‘You know,’ Sparks says, ‘I knew another Stanley, once. Handsome lad, just like you. We were in Italy, one of the rivers. Stanley Wright was one of the new boys on the platoon. He’d been at a bloody art college or some such. We had a tradition — First-Timer’s Luck, we called it. Always take a first-timer out on a job, nothing could touch you.’
The fox stretches out his neck, coughs, a half bark. His eyes, staring. Sparks runs his hands down the animal’s neck, under its chin, over the sacking. The fox doesn’t move.
‘OK, Chummy.’ Sparks unties the twine. The fox still doesn’t move. Sparks pulls the sacking away from its muzzle. The fox’s jaws are relaxed, slightly apart. Sparks can see perfect white, pointed teeth. He rests his hand on the animal’s head.
‘I was saying, First-Timer’s Luck. I took Stan Wright along with me, break him in, give me a bit of luck. We were checking out a road running along a riverbank, the fields below. There was a farmhouse, red-tiled, ochre walls, peeling, a weathervane rusted and swinging. A high whine on the breeze, wind through the vane. I can still hear it.
Like small boxes, now, anti-personnel mines. Well, some of them. Then, they were bigger, flatter, some, dug into the verges, grass grown up and over, you could still see the signs of digging if you knew what to look for. Easy to dig in, these things. After about an hour spotting the things, marking them, we stopped for a break. Stan stood by the roadside, looking at the bloody view as though this was a holiday. He was shading his eyes, weight on one foot, pointing out the layers of colour fading into the distance, the farmhouses, the tall dark trees, shifting from one foot to the other on a patch we’d already cleared. He moved. His foot sank a half-inch, maybe a bit more, into the soil, with a gob of tarmac lifting over his boot.
I said, very quietly, ‘Don’t move, there’s a lad.’ He went to turn with a smile, and I put my hand out, shook my head. There under his boot was a flat circle in the mud, maybe ten inches across. We’d missed one. How? I’ll never know. Maybe the lad was already standing close with the gear, I’d worked round him?
He stood like Jesus, with this smile on his face. A gentle smile. Stretched out his hand. ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘I’ll be fine.’
He was standing, standing on the thing. Weight shifted. His weight on the mine. To release the pressure was the trigger. What must have gone through that smile? No legs? Guts spilt? Will it hurt? And he smiled, just stepped off — and — nothing happened.’
Sparks strokes the fox’s head. ‘See, Stanley? First-Timer’s Luck. It bloody worked.’
Sparks stands up stiffly, staggers a little, straightens up, goes out of the cage. The fox lies still, follows him with its eyes. Sparks goes to the cupboard, takes out a syringe, selects a box, fills the syringe. Then he puts handful of minced raw chicken in a metal bowl, carries bowl and syringe back into the fox’s cage and sits down again, putting the bowl within reach of the fox.
‘Then we checked the field. Quartered it. There were furrows, and nearer the farm, someone had been digging pits, maybe for dumping a rotten crop, to dig it back in. I’m no farmer, I don’t know. ‘S’ mines there were, in that field, near the farm. More anti-personnel. Little box with three metal prongs on top. You, they, buried the boxes, left the tips of the prongs above ground.
Stan was nineteen, ‘From Bethnal Green,’ he was telling me as we walked up and down the furrows, spotting these little metal prongs like we were spotting sparrows, marking them for the men.
We needed to clear right up to the farm buildings. ‘Yes, Bethnal Green,’ he was saying. I can see him now; glasses glinting, fringe cropped short, a pale stripe round the back of his neck where the barber had had a go.’
The fox is licking at the chicken.
‘Stan was chatting, ‘Bethnal Green is nice. The cinema is good. We go on Fridays, a big gang of us. Do you like films?’
I was about to say no, I didn’t have time for those things, when he slipped. He’d walked just to the side, round a rusty old piece of machinery, slipped. This pit, one the farmer had dug, had steep sides, just like a shell hole in soft earth. Stan had slid down, was sliding down, the soil damp, only five foot or so down but enough. And just where his foot was going, a ten-inch circle, flat.
