Rain (21 page)

Just before dawn they began their routine, established over a month now and formalized into a rite. Ellis, on roaming stag, walked around the four wagons, put his head into the canvas shelters at their sides and prodded the sleeping bag closest to the entrance. In Three Zero it was Dusty’s, who levered himself out of his cocoon to lean over and shake Tom in the middle and Davenport beyond him. They lay there for a minute, in the cold damp of the shelter, dank with the frozen mist of their snores, then scrambled out of their bags and out of the shelter into the glowing purple of the pre-dawn desert.

Davenport switched the engine on, and the Scimitar juddered into life. Dusty got into the turret, and Jessie, who’d been on the last radio stag slot, got out to amble back to his own wagon. Dusty oiled the gimpy and switched the BV on to heat up the boil-in-the-bags he’d placed in there the night before. Tom and Davenport packed up the shelter, teeth chattering and grey fingers fumbling in the cold as they rolled up the sodden canvas and fixed it onto the bar armour with bungees. Tom chuckled at something Davenport had said the previous night just as they were about to drift off to sleep, their sleeping bags pulled tight high over their heads: ‘Fucking hell, boss, it’s always bags around here. All the time. Bags, bags and more bags.’

‘What do you mean, Dav?’ Tom had mumbled, waves of sleep crashing against his eyelids.

‘Well, think about it. We sleep in a bag, we shit in a bag, we
eat out of a bag, and then when we get slotted we get carried home in a bag. Might as well just rename
Op Herrick
and call it Op Bag instead.’ They had trickled off to sleep giggling and exhausted.

Tom walked round the wagons. In the distance, about half a kilometre away, he could see the emerging silhouettes of SHQ at the centre of the ‘death star’ formation the squadron adopted each night, with the three gun troops the points of the star protecting its four wagons. Trueman was sitting on the front of his wagon drinking a brew, its steam spiralling into the air and catching on his thick dark beard, his cut calloused fingers poking through fingerless woollen gloves. He greeted Tom cheerfully.

‘Well, boss, we done all right, ain’t we? Six hours’ time and I’m going to smash my wagon straight into the scoff tent. I am desperate now, desperate, for some fresh. My body’s screaming out for some proper vit C. Any more of this and we’ll all get scurvy. Here, want some?’

He held out his flask and Tom sipped from it. Hot chocolate mixed with coffee. It was delicious.

‘I know. I can’t wait. None of my clothes are going to fit me when I get home. Look at me.’ He tugged at the waist of his torn and oil-stained trousers, which billowed around his scrawny legs. ‘And my ribcage is even worse.’ He ran his hand up his left side and felt the undulations over his bones, and his gaunt face with its straggly beard grinned. He took another sip. He changed the subject, knowing that now was the time to ask. He had been sitting on this for days but now felt ready. It was a bit like when he had first asked Cassie out.

‘Um, Sergeant Trueman, I was wondering if it wouldn’t be a good idea if we, er, met up over R & R, if that’s OK, to go and visit Ransome and Acton in Selly Oak. I know it’s a bit irregular, but I think it would be good for them.’

Tom tried not to laugh at his own stiffness. He thought in that moment about how Trueman had seen him grow over the last few months. His sergeant had known him for almost a year now. They had become great friends in that time, and yet they still both liked to maintain the gap between them, both slightly scared of admitting the depth of their friendship and nervous that they might become too close and then have it all crash down if they disagreed about something. Tom knew it was the right way for him. When they disagreed any awkwardness was taken away by being allowed to fall back on the rigidity of the army’s hierarchy. The matey-matey approach could work – Trueman had been close to Jules Dennis in Iraq – but it had proved a disaster for 4 Troop with Clive and Sergeant Leighton, who had started the tour all lovey-dovey and were now hardly speaking to each other.

Trueman said, ‘Yeah, sir, that’d be great. The lads would like that. Who knows, we might even go out for a drink afterwards. I know Brum quite well; there’s a few good places in and around the area.’

Tom smiled at the strangeness of their stiffness with each other. ‘Christ, Sergeant Trueman, we’ll have to see about that drink. Pretty revolutionary stuff that. What would people say? No, that’d be good. On me.’

‘Fuck that, sir. No one’s going to serve you; you look barely out of nappies.’

