there. He saw her mashed on a car bonnet, or her eyes exploded
into myxomatosis mush – and all … all … because her father was a
lying, cheating, perverted … sham – a lady who loves Milk Tray … a
chocolate soldier who’s … hollow … to … the … core. Did he still
love Jonathan – had he ever? They’d spent the vast majority of their
relationship … elsewhere, their love … if that’s what it is, was mostly
chaff – electronic interference. It occurred to Gawain – once …
twice … a thousand times a month – that in deceiving everyone
around them … we’re only fooling ourselves. Yes, they were fool’s
errands, their liaisons – a way for them to experience same-sex
relations without any fear of exposure: their romantic motto wasn’t
Amor vincit omnia but … mutually assured destruction. All it would
need was one instance of cack-handed tradecraft and … that’ll be it:
he’d come home from a hard day on the phone to find the stunted
apple tree in the front yard bowed down still more by its crop of
unseasonable fruit – while Fiona would be standing in their bedroom
window, chucking out more of his clothes while screaming: He’s a
fucking poof! My husband’s a fucking poof! And all these years he’s
been screwing a spook! So, every scrap of paper shredded – every
call record, text message and email deleted. To begin with it’d only
heightened the excitement of their affair – evenings, in front of
some sedative teevee, Gawain would suddenly clutch at his pocket,
terrified he’d forgotten, and that the back-lit lettering I-LOVE-YOU
was shining through its material. So he said it over and over
again throughout the years: I hate the idea – he stroked his lover’s
saturnine cheek and bestowed several light kisses on it – that if anything
were to happen nothing of us would remain. It’d be as if …
as if … none of it’d ever happened … Jonathan rolled sideways on
to his hip, and, in the sickening radiance of the low-energy bulb
affixed to the emmdee-eff headboard of some executive bed or other,
Gawain saw the smooth pale skin slip-slide over his lover’s ribs …
so very thin – yet so very strong: Oh, I shouldn’t bother about that,
Teddy Bear – he’d’ve groped for Marlboro and lighter … ‘cause he
always does – it might be fatal for common-or-garden
muck-spreaders, but that’s not our style. ‘Sides, I’m a professional, which is
why I’ve kept everything –. – Everything? Listening to his far-flung
colleagues … whistling down the wind, he recalls taking his lover’s
neat chin in his fingers, pressing his thumb into its … dear dimple
– over!, so summoning this troubling response: Yep, that’s right –
everything: every phone call and letter, text message and email,
going all the way back to that first note I sent you – you remember,
addressed to you in your capacity as Regimental Liaison? Gawain
remembered it perfectly well then – and can picture it clearly now:
the manila marketing envelope, its frosted window on a …. chillily
matter-of-fact morning, then his words – his hot, hot carnal words
tumbling from the waxen folds: Touching … holding … kissing …
Such joy! Never experienced before – you don’t seem to know the poem,
but you are my perfect knight, Gawain dearest – I believe utterly in
you – your chivalry, your chastity … You’ll stay here, locked up in the
citadel of my heart … I’ll split myself in two: half of me will go hunting
for meat for our table, but half of me will stay here in the castle with
you – stay with you and … in the fly-blown Portakabin a ghostly
hand lightly brushes the hairs on the inside of Gawain’s thigh,
glides upwards … tempt you – constantly, insistently … tempt you to
betray me … – You’ve kept that? Gawain’s had been the indignation
of the … patronised. How could you keep that note when I bloody
well destroyed it! – Oh, have you not heard of copies, my only
dearest one? Sarcasm always leavened Jonathan’s usual flat tones:
D’you not know ours is the age of the copy, the version and the
simulation? I’m surprised it hasn’t occurred to you before, given
your status as a … chocolate soldier melting in the high noon of a fool’s
bloody errand! So, he’d kept it all – but where? Where the fuck was
it, this … this … Large Data-set, because that’s what Jonathan
termed it: It’s all metrics and analysis now, Major Dick – everything
we can know is computable. I can analyse the meta-data of our
large and loving correspondence – the time and duration of calls,
the location of both sender and receiver – or I can examine the
content: your gruff little billets doux, with their oh-so-affecting
sign-offs: Cheers, Gawain … Your Friend, Gawain … even –
when you forget yourself in the formalities, my sweet spunky
sheep – Major G. Thomas, Acting Adjutant … Then, halfway through
December, the Rams were stood down: The fuckers! The dense,
stupid, idiotic … FUCKERS! It’d been a rare outburst from the
Colonel – heard only by his Two-EyeSee, Major Townshend,
known to his men as Townie … ‘cause he goes up there all the time –
but to his fellow officers – and his Sandhurst contemporaries
in particular – as Tizer, Big T, the Orange Drinker, The Frothy Man,
the Ring-Pull-meister. Tizer, who’d been top-dog for so long it
was inevitable he’d start … howling on the way down. Not then,
though – all he’d grunted was, You gotta getta grip, Greeny – to
which Gawain had snarled: It’s just a farce, Tizer, a bloody farce –
and the curtain hasn’t even gone up yet … Christmas came well
wrapped and left in tatters … The Rams, fighting unfit wheezed
out carols in the camp church, then … headed for the hills. So did
the Thomas fam’ cell: there was a hotel lunch in Crickhowell.