It was sort of slow motion. He just slid down, stopped, and there was Stan, one foot on the mine.
I didn’t move.
‘Gosh, sorry,’ he said, not smiling this time, looking down at his boot, then up at me, the sun flashing on his glasses. Held out his hand to me.
‘Don’t move, son,’ I said. He looked up at me, holding his hand out over the edge of the pit.
I took three steps back.
‘It’s OK,’ he said, waving his hand. Beckoning. ‘I’ll be fine.’
But I kept backing away.
The yellow of the dog fox’s eyes is dull, tarnished brass. Sparks pats the animal and gets up. He takes his torch, goes out in his heavy boots into the lane. It has started to rain, big slow drops like clods of earth falling warm, wet, after an explosion.
Cello Strings and Screeching Metal
IT HAPPENS WHEN you give me champagne. Not that that happens a lot, you understand, but occasionally, perhaps when I have played my cello well, and there is a party to say thank you. You must wonder why it is that a young German woman who likes to party seems a little distant and stands back looking at the glass in her hand, watching the bubbles spiral from a single point in the base of the glass. It also happens when I hear screeching metal, maybe train wheels locking on the track.
It removes me, you see, back to a day when I was quite small. Not more than four, perhaps, although, you know, were I to calculate, I could tell you the age precisely.
My memories up to that point are sketchy. Yes, incomplete. We lived within fifty metres of the Wall, and it was not special to me. It was just something there. I remember the sounds. But then, I am a musician. You would expect that, would you not? That I recall sounds more than emotions? Or maybe that is what brings the emotion to the surface; the senses?
The barking of dogs. I remember the barking of dogs, all day, all night. I remember the sound of the leashes those dogs were tethered to. Expandable metal links, that screeched like distant trains in the dark as the dogs ran back and forth, looking for food. They kept them hungry, you see.
My bedroom did not face that way, but the sound whirled round the building, pushing in through every window until I could not escape it. The barking and the screeching metal. All night. In the end, when it stopped I could not sleep for the silence.
But before that, there was one night. My parents had gone out and a neighbour was to stay the night with me. She slept in my parents’ room, in their big bed, in the room that overlooked, at some distance, but still overlooked, the Wall. ‘Wall’ is a misnomer. I heard this word and it is right. It was no real wall, near our block. It was a chain-link fence, watch towers at intervals, a strip of green grass they called No Man’s Land, and another chain-link fence. So light, so simple, so easy.
On that night, the neighbour (I want to give her a name, but none comes) and I were playing cards. We were listening to the radio. The radio was reporting things I did not understand, and I wanted music. Music is what I always listened to, even then, but the neighbour said no. This was important. She was then on our telephone to someone quite soon, telling them that it was only a matter of days. Please, I remember saying. Please, can we play another game? But no, I had to go to bed. I begged and begged to be able to stay in the big bed, because without my parents there, the apartment seemed very empty and echoing. The sounds were round and huge.
I was put to bed in the large bed, and told to be a quiet girl.
In this room, the sounds were loudest. The dogs barking, and the leashes, cutting into my ears. I wished I could have my cello, as those sounds might calm the dogs as they calmed me, but it had to stay in the basement. (These flats have s
uch thin walls, I was told. You can practice only now and again.)
I go to the window to look out and see if I can see the dogs. I can see them between the flats, between the buildings in front. Running back and forth in patches of light. It is dark, you see. There are yellow lights at intervals, not strong enough to light up everything, but which catch movement like moths.
Then I see him. Hunched over, carrying something.He throws a blanket up and it catches on the fence. I see him begin to climb, and falter, slip back, and climb again. I see the dogs assembling. In the spotlight. That is what I see. And what am I? Four? Five? But I know I am seeing something horrible.
I want to shout to him, I have just heard, because my neighbour has explained, it will not be long, just wait a little and you can walk, walk through. But my thoughts don’t reach him. He has one arm over the top of the wire, and now he is over the top and hanging down the other side. The dogs on their leashes are barking. The leashes are screeching and the dogs are kept so hungry. But this is such a risk — maybe he loves someone over the other side?
