Killing Time at Catterick

by Jan Needle

But they didn’t. I stood about and looked all over, and there wan’t a uniform in sight, except the railway lot. It was pretty late, and the weather was terrible, though the air was pretty warm. I was pissed as arseholes, I’d left the empty bottle on the train, and I wanted to lie down and sleep, or maybe vomit. I was lost on this great big giant station, in a dump I’d only ever heard of, and I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t have a fucking prayer. I rang up Shahid.

  “Tiny! You bastard! You could’ve caught me on the job!”

  Some chance with Shahid, I’d never known him at that sort of thing. But I couldn’t joke. There wasn’t any humour to come out of me.

  “Mate. Sha. I need your help, mate. I’m in the shit.”

  There was music in the background, and laughs, and pool balls. I must’ve said “are you in a pub,” or something, although I don’t remember that I did.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That dump we went in on that first night out – no lager. It’s not so bad though when there’s no one in it, which there ain’t when they’ve moved on to town. Just me and Ashton and a few other lads, it’s a sort of lock-in. What’s up?”

  “I’ve quit,” I said. “I’ve gone AWOL, I’ve done a runner. I’m stuck up in Newcastle in the rain.”

  “What you done that for, you daft twat?” he said. “Newcastle? Poor bastard. You’ll go to fucking prison, mate. What’s happened?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Nowt. Nowt special. A kid got shot at camp. Topped himself, but...”

  “Did you know him?”

  “Nah. Just a crap-hat. But...”

  “Tiny, what’s it got to do with you, mate? You can’t do it, Tiny! You can’t just do a runner. You’ll get... they’ll throw the book at you!”

  “I can’t take it, Sha. I’m pissed off. You know we’ve talked about it. I’m getting out.”

  “You can’t get out! Not by going AWOL! Shit, it’s not that bad, we have some good times, don’t we? We’ll be back up soon, me and Ashton will, the Three Must-get-fucking-beers! England needs us, mate, to fight the savages! We’re the Great White Bleeding Hope!

  He was trying hard to get me out of it, but that didn’t even raise a smile. It nearly did – I had a vision of the Great White Hope, one drunk, one black, one Paki – but the gloom crushed down again. I was in a city street, well after midnight, in the fucking pissing rain.

  “Look,” I said. “Stop talking bollocks, Sha. I need somewhere to sleep. Tell me where to sleep.”

  There was a long pause after this, and I thought he’d hung up, even, until I realised I could still hear music and so on. My head was banging now. Clattering. When he came back on his voice was really serious, no more stupid jokes.

  “Look,” he said. “Tiny. Mate. We’ve talked about it, yeah? The army’s just a prison sentence, man, but not so bad, except the food. We’ve got to stick it out, we’ve got to fight the lunatics. Look, mate – this is what to do. Phone Catterick. Phone the camp. Tell ’em where you are and what you’ve done. Tell them you’re coming back. You’ve got to, Tiny. You’ve fucking got to. Okay?”

  No, not okay. Not okay at all. No way okay.

  “Not going back. I need somewhere to sleep, Sha, that’s all. If you ain’t got no suggestions, fair enough. No way I’m going back, Shahid. No fucking way.”

  He put Ashton on. At last, I thought – some sense. That’s how pissed I was. Some sense from Ashton. Jesus.

  “Well ain’t you the bright boy,” he said. He didn’t even do a silly voice. “Look, old mate, he’s right, you’ve got to fucking listen. Go back before you’re absolutely fucked. D’you want to spend the next four years inside? D’you want to end up down in Colchester? D’you ever want to see the light of day again?”

  “Oh piss off, Ashton. I’ve had enough of fucking bullshit. I ain’t going back. I’ve had it, mate. I’ve had it up to here.”

  I could hear him breathing down the phone. That and pub noise in the background. I was jealous. I was lonely, too.

  “You will have, mate,” he said. His voice was mild, he was really trying to be calm and sober. “Look, you’ve got to pull yourself together, Ti, you’re in the shit already, ain’t you? Have you got a pencil on you, a pen or something? All right then, I’ve got some mates. They know I’ve got a soft spot for white trash, so I expect they’ll let you in okay unless they’re all unconscious in their pits. I’ll try and ring ’em, anyway, and – oh hang about, Sha wants another word. He’s nicked my mobile, cheeky bastard. He’s been ringing camp.”

