The Illuminations Read online

  ‘The Grenadier Guards,’ Luke said.

  ‘Awesome. It’s all Royal Engineers up there,’ Dooley said.

  ‘The Chunkies,’ Lennox said. ‘A corps of Bennies up there with a single fucken standard grade and a metal ruler between them, pumping up tyres and thinking they’re God.’

  ‘Fuck them all, man. We got the battle honours.’

  ‘Fucken right,’ Flannigan said, leaning on the cabin door and closing his eyes. ‘But we’re the ones sitting here for hours going red pigs …’

  ‘Hot, man.’

  ‘Like boiling,’ Flannigan said. ‘And the cocknoshes up there, man, the fucken Chunkies, giving it fuck-o-nometry with some cunting Rupert from Bastion nodding all impressed like and we’re sitting up here getting Kit-Kat arse in the sun.’

  ‘Some officers are dicks and they’ll always be dicks,’ Lennox said. ‘Not you, Captain.’

  ‘Steady,’ Luke said.

  ‘Jesus,’ Dooley whispered. ‘I wish something would happen. I want to be all over this map. I want a whole lot of kills and then I don’t give a fuck what happens. They can take me home.’ His voice had gone down a level with the heat and he swigged water from a plastic bottle and then threw the bottle into the road among the rocks.

  ‘I don’t care what anybody says,’ Lennox said. ‘Megadeth is not Thrash Metal. It’s Death Metal, so it is.’

  ‘The guitars are gunning, man. It’s Thrash.’

  ‘Bollocks, it is.’

  ‘They practically invented Thrash. Them and Metallica.’ Lennox began poking himself in the chest. ‘I’m telling you, man. I was into them before any other kid at St Gerard’s.’

  ‘Cop on, Lennox, you daft bitch. Get real. You were about two when Countdown to Extinction came out.’

  Lennox pondered this. ‘I was definitely listening to Youthanasia when I was in primary school, so I was.’

  So the conversation went, all day, half the night, between joints and scran, boredom and mortars. The time to start worrying on a mission, Luke always said, is when the boys are being too nice to one another. And in a firefight, you only panic when the boys go silent.

  He smiled and walked off the road. He could see the wavering line of the horizon and everything in the distance looked like a form of sunstroke. There was a mud house by an irrigation ditch, a smell of shit and rotten hay, a man in a pink turban strolling with his goats. Out there, the ragged mountains appeared like a video still, not reality but a screen-grab. The whole scene looked parched and ruined. A clear picture came into Luke’s mind of a fresher landscape, Loch Lomond in the black-and-white summer of an old photograph at his grandmother’s. He could almost taste a pint of lager, and taste Anne’s art. He didn’t think that any of his Helmand images would end up in a frame.

  There was heat inside the heat. Sweat ran down the back of his neck and between his shoulder blades. Luke hated the hours it took to dig out landmines and the wait for incoming fire. Scullion said the mission would be the biggest logistical task of the war. Two hundred vehicles and a shitload of grunts desperate as fuck to get out there and banjo the Taliban. Luke felt weak. Just as there was heat inside the heat, there was weakness inside his weakness. Everything is dense with itself out there; everything is thick with its own crazed lack of known limits. Things could escalate. You could sense it in your nerves and feel it on your skin.

  Jesus, the boys were mad for action. They were mad for wild-eyed bogeymen covered in rags, for teams of degenerates to appear on the horizon wearing beards and mucky sandals, pouring through the heatwave with their sabres held high. By late August the men in the platoon were chin-strapped and breathing through their arses. They needed a story to tell and they needed pictures. They longed for something they would hate the moment it arrived. But they wanted it and their want appeared to seep into the deadly hot distances that surrounded them.

  ‘Jesus,’ Luke said. They’d given up on the famous victory long ago and now they gave a toss for nothing but the regiment. To everybody it was a cluster fuck where nobody wins.

  ‘Mad out here,’ he said quietly.

  Luke walked a dozen yards away from the convoy. The horizon was a bundle of grey and brown garments, a heap of old linen, surely not stones and mountains. The distance seemed to come and go in the heat, it appeared to liquefy before him and he felt lost on the empty map with the troops and vehicles ranged at his back. At Bastion he’d told the boys to write their last letters. A quick note just in case. Two seconds. They wrote them while waiting for their turn on Xbox.

