(2005) Rat Run (4 page)

Not expected to talk, only to listen, he occasionally nodded and tried to be attentive. He knew her life story because the same mixture of anecdote and memory was served up each fortnight, but he never showed signs of boredom or irritation at the repetition. He would be there for two hours. She had a small carriage clock with a tinkling chime - a present from her nephew, Tony - and at four o'clock on the first and third Thursday in the month the knock would come on the wall, and at six o'clock, without ceremony, and always the refusal that he should wash up the cups, saucers and plates, when the hour was struck, he would be told that it was time for her to dress to go out to bingo. He was then dismissed.

He knew she was seventy-four. She had been

widowed twelve years back after thirty-nine years of marriage. Her husband, Phil, had left no money and she survived on the state's meagre generosity. Her elder brother, Graham, and her sister-in-law, Hettie, were dead. Her only living relative was her nephew, Graham and Hettie's son, Tony - something

important in the police', and she'd snort.

He thought she must spend the first three hours of each day scrubbing, cleaning, dusting her one-bedroomed flat. It was spotless. If a crumb from a sandwich fell from his mouth, Malachy was always careful, immediately, to pick it off his trousers so that it should not fall to the carpet.

Her first married home, when she was a school-dinner lady, had been in a terrace that had been demolished to make way for the Amersham. She, Phil and the budgerigar had moved into the first block to be completed thirty-two years ago. After his death she had been transferred to block nine, level three, flat fourteen. However bad it became, she said each fortnight, she was not leaving the Amersham. She had stayed on, refusing to cut and run, while all her friends and long-time neighbours had either died or left.

The nephew, Tony - and she did a good imitation of the whip of his voice - had alternately nagged and pleaded with her to quit, even to come and live with his family. She had refused . . . She liked to tell that story. Tony had paid for the grille gate: three hundred pounds, even though the fire people at the council had warned that a locked grille gate made a potential death-trap for the elderly. She was staying on.

To entertain Malachy to tea, and he reckoned it one of the reasons he was asked on those two Thursdays a month, she wore every item of jewellery she

possessed. Her fingers were ablaze with rings, her wrists with bracelets, her throat with chains and a Christian cross, and he thought that if she had been able to plug into the lobes more than a single pair of earrings she would have. He assumed they were kept in a box under her bed for just these occasions. She would not have worn them outside because she was street-wise. She had told him: she never took money with her that she did not need to spend when she went to the outdoor market stalls. She only went to the bingo on a Thursday night with Dawn, from flat fifteen. She read the weekly paper, and sometimes over tea with Malachy she would recite the reporting on the most violent crime on the Amersham. He had been listening again to the story of the last coach outing of the Pensioners' Association to Brighton, four months ago, when she changed her tack abruptly:

'You want to know what Tony says you are?'

'I don't think it's important/ He shrugged but he could feel the cold at his back and his hand shook. The last tepid tea slopped on to his lap.

'Tony says you're a loser. He's cruel, Tony is. What Tony says is that you're a loser, Malachy, and a failure.'

'I expect in his job he has to make evaluations -

probably the right judgement most of the time,'

Malachy said quietly, simply He had not spoken to Tony, the nephew, since the first day. He had kept his distance, had stayed behind his locked door.

'What happened in your life to bring you down here? Must have been something awful. You don't belong with us. Something awful, worse, an earthquake.' She seemed to struggle for the words, and the abrasive independence that was her hallmark

wavered. 'Tony says you're a waste of space and I'm not to spend time with you . . . Was it something I couldn't understand, like a catastrophe?'

He said, 'It's nobody's business but mine. I . . . '

The clock chimed. He did not wait for the final stroke of six. He was up, out of his chair, and scurrying for the door. He didn't thank her for the tea or the sandwiches. He thought he would be dissected with Dawn that evening at the bingo - and when the next knock came on the common wall, on a Thursday, he would ignore it. He closed her front door behind him, fastened the gate and ran next door to his own refuge.

