Bully (10 page)

Somehow, I reached a seating area, about twenty metres down the corridor. Mustering up all the grace I could, I lowered myself into one of the plastic chairs and wiped the sleeve of my pyjama top across my forehead. Montaffian soon caught up:

‘Fantastic, Gary,’ he breathed. ‘One, uh, small step for man, and all that…’

I looked up at him, caught that glittery look of approval in his eyes before he had a chance to extinguish it fully. And I suppose that in that moment, the little Yankee, saw me as some kind of hero.

But I knew that Montaffian also felt terribly, terribly sorry for me. He’d seen the way that I thrown myself into the physiotherapy and must have believed that I was somehow trying to make myself strong in order to fight again or something. He didn’t know about the hold that Newton Mills and Tommy now had over me. For like a small moon, Newton Mills affected the tides of my emotions. I
had
to make myself strong enough to get back there. I dreamed about the place on a nightly basis. I dreamed about what nightmares were taking place before I’d even had the chance to warn any of them that it was coming.

After a while, I began to see the missing foot as an inconvenience. I cursed my stupidity in allowing myself to give up as I had in the British hospital, simply allowing those rats to gnaw at it. Sometimes, in the dead of night, I did feel an itch where the toes once were. In my mind’s eye, I pictured the manky misshapen nail on my big toe; the one that had fallen off in my football boot once and had never grown back. Once, I’d been afraid to wear flip-flops as everyone else did when we were in mufti. I thought that the sight of my toenail would offend them. I’d now developed this kinda displaced attachment to that nail; I wished that I could see it again.

Now, when I steeled myself to look at my left foot, all I saw was a mess of candle-wax, almost like Tommy’s face. They’d taken new skin from my thigh – taken two great strips in fact – and had kinda melted it over the edge, where they’d cut away just past the knuckle where the toes are. I couldn’t imagine a woman ever even looking at my foot again, let alone giving me a foot-rub. Even I found it disgusting.

And it was getting in the way of my leaving. It was getting in the way of my return to Newton Mills. When the stern-faced military police returned, they noticed the change in me straight away. No longer was I the desperate
victim
that they’d interrogated earlier; now they could see the Kingsman that I’d once been. Some of my men were in danger, and I was prepared to do anything that I could to get back to them and lend a helping hand.

I’d not seen them for three, maybe four days since their last visit, when I’d clocked Tommy Lee Jones. But when Montaffian let them into my little room early that morning, I slap-bang knew straight away that something had changed in them as well as me. Chewing-Gum Breath was wearing a freshly-pressed white shirt for the occasion. When he entered, he neglected to take up his usual position, on the plastic chair, threateningly close to the bed. Instead, he lingered by the wall, like Tommy Lee had done before. Tommy Lee himself seemed chastened; far less overbearing. Even his pock-marks seemed less goddamn angry. It was as though they didn’t want to get close to me, somehow. I wondered what the hell they’d found out.

Evidently they didn’t want to tell me straight away. For a while, we all maintained this stubborn silence until Tommy Lee could bear it no longer and he cleared his throat. ‘Well, Bully,’ he began, ‘it looks like most of that cock and bull story you gave us checked out.’

They exchanged a mysterious look. Inside, I felt my heart leap, but I betrayed no outward sign of emotion. I hadn’t expected to get away with things this easily. Surely the intel I’d given them about Do-Nowt’s radio call hadn’t changed everything
this
much. Or was there something else at play? Something more powerful than even the damn military police?

‘The Brits have advised that they… They want us to let you go home,’ muttered Chewing-Gum Breath, staring resolutely at the floor.

‘No more questions asked,’ continued Tommy Lee. ‘How’s that sound?’

‘I thought you said there’d be no more questions,’ I snapped, keeping my hands under my head despite the ferocious gleam which appeared in Chewing-Gum Breath’s eyes. He wanted nothing more than to slam into my unguarded chest again. He wanted to shower me with punches. But something was holding him back.

‘Of course, we’ll be keeping your file open… should anything else crop up,’ said Tommy Lee, trying to placate Chewing-Gum Breath as much as giving me the required information.

‘Something
stinks
here,’ snarled chewing gum breath.

