Rain

by Barney Campbell

  I don’t know what it is, but in the Scimitars you are definitely more switched on. Obviously because the danger is that much greater; if you hit something you’re going to know about it. But I also think it’s to do with the fact your head and torso are stuck out of the wagon in the open. You can sense stuff so much better like that. But in the Mastiffs you have this disconnect from the ground, and from the locals too. They see the Mastiff and they might as well be looking at the Starship Enterprise, but in the Scimitars you can reach down and shake their hand, and they can see you’re normal human beings. That said, if we didn’t have Mastiffs I reckon casualties would be double what they are now.

  Anyway, you’re boring me now. I think the CO and the rest of Tac are about to want to leave anyway; it’s nearly dusk. It’s so weird. Today’s job is possibly the dullest one I’ve done this tour, and I am treating it with all the trepidation I would photocopying some documents back at home. But that’s because the bar is so high out here that jobs like this pale into insignificance. There is still a massive chance that something will go wrong. I’m sitting behind a grenade machine gun for Christ’s sake; we found an IED earlier today just near the school, and we currently have two Apaches in the overhead for some reason, but basically this feels like the most normal thing in the world. When I get home I wonder if I’ll look at times like this and actually realize that even this dull day in theatre would be the most exciting thing ever for someone in civvy strasse. Who knows? Who cares?

  Looking forward to seeing you, mate. It’s amazing how much you miss people. I can’t wait to see Mum again; that’s the hardest one. I know you know.

  Tom

  It was a beautiful morning, the first proper winter’s day. Cassie walked out of the house with her scarf wrapped tight around her neck and lower face and welcomed the icy air that tingled the tip of her nose. She turned down the street and felt the scrunch of the new grit that had been spread the night before. A curious dog sniffed at some that had gathered in a pile beneath a kerb as a sullen Filipina housekeeper yanked at its lead, eager to get on so she could hurry back inside and away from the cold. Cassie walked down to the King’s Road and weaved her way through parents taking their children to school, wrapped up snugly in their smart uniforms, some looking nervous and others breathless with excitement at the sudden cold. She crossed the road and walked down Beaufort Street, past the always-mute queue at the bus stop. The milky-blue sky shone before her over the river beside the Chelsea Embankment, and she walked along it, the low sun sprinkling over the green water.

  The scarf in front of her mouth was now looser and damp with breath. As she stepped carefully along the pavement she took the letter from her coat pocket and read it again. She could see little bits of dust on the dried gum that had stuck the letter together, and she thought, maybe, that she could smell the desert on it. She had read the words twenty times already and her lips, moving in solemn silent incantation, betrayed this as her eyes pretended they were reading the scrawl for the first time. The letter puzzled her. She loved it, just as she loved all his letters, but she knew he was massaging the truth, that he was leaving out a huge amount to protect her. But how much? And what? She felt briefly annoyed with him for trying to exclude her.

  She folded the letter up and put it back inside her coat. She crossed the Albert Bridge, dodging the cyclists pushing north towards their work from Clapham with their usual impatient self-righteousness. The river felt as friendly as it had done when she and Tom had said goodbye, the only difference being the bracing, enriching cold. She went to the spot in the park where they had parted, to the bollard, stout in its shiny black paint, next to which he had kissed her on the forehead, and performed her ritual. She touched it once with her woollen-gloved hand, then again, and then tapped her foot twice against it. She had done this every Friday since September. She didn’t know why she did those particular things, and this time she chuckled at how ridiculous she must look to those walking past. She closed her eyes and thought a brief wordless prayer, then turned and walked back over the bridge to the Tube and then on to work.

  On the journey she tried to think of his face, but she couldn’t ever quite capture it. Just when she thought she could grasp him he slipped away back into the base of her brain, never willing to come out and be caught in the crystal light of her mind’s eye.

