by Alan Judd
‘Mary Magdalene,’ said Charles. ‘All legs this evening.’
‘Bitch.’
‘She claims that she and her mummy and daddy were abused at a VCP last night.’
Colin grinned. ‘Ah. We’ve got her this time. I know about it. The soldiers concerned were bright enough to report it and C company rang through this morning. They must’ve known who she was. Their version is that the old man took a swing at one of them. I think it’s probably true otherwise they’d have kept quiet about it.’ He stubbed out his cigarette and picked up the rest of the packet. ‘Give me the form and I’ll go and suggest that her statement be broadened to include all the facts. She must’ve had enough of you, anyway. She’ll be wanting the real thing now.’
He went out with the form and Charles sat down at his desk. It occurred to him that no one would notice if he fabricated the minutes of the community relations committee. He balanced on the rear two legs of his chair, resting the back of his head against the wall. Someone shouted something from the ground floor. He decided to do a trial run. He would invent a project which had come to nothing and see if it was commented on. If it were he could always say it was a hangover from the previous unit. He would start with a detailed description of what it was and then go on to show why it was impossible for it ever to have worked and record the committee’s unanimous decision. He sat the chair down on four legs again and bent forward over his desk, his elbows resting upon it. His pen had almost completed the T of ‘also’ when a sheet of redness leapt up from the floor in front of his desk. Simultaneously, a tremendous shock whipped up through the seat of his chair and the soles of his feet, stinging his calves and thighs. He felt himself rising, along with his desk and chair, and suddenly was near the ceiling. He brought his hands up to protect his face and then toppled backwards and half right. He landed on his right side in a foetal position, his knees up to his chest and his head in his arms. He felt he was enveloped in a continuous roar as in a great sea. After he hit the ground there was the sound of things falling and smashing all around him.
He lay still for what seemed a very short time, but afterwards he worked out that it must have been several minutes. Perhaps his internal clock had stopped. He did not move at first, waiting to see if there was any pain. Then he could not move because of a great weight upon his thighs, which he realised was the desk. His first clear thought was that he might be paralysed. He feared that above all else. He wriggled his toes inside his boots and felt them move. He flexed his feet. Though pinned down by the desk, he could move his legs. His head was still in his hands, and the left side felt wet. Something trickled across his eyes. He moved his hand in front of his face and saw it wet with red and blue liquids. He stared uncomprehendingly for some time whilst more liquid ran across his eyes. He could not think what it might be. Then he struggled out from beneath the desk and stood, unsteadily at first as his feet slipped on the books, paper, glass, plaster and rubble that covered the floor. He could not see the other half of the room where the door was because of a dense and continuously revolving cloud of dust. His Browning was attached to his shoulder by his lanyard and dangled by his thigh. The CO had insisted that it should always be so attached. He had the notion that the bomb would be followed by an attack on the building and so he pulled a magazine from his pocket and loaded and cocked the pistol.
He then walked, still unsteadily, to the great jagged holes in the walls where the windows had been. There was debris all over the street, the shops opposite looked as though they had been shelled, with parts of their walls and roofs blown away, and there were upturned cars on the far pavement. A figure was running across the road towards him. Holding the Browning in both hands, elbows locked, eyes open, Charles moved down through the target to the centre of the body, where two or three inches out in any direction would still be a stopping hit. He looked straight at the man so as to line up the mid-line of his body. As he took up the first slight pressure on the trigger it was borne in upon him very slowly, from somewhere far back in his mind, that the man was wearing a uniform. He was a military policeman, a Redcap. Charles lowered the pistol and uncocked it with hands that did not shake. His legs and his stomach felt empty but he was calm. He put the pistol in his pocket with the magazine still in, just in case.
