The Ned and the grinner finish that game and begin another. Third go of the same game, the same graphics, the same rules, same screams and booms and thunder cracks, everything repeated for the third time but neither player shows one sign of boredom; in fact, they seem just as excited at this third game as they were at the first. Here we go again. And aren’t we glad?
As they were beginning the game’s first move, where the spaceship releases the ISA soldiers and the first wave of the Helghast hordes attacks them, the grinner notices another tent, a large tent, made out of grubby stained-white canvas with words painted across it in black: NOT IN MY NAME on the flank and NO WAR FOR OIL on the door flap. Ronnie watches him squint and notices that what was at first taken for staining on some areas of the tent’s canvas are in fact many names writ very small, many many names, some kind of petition in tiny writing. Scores of thousands, no, hundreds of thousands of names, so many as to make the tent look mottled. And coming from that tent he could see a man walking, not on horseback, wearing jeans and a shirt and shoes and with fair hair in no particular style, simply a slightly scruffy frame for his face which appeared to flicker between determination and fear around the eyes which yet remained locked on something, some ideal, as if he was looking at an island close by but separated from him by a fierce channel with sharp-peaked waves thorned by the fins of a thousand ravening sharks but that island was sun-held and calm-looking and peaceful. That’s what he seemed to be regarding, this man. His face was pale with a slight blush to each cheek and he was bearing a banner aloft with a picture on it of the grinner’s face bespattered with red and his stride had a passion in it and his carriage an anger and he appeared to be fighting, and temporarily beating, the apprehension that now and again played across his countenance and he approached Jack on which Ned and the grinner played Killzone 2 and when he got there and stood above them breathing they realised then that he was angry which caused the Ned to point at him and splutter with derision and then look to the grinner for his imprimatur but the grinner’s expression didn’t change, he simply goes on grinning as before.
– Right, says the newcomer, – you’ve done it. Despite the wishes of millions of your country’s citizens you’ve gone and done it anyway and already the number of civilians killed stands at many thousands. And that’s not just the death-count in Iraq, either; I’m also talking about civilians here.
At that last stressed word the newcomer stabs the index finger of his right hand towards the ground, the earth he stands on, the soil beneath his feet. Ronnie follows that finger with his eyes and sees the slightly muddied earth somewhat churned beneath the man’s shoes and notices how it has begun a bit to stain Jack, to turn Jack’s white lines slightly brown, wet-brown, to discolour Jack’s bright blazon.
– So you’ve done it, the man goes on. – Left us your legacy. Ignored us and encouraged them.
The man nods at the Ned, who splutters yet again and looks again to the grinner for approval. But the grinner just goes on grinning. A smile becoming a rictus.
– I would ask you to call your hawks off but they wouldn’t listen to you even if you did. You’ve released them, now; they’re flying. You’ve given permission to people to let out the black oil of their hearts and act as selfishly and ignominiously as they want to. Are you proud of this?
Grin. Ronnie looks at the gleaming teeth.
– The doves have either been killed or wounded so badly that they’ll never be able to fly again. Is this the legacy you want to leave?
The grinner clears his throat and makes some strange and ineffectual gestures with his hands and says: – By my actions have I answered questions. The time has come for an end to talking. The time has come to be tough. There can be no negotiations with tyrants.
– Yah! yells the Ned in the newcomer’s face, spraying him with spittle, and performs a little caper around him, pointing at him and making a noise of mockery, a half-laugh/half-shout of triumphant contempt. – You heard the man! End of the day, what the man sez, you listen to, yeah? Now fuck off or my boys’ll mash you up.
The grinner flaps a hand. – Go, he says to the newcomer. – March in your millions if you wish. Raise your banners, perform your chants, sign your petitions. I know what I’m doing. God’s will be done.