  I couldn’t believe it. I had a bit of paper in my hand and I fucking near fell over. “You what!” I shrieked. “You fucking bastard, Sha! What you fucking doing?”

  “Calm down, Cynthia, I ain’t doing nothing, as it happens. I’ve been on directory to find the camp at Catterick, and I’ve got fucking nowhere, it don’t exist, apparently. Bloke give me a central number in the end, down London somewhere, and guess what – no reply! He said I wouldn’t get one. He said the army only answers during working hours, it’s a well-known fact. He seemed to think I should’ve had a special number, seeing I’m a soldier. That’s fucking likely, innit?”

  “Good if we’ve been invaded, eh?” said Ashton, in the background. “Give us the phone, Sha. Tiny. Write down this address. Just for tonight, right, and I’ll ring you in the morning, yeah? You’re fucking going back.”

  Half an hour later I was standing on the pavement in the rain outside this little terraced house, and the only nearby sound was the taxi disappearing down this long, long road. I knocked again, and listened. Unconscious in their pits – what had he meant by that? No lights, no action, nobody. I knocked again. And knocked again. What had he bloody meant by that?

  Oh you bastard, Ash, I told myself, five minutes later. Some sort of rotten joke this is, you bastard, not funny to an enemy, let alone a mate, not fucking funny. I knocked again. I knocked harder. I kicked seven kinds of shit out of the door. And at last a light came on. Footsteps. Like something in a bleeding horror film.

  Whoops, I thought. I heard a chain rattling on the door. Whoops, I’m going to get my head smacked up for this, I’ve bloody nearly kicked the bastard in. It’ll be a big black hairy bruiser. It’ll be a giant. Poor little me. I giggled. I was pissed unconscious. I tittered like a total tit.

  I didn’t think I’d even feel a thing.

  Two

  Black, yes, but not a bruiser, no way a bruiser, not even after ninety seven pints. She was small in fact, but really small, about half my size, as far as I could see. She was in a nightie, and she looked more than half asleep. She just stared at me, through the gap. Not stupid, then. That chain had rattled going on, not coming off.

  “Hi. I’m... well, I’m... Well Ashton rung you, yeah?”

  “Ashton? Ashton? No, did ’e ’eck.” There was Manchester in her voice, unmistakable, and I thought thank God, thank God for that. Don’t take a lot, does it, when you’re pissed? “The phone’s knackered,” she added, like an afterthought. “We an’t bothered, really, we use us mobiles, don’t we? What, you an army mate, are you? Why aye, man-pet – you’re soaking to the skin.”

  She said that in a different sort of accent (Geordie – like them wankers on the box, that Ant and Dec), and it was a kind of joke, to make me feel okay. Then she smiled this big wide smile and rattled the chain off, and said “D’you want a brew? I’m called Carole, with an E.” Oh, it was like bloody coming home.

  It started slowly, because basically, I didn’t have a thing to say. I felt so, like, you know, embarrassed, out of place, that I sat there like a total dick for ages. What I really wanted was a piss, it was getting desperate, but you don’t like to say, do you, specially not to a girl. All she wanted to do was make me feel at home I think, so she give it the small talk for a while and it got worse and worse. I mean, she didn’t know me, I didn’t know her, and I’d turned up in the middle of the night, well pissed. What should we’ve talked about? The price of fish in Grimsby?

  In the end I thin
k I was going to literally piss myself, and I couldn’t even stand up now because my dick was swole up like a firehose and she would’ve thought – well, God knows what she would have thought, but she’d have been dead wrong, whatever. And I think I might’ve made a little noise, I might’ve had a little moan or something, or maybe she was psychic, because she suddenly bounced up to her feet and sort of shouted.

  “Oh my God, that brew! Oh look I’m sorry, love. Do you take sugar? Oh God, what a cow!”

  She shot off to the kitchen then, and I shot off down the passage to the pisser, and nearly had to break me thing in half to get it out. Wall, seat, cistern, they all got a squirt before I could control it, but I used plenty of paper to mop up with so I hope she never noticed. I had her figured for a nurse in any case, so I spose she wouldn’t’ve minded all that much.

