Killing Time at Catterick

by Jan Needle

  At the end of it, I couldn’t get a punishment, because you can’t be forced to believe can you, even in the army? Major Fodder just told me that he’d suggest certain duties for me every Sunday, nice and early, in lieu of sitting in the chapel with my friends. I wouldn’t want to waste my time, would I? And I could have no objection he could see, no way. I got sent to the kitchens usually, to pick my nose and fart off Saturday night’s vindaloo and lager, and like most army punishments it was completely pointless, and more or less forgotten in three weeks. Except that my “non-believer status” was on my file, and everyone always knew, and every time we went on an exercise or to a different camp or anything, I had to tell, and explain, and hang about like a spare prick, and it was mega, mega boring.

  Shahid used to take the piss as well. He said what if we were wrong and there was a God or Allah in the clouds? He’d get seventy three virgins – Muslim perks – and I’d get eternal hell. Actually he said it was a mistranslation and he’d only get a bunch of grapes, and he’d have to kill a Christian anyway to make it as a martyr, which might get him into trouble with the padre. So in the end, sometimes, I went to services just for the crack, and to stop them asking stupid questions. Part-time believer, sort of. Look good on a job CV that would, eh?

  Anyway, this Sunday morning – the day of Mart’s revenge – religion turned out to be the least of my worries. The padre down here was a boring bastard, I’d found out the week before, but today the Lord had other plans for me. I had a shower and a shit to clear the stale booze out, but as Sha and Ash and me went to the eatery we clocked alien activity. Outside the main block was two police cars, and there was a lot of lads milling about, and a lot of officers. This caused a buzz for us. Maybe some pikie had got killed! When we queued up for our scran, though, we heard it was much worse. They’d let the coppers into camp because they’d had to; they’d got a warrant or some fucking thing. It was a tin-lid job apparently. The town was well pissed off with constant trouble from the squaddies, and heads were going to roll. Someone, at long long last, was going to be in the shit. Up to the testicles.

  Chas Hicks and Bollocks Bowyer were jumping up and down like blue-arsed flies.

  “It’s bloody typical,” Chas was screeching. “We sort their gippoes out for ’em and all we get is blame. Jesus, they’ve been nicking stuff and raping girls for yonks and the fuzz have done fuck all. They don’t know they’re born, these sheep-shaggers!”

  “Gratitude!” said Bollocks. “That’s what they ought to give us, they ought to give us fucking medals! They’re trying to arrest blokes! Squaddies! I’ll tell you what, we’ll break the place up tonight, no danger! Last night’ll be like a poofters’ pantie party!”

  I had a sudden picture of the cop-girl and the CSM. It was a real punch. It could have smashed her face in.

  “Bastard coppers,” said a lad I didn’t know. “I got one a good kick up the arse, I know that much. They’ve got no bloody right!”

  “They’ll not do much,” said Shahid, soothingly. “We’re fireproof in here, it’s strictly invitation only, the police have got no jurisdiction.”

  “You what? Talk English can’t you, Stanley!”

  “We don’t even have to let them in,” said Shahid. “That plain enough for you, Dumbo?”

  “Fucking Paki,” said Bollocks, in disgust. “They’ve took Martie in, in any case. That serious enough for you, is it?”

  Ashton snorted.

  “So who’s that up there, then? Bloody Elton John?”

  That shut Bowyer up, because Martie was walking through the door right then, followed by Big Dave and Billy ’Unt. It shut me up, too, because the lance stalked straight up to me with a sort of hardman sneering look. I noticed his mug was even worse than the day before – bent nose, black eye, and now a good split lip. Couldn’t fail to notice really, because he stuck his face right up to mine and he wasn’t going to kiss me, neither.

  “You!” he said. “Get in that office! Now! Where’s your mate?”

  I goggled. If I had mates they were there in front of him.

  “What for?” I said. “What mate?”

  “The other yellow bastard. The other pansy toerag. Gough.”

  Ashton fell about.

  “They’ve found you out, Ti! Goughie’s your bestest pal!”

  “Shut the fuck up, you!” snapped Martie. “Where is he, Hassan? The captain wants you in the office. He’s bloody livid! Now!”

