To Fight For (2 page)

I never really thought about those days. But it seemed to me now that I was still doing the same thing; going around in circles, never getting anywhere. My head was going round and round while men I knew and men I didn't know were circling me, and all the while I was going back and forth in time.

Yes, I was going round in circles, and the circles were getting smaller.

I thought about all that as I stood there, like an idiot, lost in an unknown, known landscape.

Then I saw them.

They stood at the far end of the playing field, where I'd been a few minutes before. They weren't doing anything much, just waiting there, talking, looking at anything but me. And that made my gut turn. Two men standing at the edge of a playing field, not doing anything. That was trouble.

If they wanted to take me out, they must've needed to get close to do it. In that case, they'd wait until I'd crossed the playing field and then follow me over. They'd want to kill me in a less exposed place.

I wasn't tooled up. That was dumb. I was dumb. The Makarov should've been glued to my hand.

I started to walk. I knew they'd be following me. I scanned the distance for cover. There was an old oak tree, thick around the trunk. I could use that to screen my movements for a while, maybe run when it was between us. But as soon as I was out of sight, they'd run too.

There was the fog, of course. There was always the fog, far off and always getting further. I walked towards it, and tasted the cordite again. My foot caught in the mud and the ground turned up at right angles and slammed into me.

I tried to stand, but the world was out of control, sliding around my head. I fell again.

When I finally managed to stand there was a weight in my arms. I looked down at the SLR I was cradling, the body clean except for some mud on the magazine. A hundred years before, my platoon sergeant would've bollocked me for that, but now he was covered in as much mud as the rest of us.

I felt the weight of my bergen, pulling me down into the wet ground. I felt the straps biting into my shoulders.

Around me, men of my platoon were fanned out, some of them wanting to get to the kill, most of them cold and tired and sick of it all. I might've been one of them or I might've been one of the mugs who wanted to get to the fight. I don't know. I can't remember that far back.

I heard the sound of heavy calibre automatic fire, like a hundred drummers beating the same drum. I heard the odd crack of far-off thunder that wasn't thunder at all. I heard the order to fix bayonets, and fumbled with my rifle. I saw the bulk of the mountain, looming, dark. I heard the thwump of a nearby mortar.

Then I saw the fog again, the white lines, the mud, my empty hands.

When my heart left my throat and the sweat turned cold, I looked behind me. There was no one there, and I thought, What's real?

I made it to the corner store. I don't know how. I can't remember.

I bought Browne's paper from the young bloke behind the counter. He looked at me like I was robbing the place.

I saw the car when I came out. It was on my side of the street, facing away from me. It pulled away from the kerb as I passed. I reckoned they'd come up slowly behind me, put a few rounds in my back and drive off. I waited for the sound of a door opening, a window rolling down, something like that. I was trying to think what I should do. I couldn't fight. I couldn't hide. And I couldn't outrun a bullet. So I just walked and listened and waited to die.

Nothing happened.

I kept on walking and the car moved with me. When I got back to the playing field, the car slowed and two doors opened.

Browne was waiting for me in the hallway. He had his jacket on, and his shoes. He'd tucked his shirt in.

He stood back, looked me up and down.

‘What happened to you?' he said.

I saw that I was covered in mud. I didn't know how that had happened. I glanced up the street, saw the car park. I closed the door.

‘I fell,' I said.

‘Fell? How?'

‘It doesn't matter.'

‘Did you trip? Or lose your balance?'

‘It doesn't matter.'

‘Of course it matters.'

He was doing his old lady act again, fussing about everything.

‘Why does it matter?'

‘Well …'

He ran his hand through his messy grey hair, making it messier. He knew I was right; it didn't matter.

‘It's getting worse, isn't it?'

‘Pack it in.'

‘Was it another flashback?' he said. ‘I mean—'

‘There are men outside.'

That stopped him.

‘Men?'

‘Yeah.'

He looked at me like I was going barmy right there and then.

‘Men,' he said again. ‘Outside.'

He must've had a bit of booze because it was taking him a long time to cotton on.

