by Andy Graham
He flicked the black specks of paint off his hand and turned his back on the gate. Rick trudged down the hill to an old cottage that had been disused for decades.
8
Stay Gone
Around Rick, rusting metal tools hid in the weeds that choked the pocket-sized front garden. There was an old bathtub by the gate. It held stagnant water with insects skitting across the surface. There was an armchair, too. It stood near the cottage door, upside down, with scorch marks licking up a faded floral pattern. Rick had an unnerving feeling it was watching him. Blaming him. Accusing him of surviving Castle Brecan when so many had died. Despite the sun warming his back, he shuddered and rapped on the door again. “Let me in. I just want to see how you’re doing.”
A voice filtered through the wood. “I told you already. I have nothing to say to you. Go away.”
“Damn it. Just talk to me,” Rick muttered, reluctant to take the first step back down the path. An old tractor rumbled up the hill behind him, chased by a lame dog snapping at the tyres. They disappeared round the bend at the top of the hill and the door creaked open.
“Stann,” Rick said, a smile creasing his face.
The high and tight had grown out. Stann’s stubble-covered face, once angular and edgy, was now gaunt and hollow. Black eyes stared through the thin plumes of smoke that wound their way from the roll-up dangling from his lips.
“You smoke now?”
“Always did, secretly. Stop pretending you know me.”
“No. Just—”
“I said I’ve nothing to say to you and I meant it.” Rick’s oldest friend adjusted the crutch that rammed into one armpit. “I just wanted to see you one more time. So I can remember you for all you’ve done to me.”
“Please, Stann, I’ve said sorry. It was a terrible mistake. I’m not sure what else to do. Tell me what I can do to help and I will, I promise.”
“Stop with all the touchy-feely crap. You screwed up. You let those soldiers die while you cowered behind an armchair. And now you lie about what happened. I read the report. I had to sign it before I got discharged. You lied.”
“No, that’s not the way it is. I had to—"
“You had to do your job. You failed.” Stann’s face split into a yellow-toothed grin with no humour in it. “I know your Thryn’s always saying life needs balance but this deal was weighed on the Devil’s scales. Your reward for failure was a massive promotion and public praise. Mine was an amputated leg and a quiet discharge from the army. No injury bonus. Minimal pension. Part of a ‘cost efficiency ratio re-optimisation drive’.” He wiped a thin line of spittle from the corner of his mouth. “I hope for your sake this unnatural promotion of yours is not them setting you up for a fall.”
Rick’s shoulders sagged as the sun disappeared behind a cloud. In the sudden chill of the shadow, the cigarette glowed. The light reflected out of Stann’s eyes, turning them into ugly red dots that looked as if they had never slept. “I thought you’d just been discharged from the hospital, not the army.” Rick had hoped the inevitability of Stann’s injuries could be avoided somehow, that someone somewhere would have a solution: a hand full of blood and sensations grown on a steel matrix in a lab, part of a dead man recycled and resurrected, even a fleshy gauntlet filled with pistons and springs that had to be oiled and wound up to work. Something. Anything. Not nothing.
Stann’s laugh startled a bird from the huge wolfbark tree in the village green as Rick realised he was holding his own hands behind his back, where Stann couldn’t see them. “What use is an infantry man with only one leg?” Stann’s angry question demanded no answer. “I’m sure there’s some kind of joke in there about a one-footed foot soldier, but I’m not going to look too hard to find it.”
“You could retrain?” Rick suggested. “They’re letting Private Lee—”
“Coffin-Boy,” Stann spat.
“—study to be a teacher. The big dogs in the military forced it through. They want an ex-soldier in the schools to impress the kids. Not sure how long he’ll last, though. He’s twitchier than ever, near enough shits himself if anyone so much as sneezes out of turn. Still wears dark glasses indoors.”
“Thanks, Major Franklin. I guess this is your attempt at humour to try and bond with me.”
