Afterwards (17 page)

– Hang on.

Joseph whispered, he held his hand up and Arthur stopped and listened with him. On the monitor, they heard Ben shifting on the sofa cushions, coughing again, and then David’s voice, soft, in the background.

– Hello fella. Didn’t see you there.

Joseph and Arthur ducked their heads in smiles, almost giggles, although it wasn’t entirely clear what was funny. Listening to someone who doesn’t know it, maybe. They held their breath, hands over their mouths. Ben’s breathing was loud but steady, still sleepy, and he didn’t seem upset by the strange room and the stranger speaking to him:

– Can I get you something? Something to drink or a biscuit perhaps?

– Biscuit.

Arthur rolled his eyes, mouthing please and heading downstairs.

– Righto.

The paste was drying on the sheet in front of him, but Joseph listened instead of working. To David rummaging for biscuits in the kitchen and Arthur’s apologies.

– It’s not a problem.

– Dad, the man said I could have one.

– I know, and that’s very nice, but just one now, alright?

Joseph imagined the old man awkward, standing between them, and his mind’s-eye picture embarrassed him. He folded up the sheet of wallpaper, dumped it, wasted, laid out another, started working again. The baby monitor went off and Arthur came upstairs with Ben and a tray: tea and biscuits from David for all of them. The boy was happy on the floor with his digger and chocolate digestives, while Arthur and Joseph worked their way down the stairs and along the hallway. They finished the papering with time to spare for tidying and
sorting. Moving David’s things from the garage back into the shed again, and Joseph’s into his van. They didn’t talk much, just had Ben nattering and bashing in the background. Arthur sang a bit under his breath while he worked, and Joseph was very aware in those afternoon hours of David alone in the next room.

All she asked was:

– How come you joined up? I’ve been wondering about it.

Joseph was driving them back to his place: early evening, and the roads were crawling with midweek traffic. It was a few days after he’d finished at her grandad’s and they’d both knocked off early, met up at Stan and Clare’s. Ended up spending a couple of hours in their kitchen, because Stan wanted to get some work done on his own house over the winter, and he asked Joseph to give him a price for the plastering and painting. The traffic was stop-start by the time they got going, took half an age just to get as far as the common, and Alice was quiet for most of it, before she brought up the army.

– How old were you? You’ve never said.

Joseph shrugged. They were stuck now, still a good ten minutes from home, longer at this rate. He said:

– Old enough to know better.

Townsend was sixteen when he signed up.
That’s my excuse
.

No end to the cars ahead of them, so he turned off
early. More traffic on the side streets, they were stopped again, and Alice was watching him.

– Infantry Command Respect.

Joseph saluted, making fun of his younger self and the recruitment slogans, and he told Alice he remembered the posters from the pinboards at school, in the corridor outside the metalwork room.

– They put them up on all the bus stops too, on our estate. Around exam time usually, that’s when they get their best recruits.

Alice smiled at his joke, but she was still waiting. The road was clearer again after the next junction and Joseph cut through the back streets, waiting to see if Alice would ask another question, but she didn’t, she just let it go.

He hadn’t been straight with her and she knew it. It bothered Joseph, and he kept thinking what he could have told her. It was true enough about the posters, but he’d laughed about them back then too, even when he was at school, how they always got covered in biro dicks and specs and had to be taken down. It was the same a year or two later with all the videos and leaflets the recruitment officer gave him: couldn’t take any of that stuff too seriously, actors running about looking hard in cammo, loud music and speedboats. Never expected that from the army, he was never that stupid, and Joseph didn’t feel right, fobbing Alice off with a story like that. She wanted to know and it was hard not to tell her something that counted.

Couldn’t wait to leave school, he remembered telling his teacher, after he let off the fire extinguishers in the science block for a dare. She sat across the desk from him, shocked and frowning, and it was like she couldn’t bring herself to believe it was him that did it, because he was quiet enough in class and never caused her trouble as a rule. Pissed him off, the way she looked at him, all let down: like he’d ever promised her anything. So Joseph swore at her, for good measure, and said he just wanted shot of the place, and all of them in it: get earning, get on with living. But then the novelty of that wore off quick enough. He liked his job alright, and his boss was a nice bloke, but it felt like pond life sometimes, stagnating. Work, pub, snooker club, all the usual streets and houses. A small life and he’d spent all of his in the same place, with the same people. Seemed like the most you could expect was the odd shag or a fruit machine that coughed up more than you fed it.

