Authors: Hilary Bonner
‘So where did you walk from?’ he asked casually.
‘Hangridge,’ replied the boy, and then seemed to realise that he’d divulged information he had not intended to. ‘But I’m not bloody going back there, so don’t even think about it,’ he continued, so emphatically that for just a moment he sounded almost sober.
‘Hangridge,’ Kelly repeated. He knew about the place, of course. The isolated barracks built on a remote Dartmoor hilltop was the headquarters of the Devonshire Fusiliers and a major infantry training base. Farmers settled in moorland valleys, the army always chose hilltops. Hangridge was known not only for its bleakness, exposed by its geography to the most vicious of Dartmoor’s elements, but also for the toughness of the regime endured by the young recruits stationed there. But the Devonshire Fusiliers was an elite regiment with a proud history, and Hangridge’s training programme was designed to produce only top-notch professional soldiers. Idly, Kelly wondered how a Scots lad had come to join a regiment which he knew still drew around sixty per cent of its intake from Devon, its home county.
Kelly had been to Hangridge once, the previous year when his paper had sent him to cover an anniversary visit by the minor royal who was the regiment’s colonel in chief, but for a moment he
couldn’t quite place its exact location in relation to The Wild Dog. He attempted to visualise a map of Dartmoor. The pub was on the south side of the moor, on one of the highest points of the road between the villages of Hexworthy and Buckfast, just forty-five minutes’ or so drive out of Torquay. Hangridge was considerably further north, on the far side of the moor heading towards Okehampton. Kelly half closed his eyes, trying to measure the distances involved.
‘Shit, Hangridge must be almost twenty miles away,’ he said. ‘And you say you walked here?’
‘I yomped it,’ muttered the boy, suddenly exhibiting just a flash of the military pride for which the Devonshire Fusiliers were famous. ‘Came over the hills, didn’t I? Not sho far that way.’
He slumped into his seat again, the moment of near-erudite diction behind him, his legs thrust out before him. For the first time, Kelly noticed that his jeans were stained with mud almost to the knees and that his boots were also caked in mud. A damp parka lay in a pile on the floor over by the bar.
‘That’s still quite a march for a pint,’ said Kelly mildly.
Alan glanced around the bar before he replied. Kelly thought he seemed nervous.
‘I was heading for the main road. I was going to hitch a ride. But I was wet through and so bloody cold …’
Alan interrupted himself with a sudden bout of hiccups.
Kelly finished his sentence for him.
‘So you came in here. Where were you going on a night like this, anyway?’
‘None of your fucking business,’ Alan replied through his hiccups.
‘Fine,’ said Kelly, who had too much experience of drunks to be offended. ‘But you’ve had a few now, so why don’t I run you back to Hangridge. It won’t take long in a car.’
He was unsure of why he was prepared to go so far out of his way. After all, the barracks were almost directly in the opposite direction to Torquay. Was he just being kind, or was his generous offer prompted rather more by the curiosity he was already beginning to feel about this young man? Something did not add up, and Kelly could never resist even the hint of a good human riddle.
However, he had no time for further introspection. Alan reacted almost as if Kelly had hit him. He shot upright in his chair and would no doubt have jumped to his feet had he been capable of such sudden movement.
‘I’m not bloody going back there,’ he yelled at the top of his voice. ‘Nobody’s bloody taking me back there.’
Out of the corner of his eye, Kelly noticed the elderly couple whose quiet supper had been so disrupted sidling towards the door, still averting their eyes from the cause of the disruption.
‘For goodness sake, John,’ said Charlie, this time from the safety of behind the bar. ‘Get that damned kid out of here, if you’re going to. If not, I’m calling the filth.’
Kelly glanced at him balefully and did not bother to reply. The filth? Presumably, Charlie was referring to a possible visit from a patrol car out of Ashburton, which would now be highly unlikely to arrive before
closing time. And, in any case, one drunken kid hardly warranted a 999 call. In pub-land terms, the landlord of The Wild Dog did not know he was born. Kelly turned to Alan.
‘C’mon mate,’ he said. ‘You heard the man. You can’t stay here. And if I don’t take you back to Hangridge, where the hell else are you going to go?’
‘Anywhere I can sh-shtay alive,’ replied Alan, frowning with the effort of getting the words out. But at least he seemed to have stopped hiccuping.
Kelly chuckled. He was no stranger to alcoholic paranoia.