“There must be something.” The hope had taken hold of Rick and refused to let his tongue be still. “There must be another way. Thryn says there’s always another way. You could—”
“Just shut up with your wife’s advice,” Stann cut in. “I told you. I’m not worth it. I was discharged because the maths doesn’t add up. It’s cheaper to train a new soldier than look after a wounded one. If I’m not in the army, they’ve got no more responsibilities to me. They said they won’t retrain me as they won’t get their investment back. But then you’d have already known this if you’d made the effort to come earlier.”
“I couldn’t leave. I had the shoulder rehab and some new projects. You know how the army is when it comes to orders.”
Stann jabbed the roll-up towards Rick’s face. Flecks of glowing red ash tumbled to the ground and turned black on the stones. “And I know how obedient you used to be. Funny, isn’t it? You’re happy to obey orders when it gets you more money and more stripes on your arm. Now go away. Get the fuck out of here.” Half-limping, half-hopping, Stann retreated into the cottage.
“Stann, no. Just give me a minute.” Rick followed him over the threshold.
It was cooler inside, damper. A metal prosthesis lay on the floor; some of the dents in it looked to be new. Mice scurried in the rafters and under a flickering TV standing in a brick hearth. What hit him, though, was the smell. It was so thick Rick could almost see it: fried bacon.
His stomach gurgled, reminding him how long it had been since he’d had anything so decadent, so simple as bacon, butter and white bread. The craving was visceral, no matter that the government had recently added bacon to the endless list of carcinogens and other health hazards generations had lived through unscathed.
“I told you to fuck off, Franklin.”
“One minute, Stann. That’s all.”
Stann scowled at him and jabbed his finger at an alarm clock on the table. It was chipped and missing a bell on top. “Talk, coward. You got about fifty seconds left.” A duct-tape-wrapped chair groaned as Stann slumped into it. “I’d offer you some bacon or ham. I’m swimming in the stuff and I know what army hospital food is like. I’d rather leave it for the worms than give it to you, though.”
“Stann, please.” Rick looked up at the new camera that had been installed above the mantelpiece. He recognised the make, knew what angles it covered, its resolution. The red light on the top should have been flashing. It was on permanently, giving the camera an odd halo.
“It’s for my safety,” Stann said, with a contemptuous gesture at it, “just in case I fall. Generous of them, isn’t it?” He pulled a tobacco pouch from his pocket and flung it onto the rough table. It came to rest between a half-polished copper lantern and a bowl of wax lumps. Propped up against the bowl was a picture frame holding Stann’s service record medal. The metal glinted on green gauze. The hands of the brass triangular clock engraved into the metal showed his years of service.
“They didn’t let me keep the uniform. They gave me that instead.” Stann jerked his head towards the medal.
“It’s purple.” Rick felt an urge to salute. “Do you know how rare they are?”
“Not as rare as they used to be.”
“‘For valour in battle, wounded in the service of the nation, a sacrifice to keep your child’s dream alive.’”
“I remember the words, too, Franklin. I’d rather have my leg than a medal, or at least a pension that arrives when it should, but I guess it’s some recognition of what I did, what I lost. Not even you can take that away from me.” He rubbed at his eyes with the grimy bandage on his wrist.
“Give it time, things are still raw, too fresh.”
Stann held a finger to
his lips. There were streaks of purple along the whorls of his fingertips. “I didn’t know they used to take the bullet or shrapnel that had caused the injury, and melt it down to make these medals. Then they decided to melt the bullets down into more bullets instead.”
“A vicious circle of life,” Rick said.
The camera whirred and hissed. The red light flashed once. Rick glanced at it, frowning.
“Keep trying to be clever, Franklin, you’re still way off close. I’m not sure I’d have liked the bullet or nail that took my leg pinned next to my heart, so I guess this is better. They told me purple paint is cheaper and easier than recasting a medal. ‘It’s easy to be generous with someone else’s money’, they said. I told them it was easy to make sacrifices when it’s someone else’s life. They didn’t like that. Fuckers.”
