It was like his mind got stuck sometimes, turning everything over again to have a closer look. Not like he didn’t know it all already, but when he got that way, it was hard to stop. Thought it was down to David this time. Or down to himself for listening. Thought about the old man a lot that week away with Alice: how he talked, once he got started, just kept running on and getting distracted. Joseph reckoned he knew how that felt: he’d done enough of it over the years, not out loud like David, but in his head. Thinking it might all add up to something, maybe, all the remembering. Different parts of it on different days, and the order of things kept changing, but it was all the same memories and always the same people in them.
September in Ireland, hot for about a week and the local kids swam in the river. Sat on the banks in wet shorts, skinny boys shivering. Sixteen-, seventeen-, eighteen-year-olds, drinking cider out of plastic bottles. Smoking, shouting, the hardest ones jumping off the old stone bridge into the water. Cuts on their legs from the rocks at the bottom, but no limping, no pain showing, at least not while the girls were there on the opposite bank watching. Back at the barracks, in their bunks and the bar, the talk was all about how the girls surely had to go swimming soon, and what the boys should be doing to get them in there. But days passed, boys only, in and out the water, stomachs pulled in from the cold and the skin on their ribs shining blue-white in the unexpected sunshine. Out on Ops, they kept watch on them through binoculars: the boys showing off, charming and persuading, and the girls ignoring them. Joseph remembered being with Lee and Townsend on the hill above the village, always one of them ready for when the girls got their kit off.
The boys nicked some tractor inner tubes from one of the farmers and that was what did it. Genius, Townsend reckoned. Joseph was on stag, but he kept quiet and kept hold of the binoculars when the girls finally got off the banks. Still not showing much skin except leg: pale, wet limbs splayed, floating around on the black inflated rings, mouths wide. Joseph thought he could just hear them from where he was lying. Screaming and laughing, turning with the current, boys swimming out and splashing them, T-shirts and knickers soaked through and clinging so Joseph could see more by then, if he kept the binoculars still enough. Insects dancing in the long grass in front of him, sweat on his belly from the heat of the sun, from lying there for hours on his buckle, bored and uncomfortable. Breath held, pressed down onto the hillside, Joseph kept watching as long as he could, until the girls floated under the bridge and then he passed the binoculars on.
– You dirty fuck, why didn’t you say nothing?
That was Lee. Who said guard duty was for wanking. Told Joseph all about his porn collection at home in boxes, in the attic at his mum’s place. Always left a Forum or something stashed somewhere in the sangar, and if you were on after, you could spend half your time searching, take it away with you for later. Lee liked talking about it: called himself an addict, junkie for skin. Blamed the army, said they got him started, and that filth was all part of his training for the province. He told Joseph they showed him videos of riots and bombing with hard core cut in. Cunts and petrol bombs. Parades and fucking and burnt-out cars. Joseph didn’t believe him, you sick bastard, laughed:
– How come I never got to see them?
Jarvis was out with them that day, heard Lee talking. Told Joseph to stop laughing, because it wasn’t right to mock the afflicted. Said Lee’s training video was just wishful thinking: too much time on his hands and not enough in his y-fronts to fill them.
They heard later that a few of the younger boys took a tube each and drifted off downstream, beyond the bridge and away from the town. Made it as far as the sea, miles away, down at Dundalk in the Republic, and when it got dark they hitched home again.
The farmer was furious about his inner tubes, dumped at the beach. His wife wanted him to go down to the police station and report them stolen, but there was no chance of that, because two of the boys were sons of someone who counted. An RUC officer told them about it, tight-lipped and livid.
– That’s the way things work here. No such thing as due process. IRA makes its own laws. No one follows the ones we’re here to be upholding.
Joseph knew it should have bothered him too, but he couldn’t get worked up with the policeman: about the principle, maybe, but not about the boys and their inner tubes.
They saw them again a few days later, all up on ladders, painting the guttering on one of the farmer’s outbuildings, and Townsend said they were witnessing the local version of justice in action.
– You’ve got to admire it, haven’t you?
He was in the same brick, patrolling with Joseph most days, the whole time they were there. Townsend was Welsh, and kept a photo taped up on the wall by his pillow, of the hill behind his grandad’s house in the Rhondda. Said he climbed it every time he got home on leave, and he liked having the picture there, to remind him what mattered. But you could never tell with him if he was serious. A wind-up merchant. Always watching you while he was talking, and always some part of him smiling: mouth, eyes, something about him. So whatever he said you’d have to be careful about joining in, just in case he turned it against you. Told Joseph his cousins used to torch the English holiday homes and quite right too, he’d have done it as well only his dad said he had to wait a couple of years until he was old enough to go with them.
– It was all over by that time. Wanker.
Not the most convincing story, Joseph thought. Especially the bit about his dad: sounded like a poor excuse for not joining in, if he’d wanted to.
– What the fuck you doing here then?
– Fuck knows. You?
