Rain

by Barney Campbell

  ‘What’s wrong, Cass?’ he prodded unhopefully.

  ‘Nothing,’ she stonewalled.

  Tom sighed, picked up his book and tried to read by the bright moonlight; he would wait this one out.

  Suddenly she sprung up onto her knees. ‘It’s just … What are you doing, Tom?’

  ‘Um …’

  ‘I mean, look at you for fuck’s sake.’ Tears streamed down her cheeks, mixing with her mascara to form black streaks that clung to her cheeks in the pale darkness. ‘You’ve just got one of the top firsts at Cambridge University and you could walk, I mean walk, into any job out there. You would be snapped up, tomorrow, by anyone, and instead you’re joining the army. The army?’

  ‘But I’ve always wanted to join the army.’ Tom tried to take in what was happening. All he could think was that her father had put her up to this.

  ‘Look, Tom, we’ve all heard about the fucking army. Army this, army that. Well great, I’m sure there are some great guys in there, but look at you, Tom.’ That was the second time she had said that, and he fought down his anger.

  ‘What do you mean, look at me?’

  ‘I mean just that, Tom: look at you. You’ve got a brain the size of a planet, friends who love you, a mother who’s devoted to you, and you’ve got two arms and two legs, and you want to go and piss it all down the drain just to fulfil a childish fantasy.’

  ‘It’s not childish, Cassie,’ he bleated.

  Gaining momentum she went on. ‘Oh shut up, Tom. Treat yourself as a grown-up for Christ’s sake. What are you going to do in five years’ time if, and that’s a big if, you ever get through this Afghanistan stuff, probably with some kind of drink problem and an inability to engage with anyone who hasn’t been in the sodding army, and that’s assuming you’ve even got any legs to walk on. No one, Tom, is going to care about it because deep down they’ll know that while you were dicking around they’ll have got themselves set up for life.’

  ‘I don’t know if I want that life.’ He suspected, deep down, that Cassie had a point.

  ‘Yes, you want that life, Tom. Why are you going to waste it?’

  The street lamp outside flickered and the fan shuddered from a power surge as Tom’s throat went dry. You know what – bugger it. He decided to fight fire with fire.

  ‘I’m not wasting my time. Yes, I could go and work for whatever twats those tossers at all the milk-round events fawn over. I could go and make friends with a calculator and a spreadsheet instead of real human beings. But I’d look at myself in ten years’ time, Cass, with a massive, massive regret that I hadn’t done the army. It’s a young man’s game; anyone can be a banker, anyone can hang out with a calculator whether they’re seventeen or seventy. If I don’t do this now, Cass, I’ll never do it.’ He stopped, knowing this was only going one way, what she was about to say. It was her only logical move. And he wouldn’t have an answer.

  ‘If you do this, you lose me.’

  ‘Well Cass, I can’t expect you to stand it. If you want to go, just go. I can’t stop you.’ With that, Tom realized that she would go; he’d lost her for ever. At least her parents would be pleased, he thought bitterly. He sighed. ‘Come on, let’s tidy up your face.’ He rummaged in his rucksack for a T-shirt, crumpled it up and dabbed at her eyes. ‘You look like one of the living dead.’

  She giggled just for a moment but then hardened and pushed his hand away.

  ‘We’ll talk about this in the morning,’ he said. ‘We need to sleep on this.’

  She lay down again, the argument dying as quickly as it had started. Tom never heard her stir the whole night; he just kept looking at the fan.

  They didn’t talk about it in the morning. For the next four days they limped back through Berlin, then Strasbourg, then Paris, more out of polite obligation to their original plan than any enthusiasm. Tom thought about suggesting a detour through the First World War battlefields but thought better of it. Probably not quite the time. Back in London they split at St Pancras, Tom to go home for a final week before Sandhurst and Cassie going on to a festival with some friends.

  Waiting in the queue for her cab, Tom looked at her as she scribbled down his Sandhurst address. The late-afternoon sun bounced off high windows above them and lit up her hair. He knew that she’d probably only write him one letter at Sandhurst. He knew he’d never see her again.

  She got into the taxi and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Bye, Tommy. Take care, please take care.’

  ‘I will, don’t worry.’ He felt completely alone.

