‘He didn’t die for nothing, Mr McNulty.’
‘He was a fucking idiot.’
IF U B WEIRD WITH ME I’LL B ANGRY
How easy to go from being one with responsibilities to being nothing at all in a nightclub queue. A man who was boss of a platoon section out there in history, an officer, yes, making decisions in the hot fuckery of life, now swaying in the line for the Metro with a nearly dead iPhone in your hand and surrounded by people ten years younger.
If u b weird with me I’ll b angry.
That’s what the text from Lennox said.
And to the clubbers you’re just a pissed guy with no friends. You’re a dude in the wrong clothes. So you start a conversation with them and they’re a bit embarrassed at first but they pass you the joint. And after a while in the queue you buy some coke off the boy in the white high-tops and you stick it in your boxers and get past the bouncers by straightening up. You expect nothing of the kids but they surprise you by proving you right. Inside the club they veer off into a red pumping chasm of secret belonging and you wander to the bar where some boys gather and you find it hard to believe they’re the same age as Dooley.
You drink sambuca. Jägerbombs. And then the girl Kelly comes out of the smoke all sweaty from the dance floor. You kiss her and she says ‘you’re really nice’ but she can’t put her number into your phone because your phone is dead and anyway the laughter. She pulls you onto the dance floor and she whoops and you say ‘I don’t dance’ and yet the lights bring you out and you find some version of yourself you didn’t know. You try to talk him down and then you give in to the lights and the girl is lost and you’re still there.
Oh, Luke. You never put in the hours. And then a minute comes that brings you out of yourself. You see the girl again and she’s laughing big-eyed and you like how it feels and you tell her to follow you up to the bogs. You snort two more lines each and then you fuck in the cubicle, the girl talking ten to the dozen with the music deep below. Her legs are balanced on your forearms and you’re fucking her standing up and kissing her neck and she says something good. You’re back downstairs, you see the lights again, the kids with their hands in the air. You hear the old dark emptiness behind you and you turn and smile, feeling for one mad moment you’re at home in the beat. The music is beautiful and you take a mouthful of water, so cold you could drink the sea, and suddenly you’re outside the club. You float over the pavement and crouch by the door of Cancer Care, puking your guts up, and then you suck from the bottle in your jacket pocket, rub some coke on your teeth and think of Scullion.
ARRAN
A box was sitting in the doorway of the charity shop. It contained books and shirts and a small fire extinguisher covered in stickiness and dust. He took it. When he walked down Windmill Street he felt exposed again as if the mirrors of the cars were conscious. He looked round to see a closed chippy and a washing-machine repair shop, and there, in darkness, facing the sea, was the Army Careers Office. He didn’t look in or think about anything much, he just raised the fire extinguisher above his head and threw it at the window. He expected an alarm but the glass didn’t break and he staggered away.
A boat was roped to an orange buoy. The water came in around it and a bird stood on the prow, the boat rocking, the bird looking into the night and cawing, as Luke sat on the wall. It was perfectly dark out there. The bird would attempt the crossing if she could be sure to make it. Luke just stared at the creature and willed her to go, as if, with a surge of courage, she might conquer the reality of sky and whatever else.
Lochranza Court was behind him. He looked back, seeing a dim light. The corridor was never dark and it amazed him suddenly to think what stories the building must contain. His gran was there and the lady next door, Maureen, the one who wrote the letters, she must be asleep, also. He wondered if the women slept well, or did their experience keep them awake? He could still see his mother in the restaurant the day before, the worry on her face as she spoke about never knowing who she was. For the first time in his life he felt sorry for his mother and wanted to know more about what had estranged her from the woman who lived across the road. Once the war is over, what is there but life? He pulled the jacket around his ears and looked at the building, just thinking of them.
