Rain (6 page)

They both laughed – callous, self-righteous, arrogant.

‘All right, mate,’ Will continued, ‘before we get stuck in I’ve got to give it to you on Afghan.’

His mask dropped, his tone changed, he lost the sparkle in his eyes and he fixed Tom with them. He started to speak as though he was talking not to his friend but to one of his soldiers. He was quite violent in his manner, and he had small tears in his eyes. He unloaded on Tom, telling him for almost twenty minutes what had happened to him, smoking cigarette after cigarette, taking long, urgent gasps. When he had to light another, if he couldn’t work the lighter at the first or second attempt, he clicked his teeth and swore under his breath. It was horrible. The letters had merely been the start of it. Tom listened as he went on, horrified. Then, hearing the hubbub from the sitting room start to move through to the kitchen and threaten to come out and disturb them, Will
wound up his diatribe almost as quickly as he had begun it, hurrying out his words.

‘Mate, I can’t tell you how bad it is. It’s minging out there. Just make sure your lads are as prepped as possible before they get out. If your drills aren’t 100 per cent up to scratch, lads will die. They have to be all over it. There’s no room for fuck-ups, no room. One mistake, one slack drill, boom.’

The door to the garden opened, and a handful of guests poured out. Will put his mask back on, stubbed out his final cigarette and turned to hug one of the girls.

After half an hour the party started to fill up, the music got louder and, it seemed to Tom, the guests got a bit edgier. Back inside, Will liberated a bottle of vodka from somewhere and they tackled it; they were only interrupted by the arrival, Tom was amazed to see, of the same man in the Harlequins shirt who Jules had confronted outside the pub earlier. He didn’t recognize Tom. Evidently he was also one of Will’s gap-year cookery gang. Will greeted him with no particular enthusiasm and they were forced to talk to him, or rather listen to him, trapped in a corner by his boorishness. Tom got restless. Who the hell was this bloke? As if he had heard him, the man thrust out his hand. ‘Sorry, chap. Didn’t say hello. Jonty Forbes.’ Tom winced. He hated being called chap. He squirmed his hand forward and had it crushed by his new acquaintance.

Jonty changed tack: ‘What say we get this party going, amigos? Your nostrils as hungry as mine?’

Tom watched as Jonty grabbed a fold-out table, wrestled with it and finally succeeded in erecting it with an undignified grunt of triumph. Drawing up a stool he cut some cocaine into lines using a credit card, ostentatiously wetting his forefinger, dabbing it on the powder and then rubbing it
onto his gums. Will was encouraging him: ‘Wow, thanks, mate. This is really kind of you. Is it good?’

‘Good? The best, pal!’ Jonty looked at his deftly drawn lines with pride.

Will egged him on: ‘Go on, Jonty, we’re in. Put some more out. I’m good for the cash.’ Delighted, Jonty emptied out a packet to form a little mountain of white powder on the table. Out of his wallet came a twenty-pound note, which he rolled into a tube.

‘Right, who’s first?’

‘No, after you,’ said Will.

‘OK. Get your skis out, lads, because here comes a blizzard!’ announced Jonty as first one, then two lines disappeared up his nose, reminding Tom of films about aliens coming to earth and beaming up unsuspecting humans. Manfully, Jonty was about to tackle the third line when out of nowhere Will kicked the table away, seized him by the throat, lifted him up and slammed him back against the wall.

‘You twat! Do you have no idea that your fucking drug money goes back to fund the same cunts who blow up my soldiers?’ he screamed at him, eyes blazing with unblinking hatred, mad in his skull. He looked to Tom as though he thought he was back in Helmand in a firefight with the Taliban, in a one-track mania to kill. Jonty’s own eyes bulged out of his sockets, his eyelids unable to close around them. Will drew his head back as if to butt his quivering victim, and Tom winced in anticipation, but then he stopped, blinked and said quietly, in a low snarl of contempt, ‘I’d headbutt you if it wasn’t going to kill you. You make me sick, you piece of shit.’

He threw Jonty to the floor, where he choked and spluttered, his face pasty with dribble and cocaine. Will looked around him and calmly addressed the cowed crowd: ‘Sorry,
everyone. I think I’ve ruined this party. Oh well. Come and visit me when I’m in Selly Oak lying in bed with no legs. Or come to my funeral and pretend that you were my best mate. Enjoy your spreadsheets and calculators. I’m going.’

