No Reason To Die

by Hilary Bonner

  Kelly began to feel slightly nauseous himself. But he stood his ground. He told himself he didn’t want the lad to choke on his own vomit, and that he was quite out of his head enough to do so. But there was also a further element of self-punishment about it. So-called writers who spend the best part of an entire day playing computer games don’t deserve to have a good time. It seemed only right and proper to Kelly that he should suffer that day.

  The boy remained slumped over the latrine for several seconds after he had finished vomiting, before lurching to one side and swinging himself around, leaning against the wall for support, so that he was looking directly towards Kelly. His face was flushed and blotchy, and he was of very average height and build, but through the drunkenness Kelly could see that this was an extremely fit young man. There was not an ounce of spare flesh on him, and his light reddish-brown hair was cut extremely short, shaven at the back and sides and only slightly longer on top. He could well be a boy soldier or a young wannabe marine out of Plymouth, thought Kelly idly as he turned away to bend over a washbasin in order to splash his own face with cold water.

  ‘What’s your name, mate?’ he asked conversationally, straightening up and running the fingers of one hand through his thinning, once black hair.

  The boy focused on him uncertainly, his eyes still glazed. He did not speak.

  ‘Your name?’ repeated Kelly, rather more loudly, and with exaggerated clarity.

  ‘Whassit to you,’ came the muttered reply.

  ‘I was going to buy you a drink,’ responded Kelly. ‘And I only buy drinks for people whose names I know.’

  Kelly spoke the language of drunks. He understood the logic. He was quite sure of the response he would get to that remark, and he was not disappointed.

  ‘Oh, right, yeah. It’sh Alan, my name’sh Alan.’ The young man spoke with a heavy Scottish accent which made it even more difficult to decipher his slurred tones. But Kelly managed it.

  ‘OK Alan, time for a bath.’

  Kelly moved quickly again, crossing the small room in two long strides and once more catching hold of the young man by the back of his jacket. Then he half dragged him, barely protesting at all, over to the basin, which he had already filled with water, and dunked his head in it. Alan spluttered a bit, but was uncomplaining when Kelly let go of his head and allowed him to stand upright again, or rather, as near to upright as he could manage. He was still very drunk and his eyes were glazed as, dripping water over himself, he propped himself uncertainly against the washbasin. Kelly threw him a handful of paper towels, then, reckoning he’d done quite enough thank you, and that it was time to leave the lad to it, he headed for the door back into the bar.

  ‘Just clean yourself up, there’s a good boy,’ he said.

  With the resilience of youth Alan seemed to recover almost immediately, enough to be able to walk, anyway, which in his case that night was a considerable improvement. He quickly followed Kelly into the bar, arriving just as the would-be writer was settling on his stool again and as Charlie emerged from the trap door.

  The lad looked uncertainly around him. ‘Where’sh my pint?’ he asked, still barely able to get the words out, and equally unable to see that his half-full glass remained where he had left it further up the bar.

  Charlie, perhaps indicating that he had been well enough aware of what was going on but had chosen to leave Kelly to deal with it, promptly removed the glass of beer, but was not quite quick enough. The young man, with perhaps surprising comprehension under the circumstances, both saw and grasped exactly what was happening.

  ‘’Ere, I want my pint,’ he half growled, making a real attempt to appear aggressive.

  ‘Now, now …’ began Charlie.

  Kelly sighed again. If there was one person in the world who knew all about dealing with drunks, it was John Kelly. After all, he’d been there. In spades.

  ‘It’s all right, mate,’ he said. ‘Come and sit down with me, and I’ll get you another one.’

  He steered the boy to a table by the wall and more or less pushed him into a chair. There was something about Kelly that allowed him to get away with it where another man might not. Perhaps even in his drunken state the lad could sense something of Kelly’s chequered past.

  At the bar he ordered a pint of ginger ale for the lad and another pint of Diet Coke for himself, resigned to the fact that he was going to do nothing constructive with the rest of that night, anyway, so he might just as well stay a little longer in The Dog. The ginger ale was warm, wet, pale brown and slightly fizzy. Kelly had a small bet with himself that the boy wouldn’t even notice that it wasn’t a pint of bitter.

