The Illuminations (15 page)

‘Well,’ Scullion said, ‘you’ve slept peacefully in your bed for fifty years.’

‘Peacefully? I don’t know about that, Charlie. Any peace we’ve had is because we’re not really thinking. If we actually understood what we were doing in the world we wouldn’t ever sleep again.’

Around midday, Scullion poked his head out the top of the Vector and spat down on the road. ‘Fucking A,’ he said. As they
moved up the track a flock of partridges scooted over the wall of an orchard. Scullion’s eyes followed the birds as they flew into a field and then a larger bird dived down to a puff of feathers. You couldn’t be sure of anything because of the heat and the way reality was bent by the temperature.

‘Hawthorn sixty-eight. This is zero.’

The radio was loud in the Vector and he could hear the boys crapping on. ‘Shut your gobs,’ he shouted down. ‘If it’s hot weather you want you should try Kuwait in July.’

‘What?’ asked Lennox.

‘Our fucken rifle grips were melting out there.’

He ducked back down and saw Captain Campbell sweating on the bench with his shirt off. It was a furnace and the heat’s weight was dragging down their eyelids, but Luke stared at the major with a face full of accusation. He couldn’t empty his mind of how Scullion had missed the ambush. It made him sick to think of it and he could still see the major climbing from the Vector after the firing stopped, that look, as if fatigue and horror had taken over at the end of a long march.

CULVERT

They came to a farmyard that was known to Luke. He hadn’t seen it before but it existed in his head, grey stone walls, a run of trees by the road and a covered ditch hewn from the farm into the field. A man and a small boy were walking away from the building and the boy carried a helium balloon on a red string. ‘That’s weird,’ Dooley said. The farm was bombed out and the boy didn’t look over at the soldiers.

‘The Yanks give them out to the kids,’ Scullion said. ‘Why the fuck are we stopped here?’

Luke watched the child going off, a large Disney princess in an aqua-blue dress floating above him. ‘I want these rifles clean,’ Scullion said. ‘Get your wire brushes out.’

‘It’s forty-eight degrees, sir,’ said Luke.

‘I don’t care if it’s the fucking
Towering Inferno
. I’m sick watching this section sit on its arse.’

Luke turned to the boys. ‘Open your kits. I’m taking a radio and we’re going to check out this compound. Okay?’ He looked back at Scullion. ‘You and me, sir. We’re going to check the safety of this shed.’

Scullion put on his helmet and raised his rifle and followed the younger officer into the farm. Rashid walked from the vehicle behind and Luke noticed his shirt was soaked in sweat. ‘It is okay,’ Rashid said. ‘This farm is safe, you can go in.’

‘And how do you know that, Rashid?’ Luke turned and squared up to him by the broken stones in the yard. ‘Would that be your fucken sixth sense or is it your priceless contacts with the enemy?’

‘This building has been cleared.’

‘By whom? Not by me.’

‘We have the surveillance plan.’

‘No, Rashid. Your head is a surveillance plan. I don’t fucken trust you as far as I could throw you.’ Rashid stepped back and put up his hands and shook his head like a professional.

‘We are the same rank. I will not be disrespected.’

‘No? Well, you can take your one beady eye and fuck right off over there, Captain. I am having a private meeting with Major Scullion of the British army. Fuck off, I said.’

The boys liked it. They liked his style. And they liked nothing
more than sudden anger directed at a local. They thought Rashid was all right but a bit of a crawler, and the captain’s way of sorting him out had them enthralled over in the Vector. Rashid just walked away and none of them turned their heads as he passed. When Scullion and Campbell went inside, the boys just fiddled with their rifles and then dropped onto the road. They started a game at the edge of the field with a few Royal Scots, playing football with some empty water bottles in a plastic bag.

There was chicken shit on the floor. Scullion flicked a gum wrapper and turned at the wall to look up at his young friend. ‘He’s one of us,’ he said. ‘You should be nicer to our allies.’

‘He’s irrelevant.’

‘A little keen, maybe.’

‘He’s got nothing to do with our section.’