As Will turned away, the hapless Jonty, with a speed that belied his girth, leapt to his feet and charged at him. As if on autopilot Tom stepped over the fallen table, drew his fist back, threw it forward and smashed him back to the floor again. ‘And stay down, prick,’ he snarled, amazed at how infectious Will’s anger was. He turned to leave.

Will clapped him on the back, and as they pushed through the onlookers Tom stopped dead, rooted in front of a girl who had arrived just in time for the fight. She was still wearing her coat, and her hair was wet with a rain shower that had caught her on the way to the party.

‘Tom?’

‘Cassie.’

Why now? Why had she come back into his life at this moment, when his brain had at last completely expelled everything about her from his memory? A sudden love for her bounced itself to the front of Tom’s head before a strange hatred hit him too. She had always dismissed the army. He remembered her loathsome father. He saw Will in the street through the open front door, standing in the rain. He should be looking after him, but he wanted to be with her.

He heard himself say to her, polite and distant, ‘I’m sorry, Cassie; I must go with my friend. Hopefully see you soon.’ He left her and walked out the door. At the end of the road beside a bus stop Will collapsed in tears.

Tom knelt and hugged his friend. ‘All right, mate, all right. Everything’s going to be all right. Everything’s going to be all right,’ he whispered over and again as Will sobbed into his shoulder. Tom looked back up the street towards the
party, but the houses were blurred in the dark and the heavy rain.

Pre-tour leave began, and Tom went home. Constance surprised him by announcing that she had rented a cottage on the Devon coast for a week. Tom found the total peace down there the tonic he had needed all along in the testosterone-fuelled last few months. It wasn’t Las Vegas, where Clive and Scott had gone, driving from San Francisco in a rented Mustang – far from it – and Tom could only imagine what they were getting up to, but he was pleased he was in Devon.

It was like being a boy again. In the mornings Tom and Constance would go round nearby National Trust properties and castles, then have lunch in a pub and go back to the cottage, where Constance would read. Tom would go with Zeppo for walks along the cliffs, wind picking the sweat off his face and emptying his brain. There was a cove a quarter of a mile down from the cottage, completely secluded, where an Edwardian swimming fan had had a seawater pool dug into the rocks. It was straight out of an Agatha Christie novel. In the sun it warmed up quickly, and Tom spent hours swimming in it.

His favourite activity, which he soon came to do with a haunting addiction, was to jump in from a rock above the pool. As he plunged in, the thousands of bubbles that he brought down with him into the water then began to rise, and Tom dreamed, holding his breath for twenty or thirty seconds, that these bubbles were the dust and shrapnel thrown up by an IED he had stepped on, his body engulfed in the cloud of sparkling light, lost in weightlessness. The bubbles rose past his chest, tickling it on their way to the surface, as he hung in suspension and looked up from the bottom of the pool to the dancing mercury underside of the
water. He did this again and again, wondering if an explosion could possibly trick a shocked mind and screaming nerve endings into feeling comfortable. Would it feel sore? Or would it be like a dream, with you borne away in silk blankets?

Early one evening, as the late-August sun lit up everything in gold, Tom jogged up the sandy path from the cove to the house. He walked through the garden and saw through the window that the television was on. A news report announced the names of three soldiers who had been killed in Afghanistan the day before. Their pictures appeared on the screen. A sergeant and two privates. Then the scene changed to Wootton Bassett, to where the bodies of another four men had been repatriated that day. Constance was kneeling just two metres from the screen. She didn’t notice Tom at the window as he watched her watch the television and cry.

He stepped away from the window and went to catch his breath. Fifteen minutes later he walked into the house and Constance greeted him: ‘There you are, Tommy! Now what are you going to get me for a drink? I think a glass of wine, please!’ As Tom opened the fridge and uncorked the bottle a terrible feeling swept over him. What was he doing? What was the point of this wretched game?

That night at supper Tom did his best to keep conversation away from the army. But at the end of pudding, just as Tom was finishing off his ice cream, his mouth full, Constance took advantage of the fact that he couldn’t give her any more flannel and told him, ‘Now Tom, I know you will hate me for this, but when you are out in Afghanistan no one will think any the less of you if you don’t always take risks. You don’t have anything to prove.’

