The Illuminations

by Andrew O'Hagan

  ‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ Lennox said, looking at the mess on the ground.

  ‘Luke!’ shouted Flannigan. ‘We’ve got to get Charlie out of here. We’ve got to go!’

  ‘Bosh!’ Dooley said. ‘Fucken killed the bastards. Dirty Taliban scum. See ye! Fucken see ye!’

  ‘Holy Christ,’ said Lennox.

  Scullion was looking at the dead ANA captain and Flannigan tugged him by the arm. ‘Just leave it, sir. A no-use traitor bastard.’

  There were rose petals on the road. Luke saw them and the blood running into the dust at the edge of the orchard and his eyes were stinging with sweat. Suddenly he came up and pushed Scullion nearly off his feet. He grabbed his shirt and pulled him in and locked eyes with him. ‘You caused this. You fucken caused all of this.’

  ‘Leave it, sir,’ Dooley said, pushing the captain back and separating the men. ‘Let’s go.’

  Scullion was wild in the eyes. ‘This is yours,’ Luke said, walking away from him. ‘Good fucken work.’ He waited a moment. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Moving out!’ There was screaming coming from the hujra and the women appeared in the road beating their chests, raising their hands. Dressed for the wedding, they cried for their sons.

  The Canadian and Private Dooley walked ahead to secure the retreat and Luke ordered a couple of the others to carry Mark’s body. The dead soldier’s hair was matted with blood and white dust and his pal from the regiment was holding his hand and weeping. Dooley opened the passenger door for Scullion and he got in without a word. He wasn’t there, Dooley said later. ‘The lights were on but nobody was at home.’ Luke and Flannigan walked back up the road from the hujra, their rifles pointing at the village. And when they reached the bridge Luke cast his eyes at the school and saw a line of children’s faces at the open window.

  ‘Charlie base. This is call sign 722. Over.’

  AIRLIFT

  Beside the whop-whop of rotary blades, Luke stood with the commander at the edge of the convoy. ‘There will be a full investigation,’ Emory said. ‘Questions. Big fucking questions.’ But Luke wasn’t listening. The camouflaged underside of the Lynx lifted away, creating a wind that blew the dust into a dense cloud. ‘You chose to leave his body,’ said the commander. ‘He was Afghan National Army.’

  ‘He was not one of us.’

  ‘We are all one of us, Captain.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘We are forging on. Nobody’s going back. We are fifty-nine miles from the delivery point and that is where the action is. Major Scullion will stick with the platoon and we can discuss his jolly outing into bandit country back at the base.’

  ‘As you wish, sir.’

  ‘It’s not as I wish. What I wish is that the British army did not harbour such fucking idiots.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  BANN RIVER

  The operation had to be completed that night and they were in the Vector moving towards Kajaki. They said little, feeling everything, eyeing one another and hanging their heads as they breathed in the hot aftermath. They would remember Scullion sluicing himself with sterile water, but was it fury, confusion or regret that dimmed his eyes and made him grunt and rub his sodden hair until it tufted into spikes?

  The old life was over and Scullion knew it. As the vehicle bumped along and then rejoined Highway 611, he recalled that he’d once imagined the world could be put right and made whole. He had been a man who liked the era he lived in and was well suited to it. He loved the metaphysics of the new wars, where one spoke of freedom, of delivering security, but as he put down his head and meshed his trembling fingers he pictured slain Bosnians by a shopping precinct in Srebrenica. He saw corpses in burnt-out cars on the Basra Road and rebel soldiers lying dead by a runway north of Freetown, their eyes open to democracy. He saw those boys in the orchard. And it was all a mystery to him now, all at an end, the resolutions, agreements, interventions, because the people who police the world are never ready for the world’s ingratitude. Eight construction workers in Teebane, blown to pieces by the IRA. His first acquaintance with gore. A culvert bomb on the Drum Road. His platoon got to the crossroads in minutes from the barracks in Omagh. That’s what the journalists don’t see. That’s what the politicians and the mothers never see.

  Luke was staring the other way.

  ‘You all right, Charlie?’ Flannigan said.

  When he turned his eyes they were clouded with failure. ‘People let you down, son. They do bad things.’

