by Will Self
Trooper? TROOPER CARR (tipsily enthusiastic): Y-You qu-question
them, sir – interrogate them to see if they’ve any operationally
significant intel’ … sir. COLONEL THOMAS: That’s right – you
question them, which is what Captain Cambell and his colleagues
in the int’ cell should be doing, not this … this … bullshit. Now,
you men: I know you’re all shaken up by what happened today –
Bessie’s a good lad and one of our own. He’s our first casualty – but
almost certainly won’t be our last. Think of those poor bastards
who were brought down in the Herc’ by all means, but don’t get
any ideas about doing a Beharry – tinware only gets handed out
once in a blue moon. Okay (he raises his voice), fun’s over, lads –
off you fuck to beddy-byes. (Gawain stands watching the men’s
fag-ends as they firefly across the compound towards the squadron
lines. He turns back and, approaching the metal door of the TeeDeeEff,
knocks on it. It’s opened immediately by CAPTAIN
CAMBELL, a tall man in his early thirties with a flat pie-dish of a
freckled face, split-ends to his red hair and dandruff on his collar.
From behind him come the sounds and smells of a number of distressed
humans in a confined space: muttering, sobbing, keening
and stinking. Gawain tries to speak, but can’t – he just stands there
because everything’s … lagging.) CAPTAIN CAMBELL: All right,
Boss – everything all right? Any news from Main? COLONEL
THOMAS: Ah, yeah – same as, Dave: detainees’ll have to be down
to Shaibah asap tomorrow – which is a pain, given the rugger’s due
to kick off. Convoy’ll need to be fairly hefty – couple of aypeesees
for the detainees, at least four Wimmiks for Force Protection. You
can go along if you like – get a decent shower, kip in a proper
bed for a night. Those pod-thingies have all mod cons and a hard
cover. CAPTAIN CAMBELL: Thanks, Boss – who knows, I might
have some stuff to give to the slime at Main as well. COLONEL
THOMAS: You did the course at Chicksands, didn’t you, Dave?
CAPTAIN CAMBELL: Yes, sir, that’s right. COLONEL THOMAS:
Interrogation – that sorta thing? CAPTAIN CAMBELL: Teaqueue,
sir. COLONEL THOMAS: Tea queue? CAPTAIN CAMBELL: Tactical
questioning, sir – designed to get them singing, so we can find
out who’s Jam, who’s Badr, who’s in it just for the sheer badness.
COLONEL THOMAS: So that’s why you formed a choir, is it – so they
could sing the truth? CAPTAIN CAMBELL (flicking sweat-damp
hair from his shadowed eyes): Well, that’s really just the warm-up,
Boss – the singing. Gotta get them sorta … in tune. Then Myerson
brings ’em through to me and Marty for the proper do. COLONEL
THOMAS: The proper do, eh … I hope there’s nothing iffy going
on here, Dave? CAPTAIN CAMBELL (smiling): By the book, Boss,
by the book. COLONEL THOMAS: All right, then – better let me
have a butcher’s … (CAPTAIN CAMBELL swings the door open
with more hideous screeching, and admits COLONEL THOMAS to
the grim little vestibule. He unlocks a large padlock and opens
the cell door. The odour of piss, sweat and fear is palpable – but
it’s dark, and difficult to make out anything beyond bulbous
shapes and lumpy shadows.) COLONEL THOMAS: How many of
these blokes are there, Dave? CAPTAIN CAMBELL (reading from
a sheet of paper attached to a clipboard he bought for himself at
the Ryman’s in York): Ibrahim Gattan Hassan al-Ismaeeli, seven-seven-four,
Kadhim Abbas Latifah al-Bendali, seven-seven-five,
Hussein al-Almari Gibarian, seven-seven-six, Abdul Sayyid al-Lami,
seven-seven-seven, Mahdi Ahmed al-Rashid Hameedawi,
seven-seven-eight, Amir Ali al-Jabbar, seven-seven-nine, Mahdi
Mohammed al-Baghri Noor, seven-eighty. All detainees present
and correct, sir. COLONEL THOMAS (wiping his face with the scrap
of camouflage netting he uses as a cravat): That’s seven, Dave –
minus the women and kids we scooped up, eight. Where’s the
eighth? CAPTAIN CAMBELL: He’s in the rap, Boss – touch of heat
exhaustion. COLONEL THOMAS: I’m not bloody surprised – it’s hot
as hell in here. (Having gained his night-sight, he walks the length
of the detainees, who sit or kneel on the floor, hands plasti-cuffed
behind their backs. They’ve been hooded with pillow slips, and
the loose cloth transforms them into cowering Elephant Men.)
