The Illuminations

by Andrew O'Hagan

  ‘I understand, sir. Let’s talk about something else.’

  ‘You think I failed.’

  ‘I think you’ve suffered.’

  Scullion’s smile had something wrong in it. It took the world at its worst and gave it his blessing. ‘Holy fuck,’ he said. ‘I sent my bitch of a wife away. I lost my legs. One of my eyes is fucked for good. And you think I’ve suffered?’

  ‘It was a terrible tour.’

  ‘That happens.’

  ‘Not to me,’ Luke said.

  ‘You know, Luke: some things are simpler than others. Maybe you just chose the wrong career.’

  ‘I know I did.’

  ‘You’ll be appearing at the tribunal? And you’ll be talking to the journalists downstairs?’

  ‘I thought you liked the truth, Charlie? Wasn’t that your thing? Alexander the Great and all that? Truth and enlightenment? Pulling the savage peoples out of the dark ages? But now that a few papers want to ask what happened, it’s loyalty, is it? It’s sticking together for—’

  ‘The regiment!’ he shouted.

  ‘Oh, Charlie,’ Luke said. ‘Is that the best you can do?’

  He walked to the cabinet to lift the cakes, setting them out slowly on a plate and placing it on the edge of the bed. ‘This has nothing to do with the regiment,’ he said. ‘It’s to do with a bunch of kids from different regiments being mistreated by their superior officers.’

  ‘Is that what the boys say?’

  ‘The boys don’t know what to say. They’ve gone back home to see their families and pine for another chance to be heroes.’ Luke took one of the cakes and picked at it.

  ‘You always had judging eyes,’ Scullion said.

  ‘Calm the fuck down, Charlie. I came on the train to see you and there’s no point talking shit.’

  Scullion was one of those actors. He had any number of selves to call on and he didn’t favour one in particular. That’s why he could do things other people couldn’t do, because, to him, at some level, it was always another person doing it. He was always above it. ‘I don’t know what any of you want,’ he said. ‘You’re all the same.’

  ‘Is there anything you need, Charlie?’

  ‘I need a year. If I can make it to a year I’ll go to India and none of you will see me again.’

  ‘India?’

  ‘I’ve never been happy, Luke. That’s a lie. I was happy for a term at Trinity College Dublin. I think I told you. Me and Madeleine up the stairs listening to jazz records and that was it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That was it.’

  ‘You were happy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He spoke for a while about the early days when he thought he would live in London and write a book. For a summer he haunted Senate House and the reading room of the British Library.

  ‘Then you joined up.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Why didn’t you just stay in that world?’

  ‘It isn’t a world, Luke. People who read books aren’t reading them properly if they stop with the books. You’ve got to go out eventually and test it all against reality.’

  ‘You’re from another age.’

  ‘That’s what she said. What they all said. And I made the mistake once of thinking you were the same.’

  ‘I just missed my da’, Charlie. And I thought I could show the difference between right and wrong.’

  ‘We all did.’

  ‘That’s right. We all did.’

  ‘There was a generation of men wrecked by Ireland,’ Scullion said. ‘A fair few of us. I saw those dead construction workers in Teebane, the ones that were blown up by the IRA. I was young and I hoped at the time that I’d never see such carnage again. But time passes and I’ve seen more dead men than I ever imagined. Hundreds more. It makes you hard. I’ve been shot at from buildings in places you don’t even know.’

  He sat up straight and wiped his good eye. Luke imagined it was now trained only on the dark places.

  ‘You should go to India,’ Luke said. ‘Go if you can and look after yourself, Charlie.’

  He put his head back on the pillows. ‘We never had children. We were too busy trying to work ourselves out and we missed the boat. We missed our chance. And maybe they would have been my cause. Maybe that’s what people do to …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Gain a foothold. Make their own news.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘She never forgave me. My army career was a nightmare to her and it killed our marriage.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  It was obvious to Luke that something final was taking place. He tried with words and gestures to reassure his old boss, but his heart wasn’t in it, and his attitude clearly irked Scullion, who saw only disloyalty. Scullion suddenly winced: it was obvious the whole thing felt to him like pain, the dull unravelling of his command. Being unable to shout orders, he could only stammer, his bad temper entering in gasps.

