Rain (22 page)

The next evening they were ready to go. Their kit was packed in the tents and their flight to Kandahar was at midnight. They spent the day bouncing around Bastion, having brew after brew with mates from other regiments and hearing how things were going in the rest of theatre. Tom had forgotten how cocooned they had been up in Loy Kabir; he loved hearing all the stories from the friends from Sandhurst he bumped into, and their take on the past months.

At dusk they gathered with other units on the Bastion football pitch for a memorial service for a corporal who had been killed four days before, whose body was about to be repatriated to the UK. A chaplain ran through the brief formulaic service, six hundred soldiers dutifully listening to words about a man they had never met, but still polite and attentive, feeling as though they ought to have known him. He had been killed by an IED near Babaji in an explosion that had wounded three others. Tom listened to proceedings with his nose scrunched up in denial. He didn’t want to think about this any more. All he wanted was to go home.

The corporal’s platoon commander stood up to give the eulogy. It was standard stuff – about how good he had been at his job, about what he had done in his career – and the lieutenant was no orator. He kept fumbling his words; he hadn’t even bothered to learn them off by heart and read shakily from a piece of paper, which fluttered and rasped in the wind. It was an entirely forgettable speech, and Tom felt sad that this was all the send-off the man was getting from
Afghanistan. But after the officer came a lance corporal who introduced himself as the dead man’s best friend; they had joined up together and had served all over the world living out of each other’s armpits.

The lance corporal’s speech was short and seemingly off the cuff. He needed no notes, and with a series of jokes and memories rammed home to the entire assembly how special this man had been to him. He ended with ‘I just wanna say that Carl was the kind of bloke that glues a platoon together. Without him a platoon falls apart. Look among you now. You know who the guys are in your own unit. The ones that make you laugh. The ones who are never down. The ones who always start the banter. The ones always first through the door, first to help with the barma. Well, Carl was that bloke. And we only ever realized it after he was killed. Look around you now and think who that bloke is in your platoon. And when you’ve found him look after him. Because you won’t realize how important he is until he’s gone.’ His voice, which had started clear and booming, was faltering. ‘I mean that. Just look after those guys.’ He broke off, composed himself, turned and walked smartly back to his comrades, who dragged him close and hugged him.

The chaplain finished off the service and then two
105s
blasted blank rounds into the sky in violent salute. The assembly broke up, and 3 Troop went to their tents to get ready for the flight. Tom walked back alone, having lost the lads in the crowd, and thought of Trueman, how he was just the person described in the speech. He’d never really thought about it before.

At midnight they flew the short distance to Kandahar. As they walked off the Hercules, all around them was the hum of a huge airfield. Two jets scorched their way into the sky, and
immediately they felt the change in atmosphere from the restrained, almost austere Bastion to the military baroque of the American base. They were corralled into buses and driven to a huge warehouse sixty metres long packed with bunk beds. There was room for maybe four hundred soldiers in there, and it was about half full. They stumbled through the half-dark to find an area to bed down in, climbed onto some bunks and fell asleep using their daysacks as pillows.

They awoke disorientated and dehydrated, and stepped out into the mayhem of daily life in Kandahar. Bastion, they immediately realized, was a masterpiece of military planning: neat ordered rows of tents with wide roads and drainage ditches immaculately dug, almost Roman in its symmetry and order. Kandahar by contrast was a jumble of sprawling huts and winding roads, like a shanty town, with huge warehouses and hangars strewn randomly around. American soldiers and marines mingled with civilian contractors with huge paunches and bull necks wandering around behind sunglasses grafted onto their faces. Trueman and Jesmond immediately and entirely true to form bridled at the American scruffiness and made sure all the boys looked smart, like mothers at school gates doing up ties and combing down fringes. All the while in the background jets took off; an A-10, teeth painted on its nose, buzzed the airfield.