  “What for?” I said again. “I mean...”

  “Are you refusing, soldier? Shift!”

  It was madness. It was upsetting, if you know what I mean. But five minutes later I was standing in front of Captain Sanders listening to what I’d done. It was terrible, I was a thug, a ringleader, and it was only because my lancejack had stood up for me that he’d persuaded the police not to “pursue the matter.” What matter? He wouldn’t tell me. I couldn’t ask. I fucking knew!

  He was a tall man, this Captain, probably not thirty, with rimless specs. After his little bit of shouting, he played the kindly uncle bit, only disapproving. More in sorrow than in anger, that sort of diarrhoea.

  “But I didn’t do it, sir,” I said. “That’s the honest truth, sir. I didn’t do nothing. Anything.”

  The look of sorrow got more sorrowful.

  “Hassan,” he said. “Can’t you just tell the truth for once? Can’t you be man enough?” He sighed. “Not in your nature, I suppose. Something you just can’t bring yourself to do. Ah well.”

  He’d been standing up, now he sat down. He picked up a pen and marked something on the pad in front of him. He was going slightly bald.

  “So now you’re insulting your own lance corporal,” he said. “Now you’re calling him a liar. I’m sending you back to Catterick. You and Private Gough. We can do without you here. The pair of you.”

  What to say to that? Some fucking punishment, I don’t think!

  “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

  I knew the rules, the regs, and so did he. I could do no right, and he could do no wrong. If he moved, salute him. If he spoke, apologise. I wondered vaguely where Gough had got to. Perhaps he’d done a runner. Perhaps he wasn’t as stupid as he looked.

  Late that afternoon, they put me on a train and sent me back to Yorkshire, which some would say was punishment enough. Out of all the bastards in the ruck last night, me and Goughie were the only ones to get it in the neck. He hadn’t done a runner, by the way, he’d been having a crap. I didn’t see him on the train, cause he avoided me, and it didn’t take much working out that he blamed me for everything, including grassing him up (and myself as well, presumably, the stupid twat.)

  I did have a conversation with the ginger SAS man, though, who turned out to be a pretty decent bloke, and it passed the time away. He laughed like a drain when I said we’d thought he was something undercover, but he did ask me about my mates in the army, about Sha and Ashton, and if it had turned out as good as I’d hoped it would when I joined up. I didn’t want to go on too much, in case I bored the tits off him, but I did tell him how they’d conned me out of learning a trade, which was why I’d come in in the first place. He said my timing was unlucky. The only skill they really needed in a squaddie nowadays was to keep the numbers up – and stop a bullet, naturally.

  I found out later that he’d had a talk to Gough as well, in another carriage. From what I gathered, Gough had told him Shahid was a terrorist, some sort of Muslim nutter. And Ashton was a maniac for sex.

  You’ve got to laugh, ain’t you? That Goughie. What a bleeding dick.

  Crap-Hats to the Slaughter

  One

  I’d not had much to do with Sergeant Williams before I got sent back to Catterick, except working out how to avoid him. He was on intake mainly – because he was too brainless to do a proper job, was the general feeling when you got to know him. Pretty bog standard of the army to think that new recruits weren’t important, but it wasn’t like that, exactly. Some of the new lads took to him big style,
because he was hard and macho and everything that lots of kids had joined for, I guess – so that they could be like him. He was a mate of Martie Martin ditto. Which said it all for me.

  I was eating on me own on the first morning of my “punishment,” half through choice, when I clocked him coming to my table. He smiled the smile, which gave me fair warning there was shit to follow, and reached across and picked a sausage off my plate.

  “Worth eating are they? Or just the usual shite?”

  Why wait for my opinion? He held it between his thumb and finger and sniffed at it hard, snot rattling in his throat. Then he give it a lick, all up its length like a prick in a porno, and smacked his lips. Then he dropped it back on my plate, right in the middle of the fried egg that I was eating.

  “Yerk,” he said. “Fucking vile. I don’t know why you put up with it. Shoot the cook, I say. Where’s your mate? Your bumboy? Gough?”