‘He’s with us,’ Scullion said. ‘Mainly, he’s with us. And you can’t blame them for having maybe a … heightened sense of desecration, what, with everything that’s going on?’

‘It’s not the 1840s,’ Luke said. ‘And this is not your private army.’

Scullion made a show of listening carefully to him and then he walked to the far end of the room. Light came from the internal courtyard and he seemed to absorb the light and draw strength from it.

‘Listen, Luke. Are you homesick?’

‘Don’t make this about me.’

‘But, are you?’

‘I’ve been homesick all my life.’

‘Good. That’s a good answer. You’re an intelligent man and you should pay attention to these facts.’

‘I’m not your pupil any more.’

‘That’s right. Your contempt has run ahead of your wisdom. And you no longer have a use for me.’

‘This unit … this regiment has need of a senior officer in the field, sir, who does not absent himself during a major firefight. Can you explain yourself?’

‘As a matter of fact … I can’t.’

‘They said you fell asleep.’

‘I wasn’t asleep, Luke. I was in the Vector. I was on the floor of the Vector, to be accurate.’

‘And you decided it would be a good idea to leave a group of your own soldiers, average age eighteen, to survive and then recover from a heavily armed ambush by unknown enemy forces? You decided this was the best way to deploy your experience, did you? The best way to exhibit your leadership?’

‘I didn’t decide anything, Luke. I was frozen to the spot and that is simply what happened.’

‘You’re a fucken coward!’

‘So it would appear.’ Scullion didn’t flinch. He didn’t move. And as the seconds passed he seemed almost relieved.

‘I find that hard to believe.’

‘So do I. But it happened. Plain as that. I couldn’t move.’ He spat his gum onto the ground and looked at it. ‘Do you know how many countries I’ve fought in, Captain?’

‘I couldn’t guess.’

‘Just about all of them. Wherever we had a decent amount of hostility. And here’s my hand on my Northern Irish heart to tell you I was never scared in any of them. In fact, I was overjoyed.’

‘That’s what they say.’

‘You know the phrase, “They have blood on their hands”? Well, I have blood on my hands, comrade, buckets of it, all in the
cause of something good and something noble. Democracy.’

‘So you decide to launch your new career as a white feather just at the very moment when my boys are in danger? You leave them to a firefight in the dark, do you? Exposed on a hill? What the fuck is happening to you, Charlie? Are you losing your mind?’

‘I might be. It might be that.’

‘Not on my fucken watch.’

He sniggered. ‘Little Luke Campbell, who joined the army to find his daddy. Ends up confronting real-life danger and real-life fear. Shall I phone your mammy, Luke – get her to come up and turn your Xbox back on? Get you back to your nice wee world of video game combat, eh, my friend? Piling up the points. Topping the leader board. This nasty world of real people and unexpected turns doesn’t really suit you, does it?’

‘You’re sick, Charlie. That stuff with your wife has made you mental or something.’

‘Oh, we’re all mental. You think all this fighting was making me wise? Making me braver? Here’s the lesson, brother: it wears away at you; there’s less of you every day.’

‘There’s less of what?’

‘Less life. Less cause. Less morality. Less belief. Less judgement. Less energy. Less fucken hope. Just less. Know what I mean?’

‘You know what, sir: I don’t fucken think I do.’

‘Well, you should. Captain Sharp-as-a-Needle. Mr Up-at-the-Crack-of-Dawn. Where’s your fighting spirit now? It’s not just about me, all this. When you joined this regiment you wanted to police the world. What a sight you were. You wanted to arrest every bad guy with a mobile phone. No territory was too hostile for Private Ego and his wish to shape the future. That’s what made us friends. What happened to all that?’

The major’s words burned into him as they had in the days when he felt ideas could make him a better soldier. ‘Your private troubles,’ he said, ‘are threatening the lives of my men, and I won’t stand for it.’ Luke stepped forward and was up in the major’s face. ‘I’ll destroy you first. Soon as this mission is over, I’m reporting you.’