  It began early on that first day. It began with the melting horizon and the threat of forces lying outside his vision. He felt the Kajaki Operation was cursed and he wanted to be out of there. He felt the pressure of his younger self, the one who missed his father, the boy in touch with beautiful ideas. Back then, Luke often walked through Kelvingrove Park in Glasgow to spend the day with his gran. Anne was a woman who lived quietly and knew how to disappear into her own experience. He could still see her standing near the window with a magnifying glass and an old catalogue, sitting him down to explain things. Even when speaking to a boy she spoke as a person not only ready to invest in you but ready to bear the costs to the end. In Helmand, he already understood that Anne was now ill, and, thinking of her, he realised her quest had long since become part of who he was himself. It was inside him. He didn’t yet know what her quest was, but he had never forgotten that by going round galleries with him and talking about books, Anne had given him the world not as it was but as it might be. He could see himself as a boy on her sofa with a large seashell clamped to his ear. He felt he needed her more than ever, he wanted her close, the person who once revealed to him a world beyond the obvious. He recalled the time she took him to Dunure Harbour. He was twelve years old and they stood holding hands on the jetty, the wind pushing them back as they took great gulps of air. ‘Breathe, Luke!’ she said. ‘You can’t argue with that! Fresh wind off the sea. Oh my. I wish I could catch it with the camera.’

  It all felt different now, the ethos, the habits, the taste he and his fellow soldiers had developed for a high kill ratio. Out there, staring into the mountains, it occurred to him that he had travelled far from his old resources, far from Anne Quirk and her mysterious belief that truth and silence can conquer everything. Was she even real in herself, he asked. Or was she just another of life’s compelling hopes? He remembered her bringing books back from the library and then disappearing down to England for weeks at a time. His mother wouldn’t tell him anything about Anne’s story and the books stood, in his mind, for everything missing. ‘You’re the first officer I’ve met in years’, Major Scullion had told him, ‘who knows that Browning is not just a small arms weapon.’

  Luke and the major were now miles from the shared conscience that had once elevated their friendship. Something was wrong. ‘Jesus,’ he said again. ‘This war is dirty as fuck. There’s nothing good here. And we the police are coming to our end.’ He blew out his breath and watched his thoughts vaporise against a wall of daylight. Some crazy box of frogs out here, he thought, goats and fuck knows what, Fat Alberts flying overhead dropping cannon on the wrong people.

  MAJOR SCULLION

  Some men say they love it. They love the flamingos that once nested in the alkali lakes of Ghazni. Major Scullion could speak a little Pashtun: he was that kind of man, a perpetual scholar of green river valleys, an inspector of old travel books. And now he was a veteran of long hot days spent eating pomegranates in the Afghan mire. Like many people who love walking, Charles Scullion was a professor of his own singularity, yet he preferred to speak of himself as a dot in a majestic landscape. He liked the clichés, the phrase ‘harsh beauty’. In his mind he had reformed all images of blood so that now he only saw Kipling’s vistas of white carnations. The major came with recent memories of Sierra Leone and Kosovo, but it was Afghanistan he loved more than home, and he spoke of the Caspian tiger the way others spoke of the nightclubs in Temple Bar.

 
; ‘What’s in the horror-bag?’ said a tall kid from Edinburgh who’d been in the jeep with Docherty and the Afghan soldiers. They had high hopes for the canteen at Maiwand and the queue was long. Luke’s head was miles away. He turned after a moment and saw the kid.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘What’s the snap, Captain?’

  ‘Curry, I think.

  Private Flannigan scraped past with a full tray in his hands. He winked at Luke, who just shook his head and gave him the finger. The canteen was buzzing, the soldiers ate quickly. Luke went over to a corner mess with Major Scullion and listened, not for the first time, while the major gave a lecture about medieval barbarism. Luke knew it was unreal. What was behind all this talk of the British attempt, whether in Bosnia or Kandahar, to obliterate ignorance with firepower? With the smell of boil-in-the-bag curry coming over the partition, Scullion reminded Luke of the defeat once suffered by the British at Maiwand. ‘Your fucking Jocky ancestors were forming a football team in Glasgow around that time,’ he said. ‘God bless them. They were bog Irish like my own, with hardly a kilo of potatoes between the lot of them. And what do you think was happening over here in that year of Our Lord, 1880?’