  How should I know? I hadn’t really seen that stubborn bastard since we’d got out of the taxi from the station. The ginger SAS man had taken it, and let us share for free an’ all, which was amazing, unbelievable. But there were only seven soldiers on our whole floor when we got back to our lines, and Goughie even moved his stuff to the furthest empty room that he could find away from me, to make it clear that we weren’t mates. (He must’ve thought I didn’t know!) We weren’t even talking, it turned out, even in the taxi. We were like a married couple waiting for the kids to die so we could get divorced.

  Anyway, to cut a long story short, Williams had decided humiliation would be the best thing for my soul, the smartest punishment, so I was going to be his “bitch” to help him with the latest intake, who’d come in the night before. Williams, who was white (or Liverpudlian at least), fancied he could do the ’ard-man Yardie talk (he couldn’t) and even did it with the ’ard-man black recruits we got sometimes. They had to take it, naturally, not because he was hard himself (he was) but because he was a sergeant. Ashton had been one of the few black lads who’d took the piss once, months ago. He never did again. My role, my part in it, would be to show the poor new trogs about, take them to where Williams told me to take them, answer their stupid moron questions, wipe their arses if they needed it.

  “You’re trained, see,” he said. “The government have put a lot of cash in you, and we’ve got to make some use of it, ain’t we? You can strip down an SA80, can’t you, la’? And fire the fucking thing, although I doubt if you can hit a target. And you can drive a Warrior, and service it, and work a radio, and march an ’undred mile in full kit with a cooker and a kitchen sink stuffed up yer arse and turn water into wine if you’re stranded in the desert. Can’t yer?”

  Oh aye, I thought. And sleep suspended by me foreskin up Mount Everest, and boil a kettle with a candle in an Arctic gale, and shit standing on me fucking head. And within six months or so I was off to Helmand or Sangin to show the madmen of the world we were the sane ones, and they should vote like us, and have an English God, and never drink and drive, not even on a camel. I could even tell them why, if anyone was dumb enough to ask. Cause the Yankees say so, right? Don’t you for-bleeding-get it.

  “Well?” said Williams. “Are you dumb as well as fucking stupid? All that training needs some use, don’t it? And why you dressed up like a plumber on a call? You’re on punishment, have you forgot? I’ll give you thirty seconds to go and get your combats on. And don’t forget to clean your plate away. Whoops. Butterfingers!”

  As I went to stand – I didn’t bother to say I’d been told the night before to put on coveralls – he tipped my plate up and shot the leftovers across the plastic tabletop. I saw some squaddies smile and snigger but I just got a pile of paper and pushed it all back on again. He watched me set off for the bin.

  “Outside here in five mins, Hassan. Don’t keep me fucking waiting. Twenty press-ups for every second that you’re late.”

  It was the second day for the new intake of crap-hats, and as we went across towards the big reception hall, they did look pretty comical, I must say. They all tried marching everywhere, because they thought that’s what they had to do, and unlike on the first day, the corporals and the sergeants had dropped their Mr Nice Guy act. As we came round the corner one NCO was screaming: “Don’t fucking march, you fucking twats! You can’t even fucking walk yet! You look like a crowd of pregnant chimpanzees!”

  “Cunts,” said Sergeant Williams, affably. “Where do we dredge ’em up from? Look at the hair on that one. Look at that kid’s keks. Has he shit ’em, do you reckon?”

  The faces were amazing. Pale and pasty most of them, mostly scrawny, some with puppy fat. About fifty came past us, sort of marching, sort of stumbling, and only two of them looked two points above completely useless. Which the sergeant seemed to think was a good thing.

  “We had another Scotch lot in yesterday,” he said. “Train down from Glasgow, coach from Darlington. They’re mad them Scotchies, do you know that? All pissed. Every last man jack of ’em. Man Jock, I mean, geddit? The bus was full of sick. Diced carrots and tomato skins. The stink was ’angin’. Animals.”

