The Illuminations (10 page)

‘Air cover?’ he said.

‘Air cover coming in,’ Bosh said. ‘The Yanks are on it. Ops says stay up high: they’re going to scoop the valley and fill it with cannon.’ The men of 5 Platoon were firing and reloading and Luke heard barks of excitement as they shouldered the wall and poked their bang-sticks over the top. A single shot came whizzing over their heads and fucked into the side of a truck, which sent them wild. They were shouting and swearing and pushing at the wall. ‘Over there! Fucking Terry cunt at eleven o’clock. Doosh, get down! Get fucken down! You can see his fucking rag, man. Flange. In the gap to the right. Go for it. Smash the fuck out of him!’

Docherty at some point came up behind Luke and told him he
thought the major was pretending to be asleep. He was inside one of the vehicles, crouched down.

‘What? Are you messing with me?’

‘He’s in the Vector.’

‘What you talking about? Get him out here: he needs to direct this shit and support the boys.’

‘He threw up.’

‘Are you fucken having me on, Leper?’

‘No, sir. He’s not well.’

In seconds the boys would notice. Luke knew they would notice and he feared their bottle might collapse if they heard the major was hanging back in the van during a fire-fight. Yet he knew something was wrong with Scullion and he’d felt it since they left Bastion. ‘Holy fuck,’ Luke said. ‘Am I medicine man to the whole platoon?’

‘Let’s cover for him, boss,’ Docherty said. ‘It’s a bad week for him and we can easily cover it.’

‘What is it, his fucken period?’

‘It’s going to be fine here.’

‘Is it? I don’t know what bins you’re looking through, Docherty. But mine tells me there’s Terry crawling up our fucken arses.’

‘It’s fine, sir. We’re covered.’

‘Not yet we’re not. Scullion’s losing it. I’m telling you, Leper. He’s out the fucken game. He’s supposed to be over here commanding his soldiers. He’s the CO. He asked to be out here: he could be back at headquarters eating fucken Pot Noodle, like a normal. But he wanted to be involved with my section and now his head is fucking erupting with crap. You’re seriously telling me he’s fucken sweating his bollocks off in the back of the Vector? To hell with the turbine. It’s about the boys.’

Luke got on the radio. ‘What I’m saying is we’re in the open here and request urgent air cover to the north side of the ridge. We’re just a group. Yes. We’re a short section. The rest of our platoon is manning other vehicles.’ He looked at Docherty and read his thoughts. He flicked the mouthpiece on the PRR down for a second and breathed deeply. ‘But bearing up and holding our position. Over.’

Flannigan was ordered to set up a mortar battery and was now pounding the poplar grove, laughing his big Scouse laugh. ‘That should keep their cakey arses quiet for a bit, lads,’ he said. He looked round at Luke. ‘Eh, Jimmy-Jimmy! Fucking hardly out of my gonk-bag, man. Hardly opened my fucken eyes and these badasses are burning our toast!’

‘Hardly had time to grab my cock,’ Dooley said.

‘That might’ve held us back for a while,’ Luke said, reloading. ‘Waiting for you to find your cock.’

Dooley darted his eyes around the camp. A bullet banged into the metal drum and it spewed diesel but didn’t explode. ‘Get that out of the fucken way,’ Luke shouted to some men at the back. ‘You in 5 Platoon! Ross. Private Bawn. Move it! Get that fucken drum cleared before we have a fucken Guy Fawkes party out here.’

There was a pause. Kind of horrible, the pauses. Luke got back on the radio and tried for more information. His hair was drenched. ‘Roger that,’ he said and looked along the wall at the boys.

‘Where’s the major?’ Dooley said.

‘He’s checking maps,’ said the captain.

‘You what?’

‘I don’t know. Maps.’

‘What’s he checking maps for? We know where we are. We’re up here and they’re down there.’

‘Wind your neck in, Dooley. Just leave it.’