Lee said he’d joined up to get himself sorted. Jarvis reckoned the army had done everyone a favour:

– Bring us your great unwashed and sick in the head. Give us your borstal graduates, we take any old scum. Can’t make men of them all, we’re not miracle workers, but at least you know they’ve got an outlet.

But Lee’s record started when he was thirteen and Joseph knew his didn’t compare. Small-time thieving for cheap thrills and pin money.

– A good laugh, was it? Or couldn’t you think of nothing better to do?

It hadn’t impressed his dad. He knew the others who got collared with him too.

– What you doing with idiots like that anyway?

Gave him the third degree when he got back from the station, had refused to pick him up when he’d phoned.

– You’re seventeen, Joey. Old enough to catch a bus on your own.

Took him out for a drink later, though. And a long talking-to. About how much he had going for him and why he shouldn’t just chuck it all by acting stupid.

– I know it gets a bit boring now and again, but that’s not so bad, is it? Not the worst thing that could happen to you, son.

Just a bit of half-arsed rebellion, too shameful to admit to, and Joseph knew it didn’t add up to a reason for joining up either. Not enough of one to give Alice. His day in court never stopped him getting work. Plenty of jobs going round his way, maybe nothing too exciting, but plenty of other things he could have done instead of becoming a soldier. Joseph didn’t know how to explain it to her. Signing up was just one of those things people talked about doing. Like living abroad or winning the lottery. Mates of his from school and work, late at night when they’d had a skinful, smoking too much and waxing lyrical.

– It’ll get me out of this dump anyway.

– Army’s for sad cases.

– Just because you couldn’t handle it.

– Wankers giving you orders.

– Wankers is right. No birds. No decent ones anyway.

– Comfy shoe brigade.

– Get fit, get paid for it.

– Not enough.

– Not enough for taking a bullet.

– Better than hanging about with you cunts.

– Go on. Piss off then.

It was easy in the end. Couldn’t believe he hadn’t done it earlier. The recruiting office was on the high street and he just went down there one afternoon after he finished work. His dad read over all the papers with him, said he should take his time, that it was a big decision, but it didn’t feel that way to Joseph: just the best he’d felt in ages. When he got his dates for basic training, it was like his whole life had got easier. Still getting up, going to work and coming home again. Still the same old same old but it didn’t bother him. And it was like that again when he found out they’d been posted to Ireland. It was knowing he was going. That feeling: like something real was going to happen.

Joseph thought about telling Alice he’d hated it, because he had sometimes, especially out in Ireland. It got to all of them, the stress and the boredom, worst combination: led to poor concentration, zero motivation. Add the rain and cold, and days like that Joseph would be counting, counting, from the minute they started, clocking off time. Feeling everything slipping, seconds going by too slow and all gone slack inside. Uniform walking empty. No will, no muscle to put into the task at hand. Just wanting to get this patrol over and be back in his bunk. Still functioning, but brain and body shunted over to minimum.

Turned the volume on his radio down once. Stupid thing to do, fucking dangerous for everyone, but he just couldn’t be arsed with the patrol that morning and all the orders. Slung his rifle and walked out across the stubble and on through a hedge, even after he’d heard the command to wait shouted behind him.

– What the bloody hell were you doing?

He was spoken to after by the Second Lieutenant heading up the multiple. Just out of Sandhurst and younger than Joseph: they’d all been giving him a hard time ever since he came. Joseph got the CO’s face shoved up to his after they got back to the barracks too, and then a man-to-man attempt from the Lieutenant later on in the evening: he came and found Joseph having a cigarette out behind the cookhouse.

– I’m not getting one hundred per cent from you, am I?