The dust in the room had thinned and he could see the telephone on the floor where Colin’s desk had been. To his surprise, it worked. He dialled 999 and was told by the operator that they already knew about the bomb. Of course they knew. He must think more clearly. He next noticed a large blue stain on the ceiling above where he had been sitting, with bits of his inkwell embedded. The ink was dripping off the ceiling on to his upturned desk. He put his hand to his face and head and found that he was wet with ink and blood. The blood came from a couple of tender places on the side of his neck and on his left eyebrow. At his first attempt to leave the room he was forced back by the dust which made him cough and stagger clumsily. However, he got through the door at the second attempt and found himself on the landing. Soldiers were running purposefully to and fro. No one seemed to notice him. He went to lean on the stair rail but found that it swayed. The stairs were littered with bits of wood, concrete, plaster and glass. An upturned helmet rocked gently by itself in the exact centre of the centre stair. There were a few small splashes of blood.
He stood in the door of the ops room where everyone was active and everything seemed to be working. Again, no one noticed him. He made his way down the stairs, where a lot of people were moving about. Two soldiers came running up the stairs three at a time. One stopped. ‘You all right, sir?’
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘Want me to get a medic for you?’
‘No thanks, I’m all right.’ His own repetition of the soldier’s ‘all right’ echoed in his skull, along with the ‘all rights’ of a hundred other voices. He thought, with the clarity born of supreme detachment, of how this was an Army stock phrase, an all-purpose measure of spiritual welfare, military competence and personal affability. He seemed able to think only of irrelevancies.
The soldier was still staring at him. ‘There’s one in the cookhouse. I’d go along there if I was you.’
‘Thank you.’
He lost his bearings for a moment at the bottom of the stairs because several walls had disappeared, there was daylight in unexpected places and the floor was covered by concrete rubble. Some soldiers were bending over something on the floor. They straightened and Charles saw that they were carrying a door, upon which was Colin. His head lolled oddly to one side. The empty feeling in Charles’s stomach increased so much that he put his hand to it. As he watched the door go past he felt a deep and secret elation because he was alive and whole. They carried the adjutant out through a hole in the wall and put him on a stretcher in the back of an ambulance. Charles followed them out into the street. A group of squat women were standing on the corner jeering and laughing. There were several youths on the other side of the road. One shouted, ‘Let’s get their guns!’ and started forward but was pushed roughly back by some soldiers from A company who had just arrived in their Pigs.
Charles was facing a TV camera and a reporter he knew. He was being asked what had happened. ‘There has been an explosion,’ he said. More people were asking him and he repeated it several times. He was asked how it happened and how many injuries there were. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, again many times.
Then he was looking at the CO, whose face was drawn and grim. ‘Charles, are you all right?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You’re not.’
‘No, sir.’
‘Go to hospital and get cleaned up.’
There were more questions from the press. Then he was standing inside amongst the rubble, again facing the CO. ‘I thought I told you to go to hospital.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Well, go on then.’
‘Yes, sir.’ He made his way to the cookhouse where he found Henry Sandy’s medical sergeant, grinning.
‘They told me you was dead, sir. I was all ready to go on telly meself. Sit down here and let’s have a butchers. Blue blood, eh? Always knew you were different. Red stuff too. At least you’re human. More blood than cuts, I reckon. You got some glass in there. Where does it hurt? Sorry. Where else? Won’t even need stitching, this won’t.’
A normally reluctant and surly cook produced gallons of tea in a very short time and with no visible equipment. As Charles drank his he began to feel a little more in touch with the world. The cut above his eye was throbbing. When he got outside a troop of Sappers had arrived with lorries to clear away the debris. One half of the ground floor of the building was completely wrecked and the upper two storeys remained only because the pre-stressed concrete structure was designed so that the pillars stood firm even if the walls blew out. The quarter-inch steel shutters on the windows on the ground floor had disappeared, as had those in Charles’s and Colin’s office, which had been directly above the blast. One pair of shutters had been blown across the road, through the front of the house opposite and into the kitchen at the back. There were press swarming everywhere and, after many enquiries, Charles was able to establish that about thirty people had been taken to hospital. A baby, the adjutant and one other not yet identified were seriously injured. The rest were civilians who had chanced to be in the area. It was believed that the bomb had been in a suitcase brought into the police station by a young man, who had run out. Someone had shouted, ‘Bomb!’ which was the shout Charles had heard.
