by Martin Hand
Pete shoved Taylor out of the way and proceeded to perform the most instinctual hug he had ever been driven to deliver. The hug wasn’t entirely successful because Fionn himself clutched Martha to his side, holding her firmly around the shoulder. As Pete threw his outstretched arms around the pair, he noticed how firmly Fionn was holding on to Martha. He was keeping her upright.
‘What the fuck? Are you all right? Where did you come from?’ Pete blurted as he released them.
The rest of the lads came to take a closer look, steering around the hole in the ground, euphoria rising in all of them. Rowdiness and shouting were OK now. Relief. Fuck the rangers.
The lads saw that back-slapping was in order, and Joe was next to embrace Fionn. Hugging wasn’t something that was common among Irish young fellas but given the circumstances it was needed as a tension reliever. Fionn returned the embrace as he knew Larry and Michael were on hand to buttress Martha from falling. Farming lads always had more biological sense, like that, about them. Paul and Martha had been two of the main actors in the drama, but only Fionn was able to talk and take in the group’s relieved congratulations.
Taylor, still holding his sore arm, spoke up: ‘Lads, I suppose I’ll be getting another thump soon. The rangers will have heard that bang, right?’
Pete was now more conciliatory: ‘No worries on that score. Those boys keep office hours. They’ll be snug in their bunks tonight.’
‘We will be as well, right?’ asked Taylor.
Pete called Mark and Seamus over to him. ‘Boys, I think we’ll hole up here for the night. What do ye reckon?’ The two just grunted so Pete carried on. ‘I was crouched at a position only fifty metres directly below us. We’ve been here before, but I only noticed now it’s an old stone circle. Not much shelter but at least it’s a boundary.’
‘Sleeping in a fairy circle! It sure is turning out to be a day of queer experiences,’ said Seamus.
Mark had one of his rare contributory moments. ‘Yeah, OK,’ he said. ‘It’ll give us time to get our story straight.’
Seamus wasn’t letting him off the hook so lightly. ‘Is that the story where you were the first to beat a retreat down the bloody hill?’
‘How many dead heroes were you planning to clock up?’ Mark replied.
‘Ah give up, give up, for fuck’s sake!’ said Pete. He was more annoyed by not being able to figure out the geometry of how Fionn and Martha had ended up standing behind him.
‘Let’s move the boys down and get a fire going. There’re only a few minutes of daylight left. These two’ – Peter pointed at Paul and Martha – ‘need to be minded – shock. Let’s get going.’
Pete continued to use Larry and Michael to help marshal the dazed Martha and Paul, with his squelchy stockinged foot, down the hill. Fionn and Joe ambled behind. Joe wasn’t talking but the stress pain in his stomach was easing. No-stripes Pete had a head on his shoulders. When he took off his backpack, he knew exactly where to look to retrieve a couple of paraffin-smelling firelighters wrapped in tin foil. Using a small Bic lighter and the couple of twigs he had collected on the way down the hill, he soon had the beginnings of a camp fire.
‘Larry, Michael, will you park those two here beside the fire and do a bit of wood gathering.’ Pete wasn’t anti-Dublin, but he instinctively trusted the country lads, like himself, to be more cooperative.
It was dark now and Pete got a bit of a blaze going, which encouraged the rest of the troops to congregate in the circle. He had ringed the fire with a cordon of stones – a stone circle within a stone circle.
With the troops gathered around Pete spoke: ‘Boys, it won’t rain in a fog so your twenty-tog survival bags will keep ye snug.’ There were a few moans when he confirmed that they were staying put for the night. ‘The timber-gathering detail will be back soon and we’ll get some grub cooked.’
‘Have we any drink?’ asked Taylor.
Pete knew he had been on Taylor’s case enough, and anyway he was nearly wishing he had brought a flask. ‘Let’s concentrate on a sugar-restoring meal,’ he said.