Even this little bit further south it was ten degrees warmer than Bastion and felt amazing to be back in some sort of sunshine again. The troop went down to the Boardwalk, a great wooden hexagon built around a basketball pitch lined with coffee shops, T-shirt shops, doughnut shops and burger bars. It was indeed the paradise that Tom had heard it to be, and the boys fell upon it. Tom walked around on his own, enjoying the feeling of being in transit and not required to do anything or think for himself save only when to eat and
sleep. They were to fly out at 0200 the next morning and so with the whole day to waste he mooched through the Boardwalk shops, amused by a lot of the stuff available.

Clearly the Americans hadn’t yet fully got to grips with the delicacies of local-population-centric counter-insurgency. One T-shirt featured jets with Gothic script beneath clamouring,
LASER-GUIDED DEMOCRACY! GET SOME! GET SOME!
Another had the Grim Reaper riding atop a tank, a third a skeleton chomping a cigar and shooting a machine gun from the hip. Yet another had the cross hairs of a rifle overlaid on a Taliban silhouette;
TALIBAN HUNTING CLUB OPEN SEASON
, it proclaimed. One echoed a phrase from Vietnam, shouting out, again in Gothic script,
YEA THOUGH I WALK THROUGH THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH I SHALL FEAR NO EVIL, FOR I AM THE EVILLEST SON OF A BITCH IN THE VALLEY
. Another posed the delicate question,
HEY TALIBAN, HOW ABOUT I OPEN A GREAT BIG CAN OF WHOOP-ASS … IN YOUR FACE?

Tom went to the counter and handed over a torch he wanted to buy. Fumbling for dollar notes in his pockets, he looked at the shop assistant. She was about his age with black hair in a neat ponytail and a small slightly upturned button of a nose, deep-brown skin and the kind of smile he hadn’t seen in months. ‘There you go, sir. That’ll be nine dollars fifty.’

He couldn’t speak at first. He hadn’t spoken to a girl in weeks, and he stared at her, eyes on stalks.

‘I’m sorry, sir; are you OK?’

Tom went red and blurted out, flustered, ‘Yes, sorry, quite all right, quite all right. Away with the fairies, I’m afraid.’

She laughed.

‘What’s so funny?’ said Tom, trying to claw back a shred of confidence.

‘I don’t know.’ She had a chirpy, happy voice with maybe a
tiny Southern drawl in there. It was beautiful. ‘I guess you English are just kinda funny, that’s all.’

‘Funny peculiar or funny ha ha?’

‘What do you mean?’

Christ! What an idiot.
‘Um, I mean are we funny like we’re strange funny, like a monkey might be funny, or funny like in joke funny? Oh, forget that; I suppose a monkey might be both types of funny.’
What am I saying?
He was behaving like a total prat. He couldn’t believe that the sight of a girl had reduced him to this state.

‘I mean funny both ways.’ She smiled and then, tilting her head to one side inquisitively at Tom’s own laughter, said, ‘Now why am
I
so funny then?’

‘I don’t know. You’re not funny. I mean, you might be funny ha ha but not strange funny. You’re very nice. It’s just, well, I haven’t spoken to a girl in months, and it’s quite a weird feeling.’

‘Oh really, where you been?’

‘Up in this town in Helmand called Loy Kabir. It’s in the middle of nowhere. I wouldn’t go there. Pretty overrated as a holiday destination.’
Why can’t I just shut up? This is utter bilge.
But he carried on: ‘The locals aren’t terribly friendly. Weather’s awful. No galleries, exhibitions, theatres, no nothing. And the food? Don’t get me started. Dreadful.’

‘You can say that again. You ain’t carryin’ an ounce of fat. You look like a skeleton.’ She paused as if to try and pluck up the nerve. ‘A nice-lookin’ skeleton, but still a skeleton.’ Tom looked to his right and caught his reflection in a mirror. She was right. He was very, very thin. He looked like a brain on a stick.

‘Crikey, you’re right. Do you know, I’d never realized how thin. We don’t have any mirrors up there. Might break one
and get bad luck, you see.’
Oh Lord. This is risible. And did I really just say ‘Crikey’? This is terrible, terrible.