What I haven’t seen before are the floodlights. They are beautiful when they come on. It is just like daylight. He is caught hanging on the fence, one hand on the top, the dogs below, and only me watching. I hear something through a loud hailer, but I cannot hear the words. Even me with my musical ears cannot hear them because this is no music. I know. If he falls the dogs will get him. If he stays the voices will get him. I can see his hair from the window. It lifts in the breeze, in the lights. Then I shut my eyes before the guns start. I don’t see him drop although I know what is happening. I don’t hear him call out although my ears are straining. I don’t understand. I am too little. I know I cannot sleep.
A very few days later, we are all in the apartment, my mother, my father and I. My parents are listening to the radio and I am bathing a doll. All of a sudden, my father picks me up and shouts to my mother to come, come quickly. They do not normally do things with excitement like this, I think.
We rush outside, I am bumped and crushed in my father’s arms, and he puts me on his shoulders. I ride up there proud to be his daughter, above the hundreds and thousands of people. All our neighbours, and the sounds. I hear them, the sounds. Car horns blaring out. Trabant engines, the revving of engines like your mowers in parks, people laughing, pushing, men I do not know saying: Dieter, what a day! Then running through to where the Wall is stone, not wire. Bulldozers, revving, pushing, the wall cracking and giving way with dust and noise. People singing. People crying.
I remember someone holding a glass up to me and saying: Drink this, little one. It is a good day, is it not? The drink fizzes and my eyes water. My father laughs, and my mother is crying and smiling. It is a good day. It is history.
Confession to a Drowned Dog
TOMMO, YOU OLD mutt. This is me.
I am the same John G. Cassie, nine years a soldier, proprietor and sole occupant of this wee stretch of sand. John G. Cassie what stood next to Dannie McGee on a godforsaken moor in the Falklands, saw him blown apart against a mountain range so beautiful — on a day that was twinkling bright and clear, the sun sending up flashes from the grass like a wedge of broken glass behind him, and he turns and says: ‘Och Johnny, lad, I thought there was nowhere like Cul Mor’ — and his brains are falling through the air like thick rain.
See, all I can tell is what I know, and I know this. Nine years a soldier, gave every breath, every inch to Her Majesty, God blesser, and now, it’s the strand for me. And the whisky.
There’s pure water cutting through the sand just here. Cold as dying. Keeps the bottle nice and fresh. All my life I’ve tried to put it from me, but now it’s just me, the bottle and the dear old sea, the tide. You can count on the tide; she’s a faithful consort and no mistake. And I have to talk to you, Tommo, before she comes back.
Nine years, soldiers, me and Dannie McGee. Nine years before that, arch enemies at Inverness First and Second. The best shot with the stone, he was, me the next. Could put out a lavvy window at thirty paces, and run? Ah, run man — with old man MacIver running after us, keks round his knees, braces flying. Then back behind the wall, creeping back low down like Indians to resume the eternal struggle against the MacIvers.
I was born on this strand. Born of some young thing who creepy-creepied out of the big house after setting the bacon to cook on the skillet, dropped her whelp, meself, like a hot iron, and back home before the bacon blackened.
And John G. Cassie has his life, thanks to you, Tommo, the mutt of a bait-digger digging for the rags before dawn at low tide, a mutt who’s told to go off and guard the bait, but you creeps and sidles to this food — food! And the bait-digger comes with a stick to chase you off this dead thing, and aha! Its old John G. Cassie, and Tommo dragging him across the mud butt-naked and yelling — and thank the Lord for low spring tides.
Oh, and was there ever a querying and a questioning when a bait-digger comes home with a yelling meself! And a succession of lucky family men — trawler-men most, but even a God’s own minister — had the privilege — nay, the holy honour — of caring for John G. Cassie, and I am told that for years they tried to find the look of the father in the shadows of my face.
