'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