He answered queries for about an hour, repeating himself often. Later he saw himself on the television news saying, ‘There has been an explosion,’ with the devastated building in the background and blood down one side of his face. Then there was a close-up of his cuts, robbing them of their impressiveness, to the commentary, ‘Officers refused to have their wounds treated until all the injured had been accounted for.’
Chatsworth and his platoon turned up to help clear the rubble. ‘If it had gone off ten minutes later I’d have been here anyway,’ he said.
‘Then you might not have been here now.’
‘True.’ He enjoyed the scene but was obviously disappointed. ‘I don’t think much of your wounds. They won’t last. Mine will last longer. Even though it’s hidden by clothes most of the time it’ll still be there. The one on your neck is quite near the jugular, though.’
‘Did you hear about the adjutant?’
‘He’s bad, isn’t he? That’s a bit serious. Brings it home to you. All because they won’t let us shoot the bastards unless they’re doing something. I wish I’d seen it, all the same.’
Arc lights were set up as it became dark. It was impressive how quickly and easily the necessary equipment and personnel were mobilised. The artificial glare made the scene of toiling men look slightly unreal. Some of the local women protested about the noise. They stood on the spot where the complaints desk had been and shouted in their harsh Belfast accents about civil rights. The operations officer also had a complaint for Charles: ‘Some bloody oppo of yours called Beedley or something keeps ringing up on the ops room phone to know what’s happened. I keep telling him to come down and see for himself or piss off but he won’t. Screw him or something, will you?’
It proved to be Van Horne’s hour of triumph. Uninjured, apart from an already picturesque scar on the cheek that excited Chatsworth’s envy, he composed and phoned through Beazely’s copy whilst Charles dealt with the more adventurous press. Later Charles was called back up to his office by the CO, who was examining it. The room was a shambles. There were gaping holes where the windows had been, cracks in the other walls and everything movable was smashed or twisted. Even the floor was unevenly shaped, with a great cracked hump in the middle where Charles had seen the sheet of redness leap up. ‘You ought to be dead,’ said the CO. Charles remembered having been told this before and wondered whether, if he were to be killed, the CO would then say, ‘It ought to have happened some time ago, of course. I’ve told him twice before.’ The CO paused and then began again, as though the point needed emphasis. ‘By all that’s reasonable you ought to be dead. This floor is reinforced and blast-proof and it’s still come through it. If it had been a normal floor you wouldn’t be here. Nor if you’d been sitting in a different position. I can’t understand why you weren’t cut to pieces. How’s your eye?’
‘Fine, sir, thank you.’
‘Well done. You did well to escape.’
When they got outside again there was alarm because a car had been spotted parked around the corner against another wall of the building. It was thought it might be another bomb. A warrant officer from the bomb disposal team was summoned and the street cleared. From the safety of the corner they watched him advance alone to the car and examine it. He got down on his knees and peered beneath the boot. Charles was indulging in the warm pleasure of relative safety when the CO, after peering impatiently round the corner, said, ‘Go down and see if he wants a hand, Thoroughgood.’
Charles walked down the street as slowly as he dared. It was pointless to hazard two lives instead of one and he knew nothing about bomb disposal. It was probably even contrary to Army procedure but he did not have the nerve to disobey the CO. Even if he had, the habit of obedience would probably have sent him down there. He felt calmly fatalistic as he stood by the car. ‘D’you want a hand?’ he asked the warrant officer.
The man was half under the car. ‘There’s a wire here I can’t identify.’ He wriggled out. ‘We’ll go in from the top. You can hold those for me.’ He handed Charles some tools, selected a strange-looking drill and cut a hole about four inches in diameter in the top of the boot. ‘All clear,’ he said after a minute or so.