Stann’s voice clicked up a notch, brighter, more intense. “But seeing as you’re here. I saw something interesting on the TV the other day. A flying energy platform called a sun-fan. It’s like a giant windmill, the blades covered with solar and lunar panels. The news monkeys said the genius behind it is also working on some kind of electricity bridge to link Substation Two to the capital. They’ve nicknamed it the elecqueduct. Amazing the ideas some people have, isn’t it?”
Rick felt like he was drowning in his new uniform, swamped in it. It was the same sensation he’d had when he and Stann had dressed up in Rick’s father’s uniform from the Great Trade Conflict. “Stann, please, stop. I feel bad enough about this situation as it is. I tried to get you credited, trust me, I tried.”
“‘Trust me’, he says.” Stann grimaced. “I seem to remember you saying something similar back in that castle. Turns out Private Lee’s coffin ghosts were more vindictive than any of us thought. And it must be terrible that ‘you feel bad’ about what happened. Especially when you hit Chester’s new gyms in the morning.”
“Why are you here? Why not go to Axeford, back to Edyth, to your son? Your Donarth needs his dad.”
“Why do you think? Edyth deserves better than this, than me. She married a ‘cocky, tanned squaddie’ who literally swept her off her feet and took her to dance under the Arch Trees.” Stann’s voice cracked as he spoke, filled with grief and regret and opportunities that would never be. “I was the regimental boxing champion, scored highest in the sniper shoot-out three years running in the annual games, captained the Army bodyball team to a cup final win. I practically carried you and your gear through the last promotion run we did in the Beacon Peaks after you sprained your ankle. I could have left you where you fell and aced the run, got made sergeant. But duty and loyalty to an old friend held me back. I got demoted, lost the team captaincy and my place in the shooting team. It all went to shit then. Look at me. I can’t go back to Edyth now. Not like this. And as for Donarth?” Stann choked back the sobs. “What kind of role model would I be for him now? Boys need a proper father.”
More so than the injuries, more than the anger, what cut Rick to the core was the look on Stann’s face. It was the expression of a man who had lost everything that had made him what he was. Smouldering beneath that look of utter loss was a burgeoning, red hate that needed feeding. “You’re no less Donarth’s father now than you were before.”
“Don’t patronise me, Franklin. My kid, my rules. A boy needs a father who can show him what a man is. All I can do now is show him what a man was.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “And you saw what I did to that girl, how I killed her. I don’t trust myself round people no more knowing that lives inside me.”
“It was a battle, Stann. Horrible things happen.”
“Doesn’t make it right.”
“No. Guess not.”
Silence settled across the damp cottage. The smell of bacon had faded to be replaced by the taste of dampness. It was uncomfortably similar to the air in Castle Brecan. It clung to Rick’s skin, dragging up memories. Men and women screaming. Sub-lieutenant Lacky’s blood, warm and sticky on Rick’s hands. Chel’s torso. A girl with bayonets for eyes.
“And there’s a loophole in the military pension law.” Stann’s voice broke the silence. “If I’m on my own, I get the money. If I’m cohabiting, I don’t. This place doesn’t cost a lot. I don’t eat much any more and I’m good for pig for a few months. I send Edyth as much as I can each month via Lenka. I think she suspects but hasn’t come looking yet.” He wiped his eyes. The purple stains on his finger marking his eyelids. “My new neighbours are good to me, too. It seems you people from Tear have long memories. You all still feel indebted for the help Axeford gave all those hundreds of years ago. My town has less tolerance for people who are discharged from the military because of injuries. Far as they are concerned, you serve, you retire with honour and all the limbs and eyes you signed up with, or you die. Unlike what your Thryn believes, my town don’t think there is another way. There is no other choice for them.” His voice faded.
“We’ve been friends a long time. It doesn’t have to be this way.”
Stann knuckled the tears off his cheeks and sneered up at him. “Stand up, Rick. You know I can’t bear all this hearts-and-mind crap. You’re a soldier, not a counsellor. And don’t think that you can just wait this out, and I’ll come round. I know what you’re like.”