When he visited earlier that day, he’d found his gran beside the window in the laundry room, and he’d been sure she was speaking to something in her handbag, perhaps the rabbit. She looked up and called him Harry and then she remembered his own name. She took his hand and said yes, of course, he was Luke and he had been away. Just sitting in the room, he realised there was so much to find out about her, so much to do for her. And perhaps for all of them. He said he was home now and she brightened. ‘That’s really nice,’ she said. ‘I want to go on a journey with you.’
‘Where?’
‘To Blackpool.’ She rubbed his hands by the window and touched the object in her bag and said very clearly to both of them that life was only what you made it. ‘They were our best years. Lovely times. I think there are photographs down there in Blackpool.’
‘You’ve wanted to go for ages, haven’t you?’
‘Yes. Since the snow.’
Sitting on the wall, he smoked a cigarette, watched the water. It was a loss of spirit that had occurred in him, a loss of make-believe, that’s how he thought of it, and he knew it meant he would have to start again. The waves arrived on the sand and they bubbled there and he liked it, seeing the white froth and how it disappeared in front of him. He later wished he could capture the peace he had known over those hours on the seawall as he looked into the black distance, the lighthouse on the Holy Isle beating out a message just for him. The mountains of Arran he felt he had seen in another time, a recent one, but there was no gunfire or flares, no broken sleep, no enemy below, just the mountains themselves, the steady return of the fishing boats and the light that came with the morning.
SELLY OAK
‘You’re in England now,’ the nurse said. ‘You’re not in Afghanistan any more, do you hear me?’ That was the first time he saw the room, though Scullion knew it wasn’t seeing in the normal sense because everything was blurred with a milky radiance. And then, one at a time, he counted the colours back into his life. She was moving tubes about his face. For minutes or days he saw her green tunic. She was chatty, the nurse, and her head came in and out of focus, lifting, prodding, reminding him of school. One day a pair of blue surgical gloves fluttered over him like a hawk. A yellow drink came with a straw but he couldn’t.
Three weeks in Critical Care. ‘You’re doing great,’ she said. ‘You’re in Birmingham.’ Scullion wanted to say this was a contradiction in terms but he couldn’t speak and didn’t know if his mouth was moving. Try to be nice. Sunlight broke through the blinds one day, then he heard Madeleine, her voice by the bed and her hand smoothing his hair. He couldn’t afford to be miles away now that Madeleine was here, the spouse of doom, passing small pink sponges into his mouth.
‘Drink, darling,’ she said.
He smelt her perfume. Anaïs Anaïs.
It came in small bottles. He fell asleep. And when he woke up again he imagined he saw a goat’s bones on the sand and staring down from the mountain a boy with brown eyes. What if evil came and held your hand and said you were in England?
She sat in Kehoe’s pub in one of the snugs. He saw her. It was twenty-five years ago and you couldn’t smoke a cigarette without Madeleine taking half of it and kissing it down to the filter. She had a perfect smile and he loved the way she knew more than she said about everything. She just laughed instead of boasting. He called her Kitty because she loved Parnell. Back in college they had sex every day and he remembered her spraying scent into her bathwater afterwards. Sitting in the bath with her knees up to her chest asking for a puff, she looked as if trouble had been banished from her life. Disaffection was never going to touch this sweet woman, the Kitty who gleamed and the Kitty who smoked.
He lay thinking of her. Heart monitors beeped i
n the distance and every day more detail arrived. Madeleine was always there in the morning and he began to wonder if she’d forgotten that she hated him. ‘Don’t you remember, Maddie,’ he said to himself, ‘the day you woke up without children? And your husband was off in the sand again looking for snakes and vermin. On tour again. He wasn’t the Charlie you’d known, was he? Him hiking round the world killing people because the government wished voters to see they were taking a strong line.’
Wasn’t Charlie, he thought.
‘We wanted different things didn’t we, Mad? I was fighting out in some shithole and you were booking rooms in expensive hotels. That’s right. We wanted different lives and we grew apart and these things happen to the very best of people, don’t they, Madeleine? And you just wanted someone to be kind and to look at you that way again.’ So she changed the locks and gave his books to Amnesty.