Martha and Paul got pride of place, close to the fire. The base of the mountain, where they were now, had a surprising amount of scattered wood when you went looking for it. Probably from a woodland that had existed a thousand years ago. In the glow of illuminated grey fog a little sense of normality had returned. Nothing like a tinned-beef dinner, heated on the fire, to return you to a state of quasi-normality. After what had just happened, things were going to be different. The lads were gathered in huddles. Fionn and Joe kept their own company, but it seemed to Pete that Joe was doing most of the talking. The kids had survived, literally, their first soldiering adventure. What was to come in the far-off hills of the Middle East could surely only be boring by comparison.
Not surprisingly, the older guys – Pete, Mark and Seamus – were gathered together, eating. Pete had positioned himself behind Martha and Paul. He was happy they were sitting up and eating a bit. Pete wanted to talk with Mark and Seamus and could see that a dazed Martha wouldn’t be paying much heed to them.
‘Lads, we’re after surviving a near miss balls up,’ said Pete.
‘We’re going to have to get our story straight for camp tomorrow,’ said Seamus.
‘You don’t have to be a good liar if you’re not telling the truth. You just have to remember to shut up,’ Mark replied.
‘I think the truth is the last thing we want to deal with right now,’ said Pete.
‘The truth, if you ask me, means no stripes, and do ye know what that means for your pension, Mark?’ said Seamus.
Seamus had Mark’s full attention, if not Pete’s, once money was mentioned.
‘So what is our story and how do we keep the kids from ratting?’ asked Mark.
‘One thing is for sure, boys, we’ll have to figure out who’s a blabberer and who can be trusted,’ said Seamus.
‘Lads, stall the ball awhile,’ said Pete. ‘No matter what, something very strange just happened. We’re bonded as a platoon now, whether we know it or not. How are those two guys not dead or limbless or something?’
‘That’s obvious, isn’t it? They weren’t blown up,’ said Mark, logical to a fault.
‘Well, how then did they magically appear from nowhere with shiny clear faces?’ asked Pete.
‘Duh! Well, I’m guessing they walked away from the boot bomb, just like the rest of us, and cleaned themselves up for good measure,’ said Mark a little smartly.
‘Pete is right, Mark,’ said Seamus.
‘The timing is all wrong. Fionn and Martha couldn’t have just walked through a ring of soldiers who were tensed up with adrenalin and on high alert.
‘Lads, come on,’ said Mark. ‘It’s spooky enough being out here in the Halloween fog, stone circles and what have you. Supernatural happenings me arse, if that’s what you’re getting at. They did their job and they walked away. Good night and God bless.’
‘Stop being such a fucking smart-arse,’ Seamus said to Mark, and he wasn’t finished. ‘Maybe the speed that got you down the hill yourself would have stopped you from seeing anything go past you.’
‘Ah lads, give it a rest. It’s hard enough figuring the thing out without a load of bickering,’ said Pete.
‘How did they get their faces so clean, no camouflage paint?’
‘Ask them,’ said Mark, tetchy again.
‘Well, I will, because we can’t put together a credible story for HQ till we know what happened,’ said Pete.
‘I’d ask the Martha one first, if I were you, Pete,’ said Mark. ‘That Fionn guy talks in riddles anyway.’
Pete manoeuvred closer to Martha but still within earshot of the older two privates. He needed their support. ‘Martha, are you OK?’ he asked.
‘Not bad, Peter,’ was her soft-spoken reply.
‘Make sure you keep inside the ba
g. We can’t have your temperature dropping. We should really have taken a closer look at ye for cuts or injuries. Martha, what do you remember about the explosion?’
‘Flying, hitting, being dead,’ was Martha’s astonishing reply, more so because it was delivered in the same calm monotone as her previous sentence. With the three lads stuck for words, she carried on: ‘I was lying on my back. I thought I was dead because the pain I felt when I hit the ground was the worst I’ve ever felt. And then I felt nothing. My eyes opened and there was no fog and Fionn was leaning over me and his hands were on my shoulders … and the heat. He said, ‘Get up, Martha.’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ said Mark. ‘We’re trying to get our story straight and she’s talking about coming back from the dead. Listen Miss Mary or Martha or whatever your name is, quit talking shite, will ye, for Jaysus sake?’
