New Model Army

by Adam Roberts

  ‘I’ll put it on the side downstairs.’ A pause. Then: ‘Joram’s working from home, yeah? Is that OK?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Tony - are you . . . ?’ I was watching the twin lines of shadow in at the slit of light underneath the door. From those I could be sure my aim was at Harry’s heart. He shifted his weight a little to the left and I moved my gun fractionally. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Try to go easy on Joram, yes?’

  ‘Sure.’

  I lay down again and stared at the square in the ceiling. I heard him go downstairs. Then I heard the front door, and, through the window of my room, I heard the diminuendo of Harry’s coughing as he walked away up the street.

  I went to the bathroom, put my pistol into the soap dish and undressed. For the first time since Simic died I examined my body minutely, going inch-by-inch over it; bruised in a dozen places, new bruises layered upon old bruises. I found a thumbnail of something hard (metal, glass, stone) half-embedded in my thigh, and connected it - belatedly, stupidly - with the consciousness that I had had the sensation of discomfort in that leg. It came out and a slurp of blood came after it. I put a waterproof plaster over the cut.

  I showered.

  Then, wearing only a towel and carrying my pistol in my good hand, I went through to the master bedroom. The neatly made double bed: window opened a crack to air the place.

  Harry, I knew, was the same build as me, give-or-take; and without compunction I went through his wardrobe and his chest of drawers and clad myself in his gear. It took longer than it might have done, on account of the awkwardness of dressing oneself one-handedly. The gun lay on top of the duvet whilst I did this, like a pet, watching me with its one eye.

  I took some trainers, too. Then I strapped my wiki screen to my no-good arm, and made a sling from one of Harry’s handkerchiefs. My right hand was tingling, which was either a sign that life was returning to it, or else that it was getting worse.

  There was an enormous high-res photograph of the two of them hanging on the wall opposite the bed: shoulder to shoulder each with his arm about the other, beaming at the camera. It was pretty much life-sized; that’s how big it was. Examining it I could not see any of the usual photographic grain or roughness in the image, so I daresay it had cost a fair bit. They were both dressed up, standing in front of some nondescript doorway. In the corner of the image, at a jaunty skew, had been written in silver ink: Harryl & Joram, with a little flourish on the downstroke of the &.

  There was a muffled clatter downstairs.

  I took the gun and slunk into the hall, coming down the stairs stealthily. It had been the postman. The post lay on the mat beside the cat-flap. I tucked the gun away and stooped to pick it up. HARRY VAVASOUR, HARRY VAVASOUR, HARRY VAVASOUR, all official looking, and here was one: JORAM VAVASOUR. For some reason I found the juxtaposition of that forename and that surname comical. Some things just don’t go very well together. Perhaps I was thinking, subconsciously, something along the lines of - you know: TONY VAVASOUR, or maybe HARRY BLOCK. Or something along those sorts of lines. But I can’t honestly say that I was thinking that. I’m pretty sure that I wasn’t feeling anything, on any level, at that particular moment. That might be an index of repression, or just of exhaustion.

  Joram was in the doorway at the far end of the hall. ‘I don’t suppose any of that post is for you, Tony,’ he said. The way he turned my name into two syllables. The way he bent it around its vowel.

  I held the mail out to him. ‘You took Harry’s surname?’

  ‘We’re married,’ he said coming towards me and taking hold of the envelopes, ‘and I come from a traditional country.’ I thought about arguing for the incoherence of this statement; but of course it would only have antagonized him.

  ‘I’m going into town for a bit,’ I said.

  ‘Paul left you a key on the side. In the kitchen.’

  ‘He said.’

  As I went through, Joram called after me: ‘How long will you stay?’

  ‘Tomorrow. Or the day after, maybe. Not long.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Or maybe months,’ I added, with a little dazzle of spite in my smile.

