‘It’s true,’ Scullion said, taking the joint. ‘The CIA are putting in money nowadays to start up gaming companies.’
‘They used to put it into brainy magazines,’ Luke said. The major looked up and his smile was nostalgic.
‘Encounter,’ he said.
Sergeant Docherty had taken off his boots while staring at the hexi-telly. ‘Your hoofs are fucken rank, buddy,’ Lennox said. ‘Jesus, Leper.’
Docherty ignored him. He was never going to endanger his peace of mind with too much talk, yet he caught the officers’ attention after he calmly put down his boot and spat into the fire. ‘You’re talking about simulators,’ he said. ‘I think it’s ironic that the people who flew those planes on 9/11 taught themselves on flight simulators in Florida.’
‘Ooh. Ironic,’ Lennox said.
Scullion nipped the end of his tongue with two fingers and offered a bleary laugh in the Leper’s direction. ‘Everything now is pre-experienced,’ he said. The men weren’t listening. Another burst of machine-gun fire went off in the valley and Docherty stood up holding one boot. Scullion then went off at him and nobody could work out why. ‘I can’t stand the way you fucken stink,’ he said. ‘The smell of you … it’s unbearable.’
‘What?’ Docherty said.
‘You, personally,’ Scullion said. He was suddenly over at Docherty and right up in his face, swaying in front of him. ‘You reek of sweat, the smell of you, what, it makes me fucking puke.’
‘I wash, just like everybody else, Major. I use deodorant. What do you want me to do?’
‘Nothing. You can’t do anything. You smell vile and it drives me mad.’ The sergeant just stared at him and then he went to arrange the night guard.
‘Put your boots back on,’ Luke said to the others. ‘We’re in a state of alert up here and I want everybody ready.’
‘Papers?’ Lennox said. He was talking to the group and fondling the cement bag and giggling. But the boys ignored him. They were too stoned and they just stared at the low blue flame. Time passed and Scullion stood up and came out with some complicated nonsense. They all wished the stars could lift them up or else come down to play.
‘I’m fucken stoned out my gourd,’ Dooley said.
‘No messing,’ Lennox said.
‘Champion weed,’ said Flannigan.
Luke just watched the soldiers and felt warm for the cold night, or cold for the warm night, lost in some little question about whether the world was round or made of putty. He smiled and felt his mouth go dry and then rootled in his pack for a stick of gum. Flannigan went over to the wall and took a piss then zipped up and looked down the edge of the plateau and saw bursts of green tracer. ‘They’re having a crack down there,’ he said. ‘Eat fire, you bitches! Eat metal, you Terry scum!’
‘Hey, wind it in. You’ll wake the babies,’ Scullion said, stretching out on a groundsheet and putting a bunched-up smock under his head. ‘Five billion stars and we still can’t find the knives and forks. Get them a bloody knife and fork and they’re yours for life. People will believe in the transition if they feel their lives are getting better and that starts up there.’
‘The major’s talking pish,’ said Lance Corporal McKenna coming into the camp. He had two Afghan soldiers with him. ‘Talking pure pish. That’ll be the top-notch Asian cigarettees,’ McKenna added.
‘Drop dead, McCrack-Whore.’
‘Is that the price? Too dear. How about a Bounty bar and a packet of Turkish playing-cards?’
‘Done.’
They smoked and looked.
‘There’s a lot of fire down there.’
‘Who gives? If it’s not coming towards you, you don’t give a fuck,’ McKenna said.
The Afghans spoke not a word and smoked as if the weed was like a fresh supply of oxygen. Their teeth were knackered and they looked sixty but were probably thirty. ‘Dam is good at Kajaki,’ said one of them after his brain fogged over and the high settled in and the mellow scene shaped up like a welcome.
‘That’s right. We don’t give a fuck,’ Dooley said.