‘It’s hard,’ she said to her friends in wine bars, ‘but some men, you know, they’re nice in bed, they’re good to you, but they’re just an absence when it comes to it. Poor Charlie. He just wants to be with the tented people.’ And now she stroked his head and called him darling. This woman who would float for ever through his mind in summer dresses.
‘We tried to save the left leg. The other one was off when you arrived. But we had to amputate, old boy. It’s too bad. It’s just too bad, but you’ll recover.’
Scullion lifted a hand, bending one of three remaining fingers. ‘Yes,’ said Colonel Pettifer, the chief surgeon. ‘Both legs, old boy. You’ve lost an eye and your mouth is damaged, but we’ll fix that. And the fingers, obviously. But I wouldn’t worry too much about that.’
The heavy sedation wiped Scullion’s questions. For weeks he roamed in a field of floating reds, before he saw white carnations. A week later it was lines from ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’.
‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldiers knew
Some one had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
He spoke the words to his own face in County Westmeath, the clear eyes of his boyhood, and he knew the boy’s wonder would only awaken to grief. He’d never given himself good advice and it was too late. Was that Madeleine holding the blunderer’s hand, counting the days, saying all would be well now between them?
‘Patience,’ the surgeon said.
‘The wounds are healing and it’s all about …’
‘… commitment to getting … that’s …’
‘And then you won’t know yourself.’
The tubes came out. One day: the theatre. A journey under lights and the operation on the mouth. The nurse said mud and dirt had been embedded in his gums, causing infection. Pettifer picked out the material with a silver tool and then he bent over to show him the grains on a swab. ‘Grass from an Afghan field.’ All the while Madeleine spoke about the good eye. He was in England now and many patients walk again.
A day came when his mouth had healed enough for him to try getting out a few words. He took his time. It was slow. And the first words he spoke were not curses or woes, not instant requests or questions about the legs. He simply said enough to make it clear that Madeleine should leave. He was sitting up and he could see the outline of her blonde hair, her white blouse, and he imagined her looking at the stumps of his legs and seeing that the whole man she disliked was gone.
Two weeks later he could say much more to the nurse. ‘No sentimentality. You can write it on the end of the bed.’
‘Like “Nil by mouth”?’ she said.
‘That’s right. Nil by sentiment.’
‘You’re back with us. Good-oh. Sentiment? I think you’ll find that sort of thing’s in short supply round here, Major. Shame about the lady, though. She was here for weeks.’
‘She comes from money,’ Scullion said. ‘Or they pretend they have money. What they really have is debt. Those people live with so many lies they forget the money thing is false, too. And one day you just have to get away from them.’
‘Too much information,’ the nurse said.
The day he dismissed her, Madeleine went back to the family quarters and phoned her sister in County Clare. She was crying. ‘The thing Charlie will never understand’, she said, ‘is that he’ll always be all right because he’ll always have himself. He’ll never see it, but there’s a sort of complete selfishness in him.’
‘You did your best,’ her sister said.
‘He doesn’t have it in him to be pitied.’
THE TOLLYGUNGE CLUB
One day he smelt food. It was coming from the corridor and it marked the return of routine. ‘This is how it works,’ Pettifer said. ‘You’ll be going off to the High-Dependency Burns Unit. You’ll need skin grafts and a cataract operation to improve your good eye. After that, the real work begins – the legs. We’re going to seal them and then you’ll be off to Headley Court in Surrey. You’re not old, Major, but you’re not in the first flush. The training is hard work, let me tell you. It’s six months before you’re off the stubbies and walking on prosthetics.’
‘Prosthetics, really?’
‘Yes.’
‘We had better get a move on, Colonel,’ said Scullion. ‘It would be lovely to be able to walk to my own disciplinary hearing, don’t you think?’