  ‘I’ll write.’

  ‘Please; it’ll be such a boost.’

  He leaned into the taxi and pressed twenty pounds into the driver’s hand.

  ‘Tom, don’t be ridiculous …’

  ‘No, I insist. I’m not going to be spending much in the next year or so, am I?’

  He gently closed the door, smiled at her, turned and walked away. He didn’t look back. Cassie watched through the rear window as the taxi pulled away, willing Tom to turn his head. He didn’t. If he had, she would have seen him crying.

  A week later Constance took Tom to start at Sandhurst. Her battered old Ford Focus heaved with the paraphernalia that he had been instructed to bring, from twenty wooden coat hangers to shoe-cleaning kit to an ironing board that was so large it could fit in the car only if Tom removed his headrest and almost crouched in the footwell. Leaving the house was a frenzy of nervous laughter with Zeppo trying to jump in the car with him, Tom fretting about not having all his kit and Constance worrying about whether she was wearing a smart enough dress.

  Sam came to wish him goodbye.

  ‘Well boy, I wish your old man was here for this. Best of luck.’

  ‘Thanks, Sam. I hope it’s not going to be too bad.’

  Sam flashed his teeth in a throaty laugh. ‘Oh, it’ll be worse than anything you could possibly imagine. But then, just when you think you can’t go on, you’ll start to love it. You’ll make friendships that you’ll never lose. Oh, one thing. You could have bothered to get your hair cut.’

  Tom’s face went pale. ‘Oh bollocks! Mum, we need to go to a hairdresser. Right now.’ He felt his hair. ‘Oh God, they’re going to crucify me.’

  In the car on the slog around the M25 it felt like he was off to live in Australia for the rest of his life. Tom’s throat was dry, and the closer they got to Sandhurst the more monosyllabic and terse he became with Constance’s eternal questions and worries. She kept glancing over at him, her eyes sad with losing her son and having an empty house again.

  At Sandhurst Constance was ushered straight into tea with the commandant, the general who commanded the academy, while Tom unpacked the car. The boot had jammed shut, so he had to wrestle the ironing board out through a window. He was sweating in his suit and getting into an ever greater panic. As he trudged up the steps to Old College laden down like a pack animal, two colour sergeants, rampant in their service dress, death-stared him. They knew that while the parents were having tea they could torment their new prey with impunity.

  ‘Fuck me, wha’ the fuck is this? Fred fuckin’ Karno’s Army or wha’?’

  ‘I give ’im five days before he runs away screaming.’

  ‘Nah. Two, max. Ah Christ, just look at that hair. I’ll bite it off for him.’

  Tom finally got all his kit into his room and went to find Constance. They went outside together, passing the now silent vultures, and walked to the car in the afternoon sun. She kept finding excuses to touch him, straightening his tie or flicking bits of dust from his shoulder, and he felt himself welling up. After a strangling farewell hug he watched the car wheeze away, not even daring to imagine what a state Constance would be in that night at the house. What had he done? He tried to harden his heart and took a deep breath but found nothing in there. He waited till the car disappeared from sight, gave one final, unnoticed wave, turned and walked up the steps back past the vultures.

  ‘Eh, wee man, why so fuckin’ weepy? Eh Trev, ah think he’
s greeting.’

  ‘Yeah well, Robbie, if I had a suit like that I’d cry.’

  ‘Two days. Max.’

  Tom turned to face them. Might as well be polite. ‘Good afternoon, Colour Sergeants. Nice day for it.’

  The Scottish one looked at him aghast. ‘Eh son, speak when ya fuckin’ spoken tae, ya lippy cunt. We were talking aboot ye, not tae ye. Now FUCK OFF!’

  That night in Tom’s platoon lines the same man, Colour Sergeant Robbie Laidlaw, the midwife of their army careers, introduced himself. He cut an immediately impressive figure. Hovering just above six feet, with crew-cut black hair splashed at the temples with grey, beneath his immaculate uniform both his arms were sleeved in Japanese-style tattoos. Broad Glasgow accent soft in conversation, when he raised his voice to admonish or to bark a drill command on a parade ground he seemed to rise to six foot six. He had crow’s feet laughter lines at his eyes, and back in his battalion had already been marked out as a superstar. At battalion he got on well with the officers – he liked their self-deprecation and their keenness to help the young soldiers – but when he was posted to instruct at Sandhurst he swore not to show this fondness; the harder he treated these kids the more he would be helping them in the end. He was going to push these boys, and push them hard, but only so they didn’t get themselves killed when they eventually got into the ulu. And certainly so they didn’t get any of their lads killed.