Luke examined the red returning fire – red was Allied, green was Terry – and thought of those strings of lights you get at fun-fairs. He followed the dots and thought of Ayrshire nights when the amusement arcade became the brightest thing on the coast. Lennox put Natural Born Chaos by Soilwork on his iPod. Usually he just listened with one earphone, but he had mini-speakers in the camp and he jacked the sound up. The guitars went off and everybody smiled, the Afghans too, not like their normal faces but actual smiles breaking out, and Luke stared up and imagined the tracer fire was firing in time to Lennox’s stupid music. Yes, Luke thought, it was nice to be here with the smell of roses coming over the wall and the men showing the Afghan squaddies how to play air guitar and some of them falling asleep in their boots. Luke lay back giggling when he heard Lennox talking about the girl who was going to marry Doosh. He was rolling out the abuse, saying you’d think Dooley couldn’t pull the ring off a can of Red Bull but it turns out the girl’s as fit as a butcher’s dog.
LET THEM KNOW
The ambush came early that night. Docherty was up and talking to Bosh-Bosh the signals operator and sticking his fingers in a muesli pack when the radio went berserk. ‘Incoming on the crane side. Sniper fire. Over!’ McKenna had been on guard with the two Afghans, but the Afghans couldn’t be found. Luke was half awake. He felt he’d almost known it was coming, as if the enemy had been getting closer all day. His boots were on and he grabbed his helmet and smock and was zipped up in seconds. He never thought about how to distinguish himself in battle; that’s not what good officers think. They think about the men. And then they think about how to obliterate the threat.
Flannigan was tossing sandbags. ‘Over there, over there,’ he kept shouting. Lennox pulled the machine-gun off the wagon and soon they were directing fire into the trees behind the old wall.
‘Lennox, get your fucken helmet on,’ Luke said.
‘Over there!’ shouted Flannigan.
The snipers were few and quite far off but fear of snipers shrinks distance: they are on top of you. They are here. Luke’s eyes narrowed as if they were telescopic and his hands grew jumpy and his instincts made an instant grid of the ground. ‘Against the wall! Dooley, Lennox. Get the gun propped in that corner. Bosh?’
‘Captain?’ the signals man said.
‘What they saying?’
‘Incoming fire from below. Quite heavy. Here’s your set.’ Luke put his helmet on and fixed the earpiece and immediately heard the crackles and the news that several dozen insurgents were under the plateau trying to poke holes in the convoy. The men around him were still shouting and bawling and sending out a great deal of fire. That was the thing you always forgot later – the shouting, the noise, the great thunder of lads in your ears. Gunsmoke was spreading eerily over the land down there like mist on a childhood morning. Luke shivered to see it, the white smoke coming from the poplar trees.
‘Air cover?’ he said.
‘Air cover coming in,’ Bosh said. ‘The Yanks are on it. Ops says stay up high: they’re going to scoop the valley and fill it with cannon.’ The men of 5 Platoon were firing and reloading and Luke heard barks of excitement as they shouldered the wall and poked their bang-sticks over the top. A single shot came whizzing over their heads and fucked into the side of a truck, which sent them wild. They were shouting and swearing and pushing at the wall. ‘Over there! Fucking Terry cunt at eleven o’clock. Doosh, get down! Get fucken down! You can see his fucking rag, man. Flange. In the gap to the right. Go for it. Smash the fuck out of him!’
Docherty at some point came up behind Luke and told him he thought the major was pretending to be asleep. He was inside one of the vehicles, crouched down.
‘What? Are you messing with me?’
‘He’s in the Vector.’
‘What you talking about? Get him out here: he needs to direct this shit and support the boys.’
‘He threw u
p.’
‘Are you fucken having me on, Leper?’
‘No, sir. He’s not well.’
In seconds the boys would notice. Luke knew they would notice and he feared their bottle might collapse if they heard the major was hanging back in the van during a fire-fight. Yet he knew something was wrong with Scullion and he’d felt it since they left Bastion. ‘Holy fuck,’ Luke said. ‘Am I medicine man to the whole platoon?’
‘Let’s cover for him, boss,’ Docherty said. ‘It’s a bad week for him and we can easily cover it.’
‘What is it, his fucken period?’
‘It’s going to be fine here.’
‘Is it? I don’t know what bins you’re looking through, Docherty. But mine tells me there’s Terry crawling up our fucken arses.’
‘It’s fine, sir. We’re covered.’
