Body Blow

by Peter Cocks

“How are you getting on?” she asked.

  “I was doing OK,” I said, “but I seem to have slipped into a black hole.”

  “You’re feeling depressed?” she asked.

  “No, I think it’s called Stoke-on-Trent,” I joked and she laughed. “Really, I don’t feel good. I feel like I’m sliding back to where I was a couple of months ago.”

  “It’s pretty normal,” she assured me. “Most people will have a relapse at some point, panic attacks or depression. It will pass. Would you like me to prescribe you something?”

  “I don’t want to become even more of a zombie than I am already,” I said. “Can I come and see you?”

  She paused. “I don’t think that would be helpful, Eddie.”

  “Let me come and see you.” I saw an opening and was trying, unsuccessfully, to hide the desperation in my voice.

  “I think you should try some group therapy, as I suggested,” she said, the brisk professionalism returning to her voice. “It would be a backwards step if you came to see me now. You need to socialize. Let me give you a number.”

  I waited, disappointed, while she read out a phone number and I wrote it down.

  SIX

  I clocked Gav Taylor as an ex-serviceman before he even opened his mouth. His jeans were pressed and his trainers were too clean, like they were ready for inspection. I could read people from a few signals like this. He wore a surfer thong round his neck that didn’t seem to belong to him. His hair was growing out from a shorter cut that didn’t look like it fit his head.

  The real giveaway, though, was the twisted red scar that ran from his forehead, through his hairline and appeared again behind his ear. Whatever had hit him must have taken a big chunk out of the side of his head. He limped, too.

  There were about six of us in the group. We were in a big room in a health centre attached to the local hospital. It had plastic chairs and a shiny laminate floor, colourful posters on the wall and small flyers proclaiming the nasty effects of drugs, fags and unprotected sex. Jeremy Kyle ranted silently from a flat-screen TV high on the wall. The room smelt of the stale cake and instant coffee we were offered. I was the youngest, a few years younger than Gav. Then there were three women and one other bloke, who chewed his fingernails and looked around nervously. One of the women smiled at me in a sickly way, her mouth downturned at the corners. The other two looked at the floor.

  It wasn’t a cheery group.

  The therapist came in and smiled at everyone in a practised way. She had shortish, dyed red hair and dangly earrings. My heart dropped when she said she was going to ask us to introduce ourselves before going on to do a few warm-up exercises.

  I felt like a plum as I had to say my name not only once, but then again as we threw a beanbag from one to another. To build trust, the therapist said.

  “Danny … Gav … Sharon … Geoff … Pam … Deb…”

  Everyone calling their names out in dull, depressed voices made me want to run and Gav looked even more uncomfortable than me. The urge grew in me as the team leader, Kate, took off her Birkenstocks and invited us to lie on the floor to try some relaxation techniques.

  I lay down next to Gav, who seemed reluctant – or unable – to lie flat. It was as if the vulnerability of the position left him open to attack. I felt the same.

  Defensive.

  The deep breathing was OK. It was when she put some whale song on the CD player that I began to crack.

  I opened an eye, rolled my head round to the left and saw Gav Taylor, eyes wide open in fear. He looked like someone had asked him to put on high-heeled shoes and use a handbag. He caught my eye and I began to giggle.

  “Fook this for a game of soldiers,” he said.

  I had to agree.

  Half an hour later, Gav dumped two pints of lager on the table as if they were a challenge. There were a few hard-core drinkers at the bar of The Brown Jug and some office workers with halves and scampi and chips in baskets for their lunches.

  “Going to take more than whale song and a couple of beanbags to sort my fookin’ head out, Danny mate,” he said, tapping his skull. His sentences were punctuated with “fooks” like they were commas. “A couple of fookin’ pints work better. Cheers!”

  I gulped down a mouthful of chilled lager. It was good. Better.

  We talked about this and that for a few minutes, the cold beer relaxing us. I looked at the scar on his head. “What happened?”

  “Roadside bomb,” he said, matter-of-fact. “Helmand Province.”

  “Afghanistan?”

  He nodded. “I was out there with the QRL,” he said. “Queen’s Royal Lancers. The Death or Glory Boys, they call us.” He laughed drily. “Should have changed it to the Death Boys. I saw more of that than I did glory.”

