New Model Army

by Adam Roberts

  It was black as midnight. My head hurt.

  I was lying on my front. It was dusty and dark and I couldn’t see anything. The whistle continued blowing its unyielding monotone.

  I knew at once what had happened. A jet had spotted the muzzles of our cannon, poking over the lip of the car park and had decided to take them out. I say decided: I daresay what happened was that the pilot reported it, and his superiors considered the report and ordered him to fire a missile and destroy those cannons. We had been, of course, foolish - stupid - careless. We shouldn’t have set the guns up so close to the edge. We should have positioned them deeper inside the car park; perhaps on the bonnet of a car, angled out in decent obscurity.

  I dragged myself round. The whistle was still blowing. Penalty. Foul. Stop the game.

  I was dazed. I had a sticky gel all over me. I had blood all over me. I blinked and blinked, and saw what had saved my life. When the missile struck I had been between a stocky concrete pillar and the inner concrete wall of the car park. The blast had caught a 4by4, shove-ha’pennied it, thrown it directly at me. The front of the chassis had slammed against wall and the rear against the pillar and the thing had stuck there, such that, although I was knocked down, the body of the vehicle had kept the worst of the blast off me.

  My left hand wasn’t there. The whistle was blowing. I searched frantically for my right arm, and pulled at the sleeve, and found the hand - it was still there, after all, still attached to my arm, though the hand itself was numb and I couldn’t feel it. My arm ached, though. The wrist had been bent back, or broken, or something. And, yes, now that I looked at it, I noticed that there was a considerable amount of pain in that wrist. Now that I noticed it, my wrist hurt like fuck.

  All dark and dusty, nothing to see.

  With an inward pop the whistle stopped blowing. Sound came back into my ears, though muffled: a distant roaring; the sounds of sifting and things falling; the scrunching-tinfoil noise of flames.

  That was when I finally thought of Simic.

  I got on all fours, or tried to, but I couldn’t put weight on my right hand; so actually I got on all threes, coughing and trying to spit dust out of my mouth, and I did a sortof lame dog crawl, two knees and one hand, through the smoke. I tasted tar, and charred tyres, and death.

  And as I looked about me I could see that the scene was not altogether dark, after all. There was an orange-yellow smear of light and heat away to my left. A burning car, I supposed.

  Where had Simic been? Until a moment before he had been standing four yards to my right.

  I found him. My left hand touched him as I crawled. He was lying on his side. I couldn’t see in the bleary orange-dark. So I sat back, and scrabbled through my pockets with my good hand to find a torch. Fumble fingers. It took me a shaky while to locate the torch and turn it on, but finally I directed a beam of light at his body. I wished I hadn’t immediately. Something more rigid than flesh had passed through Simic’s back, on the dexter side, and had torn off his right arm and right shoulder-blade and a sizeable piece of his flank. A rope of raw meat, slathered with eggwhite and oil and cream-of-tomato soup, had spilled out of the hole in his torso. Everything else was scorched black. The hair on his head was smoking with an odour I could smell even over all the other baked and scorched and dusty smells of that place. The uniquely astringent stench of burning hair.

  I fumbled the torch away. I was shaking pretty seriously. It was a proper late-stage Parkinsonian tremor, all over my body. But I couldn’t stay in that place, shakes or no shakes, Simic-corpse or none. I crawled over to the crushed-up 4by4 because that’s where my weapon was. I reached out to pick it up, but instead of managing to grasp it I acted as if I was trying to fan it cool. Like I was waving bye-bye at it. I couldn’t stop my hand shaking. I sat back, and suddenly vomited, turning my head to avoid getting it on my clothes. Pull yourself together, I told myself. I said those actual words to myself: pull yourself together. I wiped my mouth on the back of my coatsleeve and tasted ashes and blackness.

  I couldn’t stay where I was.

  So I pulled myself together, and hooked my shuddery arm through the strap, and dragged the weapon over the stone to the exit, and through the place where the door had been, and out into the stairway. I came down shuffling on my arse, step by step, and my gun came clattering down with me.