  I put some milk and muesli in a bowl and sat in the kitchen. Joram stood in the doorway looking at me, but I didn’t let myself be rattled by that. I checked my wiki as I ate. My people had scattered, and the British Army was stomping all over London with their heavy feet and rage in their hearts. But their knife had met only water. There were several discussions going on simultaneously about the timing of our reassemblage; which in turn was tied to the larger question of how long before the English government accepted the inevitable, ceased fire and entered into proper negotiations. One week, said some. A month said others.

  ‘When I die,’ said Joram, out of the blue, ‘I’ll go to my grave happy I got through my whole life without killing nobody. Without,’ he added, flushing, ‘killing anybody.’

  I looked at him. I could see how thin his bravado was from the way he twitched and fidgeted under my gaze. From the way his own eyes looked left or right rather than directly into mine.

  ‘Anything you need from town?’ I asked.

  As I was going out he hovered behind me in the hall, and said, again apropos of nothing: ‘I make him happy, you know? Did you ever really make him happy?’

  There really wasn’t any point in getting into that.

  I had left my helmet in the car. I didn’t want to lose it if the car were seized (it was stolen, after all) so I transferred it to my room. Then, with a little black tape I’d found in Harry’s toolbox, and some nail scissors, and I turned the 3 of the numberplate into an 8, front and back; and for good measure I changed the P into an R too.

  It was half ten before I walked into town. The day was bright, though cloudy; a few twisty ribbons of blue visible between tremendous swagbellied clouds, all fat white and cream brushstrokes and swirls. The closer to the centre of Cambridge I walked the more thronged the streets became. There were innumerable roadside stalls selling coffee, or bagels, or second-hand stuff, all operated by students presumably supplementing their income - or reducing, howsoever slightly, their debt. In the central market square there was a not unpleasant cacophony of musics: dance beats and brass, plainsong and acoustic guitars. I watched break dancers throw choreographed conniption fits around a hat - an actual homburg hat - that was almost half full of coins. Then I watched a lone trombonist, standing behind an almost empty plastic tub, angling himself down and up as he parped and blew: going as if to punch the ground, pulling back. Heiling at the sky.

  Somebody jostled me from behind and I had them over, my trainer on the back of their neck, before I started thinking about what I was doing. He was whimpering. I’ve no idea why he bumped into me, accident or design. People were looking. My right hand was throbbing, its fingers twitching, as if straining to get back into the action and clasp his throat.

  I took my foot from him and moved as quickly away as was compatible with inconspicuousness.

  After that I tried to avoid the crowds. I wandered down to the river and sat on a pub terrace with a pint of beer, quite alone, and pleased to be alone. There were few other patrons, but they left me to myself. I had no thoughts. There were no thoughts in my head.

  I browsed the wiki and added my contribution to a few of the debates. Being in this city felt wrong: the shops and the colleges; the crowds, all busy with their day-to-day stuff. There was a degree of war austerity, it is true: police patrolling, the occasional military Land Rover thundering along the road. But the city was mostly just carrying on its usual thing. The mundaneness of that seemed to me an affront. Or if not an affront, precisely, then certainly a kind of weird irrelevance. I found myself wondering whether I ought not to go to Kent - whether I did not have a kind of duty to go down to Kent, and find Simic’s girlfriend, and tell her the bad news in person. Should I do that?

  Apple orchards. Rain, being neither of the sky no
r of the sea, is its own thing. The enormity of clouds; those giant objects.

  Early evening news, and the three of us sitting in the TV room; and the newsreader folded his hands together on the desk in front of him and peered out from beneath a crinkly brow. To his left a slideshow of images from London; below him the red tape wormed its way right-left, detailing casualties; damages in euros; Newcastle peace talks; dangerous malfunctions on the EU Aeroscaphe, up in Earth orbit. The lead story was that the peace talks had broken down. Images of men in suits and women in smart dresses stomping out of a large grey building as reporters darted amongst them, prodding chopstick-mics in their faces. Then there were images of scientists suited up in tentlike protective suits, strolling langourously about Hampton Court, or what was left of it. ‘Peace talks at Newcastle have broken down for the second time,’ the newscaster said, drawing his face into ever tighter modes of seriousness.