‘Not yet we’re not. Scullion’s losing it. I’m telling you, Leper. He’s out the fucken game. He’s supposed to be over here commanding his soldiers. He’s the CO. He asked to be out here: he could be back at headquarters eating fucken Pot Noodle, like a normal. But he wanted to be involved with my section and now his head is fucking erupting with crap. You’re seriously telling me he’s fucken sweating his bollocks off in the back of the Vector? To hell with the turbine. It’s about the boys.’
Luke got on the radio. ‘What I’m saying is we’re in the open here and request urgent air cover to the north side of the ridge. We’re just a group. Yes. We’re a short section. The rest of our platoon is manning other vehicles.’ He looked at Docherty and read his thoughts. He flicked the mouthpiece on the PRR down for a second and breathed deeply. ‘But bearing up and holding our position. Over.’
Flannigan was ordered to set up a mortar battery and was now pounding the poplar grove, laughing his big Scouse laugh. ‘That should keep their cakey arses quiet for a bit, lads,’ he said. He looked round at Luke. ‘Eh, Jimmy-Jimmy! Fucking hardly out of my gonk-bag, man. Hardly opened my fucken eyes and these badasses are burning our toast!’
‘Hardly had time to grab my cock,’ Dooley said.
‘That might’ve held us back for a while,’ Luke said, reloading. ‘Waiting for you to find your cock.’
Dooley darted his eyes around the camp. A bullet banged into the metal drum and it spewed diesel but didn’t explode. ‘Get that out of the fucken way,’ Luke shouted to some men at the back. ‘You in 5 Platoon! Ross. Private Bawn. Move it! Get that fucken drum cleared before we have a fucken Guy Fawkes party out here.’
There was a pause. Kind of horrible, the pauses. Luke got back on the radio and tried for more information. His hair was drenched. ‘Roger that,’ he said and looked along the wall at the boys.
‘Where’s the major?’ Dooley said.
‘He’s checking maps,’ said the captain.
‘You what?’
‘I don’t know. Maps.’
‘What’s he checking maps for? We know where we are. We’re up here and they’re down there.’
‘Wind your neck in, Dooley. Just leave it.’
The two men looked at each other and Dooley nipped his bottom lip with his teeth. He got it. ‘No problem,’ he said, a blush perceptible in his manner if not on his face, which was coated in white dust. ‘The major’s always been deadly when it comes to the maps.’
‘Just cover me,’ Luke said. ‘I’ll go and pull over the rest of the platoon.’ But before he moved an inch and before Dooley could turn back to the machine-gun and start pounding the trees, a pair of Apache helicopters found their way into the valley and hovered above the ridge. They were high up but gunning the hell out of the mountainside. Luke shouted at the men to cover their heads and get down. ‘Let’s get the club classics going!’ he shouted. ‘Good life. Good life. Good life. Good life. Good life!’ He sang the song with his face down in the dirt and it was bedlam all around. The cannon was tearing up the grove and splitting the trees and Flannigan crouched under his equipment and laughed into the broken wall.
‘Good life!’ he returned.
‘Any fucker in those trees isn’t coming out again,’ Dooley shouted.
‘Not for Christmas,’ Flannigan said. The men laughed at this and Lennox passed a cigarette down the line. They had to keep low and the guns didn’t stop overhead and Luke started off the Band Aid song about Christmas. The weird thing they would all remember was the warm, empty cartridges falling from the sky on top of the camp, glancing off the vehicles. Docherty took a few and stuffed them in his pack. The boys smiled as if the fight was all they had ever wanted and the cartridges fell like golden hail as they shouted a song about feeding the world. ‘Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?’ It was like American Night at Camp Shorabak. The Yanks never stinted on anything and the boys knew they’d be happy to tear up the fields all morning if it meant having one more kill.
HOLIDAYS
Anne opened her eyes and saw the blue sky and the inviting tracks of a passing plane. She blinked, sat up and recalled an old song they used to sing about airline tickets to romantic places. It was warm and the sun played silver over the Firth of Clyde and shone on the windows of the foreign coaches as they made their way to Largs.
And still my heart has wings.