‘You’ve waited all your life for this, little Luke. I hope you’re enjoying your moment.’

‘The boys needed you …’

Scullion was shaking and blinking and as he turned sideways he put his hands under his armpits. ‘And I needed them. I did. But I wasn’t available and it makes me sick to my stomach.’ His face flushed when he said those words and he looked as if he might vomit on the farmhouse floor. He bent over, taking deep breaths with closed eyes, and when he looked up thirty years of humanitarian fatigue was on his face. He opened his mouth to say something but didn’t say it and then tried again. ‘I don’t sleep,’ he whispered, ‘and I may never sleep again. Those pills you gave me – I need more of them. I need to stop my insides turning.’

‘You need to leave, Charlie.’ They could hear the revving of vehicles outside.

‘I don’t think I can. They’ll have to kill me.’

‘Don’t be daft, Major,’ Luke said, suddenly younger again. It made him sad to see how willingly Scullion accepted blame. ‘The whole point of what I’m saying is you’re not fit for the boys. They need you. All your experience and what you have to offer.’

Scullion slung on his rifle. ‘All my experience,’ he said, laughing in Luke’s direction and twisting his mouth. ‘All my terrific experience and all the army’s experience, too.’

‘There’s life after this,’ Luke said. Then he turned from Scullion
and walked out of the compound, leaving him. He didn’t look round and just marched out through the door as if there would be a parade ground out there on the other side, a place of flags and proud families instead of a culvert spewing dirty water into a poppy field.

CONSTITUTION

When they weren’t on duty Flannigan called him Luke and sometimes Jimmy-Jimmy, a joke on his Glasgow accent. The two had got to know each at the barracks in Salisbury and grown close at Camp Bastion. Luke tended to look towards Flannigan for basic back-up. During the second day of the Kajaki mission, while the boys bantered in the moving Vector, Flannigan looked over and remembered what Luke had said after the fighting had stopped on the ridge. He said his father had died because of an ambush in Northern Ireland. He said he’d hardly known him but had always lived with the idea of his bravery. Flannigan saw how mortified Luke was by Scullion and the way he’d hung back from the action.

‘It doesn’t matter, lad,’ Flannigan said. ‘He was stoned and he’s probably not used to weed like that.’

Flannigan was ten years younger. He was clever in a way that had nothing to do with books. Like Luke, he was two guys, the guy in the van and the one in his head, but Flannigan had a stronger army constitution than the captain. He knew that great people often turned out to be rubbish and he thought it normal. That night up on the ridge, after the guns stopped, after the tracer went dead and the Apaches disappeared, the platoon stood around
in a state of mellow disbelief. The smoke still hung over the camp and the stars, good God, the crazy stars were out for real.

THE SOUNDS

The convoy had stopped again. It was an improved part of the road, so the sappers and ordnance guys didn’t trust it and were out checking for roadside bombs and tripwires. The boys in Luke’s group didn’t move when Scullion opened the passenger door and jumped down. Lennox had
Now
magazine down his shorts and was chuckling and saying something they’d heard before about a tattoo he wanted.

Luke was filling in a form. ‘What’s your Zap number, Lennox?’

‘LA104,’ he said, still laughing at his own antics. He pushed the magazine down further but made a serious face. ‘My last wish is to be buried with the Mondeo. Please make a note. You can drive it into the sea off the Ballygally Holiday Apartments. That’s where I was happiest.’

‘The Real IRA will do that for free,’ Flannigan said. ‘Though I think we’d rather hand you over to the Fundie Jundies. They will eat you and your Ford fuck-up live on the interwebs for everybody to watch.’

Lennox burped and made a face.

‘Stop crying, bitch,’ Dooley said. ‘You’ll get a funeral. They’ll say: “The ginger cunt was much missed by his comrades. Much saddened by his death but pleased as fuck to see the end of the plank’s shite car. They were also delighted never to hear another word about his moose back home who was stinging him for cash-money every week. Duracell dobber got her up the duff and the
whole family of lazy tink bastards screwed the benefits system for ever more. The End.”’