  ‘How they love this!’ said Joram; a little toot round the edges of the tight lid crammed over his superheated fury. ‘The news - oh it loves war, it loves all this misery.’

  ‘You can hardly expect them not to report the war,’ Harry noted.

  ‘It’s our misery,’ he said. I thought: you don’t know the first thing about misery, but I buttoned my lip; I zipped it. My lips were Velcro. Joram was on a roll: ‘News and entertainment, now it’s all the same newsertainment. They are revelling in it. To them its just ratings.’ Rrrratings. I looked about the lounge as the telly burbled on (‘. . . representatives of the so-called Independent Government of Scotland deplored what they described as “bully tactics” on behalf of the British negotiators . . .’). Wealth was everywhere in this room: two original canvases by Konstantinou, a signed Turner print; Ultra High Def screen half the size of the wall; vat-grown beeskin sofas. I saw no evidence of misery here.

  ‘I bumped into Meirion. Somebody vandalized his car,’ said Harry. ‘He said he parked it outside ours, but I don’t remember that. Somebody tried to break into the back with a tyre iron, he said.’

  ‘Hmm,’ I said. I was thinking of a piece of paper cut into the shape of a human being - this piece of paper, you see, was Simic - and then I thought of this paper man taken between two impersonal hands, and ripped in one sharp gesture into two unequal pieces. But this being magic paper, imbued with the consciousness of Simic, and all his sly wit, and his blue eyes, and the beauty of his observations, and his capacity for feeling pain and his human terror of dying - this was a hideous wrench, and agony and death.

  ‘Look,’ Joram was saying, and he was looking at me and pointing at the screen. ‘Senior sources in the military,’ the newsreader was saying, ‘have confirmed that the recent military surge has flushed almost all illegal combatants out of London.’ And there was a headshot of a senior feudal officer, face as shiny under the camera light as a newly scrubbed child’s: ‘Hampton Court was a last, desperate throw of the dice for these bandits,’ he said. ‘We have beaten them in open battle. What remains is a mopping-up operation.’

  ‘That’s why you’re here,’ said Joram. ‘With your tail between your legs.’ He had the linguistic ingenuity to turn even legs into a disyllable. It was rather winning.

  ‘Cluck cluck,’ I said.

  ‘You could at least have the decency to admit—’

  ‘One week,’ I said, the torn paper figure of Simic scattered on the floor. Blood was coming out from the broken weave of the paper - each fibre tucked-in with blood. ‘Two at most.’

  ‘You said a couple of days,’ said Joram. It was a shriek.

  ‘Not how long I am staying,’ I said, raising my own voice. ‘How long until we have properly broken the British military.’

  At this Joram opened his mouth so wide I could have put my elbow in there. His eyes were perfectly round. It was the most Mediterranean of dumb-shows; pure theatrical astonishment - for my benefit, of course. I sat forward and reached around to where the pistol was tucked, into the back of my trousers; but I contented myself with resting the hand there.

  ‘Hungry?’ said Harry in a loud voice. ‘Don’t fight, boys! I’ll start the food.’

  Harry cooked a fancy meal. The three of us sat around candles with Radio 3 on the speakers and ate in a weird pastiche of an actual civilized dinner party. Harry joked and talked small, but there was a high-pressure quality to his good humour. Joram made no attempt to disguise his hostility. He drank most of the first bottle, and as Harry opened a second he said: ‘You don’t even have uniforms.’

  ‘Who,’ I said. ‘Me?’

  ‘Who else?’ The Who was kicked off with that loch throat-scrape sound.

  ‘We do indeed have uniform. Oh, unless you mean clothes? We don’t wear uniform clothing, no.’