  He put the drink on the table next to the young Scotsman who picked it up and downed half of it in one swallow. Then he sat back in his seat and studied the glass in his hand with some puzzlement. For a moment it seemed he may not have been fooled and that he was about to comment on the true nature of its contents, but Kelly didn’t give him chance to dwell on the matter.

  ‘You a squaddie or something?’ he asked.

  Alan did not reply but looked directly at Kelly, obviously making a determined effort to focus. In his eyes there was just a glimpse of something beyond drunken incomprehension, but Kelly was not quite sure what it was.

  ‘Well, are you?’ Kelly repeated.

  Alan nodded, reached for his glass again and, in doing so knocked it from the table so that it fell, sending a cascade of ginger ale over both Kelly and himself. The glass smashed into hundreds of small pieces on the flagstoned floor.

  ‘Shit,’ said Kelly.

  Alan slumped back in his chair, eyes blank again, looking as if he was only vaguely aware of what was happening.

  ‘Right,’ said Charlie, finally playing the role of publican, as he approached from behind the bar with a cloth and a dustpan and brush. ‘That’s it. You’re out of here, mate.’

  The order was entirely wasted. Alan’s eyes were closed and he seemed to have fallen asleep, or certainly slumped into drunken semi-consciousness.

  ‘It’s all right, Charlie, I’ll sort him out,’ said Kelly, who had been unceremoniously removed from more than his fair share of pubs in his time and saved from the same fate in numerous others thanks only to the assistance of various drinking companions.

  Kelly shook the young man by the shoulders. Alan’s eyes shot open, unnaturally wide.

  ‘Look, I think you could do with a bit of a helping hand, old son,’ he said gently. ‘Where are you stationed? Why don’t I call one of your mates. Somebody will come and pick you up, for certain.’

  ‘No. No, I don’t want that. No. You mushn’t call anyone.’ Alan shouted. He was still having difficulty getting his words out, but he had no difficulty whatsoever with his message. Kelly was mildly surprised by the strength of his reaction. He sounded quite alarmed at the prospect of being collected by his army mates.

  ‘Well, you can’t stay here, you know,’ Kelly continued. ‘Maybe I could drop you off.’

  It wouldn’t be such a bad idea. He might just as well, he thought. It would get him out of the pub anyway, and maybe on the road back to a late-night writing session after all.

  ‘No.’ The boy was adamant.

  ‘Well, how else are you going to get back to your billet, Alan? Don’t tell me you’ve got a vehicle parked outside? There’s no way you could drive, anyway.’

  Alan shook his head, in an almost dreamy sort of way. ‘No, I walked here, didn’t I?’

  ‘Right.’ Kelly thought for a moment, trying to remember an army base within anything like walking distance of The Wild Dog. He knew the moors, indeed that whole area of South Devon, extremely well, but could think of nowhere military nearby.

  ‘So where did you walk from?’ he asked casually.

  ‘Hangridge,’ replied the boy, and then seemed to realise that he’d divulged information he had not intended to. ‘But I’m not bloody going back there, so don’t even think about it,’ he continued, so emphatically that for just a mo
ment he sounded almost sober.

  ‘Hangridge,’ Kelly repeated. He knew about the place, of course. The isolated barracks built on a remote Dartmoor hilltop was the headquarters of the Devonshire Fusiliers and a major infantry training base. Farmers settled in moorland valleys, the army always chose hilltops. Hangridge was known not only for its bleakness, exposed by its geography to the most vicious of Dartmoor’s elements, but also for the toughness of the regime endured by the young recruits stationed there. But the Devonshire Fusiliers was an elite regiment with a proud history, and Hangridge’s training programme was designed to produce only top-notch professional soldiers. Idly, Kelly wondered how a Scots lad had come to join a regiment which he knew still drew around sixty per cent of its intake from Devon, its home county.

