mint tea … a wonky-donkey haw-heeing … a white plastic garden
chair up-ended on a pile of rubble … Everywhere Gawain’s been in
Iraq he’s seen them – in the vulgar marble palaces of Saddam’s
henchmen on the crumbling banks of the Shatt al-Arab, and in the
burnt-out shells of government buildings. The very first thing he’d
noticed when they deplaned at the aypod was a white plastic garden
chair sitting beside the runway – and Tizer had said, Why don’t you
take a load off, Greeny – things’re only gonna get heavier from
here on in … The company of Kiwis who pitched up a week ago –
and who, so far as Gawain can establish, have bugger all to do
besides … fuck up my logistics have taken to mounting bogus little
patrols of their own, simply so they can recover more of the flimsy
booty from back alleys and shattered patios. Their SeeOh, a limber,
dark fellow called Moody who sports a ridiculous sprig of hair
on his bottom lip … beard? Goatee? Lip-ee? had revealed his clever
plan to Gawain that morning: A tournament, Greeny – your boys
and mine. Fives or sevens, depending on how many’re willing –
didn’tya say you were a pretty handy loose head yerself ? If we can
persuade the Jap contractors to join in we could call it the Three
Nations … If enough of your boys’re Jocks and Taffies – or Irish,
you could field all the home nations and we’d have six teams! Standing
there, looking at Moody, utterly unselfconscious in his ridiculous
tit-crowned wideawake hat, Uncle Rodney’s oft-uttered words rang
in Gawain’s ears: There’s a soupçon of the peacock in all army officers à
mon avis … So, yes, the Adjutant’s figure of speech was about right:
if Moody had his way they’d all be squared away – forming a hollow
square of spectators in the middle of Camp Val’s dusty compound.
Literally a sitting target for whichever gang of bandits crept in from
the badlands and began chucking over arpeegees and mortar
rounds. Not that the Rams had had much contact so far – but the
threat-level was rising, and eye-eedees were fast becoming what
Jonathan would doubtless call the signature note of the campaign.
Each morning Gawain receives emails with video attachments from
the EeeOhDee group down in Basra. The videos show devices
cunningly concealed in water butts and straw bales. One, rather
more macabrely, had been hidden in the head of a putrefying camel
… wires worming out of its eyes: not so much kill– as … rot-teevee.
With each clip he watches, the tension builds up in Gawain’s thick
neck and broad shoulders – striking lightning pains up into his …
loose head. Yes! he barks into the handset. We’re pretty much all
squared away up here, David – there’re one or two issues, obviously
… Equally obviously, the Adjutant’s no longer listening – he’s
moved away from Gawain, further into the radiophonic darkness,
where he can be heard calling out other call-signs: Charlie Two,
Charlie Two, are you reading me? Gawain sits and waits and broods,
which is pretty much what … I’ve been doing my entire professional
life! He wanders back through his hot and sweaty head to New
Delhi, and that encounter with the beautiful journalist: I’m not
in a position … he’d almost certainly said … to talk to you as a
serving British officer, but what I can say is that the role of the
Export Support Team is pretty widely misunderstood … while
Surinder Sehti had stood there, goggling at his cleavage. There’d
been, Gawain thinks, a sort of Line of Control between the two
of them – on her side Hindu prudery and womanly rectitude, on
his … complete and utter indifference. Whereas up in Kashmir the
real thing snaked over crags and down into ravines, and there were
a million men, shoulder to shoulder with their comrades – nose to
nose with their foes. What would happen if the balloon went up?