  She got off at Mansion House. She always smiled involuntarily when she walked out of the station, remembering the stupid riddle Tom had once told her. It wasn’t even a riddle, merely an annoying piece of trivia that he had obviously learned in a cracker at Christmas. ‘What makes Mansion House so special compared to all the other Tube stops?’ he had asked her with a smug glint in his eye while they were going around Europe, about a week before they had had the argument.

  She feigned ignorance and looked vacant for a minute or so, before saying, apparently frustrated, ‘All right, David Starkey, what is so special about it?’

  ‘It’s the only Tube station to have all five vowels in it.’ He didn’t need to smile; his eyes danced at his pathetic victory, and she had grinned dutifully at how proud he was.

  But then she had foiled him with, ‘So I suppose South Ealing doesn’t count then? And that one doesn’t repeat any vowels. Just saying.’ She remembered his expression as she had said it and laughed through her scarf.

  As she walked from the Tube through the winding streets of the City to her office she recalled their argument in Graz. She still thought that what she had told him had needed to be said, but she wished she hadn’t been so violent about it. But then maybe that was what Tom had deserved. He had seemingly been so blind, so unquestioning, about what he was going off to do.

  She walked into the building, passed the group lurking by the lift, brusquely pushed through the fire door and sprinted up four flights of stairs to her floor, feeling the blood hurtle into her fingers and her cheeks blush with a deep red as she did so. When she walked into the office, already a hive of activity, all the men looked up. They always looked up. She knew there was something about her that cast a spell over men, and she always found this funny. Just as quickly they looked back at their computers and Bloomberg Terminals, but she caught it every time.

  She had been at the investment management company for a couple of months and was loving it. She had been headhunted from her previous job at a hedge fund, and although she was the only woman there, apart from the receptionists and PAs, she had found that the only difference this made was that tiny fraction of a split-second look she induced as she walked in. No one had even so much as tried to ask her out, knowing that she would only – politely and charmingly – rebuff them. None of them knew about Tom, though her boss, a friendly corpulent man who had the air of an Anglican minister and the razor-sharp brain of one of the City’s finest and most ruthless operators, had more than a few times caught her looking at the BBC website listing fatalities in Afghanistan. An ex-army man himself, he knew that he should not encroach. She probably had a boyfriend or relative out there.

  Outside work there were a few other boys popping up and down on her horizon, but only a handful, and she allowed none of them closer to her than a couple of drinks, or supper, or maybe the theatre. She had lately realized that she had throughout her life cultivated quite an air of mystique. Evidently most boys were scared of her. She had suspected she had this trait at university, but it was only when she split up with Tom that she properly realized that she had a knack of unintentionally intimidating people. She usually didn’t mean to, but she didn’t really mind being able to. It was good sometimes not to let people get too close.

  The day went quickly, as it always did. She loved having to use her brain so much and so intensely, and she was glowing with health. She had never felt so good or in a way so happy. Tom being away seemed to have given her a stable emotional centre around which she could throw herself into work and weekends, meaning that she would never stray too far or too wildly. She was still in denial, to her friends and certainly to
her parents if not quite to herself, that she and Tom had rekindled their friendship, but when she thought about him or read an article about the war or blinked and fleetingly saw him on the inside of her eyelids, she felt a tiny lightness in her stomach. She wondered if it would last. For the moment, however, she didn’t mind it at all.

  As she left work that night she looked at her phone for the first time since lunch. There were no messages. She knew there were parties happening tonight, that she could have rung a few people and got herself invited to any number of things, but she didn’t. She walked all the way back home from work, handrailing the river. She enjoyed the expectant Christmas air, which had finally been augmented by wintry weather, and the pregnant broiling Thames, which her walk caught right at the fulcrum between high and low tides. An hour and a half later she reached Albert Bridge. She thought about crossing to touch the bollard again, but she was cold and wanted to get inside the house and watch television and chat with her mother over a glass of wine. She left the bridge uncrossed but, as compensation, again in her head went over her prayer for Tom.

