make it in civvy street because they’re lazy or drunk or just stupid. But there’s also another layer of blokes you wouldn’t expect to find in uniform: chippies and physios and even photographers and journalists. Once you get into the army, you can move sideways from blowing people up to reporting on other people doing it. That’s the theory anyway. My dad said I ought to join the infantry, learn a bit about the military, then get transferred to Soldier magazine in Aldershot. Then, when I got out of the army, I could be a defence correspondent for the Sun, which was the only newspaper Dad knew. It wasn’t a bad idea, really, but I took no notice because he was my old man. Instead, I failed a load of exams and got a job selling advertising on the Aldershot News and Weekend Advertiser. I gave it up after a few months, but I had learned the words people used around papers – ‘proofs’ and ‘type’ and ‘body copy’ and all that. I’d had drinks with journalists – not many of them, because they tried to keep away from the ad staff – and got an idea of how their jobs worked. I taught myself to type on an old office Remington and learned shorthand from a book.
I had to leave the News when I got into a scrap with the production coordinator, a kid called Jeremy Knight. He was always going on about how he knew jujitsu, and grabbing people from behind and acting like he was going to choke them out and stuff. He did it to me in the South Western, just around the corner from the paper, and I threw him and punched him. I thought he was just bullshitting about the jujitsu, but it turned out he really was good at it, and we had a big rolling fight that ended up getting us banned from the pub. We accidentally broke a window and got picked up by the cops and it got into the paper – the fucking Aldershot News, would you believe it? – and we were both told to find another job.
Jeremy – Jed – became my best mate. We practised jujitsu together, and I didn’t even mind when he started calling himself ‘the Jedi’ or ‘Jedi Knight’. We both got bored of jujitsu but we liked keeping fit – even though all he ever ate were pizzas the size of bike wheels – so we moved to Hackney and took jobs as cycle couriers. That was a fucked idea. I broke my ankle and my collarbone, and Jed split his head open. After about a year, we figured out we might be safer in the army. So we joined up together, and I’m sure my old man had his suspicions.
Basic training was nothing to me. We were older than most of the other recruits, and Dad had already taught me everything anyway. Jed found it a bit harder, but I helped him along, and we didn’t take shit from anyone.
It was okay being in the army. It felt – how can I put it? – inevitable. Once we were in, more or less everything was taken out of our hands. We were told what to do and how to do it, where to go and how long to stay there. Doctor, dentist, food, drink, travel: everything was taken care of. All we had to find for ourselves was women.
There was always something to do: you could blow up something or crash something or shoot at something. I played a lot of football – me and Jed both got into the regimental second team – and boxed a bit. Jed fancied himself as a swimmer, but he wasn’t all that good. Everything was pretty cruisy until we got sent to Belfast and the Paddies started trying to kill us.
We did two tours of Northern Ireland and I found out what it was like to have people want you dead. We got shot at and bombed, and we fucked the palest skinned, rattest-faced Proddie women you could imagine, and made it all better with pockets full of Es and trips.
At first we were buying pills retail, but that was a mug’s game. Jed made a connection with a UVF guy, and we started pulling in bulk supplies at wholesale prices and selling them in the barracks, then at discos and dance parties. Everyone was taking pills anyway: us, the paramilitaries, the ratfaces, the RUC. It was turning into a smiley war, with no hard feelings when you blew some Paddy’s arse back to the Vatican, and even ugly Belfast looked pretty in the light.
Jed was the best mate I ever had. He was always there for me, watching my back. He saved my life at least twice in Belfast, and I knocked out a bloke who tried to stab him in a pub. I took twenty-five stitches in my forearm to save his ugly fucking face. I loved Jed, you know. He could make me laugh about anything. And he had all these plans for our future.
But I still wanted to be a writer. I used to send these stories about a soldier’s life to the Belfast Telegraph. They printed bits of them, but with most of the words changed. I never got paid and they never used my name. They were treating me as a source instead of a writer. Then this ‘Billy Cobbett’ got in touch and asked if I knew anything about the Unionist feuds. I did, as it happened, because whenever we lost a man we leaned on our moles to tell us who did it. Sometimes they knew, most of the time they didn’t. Once we had names – usually the wrong ones – we went to the UDA, or the UFF, which was the same thing, to help us find them and fuck them up. It always felt like we got our revenge, but it usually turned out that we had killed a dissident UDA man or a fucking nuisance neighbour.
One time, Jed took off his uniform and went out with the UVF and shot a Catholic boy dead. They told him he was a terrorist, but he was just a kid who worked for Sinn Fein. Because of that, Jed can’t admit we were wrong to fight. Otherwise he would be a murderer. Jed remembers that boy’s face, and sometimes he sees it on other kids, who stare back as if they recognise him too. Once or twice he’s seen the boy in an empty room.
You get hard in the army. You laugh at things that aren’t funny, like the idea of some poor bastard getting shot in the head for waking up a UDA commander with ‘Shaddap Your Face’.
