‘Afternoon, Charlie. Sleep well, did you?’
‘You know I didn’t, sir. I was in your bloody cell all night.’
His cheeks and nose were red. If it wasn’t sunburn he was back on the juice. He said, ‘Worked though, didn’t it, old son?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You just called me sir, and didn’t even notice it. You’re a quick learner, Charlie – always knew you were.’ He had an old leather-covered swagger stick which he touched to his cap peak before he moved on. ‘Bye for now.’
And he was off again: just li’ that, as the great man would have said. I hated the bastard, but I just couldn’t seem to get away from him.
We had to drive up to the army den for supper – it was the closest I’d come yet to my working office. Spam fritters and chips: I still look on that sort of thing as men’s food. Lashings of good old HP sauce. That’s one company and brand they can’t sell off to Johnny Foreigner, can they? We wouldn’t stand for Houses of Parliament brand brown sauce being made abroad, and imported.
‘Spam again?’ I asked Pat.
‘Every meal. Get used to it, Charlie, you’re gonna eat Spam in every guise God can think of, and then some more.’
‘Spaghetti Spamalese?’
‘Thursdays.’
‘Is there anything that’s good about this goddamned island?’
‘It’s very cheap. The only thing to spend your money on is beer – and that’s very cheap. You’ll get by on a fiver a week and still save money while you’re ’ere.’
‘Girls?’
He shook his head. ‘Probably not. The nice ones are gen’rally spoken for.’
I pushed my plate away, leaving half a fritter for the cook’s dog.
‘Your Captain Collins told me about these EOKA people . . . Ethniki something . . .’
‘Yeah.’
‘What do the words mean?’
‘National Organization of Cypriot Fighters . . . although they don’t do all that much fighting. Their idea of fighting is stabbing British women while they’re out for the Saturday shop.’
‘He told me that. How many terrorists are there?’
‘Someone told me about eight hundred and fifty – maybe a thousand.’
‘And us?’
‘I never thought about it.’ So he took a thoughtful swig of his beer. ‘Ten thousand at least. Maybe twenty.’
‘So EOKA’s way of fighting us has a certain logic.’
‘Christ, Charlie – you only been here a day! You going native already?’
‘No, Pat. I just want to know what I’m up against, that’s all. This feels like Suez all over again, doesn’t it?’
He looked across the canteen. The thousand-mile stare that goes back years.
‘I liked Suez, you know that? Plenty of opportunity. A lotta grift goin’ on. The coppers have got this place sewn up tight – I have to be careful.’
‘Do you still run your own bank?’
‘Nah, I sold it to David Yassine – remember him?’ I nodded. ‘The Wogs bought him out: made it legit. They call it the Ismailia Banking Group these days, an’ all their government ministers go there for preferential rates. I was pleased when I heard that – he’d never become a proper banker. It was bound to end in tears.’ I smiled. I had good memories of Yassine, and his club – the Blue Kettle – and his dancing girls. I hid there once, dressed up as a woman, to avoid the MPs, but that’s another story.
‘Am I going to work tomorrow, Pat?’
‘Yeah. I’ll pick you up at your hut at 0700, OK?’ I nodded again. ‘Breakfast, then you goes on duty at 0800.’
‘OK. Look, I met an old pal on the plane over, and agreed to look them up in their hotel in Famagusta.’
‘Tony’s place?’
‘That’s what they said.’
‘You like nice surprises, Charlie?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘We’ll take a run in after five, when we’ve finished. Should be OK.’
Chapter Nine
Spontaneous Reproduction
Don’t even bloody ask.
Fried Spam, but at least they made their own bread and fried it, and the army was always pretty damned good at training bakers. In the middle of breakfast there was a pistol shot inside the canteen, and we all hit the floor. Some silly bastard had swaggered in with his gun still around his waist: not only that, he’d left the safety on the pistol off, and had then clouted it with the chair back as he turned to argue with a neighbour. The bullet went through his thigh and calf without touching a bone. It took ten minutes to restore order, and another five to find a medic.
‘I love the smell of gun smoke,’ Pat told me.
‘Even at breakfast?’
‘Particularly at breakfast. At least the silly bastards aren’t shooting at each other yet – that happened last month.’
I’d said it before: I was going to love Cyprus, wasn’t I?
As Pat dropped me off he asked, ‘This them you’re gonna meet at Tony’s: a he or a she?’
‘Just a them, Pat.’
‘Girl then. Hope she’s pretty. See you later, alligator.’
In the 1950s the British military had a thing about building large square buildings with very small windows. These evolved into even larger square buildings with no windows at all. Then someone cottoned on to the idea that if you were in a building that had no windows you might as well bury it beneath the ground. The excuse they gave at the time was to make them impervious to nuclear attack, but it was really just an inability to deviate from an evolving design pathway: another way of saying lack of imagination.
They hadn’t buried all of the communications block. Yet. Maybe they should have done. It was the ugliest thing I’d seen in years: windowless reinforced concrete, with a skin of local brick – a sort of architecture to make your average dead pharaoh feel at home.
What I hadn’t expected once I was through the blast-proof door, and past the small security and admin office on one side – and