‘Lighten up, Mark,’ said Pete. ‘Can’t you see the girl is shattered?’
The senior privates had chosen to interview Martha while most of the rest of the lads were pummelling Fionn for information. They were able to hear what Fionn was relating even as they sat, on their side of the fire, with Martha. Paul’s chums, Larry and Michael, were keeping Paul chatting and distracted.
‘That was one hell of a job you did today, my man,’ Joe said to Fionn. He wasn’t expecting much of a response; he never did after seeing Fionn do his thing. But Joe knew this was more than just another ‘thing’. This was unexplainable. So he asked Fionn directly: ‘My friend, were you blown up in that explosion?’
‘Lads, I don’t really know how to explain it. It might sound a bit stupid. It wasn’t so much that I was guided by nature, more that I was perfectly in tune with it. I’m not explaining it very well. When I was dealing with the bomb, I felt I was part of something. I knew I was guided and nothing could go wrong. It did – the bloody thing exploded – but even so, I knew me and Martha, because she was with me, were protected. There was a whole sense of well-being, as if the detonation happened to prove a point, or something.
‘Fionn, are you saying you have special powers, or something? I’m confused,’ Jake said.
‘I don’t know what I have, Jake, but I know I only want to do good with it.’
‘So are you the man to ask about picking lottery numbers?’ asked Taylor.
‘I don’t think it’s that kind of good work I have to do, Taylor, my friend.’
‘Fionn, did the blast blow you over everyone’s head? We were all hiding well away,’ said Jake.
‘But who among us knows anything about bomb blasts? Even the older guys – you can ask them, but I don’t know if they’ve seen many blasts either,’ Fionn replied.
Paul was safely tucked up in his waterproof sleeping bag by the fire. His buddies approached and used the excuse of heaping some more wood on the fire to sit beside him, while Pete was talking with Martha.
‘Jesus, man, you’re the lucky boy to have only lost your boot,’ said Larry.
‘Yeah, right enough, could have lost your bollix,’ said Michael.
This was as meek as the lads had ever seen Paul. His normal confidence, maybe brought on from knowing a bit more about the army, had evaporated for the moment.
‘The bravery of these guys, Martha and Fionn, and the coolness of Fionn. I wonder, no matter how long we live, will we ever see such an act again,’ said Paul, his voice quivering.
‘Fionn’s quite a lad, for a Dub, that is,’ said Michael.
‘Go way out of that, will ye! You Kerry lads love the feckin’ Dubs,’ said Larry.
‘Yeah, love tanning their hides in football, more like,’ Michael replied.
‘Us Donegalers have done a little bit of that ourselves in recent times.’
‘Boys, enough of the GAA shitting competition for the minute. I’m fucking lucky to have a pair of legs and your spitting and shitting on about sport.’ Paul was getting himself way more hyper than was good for him.
‘Yeah, you’re right, Paul,’ Larry said.
Michael nodded in agreement.
‘But listen, fair play, Fionn’s been nothing but a decent sort in the last eight weeks.’
‘Bang on,’ said Michael.
‘Do you remember when Sarge Doyle told us that if anyone failed one of those crappy, late-evening endurance drills, then no one goes to bed till 4 a.m.? Sure enough, Jake was thirty seconds behind the pace with five minutes left on the clock. Ye remember Fionn and Joe grabbing him under each arm and beating the clock by a nick? Doyle was raging, ye remember? Not because he had it in for us but more because he was thwarted in keeping us up half the night. He wanted to see how we would react, how we would treat the one who let the squad down.’
‘Yeah, Fionn was always thwarting the sarges,’ said Larry.
‘He just wouldn’t leave anyone behind … as I just found out for myself, thank God,’ said Paul, now a bit calmer.
‘Yeah, and I like the way he just doesn’t go in for that Dublin-versus-country shite,’ said Michael.
‘Maybe he’s a born-again culchie,’ said Larry.
‘Yeah, but there is more to it than that, right enough. He treats us all equally.’
‘Well, he treated me more than equally. He saved my life,’ said Paul.
‘I’ve news for ye, Paul, he might have saved your life, but he saved my bacon while he was at it,’ said Larry.