The newcomer walks into the crowd and raises his banner but at that moment there is the re-appearance of the Mohawk’d man from earlier whose hair is now styled into plaits and who, by his mere presence, thrashed the throng into a frenzy. He stands in the doorway to his tent and the crowd notice him there as one and then in an instant they are re-frenzied, screaming and surging, clawing at each other’s faces in their eagerness to get closer to this plaited man, and the newcomer with his banner and others who carry banners like his are sucked into the seethe of the boiling crowd, pulled down and then, as the crowd whips up a collective blame to put on these people for distracting them from what truly matters in their lives, which is the abject worship of the then-Mohawk’d now-plaited man, they begin to trample the banner-bearers, stamp them into the mud, bend and tear with fingers turned to talons and then hold up towards the plaited man as offerings eyes and ears and noses and dripping chunks of anonymous meat. At this, the Ned shrieks his approval and encouragement and does his little dance again and the grinner goes on grinning and the plaited man raises his arms Christ-like, mirroring the tattoo on his back which he shows the crowd again as he turns and re-enters his tent and as one the crowd howls its anguish at his disappearance and then begins to rip at itself, tearing off its own ears and fingers and toes. Ronnie looks at their feet and sees many of them stamping hysterically in a red and mucoid syrup and he hears the howls of the injured and the great whooping aggrieved screams of the thwarted and bereft and hears also the racket of Killzone 2, boom and crash and crackle, behind the screechings and bellowings of the roiling crowd as, in a mindless frenzy, it continues to eat itself.
And it goes on devouring itself. A snake, it would be swallowing its own tail, ouroboros, making of itself a wheel, a circle, enclosed, self-ensnared. Ronnie observes the chaos, the ripping and the rending, listens to the roars of loss and need and pain and if he feels any emotion then it is not one he recognises or could ever put a name to, not one he feels that he has ever felt before. Largely, he feels like a vessel. An empty vessel. If one of those torn-off and hurled limbs turning through the air were to strike him, he thinks, he’d make a hollow sound.
Then he hears another sound, a rumbling and a coughing and a mechanical straining, as of the approach of some mighty engine. Thick and dark and greasy smoke is pumped into the air above the clashing and teeming heads of the crowd to hang there in oily layers and Ronnie sees a terrible machine of war approach, a long-turreted tank, moving on tracks that churn the swampy earth up into a thigh-high mist of maroon droplets of bloodied muck. It is oddly coloured, this machine, like one of the horses earlier, all white with a red cross on it, and on top of it rides a man also oddly coloured, his clothes a swirling mix of light brown and dark brown and yellow and grey as if he wears a desert. A helmet covers his head, the colour of a digestive biscuit, and it sports a microphone that curves around his cheek to his lips and his eyes are hidden behind dark glasses and he wears a bulky vest that looks strong and sturdy enough to protect from flying shards of scorching shrapnel the soft and precious organs beneath. In one arm he holds a gun, a semi-automatic rifle, the stock in the crook of his arm and his right index finger resting bent and ready on the trigger-guard. Ronnie notices that the barrel of the gun is clogged with sand and he wonders if the tank-rider is aware of this. Wonders if he should point it out to him, but then does nothing but stand and stare and see the tank approach the place where the Ned and the grinner are playing Killzone 2, the grinner grinning and the Ned regarding the tank with such awe that his lower jaw has dropped and released a slick of shining drool on to his pimpled chin. The tank-rider is angry, Ronnie notices: angry and weary and troubled. He stays atop his steel steed as he addresses the g
rinner:
– You sent us to war ill-prepared, he says. – The guns clog, the boots melt in the heat, the armoured cars aren’t. This morning, on the approach road to Basra, small roadside IED went off. Small, not powerful, should’ve been unable to penetrate the Saracen we were promised but ripped the jeep we were told to make do with apart. So now I’ve got two nineteen-year-olds with no legs. One was lucky – he’s still got his dick and balls. The other...
The tank-rider shrugs. – No children for him, now. If you can find no compassion for the Iraqis, then surely you can find compassion for us? The sons of the island that you run and control?