  Laidlaw filed them all into a classroom and made them sit in a circle and introduce themselves. When his time came, Tom mumbled. He was rather intimidated by the rest of the platoon, half of whom seemed already to know each other from private school or university. He hoped that his shaking legs wouldn’t show under the cavernous green overalls. He noticed two of them catch each other’s eyes and barely suppress smirks when he told them about Henry VI Comprehensive. Cambridge got their attention though. Typical.

  Always the same with public-school boys, Tom thought: their ears are trained to filter vast amounts of information and names and schools, ignore 95 per cent but prick up immediately a famous name or establishment is mentioned. This signifies to them that the speaker might be worth knowing. So Tom wasn’t surprised when later that night, as they were all sorting out their kit in the way that Laidlaw had told them to, the smirkers put their heads round the door and introduced themselves.

  ‘Hi, mate,’ said one, tall, thickset, with raven-black hair and a rugby player’s jaw, whose burly appearance was offset by his spectacles. ‘Will Currer. You haven’t got any spare coat hangers, have you?’

  ‘Ignore him.’ The other one, just shy of six foot and with an easy drawl, grinned. ‘The stupid bastard didn’t follow the instructions on the packing list.’ He held out a hand with a signet ring on the little finger; clearly he had ignored Laidlaw’s instruction to remove all jewellery. ‘Clive Hynde-Smith. Right, now that Jock maniac’s buggered off, I’m going outside to have a smoke. Want to join us, mate? Tom, isn’t it?’

  They chatted happily outside on the fire escape, Tom fielding their questions, perfectly friendly ones at first glance, but each concealing a probing dart designed to work out exactly how to take this Cambridge boy.

  The next day they had their heads shaved, and in their boiler suits their homogenization was now complete; they had lost the final visible distinction between them. The routine quickly established itself. They slept on the floor so that they didn’t crumple their beds for the 4 a.m. inspection. When they woke they would parade in the corridor, sing the national anthem, do forty press-ups and then drink a litre of water without drawing breath. Someone always then vomited. They would then go back into their rooms and crawl all over the floor with Sellotape wrapped around their hands to remove any dust before Laidlaw inspected. This he did wearing white gloves, and when he wiped something, if the glove came away with dust on it he would calmly tell the occupant to trash his room.

  ‘What do you mean, trash my room, Colour Sergeant?’ Tom asked on his first inspection, instantly regretting doing so.

  ‘I mean turn yer bed upside doon and rip yer clothes off the shelves so yous learn how to fucking tidy it properly, yous fucking twat. Here ye go, I’ll start yous off,’ Laidlaw screamed as he chucked Tom’s immaculate drill boots out of the window into a patch of mud. He watched on as Tom then dutifully turned his bed upside down and pulled out his drawers and emptied them on the floor.

  They were exhausted. They would sleep standing up or sometimes even as they marched. And they marched everywhere in a group and never, ever by themselves. They ate, drank, pissed, crawled through mud, breathed each other’s breath and ironed their clothes till 2 a.m. together. This lasted for days. Tom would wake at 3.45 just to lie in silence for the precious few minutes of the day he would have to himself and despair. Maybe Cassie had been right.

  Slowly though, all the hardship began to fade away. Knowing grins and in-jokes, shared torture and common slang became their glue, and as they saw each other pushed to the brink of mental and physical collapse, so all barriers crumbled. Each of them was at some point laid bare in front of everyone else, bare to their souls and buttocks. They could hide nothing from anyone, and Tom realized that he knew these men better after mere weeks than he did most of his university cohort after three years. They would bicker, laugh and chatter like a tribe of gorillas picking nits out of each other’s hair. They became very fit, developed extraordinary stamina and could sleep within five seconds of being told to do so.