Now, Dave, your back-up ’terp … CAPTAIN CAMBELL: Marty?
COLONEL THOMAS: Up to the job, is he? CAPTAIN CAMBELL
(thinking about his girlfriend, who he’d left on a bench outside
the Jorvik Centre while he went to buy the clipboard): We-ell, he’s
all right, Boss – but you know the drill: he’s just a stab so I gotta
brace him a bit. Keeps saying he’d rather be out with his whippets.
COLONEL THOMAS: Whippets? CAPTAIN CAMBELL (he knows
his sexual technique isn’t that good – she flinches when he touches
her): Yeah, he’s got a kennel outside Uttoxeter, Boss – but he did six
months at Aldershot with some Iraqi exile. One-to-one conversational
Arabic. COLONEL THOMAS: So, enough to understand what’s
going on – and, more importantly: make them understand him?
CAPTAIN CAMBELL (who’s been bored rigid by MAJOR MCADIE):
Yeah, well enough – frankly I sometimes wish I couldn’t understand
him, he’s always banging on about scran. COLONEL THOMAS:
Explain, Cambell? CAPTAIN CAMBELL (she was narked when he
came back, but he told her: Mad, I know – but I’ll get out there
and I’ll have to proff everything: pillowslips for hoods, Bill Haynes’s
boom-box so’s to give ’em the mega-mega white noise – and a
clipboard’s fucking essential if you’re gonna run an improvised-bloody-torture
chamber): Marty went up to Baggers last week,
Boss – some ’terp refresher thing the Yanks organised. Anyway,
he got to eat in their deefac, came back banging on about the delights
therein. COLONEL THOMAS: Enlighten me further, Captain
Cambell. CAPTAIN CAMBELL: ‘Parently YouEss government makes
a pledge to its servicemen and women – not to give them the right
equipment for the job, that’s a given, but to supply them with surf-and-turf
every Friday evening. COLONEL THOMAS: Every Friday
evening? CAPTAIN CAMBELL: That’s right, fresh-bloody-lobster –
not frozen. And fresh-bloody-steak – or crayfish tail at the very
least. Had some of that myself once, on hols in Orlando – yabba
they call it, and they yabba-dabba-do get their grub in, come what
may. You can be plotted up in Falujah, Boss, warming your backside
on deeyou ordinance and they’ll get it to you – together with a
couple of cans of soda –. COLONEL THOMAS: Soda? CAPTAIN
CAMBELL: Coke, Pepsi – Doctor Pepper or Tab. You don’t get a
choice, but it really is the real thing – not some Freedom Cola
bullshit – and you always get your two cans, that’s their two-can
rule, Boss. COLONEL THOMAS: Extraordinary – ‘specially when
you consider the logistics. CAPTAIN CAMBELL (manipula
ting the
buttons of a cheap calculator he bought at the same time as the
clipboard and has clipped to it – she wouldn’t give him a blow-job
before he went overseas, which was surely the whole point of going
to war): I have, Boss – look, it’s actually two cans per meal, which
makes six every day. They’ve got what? Somewhere between a
hundred and thirty and a hundred and fifty thousand combat
troops in theatre – same numbers of support. Round it down to
two-fifty kay and that makes one and a half million cans being
brought in for the occupying forces every single day. COLONEL
THOMAS: It’s impressive, certainly – but then you don’t get to be
the world’s only super-power without a certain amount of … fizz.