The grinner blinks and for a nano-second Ronnie sees the grin falter on his face but then it’s back up in a blink, splitting his face, revealing his teeth which, Ronnie is sure, have in the past few minutes begun to stretch and sharpen into fangs.
– Ned, says the grinner. – Your move.
The Ned shouts and flicks the fingers of his right hand at the tank-rider like Ali G and turns his attention back to the game. – On it, man! he yells, to anyone who can hear him, and the tank-rider turns his machine to face the crowd which is still attacking itself with no diminution of rage or ugly gusto despite the fact that most of its members are now missing eyes or ears or noses, black and spurting holes in their faces, or flaps of scalp or fingers or in some cases even arms and legs. One man, in fact, is using his own left arm as a club, holding it by the hand in his right hand and swinging it at the heads around him or using the protruding spike of red bone at its ragged shoulder to blind his neighbours. And a woman hops up behind another woman and taps her on the shoulder and when she turns she pounces with a screech and sinks her teeth into her face, bites off a cheek, swallows.
Killzone 2 rages on, too. The people in the crowd, the people that have now become blood-streaked and truncated and mutilated dervishes, screech and scream like ravening hawks and continue to mill and seethe and hack. The tank chugs through the crowd, which doesn’t part for it, crushing fallen bodies to pools of pulp in the sucking scarlet mud and when it has disappeared, when the rhythmic roar and thump of its engines has completely died away, it is replaced by another of exactly the same model but decorated in different colours; half of this tank is white, the other half green, with a great red design superimposed across these colours which, Ronnie notices, is in the shape of a dragon, a big red dragon, one foreleg raised to show claws and the forked tongue caught in mid-flicker and the arrow-headed tail twisted in a loop. The rider, sitting atop the tank just like the first, is dressed identically to him in sandy camouflage fatigues and a bulky protective vest and he too carries an identical gun which again Ronnie can see is clogged with sand in the barrel, and on this rider’s feet is a pair of light but durable biscuit-coloured boots which have gone rippled and misshapen at the soles. On this rider’s head is a tight-fitting beret adorned with an emblem of three upright ostrich feathers and a daffodil pinned to the front of it, the single decapitated head of a daffodil with yellow petals wilting and trumpet-shaped calyx shouting a silent alarum into the reddened air above the smashing heads of the clashing crowd. The tank chugs closer to the Ned and the grinner and Ronnie is shortly able to make out its rider’s expression which, like the first, is angry and weary and troubled. The Ned and the grinner continue with their game; even when the tank is mere inches from their rapt faces, its armour trembling with its engine’s beat, washed in the flashing colours of the screen, they simply continue with their game.
– Oi, says the rider on the tank. – Talking to yew, butt. Gunner listen then?
The grinner and the Ned just go on with the game.
– We’re dying, says the rider. – Dying in the desert. Yew gave us bugger all to live for and do on our estates like and then yew offered us jobs as soldiers and then yew sent us to war on lies and we’re dying, mun, dying in the sand. This morning, Private Billy Pugh of Ton-yr-Efail, shot by a sniper he was, one shot, head, clean kill. Well, clean for the sniper, I mean; I spent an hour washing the boy’s brains out of my hair. Never get to celebrate his twentieth birthday, now, young Billy Pugh. Yew listening to me?
The grinner and the Ned play the game.
– I’m talking to yew. Yewer sending yewer country’s young men off to be killed, mun. Yew talk about national defence. About bloody homeland bloody security. Yew send tanks to Heathrow as if they’re gunner be any use against a kamikaze hijacker so that we’ll all feel under threat so that we’ll support yewer bloody crusade. We’re dying for yewer lies, mun. I don’t mind fighting, Duw, that’s what I joined the bloody force for, mun, but there needs to be a bloody reason. And say this island was attacked – what then? No one yer to bloody defend it. All them women without husbands and children without fathers and parents without sons. See, what yew don’t understand is...