Me and Jed were brothers, because we both knew what the other had done. It could’ve been either of us that shot the kid. The reason Jed went out hunting Catholics was the IRA had attacked our patrol and blown up the driver, Bob Edmonds. Jed had been sitting with him in the front seat, and afterwards he’d had to pull pieces of Bob’s brain out of his hair . . .
[Inaudible.]
Let me pour you a whisky, Anthony. I understand. The horrors of war rest heavily on us all.
Thanks, Jake.
Call me that again, son, and you’ll be pulling bits of your own brain out of your hair. Now, tell me about this Billy Cobbett. Was he another dead war hero whose name you stole?
There’s a pub called the William Cobbett in Farnham. I don’t know if he was related to the people there or what, but he wrote this column for the Belfast Telegraph that was supposed to look inside the paramilitaries. I told him what I knew about that lunatic Johnny Clarke, and gave him the squaddies’ view of one or two other things that were going on. I saved all the cuttings that I helped with. It was good to see the papers get something right for once. I kept asking the journalist if there was some way I could get into working for the Telegraph, and he promised he’d do his best.
We got a great story about Clarke’s lieutenant having an affair with another commander’s wife, and the bloke who was doing Cobbett got me in for an interview with the general manager of the paper, who said that, bearing in mind my exper
ience, he’d be happy to offer me a job selling display ads. I told him I’d rather be a British soldier in Northern Ireland: fewer people would hate me.
When we were rotated out of Belfast, I went to the boys on Soldier magazine and asked if there was a chance of getting a billet there, but they were all sitting on their postings until they retired or died, and it’s been a long while since anyone was killed in the line of duty on Soldier magazine.
We spent a few weeks training in Aldershot, wasting most of the time tripping in these terrible nightclubs, until we suddenly got sent to Kosovo. We had no idea why we were there. Jed had never even heard of Albania; he thought it was a joke country where James Bond villains come from. It was hard to get drugs at first, which pissed everyone off, but as usual Jed met a bloke in a bar, and we started taking shipments from Italy.
Everything was great until the Italians upped their price and Jed started talking to the Kosovars. The thing was, the Kosovars didn’t want to be paid in cash, they needed weapons, and – I didn’t know this – Jed set up a deal where he’d disappear some quite heavy kit in exchange for ten thousand Es. It was another Great Fucked Idea of Jed’s, because (a) they might’ve used the guns to shoot at us eventually, and (b) it would take us months to sell ten thousand Es in Kosovo. Now the army don’t care if you’re all loved up on a Saturday night, but they’re not happy if you love your enemy and pass on your kit to him. It’s against the spirit of the whole thing. So Jed got shopped by an outraged corporal, and I was caught up in the slipstream. The fact that we’d both seen combat went in our favour, and the army didn’t want a scandal. In the end we were both dishonourably discharged, and we lost our entitlements but we were happy just to dodge ten years in Colchester.
We went back to Aldershot and got a flat together near the South Western, and in two fucking weeks we were barred again, this time because Jed nutted the landlord after a row about whether Pritina was founded by the Romans. Jed wanted to do history at university, and we both thought about studying, but then Jed decided we should be private detectives instead, because somebody in the pub had told him the PI’s course was easy to pass. Jed said it would be a way into journalism for me, because I’d be learning the skills I’d need as a reporter: observation, interviewing and writing reports. We mainly did surveillance for compensation claims, sitting outside people’s houses in a white transit van, trying to catch blokes with broken backs landscaping their gardens, then we were hired to gather information on this pikey family who kept pretending to get run over by their own uncles and cousins. They figured out what we were doing and came at us with shotguns. I didn’t realise it but Jed was armed too. We had a firefight in Ash. That’s when I realised our lives were fucked. I’d had enough of being attacked by strangers, and chased through the streets by nutters, and always being hated by everyone.
I was going out with a girl called Helen from Trowbridge in Wiltshire; before we’d got together she’d been thinking of going to Australia for a working holiday. We were both going on twenty-nine and the cut-off date for applications was thirty, so this was our last chance. We decided we were going to leave our old lives behind, and start again. The funny thing is, I never thought of going without Jed.
So we came to Sydney as a threesome, although not literally – at least, not at fucking first. We stopped off in Thailand and Jed met an Aussie girl on Ko Samui. He moved in with her when we got to Sydney, and me and Helen rented the flat behind the police station in the Cross. Life was pretty good for a couple of months, until the money ran out. Helen got a part-time job as a sandwich hand. Jed subcontracted as a PI to a big local outfit, doing pretty much the same as we’d done in Aldershot, and I invented a CV and tried to get a job as a journalist.
Australia’s like the army. You’ve got all these shit people in mid-level trades. We met loads of backpackers in Thailand who had blagged their way into good jobs, and the first week I came here I hit the jackpot. I applied for something I figured nobody else would go for – a reporter on the Catholic Weekly. I told them I used to work as a section editor on the Sunday Times. I said I knew I was overqualified for the job, but it had become important to me to work in a religious environment. I felt this was the next stage in both my spiritual and my career development. They hired me on the spot.
And then?
