The Illuminations (24 page)

A day came when his mouth had healed enough for him to try getting out a few words. He took his time. It was slow. And the first words he spoke were not curses or woes, not instant requests or questions about the legs. He simply said enough to make it clear that Madeleine should leave. He was sitting up and he could see the outline of her blonde hair, her white blouse, and he imagined her looking at the stumps of his legs and seeing that the whole man she disliked was gone.

Two weeks later he could say much more to the nurse. ‘No sentimentality. You can write it on the end of the bed.’

‘Like “Nil by mouth”?’ she said.

‘That’s right. Nil by sentiment.’

‘You’re back with us. Good-oh. Sentiment? I think you’ll find that sort of thing’s in short supply round here, Major. Shame about the lady, though. She was here for weeks.’

‘She comes from money,’ Scullion said. ‘Or they pretend they
have money. What they really have is debt. Those people live with so many lies they forget the money thing is false, too. And one day you just have to get away from them.’

‘Too much information,’ the nurse said.

The day he dismissed her, Madeleine went back to the family quarters and phoned her sister in County Clare. She was crying. ‘The thing Charlie will never understand’, she said, ‘is that he’ll always be all right because he’ll always have himself. He’ll never see it, but there’s a sort of complete selfishness in him.’

‘You did your best,’ her sister said.

‘He doesn’t have it in him to be pitied.’

THE TOLLYGUNGE CLUB

One day he smelt food. It was coming from the corridor and it marked the return of routine. ‘This is how it works,’ Pettifer said. ‘You’ll be going off to the High-Dependency Burns Unit. You’ll need skin grafts and a cataract operation to improve your good eye. After that, the real work begins – the legs. We’re going to seal them and then you’ll be off to Headley Court in Surrey. You’re not old, Major, but you’re not in the first flush. The training is hard work, let me tell you. It’s six months before you’re off the stubbies and walking on prosthetics.’

‘Prosthetics, really?’

‘Yes.’

‘We had better get a move on, Colonel,’ said Scullion. ‘It would be lovely to be able to walk to my own disciplinary hearing, don’t you think?’

Pettifer just smiled the way people smile when they don’t want
to get involved. ‘Keep fighting,’ he said. Scullion wasn’t sure if blushing was actually an option any more, but the words embarrassed him and he wished he could go to sleep.

He spent the long afternoons thinking about a new life in India. He thought he could just about bear it in Calcutta, the slow, fading intensity, playing billiards at the Tollygunge Club with the gardeners, eating mangoes, reading Saki and drinking gin and tonic. He could see it so clearly he almost believed in it, a life of displaced authority in warm weather, a life of impotence. He was only two days in the Burns Unit when he asked for paper and started trying to write out the logistics. There was money from his parents’ old pub in Mullingar: he could pay for nurses. He could talk to strangers or start a charity or write a book. With his childish legs in front of him under the blanket, Scullion knew that his great companion had always been his imagination. He asked the welfare officer if she could bring him
The Jungle Book
. He could see himself sitting under the twisted boughs of a banyan tree, hidden from the sun, recalling the Great Game, a blanket like this over his poor legs and a drink in his hand, the mind alive, his eyes scanning the horizon for elephants.

‘Hello, Charlie,’ he said. It was Luke standing in the doorway with a bottle of Talisker and a bag of cakes. He had walked all the way from Birmingham New Street thinking of what to say.

‘Is it yourself, Captain Campbell?’

‘It is.’

‘Well, fuck me with a flute band,’ Scullion said. Luke smiled and walked over to the bed. He thought better of shaking the major’s hand so he clapped his shoulder.

‘I’ll pass that request on to the regiment. I’m sure we could arrange for the old Western band to march up your hole while
playing “Amazing Grace”, if that’s what you really want. I mean, it’s quite a strange order but look at the fucken state of you. You can have anything you want.’