‘Well you better get yourself some burgers!’ Tom thought he recognized a glint of something he had seen before, and he took a moment to place it. It was when he had seen Cassie the day he had left. This girl was just like her. He drew a breath, and behind him the bell on the door tinkled as some other customers came in.

‘Um, I know this is all a bit sudden, and you probably get this from every soldier who walks in here, but I wonder if when you get a break you might, er, you might want to come and get a burger with—’

He broke off as a shout came from across the shop: ‘Oi, boss, so this is where you been!’

Bugger.
He turned around. Dusty, wearing an LA Dodgers baseball cap and aviator sunglasses, was with Ellis. He was holding aloft one of the
LASER-GUIDED DEMOCRACY!
T-shirts. ‘What do you reckon? Suit me?’

If ever a moment had been ruined this was it. Tom looked at the shop assistant apologetically and her eyes met his. He smiled, and she winked and turned back to the till to pretend she was examining a receipt. Dusty and Ellis looked at Tom and realized they’d interrupted. Dusty stage-whispered, ‘Oh sorry, boss; didn’t realize you were
on duty
as it were. Did we disturb anything?’

Tom walked over to them, turned the baseball cap on Dusty’s head back to front and clipped him gently around the head. He sighed, ‘Nothing, Corporal Miller, nothing at all. Come on, brews on me.’ They laughed and left.

That night they boarded the plane. They hadn’t slept all day, too excited about going home. The plane was two-thirds full
and also taking home an RAF Regiment squadron which had been guarding Bastion. Trueman shepherded the boys away from them, pushing them towards the back of the plane as if scared that they would catch something from the REMFs. ‘Don’t want to be associated with that filth, sir,’ he told Tom as he patrolled the rear of the plane like a mother lioness, snarling when one of the RAF Regiment lads even so much as dared to intimate he was going to sit near them.

As they were taxiing to the runway Jessie got out of his seat and made an announcement. ‘Well, fellas, we’ve got this far. Who’d have thought it? Just wanna say, everyone have a crackin’ leave.’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out a little white plastic bottle. ‘We all wanna be in fine fettle when we get back home, so I went to see the Dutch doc in
KAF
, told him some bollocks about how I was suffering from
PTSD
and had trouble sleepin’. Well, you know what the Dutch are like. He gave me the strongest, most hard-core sleepin’ pills around.’ He looked at the bottle proudly. ‘Here the fuckers are. Called Schleepz. The quack said they knock you out like a light. He said no more than three at a time though. Otherwise you die.’

He passed around the bottle, and they all took one. Dusty was next to Tom, and when the bottle reached him he looked with contempt at the pills. ‘What? They’re mini, these. Only three? Bollocks to that.’ He poured at least six onto his palm and before Tom could stop him gulped them down. ‘Bet you they’re fuck-all use. Sleeping pills are a complete joke. Always are. We’d be better off having a spoonful of Calpol.’

Five minutes later, as the engines roared into life and they shot down the runway towards home, Dusty was fast asleep, mouth wide open and a stream of dribble dripping from it.

A cold and frosty late-January dawn was breaking when they touched down at Brize Norton eight hours later. They
emerged from the plane drawing great gulps of air. It was the first time in months they could breathe without dragging dust down their throats. Tom and Trueman stood at the bottom of the steps and heaved great breaths of clean, pure Atlantic air. Behind them at the top of the stairway Ellis and Davenport struggled out the door, supporting a comatose Dusty still fast asleep. They staggered down the staircase and Trueman led them over to a fire hydrant, where they rudely woke Dusty up with a high-pressure blast of icy water to his face. Cackling with laughter, they went inside to pick up their bergens.

A bod from
rear party
met them with a minibus outside the terminal, and soon they were speeding down the motorway towards Aldershot. They looked out the windows in silence, mesmerized by the green and brown countryside, wet with thaw and with spindly trees spreading their bare fingers into the sky. Winter had never looked so beautiful.