The two men looked at each other and Dooley nipped his bottom lip with his teeth. He got it. ‘No problem,’ he said, a blush perceptible in his manner if not on his face, which was coated in white dust. ‘The major’s always been deadly when it comes to the maps.’

‘Just cover me,’ Luke said. ‘I’ll go and pull over the rest of the platoon.’ But before he moved an inch and before Dooley could turn back to the machine-gun and start pounding the trees, a pair of Apache helicopters found their way into the valley and hovered above the ridge. They were high up but gunning the hell out of the mountainside. Luke shouted at the men to cover their heads and get down. ‘Let’s get the club classics going!’ he shouted. ‘Good life. Good life. Good life. Good life.
Good life!
’ He sang the song with his face down in the dirt and it was bedlam all around. The cannon was tearing up the grove and splitting the trees and Flannigan crouched under his equipment and laughed into the broken wall.

‘
Good life!
’ he returned.

‘Any fucker in those trees isn’t coming out again,’ Dooley shouted.

‘Not for Christmas,’ Flannigan said. The men laughed at this and Lennox passed a cigarette down the line. They had to keep low and the guns didn’t stop overhead and Luke started off the Band Aid song about Christmas. The weird thing they would all remember was the warm, empty cartridges falling from the sky on top of the camp, glancing off the vehicles. Docherty took a few and stuffed them in his pack. The boys smiled as if the fight
was all they had ever wanted and the cartridges fell like golden hail as they shouted a song about feeding the world. ‘Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?’ It was like American Night at Camp Shorabak. The Yanks never stinted on anything and the boys knew they’d be happy to tear up the fields all morning if it meant having one more kill.

HOLIDAYS

Anne opened her eyes and saw the blue sky and the inviting tracks of a passing plane. She blinked, sat up and recalled an old song they used to sing about airline tickets to romantic places. It was warm and the sun played silver over the Firth of Clyde and shone on the windows of the foreign coaches as they made their way to Largs.

And still my heart has wings.

And yellow was the room where she loved him. Down from Glasgow she would wait there in Blackpool and sometimes he didn’t arrive. He just didn’t come, she said to herself, and she’d be sitting there with a shopping bag full of breakfast, the square slice, the plain loaf. And sometimes he changed his mind and he would turn up late, good grief, the middle of the night chucking stones at the window and she’d throw down the key. He’d come up the stairs and she’d bury her face in his neck and say nothing. Oh, the relief. And never to mention the sadness or the fright she’d got. She could still smell his Old Spice and was so glad she had waited.

Nobody ever tells you the natural world has all the answers and keeps count of all the days. They don’t tell you – you work it out. One minute you’re getting on with your tasks, the jobs and the life and all your goals and one thing and another, then, just like that, you notice the smell of burning leaves as you walk past
the playing-fields. The seasons seem for a long time to ask nothing of you, but eventually you must brave their familiarity. Most of the time she felt distant from her old artistic self, but some days, especially in sunshine, the feeling came.

A cigarette that bears a lipstick’s traces.

She was in a deckchair outside reception. ‘Blackpool’, she said to the warden, ‘was often hotter than Spain. I want to go back.’

‘Was it hotter, Anne?’

‘Oh, yes. Hotter than any place. I used to say to my Harry, “You could fry an egg on the pavement down there.” He never believed me. But it was always hot at that time, in the seventies.’

‘The 1970s.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Our Audrey goes to Faliraki,’ the warden said.

‘What’s that?’

‘Greece. Same place every year. Same hotel. She says the drink’s dirt cheap.’

‘Oh. We didn’t have those places.’

Mrs Auld from flat 25 came out to curse the weather. It was never right for Mrs Auld. ‘They’d let you just go down the beach there and get burnt to a crisp.’

‘Who’s they?’ the warden said.

‘You know fine well. The government.’

‘What’s the government got to do with suncream?’

‘Everything, Jackie,’ said Mrs Auld. ‘You mark my words. They keep it back, the government. They make it too dear for pensioners to buy. And we all burn to a crisp, so we do.’

‘Oh, Dorothy!’