  Cassie’s letter, when it came, was as bloodless as Tom had expected it to be. He found it in his pigeonhole after the platoon got back from a ten-mile march, and while the rest of them showered and fought over the washing machines Tom sat on his bed and stared at the envelope. He sniffed to see if there was any perfume on it. None. Resignedly he started to read. It was nothing he hadn’t already heard tens of times before in his idle faraway speculations. She hoped he was well, that he was being treated nicely and had made lots of friends. It was as though she was writing to someone in prison. She was really enjoying her new job at a hedge fund in London. Tom didn’t even know what a hedge fund was. She had loved Europe and all the time at Cambridge but reckoned it would be best for them to move away from each other, at least for the moment; her new job might take her to New York. Who could say? She’d no doubt see Tom again, but with travel and the rest, who knew when?

  Tom read it without a flicker, walked out of his room and pinned it to the noticeboard, already half full, that Laidlaw had put up for such letters.

  As the months went on and the cadets learned more, Sandhurst became less like a penal institute and increasingly like a dressing room before a boxing match. They were being primed and honed for their soldiers and to get on the ground. Every lecture on leadership banged this home to Tom, every range session or final assault of a company attack came with the exhortation, ‘Come on, Mr Chamberlain. That cunt’s just killed your fucking mate! Shoot him where it hurts, in his fucking Taliban FACE! In the FACE! In the FACE!’

  Their generation had, amazingly, been picked to go and fight in the hardest place, in the hardest fight since Korea. And in Afghan, Helmand. And in Helmand, they had to be in the worst area, the most kinetic base. The most contacts. All the cards had to fall exactly in to place.

  Almost a year later, in April, Tom and Clive walked into the officers’ mess of their regiment, the King’s Dragoons, based in the outskirts of Aldershot. Filthy, with matted hair and sallow cheeks, they had just finished a three-week exercise on Salisbury Plain. After Sandhurst they had been thrown straight into the exercise with a squadron preparing for a tour of Afghanistan in September. The learning curve had seemed almost beyond the vertical, and they had never felt so tested. Clive went up to have a shower, and Tom went into the anteroom, took a can of lemonade from the fridge and sprawled over a sofa. He put his head back and dozed.

  The pair of them had arrived late to the exercise, fresh from their troop leaders’ course, and had hung around an empty Westdown Camp on the e
dge of Salisbury Plain for a whole afternoon, kicking their heels and wondering if anyone in the regiment knew they were even there. They sat down on a grassy bank next to their bergens and spent the afternoon chatting, reading or just in companionable silence, enjoying the springtime sun. They were pretty much joined at the hip now, each eternally amused by the other’s character and linked by the invisible umbilical that Sandhurst had created between them. Where Tom was shy, terrified of being embarrassed and with a quick dry wit, Clive was brash, bumptious and happy-go-lucky. They knew each other now better than they could ever have wished to know anyone, and loved winding each other up and poking at each other’s flaws, while turning swiftly protective of the other and rounding on a critic or a threat. The afternoon passed in lazy if faintly nervous anticipation of what they would face when they met their soldiers for the first time.

  A rickety Land Rover pulled up next to them in the early evening and a bored voice asked them, ‘All right, sirs? If you’re the new officers I’ve got to drive you to C Squadron. Jump in.’

  Twenty minutes later their sullen driver, one Trooper Livesey, pulled to a halt and pointed up a low hill towards a dark wood. ‘There you go, sirs,’ he said disdainfully. ‘C Squadron. Middle of the wood.’ They got out, and he drove off, leaving them bewildered and struggling to see in the drizzly gloom.

  Labouring with their bergens, tramping through brambles and making a din of snapped branches and stumbling, eventually they were challenged by a sentry and led into the squadron harbour. They were immediately impressed. A squadron’s worth of Scimitar reconnaissance vehicles had been skilfully camouflaged, and the only noises were the quiet snores of those asleep in tents put up at the sides of the wagons and the drivers’ muffled and deliberate tinkering with the tracks and running gear of their wagons. Tom couldn’t make out anyone in detail, but his eyes, now attuned to the dark, could register blurred shadows moving softly around, breaking no twigs or branches – unlike his and Clive’s clumsy steps.