Through the drops of drizzle clustered on the train window Tom looked, resting his forehead on its cold surface. The train followed the route he had taken into London when he had last seen Cassie. Back then the river had shone and the city had looked fantastic; four months on, it had shed that coat and lay naked in its greyness; grey buildings, grey pigeons under the eaves of the stations they stopped at, grey sky arching overhead.

Tom got off at Clapham Junction and walked north to Victoria. He was wearing his uniform. There were some civvies in his room in the mess, but he had decided to stay as he was. For one, he couldn’t bear to take his deserts off; they had become almost a part of him. For another, he wanted to walk through London pushing his uniform into people’s faces, to show them what men who fought in Afghanistan looked like, to rub their noses into the fact that the war wasn’t just on the news, but something fought and lived by real Britons. As he walked he glared at everyone he passed, as if daring them to say something hostile.

He tried to grow used to the sensation of the city and its unaccustomed background hum. In Afghan there was no such thing as ambient noise. The only thing that you heard, ever, was what was going on right in front of you. It was strange having these new layers of sound impede his senses. He walked up Albert Bridge Road and stopped where he and Cassie had split in September. It looked different. The river then had sparkled; now it seemed old and dull, the only
brightness coming from the reflection of passing headlights on the wet road.

He crossed the river and walked up to the King’s Road. He had wanted to come there specifically; he might bump into Cassie, but also he couldn’t imagine anywhere on earth more different to Loy Kabir. It was raining heavily now, but he didn’t make any concession to it and puffed out his chest in defiance at the freezing drops streaming down his neck. He looked with contempt at grown men scuttling like beetles down the street, or cowering under awnings afraid to step out into the wet.

Scum
. None of them were fit to lick his boots. It was Sunday lunchtime, and here they were, masters of the universe, wallets heaving and all clearly doing something clever with money, and Tom hated them. Some looked at him with curiosity, and Tom hoped that they felt a piercing, emasculating shame. Digging his fingernails into his palms he realized how angry he was and told himself to chill out and enjoy himself.

He stopped at a delicatessen to satisfy a sudden urge for a cake; he hadn’t had a cake for ages. But when he went inside he couldn’t decide what to choose from the array of pastries before him, and he sensed the queue becoming impatient behind him. He found the shop bewildering, and everything seemed to swirl around: the bright cakes, the thick make-up on the women’s faces behind him. Two children were screaming at a table a few metres away, an incompetent nanny trying to get them to behave. Tom found this infuriating and began to feel hot. He hurriedly and awkwardly left the shop to continue his arrogant snarling march up the road.

In Victoria he queued for a ticket and then stood in front of the departures board, becoming tenser as the world moved around him and the board flicked its changes from right to
left until his train appeared. He went to the train and found a seat, bolt upright and with his daysack on his lap, feeling scared by his anonymity. An old lady came to sit opposite him and smiled. He smiled back and then shifted his gaze.

The train left the station, and they crossed back over the river again. The old lady was wearing a black fur hat and an elegant dark-blue coat; she had perfect skin, if heavily wrinkled, and bright, piercing blue eyes beneath shining white hair. She leaned towards him conspiratorially and said, as though not wanting anyone else to hear, ‘Bet it’s strange to be back.’

Tom looked surprised. ‘How did you know?’

She laughed with a rising, girlish peal. ‘Young man, look at you. It doesn’t take Einstein to work out where you’ve been. Besides, you look like my son did when he came back from the Falklands. Wound up like a coiled spring. Is it very bad out there?’

Tom was taken aback. He found that he wanted to tell her everything. He had never thought about how he would explain it. In a few seconds he scanned back in his mind’s eye over the entirety of the last months in crystal-clear review, and then, in barely more than a whisper, he replied, ‘Yes. Yes. It is very bad out there. It’s … unforgiving. I don’t think I’ve learned so much in all my life. There are horrible times, but, do you know, there are some rather wonderful times as well.’ His muscles loosened and he settled back into his seat. ‘I suppose … that, well, I suppose … I never really thought properly about coming home, the whole time I was out there. You just blank your mind off to it. I think … I think that in a funny sort of way I never thought I was going to come back. And now I am back, it feels strange. I mean, I’ve only been back in the country for what –’ he looked at his watch and noticed it was still on Afghan time ‘– seven hours, and
this city doesn’t feel like home at all.’ He flicked his hand contemptuously towards the suburbs as they sped by. ‘It sounds strange, I know, but I’ve sort of found a home from home with my soldiers.’