The rider continues to speak but his tank is now reversing, back into the crowd, chugging backwards into and then through the mad maul of people. The rider talks as he moves backwards on his machine, still talking, but Ronnie can’t hear his words, just watches his mouth move, and he is transported backwards beyond the crowd and down the valley until he vanishes from sight.
– Ned, says the grinner. – Your move.
They finish that game and begin another. Their appetite for Killzone 2, it seems, with its big weapons and loud noises and bright flashing lights, is insatiable; they tackle each new game with a relish undiminished. Ronnie, some bones and flesh around emptiness, just watches them play, watches them kill each other’s avatars, sees yet another game come to an end and hears the nearing of yet another tank.
Rhys is the first to wake. A scumble-headed, lip-plapping, eye-encrusted scarecrow he is as he wakes on the couch in a taste of cheesy Doritos and beer and fags, rubs his squeaky eyes, looks around him in the cold and smelly room. There’s Robert, all curled up on the floor next to the cold gas fire, beneath a jumble of coverings, an overcoat and a hairy blanket and what looks like a beach towel. There’s Ronnie, still sleeping, still, it appears, dreaming, on his lucky moo-cow rug, his hands wafered beneath his cheek, his knees drawn foetally up to his rising and falling chest. Helen’s not in the room, but Rhys can hear her sleepy-grumbles through his ceiling, her floor. He sits up and farts and looks at his watch; just gone ten. Can’t remember falling asleep, but it must’ve been before Helen came home, and after a hell of a lot of cans. He has vague memories of vodka, too. He levers himself groaning off the sofa and thumps upstairs and releases a stream of thick and orange pee into the toilet then rinses his face with cold water and groans again and brushes his teeth with his finger then goes back downstairs and enters the kitchen. Fills the kettle, flicks it on. The house silent but for three soft snorings. Sees a half-eaten loaf of sliced white on the counter top next to an empty bottle and toasts and magarines six slices of it, then makes three mugs of tea and carries everything into the front room. Places the tray on the floor and gently shakes Ronnie’s shoulder but Ronnie just mumbles and goes on sleeping and dreaming on his lucky moo-cow rug. Rhys shakes him harder but Ronnie will not respond. Rhys looks down at Ronnie for a moment then turns to wake Robert but Robert is already awake, lying on his back with his hands behind his head, looking up at Rhys.
– He still won’t wake up?
– No. Getting worried about him.
– He’s breathing, inny?
– Yeh.
– Well then he’s alive.
– Aye, but what if he’s in a coma or something? Could be brain dead in that head of his. No telling what was in that pill.
– Nah, look at him. He’s changed position since last night; remember he was on his back? And he’s making noises. Coma victims don’t do that.
Rhys looks back down at Ronnie, sees his eyelids ripple and move. Do comatose people dream?
– I made you some tea and toast, Rob.
– Good man. I’m fucking starving.
Robert sits up and slurps tea and crunches toast. He gulps his tea quickly and wants more
so he drinks Ronnie’s, too.
– What time did we nod off last night?
– Can’t remember. Must’ve been late.
– Drank a fuck of a lot of lager.
– Too right we did. Look at that.
Rhys nods at a pyramid of empty beer cans next to the TV, on the other side from Ronnie. Maybe forty of them.
– Seen Helen?
– No, but she’s back. Still asleep. Heard her snoring when I went for a slash.
Robert crunches toast. – We need to go home, don’t we?
– Why?
– Got to see me mam before I ship out. She’ll be worried sick. Me dad as well. So will yours.
– I’ll ring ’em later. Got to wait for Rip Van fucking Winkle to wake up first, haven’t we? Whenever that’ll be.
– Aye. Fucking war’ll be over by the time that idle bastard gets his arse in gear.
– Talking of which.
– What, arses?
– No. Wars.
Rhys picks the remote up from the catshit-spotted carpet and turns the telly on. Flicks through the channels for the news and sees images of tanks at an airport.
The Dreams of Max & Ronnie Page 4