  ‘Death and destruction, I presume.’

  ‘Correct! A British brigade was massacred by 25,000 Afghan savages. A thousand of our lads. And here we are making ready to bring water to the same ungrateful pigs in their madrasas, still teaching their young how to blow up British soldiers who are out here to help them.’

  ‘They’re mainly in Pakistan, the kind of madrasas you’re speaking about.’

  ‘Wherever. It’s all the same.’

  ‘In any case I would cut that speech, sir,’ said Luke. ‘For the briefing. This is a two-day mission requiring tolerance.’

  Scullion was in the mood for firing off questions. Luke had seen it before and knew it was coming. ‘You’ve seen this country from the air a number of times?’ he said.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What does it look like to you?’

  ‘Dunno, sir. Empty. Bleak.’

  ‘No, Campbell. It looks like bundles of brown blankets slung over history. And that is what it is.’

  ‘You’ve said that before.’

  Scullion stood up and took a few steps and drew his finger down some bullet holes in the window frame. A few hundred yards off he could see whorls of razor wire with plastic bags snagged on the blades. The bags didn’t flutter, they were still, it was hot.

  ‘Did you have a nice time at university?’ Scullion asked.

  ‘Just normal, I suppose.’

  ‘And what did you learn?’

  ‘I learned how to climb. I was in the climbing club.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘I learned how to drink snakebite and blackcurrant. And I learned that nationalism is a false promise.’

  ‘Well worth the visit,’ Scullion said. ‘I met my wife at Trinity. We used to lie in bed listening to Duke Ellington. Frost on the trees. Early 1980s. The cleaner in the halls of residence used to bring us a lit Carroll’s cigarette and a cup of tea in the morning.’

  ‘That’s the life.’

  ‘It was, Luke. It was the life.’

  ‘You’re upset, sir.’

  ‘You know something …’ He sat down and his shoulders sank. It’s not ordinary for a man like Scullion to let his shoulders go. He coughed. Luke knew he had recently split up with his wife. ‘A bad marriage can smash a person’s life for years. You haven’t really lived until you’ve been fucked over by a person who claimed to love you. Some people have it in the bag by the time they’re twenty. But most of us get it at forty or forty-five, the lunatic surge, desperate to take you down. They force you out of your own house and claim you left them. Madeleine was so hormonal and dark I think it actually wiped her memory. She can’t remember what she did. The hostility. I never faced a bigger battle.’

  ‘Come on, sir,’ said Luke. ‘You fought in Bosnia.’

  ‘Dead on. I’d faced dictators before but none of them controlled access to my dog.’

  ‘She never hated you, Charlie.’

  ‘No, she didn’t. Her negatives were just too deeply cooked into the casserole.’ He smirked and sat down again. ‘But she didn’t love me either. She used me, man. She used me as an alibi against the accusation she was messing up her life.’

  ‘No way, sir.’

  ‘Oh, yes. She saw me coming along and she thought, “He’ll do. He’s respectable. He’ll take the sting out of it for a while.” It was her father and mother that did it. They were liars, too. By an early age she was totally fucking destroyed as an ethical being. She could speak endlessly about love but her actions were without it. And that’s evil, Luke. That’s badness for you, right there.’

  ‘Charlie …’

  ‘They never see it, those people. They never see what they’re doing because they’re too busy doing it. And when you finally find them out it’s part of their brilliant act to deny it, to pretend they are the victim and then convince themselves of it. That’s the brilliance, Luke. They lie and lie, those people, and never face up to who they are or what they did. And then they move on to the next person and it’s mansions on top of ruins. Thank Christ there are no children to pass this stuff on to.’

  ‘Let’s think about the briefing.’

  ‘Every day there are fresh outrages …’

  ‘It’s not worth thinking about.’

  ‘Oh, but it is, Luke. You have to keep good accounts with yourself. Because one day the inspectors come round, the inspectors in your head. The moral cops. And you have to be able to show them what you did. You’ve got to show them that you tried to do the right thing.’

