Army of You & Me (2 page)

Dear Captain Goldsmith,

I know you’re in the middle of a difficult tour. So I wanted to do my bit by giving you and the other soldiers some reminders of home. Please do keep the
Marc de champagne
for yourself. They’re one of the bestsellers in my shop. This, all these little things, is to say thank you. Thank you for protecting us, for doing your job. To say we’re all proud of you. Keep going. And come home safe.

Best wishes

Madeline

Owner of probably the best sweet shop in London

The address was neatly printed at the top in immaculate penmanship. How had she known? Did she know his parents? A thought trickled through him. Christ, did she know his ex-wife? Were the sweets all poisoned? That was foolish. If Sarah knew anyone who owned a sweet shop, he’d have inherited those friends in the divorce. Sarah didn’t touch sugar.

“Tommy!” he yelled, shoving the note into his pocket.

“Yes, boss.” The young private loped over to Cain’s little mud hut of a cubbyhole.

“Hand these out.”

Tommy’s eyes widened like golf balls. “Fuck me! It’s Christmas in here!”

“Yeah. We got lucky.”

Grinning, Tommy bounded outside to hand out the sweets to the rest of the platoon. Cain juggled the small box of truffles in his palm and glanced down at the letter. It touched him. To be thought of with kindness by someone he didn’t even know. Soldiers had been given little more than grief since the war in Afghanistan started. He’d had bottles thrown at him, physically broken up fights between drunken men and soldiers in uniform heading to their barracks. People had accosted him in the street for starting illegal wars, then cited World War II as their argument. Some of those same people knew that every male in his family since the eighteen hundreds had served in the military. Those who didn’t, were even more incensed that he was blindly following family tradition rather than protesting against the government’s hidden agenda for invading the Middle East.

Gradually, attitudes changed. Not all of them – he still got grief if he wore the uniform
—
but it shifted. As soon as the first soldier was killed, and his coffin, draped in the Union Flag, was broadcast on television, his father told him how close it was for everyone in the country to see a young man return home dead. A terrible version of six degrees of separation, everyone knew someone who was serving and eventually, would know someone who died serving.

“It’s not just principle any more,” his father wrote to him. “It’s someone’s child. Someone’s spouse. Someone’s sibling. It’s now real to people because they know the dead soldier. They went to school with them. To the pub. Probably used to babysit for them. They can argue illegality all they want but as soon as they’re at the funeral of someone they know? They understand life’s not black and white. It’s death.”

Maybe that was part of it. Someone just being kind to him after all the misery. The care packages came with regularity – not regular by normal Royal Mail standards, but by the date of each of her letters, Madeline was sending packages each week. Not just sweets and chocolate, but wet wipes, which were a godsend when the showers and toilets stopped working. Deodorant for the times when the heat was so intense, they could barely carry out patrols. Wotsits - God, he’d missed those crisps, and munching his way through a packet whilst reading a brand new Lee Ryan novel was simple luxury.

Madeline didn’t seem particularly
au fait
with emails, even though he printed his own clearly on his thank you note, so he wrote to her. Nothing about operations and missions that he could go into detail, but he’d describe the bazaars in the little villages. A game of volleyball between the troops. The song a member of his platoon sang with bawdy enthusiasm before they all went to bed. An Afghan child exchanging words in English with him.

In between letters to his parents and to various friends, he always thought carefully of what to send back to Madeline. She was his Wotsit dealer; he had to of course keep her on side. As little as he gave away in his letters, Madeline gave away even less. She’d write reams on celebrity gossip that brought him back down to earth. That silliness was carrying on in the world, even whilst insurgents were planting IEDs and colleagues were losing limbs and lives. It cheered him. Kept up his morale. She’d write about the news
—
political affairs, world crises, the stock markets. She’d tear the back pages from the
Financial Times
and she’d complain, like a typical Brit, about the weather. Never once did she write why she chose to send him the care packages, and she never answered him as to how she knew him.

But here he was, sitting in probably the greatest sweet shop in London, waiting for a cup of tea from the woman who had made each day of that pretty boring-arse tour bearable. Madeline placed a large mug in front of him, and he glanced at the print.
Home Sweet Home
. Cute.

“When did you get home?” she asked, sitting at the far end of the table.

Again side-stepping.
“Last week. Took a few days for my mum to let me out of her sight. How are you? How’s business?”

“Could be better,” she admitted. “I suppose I’m luckier than most business owners at the moment. I’m not bankrupt, and I don’t owe the bank any money. Before the crash I bought the lease from the landlord outright, so the premises are fully mine. No mortgage. I rent out the flat above. Nice tenants. Clean.”

Clever, distracting little thing
, he thought admiringly. “That’s marvellous. So, how do you know my dad?”

She started and overturned her mug of tea. Cain righted the mug and stepped around her to unravel a roll of kitchen towel and mop up the hot liquid. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled.

He placed the ruined papers in the bin and stood next to her. Madeline got up and put the table between them.
That’s odd...
On paper she had been more than friendly. Now he felt as if she were intimidated by him. “It’s fine. How do you know him?”