Pettifer just smiled the way people smile when they don’t want to get involved. ‘Keep fighting,’ he said. Scullion wasn’t sure if blushing was actually an option any more, but the words embarrassed him and he wished he could go to sleep.
He spent the long afternoons thinking about a new life in India. He thought he could just about bear it in Calcutta, the slow, fading intensity, playing billiards at the Tollygunge Club with the gardeners, eating mangoes, reading Saki and drinking gin and tonic. He could see it so clearly he almost believed in it, a life of displaced authority in warm weather, a life of impotence. He was only two days in the Burns Unit when he asked for paper and started trying to write out the logistics. There was money from his parents’ old pub in Mullingar: he could pay for nurses. He could talk to strangers or start a charity or write a book. With his childish legs in front of him under the blanket, Scullion knew that his great companion had always been his imagination. He asked the welfare officer if she could bring him The Jungle Book. He could see himself sitting under the twisted boughs of a banyan tree, hidden from the sun, recalling the Great Game, a blanket like this over his poor legs and a drink in his hand, the mind alive, his eyes scanning the horizon for elephants.
‘Hello, Charlie,’ he said. It was Luke standing in the doorway with a bottle of Talisker and a bag of cakes. He had walked all the way from Birmingham New Street thinking of what to say.
‘Is it yourself, Captain Campbell?’
‘It is.’
‘Well, fuck me with a flute band,’ Scullion said. Luke smiled and walked over to the bed. He thought better of shaking the major’s hand so he clapped his shoulder.
‘I’ll pass that request on to the regiment. I’m sure we could arrange for the old Western band to march up your hole while playing “Amazing Grace”, if that’s what you really want. I mean, it’s quite a strange order but look at the fucken state of you. You can have anything you want.’
That was well done. Well managed, thought Scullion. He laughed and pulled himself up on the pillows. Luke was pleased to see he could still laugh and he realised, watching him struggle, how much he had always been intimidated by the major. He began speaking hospital small talk while Luke considered him, realising, while he listened, that he was now in a position of power over Scullion. Nobody else but Luke had fully witnessed the major’s meltdown. Nobody else knew how reckless he had been in making them go to that village or how his judgement had collapsed before the mortar attack. Scullion had abandoned the boys to da
nger more than once, they both knew it, and the facts of the matter told against them both. The facts ridiculed them as soldiers and mocked the legend of Scullion’s war. At that stage it hadn’t gone beyond blame into a collective sadness; indeed, it lay heavy on Scullion’s own head, on his features, his scarred mouth, twisted now as he stared from the bed and tried to talk.
‘Sit your arse down.’
‘How they treating you?’
‘They dance around. The nurses. Doctors. You’re lucky if you see the same one twice.’
They discussed the hours after he was hit. He didn’t remember the song or the tourniquet, the morphine, the airlift. He didn’t care so much about the weed-smoking or the gamer mentality in the field. It was all nothing in the end, the sound of a different drum. ‘We ran into some bad luck. Or I did. And the wee boy did,’ was all he wanted to say.
‘It was a fuck-up,’ Luke said.
‘We brought light to those people …’
His bad eye was leaking. Luke handed him a swab from the top of the bedside cabinet. Another silence. ‘You nearly died.’
‘One thing I’ve learned. When death smiles at you, Captain – you’ve just got to smile right back at it.’
Luke didn’t mind the fakery. The man was in pain. Or was he actually proud of all the sacrifices?
‘We achieved a lot,’ he said.
‘Fucking zero,’ Luke said.
‘We deployed with confidence.’
‘The mission to make the country stable has made it less so and only the Taliban rose in confidence.’
‘Ah, fuck it,’ Scullion said. They were silent for a minute and Scullion wished he could resurrect the banter that had drawn the boys together. But when he spoke he found he was grasping for something larger. ‘Some of us are just two-sided men, Luke. The moment we look at anything we see its exact opposite. It’s a way of life.’
The Illuminations Page 17