‘I know, Mum. I promise you, nothing unnecessary.’

‘We’re all very proud of you, and nothing will change that, so don’t feel as though you always have to be the hero.’

‘Look, Mum. I’m going out with the best soldiers and the most experienced NCOs. I promise you they will look after me. I can’t wait for you to meet them.’ He had made sure Constance, who had a ready ear for gossip, was always up to date with the ups and downs of his troop, and she was always amused by tales of what the soldiers got up to, the ill-advised tattoos they had got or their brushes with the law.

Tom was about to start a story about one of Miller’s tattoos, just to steer the conversation away from Afghanistan, when Constance stepped in again, seeing straight through her son’s plans to obfuscate.

‘You see, Tom, and I do not at all want to put undue pressure on you, but a mother must say this: you are all I’ve got. I know you know that, and you have known it ever since your father died, but I must be allowed to say it again. There, I’ve said it. Please, Tom, come back. Don’t try to be a hero.’

Tom’s throat seized up and his eyes strained. After what felt like minutes he managed to croak out, ‘I know, Mum. I know. I’ll be OK. I promise.’

After Constance had gone to bed Tom sat up for hours with a glass of whisky, on a stool in front of a fire that fought the cool night, looking through the flames as though he were fixed on a point a hundred metres away, as the logs slowly burned out into grey skeletons of ash. Finally he stood, put the fireguard up and pulled his way up the bannister to bed.

On the final day of leave he said a sad goodbye to Sam, and then Zeppo, and then finally Constance, after a tea of cakes and scones. He couldn’t eat them all – she had made a vast spread – and so she gave Tom a full tin to take back and give to 3 Troop the next day. She made the parting mercifully brief, but as Tom pulled away from the house and saw her in his rear-view mirror as she waved him off, he was again almost overcome with waves of guilt. When he got back to
the mess that night, he walked into the TV room to be greeted by the other subalterns, looking just as gloomy as he was, slumped on sofas and beanbags and pretending to be interested in a film.

‘Tom!’ Clive piped up. ‘How was leave?’

‘Great, pal, really great. The drive back was miserable though.’

A sea of nods agreed with him. ‘Too right, mate,’ Scott Lanyon answered. ‘I’ve felt like slitting my wrists ever since I left home.’

‘I know; the central reservation never looked so tempting.’

‘How was leaving home? Dreadful?’

‘Yep, pretty much. I’ve never felt like that in my life. It made the first day at Sandhurst feel like going to a fairground.’

‘I know. And all those KIAs out in Afghan didn’t help, all through fucking leave. My ma and pa were just glued to the TV. I just felt like a total bastard.’

They all grunted agreement.

That was the Monday night; they were to deploy on Saturday morning. The week was a whirl of administration and rituals. On the Tuesday morning Tom helped Trueman to check that all the squadron’s
bergen
rucksacks had a small blue and black marker painted on them, to identify them as King’s Dragoons bags in the airports at Brize Norton, Kandahar and Bastion. Then in the afternoon he had to help the guys make out their wills, as well as write his own. On the Wednesday morning they had an eight-mile run and that afternoon lessons on the
Vallon
metal detectors, and then they practised their barma drills. That night Tom and Trueman took 3 Troop out for a curry and few drinks, but nothing spilled over into a particularly late night.

On the Thursday morning they packed up their rooms,
putting all their kit, posters, pictures, books and trinkets into boxes and leaving them in the middle of the bare rooms, so that if they were killed it would be easy to get all their property back to their next of kin. In the afternoon they were issued their dog tags – lining up in the gymnasium to receive them from the regimental clerks – as well as their medical documents, and had all their passports checked. It all started to feel as though they were going on some kind of extreme package holiday.

Immediately they got their dog tags Tom and Clive debated how they were going to wear them. They came on a beaded metal necklace, and detailed in shallow punched capitals the bearer’s army number, his initials, blood group and religious denomination. There was great mileage in discussing how one wore these millstones of mortality. The rule was that they were to be worn around the neck, but there was an urban myth that it was bad luck to do this, as what would happen if your head was blown off and they were both lost? So some soldiers had one tag tied to a belt loop of their trousers or strung on one of their bootlaces.