And yellow was the room where she loved him. Down from Glasgow she would wait there in Blackpool and sometimes he didn’t arrive. He just didn’t come, she said to herself, and she’d be sitting there with a shopping bag full of breakfast, the square slice, the plain loaf. And sometimes he changed his mind and he would turn up late, good grief, the middle of the night chucking stones at the window and she’d throw down the key. He’d come up the stairs and she’d bury her face in his neck and say nothing. Oh, the relief. And never to mention the sadness or the fright she’d got. She could still smell his Old Spice and was so glad she had waited.
Nobody ever tells you the natural world has all the answers and keeps count of all the days. They don’t tell you – you work it out. One minute you’re getting on with your tasks, the jobs and the life and all your goals and one thing and another, then, just like that, you notice the smell of burning leaves as you walk past the playing-fields. The seasons seem for a long time to ask nothing of you, but eventually you must brave their familiarity. Most of the time she felt distant from her old artistic self, but some days, especially in sunshine, the feeling came.
A cigarette that bears a lipstick’s traces.
She was in a deckchair outside reception. ‘Blackpool’, she said to the warden, ‘was often hotter than Spain. I want to go back.’
‘Was it hotter, Anne?’
‘Oh, yes. Hotter than any place. I used to say to my Harry, “You could fry an egg on the pavement down there.” He never believed me. But it was always hot at that time, in the seventies.’
‘The 1970s.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Our Audrey goes to Faliraki,’ the warden said.
‘What’s that?’
‘Greece. Same place every year. Same hotel. She says the drink’s dirt cheap.’
‘Oh. We didn’t have those places.’
Mrs Auld from flat 25 came out to curse the weather. It was never right for Mrs Auld. ‘They’d let you just go down the beach there and get burnt to a crisp.’
‘Who’s they?’ the warden said.
‘You know fine well. The government.’
‘What’s the government got to do with suncream?’
‘Everything, Jackie,’ said Mrs Auld. ‘You mark my words. They keep it back, the government. They make it too dear for pensioners to buy. And we all burn to a crisp, so we do.’
‘Oh, Dorothy!’
‘I’m telling you. It’s true. We’ve all got cancer because of these English prime ministers.’
‘That’s ridiculous. And half of them are Scottish.’
‘Mark my words. I’ve got liver spots on the backs of my hands that I didn’t have before.’
‘Are you going on the bus thing?’ asked Anne without opening her eyes or l
ooking over.
‘The bus run? I am that,’ Dorothy said. ‘I certainly am. The bus is taking us all to Gretna Green first thing in the morning. Just for the day. You should come, Anne.’
‘No.’
‘You’ll miss yourself. A walk about and a nice fish supper. If we get the sun it’ll be lovely.’
‘Unless you get burnt to a crisp,’ the warden said. She liked to tease the residents as much as possible and stop them from getting down in the mouth. There are never enough jokes to go round.
‘Aye, well, don’t you worry. I’ll be shelling out for the good stuff,’ Dorothy said. ‘Ambre Solaire: that’s me.’
‘Oh, you’re that hard done-to,’ the warden said.
‘My family think I’m trapped in here,’ Dorothy said, offering a sudden new bend to the conversation. ‘They feel sorry for me. They do. But I love it in here. I’m going to Gretna. I have days out and I have breakfast every day with the ladies. I don’t mind telling you – it’s a great place, this. It would never occur to my family that it was the years living with them that made me feel trapped. And now I’m free, so I am.’
Anne opened her eyes. ‘More power to your elbow.’
‘More suncream to your elbow,’ the warden said.
The warden and Mrs Auld left Anne alone again and she closed her eyes to think about the speech. She wished she could write things down or look at the old contact sheets, just to help her remember. But that was against the rules of the Memory Club. You weren’t allowed notes. The point was not to run past the window but to stop and admit things.
THE MEMORY CLUB
They met every Friday and sometimes more, if a doctor was coming in to see them. Anne said it was the nicest day of the week because she liked stories and the way the residents got into conversations about what they all did when they were young. She tried to speak up and some of the old agony about appearing in public had gone. That Friday, it was her turn to lead them off and the district nurse said it might be good to go back to when she was small. There were always biscuits in the lounge for the Memory Club and Anne lifted one and dunked it into her tea without ceremony. ‘A lot of the times when you do this the biscuit drops into the tea,’ she said.
The Illuminations Page 7