  “Did you lose mates?”

  He nodded again. “I was in Iraq before that, when they topped Saddam.” Gav took a swig of his beer as his voice went croaky. “Three lads, mates from here, Stokeys like me. Adrian Turton, Ben and Ant Carter. Took a direct hit in an Armoured Recovery Vehicle. Burnt to death.”

  I shook my head. He emptied his beer and I bought him another.

  “Thing is,” he continued as I returned from the bar, “I should have been in that ARV with them. While they were out there, I was in the sickbay shitting through the eye of a needle with dysentery. Dysentery’s pretty bad, but burning to death in a steel trap’s worse, your skin peeling off and your bones frying in your own fat. Suppose you could call me lucky. Lost me three best mates, though.”

  “How old were they?”

  “Eighteen, nineteen and twenty-three,” he said. “Ben and Ant were brothers, so their mother lost both her kids.” His nostrils flexed and his eyes darted about.

  “So you ended up in Afghanistan after that?” I asked.

  “Yep, promoted from Trooper to Corporal Gavin Taylor, QRL, by the time I was twenty-one. Got a brag-rag for holding a position single-handed in Basra.”

  “A what?”

  “Brag-rag … a medal, well, a medal ribbon to stick on me battledress, to keep me keen.”

  “Was Afghanistan worse than Iraq?”

  “I reckon,” Gav said. “It’s a fookin’ hellhole. The Afghans are hard bastards; ruthless. You might think they’re simple towel heads, but they’re cunning. You lie awake, knowing you’ve got better forces and weapons, but you still shit your pants thinking one of them’s going to creep up and slit your throat in the middle of the night.”

  We were into our third pint by now; the afternoon was drifting away in front of us. The pub was emptying and ex-Corporal Gav Taylor was warming to his theme, and I wasn’t going anywhere now. I wanted to know more.

  “The Taliban are the worst of the lot. Even though they were supposed to have been overthrown ten years ago, they rule the place and they support al-fookin’-Qaeda. Between them they train most of the world’s terrorists.”

  “Did you have much contact with the Taliban?” I asked.

  Gav laughed. “Mostly at the end of a gun barrel,” he said. “But we had to go out on patrols and you’d never know where they were hiding, or what they’d planted in your path. They’d put the fear of God into us,” he said. “Or Allah.”

  “But you must have been better kitted out…”

  “They spooked us out,” Gav explained. “Three of our lads went out on a patrol. One of them’s a Sikh, right? Rajinder Singh Sidhu. From Leicester. So he’s not even a Muslim. One of Raj’s patrol steps on a mine and kills two of them instantly. Raj is knocked out cold and when he wakes up with a couple of broken ribs, he finds he’s been captured by the Taliban. They’ve thrown him in a Transit and driven him to some wasteground, somewhere in the outskirts of Kandahar. They tell him he’s not righteous, that he’s a traitor and is fighting for the enemy. That he must convert to Islam or he’ll die. Now Raj has been a devout Sikh since he’s born. He’s campaigned to wear his turban and grow his hair an’ beard and all that, and he’s not going to be told what to do by some igno
rant twenty-year-old sect who beat women with sticks and run around like homicidal lunatics off Indiana Jones.”

  I began to visualize a heroic ending where this Sikh warrior beat off a dozen Taliban single-handed, rescued the girl and rode off on a white horse, like in the movies.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  Gav had gone quiet. He took a sip of his beer and swallowed hard. Stared into the space ahead of him.

  “They tortured him. Stripped him and dragged him for miles, roped by his feet to the back of a jeep. Hacked his hair off with a knife, scalped him. Drove a power drill through his kneecaps … then they sawed his head off with a bread knife.”

  “Shit.”

  “And how do I know?” he said. “Because they filmed the whole thing on his own phone then dumped it, with his body and his head, outside our camp two days later. I found him. Found his head. Found his phone. Watched it. Fookin’ animals.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I flashed back momentarily to my brother’s body washed up in the Thames, a “K” carved into his skull by the animal Donnie Mulvaney. But compared to Gav’s comrades, Steve had been treated almost humanely.