  ‘You don’t know what I’m talking about, Campbell. What … what have you had?’ he asked. ‘Girlfriends? Silly girlfriends? You’ve never risked anything, never mind your happiness, never mind your legs.’

  ‘People get over things, Charlie.’

  ‘Good luck with that.’

  A nurse and two men came in. ‘Time for your scan,’ the nurse said. ‘The porters will wheel you along.’ She started fussing with wires and tubes and Luke stepped back. When he came forward again he placed a hand on the major’s arm.

  ‘You taught me things,’ he said.

  ‘Like what?’ Scullion said. ‘How to put trust in the wrong people? How to become a two-sided man?’

  ‘Maybe you’ll write something.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know. You’re the one with the stories.’

  ‘History’s always told by the deputies,’ Scullion said. ‘Men like you. You’re just the right age for revenge.’ Luke stared at his old mentor. Decency or pity demanded that he allow the major the final insult.

  ‘Goodbye, sir.’

  ‘This is real life.’

  ‘Aye.’

  Unspoken words softened the air. ‘Why don’t you wait here,’ Scullion said. ‘I won’t be long at this thing and you can just sit and wait for me.’ But Luke kept his eye on him as the bed turned and was sure the major understood they would never meet again. ‘My hand’s warm,’ Scullion said. ‘You don’t get this in your video games, sure you don’t, son.’ Luke felt the years slide away as the major withdrew his hand. A look of complete spite came into Charlie’s face and he blinked his crusted eye, then rested his head on the pillow as the bed moved off, steered by his new lieutenants. Luke could hear his old friend complain about the bumps as he vanished down the corridor, setting out on his long journey to India.

  REALITY SHOW

  Maureen was setting the table in the breakfast room and getting all het up about an episode of EastEnders. Bloody napkins, she thought. The stress was too much, doing a lunch. It wasn’t even the whole family, but she didn’t do lunches. It was all because Esther was coming down from Edinburgh for one of her visits and she’d given her mother a stiff lecture on the phone about how normal it was, having your family round. Maureen felt it might be Esther’s idea of a Sunday but it wasn’t hers. It was a sheltered housing complex she lived in, not the Ritz.

  Esther was like her father that way. She would just decide on a whim that everybody had to live according to new rules. Stanley used to come back from his jaunts, Maureen remembered, full of ideas about how they should eat more salad or start playing tennis. It would cause rifts between them that couldn’t be healed. The children could still remember the time their parents decided to buy a gas fire. They had arguments in every showroom in Ayrshire and collected dozens of leaflets. Every Saturday and Sunday for months was spent looking for a fire, but still they couldn’t agree and it somehow destroyed any good feeling between them. She wanted something plain like you might see in a modern office, and he wanted one w
ith a flame, a novelty fire that could cheer you up. Their differences were silly but they became strangulating to the kids. Maureen then watched for bullying tactics in everything Stanley did: if he made a pot of soup, she would follow him around the kitchen with a damp cloth, cleaning the surfaces before he’d even had time to mess them up, pointing out how soup was his mother’s thing, waving away his cigarette smoke, his pleasures. Maureen was young then but she behaved as if her life was a trial. And as Esther and her brothers grew up they realised their mother had never stopped being angry at their father. He was still a force of resistance for Maureen, a niggle, a source of objection that she couldn’t stand, and now, in her later years, his invisible fire still sent a chill over her living room.

  Maureen was not at her best that Sunday. Her mind raced back and forth between bitterness and scorn, and lavishly, early that morning, she began to exert herself making sure the lunch would be difficult. Them with their Edinburgh dinner parties and what have you. Out of the blue they decide they want catering in the middle of the day, Maureen thought. ‘It’s not the kind of thing we do in Ayrshire,’ she whispered, ‘and I’ll be seventy on my next birthday. Them with their fancy cars and their pasta.’ Esther was always dropping little hints about how her father loved having them over to stay and how the new wife was into cookery books and growing her own tomatoes. Maureen liked to say the new wife would have her eyes opened one day.