  ‘People can grow apart, sir. It’s nobody’s fault.’

  ‘I wish we weren’t here, Luke. I wish we were sitting down at home with a couple of drinks talking about good poetry. Housman or whatever or Ezra Pound. Just to sit down with a bottle of Talisker.’

  ‘The plan, sir. We need to talk about the plan.’

  ‘I left her with everything and set her free. She could honour me for that, but she doesn’t.’

  ‘Doesn’t she?’

  ‘No, man. She acts like life is just the sum total of what you can get away with.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And on a bad day I do think that’s quite evil.’

  ‘It’s not evil if you can’t help it.’

  He was probably the toughest guy Luke had ever known, yet simple things were clearly hard for him as he got older. He was a veteran of many battles but life at home was casting doubt over his authority. Luke wasn’t sure the major had got it right about how to live: the uncomplicated things, the comforts. He was probably a nightmare to live with. Their friendship used to be like a winter coat to Luke. In the regiment, Scullion had always had a reputation as a brave soldier, but Luke wondered if that was even true any more. He wasn’t sure. To him the major looked scarred and self-indulgent, unreliable, and whatever had been tough in him was in danger of going softly malignant. Maybe it was Luke. Maybe the war made him question everything.

  ‘You think it’s simple?’ Scullion said. ‘Domestic life is harsher than Stalingrad. You’ve got a long way to go, Captain. How old are you, thirty or something?’ Scullion laughed and slapped Luke’s back and then drank his cold tea in one go. Luke saw that the major’s hand was shaking as he lifted the plastic cup. ‘The bottom dropped out,’ Scullion added. ‘I had no ambition. I thought she was out to fucking kill me. And all she had in her arsenal was my feeling for her.’

  ‘Come on, Major. Take these.’ Luke passed him two sedatives from his wallet. ‘See you out there in twenty minutes.’

  ‘I would like you and the others to forgive me for anything cruel I’ve ever done,’ Scullion said. ‘Just stuff that I might have said or times when I lost my temper. Like the wee things that stick around and before you know it the person thinks you’ve stopped listening to them. I want you to know I never meant to be cruel about anyt
hing. It was only life and sometimes you’re not yourself.’ The smell of baked curry and stewed tea was mixed in the air with unsaid things.

  ‘Army curry,’ Luke said, nudging his plate.

  ‘You have to taste the real McCoy. You have to go to Calcutta.’

  ‘Don’t sweat it, Major,’ Luke said. ‘We’re going to get this job done and then we’re out of here.’ Scullion gripped his shoulder and Luke imagined he was talking to all the boys.

  ‘It’s a great operation this, Captain Campbell. A brilliant thing to be doing. I just feel upset.’

  ‘Come on, sir. We’re the Western Fusiliers.’

  ‘I’m the son of a barman, Luke. Believe me. The sons of barmen have taken over the world.’

  OQAB TSUKA

  Private Dooley was rolling a cigarette at the back of the hall, a breeze-block community centre in Maiwand. The hall was packed and after a while Luke sat in the row beside him. In front a staff sergeant with the new Royal Caledonians was gassing about Scullion and the regiment. ‘And this major’s a total fucking mentalist,’ he said.

  ‘What’s mental about him?’ asked the lance corporal beside him.

  ‘Brutal cunt, Mark. He’s about forty-eight. He fought in every fucking battle you can think of since the Falklands. Bosnia, the lot. I’m talking about Northern Ireland, Sierra Leone.’

  People change, thought Luke. The world changes. Maybe he’s just not the person he was any more. Maybe he’s sick. He thought carefully as he listened to the Scottish men. Just as likely it’s me that’s sick. It’s me that can’t stand the pace. The major is probably as committed as he ever was and it’s me that’s changed my mind. Every soldier has his ups and downs, don’t they? Every soldier. Maybe Scullion’s just going through a bad patch in his personal life, like he said, and it’s nothing more, except in your own head, Luke.

  ‘Iraq? He fought in Iraq?’ asked Mark.

  ‘Obviously. He was a big man in Basra. Is that when you joined up?’

  ‘Aye. In 2003.’

  ‘Right. Well: Scullion. Jesus fuck. He would lift a bazooka to swat a fly.’