by Will Self
their hetero status only by vigorously bumming pre-op transsexuals.
Gawain felt the web of regimental relationships he was caught up
in … intensely – the sticky storylines of shared experience, the taste
of tacky military catchphrases … gumming up the back of my throat.
Demob happy following his decision, he’d stopped at the Eye-DoubleyouEye
stand to heft a Dan sniper rifle, and wound up his
fellow salesman even as the … balloon began to refill: What’s the
effective range? Silencing and night-sight capability? So, suitable for
an EssEff solo operation? Say if one wanted to eliminate someone
important – someone heavily protected, a head of state, f’rinstance –
the head of a rogue state? To all of which the Israeli bobbed his
curly head and batted his wiry lashes: Great … Gawain went on,
squeezing the trigger … Jonathan’s fingers inside me, Oh, Lord! …
I’ll take one and a spare – ‘cause he’s gone totally insane, have
you seen the Hitler moustache? And it’s not just his methods
that’re unsound – my mission is to travel up the Zambezi, infiltrate
his governmental structure and … terminate him. As Gawain
recalls, some four years later … up the fucking Tigris, the Israeli had
yelped: Terminate? And Gawain, chink-a-chinking his chainmail,
had chuckled up: Terminate him … with extreme prejudice. Yes,
extreme prejudice – the extreme prejudice of the homoerotic towards
the homosexual wasn’t something Gawain could conceive of … as
such – that was Jonathan’s department. When they lay together,
after sex, his lean face resting between Gawain’s plump pecs, his
cigarette smoke invisibly knitting into the close atmosphere of the
Rotheram Days Inn, or the Premier one outside Oswestry … pearl
one semen-slide, he’d say, They hate us because they’re more like us
than they’d ever dare admit … Think of your Rams, Gawain – your
precious bloody Rams. Sheeple, they are – sheeple desperate to push
their horny heads between each other’s woolly, masculine legs. All
that martial display? It’s a desperate front, put up to deter each
other, mostly, from looking inside – inside the pink little bower of
their bedrooms, where they lie, their blond tresses in pigtails,
glittery pens between their strawberry-balmed lips, keepsake diaries
unlocked and lying open wide in their soft laps … The first single
he’d ever bought – Jonathan told his lover, who’d played loose-head
for the British Army fifteen, only two fixtures but they’d been
savage ones – was Softly Whispering I Love You by a group called
the Congregation, a vast and shaggy chorus draped in chiffon-curtains-for-dresses.
It had cost Littler Johnny two-and-six from
Woolies – it’d been a woolly era … though they all wore acrylics:
swaying this way and that, softly, statically whispering … I love
you. But Gawain wasn’t convinced – unlike his lover he’d never felt
his attraction to men sprang from some feminine source. He peered
deep inside his troubled chest and discovered … what? That the
part of him most drawn to men was itself – unsurprisingly when you
stop to think about it – the most … ram-like, butting its way into butts.
Or, rather, longed to do so … find out what I’ve been missing –
because Gawain had been kept in a purdah as deep as any freezerunit
Fatima: locked down tight in the harem of his lover’s jealous
affections. If you ever so much as look at another man, soldier-boy, I’ll
wipe you off the face of the earth, Jonathan had said on more than one
occasion, in some Holiday Inn or other, backing on to an industrial
park – where, below their second-storey window, a corrugated-iron
porte côchère, overlaid with damp folds of rubberised carpet
underlay, sheltered several large canisters of acidic blue fluid. Oh
God! weeds gripping the crumbling edges of concrete hard-standing
… Oh my! the swish from the bypass seeping in through the
warped window frames … Oh no! the ironing board clipped into
the cupboard – the hangers clipped on to the rail – the hairdryer
clipped to the wall … Canderel … Kenco … Sweet ‘n Low … softly
whispering … lower-and-lower … Don’t doubt for a second I could
do it, said the man who’d … taken my maidenhead. I have carte
blanche – you know that – and Requirements can eliminate an
identity just as effectively as they can create one, and a body – even
one as beautiful as yours, my darling – can be, um, dissolved in …
large canisters of acidic blue fluid … weeds gripping the crumbling
edges of concrete hard-standing … Assassination as a janitorial duty.
Gawain had … on more than one occasion punched him lightly in
the solar plexus: Shut up, you idiot – what about my family, what
about the Rams? They aren’t going to forget I ever existed. But
they might … the stillborn small voice wheedled in the small, still
hours … they just might. No, if there was a sinister correspondence
here it was between … my fidelity to him and our rules of engagement:
Check the breech, the block, the safety, the firing pin, the magazine
– check and check again, but never, ever, what-so-ever fire the
fucking thing. Apart from his annual small-arms refresher course,
Lieutenant-Colonel Gawain Thomas could count the number of
times he’d live-fired … on the fingers of a Sierra Leonean leper. Not
that the Rams had got that deployment … but you catch my drift.
