‘It’s a busy life,’ said Luke. ‘Smoked haddock.’
She giggled, took a sip. He noted a certain fierceness about her, the pursed lips, the eyes. He could tell she wanted to get close to him by having an argument. Families do that. But he’d been away a while and wasn’t sure he could face it.
‘Aren’t you proud?’ she asked.
‘Of what?’
‘Scotland.’
‘I know we’re supposed to feel proud. But maybe we ought to earn that feeling.’
‘You
have
earned it.’
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘Everybody feels proud, Luke.’ She drank nervously from her glass and put her elbows on the table.
‘Before we get totally leathered on national pride,’ he said, ‘maybe we should first work out how to be proud of being in the human race. I would like that. I would like that first.’
‘You were fighting for your country.’
‘I was fighting for Flannigan and Dooley. For Lennox and Scullion. Is that a nation?’
‘Your friends? It kind of is, Luke.’
‘There’s no nation, Mum. There’s only people surfing the Net. People like your husband sending cod in parsley sauce to people in France. And the money pouring into your life via PayPal. And every person imagining the world as he wants to see it, just like the guy in the turban behind the wall with an explosive vest who thinks he’s going to Allah. He thinks he loves his country, too. And he thinks his country is being exploited. And he thinks his pals are a nation.’
‘You don’t believe that, Luke. You were brought up in a country with traditions and you loved them.’
‘It’s a game, Mum. A great game. We only believed in it for as long as it lasted. I love my country for its hills and its inventions, not for its sense of injury, not for its sentimental dream that’s there nobody like us. I’ve been out in the world and I can tell you they’re all bloody like us: desperate and tired and fighting for a way into the modern world. I don’t know what convinced you that building walls would make you better inside.’
‘You’re on the wrong page. It’s changed. This country has a flag!’
‘Dump the flags and the drums and the pipes. They’re for the museum. Like all the junk of all the nations.’
‘Those countries you’ve fought in want to kill us. Those people hate civilisation.’
‘Oh, Mum. Stop reading the
Daily Mail
The band of people who want to kill us are just psychopaths and criminals. They won’t last. And they’ve never even heard of Scotland. Jesus, those
people couldn’t point to their own country on a map.’
‘But you can.’ She went on to tell him he was rootless and cynical. It was a nice conversation, hopeless, going nowhere, but full of the possibilities they each denied. They came alive arguing with each other and so did the country.
‘I might be rootless,’ he said, ‘but I’m not cynical. I love improvement, but I can tell you it doesn’t often arrive in a tank.’
‘Well, remember where you come from,’ she said, ‘if you care for improvement. That’s what we do up here. That’s what we’ve been doing for years now.’
‘Don’t rest on your laurels.’
‘You come from here, Luke.’
‘Do I? I come from here? A person might come from lots of places at the same time and a young person’s sense of humanity won’t confine itself to Dundee.’
‘Oh, Luke!’
‘Don’t Oh-Luke me. Those people in Afghanistan are poorer than you could ever imagine, and they can’t read the books containing the words that they’re willing to die for. But the biggest armies in the world can’t stop them imagining. That’s the truth. They want their tribes and they want their enemies. And so do we.’
‘Oh my,’ she said. ‘Some nations are decent, Luke, and if they want to spread that to backward places then it’s worth it.’
‘Decency?’ Luke said. ‘Do you know why I’ve been drummed out of the army, Mother? Do you want to know exactly? Because my group went into a village where there was a wedding. A small village. People preparing food and playing games and looking after goats. And we were led into a trap but we massacred the whole fucken lot of them. We sprayed them with bullets. We
weren’t even supposed to be there. It wasn’t part of the mission. But we killed them all. Some of those boys were no more than thirteen or fourteen.’
‘I’m sure you—’
‘Don’t be sure, Mum. Don’t be. I was out of my fucken head.’
‘Don’t swear, son.’
‘It was a slaughter in broad daylight. We were smoking spliffs. We were listening to heavy metal. Scots boys. Irish boys and others. All from proud nations. All from freedom-loving nations with statues to philosophers. And then we went into this village …’
‘Son.’
‘No. It was chaos. You want decadence? You want rootlessness? Come to Bad Kichan. I could’ve fired bullets into every building. Into the lady in the wedding dress and the old men and the animals, too. All of them. Just blood. Just the enemy. I didn’t know if I was firing for decency or just gaming. It wasn’t real to me and it’s not real to anybody. So. That’s what I’ve been doing on my holidays, Alice.’
‘Good Lord.’
‘Don’t talk to me about proud nations. That was me. Spreading decency to the world because we have so much to spare.’
‘Oh my.’
‘I’ll never put a uniform on again.’
‘No.’
‘I shamed it and it shamed me.’
Alice was remembering how Sean was the same. He started off believing in all sorts of things for Ireland and by the end he thought the players were part of the same rabble. Maybe it was just hard for soldiers to keep faith. But if Gordon was here he
would put Luke straight on a few things. Nationalism was the way to live in a small country. England had been in charge for long enough and look at the mess they’d made.
‘One of our own boys got killed,’ Luke said. ‘A boy from Dalgarnock. Aged twenty-one.’
‘I know. We saw it on the news.’
Alice slowly shook her head and eventually the mussels came and she ordered more wine. She dipped a piece of bread in the bowl, tasting garlic and herb butter. Being in the Rogano made Alice feel part of something elegant. Gordon might bring her here for St Andrew’s Night and he knew the chef from the markets and was trying to tie them in to an online shop. Luke went outside and when he came back she saw something weary in his handsome face. For the first time, she saw how he might look when he was old. It was a shock, really, because she had never seen his father old. Sean was twenty-six. ‘You still at the smoking?’ she said.
‘I’ll shake it,’ he said. ‘I always start again during a tour. Just being with the boys. They all smoke.’
Alice didn’t know why she needed courage to pat his hand. ‘They said on the news it was drugs. They said the soldiers were smoking drugs.’
‘It catches on. I mean, the boredom. And the Afghans smoke it all day and all night. The boys are like nineteen.’
‘But the major, he wasn’t nineteen, was he? And the newspapers say he was worse than any of them.’ Luke knew there had been stuff in the papers but a public hearing was unlikely.
‘Mum. Just leave it.’
But leaving it just wasn’t Alice. Luke could hear the vague, distant pleasure in her voice as she said the things he didn’t want
to hear. ‘But you’d think a man that age — I mean, practically my age — would know better than to smoke that stuff and then go into a place …’
‘Mum.’
‘… taking boys who can’t see what they’re doing in that state and it was children at a wedding.’
He couldn’t help it but his teeth were gritted when he said it and he felt the heat in his face. ‘Fucking. Stop. Talking,’ he said and he stared hard at her. There was always something weird about Alice’s make-up, as if she didn’t really believe in make-up and was trying it on.