  Luke had come to the end of his own dark corridor in the mountains and Charlie Scullion was merely a name he would give to the mistakes that led him there. He had suspected in Maiwand that the major, despite his stories, his reputation, was not up to the job, and he had looked away as the enemy made an opportunity of their weaknesses. Luke and Scullion were not so different as either hoped: they ran their battle from the centre of some persistent idea of themselves as good men, and, in this way, they resembled the politicians who paid for their boots and gave them their language. Luke wasn’t sure how a life works, how your story accumulates and regresses, how it speaks, how it hides, but he’d know it eventually. As the vehicle rumbled on and the daylight dwindled, he knew he had played his part in the disaster at Bad Kichan.

  ‘It sounds bad,’ Lennox said, ‘because I feel sorry for the Scottish lad, but I’m just glad it wasn’t one of the platoon.’

  ‘It was bad luck, that’s all,’ Dooley said. ‘The soldier stepped forward at the wrong time.’

  ‘It was more than that,’ said Flannigan. ‘It was bad everything. It was just bad.’

  Scullion stared at the ground. It was Operation Grapple. The Croats were trying to cleanse the Bosnians from the Lašva Valley. Three hundred people were murdered in a cinema in Vitez and the boy next to me, Second Battalion …

  ‘How old was the kid today?’

  ‘He was twenty-one.’

  The convoy joined the decoy units for the final push. They went past canals and villages and climbed to the high fields around Kajaki Sofla. Crossing the Helmand, they took turns to look out and see the beautiful green of the river and the many sunflowers growing on the banks. They got their full battle kit on and Scullion looked up and told them to affix their radios and bring out the light machine-gun.

  ‘The Mini-Me?’ Dooley said.

  ‘There’s two here,’ Scullion said. ‘Let’s get this over with. Docherty brought in two after the last stop.’

  Kajaki was one big choke-point, a lot of vehicles waiting to go in and a lot of Terry down there. This was the fight they had come for and it had to be over quickly. Night fell and Luke could hear the Chinooks moving ahead of them, softening up the gun positions around the hills. The men fixed their bayonets and checked their ammo outside under a hanging herb that smelled of peppermint. Scullion came with information about Taliban gun-mountings in the town but he didn’t offer any speeches. He just looked into the desert.

  Scullion put his hand on Luke’s shoulder. He didn’t respond, but when he looked up he hated the expression in the major’s eyes. It was dark now and a burst of red and orange appeared over the tops of the trees. Scullion clapped Luke again and the younger officer widened his eyes. ‘Please fuck off, Major. It’s my only request.’

  ‘We have a battle to fight,’ Scullion said.

  ‘Then fight it.’

  Luke climbed up and examined the scene from the top of the Vector and thought of the little town of Bethlehem they knew at school, the white buildings on the hillside and the stars. Except this was godless territory and the night ahead would be brutal. ‘We better get a few rewards after this,’ Dooley said. ‘A few shakes of the choccy-tree. The lads have been through the mill today and a few beers might be in order.’

  Scullion led his own platoon over the hill. They could see the floodlit dam and he wanted to press home. ‘If you haven’t got a wife or a child, follow me,’ he said. The boys turned to Luke and he shrugged and stared into the poplar trees and the centre of Kajaki Sofla. It was e
ither a slow or a fast descent but you had to get there. A commander came up and a mortar brigade and they took up positions and started shelling. The directive was to repel incoming fire, then to shell into enemy positions and move forward, taking the fight down to the insurgents who controlled access to the dam. Within seconds of the rounds going over, the return fire was brutal. There was smoke on all sides and bullets tearing past or thudding into the ground. Out there, somewhere in front of them, a machine-gun was being fired so furiously by one of the Canadians it glowed orange in the dark. Scullion feared it might give away their position, but the enemy was too chaotic. He snapped down the night-vision goggles on his helmet and assessed the activity on the road and around the buildings. He spotted a gap and began firing tracer rounds towards it, which gave the platoon a bead on where to direct their fire.

  ‘Go on, my son,’ shouted Lennox to the Canadian. ‘Go on. Give the fucktards a pounding.’