  “So,” he went on, “every time I’m out on patrol after that, I’ve got images of old Raj’s nut coming off … I hear his screams in my head. I can remember them now, crackling out of his moby. I start to wish myself dead, a clean kill, a shot to the head or a great big bang. Anything rather than be captured by them savages. Coming home in a Union Jack box isn’t the worst thing that can happen.

  “Turns out, when I got my one, it wasn’t so clean. These roadside bombs – home-made IEDs they call them, Improvised Explosive Devices – are messy bastards. The Taliban take a biscuit tin full of nuts and bolts, nails and glass and a fag-packet-sized lump of plastic explosive. They bury them in the earth at night and then wait for patrols to go out in the morning. They must’ve been watching us. My sergeant got his face blown off in front of me. I just copped a lump of shrapnel that ventilated my brain for a bit.”

  He raised his finger to the scar and touched it. Then his hand went to his ankle.

  “And lost me leg, of course.” He pulled up the leg of his jeans to reveal a steel rod where his shin should have been. A pink plastic foot covered in a white sock fitted snugly into his trainer. He saw my reaction and grinned. “Not bad, eh?”

  “I didn’t realize,” I said. I’d seen he had a bit of a limp, but he walked pretty well for someone whose leg had been blown off at the knee.

  “So what’s your story, Danny mate?” Gav asked. “What have you been traumatized by?” He grinned as he said the word, as if anything less than his experiences were lame – which they were, really. By now I was feeling a bit pissed, but I was careful not to let my tongue get too loose.

  “I got shot,” I said.

  “Unlucky,” he said. “You’re not forces, are you? You don’t look like you are…”

  “No,” I said. “I got involved with some drug dealers. Stepped in the way of a bullet.”

  Gav studied me for a moment, summing me up. “Droogs, eh?” he said. “Child’s play.”

  SEVEN

  Donnie chopped a line out on top of the toilet cistern, rolled up a twenty euro note, put it to his nostril and flushed. The gush of water disguised the sound of him snorting the white line up his nose.

  Valerie wouldn’t have liked him doing it; she was dead against drugs of any kind after her ex had wasted years of her life, spending all her hard-earned cash on cocaine and heroin while she brought up their daughter virtually alone and penniless.

  Donnie kept it a secret from her. The money wasn’t an issue if you knew who to ask for the gear. This town was awash with cocaine, coming in by the boatload from North Africa on its voyage from South America to mainland Europe, controlled by his firm. Donnie had secured himself a couple of nice little gigs; a couple of evenings on doors of local nightclubs and the odd bit of security work, driving and escorting people whose movements needed the protection of muscle. The nose candy came as a perk on top of the cash wages.

  Life was working out pretty well, all in all. He’d done three months already, and a month ago he’d met Valerie, who was now sitting on the balcony of the apartment, hair washed, smelling of perfume and sipping a Bacardi and Coke. It had been her birthday earlier in the week and they were going for a rare night out. Her daughter Juana had promised to join them.

  Donnie checked his domed skull in the bathroom mirror for any stubble he might have missed with the shaver. He thought the shaved head suited him. With the Zapata moustache he’d been growing, and now that his sunburn had deepened into a brown tan, he could have been a different man. His old mum wouldn’t have known him.

  She’d hardly known him anyway, he thought.

  He tipped out a slosh of aftershave and slapped his clean cheeks, running a hand over his smooth skull. Then he took the heavy gold chain, a new acquisition, off the glass shelf and fixed it around his bull-like neck. The cocaine was beginning to do its work, trickling down the back of his throat and spreading a feeling of well-being down the muscles of his back.

  Donnie unlocked the bathroom door, checked his ear lobe for the diamond earring that Valerie had given him as a present, and stepped out onto the balcony in his underpants.

  “Another drink, darling?” he asked, the term of endearment still strange on his curse-hardened tongue. He poured rum into his glass while Valerie covered the top of hers with her hand. The Spanish can’t really drink like we can, he found himself thinking, not for the first time.

  “We got to drive, Bic,” she said.

  Donnie snorted, lit a fag. “The law ain’t going to pull me over just ’cos I’ve had a couple.” He chuckled.

