The Thompson Gunner (23 page)

His mother came back in then. She made cups of tea and Mark said to me, ‘So what are you writing for your “My Day at the Beach” story?' and I expect it sounded fake to all of us, even though it was genuinely part of the homework. His mother was doing the books for the farm that afternoon – her homework, she called it – and she took her tea and went back to them.

I'd always thought Mark had made up the cellar, since he was quite a teller of stories, and the stories always put him closer to danger or excitement than we ever actually were. A cellar for making illegal drink was an exciting prospect. I'd imagined a huge underground chemistry set when he'd talked about it, but I don't think I'd believed that the cellar was there at all till I saw it that afternoon.

When we could show that we'd done our homework,
Mr Macleish took us over to the barn. It was padlocked now, and he unlocked it, then used an inside bolt to close it once we'd gone through the doors.

‘Now, you understand how this works?' he said to me quietly, putting the keys in his pocket. ‘This is the biggest secret you've ever been let in on. Do you follow? This is one of those secrets that you never tell anyone, no matter what. And that means anyone. Your daddy doesn't want to know about this. So it's just between you and me and Mark.'

The barn light was a single uncovered bulb and I looked at our shadows on the stone floor and heard the pigs moving in the half-dark, snuffling and nosing around in their hay, and I told him I understood and could be trusted completely. He took the torch from where he'd tucked it into the pocket of his tweed jacket, he turned it on and said, ‘Mark tells me you know the Gurkhas. Well, this might have been on its way to them.'

We knew the Gurkhas from Commandoes, the small but fearless Nepalese warriors with their famous kukri knives. The Gurkhas were legendary to readers of Commandoes.

The guns had come in on a fishing boat. They'd been taken from a container in England about to go to Nepal, then driven to the coast and brought in to Donaghadee by boat in the middle of the night.

‘And here they are,' Mr Macleish said. ‘In the last place anyone would expect.'

He lifted the trapdoor and led us down by the light of the torch. I could see boxes with writing on them, and the edges of the torch beam picked up metal here and there but mostly, beyond the steps, it was dark. Then he lit a lamp and the whole place lit up and all I could think of was Aladdin's cave. An Aladdin's cave of guns.

And
Mark said ‘Bloody hell' since he hadn't seen it all laid out before, and his father clipped him over the head, but just as a joke, and he told him, ‘Don't you go using any of that bad language above ground. Your mother'll be right onto you.'

Mark laughed and then went quiet as we all stood there and took it in. We'd seen stories on TV about guns, Mark and I, and we'd handled one or two, but here was an entire arsenal all in one go. Guns being handed on by the British army to the Gurkhas, filling up the cellar under the Macleishes' barn, on their way to loyalist paramilitaries. Rows of 303s, Lee Enfields, with boxes of ammunition. And submachine guns, and two Brens with stands and, over in the corner, a bazooka.

‘There's no ammo for this one yet,' Mr Macleish said, patting the bazooka, ‘so it's just for show at the moment.' Then he picked up a handgun and held it in front of me and said, ‘This'd be more your size. It's a Webley. It's a Mark IV, thirty-eight calibre.'

He let me take it right over to the light. Its grip was scored into little hard diamond shapes, with a screw going through a bigger diamond in the middle, and when you held it, you knew you had something special in your hand. There was an oval bit at the end of the grip where it met the metal of the gun, and it had ‘Webley' written on it in raised letters, neat printing with the tail of the Y running all the way back to the W. I knew that Webleys broke in the middle, so I snapped it open, checked it was empty, and the cylindrical magazine made a series of smooth quiet clicks when I rotated it. I snapped it shut again, held it up with both hands and looked past the sight and into the dark on the far side of the cellar. I could keep this one still, still enough, even though it was quite heavy too.