  ‘I’ve got disco-leg over here,’ Dooley said. ‘Fucking dizzy I’m tellin’ you. Let’s go!’

  ‘Don’t move forward yet, Doosh. Wait for the signal.’

  ‘What we waiting for?’

  ‘An order, Dooley.’

  Red tracer fire streaked across the hills and fell prettily into the town. The arcs of red and green appeared more sluggish than they were, like an illusion of movement, a strobe, out across the hills and into the static night. But down there in Kajaki Sofla the bullets arrived as a hail of ripping metal. Car windscreens exploded and copper bowls ricocheted down the alleyways. The enemy manned its own batteries from the rooftops and their rockets scudded over the inclines, shearing the trees, falling short for the most part and lying phosphorescent in the fields. He looked up, they all looked up, and suddenly the pattern in the air was not a light show but a constellation of death. Luke wasn’t a gamer as he watched the fire but a man seeing action in real time, a miasma of efforts and consequences. He met the realisation calmly on the hillside as the guns blazed and the boys shouted into the dark. He looked up and experienced a short invasion of mortality and a surge of adrenalin. He was just a man and he faced what was coming with a singleness of heart. He knew standing there that the string of lights began and ended in fear.

  He took his soldiers down the irrigation ditch and found cover behind the rocks. Enemy mortars were exploding just in front of them and they held fast, while troops from other regiments ran ahead and took up position. Luke knew where he was. A sense of documentary reality came over him as he pressed his face into the rock and waited his turn to take the boys forward. His breath was short and he saw jackals scattering higher up. He heard the shouts of the other soldiers as they stormed into the gully, moving in formation according to their training, and as he heard them he thought of the geography around each man.

  They were near the street. Every soldier had his rifle raised and was picking off targets below. With goggles down, Luke could see the enemy scurrying from one building to another. Fire appeared at the windows of the engine house above the dam. In the final push off the hill, the enemy had a clear shot into the ground in front of the allied soldiers, the last 200 metres leading down to the road and the end of all hope for that day’s insurgents. The allies were all over that part of the hill, shelling the hell out of the engine house and rocketing the vehicles on the ground. At the final clearing, Luke was making ready to go forward, listening to instructions from the commander on the radio, when suddenly, without warning, on his left-hand side, Major Scullion came dashing out from behind a clump of rocks. He was firing his assault weapon and roaring in a blur. ‘Charlie!’ shouted Luke. ‘We can’t cover you from there, get back.’

  ‘Major!’ screamed Flannigan.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ Dooley said on the radio.

  ‘Hold back.’

  ‘Jesus fucken Christ,’ Flannigan said.

  The radio was going mad. ‘What’s the fucken matter?’ a voice said. A mortar landed a short distance in front of where Scullion ran and Luke saw the shrapnel tear up a tree and Scullion was down. The shouting increased and suddenly the ANA troops led by Docherty and the 1st Royal Western team surged down onto the road. They pushed forward and the explosions were massive and the sniper fire cracked out, then the Apaches came in and suddenly the engine house was gone. The whole platoon tumbled over the rocks like a body of water, except for Luke and Flannigan, who held back and took advantage of the air cover and the Terry batteries going silent to rush into the clearing. They found Scullion sitting as a child might sit in a sandpit, planted on his bottom with his legs out, except that his right leg was severed and lying apart from him. The other leg was a mess. He sat with his eyes wide open to the scene before him, smoke rising from the rags of his trousers and his hands down flat.

  ‘Jesus, mother of God,’ Flannigan said.

  ‘You’re all right,’ Luke said. He rubbed the blood out of Scullion’s eyes and reached for his meds. Fingers were missing on Scullion’s right hand but he continued to stare out and pick at the rags of his trousers. He was shaking as he saw the leg a few feet away and touched the sheared, bloody bone of his knee. The bullets had stopped coming and it was weirdly quiet up there, the dark about them and Scullion murmuring, which seemed a good sign, while the men tried to keep him from passing out. ‘Look,’ said Flannigan, ‘Jimmy-Jimmy’s here. We’re all here.’

  ‘What’s the score with these trees?’ Scullion said.