  She offered food with the mug of Typhoo (“only cheese and bread and stuff like that, sorry.”) but I think I would have chucked up on the spot so that was easy. But then she offered paracetamol and I had a go at that, and, being stupid, I asked her if she had some weed, which I did not want and didn’t even know why I’d mentioned it. She knew, though. She laughed.

  “Bog off,” she said. “If you was a racist Ash wouldn’t bother with you so no stupid jokes to break the ice, okay? You don’t want weed, and I ain’t got none, end of story. And no more booze, okay? You’ve took your paracetamol.”

  So she was a nurse then. I was blushing. I felt a total prat.

  “Sorry,” I said. Well, sort of mumbled. “It’s just I’m…I’m…”

  “Half pissed. Yeah, I know, love. But you’re here now, you’re all right. We’ve got a bed for you and you can sleep it off all day tomorrow if you want to, I’ll be off to work and the others are away, and you’re more than welcome, anytime. What you doing here, are you on leave or something? Funny place to spend it, Newcastle, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

  I’ve got a way with words, you might have worked it out by now – I can’t express meself even when I know roughly what I’m thinking. Now, today, this moment, I didn’t have the foggiest idea, to be quite honest, or maybe I did – the foggiest, that’s what it felt like, inside my head. Thick fog. Confusion. A little bit of pain.

  “I’m on the run,” I said. “I’ve quit. I’ve just fucked off. Sorry.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I don’t know what to say. ‘That’s nice’ don’t seem to cover it, somehow. Oh bloody ’ell, love. You poor thing. Do you want another cup of tea?”

  That made us both laugh, because I’d hardly started on the first one, but I bloody did, an’ all. I chucked it down my neck and held the mug out and she took it and went out, a swish of long white nightdress. I sat down and pulled myself together. I sat down and wiped my fucking eyes. When she came back she gave me tea, then turned an electric fire on. She sat down in an easy chair and tucked her legs up under her. Shit, I thought. She thinks it’s going to be a long night. She thinks I’m going to talk. She’s going to die of fucking boredom.

  She didn’t mention me being on a runner, that was the funny thing. She asked me where I came from, and how I knew Ashton, and who our other mates were, and what was Blackburn like, was it a dump like everybody said, but nothing to do with bunking off, not even why I’d ended up in Newcastle like a drownded rat. When I got tongue-tied she didn’t laugh, and if I stopped talking halfway through a sentence she didn’t hurry me, she didn’t seem to mind at all, or even notice. She made me endless brews, and some time later I got a tin of soup and bread, then three square corner yoghurts, bloody A. Before I really knew it we’d sat up half the night and she was bloody great to me, she was like a sister, the best a bloke could ever have, and I was getting sober – without pain!

  There were four of them shared the flat, it turned out – all girls – and one of them was Ashton’s ex, and he still kept in touch and came to see them sometimes. I must’ve raised me eyebrows or summat, because she said “to see, I said, and nothing else. They’re friends, okay?” and I bloody believed her, which put old Ashton in a brand new light, no danger! The way she said it, I wondered if she was a schoolteacher, not a nurse, but she just worked in an office, that’s all, in a supermarket. She said Ashton was a great bloke, and he was engaged to his ex’s sort of cousin, and he was like a little lamb. Jesus, I thought. Where do we go from there? Next Shahid’ll be a bleeding Catholic.

  The girls were at a concert somewhere – Whitstable or Whitehaven Bay or some other place I’d never heard of – so I had a choice of beds, she said, not just Ashton’s sofa in the telly room. I didn’t even wonder if she’d let me kip with her, I didn’t even think about it. She was just there, all kind and sisterly, in this big white nightie, and she was smiling, like tea and sympathy, big style. And when she finally did get round to asking why I’d run, it seemed completely natural, like she really wanted to know, not just looking for a bit of dirt or scandal. I was still tongue-tied, though, but only ’cause I’d never put it into words before, not even to myself. Why had I? Why had I just walked through the gates last night without signing out when I’d thought that Ken was dead, why had I give the duty squaddie the big finger when he called out to me? Why?

  I said: “Carole, no bullshit. But I’m fucked if I know – oh, sorry, like. Is it all right to swear?”

  “It hasn’t stopped you so far, Andy,” she said, laughing. “Don’t mind me, love, I’d join in if I could, like. Way I were brought up, know what I mean?”