Some
of the guns were gone quite quickly, some stayed. Mr Macleish knew even more about them than we did. He told us he'd done national service in the fifties, using guns just like these when they were the best the army had, but Korea was over before he had the chance to get there. He gave Paul a go of a Sten one afternoon, after he'd found a silencer. He'd said he couldn't try it till then. Single-shot might have been okay, since the farm was on the edge of the woods and people would think it was a fox or something, and not be bothered about the legalities. But there was no real point in trying a Sten if you couldn't use it as a submachine gun.

He lectured Paul about how he had to do it, but Paul just wanted to have a go. Mr Macleish told him we weren't gangsters, there'd be none of that shooting from the hip rubbish. And no thrashing around, since his turn would be up in seconds that way, and it wasn't how you were supposed to do it. You had to fire bursts of two to three shots only, and use them to walk your fire to the target.

Paul gave it a try, and Mark and I stood well back and behind Mr Macleish. Paul never paid enough attention to instructions and he'd already done a gearbox in the tractor because of it, so we weren't going to take any chances. But he did all right. And the silencer didn't make it silent, but it wasn't noisy either, certainly not like you'd expect a submachine gun to be.

Then Mr Macleish
handed me the Webley, and he took three bullets from his pocket and told me he'd give them to me one at a time. He told me to keep steady, and to use both hands and keep both eyes open. He said there would be a kick, but I'd be okay.

I missed the can with the first bullet, and we all laughed since I wasn't too close, but I hit it with the next two.

There was never one clear moment when it turned serious – perhaps it was the afternoon in the cellar, perhaps shooting at the cans, perhaps not. Each step seemed small, and also exciting, and the natural successor to the step before. We were eight, we'd read about these things, here they were and we were getting our chance. We'd read Commandoes, we'd played at being commandoes but we couldn't get caps for our cap guns any more and now, once in a while with Mr Macleish, we could use the real thing instead.

I wondered where the bullets went, into the dirt in the potato field. I wondered if, one day, someone might dig there and find them, and we'd all be in terrible trouble. They'd tell my parents, for a start.

I picked up the three empty cartridges, and the last one still felt warm. I gave them back to Mr Macleish and he put them in his pocket and said, ‘Good girl.'

W
E TRAVEL NORTH
and inland, through the suburbs. There are twelve of us, nine men and three women, and I'm sitting next to Terri, a location scout who has been working with Elliott somewhere outside the city for the past two days. They've been searching for beaches that have the features their script calls for, and a place that can look like a fishing town that's down on its luck.

‘I'm probably only here because you need a minimum of twelve,' she says, ‘but I thought I might as well come when Elliott asked me. You never know what these things are like unless you give them a go.'

She sits with a water bottle between her knees and tells me that she saw in the paper this morning that I'd been busy lately. She asks about Canada, and says she's always wanted to go there, particularly to the Rockies and to that very grand old hotel that's in either Montreal or Quebec City.

There are fewer houses now, and more dry bush. Elliott has the radio tuned to a commercial station with a playlist that owes a lot to the soundtrack of
The Big Chill
. He keeps
turning around and telling anyone he makes eye contact with how great this is going to be, like someone trying to create nostalgia from scratch, and too early in the process. The two men from the network head office in Sydney are sitting behind him, but most if not all of the others are locals – the Perth station general manager, a sports reporter, the producer of a local travel and lifestyle show.

I remember how quiet I was in the car when my mother picked me up from the Macleishes' after my first turn with the Webley. Not quiet but silent, actively not speaking in case the new secret came out, sitting saying nothing and remembering how the gun had felt to fire. ‘What's got into you?' she said, since we usually talked a lot. ‘Are they tiring you out with all that homework?' And I told her that was it exactly and she should get them to give me less, and she messed my hair around with her hand and laughed and said, ‘Next you'll be telling me they're sending you home from school with specific instructions to watch more television.' I had wanted to keep the empty cartridges, to take them home and hide them in my room, but I knew that wasn't possible.

I had wanted them because they could remind me always of where I stood, and what I was part of. I could have hidden them in plenty of places. And they were mine really, since I'd fired the bullets.