(Both men laugh – COLONEL THOMAS stops first: he’s looking at
the detainees’ plasti-cuffed hands, the complicated meshing of their
blue and bloodless fingers. He sees the detainees’ hands amputated
and armoured – sees them fumbling in two long files along the
sandy bed of the Shatt al-Arab, trails of bubbles purling from their
knuckles up to the silvery surface.) But Marty – he can handle this,
can he, Dave? CAPTAIN CAMBELL: No need to worry, Boss – he
did the same course as me. Knows the drill: go in clean and act just
a little bit … dirty. COLONEL THOMAS: Well, he’s not one of us,
Dave – he’s not a Ram, and, frankly, I find him to be a bit of an
arrogant buffoon. CAPTAIN CAMBELL: No doubt about it, Boss –
but for now he’s our arrogant buffoon, and he’s well integrated
into the hum’ int’ team –. THE CHOIR: Hum’ int’, hum’ int’, hum’
int’! THE METAL DOOR: Scrrrreeeaaalllarrrk! MAJOR MCADIE
(enters carrying a BOOM BOX – he’s a paunchy man in his fifties,
with male-pattern baldness): Boss – Dave. THE BOOM BOX: Got
me lookin’ so crazy like now, your touch, Got me lookin’ … COLONEL
THOMAS: Is that Bill’s boom box thingie? MAJOR MCADIE:
That’s right, Boss – I see you’ve met the choir. (He walks along the
line of cowering Iraqi detainees, stooping to yank each pair of
plasti-cuffed hands in turn.) THE CHOIR: Ooh! Aah! Eek! Arr!
Incomprehensible Arabic oath! Fuck you! Aah! MAJOR MCADIE:
Hear that? If I could just get them to be a bit more bloody consistent,
I could sorta … play ’em – like an instrument, sorta human
synthesiser-type-thing. THE BOOM BOX: … Your love’s got me
lookin’ so –. COLONEL THOMAS: That one – he said fuck off, take
his hood off, McAdie. MAJOR MCADIE: Ooh, no, Boss – no can
do. COLONEL THOMAS: Why the fuck not? CAPTAIN CAMBELL:
Marty’s right, Boss – proper teaqueue requires following exactly the
same cycle for all the suspects –. COLONEL THOMAS: Let me stop
you right there, Dave – you called these men suspects. Strictly
speaking, since we’ll be handing them over to their own legitimately
elected authorities soon enough, and won’t be charging them ourselves,
is it right to even think of them as suspects? MAJOR MCADIE:
Well, Boss, saving your feeling for the finer points, we definitely
suspect one of these rag ‘eads of shooting Trooper Bessemer – and
either him, or one of his greasy little pals of slotting Asif –. CAPTAIN
CAMBELL: And we happened to like Asif – liked him a great fucking
deal! (He moves in on the detainees and shouts at their shapeless
heads.) A! Great! Fucking! Deal! THE BOOM BOX: Uh-oh, uh-oh,
uh-oh, oh no … COLONEL THOMAS: Gentlemen, would you mind
stepping outside for a moment, please? (The three British officers
retreat from the darkened chamber with its hooded occupants
stinking of sweat, piss and fear. In the vestibule MAJOR MCADIE
knocks on the door opposite, and they’re admitted by a dark haired
and overweight Lance-Corporal wearing a khaki T-shirt. This
chamber isn’t as large as the one the detainees are being held in.
Extension cables worm in through the crudely barred window-openings,
piping juice to orange-blooming light bulbs. A pair of
mismatched tables sit in the middle of the concrete floor – one
trestle, the other an ancient gate-leg. On them are a digital recorder,
an IRON BAR, a hank of electrical cabling, a NOKIA mobile phone, a
canvas bag, some mineral-water bottles and a beach-bloated copy
of HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS.) MAJOR
MCADIE: Everything all right, Lance? LANCE-CORPORAL MYERSON:
Boss … (seeing the SeeOh, and saluting smartly) … Sir!
COLONEL THOMAS: Were you abbreviating his rank, Marty, or
calling him by his Christian name? CAPTAIN CAMBELL: We-ell,
it’s a bit of a laugh, really, Myerson’s Christian name actually being
Lance – unusual one for this day and age. What was the deal with
your old people? LANCE-CORPORAL MYERSON: Dunno, sir – me
da’ passed away when I was little, and me mam thinks it might’ve
been a family thing on his side, but she isn’t sure. COLONEL
THOMAS: I tell you one thing that’s for sure, Myerson. LANCE-CORPORAL
MYERSON: What’s that, sir? COLONEL THOMAS:
You haven’t got a snowball’s chance in hell of further promotion.
LANCE-CORPORAL MYERSON (crestfallen): Why’s that, sir?