Charles was very relieved, despite his calmly fatalistic feelings of a few minutes before. He offered the man a cup of tea, which was all he could think of to say. ‘No time,’ he said as he collected his tools. ‘Got another one in the city centre. They’re popping up like mushrooms tonight. This is my third. Mostly hoaxes.’
Much later Henry Sandy returned from the hospital. He looked very tired. ‘Colin’s dead,’ he said.
Again, the secret thrill of being alive. It was a shameful thrill though his heart leapt within him to hear Henry’s words. Yet it was still a shock to hear it said. He knew there was no reply, as Henry knew, but there was a desire to say something. ‘Blast?’
‘No. A severely fractured skull. The whole of the right side was smashed in. He must’ve hit something or something hit him. He never had a chance. His brains were coming out of his mouth in the ambulance. They did everything possible at the hospital. They had two surgeons working on him for an hour and a half.’ He pulled slowly on his cigarette, talking quietly. His face was expressionless. ‘And there’s a baby with a part of his brain outside his skull. He’ll live. They’ve saved him, as a vegetable. He was in one of the cars, apparently. And some bird who’s lost both legs. She was in the building, I think.’
‘Mary Magdalene.’
‘What?’
‘Local girl.’
‘Ah.’
The Army had a way of dealing with death that took the edge off the acute sense of futility and helplessness that afflicts most people. Woven into its collective subconscious was an expectation of death and even a vague sense that it was apt. It was a part of the contract. Besides, the war had to go on and there were things to do – repairs, new defences, reports to write, kin to be informed, precautions to be taken. Two clerks packed Colin’s kit that night. They stripped his bed, collected his clothes, gathered the family photographs, the cigarettes and personal oddments from his locker. His money was counted and recorded. Charles pointed to a family photograph that included Colin in uniform. ‘I’d better have that for the press,’ he said. The two clerks hesitated, sullenly. ‘Otherwise they’ll be bothering his wife and family for one. It’s better if they get it from this end.’ He signed for it and within an hour the only trace of the adjutant was a pile of kit stacked and labelled in a green m
etal cupboard in the orderly room, waiting to be shipped off. So long as the procedure was followed, the now-living and meaningful book which was so often abused, everything would be all right. Slow and unwieldy as it was in normal times, the Army was one great system designed for disaster and, so long as enough of it survived to work the system, that was when it worked best. It was believed in. Tony Watch took over as adjutant that night.
By four in the morning there seemed nothing left to do but go to bed. Charles was present when the CO gave an interview to a young radio reporter, one of the few journalists he liked. The man had flown over from London on the last plane on hearing of the bomb and was rewarded by a simple and touching piece for the seven o’clock news, with details of Colin Wood’s death which were released only that morning, too late for the dailies. When the reporter had gone, the CO rubbed his eyes wearily. ‘It’s terrible, simply terrible,’ he said slowly. ‘One simply doesn’t know what to say. I’ve known Colin since he was a young subaltern, and to see him killed like that – there simply aren’t words. I don’t know a better young officer, you know, I really don’t. D’you know Diana his wife?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Lovely girl. God knows how she’s going to take this. Two young children, you know. And for you, sharing his office like that. You must have got to know him. How terrible for you, how simply terrible. Of course, it could have been any of us, and we’re extremely lucky it was only him. We could’ve lost half a dozen soldiers down there tonight. The press will no doubt say he was trying to save that poor girl, but I don’t know, I just don’t know. It’s the sort of thing he would do, but one will never really know. I don’t suppose the girl herself will know.’ He stood and began walking round the room. ‘And that wretched baby. What will become of it? These are things, you see, that are forgotten about, these trivial, incidental little details, the suffering of people who don’t matter. These people will be forgotten while those who maimed them will go prattling on about the cause and all that other rubbish. We should remind people everyday about this sort of thing but it’s no good, they don’t listen. And even if they did they’d get used to it and stop noticing. It almost makes one despair of people entirely, doesn’t it, Thoroughgood, eh?’
