‘Later,’ said Luke.
THE METROPOLE
He wouldn’t have said no point blank. Easier, and less judgemental, to drink your share and subtly dodge the pills. Most of his years in uniform had been spent artificially high or falsely tranquil, states that appeared, with hindsight, to mirror the campaigns themselves. He was the old dog now and in his mind he was easing towards the door. People would say it was all part of the general disorder to have smoked pot with the privates but such people don’t know the British army.
Another few drinks, then up to the darkroom. That was his plan. He didn’t want to bail too early but he knew as he sat there that his compass was set for the off. Listening to himself banter about the army and its characters, its duties and compensations, he saw again how much he had once wished to live like a good, sensible machine. But he’d failed at that. He wanted them to know the failure was his. There was no such thing as an ordinary life. He’d learned that from Anne and he learned it from himself. You can only live a life proportionate to your nature. And he was calm. He was getting there. He could imagine a future less taken up with loss.
‘With a drink in you, Flannigan, you’re an absolute pest to all people of the female persuasion.’ Luke said it as they walked down the promenade and Dooley joined in.
‘He’s even worse on E.’
There was scarcely a group of girls on the prom that Flannigan didn’t stop and ask for a light or the way to another bar, allowing Dooley to bring up the rear with his shorter presence, ogling away. A posse of lip-glossed girls in dangerous heels told them to shut up a minute and listen. What they wanted was the Metropole
Hotel, down at the end of the prom, open late, where they had a great karaoke bar and a disco.
‘Are you the shy, sexy one?’ said a girl wearing something debatably more than a bikini, tottering up to walk next to Luke, offering him the dregs of a Bacardi Breezer.
‘I’m their dad,’ Luke said.
‘Hey, slappers!’ she shouted at the group in front. ‘Wait for me and Dumbledore. We going up the Metropole?’
‘Yo, bitch,’ a girl in front shouted. ‘Get your skinny arse in gear.’
‘Is the place still open?’ Luke asked.
‘The Metropole never shuts.’
‘But isn’t it old people there?’
‘Oh, aye. Like wheelchairs. You’ll love it.’
‘And why would you want to go there?’ he asked.
‘Three answers: cheap drink, cheap drink, and cheap drink. Plus the oldies go to bed and there’s a fuck-off dance floor.’
‘Can I ask you a question?’ he said.
‘Go for it, soldier.’
‘Are those eyelashes real?’
‘Definitely,’ she said. Luke saw the waves rolling up and flattening on the beach, reflecting the lights, the hotel. ‘You don’t seem like a squaddie,’ she said. ‘They do.’
It was foldaway tables in a smelly ballroom. It was a handful of pensioners and a compère with a microphone, a tanned man in a nylon suit that came from another era. He was Scottish and he seemed delighted that ‘the young team’ had arrived and that the girls were already dancing. Luke went to the bar and came back with a tray of drinks. The Scouser was complete. ‘All I want is a big juicy pint.’ We’re on a big night out, he thought, the music
inside him, and these girls are definitely with us. ‘Give it here,’ he said, taking the pint and tanking half of it down. ‘I love beer, me,’ he said, putting down the glass and wiping his mouth. ‘I love beer and I love Blackpool and I could drink a barrel.’
‘Check him out,’ Dooley said. ‘He’s having it.’
‘I’m having it large,’ he said.
The bass was loud and it filled the room. They settled round the table and the girls came back and forth to have swigs from their bottles and to open and close their handbags and fix their make-up. Other groups of young people arrived and the wallpaper began to gleam. ‘It’s just bollocks,’ Dooley said. ‘They have a trial and these three NCOs get off.’
‘Who?’ Flannigan said.
‘The two sergeants and the corporal. Budgies.’
‘What?’ Luke said.
‘The Royal Welsh. These three guys get acquitted the other month. They were beasting a young lad and he died.’
‘It was a normal beasting,’ Flannigan said. ‘The boy was a tit. He was undergoing a reprimand.’
‘Fuck off, Flange. The guy was twenty-three.’
‘So what?’
‘So everything, you twat. The guy was twenty-three and got a bit pissed at a party in the mess. He fucked about with some office equipment and he got smashed for it. But it was too much. They marched him out the next day, it was thirty degrees Centigrade, and they beasted the kid until he had a heart attack. That is totally fucked up, man.’
‘If you don’t want a good rifting, don’t be an arsehole,’ Flannigan said.
‘This was on the news?’ Luke asked.
‘Yeah,’ Dooley said. ‘On the news. The adjutant captain told the three fucking bears, these feather-heads, the NCOs, to melt the kid out on the parade ground.’
‘Where?’
‘Lucknow Barracks.’
‘Right.’
‘It was over the top.’
‘Oh, fuck off,’ Flannigan said. ‘How many times have you been trashed up and down the mudflats, Sponge Bob?’
‘Not for hours in that heat. Not when it’s boiling outside and I’m still dehydrated from the night before.’
‘Dry your eyes.’
‘No, seriously, Flange. That’s fucked. The main guy who did it was the most hated dude in the battalion. A real fucken drill-pig with a hard-on for sprogs.’
‘He wasn’t a sprog.’
‘He was twenty-three.’
‘So what, our kid? That’s old. You do shit, you get beasted. My dad told me they once beasted him from arsehole to breakfast-time just for dropping his stick. So stop fucking moaning, and bring on the rums.’
‘The kid had traces of ecstasy in his bloodstream,’ Dooley said, turning to Luke. ‘He was off his tits when they were beasting him out there. Fucken animals. And the guys who did it get off because everybody thinks they’re a bunch of hard-asses who can do what they like.’
Flannigan was looking at the girls. ‘You can’t have a military without militarism,’ he said.
Luke put his drink down. ‘And you think they deserve the Victoria Cross for that, do you, Flange?’
The two just stopped in each other’s eyes, the younger man’s pupils so large and so ready for action, engulfed by the moment. Luke paused to see just how far he would go, but Flannigan was biting his cheek and he came back with nothing. ‘The boy was about the same age as the guy we lost,’ Luke said. ‘Remember him? The kid we lost in that stupid ambush? That’s a fucken life, mate. And when you don’t do the right thing and you rub out a life you’ve lost your decency.’
‘Captain.’
‘Just saying. That shit happens: you’ve lost your decency.’
‘All right, sir.’
‘Do you get me?’
They went quiet. ‘I’m just messing,’ Flannigan said. Then after a moment one of the girls came up to the table and pulled him by the arm. He looked up at the other men with a grin, and said, ‘I’m off my face.’
‘Go and dance, Flange,’ Luke said. Flannigan saluted and was never so much himself as then. It would be a long road for him, thought Luke. He was vulnerable, his friend, a veteran of bad dreams, made for toughness, inclined to ruin. ‘Away and dance, ya big daft bastard.’
‘We’re okay, aren’t we, Captain?’
Luke smiled. ‘Of course we are. Go and enjoy yourself.’ Flannigan shrugged and turned out his hands.