‘Bollocks. I look like a steely-eyed dealer of death.’ He proudly tugged at the straggly down on his cheeks and neck.

‘You look like Compo. Hate to say it.’

‘No, I look like Patrick Swayze.’

‘He died last year, sir.’

‘Yeah, I know, the new Patrick Swayze. The second coming of Swayze.’

He left Trueman shaking his head into the dregs of his
brew and went on to Jesmond and Thompson’s wagons as a gold film hovered in the east, and the dead land started to come to life again.

At midday the squadron arrived back in Newcastle. They had been out on the ground for four weeks without fresh food, showers or washing their clothes, which now hung off them like curtains. In their ragbag collection of civilian quilted jackets, woolly hats underneath helmets, and gloves and mittens meant for tobogganing but in fact used to pull triggers, disassemble guns or fix thrown tracks, they looked like tramps. With dirt driven deep into every pore and crevice they had christened themselves the Dust Devils.

Tom had loved living off the wagons in the desert; it had been so simple. He didn’t have to think about what to wear, about what time to get up, about how to get to work, about any of the hundreds of trivialities that encumber the minds of billions of people every day. It had been a pure, austere existence of the most brutal simplicity. Keep warm, eat when you can, try not to get killed. Sleep when you’re not doing anything else. In the four weeks he had changed his boxer shorts twice and had kept the same trousers throughout. In the turret the gimpy dripped oil onto his upper thigh, so the permanent dark stain made him and all the other car commanders look as though they had wet themselves.

He always wore two pairs of socks, two T-shirts, his combat shirt, then his woolly jumper, and on top of that his
CBA
. It was too cramped to wear the Osprey inside the Scimitar, and so all the squadron wore the older flak jacket-style CBA. This offered far less protection but was lighter and, crucially in the boys’ eyes, looked far allyer, as it marked them out from everyone else. Scimitar crews were the only people in theatre for whom the army had managed to get an insurance waiver for not wearing the better Osprey.
Behind the front plate of the CBA, which covered his heart and left breast, Tom had his father’s letter, transferred from the Osprey.

Around his neck dangled his dogtags and the St Christopher he had taken from home. Every morning in the desert he had kissed it and in his sleeping bag said one of the prayers he remembered from the booklet the padre had given them at the start of tour: ‘O Lord, you know how busy I must be today. If I forget you, do not forget me.’

The squadron parked their wagons and clamoured to go to scoff, but Brennan ordered them to wash, shave and change beforehand. ‘Look at us,’ he chided them, as he addressed them after Frenchie had congratulated them on the epic, violent and, amazingly, since Ransome, casualty-free patrol. ‘We look like Fred Karno’s Army. And no one in that scoff tent is going to thank us Dust Devils dragging in our filthy clothes and putting dirty hands onto serving spoons. Think again, fellas. Plus, we stink to high fucking heaven. So, we all wash. No man goes in unless he’s looking immaculate.’

And so to a chorus of moaning the squadron traipsed back to their tents and took freezing showers, the dust mixing with the water and forming trickles of mud down their white bodies. They tore their faces to shreds as razors blunted themselves on thick matted beards. Eventually they were clean and shaved with pink if bloody rash-ridden faces, their bodies luxuriating in fresh clothes as they sat in the scoff tent and stuffed themselves with fresh food, heaping piles of vegetables into their mouths. They spent the afternoon tending to the wagons,
rebombing
them, cleaning them up, getting them good to go again. And then they all went to their tents and slept for twelve hours straight.

Tom lay on his cot in the tent, almost feeling guilty that he wasn’t with the squadron back up north but then quickly suppressing that thought and glorying in the soft duvet. It had been only twenty-four hours since they had arrived back in Bastion, having cabbied a lift with a Chinook mail flight, but already he was getting used to it, and the month in the desert seemed an age away.

Jessie poked his head through the door. ‘Hi, sir. Dunno if you want to join us, but me and the sarge thought it’d be a good crack to go over to the American scoff house tonight over in
Leatherneck
and try out their burgers and stuff. You keen?’

Tom weighed up what he should do.
Bugger it
. He’d spent the last four months with these men sweating, shivering and bleeding. Of course he’d go. ‘That sounds great, Corporal Jesmond. Are you sure I won’t cramp your style though?’
I sound like his grandmother
. ‘Give me two minutes and I’m with you.’