  Two days before Christmas Frenchie brought the Scimitars back into Newcastle. SHQ and two of the troops had been on the ground for three weeks, roving around in the far north of the province, interdicting Taliban supply routes and providing a mobile punch to prevent out-of-area fighters coming in from the north. It was the kind of role the boys loved, recalling the Western Desert and the Long Range Desert Group.

  As they rolled in Tom looked on with envy. All the boys had wild, unkempt beards, had each lost at least a stone, and their clothes hung off them. Dust was ingrained in every pore, and it took each of them at least ten minutes in the freezing showers to get remotely clean. Some of them had frost nip on their earlobes; all had cracked lips, cut fingers and a dry cough. Skin was stretched over sallow cheeks like parchment. None of them had had any fruit or vegetables for the whole operation. Tom felt guilty that he hadn’t been on the ground with them.

  They greeted Tom and his boys with friendliness but with an undercurrent of sanctimonious resentment that insinuated that 3 Troop had somehow deliberately chosen the easier path. As ever, Frenchie read the situation correctly as he chatted with Tom in the scoff tent in the evening and heard all his news.

  ‘Don’t you worry. I know you’re jealous of what we’ve just done. But fear not, my son, because you’re now back with the gang. Two more days, and you’re in the Scimitars.’

  ‘Was there much scrapping?’

  ‘Not really. I mean, nothing major. Nothing worse than that retreat-from-Moscow-style debacle we had back in the cluster when you were shitting through the eye of a needle. I mean, the boys will bang on about a few contacts here and there, especially up in the north, but they weren’t exactly the tractor factory at Stalingrad. The main thing was the conditions, which were horrendous. Whenever we leaguered up during that rainy period it was like the Somme. On to you. I’ve heard great things about you boys back here.’

  ‘I don’t know about that; it hasn’t exactly been rocket science. Clearing routes, clearing routes, waiting for ATO, waiting for ATO, all day long.’

  ‘Don’t knock it. If it’s dull then you’re doing it well. I’d rather dullness and steadiness over cutting corners and me then having to write letters to a couple of parents telling them how sorry I am their son’s been ripped into constituent parts. Dull is good. It means good drills. Capiche?’

  ‘I know, Frenchie,’ Tom said apologetically. ‘But I can’t deny we’re not keen to get back on the Scimitars.’

  ‘That’s the spirit, sunshine. And I think we’re about to be in the hot seat. Every bit of gossip I hear about this op tends towards the idea that whatever happens in it, wherever in the goddamn AO it is, we’re going to be pretty high on the billing.’

  He got up to go back to the canteen, and returned with a bowl brimming with more carrots and peas. ‘That’s better. First fresh veg I’ve had in weeks. Anyway, tell me more about living it large back here in slipper city.’ He waited to see Tom’s nostrils flare. ‘Only joking. Christ, you’re highly strung! It’s like when I tell my wife that she’s looking nice, and she bursts into tears and bangs on about how that means I think she looks fat. You know what women are like. Just like troop leaders. If your egos aren’t massaged every minute of the day you end up suicidal. Women and troop leaders. Peas in a pod. And both the banes of my life.’

  ‘How is your wife?’

  ‘So so. I spoke to her a couple of times on the satphone while we were on the ground. But we keep it businesslike, just sorting out boring stuff like school fees. Doesn’t really do to dwell on it really. It’s fine. I mean, we’ve been married for eight years, and this is my third tour since then. We cope. Certainly a hell of a lot better than other marriages do. But where it’s really hard is with the children. That’s who you really miss.’

  ‘How are they?’

  ‘Fine. Fine, I think. Alex misses me terribly, I know. Apparently when he gets home from school he goes and finds a bit of my army kit and puts it on, as though he’s the guard of the house, and then patrols the garden. I think he took my instructions that he look after his mother a bit too literally.’

  Frenchie paused, and lost in thought pushed some peas around with his fork. Tom could see the creases around his eyes. He looked exhausted.