I resisted the temptation to inform him that it was he that was the one doing all the smelling in that room.

‘We know that, Chambers,’ said Tommy Lee. ‘
He
knows that. But for now, there’s nothing we can do. You heard the CO…’

‘Well, I’d like to thank you boys for coming visiting me so often,’ I said, grinning. ‘Without your friendly little chats, I’d have had nothing to look forward to in here.’

Chewing-Gum Breath, or Chambers as I now knew him to be called, gritted his teeth. Tommy Lee cracked his knuckles. But neither of them said anything.

‘I don’t want to keep you boys from anything important though,’ I continued. ‘If there’s some paperwork you can be doing or something, just go ahead and do it… sirs.’

‘I’ll wait for you outside,’ muttered Chambers, and then he exited the room. I
think
he tried to slam the door after him, but because of the air-locking system, all that happened was it gave this muffled sound, like a
whump.

Tommy Lee continued to stare at me a while. He made a big show of straightening his tie.

‘My colleague might be a little hot-headed,’ he said, softly. ‘But he’s a good soldier, despite what you may think. One of the very best. Don’t think that your string-pulling is some kind of victory over us. You got lucky, is all.’

I didn’t say anything. Continued to keep my hands clamped behind my head. After a while, I realised that this was what passed for an apology with those military police guys.

When it finally came to the time that I could leave the hospital, I wasn’t sorry to see the back of any of it, apart from old Montaffian. He’d fought my corner all the way. He’d come down to the hospital foyer, still clutching my clip-board, still looking overwhelmingly tired, still my one and only ally in the place.

‘The MPs won’t come a-knockin’ again,’ he said, presenting me with a new set of crutches that he pulled from behind the reception desk. ‘They’ve now officially listed you as a survivor of the explosion at the, uh, cock-up mansion. You’ll be entitled to a full military pension, Gary.’

‘I know, I know,’ soothed Montaffian. ‘That’s what’s called survivor’s guilt, what you’re, uh, feelin’ now. But you’ll get over it, son. And remember, them military police were only doing their jobs… Mind you, it was funny the way they backed off so quickly. They were like a dog with a bone with you at first.’

I tried to suppress a wince as I stepped forward.
Oh sure
, I thought,
they’d been like a dog with a bone at first, but something had called them off. Something had caused them to trot off back to their corner, whimpering like scared puppies… And that something was surely not the British army. That something probably looked very much like my old friend Tommy Peaker. Now he was a man that could make things happen.

Montaffian rested a hand on my shoulder. Looked into my eyes.

‘I hope you do eventually, uh, find what you are looking for. And I hope you, uh, find happiness in your life,’ he said. ‘Just don’t go looking for it in the wrong places, like the bottom of a bottle. I seen so many good guys like you go looking there after they’ve been signed out… Don’t let it happen to you.’

‘Don’t worry about me, doc,’ I sighed. ‘I’m ready.’

Montaffian nodded, straightened up again and then started flicking through some more papers on the clip-board.

‘We’ve got you on the supply plane which flies west to Egypt, and from Cairo, you’re on a commercial flight back to Manchester, UK.’

Part of me loved the way that he said Manchester, UK, as though I was going to get that Manchester confused with the one in America. Part of me bristled at the idea; twenty-five kilometres from Manchester, nestling in the foothills of the Peak District, was Newton Mills. And it was waiting for me to fall into its clutches again. Now I was really going back, I was starting to have second thoughts. I’d already lost a foot, for Christ’s sake.

‘Thanks, doc,’ I breathed.

His face brightened. ‘We’ll miss you, son. You’ve been an example to all of the other patients. We need more men like you out here. Men that are prepared to put their insecurities to one side.’

If only he knew, I thought. If only he knew.

Presently, Montaffian’s name was called over the Tannoy. And as he walked away from me, he became the grim-faced doctor that I’d first encountered again. Suddenly, he stopped being like my father and became just another white coat fading away into the gunmetal grey background.