  The law had plenty to do around here without stopping him, Donnie knew. Besides, if they did, the mention of a couple of names and a crisp fifty euro note sorted out most problems. He took a swig of Bacardi and leant over and kissed Valerie on the head. She smelt great, and the dress she had on this evening exposed inches of generous cleavage. Donnie stroked her shoulder and slid a meaty paw inside her dress. Valerie placed her hand over his without repelling him.

  “Maybe later,” she said. “If you’re a good boy.”

  Donnie grinned, took the knock-back good-naturedly and went into the bedroom to finish dressing. He pulled on a pair of black slacks, struggled to put on white moccasins without socks and buttoned a black silk shirt tightly across his barrel chest.

  “Your carriage awaits,” he said, in an approximation of a posh accent, coming back out onto the balcony. Valerie finished the last of her drink, got up and joined him.

  “Vámonos!” she said. “Let’s go…” She kissed him on the mouth and linked her finger through his necklace, pulling on it, leading him towards the door.

  “Tease,” Donnie said.

  The restaurant was in the better part of town, not that there was a best part of Benalmádena, but a couple of streets back from the harbour where the mug punters hung out. Benalmádena only really drew the second or third best of everything, the yachties and the villains who weren’t up to the riches of Marbella and Puerto Banús. The town was down on its luck, with businesses closing on a weekly basis. Even many of the expats had gone back home in search of a better life than the better life they’d imagined in Spain.

  The bar was English-owned. Julie and Barry had sold off the building firm in Orpington twenty years earlier and, with a little help from connected friends, had set up a restaurant, Bodega Jubarry, in a small plaza surrounded by palm trees. The locals pronounced it Bodega Hoobarray, which made it sound quite Spanish, but every expat lag for a radius of fifty kilometres knew Jubarry’s as a safe haven for retired British villains. They had a Spanish chef, Carlos, which meant that locals also ate the paella Valenciana for which it was known. Julie was rarely seen now. She was generally exiled upstairs with a bottle of cava and reruns of British soaps on Sky Plus, plugging endless Fortuna cigarettes into her sponge-bag mouth.


  Barry, however, was still committed to front of house, his retirement career cemented by his ability to recognize the names and faces of those who both protected and subsidized his rent and kept his business afloat.

  Barry paced the bar, set the tables and welcomed guests with a gushing style that disguised his nerves. The cocktail stick constantly chewed in the corner of his mouth, the ulcer medication and the large Bobadilla brandy and milk behind the bar gave a truer picture of his state of mind.

  “Vic!” Barry gushed, shaking Donnie by the hand, fully aware of his real name. He showed them to a table at the front of the restaurant.

  “Señorita.” Barry kissed Valerie’s hand and pulled out a cane chair for her, flourishing a napkin and laying it on her lap as she sat down at the table. “Lovely to see you both again.”

  “Stop blowing smoke up my arse, Baz, and get us a drink, will you?” Donnie said. Small talk wasn’t Donnie’s thing.

  Barry smiled queasily and laughed, enjoying Donnie’s joke, then Donnie looked at him and he realized it wasn’t a joke at all.

  “Pint of cerveza … beer for me,” Donnie said. “And a bottle of…”

  “Rosado, por favor,” Valerie said, smiling. She wanted a nice evening with a bottle of rosé. No aggro.

  They studied the menu. Donnie’s eye was drawn to the steak, but it was Valerie’s night so, like her, he settled for gazpacho followed by the paella to share. In Donnie’s opinion, gazpacho – cold tomato soup – was like a cup of cold sick, and paella was just hot rice and winkles. He preferred his seafood eaten standing outside a pub, sprinkled with vinegar and on a separate place from rice, which, he considered, was a pointless grain that only went with curry to soak up lager.

  But keep the lady happy, he thought. Using the excuse of a piss, Donnie snorted another line in the lavabos and his appetite for food became secondary.

  He had to admit, it was a lovely evening. The cocaine made him unusually chatty, and he managed to tell Valerie how happy he’d been since he’d met her. Away from all the shit at home. Another line in the toilets and his resistance was lowered enough to tell her he loved her.