  Kelly had been to Hangridge once, the previous year when his paper had sent him to cover an anniversary visit by the minor royal who was the regiment’s colonel in chief, but for a moment he couldn’t quite place its exact location in relation to The Wild Dog. He attempted to visualise a map of Dartmoor. The pub was on the south side of the moor, on one of the highest points of the road between the villages of Hexworthy and Buckfast, just forty-five minutes’ or so drive out of Torquay. Hangridge was considerably further north, on the far side of the moor heading towards Okehampton. Kelly half closed his eyes, trying to measure the distances involved.

  ‘Shit, Hangridge must be almost twenty miles away,’ he said. ‘And you say you walked here?’

  ‘I yomped it,’ muttered the boy, suddenly exhibiting just a flash of the military pride for which the Devonshire Fusiliers were famous. ‘Came over the hills, didn’t I? Not sho far that way.’

  He slumped into his seat again, the moment of near-erudite diction behind him, his legs thrust out before him. For the first time, Kelly noticed that his jeans were stained with mud almost to the knees and that his boots were also caked in mud. A damp parka lay in a pile on the floor over by the bar.

  ‘That’s still quite a march for a pint,’ said Kelly mildly.

  Alan glanced around the bar before he replied. Kelly thought he seemed nervous.

  ‘I was heading for the main road. I was going to hitch a ride. But I was wet through and so bloody cold …’

  Alan interrupted himself with a sudden bout of hiccups.

  Kelly finished his sentence for him.

  ‘So you came in here. Where were you going on a night like this, anyway?’

  ‘None of your fucking business,’ Alan replied through his hiccups.

  ‘Fine,’ said Kelly, who had too much experience of drunks to be offended. ‘But you’ve had a few now, so why don’t I run you back to Hangridge. It won’t take long in a car.’

  He was unsure of why he was prepared to go so far out of his way. After all, the barracks were almost directly in the opposite direction to Torquay. Was he just being kind, or was his generous offer prompted rather more by the curiosity he was already beginning to feel about this young man? Something did not add up, and Kelly could never resist even the hint of a good human riddle.

  However, he had no time for further introspection. Alan reacted almost as if Kelly had hit him. He shot upright in his chair and would no doubt have jumped to his feet had he been capable of such sudden movement.

  ‘I’m not bloody going back there,’ he yelled at the top of his voice. ‘Nobody’s bloody taking me back there.’

  Out of the corner of his eye, Kelly noticed the elderly couple whose quiet supper had been so disrupted sidling towards the door, still averting their eyes from the cause of the disruption.

  ‘For goodness sake, John,’ said Charlie, this time from the safety of behind the bar. ‘Get that damned kid out of here, if you’re going to. If not, I’m calling the filth.’

  Kelly glanced at him balefully and did not bother to reply. The filth? Presumably, Charlie was referring to a possible visit from a patrol car out of Ashburton, which would now be highly unlikely to arrive before closing time. And, in any case, one drunken kid hardly warranted a 999 call. In pub-land terms, the landlord of The Wild Dog did not know he was born. Kelly turned to Alan.

  ‘C’mon mate,’ he said. ‘You heard the man. You can’t stay here. And if I don’t take you back to Hangridge, where the hell else are you going to go?’

  ‘Anywhere I can sh-shtay alive,’ replied Alan, frowning with the effort of getting the words out. But at least he seemed to have stopped hiccuping.

  Kelly chuckled. He was no stranger to alcoholic paranoia.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ he said gently. ‘It can’t be as bad as that?’

  The young soldier made another huge effort to be lucid.

  ‘Not that bad? If you don’t fucking go along with everything out there, they fucking kill you.’ Alan made a cutting motion across his throat with the side of his right hand. He then allowed his arm to fall loosely to his side as if the effort of keeping it in any other sort of position was too great.

  ‘Sho, how bad’s that, then?’ he enquired.

  Kelly grinned. He patted Alan on the shoulder and stood up. The boy really was out of it. Just a pub double or two away from the pink elephant and giant creepy insect stage, Kelly reckoned. Well, Kelly had never pretended to be a butch version of Mother Teresa. And he did have a novel to write. Or, at any rate, a date with his backgammon software.

  ‘If you won’t be helped, mate, then you won’t be helped,’ he said, picking up his glass and walking to the bar.