  She hadn’t seen Stanley for twenty-five years. Hadn’t clapped eyes on him. Yet she’d added to her dislike of him every day, now saying he hadn’t played a real part in the children’s lives, hadn’t got involved in all the struggles of bringing them up or setting them straight. She said Alexander’s drink problem was completely Stanley’s fault. She said Ian had never really worked himself out because he had no father to guide him. And Esther – don’t get me started, thought Maureen. Esther thinks it’s healthier to forgive the bad people than praise the ones who’ve been good to you. That’s Esther. Maureen held up one of the new spoons, polished it and then set it back down on the table. They pay her well as a therapist, she thought, to hurt her mother and pretend it’s all about honesty.

  Esther arrived first and brought one of those sweet Italian loaves full of sultanas that Maureen secretly liked but always said was too rich. Scott and Jack, Esther’s two, gave their grandmother big, self-conscious hugs, and she wanted to tell them to take off their massive shoes. It was all problems of size when it came to the family, big hugs, massive shoes, the small thanks she got, the exorbitant need for Wi-Fi. ‘Can you not do without it for five minutes?’ she said to Scott when he asked what the password was. ‘We don’t have anything like that in here.’ She shook her head. ‘We’ve enough to do just trying to keep the place clean and tidy.’

  With his gelled hair and his love-bite there was suddenly something quite lewd about Scott. She was sure he was playing with a Harry Potter doll the last time she saw him. You can’t keep up with them nowadays, she thought. One minute they’re using your handbag as a magic cave for their Lego figures and the next minute they’re advertising how they just had sex. No sooner did her family arrive in the living room than Maureen went into an anxious depression, their need for things belittling her somehow, taunting her, making her yearn for her normal afternoons when she was by herself. Esther’s youngest was silent except for the bleeps and melodies that came from a small red device in his lap.

  ‘You better turn that off,’ Maureen said. She gathered up the coats and started for the bedroom. ‘The fire alarm in this place is always going off and it’s because these gadgets interfere with the system and break it.’ Jack looked at his brother and the two of them just bit the laces around their necks and smiled into their sweatshirts.

  Going off with the coats, Maureen was thinking of Stanley, realising how much better he seemed to her now that she never saw him. He had once been as handsome as Tony Curtis. He was a fine boy when he was young and Maureen felt proud then to have him. He drove lorries all over Europe and would bring back bottles of perfume for Maureen that nobody else owned, and what a laugh he was. ‘My father had no time for him,’ she always said and her story never varied. ‘He saw him for what he was, but my mother, of course, she thought he was fabulous. Stanley would come in and ply all the old women with drink. He had trouble handing in his wages or staying at home for a week, mind you, but to everyone else he was the great Stan. He always had contraband, as he called it. This was before you could just drive to France to buy drink. He brought all these things from the Continent and my mother and the rest of them thought he was just the best in the world. He always had stories. They thought I was the queer one.’

  Standing in her bedroom, with the coats in her arms and the window clear and polished in front of her, Maureen wanted to scream. In the next room they were bustling about, talking and upsetting her cushions and opening the fridge, and it all felt to her like an invasion. She hugged the warm coats and wished they were her nearest-and-dearest: she could just lay them down for the afternoon and then brush them off and send them home. But the actual people? Maybe it’s me, she said to herself, maybe it’s my problem, but I just wasn’t cut out for that way of life. Families and what have you. They would put years on you. She felt guilty when she thought about it later, but there was no getting away from it: her family made her feel like she couldn’t really breathe. Her mother had always made her feel the exact same way, as if she had so many things to prove. And she didn’t have the means to prove them so she might as well not try. ‘Stanley lights up a room,’ her mother said to her one Hogmanay. ‘But you’ve always got so much on your plate, Maureen.’ She used to dream he went to Spain with her mother and her mother’s friends. Her father was never in the photographs that appeared in the dream, but years after her divorce, long after the kids had families of their own, she would see Stanley drinking sangria from a leather bottle in a bright yellow place in her mind.