  The Andy shook me. I must have told her my real name. Politeness city, eh? Or the booze, who knows? I was almost stone-cold now, though. Just the start-off of a splitting headache.

  “I don’t know, though, and that’s God’s honest truth,” I said. “I mean – it’s shit, that’s all, the whole thing’s shit. No rhyme or reason to it. The officers are stupid, they try to be your mates and call you by your nickname once a fortnight, and they get it wrong.”

  You could see her thinking, fucksake, is that all? And it wasn’t, of course, but how to say it?

  “That sounds pretty…well,” she said. “Well, I mean…”

  “Look, I can’t tell you, Carole, that’s the honest truth. I mean, well, fuck, that’s just the officers, innit, and… Look, the sergeants. I mean. Well, one of ’em’s right into me at the moment, he’s a total bastard, Williams he’s called. Him and his mates. And he beasts the corporals, too, and the lancejacks. Thrashes them. You know? They’re scared of him, terrified, know what I mean?”

  She didn’t, you could see it. Beasts, thrashes, it was double-Dutch to her. I struggled to explain, to find the words, and then I couldn’t. I played the easy card, I went a different route. Look on the positive, as mum would say. Look on the pissing positive.

  “At least it isn’t boring, though,” I said. “Say what else about Sarnt Williams, he isn’t boring. The army is, though. Maybe that’s why I run, who knows? That’s the worst thing, Carole, that’s the thing that gets down in your bones. It’s so fucking, fucking boring. Same thing, day after day, day after fucking day. It never changes.”

  “Tell me about it,” she said. “I work in a supermarket.” But she didn’t say it in a piss-off way, it was just a thing to say, part of the conversation. She was interested, still. She was on my side, all the bleeding way. She said: “Why did you join up, though? If it’s so boring? Or didn’t they mention that in the Army Offices?”

  We had another little laugh at that, she was dead smart, Carole. And I heard meself tell her the truth, say things I don’t think I really knew myself. About how I’d gone to uni because my mother thought I ought to try, to “have the chance,” although I really knew I didn’t want to do it, because I couldn’t really see the point. Fact was I only knew at my age people were meant to be growing up, and I didn’t think I’d even started. Being out there, earning a living, relationships and children – it was a thousand miles away. I figured it would come to me, or I would come to it, but it wasn’t yet, the process wasn’t even starting, stirring,
rearing its ugly fucking head.

  “I was studying,” I said. “They called it studying. A subject I was sort of guided into, that I’d never thought of before and I’ve never thought of since. It was a big black hole. I was diving in to show I was maturing, to make my mother proud, to say thank you for all she’d tried to do. Oh shit.”

  “And?”

  “I failed. By the end of my first year, I failed every subject, every exam. I didn’t know what I was doing, I didn’t know why I was doing it, I just wanted it to end. I felt terrible. I felt a complete and utter failure.”

  “But you had the A-levels!” Carole said. “You’re not thick, you passed them! Did you take resits?”

  I shrugged.

  “I’d rather’ve cut my throat, quite honestly. You say that I’m not thick, but that’s the way it felt, I’m telling you. And all me old mum’s hopes. And all the cash I’d cost her. I felt like bloody crying, honestly.”

  She looked at me.

  “Hard man.” She grinned. “But your mum did, didn’t she?”

  Smart bitch you are, I thought. But I really like you, Caz, I really do.

  “She did when I joined the army. Floods of it. Lake Niagara.”

  “Yeah,” said Carole. “I should bloody think so too. Why did you do it, though? Bit different from university. D’you want another brew?”

  She yawned, as if her brain was going on to automatic, and I yawned too. Time for bed soon. Jesus, I was tired. Jesus bleeding H. But I thought about her question. Bit different. Yeah.

  “It seemed a good idea,” I said. “No brains needed, no school-type bollocks, no eff-all.”

  And money in the bank, and no one to feed and worry for me day to day, and someone to tell me what to do. I did it to take the pressure of my mum, that’s how daft I was. At that age war and life and death meant nothing to me. It never occurred how much they’d mean to mum.

  “You men are mental,” Carole said. “You just don’t get it do you, Ashton’s just the same. We worry for him. We worry for him all the time.”