Grandad Derek took little Myfanwy on his lap – except that Derek
Thomas no longer went by that name, but rather styled himself
Uther and wreathed himself further in the Celtic Twilight by
wearing a purple velour cloak, with a woman’s white silk slip underneath
… said it was a kirtle, and strange hessian leggings … or
puttees he’d cross-gartered to above his … dandling knee. Your lot at
the right point in the rotation? he’d asked – taking, as he still did,
a keen interest in his son’s deployments: At the right point to join
the party, that is? And Gawain gave him the details he required –
‘cause it’s all da-da-details for military men. It was strictly against
orders – and in direct contravention of the OhEssAy, which Gawain
assumes he must’ve signed somewhere … along the way, but so
what? Who was Uther going to find to utter it to? How would
Jonathan have put it … ? Yes: Saddam’s spooks would have to
insinuate someone under the natural hempen cover of Big Sid’s
tepee if they wanted to catch Uther, the worse for his potty training
and … babbling away: Charlie Company was down at Caerfin in
November. Cla
wed ’em back – and now we’re all ready to go …
hung out to dry awaiting orders, Dad … And awaiting them some
more … And some more … A cartoon spider’s web is spun
between the pink tip of Gawain’s nose and the handle of his spoon,
as he sits at the breakfast table reading the report on the Prime
Minister’s speech: according to Blair the fresh intelligence is …
substantive, authoritative and compelling, while according to Jonathan
De’Ath it’s … secondary, suspect and almost certainly compromised.
Gawain hopes Blair doesn’t let his Christian conscience hobble his
messianic belief in his own destiny – he tries to talk about this
with Jonathan, but his lover has his limits, his boundaries, his …
lines of defence: No can do, soldier – I could tell you what’s going on
at the JayEyeSee – or up any number of Whitehall’s innumerable
and tightly coiled back passages … I could tell you, sure – but then
… He’d throttled Gawain’s semi-erect cock and lisped Russian-film-baddy
… I vooud haff to keel you! — Has Trooper Bessemer
been to see you, Gawain? Fiona had said at that breakfast … or
one very like it: Cheerios and toast, skimmed milk for the lonely
sclerotic heart … home is where the Hostess trolley is. When they
were first together, Gawain hadn’t altogether appreciated her
unfussy off-the-peg domesticity: job-lots of fixtures and fittings –
easy-to-wipe blinds and frumpy soft furnishings. Why would she’ve
had any better taste … than me – after all, they were both forces
brats, accustomed to picking up sticks every few years, so there
was no call for any homely tokens that couldn’t be portaged to the
next campsite. But, as the years had passed, and they’d been to
Germany … and back again, to Cyprus … and bloody back again,
so these never-ending rotations – an infinitely extended run of
their fathers’ end-of-the-imperialist-pier show – began to torment
him: for if you simply went round and around, again annagain …
well, you never actually got anywhere at all … He fixated on the
porridge-grey louvres hanging in the youpeeveecee frames of their
married quarters – he fantasised tearing the aluminium rods from
the stair treads and hurling them in her … tasteless fucking face,
because his true lover, while minimising his own home decoration,
nonetheless … knew how it should be done. Yes, if there’s one attribute
Jonathan De’Ath possesses above all others, it’s his succulent,
juicy, pink-in-the-middle … taste. Gawain had looked up from the
fanatically folded bed-block of his Telegraph: she was standing over
him, dumpy in a novelty apron printed with a caricature of a neater,
slimmer female form: bared breasts and a naked, neutered belly:
Why d’you ask, darling? he’d said, entering this endearment in the
double-entry account, so magically offsetting … a solid decade of
adultery … semper-fucking-Fi. Before she could reply they’d been
interrupted by Mark, who propped himself in the kitchen door
and said, I’m off now, Mum. Mark, who in the months and weeks
leading up to the deployment … needed me the most. He was at
that difficult stage in his development when a growing lad is on
the point of bursting into adolescence. Mark had stood then –
remains standing now, in the murk of his father’s mind, with his
soon to be spotty face … and my shifty eyes, standing, his tie yanked
down into … a hangman’s knot, his blazer sleeves rolled up, an
Adidas saddlebag bulging on his hip, a hand-me-down Nokia in
his hand … and what a childish strop he got into about that. He’d
been a figure-eleven target for fatherly criticism: You may be off
now, Mark, but I’m also leaving very soon – y’know that, don’t you?