With the lock turned, the chain across and the bolt up, he sat on the floor and the darkness blanketed him. He did not know that, outside on the walkways and in the alleys, shadows gathered and searched for the price of a wrap of brown to feed a needle.

'I can't come, Millie. I got the flu, pain where I didn't know pain was. I'm sorry.'

Dawn was tall, would once have been beautiful. She had the ebony skin of wet coal, was from Nigeria, and cleaned Whitehall offices. Perhaps her generosity was used, or perhaps Mildred Johnson truly regarded her as a friend - but never as an equal. Her one son was in the merchant marine, a deck-hand for a Panamanian-registered company, and he never came home. Dawn minded her neighbour, and was occasionally thanked for it.

She was in her dressing gown. 'I tell you, just to come from my bed, get myself to the door and your door, that was agony. I mean it.'

They went to the Tenants' Association evenings and on the Pensioners' Association outings and sat beside each other at the Senior Citizens' Christmas Lunch.

They were together on shopping trips and at the East Street stall market. She was with Millie on one Sunday a month when they went on the bus to the cemetery where Phil's ashes were buried. Together, once a week at the Cypriot cafe, they splashed out on pie and chips and milky tea. Dawn was always there if Millie was ill and cared for her. She had been told that everything in the box under Millie's bed was left in the will to her, not the nephew's stuck-up woman. She saw annoyance spread on the slight face below her own.

'Well, that's it, then.'

Dawn croaked, 'I'm sorry, Millie, but I'm really sick.

I'm going back to bed. I can't help it.'

'I didn't say you could.'

'Get the man, him ...' Dawn gestured feebly to the next door on the level three walkway. 'Get him to walk you - or don't go.'

The door was closed on her, and the grille gate. She staggered back into flat fifteen, slumped back on to her bed and the pains surged.

12 January 2004

The sign on the lightweight door said: knock - then
Wait to be admitted. But every room in Battalion
Headquarters was part of the fiefdom of Fergal. As adjutant
he had free run. He pushed open the door. There was no
electricity from the main supply that day because 'bad guys'

had dropped a pylon, and the stand-by generators were
barely able to match HQ's requirements. No air-conditioning was permitted and the wall of heat hit him.

Inside, he could detect the scent used sparingly by the
sergeant, pretty little plump Cherie, and, stronger, the body
smell of the new man.

'Morning, Cherie - and morning to you, Mal. How's
things in Spooksville?' Fergal had a drawl to his voice,
knew it made him sound as if he was perpetually taking the
piss - and didn't care, because an adjutant cared damn all
for anything other than the welfare of his colonel, codeword
Sunray. 'Not too bombarded, I hope, with this GFH's
problems. Sorry, Mai, I was forgetting you were new with
us - GFH, God Forsaken Hole.'

He leered at the sergeant. In the officers' mess, there was
a sweepstake on when she would first get herself shagged; it
was held by a lieutenant who ran the battalion's transport
and he'd decreed that her probably outsize knickers, as a
minimum, would be required as proof- the prize now stood
at thirty-nine pounds sterling. The way she looked, with the
glow on her cheeks and the sweat stains on her tunic blouse,
Fergal didn't think it would be long before there was a
claimant... A girl always looked good with a damn great
Browning 9mm hanging in a holster on her hips. But his
business was with the captain, her companion, who was not
that new - had been with them for four months.

'Yes, Mai, Sunray would like you up at Bravo.'

'If you didn't know it, I've actually a fair bit to be getting
on with right here.'

'Are you not hearing me too well?' He heard Cherie's
snigger. 'I said that Sunray wanted you up at Bravo. It's
not for discussion, it's what he'd like.'