While I waited in the hospital foyer for the taxi to the airstrip, I caught sight of my sad reflection in the glass double-doors. My eyes had heavy, dark saddlebags under them, just like Montaffian’s. They were watery-blue now, and had that faraway look in them that I always saw in the men that had been out in the desert for too long; too much time spent staring at the horizon. I’d also lost weight; quite a lot of it. My cheek bones, which had always been ‘sculpted’ or ‘angled’ as I’d once heard them described by some bird, were now too-prominent. And where once I’d been toned - the kinda guy that likes to wear tight tees just so that it looks like my muscles are going to break-on through the material like the Incredible Hulk – I was now more like a deflated balloon. But nobody would care about that any more. All they’d see was what was missing.

The taxi driver, when he finally arrived, gave me my first indication of what life would be like for me. He came right on through the double-doors and virtually carried me to his smelly Mercedes cab, talking to me as though I was mentally deficient all the way; as though he thought that I’d lost my brain as well as my foot. Before he allowed me in the cab, he put down plastic sheeting on the leather seats in the back.

‘Just in case,’ he said, winking.

I wanted to smash him in the face for his impudence. And why was he so proud of his fucking Merc?
Everybody
out here drove Mercs. They were like Peugeots in England. As I sat in the back and listened to him prattle on, I worked a hole into the back of his seat with my Swiss Army knife. As he talked about the hopes that he had for his son in this new country that the military were establishing on their behalf, I pulled some of the stuffing through the hole.

‘In this place,’ he said, ‘we have too much awareness of death. The young people lack ambition because of it.’

Yeah,
I thought,
and it was the height of your ambition to drive a fucking taxi, was it?
But I said nothing. Instead, I gazed dispassionately out of the window. I would not miss the place. Not because of the fighting and the pain and what had happened with Tommy, but simply because everything there was so undramatic. It was too sparse, over-cooked and limp. I wouldn’t dream of the place as I did the embattled majesty of Newton Mills.

When I was deposited at the airstrip, we had a minor argument about my lack of a tip, as though the driver expected that his waffle about the geography and history of the place was some kind of paid-for service.

‘I’ve spent enough time here to know all about the history and the geography,’ I said, slamming the door. ‘I didn’t need no tour guide on my way home either.’

On the first flight, I was so whacked out on sleeping pills that I hardly even noticed time pass. Groggily, I was helped off the plane by another returning soldier who couldn’t wait to tell me all about the ‘foxy young thing’ he was going back home to. In the end, to shut him up, I shared a few drinks with him in the departure lounge as we waited for our flights. It helped; the booze. It helped me come to terms with the naked stares of the Egyptians and the surreptitious glances from the English tourists. When one little boy came too close, I growled at him and he darted away, back to his mother in floods of tears.

The flight followed very much the same pattern. I was treated with an unholy mixture of concern, contempt and curiosity. Even the stewardesses were overly attentive with the contents of the bar, just so’s they could get a better look at my footless state. When one of them asked my name, I told her I was Captain Joe Jackson, in reference to the former baseball great, ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson; the doc’s hero, apparently. The poor woman didn’t seem to get my joke.

As I downed the Lilliputian measures of Vodka and the dolls house bottles of whisky, I felt my mind starting to unravel again. I felt that stabbing pain in my chest, just to remind me that Tommy was there. I hammered my finger on the stewardess call-button constantly. I fiddled with the air-conditioning, trying to somehow stop myself from breaking out in a cold sweat. I twisted and turned in my seat and muttered and moaned to myself like a town drunk. In the end, when I fell asleep, it must have been blessed relief for my fellow passengers.

I was woken up by the air stewardess’s shaking my shoulders. I still felt the old pain there where Tommy’s claws had sunk in.

‘Sir; are you all right?’ she asked. ‘You’ve been screaming in your sleep. You’re scaring the other passengers. Would you like to come up to the front of the plane and sit with us for a while?’

Meekly, I allowed myself to be led up to the part of the plane that was curtained-off, where I was doused in strong black coffee and spoken to in the soft, reassuring manner that one would choose to speak to a poorly infant. What they couldn’t stop me from doing, no matter how many itchy blankets they draped over my shoulders, was shivering. And when the captain’s voice crackled over the Tannoy, telling us that we would soon be descending into Manchester, these shivers only became worse. I was going home; unavoidably, unquestionably, I was going home.