That was well done. Well managed, thought Scullion. He laughed and pulled himself up on the pillows. Luke was pleased to see he could still laugh and he realised, watching him struggle, how much he had always been intimidated by the major. He began speaking hospital small talk while Luke considered him, realising, while he listened, that he was now in a position of power over Scullion. Nobody else but Luke had fully witnessed the major’s meltdown. Nobody else knew how reckless he had been in making them go to that village or how his judgement had collapsed before the mortar attack. Scullion had abandoned the boys to danger more than once, they both knew it, and the facts of the matter told against them both. The facts ridiculed them as soldiers and mocked the legend of Scullion’s war. At that stage it hadn’t gone beyond blame into a collective sadness; indeed, it lay heavy on Scullion’s own head, on his features, his scarred mouth, twisted now as he stared from the bed and tried to talk.

‘Sit your arse down.’

‘How they treating you?’

‘They dance around. The nurses. Doctors. You’re lucky if you see the same one twice.’

They discussed the hours after he was hit. He didn’t remember the song or the tourniquet, the morphine, the airlift. He didn’t care so much about the weed-smoking or the gamer mentality in the field. It was all nothing in the end, the sound of a different drum. ‘We ran into some bad luck. Or I did. And the wee boy did,’ was all he wanted to say.

‘It was a fuck-up,’ Luke said.

‘We brought light to those people …’

His bad eye was leaking. Luke handed him a swab from the top of the bedside cabinet. Another silence. ‘You nearly died.’

‘One thing I’ve learned. When death smiles at you, Captain – you’ve just got to smile right back at it.’

Luke didn’t mind the fakery. The man was in pain. Or was he actually proud of all the sacrifices?

‘We achieved a lot,’ he said.

‘Fucking zero,’ Luke said.

‘We deployed with confidence.’

‘The mission to make the country stable has made it less so and only the Taliban rose in confidence.’

‘Ah, fuck it,’ Scullion said. They were silent for a minute and Scullion wished he could resurrect the banter that had drawn the boys together. But when he spoke he found he was grasping for something larger. ‘Some of us are just two-sided men, Luke. The moment we look at anything we see its exact opposite. It’s a way of life.’

‘I understand, sir. Let’s talk about something else.’

‘You think I failed.’

‘I think you’ve suffered.’

Scullion’s smile had something wrong in it. It took the world at its worst and gave it his blessing. ‘Holy fuck,’ he said. ‘I sent my bitch of a wife away. I lost my legs. One of my eyes is fucked for good. And you
think
I’ve suffered?’

‘It was a terrible tour.’

‘That happens.’

‘Not to me,’ Luke said.

‘You know, Luke: some things are simpler than others. Maybe you just chose the wrong career.’

‘I know I did.’

‘You’ll be appearing at the tribunal? And you’ll be talking to the journalists downstairs?’

‘I thought you liked the truth, Charlie? Wasn’t that your thing? Alexander the Great and all that? Truth and enlightenment? Pulling the savage peoples out of the dark ages? But now that a few papers want to ask what happened, it’s loyalty, is it? It’s sticking together for—’

‘The regiment!’ he shouted.

‘Oh, Charlie,’ Luke said. ‘Is that the best you can do?’

He walked to the cabinet to lift the cakes, setting them out slowly on a plate and placing it on the edge of the bed. ‘This has nothing to do with the regiment,’ he said. ‘It’s to do with a bunch of kids from different regiments being mistreated by their superior officers.’

‘Is that what the boys say?’

‘The boys don’t know what to say. They’ve gone back home to see their families and pine for another chance to be heroes.’ Luke took one of the cakes and picked at it.

‘You always had judging eyes,’ Scullion said.

‘Calm the fuck down, Charlie. I came on the train to see you and there’s no point talking shit.’

Scullion was one of those actors. He had any number of selves to call on and he didn’t favour one in particular. That’s why he could do things other people couldn’t do, because, to him, at some level, it was always another person doing it. He was always above it. ‘I don’t know what any of you want,’ he said. ‘You’re all the same.’