The battalion in which Fergal was adjutant recruited
other ranks from the tenements of Glasgow and the housing
estates of Cumbernauld. The fathers or uncles of many had
served two decades earlier. The officers, those with good
prospects of advancement, came from the landed estates of
the west Highlands. They were a family, a brotherhood. The
feeling of being part of a clan, with a regimental history of
skirmishes, bloody defences, heroic advances and battles,
stretched back for three centuries. Their museum was
packed with trophies from the campaigns of Marlborough,
the epic of Waterloo, colonial garrisoning, the foothills
between Jalalabad and Peshawar on the North West
Frontier, the kops of South Africa, the fields of
Passchendaele and the hedgerows of Normandy, then
Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, the Aden Protectorate, and endless dreary little towns in Northern Ireland. Soon, when the
booty had been crated up, museum space would have to be
found for souvenirs of the Iraqi desert. The battalion had
heritage and tradition, and its family strength recognized
the danger of allowing strangers to infiltrate its ranks.

Outsiders were not wanted.

'If you're not too busy, Mal...' the sneer was rich in
Fergal's voice '.. . Sunray would like you up at Bravo
tomorrow.'

Alongside the battalion's headquarters building,
separated by its sandbag blast walls and its coils of razor
wire, was the Portakabin occupied by the Intelligence Corps
personnel assigned to them - the sergeant, Cherie, and the
captain, Mai, as he was called in the mess. Put bluntly, and
it was Fergal's right as adjutant to be direct, the Intelligence
Corps captain was a cuckoo. He didn't fit, was not part of
the family or a member of the brotherhood. The battalion
had its own intelligence officer, Rory, a good man. They did
not need the stranger, who knew nothing of the history,
tradition, heritage that would see them through - if God
was kind - the six-month posting to Iraq. The man didn't
mix well, didn't share their culture.

'We've a resupply convoy going up at oh-six hundred
hours local tomorrow. You can go with them. What have
you got on your plate at the moment?'

The answer was crisply put, as if the captain, Mal,
accepted the unconcealed hostility shown to an intruder.

There was a rattle of information on pipeline sabotage,
clusters of incidents where the crude-oil supply from the
wells was disrupted on routes through the battalion's area
of responsibility, profiles of suspected 'bad guys', and the
man never looked up from his screen as he spoke.

'What does that add up to?'

'That we don't have the resources to guard the pipes, that
they can be blown up virtually at will, that the oil supply is
persistently vulnerable, that we're charging around and
getting nowhere. I have to have more time because I haven't
yet sorted a pattern of attacks - who's doing it? Identities,
safe-houses. Whether they're Iraqis or from over the Iran
border, I don't know ... That's what's on my plate. My
opinion, at the moment, we're wasting our time.'

Two nights before, in Sunray's office, the same statement
had been made, and not appreciated. After the captain, Mai,
had gone, Sunray had told his adjutant, 'I won't have that
defeatist crap. Christ, I'm under enough pressure from
Brigade on these damn pipes ... I want answers from him,
not just excuses for ignorance. Aren't answers what we
have the right to expect from the Intelligence Corps? If he
can't do better then perhaps we should get him doing something useful, away from that wretched little screen. Work
on it, Fergal.' He had: something useful was at Bravo
Company, eighty miles up the road, and Sunray had
concurred. What the battalion could do without, when
Brigade was breathing hard on them, was to be told they
were wasting their time. It was probably true, but it
shouldn't have been said by an interloper.

'Up at Bravo, an elder was murdered, drive-by shooting.'

'I know.'

'He was a good friend of ours and—'

'Shot because he was a good friend. We like to peddle this
hearts-and-minds stuff, delude ourselves the majority love
us and are grateful for liberation, that the opposition is only
a minority and mostly from over the border. He was killed
because of his association with us - that's a death sentence.'

Icily : 'If you don't mind allowing me to finish, Mal. ..

Thank you. We're going to show the flag up there, have an
arrest sweep. We have to react. You're a local-language
speaker so you'll do the initial screening and interrogation,
see who should be passed down the line.'