‘How long?’ Flannigan asked.
‘This’ll be it for the night. It’s slow going. They need to keep fixing the tracks and looking for bombs in the road.’
The captain turned down his radio. He just sat in the corner of the vehicle and watched the boys pulling stuff out their packs. It was the low-level hum of his life, the constant banter, the laughter, the mock offence, the lingo. ‘Have you seen Flannigan’s watch, sir?’
‘Nope. I don’t care about watches.’
‘It’s cheap rubbish. Take your Casio G-Shock. Classic. Totally awesome. It’s been that way since 1983.’
‘Dooley!’
‘An electro-luminescent panel causes the entire face to glow for easy reading.’ The boys were laughing and making to leave the Vector and Luke began chucking their bags after them.
‘I mean it, Dooley,’ he shouted. ‘Get the fuck out the van or I’ll mess you up.’ Luke slammed the door and smiled to himself and then a mortar burst in the valley.
‘Kaboom,’ he said.
SANDHURST
Luke lay down and flicked off his helmet. It was good to feel the static falling away, the ops talk, and Scullion. It was nice to be free of the jeering and the news from up and down the line. He stretched his legs out and pulled a folder from his backpack, a black folder from Strathclyde that had once held his Honours dissertation. Now it held photos and letters that came to the camp from home. He opened it and took out a flattened bag of wet wipes and a packet of sherbet. (From his grandmother, Anne, posted by the woman next door.) He held up a photograph and used a Maglite from the floor of the Vector to help him see. Anne was young in the picture and she looked like the happiest person alive. He searched her eyes and saw evidence of Harry’s presence, the grandfather he had never met, just a glow in her eye, always there in portraits taken by him.
Dear Luke,
This is a wee note to say hello from your gran and we really hope you’re doing well over there. We see it on the news all the time but you probably see it differently when you’re there. Nothing to report over here except the sun is finally out thank God and life in Saltcoats always takes a turn for the better in the nice weather. Gran says to thank you for sending the right address for parcels and don’t forget she says to take pictures if the light is good. Gran’s been getting a bit forgetful but she’s not bad son and coping well since the winter time. Remember there’s plenty of us in here to help with anything she needs doing. Anyway son that’s us running out of things to say so please take good care. Everybody sends their love to you.
All the best,
Gran and Maureen
He could imagine her face at the window. He wondered if any of the boys had a grandmother like his, a woman with knowledge and secrets and a gentle habit of helping you up your game. He wasn’t a very typical officer, he knew that and so did everyone else, but it had somehow played to his advantage to be different in the regiment. They knew he was a reader but thought he was made of heroic stuff because of his dad. It had been Anne who took up the slack, inspiration-wise, when his dad died, and he supposed he went to see her as part of working himself out. In those days he was always ready to get lost in other people’s ideas, and Gran was a fountain of individuality if ever there was one. There was endless chat about how life used to be, with details missing. The slow-motion world of hinted-at summers and new lipstick and the Pleasure Beach. She spoke to him about Blackpool as if it was New York or Toronto, where she’d also been, and where she’d also taken photographs that were lost along the way.
He lay back and saw the parade ground at Sandhurst. And then he saw his mother, Alice, in a sky-blue hat with tears in her eyes, her new husband Gordon beside her as they gathered their camera straps and her billowing skirt, the day he passed out from officers’ training. Gran arrived in a taxi that came all the way from Gatwick Airport. He was grateful she’d come and Alice had smiled thinly when he said, after the ceremony, that he wanted to take his gran for a walk down to the chapel. ‘We’ll go and find your ironing board and put it in the car,’ said Alice, always practical. ‘There’s no point leaving it for someone else to take.’
The chapel appeared to move, but it wasn’t the chapel it was the trees that moved and once the rain came down the trees got darker and Anne pointed it out, the way the trees darkened in the rain. She took his arm and was proud of his uniform as they walked up the path. ‘God, Granny, the world’s going mad and you’re noticing the trees.’
‘Well, that’s life,’ she said. ‘If you weren’t looking you missed it. That’s all I know.’
