‘Giving shape.’
‘Knowing what’s behind appearances,’ Luke said. ‘That’s the photographer’s gift and you have that and it’s a wonderful thing.’
She pecked like a chicken and gave a kiss to the air. ‘We knew the right thing to do with the shells and that’s why we’re pals, why we’ve always been pals,’ she said.
‘And plates,’ Luke had said. ‘You brought those bits of broken plate with the tiny blue patterns and the plates had been washed in the sea for a hundred years or … just fragments. Tiny bits. But I used to imagine them as whole plates laid on a Victorian table with a family sitting down together.’
They looked at each other. He knew he’d be off to Helmand in a few days and wondered if she’d ever be the same again. She raised a finger as if he had finally struck a chord. ‘I could take a picture of that dinner you’re talking about and you could help me,’ she said.
‘I’d love to. Will we do that? Will we get out your cameras and make a brilliant picture?’
Luke lay in the heat of the Vector and wondered why his mother and his grandmother had never clicked. His gran had made too much of the men in their lives, and so had he, and he began to see it as a form of harassment that had affected his mother. Yet he and Anne were friends. He lay back mulling it over and tipped into the kind of sleep where ideas feel like revelations until they slip so easily away.
THE RIDGE
Private Flannigan always set out his tent like a perfectionist. Mosquito net, maggot bag, folded corners: a big lumberjack of a guy pressing down his little corners. He was a born soldier. ‘What’s happening?’ he said when Luke appeared in the camp rubbing
his hair. The captain was carrying a book and he leaned on an old stone wall.
‘Nothing much.’
‘Did you get the head down?’
‘A few zeds, aye.’ Luke began to smile when he saw the delicate way Flannigan was handling his kit. ‘Hey Flange,’ he said. ‘Is this you preparing your evening
toilette
?’
‘Bite me,’ Flannigan said. There was evening primrose in the cracks of the wall and Sergeant Docherty was scraping off a sample for his collection. He was also finishing off an argument, just as Luke came in. ‘They thought they were going to get Belgium in two years,’ he said. ‘Turns out they might get Bangladesh in thirty.’ The boys took the piss out of Docherty for being a square-bear and being pussy-whipped, but in secret they admired him, at twenty-six, for what he knew.
‘Oh, look,’ Major Scullion said. He was sitting on a petrol drum. ‘It’s the fucken sleeping beauty. Want a brew, Captain?’
‘No, I’m fine. Thanks.’
Scullion had the menacing look. And he never made anybody tea. ‘While you’ve been lying in your wank-pit, Captain Campbell,’ he said, ‘the boys and I have been arranging a party. A very private party, you understand. Private Lennox here, of the small stature, the ludicrous complexion and the ginger nut, has procured for the purpose of our evening entertainment a bag of the old Afghan sweet stuff.’
‘Dead on,’ Lennox said. ‘Proper clackie, so it is.’ He kicked the cement bag full of weed over the ground to Luke.
Another of the men in the platoon, a Paisley boy, chuckled like a monkey and peered with his mates over the top of a neighbouring tent. ‘Fuck sake, sir,’ he said, ‘you don’t even need cigarette
papers. Just spark up the end of that bag and ye’ll be toking a Superking.’
‘Be quiet, McKenna,’ Luke said.
‘Yeah. Shut it, McCrack-Whore. The captain here’s just getting his shit together after a small constitutional.’
‘That’s a walk, Doosh, not a sleep,’ Flannigan said.
‘Who cares? The captain will be joining the party in jig time. So fuck off, McCrack, and get on with unrolling your farter. And fuck off, Flange, with your
Oxford English Dictionary
.’
They were talking about food. It was usually girls or cars or watches or gaming, but tonight: food. Dooley’s girlfriend sent him packets of Super Noodles and a box of Dairy Milk and it made him glad he was marrying her because she knew the score. ‘Remember American Night?’ Lennox said. He was talking about the Thursday cookouts at Camp Shorabak when the Americans would pitch a scoff-house between the tents. ‘Gatorade. Chicken wings,’ Lennox said.
‘Beef jerky,’ Luke said.
‘That was proper plush,’ said Lennox. ‘You’ve never seen so many fucken rashers. American Night. I fucken love America. They’d have like Hershey bars and M&Ms to kill. Mounds of them. I’m talking chicken and beef motherfucker and those MREs falling off the truck, Meals-Ready-to-Eat. They were super-plush.’
‘And films,’ Dooley said.
‘That’s right. Lethal with the films. I love America. Stuff that isn’t even on at the cinema for like a year.’
‘Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream,’ Flannigan said. ‘Buckets of it. How do they even get that stuff over here?’
‘It was the same in Iraq,’ Dooley said.
After an hour it was dark except for lights in some of the vehicles. The reefer glowed orange as it went round but it was the moon that picked out the ridge and the low buildings along the track. Scullion said a few fires in the distance were oil-drums burning in Ghorak, nothing sinister, just elders playing chess probably or Terry twisting wires and making their wee roadside contraptions. ‘That’s the thing,’ Scullion was saying. ‘You all think you know the terrain ’cause you’ve seen it playing video games.’ Half his face lit up as he smoked the joint and sniggered. ‘But don’t give me points man; give me a body count any day.’
‘Same,’ Lennox said. ‘I came here to get my fucken gun on, not to sit watching hexi-telly.’
‘Speaking of which.’ Dooley bent down and lit the Hexamine tablet on top of the low stove. Quickly it burned blue and the boys all gave a whistle and some of them asked for whoever it was to hurry up with the joint. ‘You’re all going blind,’ Lance Corporal McKenna said as he walked into the camp. ‘Between staring at the hexi-telly and playing with your dobbers, you gimps will soon be applying for invalidity.’
‘We’ll have to join the queue,’ Flannigan said. ‘Behind all the pikey horror-pigs in your family.’
Luke just watched them. Scullion was right. Younger soldiers often thought they knew the battleground; they saw graphics, screens, solid cover and fuck-off guns you could swap. It wasn’t all they saw but it was part of their understanding. They saw cheats and levels, badass motherfuckers, kill death ratios, and the kinds of marksman who jump up after they’re dead. Luke knew they all struggled, from time to time, to find the British army as interesting as its international gaming equivalent. They had run important
missions with their best mate from school and called in air support, over their headsets, from some kid in Pasadena they’d never met, some kid like them in a box-room. They’d beaten the Russian mafia with the help of club-kids from Reykjavik and bodyboarders from Magnetic Island. They’d obliterated the
A-rabs
They’d topped the board. They’d stayed up all night smoking weed and drinking huge bottles of Coke and ordering pizza before they cleared the civilian areas. The boys wanted action. They wanted something real that would become the highest level, the one they couldn’t reach on their consoles back home.
‘If they’re gonna hit us, I wish they’d just hit us,’ Lennox said.
‘Maybe it saves lives,’ Scullion said. ‘The war in Ireland might have ended sooner if those wee Provo kids could’ve blown up chip shops on screen.’
‘No, sir,’ Flannigan said. ‘It’s recruitment. I’m telling you. That’s the big new thing about it. Gamers are ripe. They’re fucken jumping to get out and stretch their legs. Every guy in this regiment has served time on