COLONEL THOMAS: Because as things stand you’re almost certainly
the only Lance Lance in the entire bloody army – an army which,
thanks to the perfidy of our political masters, is called upon to do
more and more with less and less. So, don’t imagine I’d dare to
degrade such a precious asset as you, Myerson, especially in a conflict
situation. THE OFFICERS: Ha, ha, ha, ha! LANCE-CORPORAL
MYERSON (his submissive expression a mask behind which his true
features are twisted with impotent rage): If you say so, sir. THE
BOOM BOX: Hisssssssshhhhhhh … COLONEL THOMAS (who was
bullied quite badly at all his schools, and especially savagely when
he was sent back to the YouKay to board. A variety of epithets
were used to denigrate him, although, a lack of imagination being
characteristic of tormentors, they all sooner or later settled on John
Thomas, Prick Thomas, Cock Thomas, Dick Thomas or abbreviations
thereof: Prick, Cock, Dick – dirty-fucking Dick … cummere.
Wanna game of slaps? Beat me at slaps like a man, an’ I’ll stop calling
you dirty-fucking Dick, Dick): Can’t you turn that bloody thing off?
CAPTAIN CAMBELL (depressing the relevant key): Sorry ‘bout that,
Boss – loud noise, white noise … all part of the conditioning.
COLONEL THOMAS: Conditioning, eh – whassat, then? CAPTAIN
CAMBELL (leaning back against the table with THE IRON BAR on
it, crossing his arms and speaking with added pedantry): All part of
maintaining the shock of capture, Boss, which is our best chance
of getting these murdering tossers to cough up the goods. See, your
Arab feels terrible shame when he’s been nabbed – reflects poorly
on his manliness, his fitness as a soldier of Allah. Makes him feel
sorta useless … weak –. COLONEL THOMAS: Impotent. CAPTAIN
CAMBELL: That’s the whatsit – impotent. Well, we build on that
impo
tence, Boss – that and the detainee’s fear, ‘cause he hasn’t a clue
what we’re gonna do with him. For all he knows, we’re worse than
Saddam’s goons – take a chainsaw to a bloke’s nuts without so much
as a by-your-leave. (THE IRON BAR leaps from the table as CAPTAIN
CAMBELL speaks, and jigs about in mid-air, giving the comical
impression it’s conducting him.) THE IRON BAR: Confessiamus!
CAPTAIN CAMBELL: Anyway, important thing is to keep ’em confused
– disoriented: cuff ’em, hood ’em, crank up the mega-mega
white noise, don’t let ’em sleep – keep ’em on their toes with a sorta
non-stop peetee kinda thing. Lads’ve been taking it in turns at that
end of the cycle – then Marty and me, we make our entrance with
our usual flair. MAJOR MCADIE: Go in clean and hard, Boss – give
’em a good old harshing. Sorta spit-shower you’ll remember from
the Academy. COLONEL THOMAS (who is once more recalling the
taste of SeeEssEmm Rowley’s spittle at oh-seven-hundred hours on
a chilly February morning as the drill inspector boiled over into his
open mouth: You fucking ghastly little bum-boy! You nasty, perverted,
wanking Welsh git! You blond-haired nancy – you’ll never have what it
takes to be an officer in Her Majesty’s armed forces! Why? ‘Cause you’re
too busy tossing yerself off and THINKING ABOUT ALL THE
COCK YOU’D LIKE TO SUCK!): Hmm, I hardly think that’s
likely to intimidate these men that much, Dave – whoever they may
be, they’ll all’ve suffered under Saddam, and most likely lost close
relatives to the regime – in the war with Iran, in ninety-one and
after. Anyway, the important thing is you’re sure of your lines.
μCADIE and CAMBELL: Boss? COLONEL THOMAS: I don’t want
you acting like a couple of clowns in there – the men from Bessemer’s
squadron were hanging around outside. CAPTAIN CAMBELL:
They’re understandably upset, Boss, Bessemer was a popular member
of the team –. COLONEL THOMAS: Was? He isn’t dead, Dave.
CAPTAIN CAMBELL: Slip of the tongue, Boss. COLONEL THOMAS:
Well, see you don’t slip up again, ‘specially in front of the men –
what’s that phone doing here? NOKIA THREE-THREE-ONE-OH
(with Wireless Access Protocol): Diddle-ooh-doo, diddle-ooh-doo,
diddle-ooh-doo-dooo! MAJOR MCADIE (picking up the phone and