They walked the length of the chapel and sat to one side under a ragged flag rescued from a battlefield, set high up on the wall in a gilt frame. They were quiet in the pews and that was easy. After a while Anne put her hand over his hand and gave him advice. ‘Be true,’ she said, ‘if not to yourself, then to something more interesting than yourself.’
‘I chose the Royal Western Fusiliers.’
‘All men are sentimental,’ she said. ‘Women get the reputation, but we just cry at the radio. Men are sentimental about institutions. You know: buildings. The old bricks, the old mottos. Harry was the same.’
‘We’re going to rid the world …’
‘Don’t say it,’ she said.
‘But Gran.’
‘The task is to see.’
‘Not for a soldier. There’s a lot to be done.’
‘We don’t rid the world, dear. We create it.’
‘We make it safe,’ he said. She just nodded at that and the high windows showed their pattern on the pews. Before they went back to join the others she took a present out of her bag. He still had the paperback somewhere, a book entitled Theory of Colours.
‘The colour red doesn’t actually exist,’ she said. ‘It only exists as an idea in your head. Always remember that. You create it yourself when your imagination meets the light.’
His attention flickered as he lay in the Vector. Looking at the letter, he heard another thud down in the valley. The summer remembers nothing of the winter and nature is a kind of amnesia. He stretched out further and kicked off his boots, considering whether memory is just one of our little sicknesses. It was the sort of topic he used to discuss with Scullion in their happier days. His grandmother had stood up in the chapel at Sandhurst and tapped his cheek.
‘Send me one of your mugshots,’ she said.
And that’s the one she put up on her wall. He saw it the last time he was home on leave, when he went to see Anne in secret. At the time nobody was talking about dementia or anything like that, but he noticed a change. Her mind was wandering as they spoke, and, by the end of his visit, she seemed miles away. She sat in her favourite chair by the window and said the lights on the sea were very festive. Luke imagined she was joking but then he saw the concentration on her face. She said she could feel the cold coming on but this was the sort of Christmas she had always wanted, just me and her and two glasses of sherry.
It was the beginning of something and he knew it. He stayed the whole evening and they spoke about old times. She reminded him of an exhibition they’d seen together, famous photographs of tenement houses and poor children in the Saltmarket. ‘The exposure wasn’t right,’ she said, ‘and the children are blurred for life.’
‘That’s an odd phrase,’ Luke said.
He had gone his own way, but an interest in ‘seeing things’, as Anne called it, was what had made them close. At her flat in Glasgow, when he was young, she set up what she called his ‘little conchological cabinet’ – a term out of Charles Dickens, she told him – which was where he kept shells he’d found and bits of broken plate from the sea. The glass cabinet described their shared interest in the gathering of facts, their attempt to know life not only by our mistakes but by artistic ordering. When Anne returned from her travels in England she would often bring a new shell or a fancy nugget of Victorian crockery. And she always brought sherbet or a stick of rock from one of the sweet shops. ‘Remember
, Gran,’ he said to her last time he was home, the time with the sherry, ‘remember that group of starfish we put in the conchological cabinet?’
‘I liked the stars,’ she said. ‘And one time Jayne Mansfield came to turn on the lights in Blackpool.’
He took her hand by the window. She looked down as if their joined hands formed an element with a life of its own. ‘No, boss,’ he said, laughing. It was the first time he knew she must be getting ill. ‘I’m talking about something in the shape of stars. I mean these creatures that are shaped like stars in the sky and I found them on the beach, remember?’
There was puzzlement on her face for a second and then she smiled as if all the confusion had now cleared from her mind. ‘I know what you’re saying,’ she said. ‘I’m not daft. It’s about the shape of things.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You trained my eye.’
‘I know the cabinet you’re talking about. We made it together.’
‘You guided me.’
She smiled and drank the sherry down. Then she peered into the window glass and said, ‘I lost you.’
‘It was all art, you said. The cabinet.’
‘Giving shape.’
‘Knowing what’s behind appearances,’ Luke said. ‘That’s the photographer’s gift and you have that and it’s a wonderful thing.’