‘No dramas, sir; we’ll be in the wagon.’

Tom pulled on some trousers and a shirt, adjusted his beret in the mirror and went outside to the Land Rover, lights on, that the boys had requisitioned.
Where had they got that?
Well, ask no questions, hear no lies. He got in the front passenger seat next to Trueman. Five of the boys were in the back, and he picked them out by their bickering and laughing: GV, Jesmond, Dusty, Ellis and Thompson. He immediately felt happy.

Trueman drove the Land Rover through the silent Bastion while the boys chattered in the back. In the American camp they parked the wagon up and went into the cookhouse.

It was like Disneyland – burgers, free Cokes, ice cream, more ice cream than they’d ever seen before – and they ran amok through the food on offer. As they ate Tom looked at the boys, watching their intricate set-in-stone interactions and smiling at the bizarre little family that he and Trueman had fostered over the last few months. They argued with each other; they laughed at people outside their group; they talked with disdain about some regiments and with great respect about others. They ate more than they had all tour and a couple of hours later piled back on board the wagon.

Trueman turned to Tom and, with a mischievous glint in his eye picked out by the bright white lights outside the cookhouse, said, ‘Right, boss, fancy some fun?’

‘What do you mean?

Jesmond said from the back: ‘He means, sir, fancy some fun?’

A spark of fear ran up Tom’s spine. Did they mean fun as in brothel fun? He had heard rumours about ISO containers in various corners of Bastion that were run as brothels by camp rats. Were the rumours true? He couldn’t possibly go along with it if they were.

Sensing Tom’s discomfort, Trueman steadied his nerves. ‘Relax, it ain’t that bad; just a game we used to play when we were back in Bastion on the last tour, that’s all. A bit of a war against the REMFs.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I mean, sir, that we go around Bastion fucking up some fat REMFs. Watch, it’ll be fun.’

Tom, intrigued now, said, ‘Well, OK then, but I still don’t know how this is going to work.’

Trueman laughed to himself and reversed out of the parking space. ‘Just watch.’

They drove through the sprawling camp, dark and lit only by the occasional flashing lights of a plane or heli landing over on the runway. They passed soldiers walking to and from various places, who would hold their thumbs out speculatively, hoping that a wagon would stop and give them at least a tiny bit of a lift. Trueman ignored all of them until they saw ahead of them a pair of large, scruffy soldiers. He sprang into life, delighted. ‘Here we go, sir; classic Bastion rats! Look at them fat fucks. Shirts untucked, waddling around. Wouldn’t know a rifle if it hit them in the face.’ He shouted back to Jesmond, ‘Here you go, Jessie; some custom for you.’

‘Gotcha, Freddie. Right boys, get ready. REMFs coming up.’

Trueman slowed and pulled up alongside them. They were indeed pretty woeful specimens, fat, scruffy, with bulbous flesh drooping over their waistbands.

Trueman wound down his window and said, as though talking to an old lady on his street back home, ‘You must be knackered, fellas. Fancy a lift?’ Tom started to cotton on to the plan and giggled. Trueman elbowed him in the ribs to shut him up, but they’d bought it.

‘Oh cheers, mate. Nice one,’ they said, licking their lips at not having to expend any more calories wandering around the camp.

The two soldiers walked to the back of the wagon, and Dusty pushed down the tailgate. ‘Hop in, fellas.’ He smiled, and the fatter of the two heaved his leg on board. Just as he stepped up, Dusty whispered, ‘Now!’ and Trueman floored the accelerator, pulling away from the
REMF
, who fell off the tailgate flat on his back in the dust to howls of laughter from the boys as the wagon sped away.

GV shouted back at them, ‘That’s right, get some fuckin’ dust down your necks, you fat chippy cunts.’

‘Again, again!’ said Dusty, like a little boy asking to go down a slide at a playground.

‘OK, OK, just let me get some distance from those lads. What do you reckon, sir? Good crack, eh? Sir? You all right?’ He looked to his left and saw Tom shuddering with laughter, bent double in his seat, unable to say a thing.

Trueman raised his eyebrows. ‘Fuck me, it’s funny, but it ain’t that funny. Officers! I’ll just never understand you lot.’ He looked ahead, and a hundred metres away his headlights picked up another waddling group. ‘All right, Dusty, round two coming up, dead ahead. Get ready!’