  The bedroom felt like an old, reliable friend. Maureen looked at the pillows and the mirror and almost whispered to them, speaking out her frustration. ‘I mean it when I say I’m lonely,’ she said to herself, ‘it’s true in the night, but when they come I don’t like it.’ The sentence mortified her but she added more. ‘When they take off their coats I feel mugged by everything they expect.’ She knew it wasn’t fair, that in her mind she lived like a servant when in reality she ruled like a queen. But she couldn’t change, she would never change, and it was her habit now to say they were ‘hurting’ her if they complained. ‘And why would anybody hurt a person who lived on her own?’ She could tell Esther thought this was some kind of strategy to get her own way.

  ‘See the family: I could run a mile.’ This is what she used to say to Anne next door. ‘I could see them far enough.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Anne said. ‘Don’t you enjoy your family? They all seem so nice.’

  ‘They’re a handful, Anne. I’m not kidding you. It’s not easy. You don’t know the half of it.’

  For years her children had witnessed it on their mother’s face, how put-upon she felt by them, how aggressed by their basic wishes. They tried to understand it. Family life, to her, was a complication best left to television. She liked greeting cards because she could buy them on her own and send them on her own, and she despatched all responsibility when she posted those cards.

  The soaps were her haunting counsel. She watched them and got ideas about how the members of her own family were less than they should be. She said it broke her heart, but, in a sense, she liked it when people let her down. It made her feel justified. Alexander was an alcoholic and a genuine worry to everyone, and there was nothing she could do. He was angry and messed up, his life was out of shape, so he just blamed his mother. She could see that. The other two, Ian and Esther, confused her much more. They had spent years trying to supply her with a new perspective, to little effect. They kept trying and they kept hoping their lives would please her but Maureen had formed a heady resistance to their id
ea of family bliss. Esther reminded Ian it was a condition she suffered as well as a decision she made. And if she ever took the trouble to compare herself to her own mother, she would see that the same pattern had been repeated. Old Sadie had liked who she was with her friends but not who she was with her family. She hardly ever invited them round, and she, too, hated finding her cushions on the floor. Maureen sometimes felt like a person being punished for no reason.

  Stanley said people didn’t really know her. Maureen remembered Esther repeating what he’d said as if it was news from God. ‘Your mother used to be light-hearted and full of fun,’ he also said. Maureen didn’t want to hear it from Esther, but it was true. The children think they know everything but they don’t know the half of it. ‘I used to make cakes and there’d be flour everywhere,’ Maureen said to herself in the bedroom, ‘and halfway to Carlisle he’d open his piece-box and find these perfect wee cakes.’ Maureen knew that Esther had brought it up – what Stanley said – in the hope that the information would boost her mother’s self-esteem. It’s one of Esther’s favourite expressions, said Maureen, and some of us don’t need boosts and don’t want self-esteem, we just want peace and quiet at the weekend and for the past to stay in the past.

  She counted to ten in front of the window. Ian was coming down the path with his daughter and his face was serious, but when they came in she heard the usual cheers. Esther always had to kiss everyone and now she would be greeting her older brother. She’d be lifting the little one and squeezing the poor wee thing to death. It would soon be over, Maureen thought, laying down the coats. The audio books were by the bed and Maureen looked forward to that. You get to a certain age and it’s just too late to start changing. ‘Hello, son,’ she said when Ian entered the bedroom with more coats.

  ‘Cold out there,’ he said.

  ‘Well, that’s November for you.’ She looked down to see her newest grandchild padding in behind her father. ‘And look at this wee lady with her chubby face. Ah, Bonnie. Come here till I see you, darlin’; take your shoes off now, there’s a good girl.’ Bonnie came waddling forward in her winter wraps with her fingers out like twigs, and, when she lifted her, a real smile broke over Maureen’s face. She patted down the fluffy hair and smelled the winter on her granddaughter’s cheeks. ‘Have you been a good girl? Have you? Have you been a good girl? Well, Bonnie, my wee pet, I’ve got a treat for you, so I have. Yes I have.’