  ‘I have this daydream. Whenever we halt or whenever I’m on the brink of sleep, for some reason all I think about is me and him, next summer, at the first day of the Lord’s Test match, watching a game of cricket on a boys’ day trip to London. I’ve got the whole thing planned. I just can’t stop thinking about that day. I suppose when it finally happens it will signify the end of tour proper. I mean, psychologically. You always take a few months to wind down.’

  He scooped up the final peas in his bowl and poured them into his mouth.

  ‘And you know what? I bet you, I bet you, that when we do go and watch that match it’s rained off.’

  Christmas Eve was 3 Troop’s last day on the Mastiffs and they were tasked to ferry two bits of cargo down Route Canterbury to PB Eiger. Trueman’s wagon carried a generator to replace a broken one, and in Tom’s wagon was the padre, going to Eiger to conduct a Christmas Eve carol service for A Squadron.

  A man of considerable girth, short and with thick round glasses that gave him the air of Mole from Wind in the Willows, the padre barely fitted into any of his clothes and Tom thought he might struggle to fit inside the back of the Mastiff. He chain-smoked little Hamlet cigars, of which he had an inexhaustible supply, had white hair and looked far, far too old for the job. Everyone suspected that he had lied about his age, and there was a rumour that he and an old chief of the general staff had been at school together or some such, and that strings had been pulled to get him out on the ground. He had been vicar of a slum parish in Liverpool, and after the Iraq War started he had volunteered for the Territorial Army. He had done a tour in Iraq, where he had taken a shot in his helmet. He had a calm, soft voice and a bookish air.

  The boys loved him, and even the most taciturn and tough of the nineteen-year-olds would open up to him. For that reason the CO made him one of the busiest men in the AO, and he was always visiting the troops on the ground, to his obvious delight. He never carried a weapon, and when Tom asked him before leaving if he wanted a pistol, he reached inside his pocket and patted a dog-eared Bible. ‘Not to worry, Thomas; this is all the defence I need. Well, and this, I suppose.’ He drew out a huge hip flask from his other pocket, unscrewed the top and took a glug before offering it to Tom as though he was administering Communion.

  Tom gleefully swigged from it. ‘Christ, Padre. I mean, bloody hell, Padre, what on earth is that? Rocket fuel?’

  ‘Not quite, Thomas. Napoleon brandy. On the few occasions when God can’t save me, then that French bastard might just.’

  The four wagons left camp and headed south. Jesmond led with the barma team, then came Tom, then Thompson and then Trueman. Over the past few da
ys a heavy frost had settled. The puddles on the route were glazed with ice that nearly held the weight of a soldier, even with all his kit. While barmaing one of the VPs Acton, to amuse the others, had jumped up and down on one without realizing how deep the puddle was beneath him, broke the ice and plunged in up to his thighs. The earth turned into rock-like chunks, and to dig into the ground to investigate a metal reading required several minutes of chipping away with screwdrivers.

  As they trundled down the route Tom waved from his turret to farmers trying to get ancient tractors to defy the petrol-freezing cold. About a kilometre from Eiger two children appeared from behind a compound, a boy and a girl, and ran alongside the wagons, waving at them. They kept up all the way to Eiger, and once the Mastiffs were safely inside the camp and Tom had caught up with the news from down there he walked to the front gate, where the sentry was laughing with the two children. Tom recognized him. ‘Morning. Borrowby, isn’t it? How’s tricks?’

  ‘Aye not bad, sir, but it’s fucking shanking out here.’ He blew on his hands, and his breath enveloped his face as he hacked away a cough. ‘These kids are the best bit of it.’ He laughed as they pulled faces and chased each other around. ‘They always come down here, every day. They’re brother and sister.’

  He broke off suddenly to pretend to chase them away, and the children, squealing with delight, ran off and hid behind a dead tree, smirking as they peeked out from behind it. The girl was about thirteen, with high cheekbones and a beautiful smile. Her long hair was wild and shiny, and her immaculate yellow dress stood out, violent saffron against the frosted brown earth and the milky grey sky. The boy was the only other source of colour in the dead land, his blue dish-dash dirtier than his sister’s dress but still strikingly bright.