  That was the last I saw of Simic.

  17

  I want to say one more thing, here, about Simic. This may not be interesting to you, or relevant to your purposes, but it matters to me. I said earlier that I’m not the first queer to fall hopelessly in love with a straight man. People have always fallen in love with all sorts of unsuitable and unavailable other people, for as long as we have been. But, you see, it felt like I was the first. You see, however much a man-of-the-world you may be, however varied your experience, there’s an element of love that necessarily makes you the first person to experience it.

  Sometimes I would look at his face and be struck by how beautiful he was. I’m not talking in terms of conventional beauty. His features were regular, and his complexion wasn’t bad; but his hairline was being swept back by the tide of age - he was nearly forty, which in gay-years is something over a hundred - and there were all these little pleats and wrinkles in at the corner of his eyes. One thing that I always look for in a man is good breath; evidence of a good dental hygiene regimen. I can’t be bothered with sour breath, or coffee-breath, or the hint of decay. Who wants to kiss that? Simic was never too careful with his teeth. I never kissed him, but I sometimes caught a whiff and it wasn’t pleasant. When all is said and done he wasn’t really my type - and all this is quite apart from the fact that he was straight.

  Nevertheless, he had the bluest of blue eyes. I might be talking to him, chatting about nothing at all, and suddenly I would stop, my heart chirruping, because I had just that moment caught a glimpse of the sky inside his skull.

  I didn’t fall in love with him because he was unavailable to me. That may be what you’re thinking, but it’s not true. Quite apart from anything else he was available to me: he and I were closer than most human beings ever are. Comrades in war - you know how it goes. We shared everything. I know he loved me, and he knew I loved him. What we didn’t have was sex. But what does that mean? Look. The key thing here is intimacy. Sex and intimacy are not the same thing. In lots of cases sex and intimacy are mutually incompatible. But love and intimacy are connected things, of course that’s true. You’ll surely agree that intimacy is the currency of love. No? Imagine true love without intimacy - or imagine it, if you like, with only glancing, occasional intimacy: a slap on the back, an arm round the shoulder (but the face looking in a different direction), a shared cup of coffee.

  You see there’s a grim secret hidden in intimacy, and this has to do with the awkward fact that because pain is more intimate than pleasure; and death is the most intimate thing of all. I tell you this expecting you to understand, because you are also a soldier. A human head deformed by some killing impact into a bell-shape, the features stretched and grotesqued upon it like wax. That leer. A body lying on its back on the pavement, its juices oozing and running from all its loose joins and threads. Blood and engine oil mixed copiously together. The day-glo orange and red and streaky yellow of intestines in bright sunlight. That old song:I want the doctor

  To take your picture

  So I can look at you from inside as well.

  Of course you might repress it, might need to do so, but it’s the truth of love regardless of that. You want to dismantle the loved one. If you properly love somebody it’s not enough to love their exterior surfaces only. This reason, or one very like it, is why love and war have always been so completely intertwined, from Homer’s day to our own. I’ll eat you up, I love you so.

  Simic’s death was a terrible and a pitiable thing for me to endure. The phrase is a blow, and once you’ve experienced it you understand the force of that metaphor. Death had swung his meaty fist and connec
ted hard with my chest - slammed me in the middle of the ribs, sat me back on my arse and heaved all my breath away. I was drowning in grief, like a man in water. Like a fish in air. That is how I was. But how I was and what I did were different things.

