September came and Alice was allowed to take some time off again: she’d used up most of her last year’s holiday looking after her gran and hadn’t been away in ages. Joseph planned a week in Scotland with her for the end of the month, and Alice booked a train up to Yorkshire first, to see her mum, spend a bit of time with her out on the Dales, at her step-dad’s place. Joseph was due to finish off a job for Stan, so he wouldn’t be able to join them this time. He had some free days, but they were in the middle of the week, and he thought he’d spend them working at David’s.
He took Alice to the station. The idea was to drop her off at King’s Cross and drive on to work, but when they got there he decided to look for a meter, said he wanted to come in with her.
– Won’t you be late, Joe?
– Doesn’t matter. We might get a space by the arches if we’re lucky.
They had to park a couple of streets away from the station in the end, and they were cutting it fine for her train by then, so Joseph took Alice’s rucksack because it meant they could go a bit faster. He’d wanted to make it a proper goodbye, but the half-jog up the platform made it all a bit hectic. And then the train was packed, and it was hard to say anything to each other with all the people trying to shove onto the carriage past them, both out of breath and sweating. Alice smiled down at him from inside the door.
– I’ll give you a ring later, yeah?
– Yeah. Take care of yourself.
– You too.
She pushed the window open further, so she could reach an arm out and touch his face.
– Don’t spend all your days off at my Grandad’s, will you?
Joseph walked along the platform, watching her through the windows, as she found her seat and lifted her bag onto the rack above. This time next week, he’d be getting on the same train and she would be meeting him off it at York: the plan was to have some lunch with her mum and step-dad before getting another train further north. He stayed on the platform, by her window, but Alice had a paper with her, and started leafing through it after she’d sat down, so Joseph thought she might not look out again. He felt a bit stupid then, waiting for someone who didn’t know he was there. But when the train started moving, Alice raised her head. Saw him, and then lifted a hand to wave to him, surprised. Looked almost shy, pleased to see him still there, and then Joseph was glad he’d stayed.
There was no answer when he rang the bell, so Joseph went to the garage and got changed before he let himself into the house. It was cool and quiet in the front room and strange to be alone in there, so he put the radio on and set to work quickly, rolling up the rug and standing it in the porch, ready to take out to the garage for safekeeping later. Laying out the dustsheets, he noticed for the first time the dark, worn wood on the arms of the old man’s chair, and the red and green light falling on the carpet through the coloured glass panels in the tops of the windows.
– Joseph? Is that you, Joseph?
The voice was upstairs, muffled by distance, and it took him a couple of seconds to adjust: not alone. He turned down the radio.
– Yeah. Only me. I rang the bell earlier. I thought you weren’t in.
No reply. Joseph wasn’t sure what to do, and why the old man hadn’t answered the door. He went out into the hallway, listened a moment and then called:
– I’ll be making a start down here then.
But he stayed where he was, looking up the stairs to the empty landing.
– No. Come up, Joseph. Would you come up, please?
The old man’s voice sounded further away than upstairs, and it didn’t seem right to Joseph somehow. Halfway up to the landing, he saw the trapdoor to the attic was open, the old wooden ladder pulled down and sagging on its hinges. He thought, Jesus. And then: fucking stupid. Took the rest of the stairs two at a time, thinking David must have climbed into the loft and fallen, but when Joseph started up the ladder, the old man was above him, stooping over the hole in the gloom.
– I haven’t been up here for years.
He was smiling.
– Found a few things to show you.
One of the bulbs had gone, but the other still cast its forty-watt glow at the far end by the water tank. Joseph moved slowly away from the square light of the trapdoor, careful where he put his feet, waiting for his eyes to adjust. Lagged pipes and loft insulation, trunks and crates and cardboard boxes. In the middle was David, watching him, nodding.
– We can see well enough, can’t we?
He pointed at the dead bulb.
– Didn’t want to risk another journey down and up that ladder again to get a spare from the kitchen. Isobel’s knitting patterns.