Townsend sang ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’ in the NAAFI bar and got put on CO’s orders. Drink in one hand, standing on a chair, loud, but still in tune. Hard to tell if he was pissed or just acting it. They were on two cans then, so he couldn’t have been. Insisted he was only proving a point, settling a long-running bar room dispute: Macca could be as political as Lennon when the mood took him. Only Townsend was smiling again when he said it, and the Company Commander didn’t take kindly. Two weeks on drill, forty minutes every morning being bawled at in the transport yard by the Provost Corporal, who told him to stay out of trouble, because he hated drill, too fucking boring.
Townsend reckoned most of the locals were happy enough with the way things were. Just like the law, they didn’t really give a toss about the border: took the long view and figured it couldn’t last. Plenty of money to be made while it was there, besides. Most of the time it wasn’t guns getting smuggled, just pigs borrowed to double the subsidy from Brussels, or car boots full of fags and disposable nappies. The border was only marked every so often, so you had to keep your eyes open: for a line painted on a fence post, a symbol on a tree. Easy to cross and not know you’d done it, they ended up spending most of one patrol in the Republic. The Lieutenant heading up their multiple got a bollocking for that one. They didn’t think they’d been spotted, but the local Gardai had put in a phone call to the Company Commander.
– What were you doing, playing Special Forces?
Joseph saw the blood vessels working under the Major’s eyes, thinking about them upsetting relations with the Irish government, making the company a laughing stock in front of the locals. It didn’t turn into a diplomatic incident, but they did get a few cool smiles over the next few days.
– All Ireland, isn’t it? Same woods, same fields, same rivers.
That was the woman who ran the post office, calling across the road to them, opening her shutters while they were out early, patrolling. Townsend said she was right, but not to her face, only to Joseph later on when they were mopping out the bogs. It was part of their punishment, not for crossing the border, but for laughing about it afterwards in earshot of the Major, and while Townsend was going on about drawing stupid lines in the earth and sky, Joseph thought he’d sooner be painting a barn than scrubbing out a pisshouse, any day.
Nine
Alice got her ph
otos back from the developers, started sorting through them in the living room: pulling out the best ones to show her grandad on Sunday, laying out the panoramas on the coffee table to see if they worked.
– More or less. What do you think?
Martha was in and out of the room: in her pyjamas, but tidying the flat instead of going to bed. She nodded approval in passing, carrying empty mugs and glasses out into the kitchen. Keith was sitting in the chair next to Alice, tackling his accounts, long overdue, piles of receipts sliding off his knees, more spilling out of a bag at his feet. Glad of a distraction, he picked up the second pack of photos from the table and laughed about the weather.
– Looks like you had about half an hour of sunshine the whole time you were away.
– It wasn’t that bad.
– No, but this is.
He held up one to show her: Alice grimacing on a beach, nose running, eyes teary in the wind. She laughed.
– It’s for the bin.
– Show me.
Martha had come through from the kitchen again. She leaned over the back of Keith’s chair, smiling as he flicked through the pictures.
– Joseph cuts a fine figure in a cagoule anyway.
– And I don’t?
– You lack the military training. Takes years of practice to carry that look off.
Martha winked at Alice and then started gathering the papers Keith had strewn across the floor. He’d got to the beginning of the photos again, and put them back down on the table.
– I didn’t know Joseph was in the army.
Martha interrupted his flow, holding out an invoice he had discarded, waiting. Keith took it from her, impassive, and then put it back on the floor after she’d turned away. Alice smiled at him, and he went on:
– My brother was too, after he finished university. What was Joseph’s regiment?
– I don’t know, actually. It was quite a while ago. I think it was infantry.
– Proper soldiering, Neil would say. He went for infantry even though he’d studied engineering, came home and joined our local regiment. Got frustrated in the end, though. They never sent him anywhere that counted, not in his mind anyway.
Martha came back with two more crumpled sheets for Keith, but when he just added them to the pile by his chair, she gave up on the mess and sat down.
– He was always off somewhere, far as I could tell. Whizzing about in Chinooks. Belize. I remember him going there, because you had to check the map to see where it was.
She kicked her boyfriend’s feet and he smiled.
– Only because my Dad’s atlas was old, it still said British Honduras. That was just training anyway. Jungle warfare. I’ve got an action man for a brother. He was forever training and never doing, that was a big part of the problem, I reckon. A platoon from his regiment went to Bosnia, part of the UN mission. Neil decided to leave after that: said it was too hard, always watching his men go without him.
Keith blinked, thinking about his brother. Alice was sitting on the floor by the coffee table, her flatmates were on chairs, on either side, talking to her, but across her somehow, and she wasn’t sure how to join in. Martha said:
– Your mum was glad though, wasn’t she? About Bosnia. She always was, when he didn’t get to go somewhere. Used to call us to say how relieved she was, because she couldn’t say it to him.
Keith nodded.
– Yeah, I remember. But he’s the last of us kids, you know. By a few years. And the army takes you over, took him over, I don’t think my Mum could get used to that. Or she didn’t want to. Let go of her son to that extent.
He shifted, frowning a little.