‘Oh, come on,’ he said gently. ‘It can’t be as bad as that?’
The young soldier made another huge effort to be lucid.
‘Not that bad? If you don’t fucking go along with everything out there, they fucking kill you.’ Alan made a cutting motion across his throat with the side of his right hand. He then allowed his arm to fall loosely to his side as if the effort of keeping it in any other sort of position was too great.
‘Sho, how bad’s that, then?’ he enquired.
Kelly grinned. He patted Alan on the shoulder and stood up. The boy really was out of it. Just a pub double or two away from the pink elephant and giant creepy insect stage, Kelly reckoned. Well, Kelly had never pretended to be a butch version of Mother Teresa. And he did have a novel to write. Or, at any rate, a date with his backgammon software.
‘If you won’t be helped, mate, then you won’t be helped,’ he said, picking up his glass and walking to the bar.
‘Can’t do anything with him, Charlie, short of
carrying the little bugger out of here, and I’m too long in the tooth for that game,’ he said. ‘So, it’s over to you. I’m off home.’
He raised his glass to drain the last of his final uninspiring pint of Coke when suddenly the young soldier rose unsteadily to his feet and with surprising swiftness crossed the bar and caught hold of Kelly’s elbow, jerking his arm and causing him to spill some of his drink down the front of his sweater.
‘Hey, steady on,’ muttered Kelly, caught off balance.
The boy swayed slightly and perched himself precariously on a bar stool, giving Kelly a dangerous sense of
déjà vu
. This was getting boring. It really was time he left.
‘You don’t undershtand,’ muttered Alan. ‘Nobody does. That’sh the trouble. Nobody listens. I’ve tried to tell people, you see – tried to talk …’
‘Yeah, yeah.’ Kelly had heard it all before. Different background information, same message. The poor persecuted drunk. The boy still had a grip on his arm. He attempted to shake it off, but Alan hung on all the more tightly. He was a strong little bugger for a drunk.
‘Don’t leave me,’ he said.
Dear God, thought Kelly. Don’t leave me? He’d only just met the lad, for God’s sake, and now he was on the receiving end of a line straight out of Mills & Boon. How did he always manage to get himself involved anywhere there was trouble?
‘Look, just let go of me, Alan, you’ll be fine,’ he coaxed.
‘No. No I won’t. They’ll get me. They will. And they’ll do for me, jusht like the others.’
The boy’s fingers were digging into Kelly’s flesh. This really was getting to be too much.
‘You’ve had a few drinks, mate, you don’t know what you’re saying,’ Kelly began soothingly.
‘Oh yes, I do.’ The boy spat the words out angrily. ‘I’m talking about Hangridge and why I’m never going back there. They’ve killed the others. They’ll kill me, I’m sure of it …’
‘Yeah, yeah, I know,’ soothed Kelly, desperate to get away now. ‘Just let go of my arm and we can talk properly, all right.’
The boy’s grip began to slacken. Then the pub’s ancient, oak, studded door burst open. Into the bar strode two men, one about Kelly’s height and build, without the paunch, and the other not so tall but thickset, his broad shoulders almost filling the doorway as he stepped through. Both were wearing oilskin jackets with the collars turned up and woollen hats pulled down over their foreheads. Water was dripping off them onto the floor. The weather had obviously not improved. The two men stood very upright as they glanced around the bar. Kelly thought at once that they too were probably soldiers, but although he could not see their faces well, he was aware that they were both considerably older than Alan.
The taller man wiped raindrops off his forehead with the back of one hand and pointed to Kelly’s companion with the other. ‘Thank God for that, there he is,’ he said.
Alan turned away from Kelly to face the two newcomers, so that Kelly could no longer see his face, only the back of his head. But he could sense him stiffen and saw his shoulders tensing, clenched shoulder blades suddenly prominent through his
sweatshirt. At the same time his grip on Kelly’s arm relaxed until his hand fell way, then the shoulders slumped and his whole body seemed to go limp. Kelly feared that recent history really was about to repeat itself and that Alan was going to fall off his bar stool again.
It was his turn to grab hold of the boy’s arm. Instinctively, he reached out a steadying hand.
‘You from Hangridge?’ Kelly enquired of the two men. There was no verbal response, but four eyes rounded squarely on him. Neither man made any attempt to reply.
‘Well, you’re mates of his, yeah?’ Kelly continued.