He broke off as if he’d said too much, and to fill the gap she stepped in: ‘And where are you off to now, if you don’t mind me asking? To your parents? A girlfriend?’

‘No, home. To my mum. My pa died when I was young. I can’t wait to see her.’

He saw a tiny glint of moisture in her eye. ‘Yes. Your poor mother, she will have been worried sick about you. Do you have to go back out again?’

‘Yup, but only for four weeks or so. Peanuts really. And most of that will be taken up with handing over our kit to the guys replacing us. So I’m basically home and dry, to be honest. I mean, fingers crossed and all.’ He grinned, and with his smile felt the last of his tension ebb away. He began to enjoy being where he was. In a comfy train heading home, shooting past familiar fields now, fields he used to tick off in his head whenever he was heading home from Cambridge or Sandhurst. He lost himself in the late afternoon, and the old lady let him be for a while as he sat contentedly watching the countryside.

A drinks trolley came, and despite his protests she bought him a gin and tonic. He sat and sipped at it like it was the most delicious thing in the world. She looked at him approvingly. ‘There. That’ll take the edge off. Where are you getting off the train? How are you getting back home?’

‘Probably just get the bus from Teynham station to my village and then walk home from there.’

‘Nonsense. You’ll catch your death of cold. My car’s parked at Sittingbourne. I can give you a lift to your home, if you would like.’

He looked at her, overcome with gratitude. ‘Are you sure? That’d be great, but … but you don’t even know me.’

She looked indignant. ‘Young man, I may not know you personally, but I know your type. You are just like my son and his friends when they were your age. And, to be honest, just like my husband after he had just come back from Korea.’ She stopped frowning and beamed at him. In that moment he felt as though he had never been away.

‘Well, if you’re sure … ’

‘Of course I’m sure. It’s the least I can do. Tucked up back here in a nice warm house while you and your soldiers are fighting for your lives. And don’t worry; you don’t have to talk in the car. Just tell me where to go. I won’t press you for conversation.’

He tried to say thank you but felt his eyes welling up with tears.

She stepped in. ‘Don’t worry. Get some sleep now. You need to be in good form for your mother. I’ll wake you when we’re there.’

A minute later he was fast asleep.

The final trace of the sun was dipping beneath the trees at the back of the Old Mill when the car pulled in at the top of the drive. He got out and looked back in through the window. ‘I don’t know how I can possibly thank you. For everything. For the lift, obviously, for the drink too, but also … ’ he tried to work out how to express himself ‘ … for teaching me to enjoy being back.’

‘Young man, my pleasure. Just one favour, that’s all I ask.’

‘Anything.’

‘When you hug your mother, hug harder than you have ever hugged her before.’

‘I promise.’

‘Righty ho, best be off. I have to get back to feed the dogs.’ She put the car into gear and started off.

‘But wait, I don’t even know your … ’ he trailed off as the car sped down the narrow lane, leaving Tom to darkness and himself.

The silhouette of the house loomed in the gathering purple. Tiny flecks of white lined the drive, guiding him home, as snowdrops pierced their way out of winter, leading the charge towards spring. He set off down the drive, glorying in the cold air.

He knocked too quietly on the wooden door to the kitchen, and when he pushed it open he saw Constance standing by the sink, chopping carrots. Zeppo was lying on his beanbag and didn’t even stir.

He stood in the doorway and said softly, ‘Hi, Mum. It’s me.’

She looked up, dropped her knife into the sink and blanched as though she had seen a ghost. And then she was hugging him harder than she had ever done before. Tom felt as though he was a little boy again. He remembered his promise and made sure he hugged back harder.