They fired me when I turned in my first story.
So what did you do then?
I worked with Jed, just to get a bit of money. He’d established himself as a PI pretty quickly, plus he had his usual thing going on with Es. He’d somehow got himself involved with these Russian coke dealers too, and we all hoovered up a gram or two at weekends. Then Jed started employing Helen. She was good at the surveillance, because it used her two main skills: sitting around and staring at things. We split our case load, so she sometimes did jobs with me and sometimes with him. Then work came in bodyguarding the Russians in Bondi. I had to take a firearms course – which was a joke – and Jed got me a permit. They don’t normally give them to non-residents, but there’s a loophole for overseas-born security staff working for foreign diplomats, and the Russians had bought some kind of accreditation from their embassy. They were supposed to be attached to a trade mission.
While I was looking after the coke dealers – who never once sold any coke – Jed was doing Helen in the back of the surveillance van. I never caught them at it, but it was obvious what was going on because Jed’s Aussie girl kicked him out and he had to get a place of his own.
I kept on applying for small jobs in journalism and spent two days as a subeditor on Supermarket News before they realised I couldn’t use their computer system. Then I saw an ad in the paper for a reporter on the Jewish Times. I thought if I could get the Catholic job I could probably get the Jewish one. Even less people’d want to do that. I copied my name from the war memorial, changed my references to fit and played Spiegeleier just like the Catholic guy.
I lasted longer at the Times because Spiegeleier gave me a week to settle in. All I had to do was edit wire copy. Then your story came up and I thought I’d go all out to impress him. You know, I might not be the greatest writer in the world, but I’ll go in there and ask the tough questions, and I thought maybe I’d come back with something so good that he wouldn’t sack me as soon as he read the lead.
I told Helen she had to leave her job or leave me, and I’d be bringing in enough from the Jewish Times to look after both of us. She quit, and we were sort of getting on all right, then you fucked everything up by making me eat the tape.
I told you that was a joke.
It was the sort of thing we did in Belfast. I met one guy in the UFF who could eat a motorbike.
And that’s it? That’s your whole story? You’re a dishonourably discharged British soldier who came to Australia and pretended to be Jewish, pretended to be a journalist and just happened to find me? This is all a fucking accident? You expect me to believe that?
It’s true.
Christ, Anthony, you are a fucking idiot.
SIXTEEN
It was a relief to have told Mendoza the truth, and the next thing I had to do was explain myself to Siobhan. I wasn’t much of a liar – except to officers and cops – and it bothered me to be sleeping with somebody who thought I was somebody else. When Siobhan tossed back her hair and cried ‘Tony’, I kept thinking she was yelling out for an old boyfriend. And when she called me ‘Anthony’, it felt like I was in bed with one of my teachers from school (Mrs Clarkson – and that wasn’t so bad).
The only problem was, I couldn’t tell how much she liked me because she thought I was a journalist. I’d always done all right with girls – especially Irish girls – but my confidence had taken a headbutt when I’d found out Mendoza had paid Leah to take me upstairs. I’d never slept with a prostitute. I didn’t like that sort of thing. Even the strippers at Baby Dolls made me uncomfortable.
I must’ve given Siobhan a set of keys, because she was in my flat when I came home, going through my cuts
again.
‘I’ve read everything now,’ she said. ‘It’s all brilliant. I love the way you can move so easily between different styles. And some of your pen-names are hilarious.’
Siobhan was beautiful, and my throat went soft when I looked at her. I wanted to cuddle her under white sheets all weekend, and march around her with a rifle, protecting her from all the bad things in the world.
‘I love people who can use words the way you do,’ she said.
She asked if I ever read poetry, and I didn’t know how to answer. ‘Come to bed,’ she said, and this obviously wasn’t the time to bring up the fact that I had failed English in the end.
Siobhan wanted to go out to dinner – which was just as well, because I didn’t have any plates – but she didn’t feel like fancy food. Spiegeleier had already taken her to Darley Street Thai and Bistro Moncur, and I wondered what he hoped he would get out of that.
She said he was the perfect gentleman. I couldn’t figure out how old he was – it’s always hard to tell with bald guys – but Siobhan reckoned he must be in his early fifties, and she didn’t know how he could be happy in such a small-time job.
‘Not everyone’s a good writer,’ I said, since not even everyone in my bed was one.
Siobhan asked me to take her somewhere that had the real flavour of the Cross. I thought of piss and kebab meat, and speed cut with Ajax.
We held hands as we walked past the fountain. She circled my palm with her finger.
Early evening was the time the ruined people came out: cracked and blistered men with skin stretched like cling wrap across the bones of their faces, and toothless women whose lips had collapsed into their gums, all eyeballing a gang of pale British lads looking for a happy-hour drink to kick off their evening. The gap-year boys wore their hair shaved tight to their heads, with England football shirts or Ralph Lauren polos, like hooligans abroad. But they were exaggerating their accents, swaggering in a foreign country when they’d have been cowering at home. I could drop two of them with one punch and sort out the rest before they had time to run.