I remember I would go to bed early and lie there sweet as anything, eyes shutted tight as an arse and ears wide open, while family men and mammies of the lads I played with are peering and peering. ‘Is it His Lairdship?’ they would whisper — and of course! Saints preserve us — John G. Cassie was born of a Laird out of a kitchen maid. And a Laird as had a good supply of the finest, the very finest whisky, and no doubt passed on his great love and total prevarication for the stuff to his unholy unwedlocked bastard, John.
But Dannie McGee was his friend, this John G. Cassie. Dannie McGee who never let the gang from the end of the street near his mate, and turned the gas on in the MacIver house until the kitchen blew. Ha!
And Dannie McGee who found your mutt’s corpse, bless you old Tommo, floating in the shallows off this beach, and we brought a blanket off my bed, rolled you in the blanket and dug a hole here — or maybe here — or yet again — I can’t remember. Maybe I will dig and find your bones.
And the time, the holy time Danny McGee purloined a half-bottle of whisky, half undrunk, from the harbourmaster’s car and we brought the precious liquid here to our beach.
If I could have that feeling as my last, the blood beating through me a thousand times each minute, the heat of the fire in my throat, and Danny reeling about, flapping his arms like a wounded seagull screeching that his head was stuck in a metal bubble and he’d never get it off. And his terrier, Jack, barking and nipping at his heels. And I can’t say how it all ended, or how much was drunk, or how little, or if it came up to see the light of the sun a second time — I can’t say exactly what happened, but there was the harbourmaster and the family man fostering John G. Cassie standing over us, and Dannie out cold, and me thinking I couldn’t believe my luck for not getting knocked sideways by the stuff.
But I tell you, I had eaten the plum. Nothing was as good as that first taste. From then on it was like I lived in a dark place, a well, only coming up for light when some kind soul pulled on the bucket and brought me up, buying me a nip.
Then Ellie, and for a while I remember, I remember things were neat, and good, and John G. Cassie almost became the family man. Indeed, sitting here, I am coming to the opinion that if I had made it with Ellie things may have been alright, but the thought now of her with nothing on brings this big man down, so best not go there. Eh? I’m sorry.
It’s bad times, I’m falling asleep, and I must not do that. I’m not ready. What if the tide comes in, indeed, catches me on my strand before I have confessed?
Imagine, just imagine, looking back is like looking across a desert. And the air shimmers in the heat, like the desert did once, on one tour of duty cut short, it shimmered with golden light. Ach, but things are ou
t of kilter.
The Army called us. ‘Do your duty, indeed!’ That’s what he said, this Mr Jones in the recruiting office: ‘Fight for Her Blessed Majesty’, and it’s the uniform, the shiny buttons, the stripping down of the rifles, and the polishing of the boots until the boots had eyes, and it’s nine years a soldier, and off the nectar excepting only on leave times.
And Ellie off with a MacIver.
It was a day as fresh as grass growing up when we got the word that it was the Falklands. The Falklands! Out there in planes, out there in ships. Some, not us, on the Sir Galahad blown to blazes and not written home. And now there’s that burning to remember.
There’s Goose Green, Mount Tumbledown, John G. Cassie and Dannie McGee. But its no Boy’s Own stuff, it’s a murder story, too. I know, I’ve been right in the thick of it, splintered a man’s jaw with my bayonet while he screamed in some dago tongue and waved his hands in the air. ‘He’s a dago-MacIver,’ says Danny, and laughs, and we’ve been given these two Argies to guard — we know it doesn’t take much to set the life of a man on fire then snuff it out, don’t we? Eh?
First one, for me. Nobody heard him, the dead man dying. And now I think of that first one, the smashed jaw and sudden quiet when he knew I was going to finish him, and I’d like to give him a dram just for old times.
But you know, no one will ever tell their families how they died. Not me, anyhow. There’s nothing to be done. They know. I wasn’t going to tell Ma McGee how Danny’s brains flew through the air. No pain is what they say. And they say it in Argie lingo too, I’ll bet.
Storm Warnings Page 3