‘In a car. Watching us.'

Now he was getting it. He glanced around the hall as if he was expecting them to come out of the wallpaper. His mouth opened and closed.

‘Well,' he said, finally, ‘what men?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Dunham's men? Police?'

‘I don't know.'

There was something else he wanted to say. I waited, but he just stood there, staring at the mud on my clothes, a look of sadness creeping into his eyes. Then he took his jacket off and hung it up and padded back to the living room. He mumbled something, but I didn't catch it.

When I went in there, he was watching the TV. He'd made a glass of Scotch appear out of thin air. It was a neat trick. I slumped down on the sofa. He was watching a programme about ants in Borneo or something. Finally he turned to me.

‘Are we in danger?' he said.

‘If they'd wanted to get us, they would've done.'

He thought about that.

‘What are they waiting for?' he said.

I'd wondered the same thing.

Browne didn't say anything for a while. We both sat and watched the ants. They were going round in circles, or so it seemed. The day was cold and dull. You could feel the coldness seeping through the window. You could feel the dullness in the air. Anyway, I could.

After a year of that, Browne turned to me.

‘Tea?' he said.

That was his solution to everything.

‘Okay.'

He went and I shut my eyes and lay back and tried to figure out what the fuck I was doing, tried to remember why I was doing it and where that mud had come from.

I might've passed out. I might've slept. I didn't know. It was getting harder to tell the difference. I saw her, next to me, smiling, her head angled to one side, in the way it used to be when she watched me and didn't think I knew – at least, I think it was her. I couldn't make out her face, and that scared me. More than anything else, that scared me. Maybe it was because I had no photographs of Brenda, nothing to hold in front of me when I had bad moments, nothing to look at and say, ‘Yes, that was her.' There'd been photos, but they were gone now. I had a film of her, of course, but I wouldn't watch that.

So, her face faded more and more, getting murkier. It was like everything else these days – turning to mud and fog. I got glimpses of it sometimes, in parts; her smile, her bright eyes, her smooth, dark skin. And sometimes, if I was lucky, I'd remember something. And sometimes, if I was unlucky, I'd remember something.

There was this one time I liked to try and remember. She'd made us a picnic. It was a warm day, clear, bright, blue.

We'd gone to a small park somewhere. We sat on the grass and ate the lunch and drank the wine and did all the things couples did when they were together and alone and away from life. So, we lay together and stared up at forever, me on my back, Brenda sideways, her head on my chest, her hand on my stomach.

But when I tried to remember that day, Brenda's face blurred and clouded over, and it became something I could only see out of the edge of my eye when I looked away from it.

Sometimes I wasn't sure if that had been real or just a dream.

I opened my eyes. The light was dull, the TV was off and Browne was there, in his seat, the glass of Scotch tight in his hand. I looked around for the tea. I couldn't see any.

‘You were dreaming,' he said. ‘Of faraway things.'

Faraway things. Yeah.

He reached for the TV remote control and flicked the box on. I wondered how long he'd been sitting there, waiting for me to come round. I suppose he must've thought I wouldn't ever open my eyes again. Still, that hadn't stopped him drinking.

‘You were saying her name,' he said.

‘Her name?' I said, knowing I'd been speaking Brenda's name, screaming it, probably. ‘Whose name?'

‘You know whose. Your woman's. Brenda's.'

‘Uh-huh.'

He took a gulp of his drink and pretended to be fascinated by some programme about earthquakes.

‘Do you go back there, Joe?'

This was something he did now and then, this interrogation, like he was some kind of brain doctor, like he was going to sit there, drunk and disappointed by his own failures and work everything out for me: where I was going wrong, what I should do, that sort of thing.

‘Go back?'

‘When you have your flashbacks. Like today.'

‘Today?'

He went to take another gulp of Scotch and found that the glass was empty. He frowned, then lifted the bottle and tipped it up. A dribble came out. He frowned some more and glared at me, as if it was my fault he'd finished his booze.

He said, ‘Hm.'