Drifting, they were … Gawain had seen colleagues grow so bored
and frustrated they’d lubricate their penises, then thrust them down
the barrels of their guns. They were tethered to reality – not by big
boys’ rules, but solely by these pansy ones of “engagement”: In
Bosnia – that grim winter … all of ’em at it – just down the road,
behind the wire … a rack of lamb – picked clean in a ragged blue-check
shirt … a freezer lorry stopped – blue corpses inside … Us trying to look
martial in our gay blue berets … Ooh, lookit me tam, mam! Children’s
faces – more blue bricks in a wall of death … We did fuck-all but observe
a two-can rule – apart from the Boss … Out jogging with him … boots
crunching on hoarfrost … thin ice on puddles pistol-cracking … Stopped
for slugs of slivovitz every twenty paces – eventually he toppled into a
ditch and after a while longer … slid down the chain of command …
The call had come at the arms fair … which is why I’m still there …
Fiona had been expecting again … Miffy, our youngest – my favourite
… to be honest … so Gawain invested in a mobile phone and
paid still more to receive calls overseas … it rang while I was actually
squatting, agitating the bunched-up fabric. The voice on the other
end hadn’t been hers … clenched by pain, but the Adjutant’s:
Gawain, izzat you? Bill, here, back at base … John, the current
SeeOh, had been Colonel Renfrew’s own appointment – favouring
this piss-artist over his own son-in-law had been him doing his bit
for the lif
e-or-death struggle against … nepotism. John had never
had what it took to command the Rams, anyway: he lacked the
necessary imagination to look out over a broad plain, upon which
his overwhelming firepower had been beautifully arrayed, and …
make-believe another exercise was for real. And so he drank … then
slowly sank, until … – Thing is, Gawain, John’s taken rather a turn
for the worse … Well, to get right to the point, he’s in one of those
rehab’ places – not an upmarket one, though, no sign of Daniella
Westbrook trumpeting the Last Post out of her hooter … When
Gawain told his lover … the Butcher laughed like a drain, then
reached for a miniature of Cockspur and chucked it back … How
do I know this? Gawain knows it because a nice undercoat of overproof
– as he’d put it – was Jonathan’s favoured tipple at the time,
and, although Gawain might’ve considered it … within my remit
to worry about his lover’s drinking, he didn’t, because let’s face it,
worrying about people’s drinking is like shaving a dog: there simply
isn’t an obvious point … at which you’d stop. Gawain stopped –
he’d voided himself entirely while he received the call. Cleansed,
he’d floated back through the antechamber … of hell. And now,
remembering the dirge his lover so often droned in the shower,
Gawain concludes: that moment in New Delhi had indeed been it.
After knocking and knocking and hammering – after standing
on the little dais full of shit and ordering grown men to unlimber
and ready to fire … a toy-fucking-gun, after suffering the dreadful
weight of the chainmail bib … on my shoulder, he was finally going
to be admitted to the inner sanctum, where men commanded
men to kill, who were then killed in turn, and the only decisive
factors were war-fighting spirit and sheer … force of arms. The old
Lee Enfields the Corps used to monkey about with – the EssAy
eighties they trained with at Sandhurst, and the geepee-emmgees
they learnt to fire during exercises. The thirty-millimetre cannons
armouring the Fighting Rams’ steely steeds he’d made it his
business to understand right down to the minutiae of their aiming
and calibration – while the Sig Sauer he favoured as a sidearm
he could indeed disassemble, clean, reassemble and load … in my
sleep. He thought of all the lethal potential latent in these steel
tubes and crimped brass canisters – lying dormant, awaiting the
deft, unthinking fingers of young men … and a few young women
to awaken them into death-dealing life. Young men … and a few
young women who’d been told and taught and instructed and trained
and told again … annagain how to strip and clean and reassemble
and load and aim but never actually commit to the deadly deed …
Had he believed back then, sat up in the small hours in his
study-bedroom at Sandhurst … a well-folded bed-block fitted exactly
in the desk drawer, blancoing the epaulettes of his blues with a
fucking la-la-la-toothbrush – had Gawain baa-baa-baa-b’lieved in the
army as an instrument that protects those things … those values
which the country holds dear? Abso-la-la-lutely! – Standing in the
moonlight – the mocking, flippant moonlight – outside the school
disco, watching through the window as the girls bussed in from
their sister school pulled up their knee-socks, Gawain had felt no
sweaty-palmed nerves, rather he’d agonised at his own lack of
enthusiasm … they weren’t the partners I wanted, while being tormented
by the perennial question: Will I ever, ever, get to … join
this party? Will you keep the balloon tightly wedged up between
your thighs? Will you keep a tight grip on the handkles of the human
wheelbarrow whose arms-for-wheels buckle beneath you? But
most of all: Will you keep everyone’s morale up? — Morale is allimportant,
even as it pisses away from him into the grimly lit toilet
of the orders group conference call: the Coldstreamers are steaming,
the Anglians want out – the EssEff bods up in Baghdad are
decapitating suspected insurgents with piano wire … or so Gawain’s
been told … and fucking filming it to boot. Yet no one, repeat: nofucking-one
is prepared to discuss the … wider picture. All shop
talk is strictly operational … or patriotic piffle. Which, to be honest,
is understandable – justifiable, even. The success of his own marriage
is due – or so Gawain jokes while the guys look at me oddly – to the
same professional focus: Mark in ninety-three, Paul in ninety-five –
and their beloved, floppy-eared baby, Miffy, in two thousand.
