With BB it was a totally different story. To keep his bulk he had to hit the weights non-stop and take supplements by the fistful. His day sack was filled with protein powder.
3
Mong began to ease himself up. There wasn’t a mark on him.
‘He’s full of shit, Mong. You know that, don’t you?’
He grabbed a fistful of sand and let it run through his fingers. ‘He still gets to me. After all these fucking years.’
‘What did he say this time?’
Mong looked away. He blinked hard, like he had sand in his eyes. ‘He came out with the wedding-photo thing. The cunt. He said I’d better keep checking.’
When BB targeted a married woman, it wasn’t about shagging her, or even liking her. It was about conquering her, and having one up on her husband. When he was pissed once he told me that every time he was in the new conquest’s home he always asked to see the wedding photograph. As soon as he was alone, he’d ease it out of the frame, grab a pen and write ‘J was here’ halfway down the front of the bride’s dress. If he was in a bit of a rush, he’d just scrawl it on the back, like a dog cocking his leg to mark his territory. If it was all going tits up, he’d say to her, ‘Go and look at your wedding pic.’
That hadn’t happened to Tracy. She was a Hereford girl who’d hung around with Regiment guys from the time she was seventeen. She and her sister had been trying to snag one for years. Why not? They got a house out of it, and a well-paid husband who was away for most of the year. For girls like Tracy, it was life as per normal, but with cash and security. She wasn’t mercenary, just realistic. And it meant that once she’d got Mong, she wouldn’t rock the boat. Apart from anything else, she really did love him.
‘Fuck him. You know Tracy wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole. How long have you two been together?’
‘Six years.’
‘So look on the bright side, you twat. You could have ended up with Jan. Fucking nightmare. You’d be changing the wedding photo every month — it’d look like an autograph book.’
He wiped sand out of his eyes and started to laugh.
Jan was the nightmare version of her sister. Tracy’s only failing was naïvety. While Jan’s head was full of shit, Tracy’s had room for nothing but fairies and happy endings. Before she met Mong she’d thought that meant she had to get her kit off every time she thought she’d found true love. It took her a while to realize she was just getting fucked and left to fend for herself.
Jan was a bit more cold and calculating. She knew she’d get turned over at frequent intervals until she stumbled across somebody stupid enough to take her on. Tracy had always been faithful to Mong. She didn’t belong in the Hereford meat market. But Jan had thought she could handle it; she thought she could keep moving from one man to the next unscathed.
I looked over at the NGO tents, a sea of smart blue and orange canvas hooked up to brand new generators.
BB had disappeared into ours, and the white Land Cruiser crowd had gone back to doing whatever they did. Not that they’d been much help. The NGO thing had always seemed to me to be about looking good rather than doing good. BB had missed his vocation.
4
Mong clambered to his feet and wandered to the water’s edge. I dropped my pacifier and joined him. ‘You’re a lucky bastard. You know that?’
He hesitated for a moment, then gave me a quick nod. He didn’t take his eyes off the scum that swirled across the sand in front of us.
‘I remember half of B Squadron telling you to steer clear of Tracy — but only because they wanted to have a crack at her themselves. They didn’t see what you saw in her. She’s in love, mate. And that’s with you, not with any other fucker. Just you.’ I pointed a finger at him like it was a bollocking.
‘You’ve got each other, that’s all that matters. Fuck BB, fuck ’em all. Just think how many of us’ve messed that up — BB included. They’re jealous of you two. We all are.’
He nodded again.
‘Why don’t you just pack up and fuck off out of Hereford? Why stay?’ In the film version of Mong and Tracy’s life that played in my mind, they would have packed up and gone to live where nobody knew them as soon as he’d left the Regiment. Like Shrek, but without the swamp.
Mong put up with a load of shit from BB, but a whole lot more of it was dealt behind his back. He was too big and fearsome for anyone else to say it to his face.
He shrugged. ‘Tracy wants to be near her mum and sister. She’s a family girl.’
I felt the corners of my mouth twitch into a smile. ‘No wonder they all think you’re soft in the head.’
He wasn’t. They were forgetting what he did for a living. And they mistook kindness for weakness. The stupid fucker was still sending cash to a woman he bumped into when he was in the Marines. He was at the checkout in Tesco one Saturday with three of his mates, each hefting a box of Stella, ready to watch the rugby. She was ahead of them, moaning that she couldn’t afford to buy nappies — one of the oldest cons in the book, but Mong was suckered. He paid for all the beer, paid for the Pampers too, and hadn’t stopped since. The baby had to be about twelve years old by now, and he was still sending her money.
Mong always had been a sucker when it came to kids. He was godfather to enough of them to make a football team. He and Tracy still hadn’t had kids of their own, and I was pretty sure that hurt. But it wasn’t something he spoke about, so I’d never asked.
Mong waded through the plastic bags and bottles and into the sea. ‘Nick?’ he shouted, over the roar of the surf.
‘I’m not washing your back.’
‘If anything happens to me — if I get dropped — you’ll look after her, won’t you?’
He made a bit of a meal of splashing his face in the water to avoid eye-to-eye. I knew it was difficult for him to be this emotional. Fucking hell, he wasn’t the only one.
‘Nothing’s going to happen, is it? Unless you spend too much time in your paddling pool with that lot …’ About twenty metres in front of Mong another three bloated bodies bobbed among the shit coming in on the waves. I nodded in their direction. ‘Otherwise the only thing that could go wrong on this job is that cunt ODing on protein powder.’
He didn’t laugh. He wasn’t in that kind of mood. ‘Everything’s good at home. I mean really. But the good stuff never lasts that long for me. You know what I mean?’
He got swiped by a tumbling body as he came out of the surf. He stepped aside with the deftness of a wing forward dodging a tackle. His clothes clung to him like a second skin. ‘Keep her safe, yeah?’
‘I already told you, mate, of course I will. But it’s not as if I’m going to have to.’
He gave his eyes another wipe as we walked back towards the tents.
I glanced across at him and was rewarded with a sheepish grin. ‘Fucking sand.’
5
Our tent was a four-man job we could stand up in, a minging old grey canvas thing that stuck out like a sore thumb among the Gucci Gore-Tex affairs with blow-up frames the NGOs lived in.
BB sat on an aluminium Lacon box that contained fresh supplies of food and bottled water. It had looked lonely outside somebody else’s bivvy doing jack-shit that morning so we’d decided to give it a home. We needed something to sit on and keep our kit off the ground.