  “Good fighters, though,” I said. I couldn’t call it racist because it was true, the Scots who joined when I did were completely mad. They did lines of coke before going to the gym in the morning. They drank Scotch and lager even in the church. And they fought. Each other. Us. Pub landlords, punters, coppers in the street. All the regiments, all the lads from different parts of England, were trained to get at each other, it was meant to keep us on our toes, to make us proud. But the Jocks were different. They really hated us. It was mutual.

  “Aye. ’Cause they’re brought up wearing skirts maybe. They put up with a lot of stick. Or maybe it’s cold breezes on their bollocks. Anyway, enough chit-chat, la’. You’ve got work to do.”

  The next few hours, in the big reception room, were really jack, really mega-boring, and stank of sweat and farts. The lads were all crammed in, but it was pretty quiet, because no one had a lot to say, they’d only met each other the day before and they were nervous. A normal life chucked up, four years to go unless you dared to take the instant get-out clause (and the taunts and insults if you did), and nothing to ease the growing feeling of disaster but smoking and self-pity. Shit city, except you couldn’t shit ’cause no one can, the first few days. Hence the smell of botty-gas.

  First off, the poor saps were sorted into their regiments, which involved queuing up for endless ages while junior officers and senior NCOs clucked and fannied round with piles of paperwork, and told them lies about why they’d be better off in such-and-such a mob and not the one they thought that they were joining. It wasn’t the only lie they’d heard before they got here, you bet your life on it. At the recruiting offices where I joined, they sort of talked the pay up sky-high as well, and failed to mention what came out of it, just little things like food and rent, and life-insurance. Can you imagine it? They charge you for your scoff, which any self-respecting pig would turn its nose up at, and they charge you for your sty, which ditto, and they charge you in case you lose a leg or bollock “fighting for your country!” The only cash I heard a mention of was the special bonus if I joined up fast, and joined the infantry. They didn’t tell me why, though. They didn’t mention the big black holes they’d buried all the money in. And the infantry.

  My job today, my punishment, was to wander in among the new lads with the sergeant, and smile, and wink, and give the proper answers to any awkward questions they might ask. It was a bit like when I did exams at uni in a way, except the smell of farts was stronger. I looked at all these faces, the hard, the scared, the dopey, and it was more a blur than anything. Mostly the things they asked were stupid – like “are we allowed to smoke?” and “how long do we get to have our dinner” – but sliding to the ridiculous, like “is it good here, will I like it, do you reckon?” I could mumble something stupid back, and I could lie in my teeth about how smart it was, but I couldn’t engage my brain in it, no way, and every now and then Willia
ms would rip the piss off me to entertain them, and I’d put on a smile and they’d have a nervous laugh.

  “He don’t mind, lads,” said Williams. “He’s a big soft twat is Tiny. Any Scousers here? Any ’ardmen from da good old ’Pool? Aye, I can see it in your eyes, nice one la’! Well, ’e’s from Lancashire, int’e, a fucking woollyback. Worse, from bleeding Blackburn, need I say more? Just laugh away!”

  Every now and then he got his knife in someone, too, and made it plain he’d “marked their card for them.” A pale-faced blond one in particular, his hair so light you could see his pink skull through it. The sergeant really picked on him.

  “Look at that,” he said to me. “Over there, by that window. He’s like a pink-eyed fucking fairy. What the fuck’s he wearing, tell me tha’?”

  A dead good jacket is what. Brilliant. That’s what Sergeant Williams meant, I guess – he fancied it. He moved in sharpish, and I had to follow. To spread a little peace and joy. He touched the lad on the shoulder from behind, and he jumped half out of his skin.

  “Hiya la’,” he said. “Boss jacket, eh? Look even better on a man, know worra mean?”

  The lad was tall like Sergeant Williams, but not so stocky. Probably ten years younger though, and not a sergeant. Not anything. A trog. A crap-hat. His pale face went bright scarlet in half a second, it seemed to glow. He tried a smile, but he was smart enough to realise he’d done something wrong. Like exist, for instance.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Er... sir. I got it at the weekend.”

  This could have been the cue for Williams to get nasty. You were told not to call NCOs sir even before they got you off the bus. Officers were sir, no bugger else. You could get hanged for calling a sergeant sir. Castrated with a rusty spoon. But the sergeant just smiled a great big sunny smile.