She pecked like a chicken and gave a kiss to the air. ‘We knew the right thing to do with the shells and that’s why we’re pals, why we’ve always been pals,’ she said.
‘And plates,’ Luke had said. ‘You brought those bits of broken plate with the tiny blue patterns and the plates had been washed in the sea for a hundred years or … just fragments. Tiny bits. But I used to imagine them as whole plates laid on a Victorian table with a family sitting down together.’
They looked at each other. He knew he’d be off to Helmand in a few days and wondered if she’d ever be the same again. She raised a finger as if he had finally struck a chord. ‘I could take a picture of that dinner you’re talking about and you could help me,’ she said.
‘I’d love to. Will we do that? Will we get out your cameras and make a brilliant picture?’
Luke lay in the heat of the Vector and wondered why his mother and his grandmother had never clicked. His gran had made too much of the men in their lives, and so had he, and he began to see it as a form of harassment that had affected his mother. Yet he and Anne were friends. He lay back mulling it over and tipped into the kind of sleep where ideas feel like revelations until they slip so easily away.
THE RIDGE
Private Flannigan always set out his tent like a perfectionist. Mosquito net, maggot bag, folded corners: a big lumberjack of a guy pressing down his little corners. He was a born soldier. ‘What’s happening?’ he said when Luke appeared in the camp rubbing his hair. The captain was carrying a book and he leaned on an old stone wall.
‘Nothing much.’
‘Did you get the head down?’
‘A few zeds, aye.’ Luke began to smile when he saw the delicate way Flannigan was handling his kit. ‘Hey Flange,’ he said. ‘Is this you preparing your evening toilette?’
‘Bite me,’ Flannigan said. There was evening primrose in the cracks of the wall and Sergeant Docherty was scraping off a sample for his collection. He was also finishing off an argument, just as Luke came in. ‘They thought they were going to get Belgium in two years,’ he said. ‘Turns out they might get Bangladesh in thirty.’ The boys took the piss out of Docherty for being a square-bear and being pussy-whipped, but in secret they admired him, at twenty-six, for what he knew.
‘Oh, look,’ Major Scullion said. He was sitting on a petrol drum. ‘It’s the fucken sleeping beauty. Want a brew, Captain?’
‘No, I’m fine. Thanks.’
Scullion had the menacing look. And he never made anybody tea. ‘While you’ve been lying in your wank-pit, Captain Campbell,’ he said, ‘the boys and I have been arranging a party. A very private party, you understand. Private Lennox here, of the small stature, the ludicrous complexion and the ginger nut, has procured for the purpose of our evening entertainment a bag of the old Afghan sweet stuff.’
‘Dead on,’ Lennox said. ‘Proper clackie, so it is.’ He kicked the cement bag full of weed over the ground to Luke.
Another of the men in the platoon, a Paisley boy, chuckled like a monkey and peered with his mates over the top of a neighbouring tent. ‘Fuck sake, sir,’ he said, ‘you don’t even need cigarette papers. Just spark up the end of that bag and ye’ll be toking a Superking.’
‘Be quiet, McKenna,’ Luke said.
‘Yeah. Shut it, McCrack-Whore. The captain here’s just getting his shit together after a small constitutional.’
‘That’s a walk, Doosh, not a sleep,’ Flannigan said.
‘Who cares? The captain will be joining the party in jig time. So fuck off, McCrack, and get on with unrolling your farter. And fuck off, Flange, with your Oxford English Dictionary.’
They were talking about food. It was usually girls or cars or watches or gaming, but tonight: food. Dooley’s girlfriend sent him packets of Super Noodles and a box of Dairy Milk and it made him glad he was marrying her because she knew the score. ‘Remember American Night?’ Lennox said. He was talking about the Thursday cookouts at Camp Shorabak when the Americans would pitch a scoff-house between the tents. ‘Gatorade. Chicken wings,’ Lennox said.
‘Beef jerky,’ Luke said.
‘That was proper plush,’ said Lennox. ‘You’ve never seen so many fucken rashers. American Night. I fucken love America. They’d have like Hershey bars and M&Ms to kill. Mounds of them. I’m talking chicken and beef motherfucker and those MREs falling off the truck, Meals-Ready-to-Eat. They were super-plush.’