‘I’m telling you. It’s true. We’ve all got cancer because of these English prime ministers.’

‘That’s ridiculous. And half of them are Scottish.’

‘Mark my words. I’ve got liver spots on the backs of my hands that I didn’t have before.’

‘Are you going on the bus thing?’ asked Anne without opening her eyes or looking over.

‘The bus run? I am that,’ Dorothy said. ‘I certainly am. The bus is taking us all to Gretna Green first thing in the morning. Just for the day. You should come, Anne.’

‘No.’

‘You’ll miss yourself. A walk about and a nice fish supper. If we get the sun it’ll be lovely.’

‘Unless you get burnt to a crisp,’ the warden said. She liked to tease the residents as much as possible and stop them from getting down in the mouth. There are never enough jokes to go round.

‘Aye, well, don’t you worry. I’ll be shelling out for the good stuff,’ Dorothy said. ‘Ambre Solaire: that’s me.’

‘Oh, you’re that hard done-to,’ the warden said.

‘My family think I’m trapped in here,’ Dorothy said, offering a sudden new bend to the conversation. ‘They feel sorry for me. They do. But I love it in here. I’m going to Gretna. I have days out and I have breakfast every day with the ladies. I don’t mind telling you – it’s a great place, this. It would never occur to my family that it was the years living with them that made me feel trapped. And now I’m free, so I am.’

Anne opened her eyes. ‘More power to your elbow.’

‘More suncream to your elbow,’ the warden said.

The warden and Mrs Auld left Anne alone again and she closed her eyes to think about the speech. She wished she could write things down or look at the old contact sheets, just to help her remember. But that was against the rules of the Memory
Club. You weren’t allowed notes. The point was not to run past the window but to stop and admit things.

THE MEMORY CLUB

They met every Friday and sometimes more, if a doctor was coming in to see them. Anne said it was the nicest day of the week because she liked stories and the way the residents got into conversations about what they all did when they were young. She tried to speak up and some of the old agony about appearing in public had gone. That Friday, it was her turn to lead them off and the district nurse said it might be good to go back to when she was small. There were always biscuits in the lounge for the Memory Club and Anne lifted one and dunked it into her tea without ceremony. ‘A lot of the times when you do this the biscuit drops into the tea,’ she said.

‘I know,’ the nurse said. ‘It happens to the best of us, so it does.’

‘Well I’m just saying I don’t mind,’ Anne said. ‘You can fish it out with a spoon.’

‘Oh, Anne!’ said Mrs Auld. ‘That’s not memories!’

‘I never said it was.’

‘You did.’

‘I never. I’ve not started talking yet.’ The ladies sat in a circle of chairs with one old man, Alex, asleep in his. Alex used to be in charge of the Saltcoats Darts Club. The district nurse said he was a great singer in his day and had won trophies at national level.

‘For singing?’ Mrs Auld asked.

‘No. For darts. But the club is mainly known for the social side and they have some good singers.’

‘I’ve never heard him sing,’ Mrs Auld said. ‘I’ve heard him snore plenty, right enough.’

‘Okay,’ said the nurse, folding her hands in her lap. ‘Today it’s Mrs Quirk’s turn to talk about her early days. And it’s exciting actually because it involves foreign parts, I believe.’

‘Africa!’ Mrs Auld said.

‘It’s not,’ Anne said.

‘Yes!’

‘I never went to Africa,’ said Anne. She knew Mrs Auld wanted it to be her turn to lead off every week. She was a torn-faced woman, always moaning and then marrying another one.

‘Just let Anne speak, Dorothy.’

Anne’s problem was the Friday meeting always made her think of memory rather than remember. She thought sketchily or vividly of the artists she had loved and supposed that was kind of remembering, but it was what they said, actually, the material and the ideas, the fact that they took an interest in making things permanent, this was the kind of thing that flooded Anne’s mind on a Friday. The connections were personal and she couldn’t always express them. ‘There was a woman called Louise,’ she said. ‘Don’t ask me what else she was called. She made spiders.’