‘What ye mean?’ asked Michael.
‘He caught me carrying a flask of whiskey. I’ve no idea how he knew it, but he put his hand in my inside pocket, grabbed the flask, took a swig and emptied the lot, just before Sarge O’Brien called a bunk inspection. I would have been kicked out of the platoon.’
‘Sweet Jesus, what are we to do with this balls-up?’ Seamus asked, really addressing the senior privates.
‘Lads, don’t lose the plot here. At least with no dead bodies, thank God, we have options,’ said Pete.
‘Options to lie, ye mean,’ replied Mark.
This group were talking more quietly than Fionn and Joe’s.
‘Jaysus, lads, this is huge. I think the bloody relief of us all not being splattered with blood is one thing. A good thing. But one way or the other this is going to follow us all for ever,’ said Pete.
‘Could two people be blown that far in the air and really come up unscathed?’ asked Seamus.
‘It’s a crock of shit story, if you’re asking me. Look, we were in a circular cordon around the blast site. Of course the boyos could have slipped past us, washed their faces and carried on with their trickery,’ said Mark, getting crankier by the minute.
‘Look, it’s head-wrecking. I’m just saying we are in a better place than we could have been,’ said Pete.
‘I just wonder if we’re making ourselves believe the unbelievable,’ said Seamus.
‘You can believe it if you want but no one survives an explosion like that,’ said Mark.
‘Lads, start bedding down for the night. If you’re staying awake, keep the chat quiet. Heads inside the bags, I don’t want ye with pneumonia on the plane to the Leb. Anyone up for a wee during the night, keep the fire going and don’t disturb the others. Some of us need our beauty sleep. We’ll be on the move after seven, just when it’s bright. We are probably three to three and a half hours from camp.’
The next morning was joyous. The fog cleared and, better still, the brightest of the stars were still visible in a navy sky. The sleeping bags had done the trick, given that a white frost was glistening on the mossy stones of the circle. Yet people were reporting that they had slept well. Somebody had been decent, not only getting the fire rekindled but also going to the nearby stream and rinsing out the cups. A mug of milky Joe with a cellophane-wrapped chocolate bread roll would provide just the right energy injection to start the day.
Seeing Martha stretch out her arms as she emerged from the sleeping bag gave Pete the shun
t he needed to address the platoon. ‘Listen, guys, we’re moving out in twenty minutes. We have two choices. Either tell all or tell nothing. But one thing is for sure: if we tell all, there’s no plane taking off to the Leb, or at least if there is, we won’t be on it.’
The significance of this information started to dawn on the youngsters. Even after yesterday, the excitement generated by the pending trip to foreign lands hadn’t evaporated.
‘Will those rangers not beat the truth out of us anyway?’ asked Jake.
This time Mark answered. He wanted the trip as well, and there was no need, he felt, for Pete to be doing all the talking. ‘No. You won’t see those guys today. If they don’t get you on the first attempt, they don’t go a second time. Badge of honour and all that crap.’
While there were murmurs of conversation among the guys, Paul, now steadier than the previous night, made the killer pitch. ‘Listen, I’m the clown that nearly did for myself and for others’ – He threw a glace at Fionn first and then Martha – ‘I’m the one that has to march back into camp with a plastic bag for a boot. I’m on that plane.’
For whatever reason it was the older guys who were secretly relieved. Seamus finished the narrative: ‘So one simple story: nothing happened, full stop.’
They trekked on in a line now. The battle-formation diagonal was abandoned, at least until they were in view of the barracks. Peter had wanted to talk with Fionn, just as he had done with Martha the previous night. He was probably using the excuse of Joe’s constant presence to avoid the conversation. Anyway, he had eavesdropped in on Fionn’s account. His act of bravery had left Peter feeling that sensation in his stomach that came when an opportunity had presented itself and been missed. He had let a kid call it. But more had been gained than lost.
There was a pleasantness to the trek back to Camp Imaal. The weather, the mood, the bond, the agreement. Maybe not quite snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, but at least getting another day for the fight.