‘And films,’ Dooley said.
‘That’s right. Lethal with the films. I love America. Stuff that isn’t even on at the cinema for like a year.’
‘Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream,’ Flannigan said. ‘Buckets of it. How do they even get that stuff over here?’
‘It was the same in Iraq,’ Dooley said.
After an hour it was dark except for lights in some of the vehicles. The reefer glowed orange as it went round but it was the moon that picked out the ridge and the low buildings along the track. Scullion said a few fires in the distance were oil-drums burning in Ghorak, nothing sinister, just elders playing chess probably or Terry twisting wires and making their wee roadside contraptions. ‘That’s the thing,’ Scullion was saying. ‘You all think you know the terrain ’cause you’ve seen it playing video games.’ Half his face lit up as he smoked the joint and sniggered. ‘But don’t give me points man; give me a body count any day.’
‘Same,’ Lennox said. ‘I came here to get my fucken gun on, not to sit watching hexi-telly.’
‘Speaking of which.’ Dooley bent down and lit the Hexamine tablet on top of the low stove. Quickly it burned blue and the boys all gave a whistle and some of them asked for whoever it was to hurry up with the joint. ‘You’re all going blind,’ Lance Corporal McKenna said as he walked into the camp. ‘Between staring at the hexi-telly and playing with your dobbers, you gimps will soon be applying for invalidity.’
‘We’ll have to join the queue,’ Flannigan said. ‘Behind all the pikey horror-pigs in your family.’
Luke just watched them. Scullion was right. Younger soldiers often thought they knew the battleground; they saw graphics, screens, solid cover and fuck-off guns you could swap. It wasn’t all they saw but it was part of their understanding. They saw cheats and levels, badass motherfuckers, kill death ratios, and the kinds of marksman who jump up after they’re dead. Luke knew they all struggled, from time to time, to find the British army as interesting as its international gaming equivalent. They had run important missions with their best mate from school and called in air support, over their headsets, from some kid in Pasadena they’d never met, some kid like them in a box-room. They’d beaten the Russian mafia with the help of club-kids from Reykjavik an
d bodyboarders from Magnetic Island. They’d obliterated the A-rabs. They’d topped the board. They’d stayed up all night smoking weed and drinking huge bottles of Coke and ordering pizza before they cleared the civilian areas. The boys wanted action. They wanted something real that would become the highest level, the one they couldn’t reach on their consoles back home.
‘If they’re gonna hit us, I wish they’d just hit us,’ Lennox said.
‘Maybe it saves lives,’ Scullion said. ‘The war in Ireland might have ended sooner if those wee Provo kids could’ve blown up chip shops on screen.’
‘No, sir,’ Flannigan said. ‘It’s recruitment. I’m telling you. That’s the big new thing about it. Gamers are ripe. They’re fucken jumping to get out and stretch their legs. Every guy in this regiment has served time on Call of Duty. Every one. Am I right?’
‘Even the educated ones?’
Luke smiled. ‘We started it,’ he said. He took the joint off Lennox and walked up to the wall. A smell of rose petals was coming from the field on the other side. He could make out the furrows and a yellow hosepipe. ‘The MOD has a game now called Start Thinking, Soldier.’
‘Yep. That’s right. That’s recruitment,’ Flannigan said. ‘Grab the little fuckers by the thumbs.’
‘There’s always been that sort of thing,’ Scullion said. ‘I loved Top Gun. I loved fucken Full Metal Jacket. John Wayne before that. Little boys with their eyes wide, wanting a gun. It’s all recruitment.’
‘It’s different,’ Flannigan said. ‘If you’ve got PlayStation then you actually know how to drive a tank. Jesus. I’m not kidding. The manufacturers have changed the controls on the new Challenger to be more like a video console. It’s exactly the same.’
‘Fuck off!’ Dooley said.
‘Look inside one. It’s a fact. Walk up the line now and look inside one, Doosh. I’m telling you.’
The Illuminations Page 6