All were the dividends accrued by prioritising operational considerations:
an outfit like the Thomas family – flexible, responsive,
inherently manoeuvrist – required a full complement, just like the
wider regimental family it was embedded in … the fam’ cell. And
if Gawain needed blind-drunkenness as his Viagra, then this
was simply one of those wider political issues not within the remit
of a serving officer … or his long-haired General. And if a serving
officer’s wife chose, in between dutifully squeezing out new recruits,
to take a part-time job, off-establishment, as the peeay to a local
haulage contractor whose bluff and manly exterior concealed a
bluffer and still more manly interior … Get the door, love, and get
your knickers off– I’m gagging fer it … Her strewn hair and stripped
white thighs – his pendulous ball sack swinging as he manoeuvres her
around … His balls slapping against the backs of those cellulite-crinkled
thighs as he takes her from behind – a position her horn-headed husband
also prefers … Well – well then! What was this, if not professionalism,
pure and simple? All marriages – Gawain hypothesises, as he’d
been taught to at staff college, extrapolating from the small sample
he had … us, Mum and Derek – his various weird liaisons since they
split… – have this screaming silence surrounding them … a Herc’s
corkscrew descent into a war zone, cabin negatived by the phos’ glow of
ehaff … out of which speaks the still, small voice … of the loadie:
I think it’d be helpful, Gawain, if you organised some sort of talk
or briefing for the Wags – ‘course they hear all kinds of stuff from
the men, but what do they actually know? Hakuna matata, that’s
all they should know – Hakuna matata and I’ll protect you, which
was what he’d whispered to Miffy when he found her in the kitchen
at some unearthly hour, and, as she sipped the milk he’d warmed
for her, she’d wept and wailed: Are you going to die, Daddy?
Gawain had snorted at the very idea: Fat chance of that – fat chance
of a posthumous VeeSee … not where I’m headed. But it was small
wonder little Myfanwy Thomas had been so upset – those last few
weeks before the coaches pulled up outside the sports hall the Rams
had been running around like … like … headless sheep, while their
boss was on the phone fifty times a day, talking to command at
&nb
sp; brigade level and at division level – and, on one faintly delirious
dial-up, chatting to the remf at the EmmOhDee who was titularly
responsible for the entire battle order. To directly lobby for inclusion
would be worse than useless – that’d been his father-in-law’s mistake
in the run-up to Desert Shield. Got too pushy – pushed and
pushed ‘til he’d a rep’ for being pushy – and who wants a pushy
git on board? So, no direct lobbying – but to suggest, to imply, to
stress the readiness of one’s regiment to join the fray – all this was
expected of him … and some. On mess nights, the expectant faces
of his fellow officers were illuminated by the silvery radiance of the
table ornament – a large silver ram rampant, its woollily metallic
neck hung about with talismanic battle honours: little gilded
plaques engraved with the names of famous parties the regiment
had got to join – Omdurman, Balaclava, Mafeking, Ypres and
Lüneburg Heath … He was like me – his beret was some sort of johnny,
keeping all that spunk in … It fuelled him – made him a martinet.
Hung a sign on his tent flap during the desert campaign: I’m ninety-nine
per cent fit … are you? At first they were going before Christmas
and everyone was in a frenzy … you have to reach a critical mass before
you can spread the load, the mechanics up-armouring the vehicles,
troopers jogging back and forth to the Queue-Emm to borrow
Allen keys for that irritating counter-sunk bolt – then lying on their
bunks, laboriously composing ten-line letters to be read … when
they’re dead. Do you believe? he’d once asked Fiona, and she gave
him a look … actions speak louder than words. The only time the
question occurred to her sacrilegious husband was when they were
at church parade on Sundays, and awash in the gentle surges of
orthodox piety … give us this day our daily dead. Beset by the weeping
groan of the organ, Gawain was always visited by these monitory
words: Never tell a military man he doesn’t know the cost of war … but
could never remember who’d said them. Standing in sweetly sweaty
brushed-cotton fur, her normally tightly braided hair unloosed …
floppy bunny! He held Miffy in his arms and felt the taut bow of her
little spine – held her and thought about all the lethal threats out