The boy’s sandy lashes mine, too fluttered. Yeah, he’d said …
or surliness to the same effect, and his father blazed away: Well,
you should also know that were I to enter a combat zone with
your degree of personal hygiene and general readiness, I wouldn’t
last five-bloody-minutes! When Mark had gone, Fiona said, Do
you have to talk to him like that? And Gawain came back: I’m
simply telling him what’s what – he’s old enough to know. Yes,
indeedy – and old enough as well to hear SeeEssEmm Rowley’s
parade-ground screech: YeeouorribblefuckinlittlepieceofWelshshitThomas
Ifuckinhateyouyoulazyslovenlypansy! internalised twenty years since,
but still howling down the years. Fiona was washing up, so accompanied
her remarks with duff percussion: And tink-tonk Trooper
Bessemer, he’s clink-clank old enough to know, is he? – Know what?
Gawain had been back in the newspaper, which he only ever
read on a need-to-know basis, scanning anything which seemed
operationally relevant … His fiancée, girl called tink-tonk Carol,
came to see me … Yes, Gawain had thought: yes, of course she’d
gone to see the regiment’s … real SeeOh. Despite this professional
rivalry Gawain remained grateful to Fiona – grateful for her
mothering of all these lost boys … our own sons included. So
pathetically grateful that every time he’d cause for more gratitude –
which in the run-up to the deployment was a daily occurrence – it’d
stiffened his resolve: She will never, ever find out … Her husband
a sophisticated double life. Fiona had pressed on: Any-tink-way,
she’s a tonk sensitive clank soul, this clink Carol, and she wants to
do right by her trooper. She’s fallen pregnant, you see … An odd
expression – whenever Gawain heard it, he’d see in his mind’s eye a
tiny Missus Icarus in a Mothercare smock, with melting Fisher-Price
wings, tumbling out of … a Clearblue sky … and she doesn’t
know what to tell him before he heads overseas. Standing, folding
his paper, grasping the hem of his tunic and yanking it down …
I am the very model of a modern major-gen-er-al! Gawain had said
words to this effect: Really? I’d’ve thought she’d be keen to let him
know – nothing better than impending fatherhood to make a man
mind his back in a war zone. – Except he isn’t a man, is he, Greeny?
… Fiona would wheel out the nickname whenever she wanted to
make a serious point – why? Because she understands that, while
Gawain-the-man may be emotionally absent, Greeny-the-Ram is
always … operationally present: They shall not return to us, the resolute,
the young … He’s a boy, and this Carol knows her boy well enough –
knows he isn’t likely to cope with the truth. – The truth? What
truth? – The truth that she isn’t carrying another little Bessemer …
What’d been the upshot of this unscheduled Regimental Parents’
Meeting? Sat staring at the Iraqi bint’s preposterous minge, Gawain
reflects: parenting has always been a major component of any
SeeOh’s job in peacetime – quite possibly the main one. And in
time of war, what kind of parent was he becoming? One who
sent his much loved children fo
rward to be torn apart by a camel’s
head exploding through the un-armoured chassis of their Land
Rover … abusive – an abusive parent. And if they knew his truth –
that he was queer? Why, to these lads it’d be as bad as their finding
out their SeeOh’s a nonce – a kiddy-fiddler … a paedo … deserving of
petrol-soaked rags through the letter-box … It was the son wot he done
it to … Yes, I’m an abusive parent and a hands-on dad, Gawain
reflects, staring at his hands sunbursting on the vinyl blotter, which
in turn rests on the metal desktop. One of the containers they’d
dragged all the way from the aypod turned out to be half full of
office furniture. The sign on the tailgate read KEEP BACK! ONE
HUNDRED METRES! WARNING! in both English and Arabic – why?
‘Cause if you’re dumb enough to pull up to my bumper, baby, in
your dirty-white Toyota pickup, we’ll riddle your stinking knobblyrag
‘ead with point-seven-six-five rounds … You touch our office
equipment and you’ll be wrapped in your shroud with a ball of hard-packed
earth under your near-severed head, ready for planting
before the first call to prayer, so help me, Allah! Yes, a hands-on dad
who’s been keeping an eye on Bessemer: Everything all right,
Trooper? Bat ears – burnt face fatty-greasy bacon beneath the camo’
netting – larking about, he was, ‘til being surprised by the SeeOh:
Everything all right, Trooper? His playmates, the gooey ends of …
lollipops poking from their chapped lips, flies in their eyes … stop
goosing Bessemer as Gawain comes up. – Sir? Eyes front, expressions
sniggerserious, eyeing their SeeOh, who stands before them,
legs slightly parted, beret at an exact thirty degrees to the … sandy
horizon of my own brows, one thumb tucked in webbing belt, the
other precisely aligned with the butt of his nine-millimetre Sig
Sauer … ally as I’d be in my Guccis: there’s a bit of the dandy in all of
us, eh, Rodders. Making sure you’re getting enough fluid down you,
lads? Plenty of wets – helps with the heat. Those rehydration salts in
your field packs – they’re pretty much essential in this heat … It’s
only oh-seven-hundred but under this water-tight tarp’ of concern,
Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas is … melting, his underpants are