He’d made a point of telling them he’d been to a comprehensive. Didn’t sound like it, and Townsend had told him it couldn’t have been nearly as comprehensive as his school was. Sir.

– Are you listening to me, Mason?

– Sir.

– Left us all open, your little display. Anyone watching would have been laughing.

– Sir.

Joseph knew what he meant: had wondered what the patrol looked like already, seen through a rifle sight.

– Very disappointing because I’ve read your file, so I know you to be a capable soldier.

The whole company had privileges withdrawn because of Joseph’s fuck-up. The bar was locked and everyone was calling him a stupid cunt, so he’d come outside because he felt like one too. The rain had stopped, but Joseph could still hear it singing in the guttering: one ear on that, the other on the army psychology: praising and scolding. Disappointing. Just like being at school again. Except he was a grown man and getting ticked off made it hard to see the point in staying.

But Joseph couldn’t tell Alice all that, just like he couldn’t tell her he’d had no good reason for joining: it all sounded too much like he was making excuses.
Big mistake, not my fault, too young, I never wanted to be there in the first place.

Plenty of times he’d wanted to chuck it, but he wouldn’t have stuck his three years if it was that bad, would he? Moaning came with the territory: always somebody talking about leaving, or slagging off the army. You could tell when Lee was losing it, because he’d start banging on about how the IRA had all the best suppliers: arms coming in on fishing boats from America and Gadaffi. He’d keep hauling out the same old chestnuts. Given the choice, would you have an Armalite or an SA80?

– The IRA buy quality and we get this piss-poor excuse for a weapon.

Joseph wasn’t like Lee, never felt he had axes to be grinding. Not like Jarvis either, who said he slept and ate and shat the regiment. Jarvis didn’t mind them
complaining, as long as they didn’t do it out on patrol. He said soldiers who moaned were better at doing what they were told:

– Give you an inch, I can get a mile out of you after, and you won’t really mind.

Most of the blokes he knew in the army were happy enough to be there, and Joseph thought he should count himself among them. A capable soldier. Even when he was piss-wet through and knackered. Out in the November wet and dark and feeling hungry; fields and roads coming up to the border; Townsend tapping on the passenger’s window; the man by the car was reaching again, so Joseph shouldered his rifle.

It was all part of the same thing, and he just couldn’t have Alice knowing. She was asking now and he knew it shouldn’t surprise him. Wanted to be straight with her, but he didn’t think he could be.

Joseph left early again, said he had a job on north of the river, and Alice lay in his bed for a long time after, until she was late for work and had no excuse to give them.
I don’t know what’s going on with my boyfriend
. She knew that wouldn’t really cut it. Clare would be on this morning, and Alice thought she might talk to her about Joseph at lunchtime, but couldn’t think what she would say: it wasn’t anything concrete. She thought of him in the car, avoiding her questions. Nothing hostile about him, but he was resisting, and it made her uneasy.

Soldiers and Northern Ireland. Alice kept trying to push them away, all those associations. Teenage boy shot in the back while he was driving away: not a terrorist, a joyrider, but they baked him a cake all the same, the soldier who did it, threw him a party back at the barracks to celebrate. Another four, another time, stabbed a man with a screwdriver, because it was the end of their tour and they were still alive and they wanted to do over a local before they went home. Disconnected incidents. Fragments, only half-remembered from the news, from years-old conversations in front of the radio and TV.

Alice was aware of getting ahead of herself, making too much of yesterday’s failed conversation: she had no idea why Joseph had been so cagey, might even have had his mind on other things entirely, he was working a lot just now, and tired with it. But then, that was just the
problem with not knowing, wasn’t it? Left you too much space for speculation.

British forces, welcomed by Catholics when they first arrived, but quickly hated: dawn raids, bedrooms turned over, humiliation. Bessbrook was built by Quakers, but now the biggest army base in Ireland took up half the town. Alan must have told her that one, or her mum, it was the kind of detail they’d pick up on. Stephen Restorick was a name she remembered. Because he was the last British soldier to be killed there. Shot at long range while he was talking to a woman, a civilian. She was a Catholic and she stayed with him while he died, because his mum couldn’t be there.