He gestured to a box next to Joseph’s leg, stuffed with magazines, their pages swollen with damp.
A trunk was open next to them, clothes, summer dresses, pastels and florals for a middle-aged woman. David lifted one of them out, held it up.
– I’d forgotten all of this.
The dress hung from his fingers but he was still smiling, and Joseph had to look away, down at the square of daylight next to him in the floor, and the landing below.
– Sorry. I didn’t call you up for this. Thought you might be interested in my old service things.
The old man was making his way over to the water tank, head ducking the roof beams, one arm out to steady himself. He sat down on a trunk and pulled a small box up onto his knees. Joseph followed, hunched and careful, squatting down next to him under the dim bulb.
– I was looking for pictures of Isobel to show Alice. Found these. Our squadron.
Men in uniform on wet tarmac. Maybe a hundred or so: five or six rows of them in front of an aeroplane, the propellers on either side marking the edges of the frame. The men were arranged behind one another in tiers, the heads of the top row level with the wing.
He passed the picture over and Joseph tried but they all looked the same. Front row on chairs, hands on knees, the men behind them standing, arms by their sides. All stiff backs and cheerful faces.
– Fourth row down. Third from left.
David prompted, but he didn’t seem offended. And then Joseph thought the face did look like him: long with a thin mouth smiling, but then so did the man next to him. All with their caps on.
– That was Norfolk. This was Kenya.
The old man had a pile of small, white-framed snapshots in his hand. Passed them over to Joseph one by one, explaining the views of forest and cloud taken from his cockpit, mountains rising at the end of a wingtip.
– Those are the Aberdares. I have one of Mount Kenya too.
Snow-capped, with another plane flying ahead: sun glare on the metal, propellers blurred. And the last one was of the forest canopy, far below, taken through the bomb bay doors, Joseph could just see the edges of them, hanging open. He handed the small pile back to David, who looked through them again, quickly, nodding as he slipped them one behind the other.
– I was a cadet, while the war was still going on. It was what I looked forward to, all through the school day. Morse code and aircraft recognition in the church hall weekday evenings. I could recite names and wing spans, used to cycle over to the airfield at Northolt, halfway across London, to name them as they came in. Hurricanes and Spitfires. I’d check the wind direction, try to guess which way the pilot would land. They had a Polish squadron there, as I remember, with the highest Allied scores in the Battle of Britain. Wished it hadn’t ended, the war. What a terrible thing to wish for.
He laughed and then glanced at Joseph, as if to make sure he was still there, still listening. The old man put the photos back in the box on his knees, told Joseph he’d been looking through his service papers when he heard the radio downstairs. David held a couple of letters out, which Joseph took from him, but he didn’t read the typed pages because the old man was still talking. Telling him that he’d been called up, everyone was then, but he’d never have got an interesting job as a national serviceman, so he enlisted immediately.
– I’d have been out in under two years otherwise, and I already knew that wasn’t long enough to learn anything. I was suggested for air crew, which pleased my father no end, I remember. Plus the fact that my training took me out to Rhodesia. It was something to be proud of then, a son in the Empire Training Scheme.
The old man took the letters back, didn’t seem to mind or notice that Joseph hadn’t read them, and he flicked through the remaining papers in the box while he was talking, but didn’t take anything else out to show him.
– I remember looking it up before I left. I knew where Rhodesia was, of course, we were taught things like that at school back then. It was a habit I’d picked up as a boy, I listened to the radio in the evenings with my parents, followed the fighting on my father’s atlas. The war made everything seem closer. I thought I had a picture in here, a postcard I bought in Salisbury.
David frowned and shut the box, glanced around the floor at his feet.
– I learned to fly Tiger Moths and Harvards out there. I’d only just finished my training. And then came Kenya and Isobel.