– We went to school with army kids. I remember they looked out for each other, I liked that about them. The families moved a lot, so there were always new kids to look out for. I reckon it would have been easier if we’d been an army family, maybe, when Neil joined up. You might feel more part of it. You’d know what to expect, anyway. I mean, my Dad was in the army, but that was national service, like everyone back then, and it was before my Mum met him. He made army life sound tedious, if anything.
– Neil signed up for officer training, though. That was bound to be different.
– Yeah, but I think it surprised Mum that he wanted to do it. He didn’t have to.
– Baby son has a mind of his own, shock horror? Keith looked at his girlfriend, mild, amused.
– She worried about the guns and bombs, as you would. Didn’t like it that he was trained to use them on other people either. It just didn’t square with her idea of him. I was glad for my Mum when he gave in his notice. Got passed over for Major again. He told me they didn’t want you getting complacent. Expecting promotion without putting in the effort. I think it gutted him.
Keith shrugged, looked over at Alice.
– It’s a bizarre world, seen from the outside anyway. I’d be interested to hear what Joseph made of it. I’m sure Neil used to get off on the fact that we found it strange. Liked having to explain it to us. I still don’t get all the dressing up and shunting around parade grounds in unison.
Alice smiled, because Keith was smiling at her.
– It used to scare me, actually, listening to him back then. He used to say he wanted to be tested. Validated. What a word.
Keith laughed, and then shook his head.
– Get it right and you get your troops out alive, get it wrong and they’re in bits or in boxes. Or they see you as a liability and shoot you in the back. This is my little brother talking.
Alice watched him, still shaking his head, caught somewhere between incredulity and sneaking respect.
– He’s a good, solid, diligent bloke, Neil. Lovely, to my mind. But he wanted to be something else, and they wouldn’t let him, poor sod. He volunteered for every posting going, and then spent most of his time shuffling numbers around on spreadsheets and dealing with troublesome soldiers. Teenagers, most of them. Neil was like a cross between an accountant and a social worker. One of his boys was always getting caught half-cut in town, or driving while banned. He said you could take them to the most extraordinary, far-flung spot in the world, but all they cared about was whether they’d get lager there and porn on cable.
Alice turned back to the photos, started sorting through them again. She wasn’t particularly enjoying the conversation. Keith was quiet for a minute or two, but she could feel him watching her, wanting her to look up again.
– Joseph was a squaddie, wasn’t he?
– Yes.
– I’m sorry.
Keith was embarrassed. Alice blinked at him.
– Don’t be. No need. Wasn’t you that said it anyway.
– I know. I mean. I don’t know.
He was smiling about himself now, back-pedalling and failing, and the unnecessary apology left Alice irritated. She looked through the last of the photos, mostly pictures Joseph had taken, and mostly better than her own. Lichen on stone walls, thick twists of seaweed, careful about detail and framing: Alice started a small pile to show him. Martha got up to go to bed and then she was alone with Keith.
He didn’t try to pick up talking again, and she was glad, because the conversation had unsettled her. Not the thought of Joseph drunk and watching porn in exotic locations, it was the idea of Keith’s family adjusting that got to her: puzzling over the strange world inhabited by one of their own. When Joseph told her he’d been in the army, she’d made the same distinction as Keith’s mother, between doing national service and joining up voluntarily. That was in those early weeks when it felt like the more she found out, the more she liked him. Alice couldn’t get the army to fit with Joseph somehow, and it had made her curious.
July weekend, sitting in his kitchen, Sunday papers spread across the table, Drumcree and decommissioning were both on the inside pages. Fewer marchers that year, but still plenty of police there and plenty of tension. Alice had watched Joseph skimming the headlines: he’d already lifted the page to turn it, but it was as though he
couldn’t let go of it, his eyes intent, settling on an article.
– Were you out there, then?
Joseph looked up briefly, then back down at the paper. Pictures of banners and sashes, bowler hats.
– Yeah. For a bit.
He turned the page, but found more of the same, and
Alice persisted.
– What were you reading just then?
– About the IRA. The Garda know where they have most of their arms dumps now.
– Will they ever open them, do you think?
– I could tell you what the article said, if you want.
He didn’t sound defensive, looking at her across the table, eyes clear and friendly enough, but the answer hadn’t come immediately. Difficult to say if she was being told to drop it. Joseph was watching her, as though waiting for her to respond, but he wasn’t exactly opening up the conversation: if you want. He flicked through to the back pages.
– The little bit I know is years old anyway.
– You’ll still know more than me, though.
Joseph shrugged and Alice couldn’t tell if he was irritated or what.
– Sorry. Do you get it a lot? People asking you about it?
– Not that much, no. Enough.
Joseph closed the newspaper, slid it away from himself across the table, and Alice thought he wasn’t angry, but he was uneasy with the conversation, resisting, and it was strange to feel like she was pushing him, when she’d hardly asked him anything.
– It’s just the obvious, isn’t it? Ireland. If you’ve been in the army, people think you must have been there, one tour at least.
Afterwards Page 12