  That car park in Hammersmith. I got to the bottom of the stairwell, scraping my arse from step to step. My pack was at the bottom - I’d had enough to do with lugging the automatic cannon up the stairway without trying to bring my pack too - so I tugged that outside on to the street. The concrete structure was groaning above me. I got it into my rabbit-panicky head that the whole car park was about to topple in upon me, so although I was sobbing and shuddering hard I forced myself to scurry through the ground-floor level and out the main car entrance. I wasn’t thinking. I should at least have checked the wiki - there might have been squad upon squad of enemy troops right there. I might have been gunned down like a fairground target, dusty and blinking in the light. That might have been where my narrative ended, when the freeze-frame goes from colour to sepia, though the soundtrack carries on to broadcast volley upon volley of gunfire. And maybe there’s an inadvertent truth in that. Perhaps hearing continues even after sight has gone; blackness and the body’s pulse frozen, and the lung’s cul-de-sac no longer throbbing. Only the sound of the voices in the darkness He’s gone, yeah, he’s done - he’s done. Cooked like bacon.

  There was nobody in the street.

  I staggered left and lollopped away. Ten minutes passed before I thought to check my wiki, and since I couldn’t get my right hand to work I had to stop and put down my kit to do this. I pinged the destruction of the car park, and Simic’s death, but the former piece of news - which, tactically, was the more significant - had been noticed by others and added already. I discovered that I was going the wrong way, and liable to stumble into an enemy patrol, so I turned about and ducked left up a long, empty street. The sporadic sounds of battle seemed enormously distant to my damaged ears. Pings were coming in constantly. Mumblings in my ears. Dust in my eyes. Checking the wiki was a tiresome process; the readout kept blurring.

  Was I crying? Of course not - a warrior, like me? The idea.

  I passed a Boots Metro, and blew a hole in its shopfront grille with a grenade shell. Inside I grabbed a bagful of first-aid: splinted up my right wrist there and then, and took the rest with me, stumbling away. Then I followed the wiki as best I could. It was a good guide; my comrades were still updating it, and enemy positions were charted pretty accurately. I’m afraid I added little to it. Prolonged jogging was awakening a series of specific pains inside my body. My wrist seared with every jolt. My hip seemed not quite right in its socket, and flared pain with each step. I ran into the enemy only once: turning a corner and seeing a tank and several dozen combatants, several hundred metres away. I don’t know if they saw me; but I pulled back sharpish. I tried to update the wiki - which is to say, I tried to focus my jammering heart and trembly fingers, to steady myself sufficiently to note this advance. But by the time I had got myself sufficiently under control to input data somebody else had noticed it.

  I jinked round again, and ran through a shopping mall, keeping tight against the shopfronts. A simulacrum of me ran through the glass frontage, leaping towards me or jolting further away as I passed shop window, or inset glass shop-door. A surveillance camera began shaking its head, glacially, in disapproval.

  I came out at the back into the delivery area, a petrified lagoon, where the sunlight cast parsimonious shadows from nearly straight overhead. Two trucks, both electric, were parked on the yellow crosshatching; and I took the nearest, cracking the doorlock with my rifle butt and starting the engine with my smartphone.

  There was a spycam tucked into the corner of the ceiling like a tiny black limpet. Some people like to stick the lens over with chewing gum; but I hardly cared. What did it matter? I backed up, the truck peeping like a sparrow, and then I pulled round in an arc. I set off. As I went over speedbumps, pallets in the half-emptied back clashed and chimed.

  A vote was called. I almost didn’t participate because I felt so discombobulated. But I make it a point of principle always to vote. The vote is the lifeblood of democracy, after all. The prop was that we not scatter but rather pull back and counterattack to the south. Some NMAs must have spotted a tactical possibility down there; but I couldn’t really follow all the debating, not whilst I was trying to drive and to contain my sobbing and shaking, and to swallow down my pain. And I preferred the earlier plan. So I voted no; and no was the overall vote. Accordingly we reverted to the earlier model, and disappeared; and the enemy’s knife met water, or mist.

  This van took me all the way out of London. I followed the wiki, and it did me proud: no roadblocks, almost no enemy activity. What I mean is: there were roadblocks, and there was enemy activity; but we had people all over the area and it was an easy enough matter to slip through the cracks. I passed underneath the M25 near Waltham, and made it up past Harlow before the van ran out of juice. I parked it by the side of the road.