  Luke stabbed the morphine needle into the major’s stomach. He returned from some place in his head and was again the boy in training. He took charge and had the old logistical zeal, the clarity of thought. He pulled out the field dressing and ripped it open with his teeth. Scullion looked up at him and smiled. ‘You’re a bad soldier.’

  ‘Come on, sir. You’re going to be all right. Hold my hand ya auld fucken wanker that you are.’

  ‘Come on, Charlie. Keep your eyes open,’ Flannigan said. ‘We’re not having a kip out here. Come on.’

  Scullion had stopped feeling around his knee and his smile continued as Luke radioed for a stretcher. They were down from the convoy in minutes and the medic from the parachute regiment said one of the boys was religious and good at prayers. ‘Don’t be fucken daft,’ Luke said. ‘He’s going to be fine.’ One of the guys lifted Scullion’s torn-off leg by the boot and wrapped it up in a piece of plastic.

  ‘You’re great, now. Okay, fella. Just keep the head,’ Flannigan said. ‘Keep it together, sir. Jimmy-Jimmy’s here and the boys are coming up for a fucken smoke in a minute. Dooley wants to tell you about that moose of his, the bird he’s going to marry because she’s a staff nurse.’

  Scullion was lying on the stretcher and his face was grey. Luke wiped his brow and tried to say everything was cool, they’d soon be out of the zone. The major’s smile went cold after a moment and he started whispering. ‘Or had I but riches and money in store.’

  ‘Come on, sir.’

  ‘Cop on!’ Flannigan said. ‘Give us one of your songs. Give us a few verses, ya mean bastard.’

  ‘It’s there on the banks of the lovely Bann river,’ spoke Scullion.

  ‘Keep going, Charlie.’

  ‘Oh, fuck,’ he said.

  A bit of a tune came into it, nothing much, but Flannigan picked it up and Scullion got the words out. ‘In all kinds of splendour I’d live with my dear.’

  ‘Go on, lad. It’s a beauty.’

  ‘My name is Delaney, a name that won’t shame me.’

  They had to make it to the top of the hill because there was nowhere for the chopper to land. Luke and Flannigan stayed at the side of the stretcher on the way up. ‘And if I’d had money, I’d ne’er had to roam,’ Flannigan sang. His eyes had filled up and he wiped the tears as they jogged. Over his shoulder Luke could see that the convoy had broken through and was at the gates of the dam and the trucks were rolling down.

  ‘But drinking and sporting,’ whispered Scullion, ‘night rambling and courting …’

  ‘Go on, sir,’ said
Flannigan.

  ‘Keep it together, Charlie,’ said Luke.

  ‘Are the cause of my ruin and absence from home.’

  LOVE ME DO

  In the waiting room, Alice looked at the frosted glass and wondered why receptionists are always so impatient and puffed up. Always, she thought. Did they want to be doctors themselves, and that’s why they hate giving out forms and taking calls about appointments? It made sense. You don’t want to spend your life feeling secondary to the person upstairs. It pleased Alice to allow a thought like that to flourish silently in a boring room, as if she had now become, at this point in her life, a lesson to herself, the kind of person on whom no small thing is wasted.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Dr Sabin said. ‘It’s complicated.’ He had taken to wearing tweed jackets and knitted ties. He offered Alice a mint from a little vintage tin showing a smiling kid and a Union Jack. ‘The truth is we’re all getting older and your mother is eighty-two.’

  ‘It’s the hallucinations, as I call them,’ Alice said. ‘It comes and goes all the time. Some days she’s quite normal. But yesterday she was talking as if it was the 1960s. Just talking about the bands and the short skirts, you know. Not recalling it but blethering to me, and to Maureen, her neighbour, as if it was all happening now. I mean, that’s quite hard to take when the person was always so – well, intelligent, I’d call it. My mother has always behaved as if the truth was the biggest thing. The photographs she took when she was young were all about that.’

  ‘Was that her skill, taking photographs?’

  Alice looked at the window and sighed. People’s offices always said so much about them, the old, soothing prints, the sweets, the boxes of wine glasses sitting on the filing cabinet. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘It’s a sad story, really. Sad, I’d call it. She was a name. A bit of a name. Anne Quirk. Her photographs still turn up in a few collections.’