“Why do you assume I know him?”

“Because you can’t send unsolicited mail to soldiers. It has to be addressed to them by name. And you thought I was my dad. So, how do you know him?” She seemed so hesitant to say so. He couldn’t fathom his father having an affair. Not that Major Goldsmith could keep a secret from the world and his neighbour, but he didn’t seem inclined to infidelity.

“He helped me. When I was a child.” She gripped her hands together and chewed on a knuckle. “I looked him up. I saw the name and I just...” She seemed to lose her nerve and her gaze lowered to the table. “Look, I haven’t talked about this to anyone. In a really long time.”

Something in her voice made him back off. “It’s all right. I didn’t mean to spook you.”

“You... It’s not your fault. It’s mine. I got things mixed up.” Her huge, dark eyes were so full of worry; he picked up his bag, ready to leave.

“I’m sorry, Madeline. I just wanted to say thank you, in person. I know you think you made a mistake, but what you did was a lifeline to the rest of the world for all of us, that we weren’t there alone and forgotten. I can’t thank you enough for it.”

She lifted a shoulder. “But you would have had your wife or girlfriend or boyfriend and family writing to you as well. I just wanted to do my bit.”

He chuckled. “Not that I have any of those three, but you did. More than your bit.”

Madeline scooted past him to open the shop door. “I’ll let you out.”

He paused as she swung the door open for him. “Madeline, if you think you owe my dad for something, you don’t. He was doing his job.”

“His job. My life,” she said slowly. Holding out her hand, she spoke again, her voice a mere whisper, “Thank you for coming all this way.”

He gave her hand a perfunctory shake and turned to leave. “Hold on!” she called to his back. The bell on the door trilled as she turned back into the shop. A few minutes later she came back and handed him a box. “The truffles. I made them today.”

“How much...?”

She slapped his arm. “How dare you? Just take them.”

“Oww.” The slap cut through his clothing. She had to be a mother. Only mothers knew exactly where to slap the hell out of people.

“Take the damn chocolates.”

“Cheers,” he said quietly. “Nice to meet you, Madeline.” Sending her a half smile, he made his way back to the bus stop. It was a two-hour journey back to Cambridgeshire, and all he had for the journey were questions.

The village was overrun. Her father heard the screams of the women who had been their neighbours and pushed Madeline back inside their home. He whipped off her T-shirt and wrapped her budding breasts with bandages. Not even having a moment to feel shock at being nude before her father, he explained in between puffed breaths, “I’d rather they shoot you than violate you.”

“Daddy...”

He shoved the T-shirt back on her and tucked the remaining roll of bandages inside her underwear. “They’re coming.”

With brutal strokes, he cut through her twists of hair, leaving patches and cutting the scalp until she felt trickles of blood running down her neck. Gathering up the shorn locks, he shoved them inside her pillowcase. “The bag under your bed. Get it.”

She pulled out a plastic bag and looked to her father for guidance. He had another bag in his hand and slung it over his shoulder. “Go! Go!” He shoved her towards the back of the house as the screams from their neighbours intensified.

They squeezed through the window and took off on foot, following the other villagers running to escape the spray of bullets and the violence of the
interahamwe
“those who fight together.” A band of men who mutilated, murdered, and raped in the name of their cause. What the cause was exactly, Madeline didn’t understand. She only understood that she was their enemy.

“Head for the plantation!” her father yelled after her. Her feet pounded the dirt as she raced to the stalks of corn. The
rat-tat-tat
of machine gun fire was close. Too close. Her arm was burning, and she didn’t understand why. Her father skidded behind her, and they edged into the centre of the plantation, camouflaging themselves within the field.

Don’t come here,
Madeline begged.
Just go, just go, please go away.
She heard them calling out, “Snake! Snake! Come out of the grass!”

She slapped her hands over her ears, blocking out the sound of gunfire. It could have been hours later, but eventually her father pulled her hands down. “It’s all right, darling. But they’ll be back. We need to move.”

“Where?” she asked, feeling weak. “They’ll find us.”

He removed a bag from his back and took out the small bottle of alcohol he had been saving for years. Pushing the sleeve of her T-shirt, he exposed the wound. She’d been hit. Pretty deeply, as well. He swore and with a capful of the brandy, he poured it over her arm. Before she could scream, he slapped a palm over her mouth, holding her tight against him until she sagged in his arms.

“Sorry, my darling,” he whispered. “I had to clean it.” Pain flared through her body. Her father’s eyes were full of sorrow. “Hold on to the corn. It’s going to hurt.”

***

The Goldsmith home in Cambridgeshire was a sprawling, detached, six-bedroom heirloom surrounded by several acres of green fields. Cain’s mother’s horses were trotting through the grass, unbridled. He’d thought of this view on tour. Even missed it. Now he was home, he realised nostalgia was a powerful tool. He couldn’t bear it. The noise and bustle of London would keep the voices in his head quieter than the stillness of the countryside ever would.