  ‘Can’t do anything with him, Charlie, short of carrying the little bugger out of here, and I’m too long in the tooth for that game,’ he said. ‘So, it’s over to you. I’m off home.’

  He raised his glass to drain the last of his final uninspiring pint of Coke when suddenly the young soldier rose unsteadily to his feet and with surprising swiftness crossed the bar and caught hold of Kelly’s elbow, jerking his arm and causing him to spill some of his drink down the front of his sweater.

  ‘Hey, steady on,’ muttered Kelly, caught off balance.

  The boy swayed slightly and perched himself precariously on a bar stool, giving Kelly a dangerous sense of déjà vu. This was getting boring. It really was time he left.

  ‘You don’t undershtand,’ muttered Alan. ‘Nobody does. That’sh the trouble. Nobody listens. I’ve tried to tell people, you see – tried to talk …’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’ Kelly had heard it all before. Different background information, same message. The poor persecuted drunk. The boy still had a grip on his arm. He attempted to shake it off, but Alan hung on all the more tightly. He was a strong little bugger for a drunk.

  ‘Don’t leave me,’ he said.

  Dear God, thought Kelly. Don’t leave me? He’d only just met the lad, for God’s sake, and now he was on the receiving end of a line straight out of Mills & Boon. How did he always manage to get himself involved anywhere there was trouble?

  ‘Look, just let go of me, Alan, you’ll be fine,’ he coaxed.

  ‘No. No I won’t. They’ll get me. They will. And they’ll do for me, jusht like the others.’

  The boy’s fingers were digging into Kelly’s flesh. This really was getting to be too much.

  ‘You’ve had a few drinks, mate, you don’t know what you’re saying,’ Kelly began soothingly.

  ‘Oh yes, I do.’ The boy spat the words out angrily. ‘I’m talking about Hangridge and why I’m never going back there. They’ve killed the others. They’ll kill me, I’m sure of it …’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I know,’ soothed Kelly, desperate to get away now. ‘Just let go of my arm and we can talk properly, all right.’

  The boy’s grip began to slacken. Then the pub’s ancient, oak, studded door burst open. Into the bar strode two men, one about Kelly’s height and build, without the paunch, and the other not so tall but thickset, his broad shoulders almost filling the doorway as he stepped through. Both were wearing oilskin jackets with the collars turned up and woollen hats pulled down over their foreheads. Water was dripping off them onto the
floor. The weather had obviously not improved. The two men stood very upright as they glanced around the bar. Kelly thought at once that they too were probably soldiers, but although he could not see their faces well, he was aware that they were both considerably older than Alan.

  The taller man wiped raindrops off his forehead with the back of one hand and pointed to Kelly’s companion with the other. ‘Thank God for that, there he is,’ he said.

  Alan turned away from Kelly to face the two newcomers, so that Kelly could no longer see his face, only the back of his head. But he could sense him stiffen and saw his shoulders tensing, clenched shoulder blades suddenly prominent through his sweatshirt. At the same time his grip on Kelly’s arm relaxed until his hand fell way, then the shoulders slumped and his whole body seemed to go limp. Kelly feared that recent history really was about to repeat itself and that Alan was going to fall off his bar stool again.

  It was his turn to grab hold of the boy’s arm. Instinctively, he reached out a steadying hand.

  ‘You from Hangridge?’ Kelly enquired of the two men. There was no verbal response, but four eyes rounded squarely on him. Neither man made any attempt to reply.

  ‘Well, you’re mates of his, yeah?’ Kelly continued.

  ‘We certainly are,’ said the taller one. ‘He was seen heading over the moor this way. We’ve been searching everywhere for him.’

  ‘I’m glad you’ve found him, he needs looking after.’

  ‘Yes. I can see that. And thanks for doing your bit.’ The man’s words were extremely friendly, and he was smiling. But there was no warmth in him. Kelly, who – for an old hack – was surprisingly sensitive to atmosphere and other people’s feelings, felt that at once. They’re sick to death of this one, he thought, taking his hand away from the young soldier as the tall man came alongside and began to help the boy upright. The second, shorter, broader man also approached and took the other arm. But it was the tall one who seemed to do all the talking. He turned to Kelly and spoke again.