A mass Eskimo greeting, p’raps, followed by them all getting down
to the … buggery business. He remembers the encounter at all only
because of having said to her, If you hang on a sec’ I can give you
the contact details for the press people – you’re best off talking
to them … He’d turned away from the door and simultaneously
felt … the balloon shoved up between my legs – a balloon full of liquid
shit! He’d got rid of Surinder Sehti as quickly as he could, then
waddled to bathroom, where he … let fly. Charlies One-through-Twelve
and Bravos Nine-through-Seventeen all present, Boss …
The stream of pissy shit crackles away into the ether – and Gawain
turns his attention to the interplay between the various commanders
attached to Battlegroup Main. The weekly orders group
conference is his best opportunity to get a grasp on the wider picture,
an essential task if he’s aiming for corps-level command. And
why shouldn’t I? No one knows I’m a shit-pisser – or a shit-stabber
for that matter. Oh, Christ! he undermoans, I feel so punctured,
so empty – so fucking lonely … What’s required to make the
loneliness of command bearable is, he thinks, the command of loneliness
… And he is alone – profoundly so: only calling home once
a week, and, when he does, after listening to a tight-lipped account
of the children’s doings, waiting in vain for some basic human
warmth … But why should his long-haired General oblige, when
for years now it’s been Jonathan who’s supplied it? To begin with
they held their conference calls in phone boxes: Gawain favoured
one on the outskirts of Pickering too remote and chilly to be much
used. He could loiter there, out of sight behind a hedge – and when
the heavy receiver rattled into life … ambush it. He knew Jonathan
called from various boxes in his neighbourhood – shifting randomly
from one to another, in case anyone was watching and … established
a pattern. Problem isn’t so much your wee wifey … he’d said in the
happy aftermath of their first full night together, when they lay
spooning in the Terylene shadows of a Leeds budget-hotel room …
it’s the mob I’m sort of married to. And so Jonathan had instructed
Gawain in rudimentary tradecraft: the dead-letter drops, brush
contacts and alpha-numerical codes that’re his … standard operating
procedure. It’s absolutely essential, he hissed, that you write
nothing – and I mean nothing whatsoever – down anywhere: not on
paper, not on a computer – nowhere at all. Because ninety-nine
times out of a hundred it’s what does for people: they write down
their lover’s name, their controller’s or the number of their Swiss
bank account, and surprise-surprise, someone else reads it. Then it’s
all over – finito! But nothing – I repeat no-single-thing you write
down will you retain – while all you send me, my love, will be seered
into me, and then … seared. There’s a sort of poetry in this: you
need never feel you’re betraying anyone, because I don’t exist at
all. And if I don’t exist – well, we don’t exist eit
her, now do we?
No, they didn’t exist: not in the way that ordinary couples do: Have
you met Jonathan and Gawain, they’ve just moved into the neighbourhood
… ? They came into being purely in their fugitive acts of
love – summoning up the territories of each other’s bodies through
kisses and caresses – or in their midnight special phone calls, during
which they fantasised about all the things … we’d like to do. But, as
the years have passed, so it’s become harder to find phone boxes.
The Pickering one was decommissioned and its equipment torn
out – all that was left was … an empty shelf. The leather hinges
creaked as the wind blew down off the North Yorkshire moors – the
heavy, eight-paned door swung open, sucking out the smells of fresh
urine and rotten phone books, together with … all our fragrant
endearments. Jonathan bought them both second-hand mobile
phones – handsets which had untraceable sim cards installed and
were set up so they could only connect to each other. They weren’t,
Gawain thought, really mobile phones at all – more like the tin-can
telephones he and his sisters played with as children – and when he
sat in the Volvo, parked up in some forgettable lay-by, he felt
reassuringly tethered to his lover. But Jonathan was paranoid – he
spoke of scanners and interception. He constantly badgered Gawain
as to where exactly he was keeping his mobile. No! Locked in an
office drawer was insufficiently secure – didn’t he have a readily
accessible fridge? Or, better still, a deep-freeze to … cool our electroardour.
Every time they met in the flesh, Jonathan insisted on
changing up – as he termed it – and presented his lover with another
Nokia, Ericsson or Motorola, relieving him of the old one, which
was – for their purposes at least – already obsolete. To begin with,
they’d written to each other as well – both their return addresses
being rented boxes in obscure sub-post offices. Jonathan’s letters
were beautiful things, full of whimsy and lyricism – but they had to
be destroyed immediately after having been read. When emailing
became more widespread, Jonathan gave Gawain precise instructions
on how to create an anonymous account – not on his work or
home computer, though, but in an internet café, protected by its
anonymity. In Moseley or Moss Side, awkward in his civvies,
sat amongst curry-smelling young Asian men who tapped on
oblivious, Gawain poked his finer feelings into soiled keyboards. It
troubled Gawain – bothered him especially in the days leading up
to the deployment – that there was no record of their relationship at
all: no photographs of them proudly arm in arm – no love letters
scrawled with passionate entreaties, no envelopes stuffed with old
tickets – mementoes of the shows they’d attended together, and the
journeys they’d undertaken. Nothing. But when he whispered this
to Jonathan as they slumbered in the annexe of the Lastingham
Grange Country House Hotel – which can be easily accessed
unobserved – he’d only chuckled indulgently, Teddy Bear, what