  By this point I had calmed down a little. I took a good look at myself in the rear-view mirror. My face was speckled with cuts, the scabs already turned ruby, by the body’s own alchemic processes of metamorphosis. I was so grubby it looked like I was wearing nightassault facepaint. Wet wipes from the bag of Boots stuff I had grabbed made some inroads in this dirt, and opening up several of the lacerations. Then I took off my body armour, and scrubbed at the clothing underneath - jeans and top - as best I could, to take off some of the worst dirt. I still looked like a tramp, of course.

  It was mid afternoon. I was suddenly ravenous. In the back of the van I found crates of easymeals - microwaveable curries, ready-to-cook pizzas. I unsheathed one of these latter from its cardboard, cheese and tomato, pulled off its condom of cellophane. I ate it raw, in big bites. I drank a can of milk. Then, still shivering slightly, I discovered to my surprise that I was absolutely, deadbeat, couldn’t-keep-those-eyelids-open exhausted. I lay on the floor of the van and fell asleep.

  When I woke it was gone midnight. I experienced for the first time (the first of many times) that horrible visceral wrongfooting, like the sensation just before you reach the top of the hump of the rollercoaster, when the thrill of anticipation turns over into the low-in-the-gut terror and nausea and horror. I might wake, and for the briefest moment the grief has gone, and the day is all possibility. Then the car goes over the lip and the reality slams into my stomach: that he is dead and will never come back again, and I feel sick and full of fear and crushed. The key had been propelled forcefully into my cranium, and there it stuck, like a poisoned thorn, a torment to my flesh.

  Through the windshield everything was black. The sky in mourning for the death of Simic.

  I gathered myself; packed up my kit and clambered painfully down from the van. Then, without looking back, I limped away into the dark, my useless right hand tucked in at my jacket pocket. It was a clear, huge night. Tyre-black sky. Bullet-sharp stars. The moon, very low in the west, made larger by its proximity to the horizon as if gorged on its own delicious, fluid light. Night is a more intimate thing than day; but the last thing bereavement wants is intimacy. Nothing to be done. I pushed on.

  Twenty minutes of holping along and I came into a village: all asleep under the English sky. I advanced cautiously, but unnoticed, beneath tangerine street lamps, past short-back-and-side hedgerows, Most of the houses stood a long way back from the road, dark and quiet. My mind was fizzing. It circled round and round. A tisket, a tasket. On and on and on. I dream I’m an eagle. Here’s a mock-Tudor house with a Ford Tiger in the driveway. I stepped up to the front grille of this vehicle, half-thinking of taking it and driving away. But these new cars are slathered in theftproof devices. So I stood there trying to think it through: I couldn’t smash my way into the vehicle, and even if I somehow got inside it would take more than a smartphone to start the engine.

  I lay my hand on the bonnet, unthinking. Straightaway the alarm started: a colossall
y loud, strangulated high-pitched yelping. All the car’s lights winked together. It made my heart jump, I don’t mind telling you, and my right hand flopped out of its pocket to dangle uselessly. I didn’t so much step away as lurch backwards up against the hedgerow and into shadows. Then, getting a grip, I took my right wrist in my left hand and tucked it back in its pocket.

  I stared, to be honest. There was something hypnotic in the son et lumière. I’ll tell you what it was: the car in front of me was giving voice to my grief, although it was a nerveless and bloodless device. It was a mourner. The machine mourned as man could not, with a force and a relentlessness: and as it did so it occurred to me, thinking of all the tasks mankind had delegated to machines, that it was strange we had not devised some machine for grieving. Of all human activities grieving is surely the one that calls for the greatest perseverance, the greatest regularity and stamina, the greatest inexhaustible perfection.

  The keening of that car. There was something terrible and beautiful about it.

  The cuts on my face had opened up again - I could feel the slick and ooze on my cheeks, and running into the corner of my mouth. But it wasn’t blood, and the cuts had not opened up. The lacerations, there, were still sealed just fine by their ruby plugs. I was weeping to keep the car company. Ach, ach, ach.