‘We’ve enough for today, enough for tomorrow. We’re supposed, in this heat, to drink seven or eight litres a day each. If we have a litre and a half each, we’re lucky. It’s despicable to steal water.’
‘Shut your mouth, young ’un, before I shut it for you.’
He did so – but intended it to be temporary. He went into his bergen and brought out the bottle. He held it up and squinted at the level. It was about halfway down – he hadn’t marked it. There was no indent on the plastic where his thumbnail had gouged a line. Had it been spit on Foxy’s cheek? He reckoned not. His own throat was too dry for saliva, and he was dehydrated enough for there to be no sweat coming off him. If he’d tried to spit he would have scarred the skin in a parched mouth. Badger was sure. He pushed the bottle at Foxy, right up to his face. ‘You want to drink, help yourself.’
‘Don’t bloody play with me, young ’un.’
‘Go on, drink it all. Have yours and mine.’
‘Watch it.’
‘Finish this bottle and start the last. Swig your way through that too.’
‘You’re pushing me, young ’un.’
‘And when it’s all gone, we can fuck off out of it… if that’s what you want.’
The scrim netting that held together the head covering he wore was gripped. ‘You’re shit, young ’un. When this is over I’ll tell the world what shit you were here – tell all Gibbons’s crowd. Tell them everywhere I get to take a seminar. I’ll wreck you.’
Badger thought he was right, but the light had gone and he wouldn’t know. Apologise? No. Might he have been wrong? No – and there was no worse crime than taking rationed water… The security lights came on outside the house. The goon paced, and the children came out to kick a ball.
Foxy said, ‘My misfortune was to be teamed with a kiddie who was so ignorant, and had so little comprehension of the English language as to be at moron level. Know what “moron” is, young ’un, or is that too big a word for you?’
Again, he couldn’t help himself: Badger did the short-arm jab.
The head was twisted so the blow cracked into the right side of the headset. It fell apart.
Foxy said, ‘Not just a moron, but an ignorant one.’
The woman came out and Badger saw her through the glasses, a misted figure against the background lights. The children still played with the ball. She looked proud, he thought, and brave. She had dignity. He watched and admired her. She stood alone, leaned on her stick and didn’t speak to the goon. He wondered how it would be for her: a sea change in her life, when it hung in the balance, was in a medical man’s hands. He couldn’t say how it would be for her if the approach was made and her man was turned… and he couldn’t shift further from Foxy. It was as if he were anchored to the man.
Chapter 11
They had drunk water, two mouthfuls each, and it had been Foxy’s turn to finish the bottle. He had held it longingly to his mouth and sucked the final drops. One bottle remained. The silence wouldn’t last through the night.
The moon climbed. Foxy, Badger realised, was exhausted and close to breaking point. He couldn’t sleep. Not until the house lights were put out and conversations were stilled would Foxy pass over the headset and close his eyes. The anger each felt for the other was raw, of course. Badger was labelled a moron and ignorant, and Foxy was accused of being the cheat who stole water.
The light had gone; the moon was on the climb. The target, the Engineer, was out, smoked and walked, but he was alone.
There were birds in the water ahead, splashing, and Badger thought that once he heard the convulsion of a pig and wondered if the wound he had made in the nostril was infected.
He sensed Foxy would break the silence first, felt him to be increasingly restless. It was worse to be branded a cheat than to be called an idiot without education. Was he certain that the water level had been lower than it should have been? ‘Certain’: a big word. Foxy could not move from the hide and go into the reed bed to crap or piss. It was two full days since the new suitcase had gone inside the main door. It would not have been bought to be shoved into a corner but because travel was imminent. There would be – if fortune favoured them – one remark, half a sentence, or a throwaway comment.
He didn’t think Foxy could last much more than the night and another half-day, and didn’t reckon he himself had the strength to go on past the end of the following day… He hadn’t seen Foxy’s skin. He assumed it would be the same as his own, mottled with tick scabs and mosquito bites. Not possible to lie still because the itching was so great, and the flies came for their ears, noses and mouths, could burrow under the scrim net. Never again would Badger complain about a Welsh hillside: rain, a low mist, night frost, a view of a farmhouse with a field for campers would be paradise – if there ever was an again. He had twice punched a fellow officer, another croppie, and had allowed himself to be niggled by rank and personality. If it were ever revealed by his oppo that twice he had thrown punches, and had accused a colleague of cheating and stealing, there would not be an again.
The thought jagged his mind. What did a croppie do with himself after he was booted out for gross misconduct? For assault? For screwing up in the field and going unprofessional? He’d go to work for a local authority, tailing disability-benefit guys who did half-marathons and played golf twice a week after limping down to collect the hand-out dosh… He’d be on the phone, burning the ears of former policemen who ran PI firms and found evidence of marital infidelity, or did in-house security on companies that were leaking petty cash and equipment… He would have nowhere to go that was anything like satisfactory to him. Would he jack it in? He wouldn’t grovel. He’d lose his job before Foxy broke. There was a trace of a whine: ‘There was no call to hit me…’
Badger gave him nothing.
‘… and no call to make that accusation.’
Badger thought Foxy had broken because, having barely moved since the hide was made, he would not be able to get out and do the legging back to the extraction point.
‘I’ve tried to do a good job in extraordinarily difficult conditions and…’
Worth thinking about. The retreat from the hide – because the mission was fucked and the target had been driven away, or was complete because the information had been radioed out – was well worth consideration. A repetition in his mind of what he dreaded most: the car came, the new suitcase was loaded, and there might be a label on it they could not – with a ’scope or binoculars – read, and the Engineer and his wife, the goon, the wife’s mother and the kids didn’t say where they were going. To have done this for nothing would be the humiliation of his life, and he would stand accused of misconduct and professional failure because Foxy would nail him. Badger would make no apology, would not help in going to the extraction point in exchange for two punches being forgotten, and a cheating call being wiped off a slate.
‘… and I’ve had no co-operation from you, no support, no comradeship.’
Badger watched the Engineer. Could have been his fourth cigarette. He was still alone and walking, no longer in silhouette from the lights behind him, thrown from the house, but moving away from the little pier where the dinghy was tied. He passed an old iron crane that in daylight seemed rust-coated – it was beside the water and might have dated back to a time when the water was the main highway – and went on towards the duller lights that fringed the area round the barracks. He was heading for the bund line to the right.
‘Of course, I shouldn’t have expected more from you. Too easy for you newcomers. And “too easy” makes for arrogance, and arrogance makes a kid useless. What did I say you were?’
Badger raked the shore with the binoculars, which were good for watching the house, but had the night-sight ready for when the Engineer was walking towards the raised track of the bund line. He could have scripted the line that would follow.
It did. ‘I said you were moronic and ignorant. I had that right, double time.’
Hours of building resentment were over; a dike had been breached. Foxy had the verbal shits, Badger thought. He himself felt calmer and was not about to hit him again. It was likely that the water had been drunk out of hours.
‘Did I say without good cause that you’re moronic and ignorant? Are you fool enough to think that?’