‘Is there anything you need, Charlie?’

‘I need a year. If I can make it to a year I’ll go to India and none of you will see me again.’

‘India?’

‘I’ve never been happy, Luke. That’s a lie. I was happy for a term at Trinity College Dublin. I think I told you. Me and Madeleine up the stairs listening to jazz records and that was it.’

‘What?’

‘That was it.’

‘You were happy?’

‘Yes.’

He spoke for a while about the early days when he thought he would live in London and write a book. For a summer he haunted Senate House and the reading room of the British Library.

‘Then you joined up.’

‘I did.’

‘Why didn’t you just stay in that world?’

‘It isn’t a world, Luke. People who read books aren’t reading them properly if they stop with the books. You’ve got to go out eventually and test it all against reality.’

‘You’re from another age.’

‘That’s what she said. What they all said. And I made the mistake once of thinking you were the same.’

‘I just missed my da’, Charlie. And I thought I could show the difference between right and wrong.’

‘We all did.’

‘That’s right. We all did.’

‘There was a generation of men wrecked by Ireland,’ Scullion said. ‘A fair few of us. I saw those dead construction workers in Teebane, the ones that were blown up by the IRA. I was young and I hoped at the time that I’d never see such carnage again. But time passes and I’ve seen more dead men than I ever imagined. Hundreds more. It makes you hard. I’ve been shot at from
buildings in places you don’t even know.’

He sat up straight and wiped his good eye. Luke imagined it was now trained only on the dark places.

‘You should go to India,’ Luke said. ‘Go if you can and look after yourself, Charlie.’

He put his head back on the pillows. ‘We never had children. We were too busy trying to work ourselves out and we missed the boat. We missed our chance. And maybe they would have been my cause. Maybe that’s what people do to …’

‘What?’

‘Gain a foothold. Make their own news.’

‘Maybe.’

‘She never forgave me. My army career was a nightmare to her and it killed our marriage.’

‘Maybe.’

It was obvious to Luke that something final was taking place. He tried with words and gestures to reassure his old boss, but his heart wasn’t in it, and his attitude clearly irked Scullion, who saw only disloyalty. Scullion suddenly winced: it was obvious the whole thing felt to him like pain, the dull unravelling of his command. Being unable to shout orders, he could only stammer, his bad temper entering in gasps.

‘You don’t know what I’m talking about, Campbell. What … what have you had?’ he asked. ‘Girlfriends? Silly girlfriends? You’ve never risked anything, never mind your happiness, never mind your legs.’

‘People get over things, Charlie.’

‘Good luck with that.’

A nurse and two men came in. ‘Time for your scan,’ the nurse said. ‘The porters will wheel you along.’ She started fussing with
wires and tubes and Luke stepped back. When he came forward again he placed a hand on the major’s arm.

‘You taught me things,’ he said.

‘Like what?’ Scullion said. ‘How to put trust in the wrong people? How to become a two-sided man?’

‘Maybe you’ll write something.’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know. You’re the one with the stories.’

‘History’s always told by the deputies,’ Scullion said. ‘Men like you. You’re just the right age for revenge.’ Luke stared at his old mentor. Decency or pity demanded that he allow the major the final insult.

‘Goodbye, sir.’

‘This is real life.’

‘Aye.’

Unspoken words softened the air. ‘Why don’t you wait here,’ Scullion said. ‘I won’t be long at this thing and you can just sit and wait for me.’ But Luke kept his eye on him as the bed turned and was sure the major understood they would never meet again. ‘My hand’s warm,’ Scullion said. ‘You don’t get this in your video games, sure you don’t, son.’ Luke felt the years slide away as the major withdrew his hand. A look of complete spite came into Charlie’s face and he blinked his crusted eye, then rested his head on the pillow as the bed moved off, steered by his new lieutenants. Luke could hear his old friend complain about the bumps as he vanished down the corridor, setting out on his long journey to India.