Mr Macleish had seemed proud of me for hitting the target twice, and for knowing not to leave the spent cartridges lying on the ground. ‘But I'm sure your ma's always been one for tidiness,' he said. ‘She's always nicely presented.' It was the only time I can ever recall him mentioning her.

Close to twenty years later, when the movie
JFK
came out, my mother said to me, ‘Do you know what Mark Macleish's father said about all that when it happened? When Kennedy got shot? It must have been the day after, and I said how terrible I thought it was and he said, “But sure he was only a Catholic.” And that was it for him. “Only a Catholic.”'

We turn off the road and drive through an open gate. There's bush on either side of us, but it thins out after a couple of minutes, and we come to a large dirt carpark with open land beyond it. There are maybe ten cars and another minibus there already, and a row of demountable buildings marking the far side of the parking area. A man waves to us and starts walking over. He's wearing a black T-shirt, camouflage pants and a black Oakland Raiders cap over buzz-cut hair.

The first thing he says to us, in a rousing kind of way, is, ‘So, is everybody ready to have fun?'

He must be twenty or so, and up close he looks less like someone in a militia and more like a student on a weekend job. He introduces himself as Trent, and says it's up to him to show us the ropes. In the distance, a whistle blows three times, and a group of male voices cheers.

Trent leads us to one of the demountables, where he takes us through the rules. He uses words like ‘tagging', ‘opponents' and ‘markers', instead of ‘shooting', ‘enemies' and ‘guns'. He says paintball is ‘like a living chess game', probably knowing that he's saying it to a roomful of people who are mostly half-listening and fantasising already about leaping into enemy bunkers and blasting the bejesus out of each other. All the way here on the bus, not one person thought to liken it to chess. Not that Elliott would have made it easy.

The analogy is hardly helped when Trent drags a boxful of camouflage overalls from the corner of the room.

‘These are optional,' he says as he starts handing them out, ‘but most people like to wear them, more because you can get dirty out there than anything else. But don't be worried if your own clothes get tagged, because we use a biodegradable dye, rather than a paint, and it comes out easily. There's also a pair of gloves for everyone and some personal protection equipment that you have to have on before you can go out on the course.' He lifts another box onto the table in front of him. ‘And in here we have the mask–goggle system that we use for face and eye protection.' He pulls one out and shows it around. ‘As you can probably tell, it's adapted from something similar that's used for motocross, but it has enhanced visibility without compromising on safety.'

As soon as he's got his overalls on, Elliott starts being irritating and saying he wants to get out there shooting people. He looks like a gardener, but he starts talking in a way that I think is supposed to be Arnold Schwarzenegger. A couple of people laugh politely. If he moves on to say he loves the smell of napalm in the morning, I will probably kill him.

The room feels different now, with everyone in their camouflage. The padded vest I'm wearing flattens my chest and bulks me up. Outside I can hear noises, someone running through nearby bush, the rapid-fire gas discharges of shooting.

Trent puts two markers on the table, an Automag Semi and a Tippmann pump-action. He explains the different ways they work, and Elliott picks up the Tippmann.

He holds it waist high, pointing it out in front of him, and he says ‘Just like a Tommy gun' and he puts on a stupid scowling face and goes ‘eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh' in a fake machine-gun noise, raking the room with pretend bullets and shaking the gun in his hands as he does it.

I grab the barrel as it's about to swing my way. He looks at me as if I've spoiled his fun, and I find myself saying ‘Except for not being like a Tommy gun at all' and some of the others go ‘ooooh', as if I'm about to start a fight. Elliott stops pushing against me, but I can't let go of the barrel, not yet. The room goes quiet. ‘It's nowhere near as shapely as a Tommy gun. It's got that ugly functional thing happening, more like an Uzi, or a Sten. Not that the Sten was brilliantly functional. Anyway, it's more like an industrial glue dispenser than a gun.'

The others come back at that with a louder longer ‘ooooh', and Elliott smirks at me and lowers the barrel.

‘Didn't I tell you?' he says to the rest of them. ‘Didn't I tell you how good she'd be at this stuff?'