matters is that I love you and you love me: we know this to the very
core of our being. All those silver-framed photographs gathering
dust on unplayed pianos – what’re they? Only the residue of
exhausted passions – whereas we, dearest, our love remains evergreen
and forever young. That there’s nothing to prove its existence
only makes it realer than the dull and solid world we inhabit …
Yes, the dull and solid world – what’d made him think of the arms
fair and that dreadful bout of diarrhoea? The dulling and solidifying
capsules, probably – two of them, broad-spectrum antibiotics the
medic back at Bovington had told him: will zap just about any
Delhi-belly going – granted, you’ll trot on for twenty-four hours or so,
but after that all the little wrigglers’ll be stony and you’ll stopper up
pronto … There were similar capsules in the medi-packs they’d all
been issued with when they deplaned at Shaibah, where, as they
awaited their movement order, one or two of the troopers did indeed
get the squits – but touch wood … he massages his own sweaty
temples … there’s been nothing too serious – no epidemic, although
the boys still have to be reminded at least five times a day to wash
their mucky little paws. Really, it isn’t Fiona’s love he feels the lack of
at all – but her people skills … She keeps her multiple of three in
line, does Fiona. And, as the years have passed, and her husband
has hauled himself, hand over hand up the chain of command, so
Missus Thomas has become more and more … commanding. In the
run-up to the deployment it’d been her quite as much as Gawain
who’d … licked the Rams into shape. As the SeeOh’s wife she was
expected to head-up that parallel structure of command, the Wives’
Club, but Gawain had seen plenty of army marriages founder on
this fact alone: why on earth should any young mother, raising a
family of her own, take on responsibility for this khaki, extended
one? The Ruperts and their Lucie Clayton girlfriends were bad
enough: time was when they simply got on with it – we all simply got
on with it … He doesn’t remember any griping or complaints during
his childhood: his own mother had simply got on with it … Missus
Thomas Senior had been loyal to her husband’s colours – following
remembers running around on the patch in Bielefeld – ringing
doorbells and then running … running away. What’d his mother
been up to? A nurse, she was working in the Krankenhaus – and she
never spoke of what happened there at all. Except for that one time,
mostly Missus Thomas had been a jolly sort of presence – he
sees her at the wheel of the family Beetle bombing down the autobahn
… laying out picnics by the Moselle … her with a glass of
honey-coloured wine … said she was drinking the river – we
all laughed, Fay and Jess and me, then she’d sucker-punched us all,
started going on about the boy – a squaddie had been brought into
the hospital in bits, she said: he’d got on the business end of a
machine-gun and been cut near in two. It was disgusting, Sister
Thomas had spat: the whole thing … the massed divisions of Brits
and Yanks on one side, the Soviet boys on the other – a children’s
crusade had been her precise words – but there’ll be no promised land,
only nuclear fire and radioactive brimstone … The Thomas family
were all speechless – sat there with slices of pumpernickel mounded
with the Heinz Sandwich Spread Granny Myfanwy sent from
Swanage. It’d only been years later that this coincidence had struck
Gawain: both his parents had been cut near in two by similar
incidents – his father in Aden, his mother in Germany. Maybe
this was why their marriage had also ended up machine-gunned to
death … Although that came years later: of his father during those
De
utschland days Gawain remembers little besides the Major
crying, Bring out the Bols! to the accompaniment of Barry White’s
chocolate tones … there’s only, only one like you – no way they coulda
made … two. The Major had built a plywood bar in the basement –
used a job-lot of tinsel for decoration, proffed a mirror ball, too.
They threw little parties down there, and Gawain remembers his
father slow-dancing … with that bald bloke’s wife, his hand hovering
over her big bum but never touching … The bald bloke was
EssAyEss, or so the Major said – why does Gawain remember this?
Because it was one of the few occasions in his childhood when
he’d been aware of the … wider picture. He’d never seen so much as
a uniform – although the Major took him into the workshop a
few times to admire his whirlybirds, which is what he’d called
them. It was his job to keep these exotic machines aloft – but when
Gawain saw them they’d just hunched there, their rotors limp
and floppy. Could anyone have anticipated what was to come? True,
the Major’s brownish hair had also been quite limp and floppy …
while for a serving officer – even in the early seventies – he wore it
suspiciously long, but still … Gawain knows where his father is
now: up there in the Black Mountains, squatting no doubt in some
soggy tepee and sucking on a … pipe of peace. Yet for a moment he
sees Derek Thomas plummeting from the aching-blue Iraqi sky …
incoming hippy! — There’s a squawk, a flutter – then the twittering
starts up again in the radiophonic aviary: Charlie One – Charlie
One, are you reading me? Can you give the oh-group the sit’ rep’
on your Scimitars … ? And Gawain hears himself – measured and
authoritative – reporting on the progress of the Bowman conversions,
secure comms being … pretty much fucking essential, now the
intel’ from Brigade is that the Iranians are teaming up with the Shia
militias … on our patch – ringing on doorbells … running away. But
Ali al-Garbi isn’t my patch, Gawain thinks – I’m like any army
brat, my patch is … wherever: Bielefeld, Cyprus, back to Blighty.
Derek got himself booted sideways into a desk job and, after a brief
Welsh sojourn, in the early eighties the Thomas family had settled
for South-coast suburbia … peeveesee trews and Holsten Pils. Gawain