“I’ve told you—”
Stann’s hand cracked down onto the table. The picture frame lurched and fell off the wood. The purple medal clattered against Stann’s prosthesis. “I’ve got nothing more to say to you. I don’t know why I’ve wasted so much time on you already. Your minute’s up. Out.”
“I can help with Edyth, with Donarth.”
The cup flew across the room, shattering against a wooden wall. Dark tea spilt on the floor, running down between the floorboards.
Stann struggled to his feet and rounded on his old friend. “You will do no such thing. Guilt fixes nothing and I won’t take money off you. Get out. Get out before I bludgeon you with that prosthetic leg your rookie mistake cursed me with. It’s more useful as a club than anything else. Get out, now!”
Tears streamed down Stann’s face, getting tangled in the thick stubble across his chin. He stumbled and crashed to the floor. Red-cheeked, he clutched at the end of his left thigh. “Please, Rick, go. Just go. Stay gone.”
9
Pig-Headed
Thryn turned the metal box over in her hands, tracing slow spirals with the point of a chipped nail. She had a streak of soot on her face from cleaning the blackened old tractor engine that squatted at one end of the room. The engine had been gutted by Rick’s father. He’d added stubby exhaust pipes to it. They poked out at odd angles, making it look like a deformed spider that had fallen over while ice skating. Once the cold winters bit, the engine became a second heating source, fuelled by whatever would burn. The blunt-bladed metal fan on top of it pumped hot air into the under-ceiling heating pipes.
A low chime rolled through the long room from the wizened grandfather clock. Rick scrambled to his feet. He looked down at the little girl hiding behind Thryn’s legs, grumbling about her stubbornness.
“You’ve been away for almost half a year. You come back with a funny shoulder and a brand new uniform,” his wife said. “It’s odd for me; give Rose time to get used to you again. Calling her pig-headed is not going to help.” She reached down to stroke their daughter’s hair. “It’s such a wonderful word, though. My language doesn’t even have a close translation but yours has several variations. It does for rain, too, where we have only one word. What does that say about your nation, apart from it being wet and miserable, and you refuse to admit it?”
Rick grunted noncommittally.
“But pig-headed is wonderful. It describes you and your daughter perfectly.”
“Our daughter. It’s convenient that she becomes my daughter when she’s done something wrong. You have your moments of pig-headedness, too.”
“Not possible. I never even saw a pig before I married you. You grew up next to a whole pack of them.”
; “Herd.”
“What?”
“You don’t have a pack of pigs, you have a herd, or litter if they’re young, or a drift, a drove, a farrow or a sounder, or any other number of terms.”
Thryn muttered something he wasn’t sure he wanted translated.
The clock chimed again, the vibrations tingling through his soles. The sound was as much a part of Rick’s childhood as the long cottage he now shared with Thryn.
One Hallowtide, Stann’s father had told the two boys that every time the pendulum stopped swinging, even just paused at the end of each arc, a heart stopped beating. Rick had spent the entire night refusing to sleep. He’d watched the clock until sunrise, just in case his family was next. Rick’s father had come down early the next morning to find his red-eyed son shivering in the shadow of the antique clock. After putting him to sleep with a mug of honeyed goat’s milk, his dad had disappeared to have a quiet chat with old man Taille.
Rick took Thryn’s hands in his, running his fingertips around the burn marks. “I’m sorry I’m late,” he repeated. “You have no idea how much I’ve missed you, but I had to see Stann. I—”
Thryn put a finger on his lips. “A reason is worth a thousand excuses. You’re here now, that’s what’s important.”
She wrapped her arms round his shoulders. Rick melted into the embrace, breathing in the smell of her hair, the scent of her skin. Something tugged at his trouser leg. He peeled Thryn’s arms off his shoulders and sat cross-legged on the floor. Rose pouted, pushing her chin into a shoulder.