‘We certainly are,’ said the taller one. ‘He was seen heading over the moor this way. We’ve been searching everywhere for him.’
‘I’m glad you’ve found him, he needs looking after.’
‘Yes. I can see that. And thanks for doing your bit.’ The man’s words were extremely friendly, and he was smiling. But there was no warmth in him. Kelly, who – for an old hack – was surprisingly sensitive to atmosphere and other people’s feelings, felt that at once. They’re sick to death of this one, he thought, taking his hand away from the young soldier as the tall man came alongside and began to help the boy upright. The second, shorter, broader man also approached and took the other arm. But it was the tall one who seemed to do all the talking. He turned to Kelly and spoke again.
‘We’ll take care of him now, mate. Had a right skinful, hasn’t he? But don’t worry, we’ll soon sort him out.’
‘A few hours’ sleep, that’s all he needs,’ Kelly
began, but stopped speaking when he realised no one was listening.
Alan seemed to have returned to the worst of his drunkenness again and was dragging his legs behind him, barely even trying to walk, as he was more or less carried towards the door.
He made no further attempt to speak, but at the door he turned his head towards Kelly so that the older man could see his face for the first time since the arrival of the two newcomers.
The look in the boy’s eyes, as he stared directly at him, cut through Kelly like a knife. As a reporter Kelly had dealt in abject misery, had seen more than anyone ought to of death, destruction and man’s inhumanity to man. He had held on to weeping women who could not even bring themselves to talk about the beatings they had suffered at the hands of their husbands and lovers. He had watched men wage war all over the world, and commit appalling atrocities in the name of the various causes to which they were allegedly dedicated. He had seen what hunger, disease, and even just the daily drudgery of a mundane life, with no conceivable future, can do to people.
And he’d been launched many times himself into the terrifying heartlands of other people’s mindless mayhem. In Northern Ireland in the 1970s, based at Belfast’s famous Europa Hotel, which became the city’s media centre right through the troubles, he’d on several occasions allowed himself to be blindfolded before being driven by the IRA to interview its more murderous leaders at unknown locations. He’d been caught in crossfire more times and in more places than he could remember, and had once been
briefly kidnapped by revolutionaries in a remote part of Africa. That had been the worst of all. Kelly could still feel the parched dryness at the back of his throat along with the warm wetness between his legs when, confronted by machine gun-wielding thugs raging at him in languages he could not understand, he had involuntarily peed himself.
In fact, Kelly was as well equipped as any man alive to recognise what he could see in that young soldier’s eyes.
It was fear. Total and utter, abject fear.
Kelly continued to stare at the closed door of the pub for several seconds after the young squaddie and his unwelcome escort had left. In spite of the unexciting nature of his drink and the tedium of a pub which was now completely empty, apart from Charlie, he found himself rolling another cigarette and ordering another pint of Coke. The minor commotion caused by the arrival of the two men, and the extreme unease Kelly had experienced, had somehow destroyed his intention to make a move.
In addition, his stomach had begun to remind him that he had eaten nothing since his lunchtime scrambled eggs. Resolutely putting the incident of young Alan the squaddie out of his mind, after telling himself that he really had to stop letting his imagination run riot, Kelly concentrated his attention on The Wild Dog’s out-of-season weekday menu. To his relief he found that bread, cheese and pickles still featured, so that at least he could be saved from Charlie’s dubious microwaving skills.
The cheese was a decent enough Cheddar, and although the bread was definitely not as fresh as it could have been, Kelly wolfed the makeshift meal down.
One way and another, it was almost an hour later before Kelly finally decided to make his way home.
If anything the weather was even worse than when
he had arrived at The Wild Dog. This was a truly filthy night. A lashing of horizontal rain hit him straight in the face as he stepped out of the old pub. It was cold as well as wet. The easterly wind continued to gust ferociously, and there was now a hill mist, whipped into flying wisps by the wind, swirling around the car park. Kelly hunched his shoulders beneath his inadequate suede bomber jacket, and wondered why on earth, as it had already been raining when he had left his house in Torquay, he had not worn a suitable coat. He broke into a trot, bowing his head against the weather, pulled open his car door and half dived inside, grateful that he never locked the little MG roadster. Kelly had driven an open MG for years and he knew from experience that there was no point in locking that kind of car. Anyone who wanted to break in merely slashed the soft top.