‘Of course, love! Away you go and enjoy yourself.’ She gave him a shove and took a gulp from her glass. ‘A young man like you should be out causing a rumpus on a night like this.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Away!’ she said. ‘I’ll make up your bed in the darkroom and you can just climb in later. Away and do your thing. You don’t have to pass the evening with blob-mouths like us! We’ll look after Mrs Blake and get her up to bed.’ He looked at Anne and actually saw her contentment, her sweet attention, float in the air of the room without quite landing anywhere.
‘It’s nice here, isn’t it?’ she said.
SPROGS
Flannigan was standing in the Washington. He’s one of those guys who knows how to be good-looking as he waits at a bar. It’s the stance, the confidence, the all-round readiness with the glad-eye and the lip. Luke stood at the door and shook his head at the whole performance. ‘Is that an AK-47 in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?’
‘Hey, dickwad,’ Flannigan said, going for the shoulder hug. ‘You’re even uglier than you were in the sandpit, Captain. How’s it shakin’? And I thought you only went to the classy places.’
‘I do. This is old school.’
‘It might be old school but it’s full of losers. Look at the state of that fucken disaster over there.’ He pointed into the corner of the pub where Private Dooley stood grinning by the jukebox.
‘Of all the chairborne motherfuckers in the history of the British army, if it isn’t our own Captain Campbell.’
Luke walked up to him. ‘Fuck sake, Doosh,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know you were coming.’
‘No. We kept it on the down low. I only emerge from the chat-room when I know the real Neanderthals are coming out. So when he told me it was Blackpool, I said “What! Awesome. This boy’s getting on the first Ryanair out of here.” So what you drinking, you lightweight?’
He ordered three pints. Three whiskies.
‘I’m insisting on Irish,’ Dooley said at the bar. ‘None of your fucken sheep-shagging Highland cheeky water tonight.’
‘Listen, dude,’ Luke said. ‘I know you live on the other side of refinement, but everybody knows Scotch whisky is unsurpassed, so suck it up, bitch.’
Flannigan laughed and nodded to Dooley. ‘Oh, we’ve missed the old brain-box, haven’t we, Doosh?’
‘Fucken A,’ Dooley said. ‘You’ve left us with the fucken horror-pigs, man. I’m talking shite hawks.’
‘The other side of refinement!’ Flannigan said. ‘You crack me up, Jimmy-Jimmy. It’s all tossers in the platoon now. We left all the education in a pool of piss in Kajaki. Fucken lady-boys giving it Super Mario on their da’s old mobile. I’m telling you. Boys about thirteen they’re sending us. Miserable as fuck at the base since you and the major fucked off to join Destiny’s Child or wherever the fuck you’ve been.’
Luke noticed Flannigan was now wearing a fancy watch, the same as Dooley. They clinked pints. ‘Get your big fat gypsy lips around that, Dooley,’ Flannigan said. Dooley drank then rolled up his sleeve and revealed a new tattoo. He said he and Flannigan and Lennox got them in Dubai on the way back and it was the most painful one he ever got. Luke leaned in
and Flannigan also rolled up his sleeve. It wasn’t a very typical tattoo, but it was identical on each of them: a short ridge of mountains and a bird above the summit with extended wings, the bird showering down heavenly light and the words ‘Free Afghanistan’. Luke wondered if everything in life was about the image you were left with. Nothing might change on the ground but the movie could be made and the pics could whizz into cyberspace. The turbines at Kajaki would never leave their wrappings but these young men would carry these pictures to their graves.
‘Very nice,’ he said.
‘Here’s to it,’ Flannigan said, lifting his glass. ‘And good riddance to all the bullshit.’ They battered through several rounds, talking about the regiment and what they’d been doing since the tour. They all avoided it for a while and then the business of Scullion came up.
‘I think he was a mess going into it,’ Flannigan said. ‘Like, fucken totalled in the brain. He gave Rashid the baton and that guy was one turncoat motherfucker from the off. You could see it in his one good eye: ANA my arse, he was Terry, bitch, and riding hard for the biff, bang, pow. Remember? Remember his face all kissy to the major, but underneath, man, he was plotting the whole time to fuck us right up. Rashid, man: to him it was open mic night at the Hotel Taliban. It was, as well. And he threw the whole fucken section into the mosh-pit.’
‘Not just us,’ Dooley said.
‘He had them watching us for miles.’
‘The boy from the Caledonian …’
‘Miles, man.’
‘The boy he shot.’
‘Fucken radioed ahead, didn’t he, Rashid?’
‘It was a day out, man,’ Flannigan said. ‘The fucken white rovers and the heavy metal. It was a day out. You could never have known it was going to be an ambush.’
‘Stop,’ Luke said. He was still nodding after he said the word and put down his whisky. ‘It was a massive fucken error. A massive fucken error, do you hear? I knew the major wasn’t stable. And I knew I wasn’t fucken doing that well, either. And we were your superior officers. And the whole day and the whole fucken next day was bad shit from beginning to end. The boy’s dead and those kids in the orchard are fucken dead, too.’
‘Captain …’
‘We can’t fix it.’
Dooley waited a moment and then the all-nonsense version of his life kicked in and he smiled. ‘I just want to clean my gun, Captain,’ he said.
‘Good on you, Doosh.’
‘I’ll never forget it,’ Flannigan said. ‘Remember the way the major shot him through the eye?’
‘He was dead by then,’ Luke said.
Dooley spun his empty glass on the table with a finger. ‘Was it the good eye or the bad eye he shot?’
‘They were both bad,’ Flannigan said.
‘I’m not so sure,’ said Luke. ‘He saw plenty we couldn’t see.’
The privates were young enough to allow every military event to embolden their spirit. That was all. To them, the captain was a defeated man, but they wouldn’t show it: they loved Jimmy-Jimmy. More than any test at home, more than any big event in their own lives, the events on the way to Kajaki would define for them what it means to have your courage measured
and tested against other men. They had grown sure in their hearts that they knew more about real life. The captain was now adrift in the civvies’ lightweight world, so the night was about nostalgia, and that was fine. It was what the two soldiers had expected. ‘He’s never coming back,’ Flannigan said when Luke went off for a minute.
‘What, from the bogs?’ Dooley said.
‘No, you dickwad. To the army. He’s moved on, lad. He’s not coming back and that’s it.’
‘Wish it was me,’ Dooley said.
‘No, you don’t.’
Three pints. Three rums.
‘Christ on a bike, Jimmy-Jimmy. Rum! Have you gone and bought your sailor whites and joined the fucken Andrew?’
‘Bite my todger, Flannigan.’
‘They will, man,’ Dooley said. ‘The Andrew, the British navy. They’ll chomp off your birthday sausage and spit it into the English Channel.’ He leaned over to clink glasses again. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get debaucherous.’
‘Debauched,’ Luke said.
‘Whatever.’
They drank in silence for a moment and then Dooley stuck his hand in his pocket and produced a bag. ‘E, anyone?’
‘Shocking behaviour,’ Flannigan said. Then he poked his fingers into the bag and took out two pills. He swallowed one immediately with a mouthful of rum and the other he slid into the breast pocket of his jacket.