  Perhaps Joram thought this an obscure dig at his command of English, because he said: ‘What other sense of uniform is there?’

  ‘We have a uniform wifi, a uniform wiki. Clothes hardly matter. Who cares how you dress online? Even the British Army have given up wearing red coats.’

  ‘The news call you a rabble. Yesterday it was terrorist militia, now its rabble - because you all turned your backs and ran away when the real army took back London.’ He made one polysyllabic tumble out of took back.

  ‘Jor!’ cried Harry. ‘Tonio, ignore him.’

  ‘No Tonio,’ said Joram. ‘Don’t ignore me.’

  ‘It’s the wine speaking, Tonio.’

  ‘It’s not the wine speaking, it is I.’

  ‘Joram wouldn’t hurt a fly,’ said Harry, rather louder than he needed to.

  Joram’s face bulged at this comment, but he didn’t say anything. He poked a fork through his pasta, trailed a strand though the bloodred sauce, then put the fork down and took another glug of wine. ‘Let us talk man to man, Tony.’ Trisyllabic Tony. It rankled, that mangling of my name. It’s not a complicated or unusual name, after all.

  I looked at Joram. ‘Man to,’ I replied, and deliberately stopped there.

  ‘I can understand you wanting to be a soldier, but if you want to be a soldier why not be a real soldier? Why not join the real army?’

  ‘He was in the real army,’ said Harry; and with a wholly unconvincing laugh he added; ‘You left me for the army. I used to say, most people, their boyfriends leave them for another guy; but you left me for ten thousand other guys.’

  ‘You were in the real army?’ Joram pushed.

  ‘I am in a real army, you pair of fuckers,’ I said, in a pleasant, well-modulated voice.

  ‘You don’t think there is a difference between a public army and a militia?’ Joram insisted. ‘You don’t recognize the difference? So, by your book any group of terrorists or mare, or mare—’

  ‘Jor,’ said Harry, his voice loud and brittle. ‘Put a cork in it? Maybe?’

  ‘—terrorists or mare-marederers can call themselves an army? You don’t think anything else is necessary?’ He had a bit of trouble with the sibilants in that last word, but he got it out.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like a government, like a properly constituted authority. And not just some gun-happy shooters all running about.’

  ‘My army,’ I said, ‘is presently in the service of a properly constituted ow-thority. The Scottish government.

  ‘Afee-glif!’ Joram hooted. ‘Afee-glif!’ It took me a moment to realize he meant fig-leaf. ‘It’s any excuse, you take any chance to play at soldiers. A trillion euros damage, the news said. A trillion! Not counting the dead, of course, or—’

  My pistol, which I had tucked into my waistband, was digging in to the top of my right thigh. I put my fork down, pulled the weapon out and placed it on the dining table, next to my plate, where my left hand could get to it if I needed it. This shut them both up.

  I suppose Joram raising his voice jangled my nerves a little. My nerves were raw, you see.

  ‘It is a little difficult,’ I said, in level voice, ‘to walk away from the smouldering corpse of the man you loved most in the world - difficult to see that as playi
ng.’

  Only silence. I preferred this to the chatter. I finished my meal. The scrape and clink of cutlery on china.

  ‘Very nice,’ I said, pushing my chair back a way and standing up. ‘Thank you for that, Harry. I think I’ll go lie down now.’

  Joram was glowering at me with a desperate sort of intensity: fear counterfeiting hostility. ‘How did you do it?’ he hissed. Harry reached out to lay a calming palm on his arm - both Joram’s arms were on the table, shivering with ill-suppressed fury.

  I picked up the pistol in my left hand. ‘Do what?’

  ‘Defeat the British Army? At Basingstoke? At Reading?’

  ‘Defeated them not once,’ I agreed, a curious lightness opening inside my chest as I spoke. ‘But many times.’

  Joram started to retort something, but Harry interrupted him with a murmur.