He stood slowly and staggered out of the room. When he came back, he had a fresh bottle of booze. He made a big thing of cracking the seal in front of me.

He said, ‘Hm,' again and fell back into his seat.

He filled his glass, put the bottle onto the floor, leaned back and lifted the glass. And stopped it short of his mouth, peering at me over the rim.

I could feel a lecture coming on. I didn't have the strength to do anything about it.

Before the lecture, though, he decided to drink his Scotch. He said, ‘Ahh,' and put the glass on the floor by his foot.

‘You know,' he said now, ‘when you first came here a few weeks back, I thought you were a goner. You had that .32 round in your shoulder and there wasn't enough blood in you to fill a thimble.'

‘I remember,' I said.

Well, mostly I remembered.

‘Why did you come here? To me?'

‘Nowhere else to go.'

‘You could've gone to a hospital.'

‘You know what I mean.'

‘Yes. You mean there was nobody else you could trust to fix you, to help you.'

I hadn't thought of it like that, but he was right. There was nobody else.

‘Yeah.'

‘You can't carry on like this.'

‘You told me that.'

He had told me, hadn't he? It sounded familiar, anyway. Now his face was red and shining.

‘Christ, you make me bloody mad, man. You're killing yourself. And for what? Revenge, rage, fury, the only bloody things that seem to keep you alive. It's ironic, you're killing yourself to stay alive.'

‘You're drunk,' I said.

His eyes flashed for a moment.

‘Bastard,' he said.

Then, as quickly as it had come, his anger went and he sank into himself.

‘Drunk,' he said to his Scotch. ‘I should bloody well hope so.'

He looked up at me and his eyes were swimming and I realized he'd had a gallon more booze than I'd thought. I was killing myself with fury, sure, and he was killing himself in sympathy.

‘So I'm drunk,' he said to me. ‘So what? And besides, what's it to you, anyway? And besides
that
, your observation is less than keen considering I try to be as drunk as possible for as long as possible as often as possible. It's quite an art, you know. Quite an art. I would suggest you try it but I think it would kill more of your brain cells than you can afford to lose. And besides … uh …'

He creased his forehead and scratched his ear. Then he lifted his shoulder and dropped it and reached over for his glass. He'd used that stuff on me before, about the art of boozing, all that. But he'd forgotten. It'd been a long time before.

Everything was back, nothing forward, except ruin and death. My life was there in the past, hanging on a nail in Brenda's flat, right where I'd left it. I should go look for it someday. Maybe that's what I was doing. Maybe that's all I'd ever done.

We were in a pub, me and Brenda. The weather was warm, that thick warmth you get in the evening of a hot day when the air is soaked through with sweat and fumes and nobody can breathe too much, though they're all gasping.

This was the day after we'd been up the West End and looked in all those fancy shop windows. This was the day after I'd bought her the box of soaps and creams and stuff. It was a week before she died, before Paget sliced her face off. She knew she was in trouble. She knew she was using me. She was cut up inside. When Paget killed her, he was just finishing the job she'd already started. She never said anything to me about it all. I suppose I never asked the right questions.

We'd been in her flat before the pub, and she'd started drinking early, chain smoking. The cigarette smoke made my eyes sore, made my head hurt, but I didn't tell her that. She had something on her mind and I just let her get on with it. I knew later that she was scared. I knew later that her fear was the only reason she was with me; because she'd thought I could protect her. Well, there might've been other reasons, but that was why she'd come on to me the first time.

‘Let's go to a pub,' she said through the smoke. ‘I know one.'

At the time I thought she just wanted to get away from the small space of her flat. I suppose that ‘I know one' should've tipped me off.

She was wearing a cotton dress. It was the one I'd bought for her. It had flowers on it. It stuck to her flat stomach, the middle of her back. She'd worn it before, too – that day we spent walking down Bond Street and Regent Street, looking at all the pricey gear the toffs bought, diamond rings, two-grand handbags, that kind of thing. That was the day she was happy, for a while. That was the day before the day before the next, when she had to make the film.