He looked at Joseph, blinking, and Joseph wasn’t sure if he was meant to say something. The old man was jumping around in time, getting hard to follow. They sat quiet a minute or so and Joseph could feel the air moving in from under the eaves. There was a slit of sunlight and garden away to his left, and he could hear a passing car, birds in the garden. His ankles and knees were stiff from squatting.
– I’ve been going on, haven’t I?
– No.
– I have.
– I don’t mind.
David smiled, like he didn’t believe him. Started searching in another box resting on the beam between them.
– I found a picture of Alice to show you.
Somewhere. It hadn’t felt like a lie when Joseph said he didn’t mind, but it was strange, squatting up here, between a bin liner of tablecloths and some empty suitcases, listening to another man’s life. The old man sat up again:
– Here. Six, I think. Or seven. With her first glasses.
Joseph was glad to see Alice’s face, and smiled at the small eyes, looking tired through the lenses, her uneven parting. He knew she wore contacts now, but he’d never thought she’d been a speccy girl.
– Her school reports are here too, old exercise books. Funny. Tent and things she put here last time she moved.
David pointed over towards the trapdoor, at two fruit crates, packed with books and papers. Joseph was tempted, but knew he couldn’t really ask to look through them. Underneath the picture in his hand was another girl, but the photo was older.
– That’s her mother, Sarah Margaret. Around the same age, perhaps a little younger.
David nodded at his daughter’s picture.
– Peggy, little Peg, they called her. Her grandparents, up in Scotland. Not Isobel. I remember she told me: I don’t call her that. Meaning, please don’t call her that either.
Joseph went down first and then held the ladder steady. David came down slowly, switching the light off once he had his feet firmly planted on one of the upper rungs. When he was back on the landing, Joseph asked if he shouldn’t close over the trapdoor for him.
– No, no. Leave it, leave it. Plenty up there to keep an old man occupied.
Pork pie, salad, boiled potatoes. David had made lunch when Joseph arrived the next day: jar of pickle and a pot of tea waiting at one end of the table with its cosy on.
– I tend to make the things that she did. This is a Tuesday meal.
The old man smiled, and Joseph sat down where the plate had been laid for him. He’d been at Stan’s in the morning, sorting out an order for their next job, and bought a sandwich from the garage on his way over, still in his bag.
– Much better than what I’d have got myself. Thanks.
They ate together, talking about Joseph and Alice’s trip to Scotland, and where they planned to go. They’d be spending most of their time on the Fife coast, around the East Neuk villages, where Alice’s gran grew up, and David knew the area well, from visits to his in-laws, taking Sarah up to see her grandparents in the summer holidays. He said there was plenty of good walking and driving they could do, and he rummaged some maps out of a drawer in the sideboard to show Joseph.
– Take them with you. I should have given them to
Alice last week, don’t know why I didn’t think of it.
They were OS, but very old, and worn at the folds. Joseph had already bought a new one, at the station after he saw Alice off, but he didn’t refuse. Followed the coastal paths that David pointed out with his little finger, the roads might have changed a bit, but he could remember the routes to tell Alice about later.
The dining table was at the far end of the room that Joseph had been working on, pushed closer to the French windows than usual, and a bit crowded by the armchairs and the piano, which Joseph had moved down there, out of his way. The other half was covered in sheets, walls exposed up to the dado rail, strips of paper scraped off above it too. Joseph had thought he’d get it all done yesterday, but the time spent talking in the attic had taken a chunk out of the morning. Hadn’t planned to come today originally. He was meant to see Arthur, have a game of snooker, only Ben was sick and Eve was working all day, so they said they’d have a drink later in the week instead. Joseph thought he could make use of the afternoon, catch up on the work here, and when he’d called David to say he was on his way over, the old man had told him he was going out after lunch so he’d have the place to himself. David didn’t look in any hurry to get moving, though: folding up the maps for Joseph, saying he envied him a week up there, and that he had wonderful memories of that stretch of coast.
– Going through all those old photos yesterday. Made me remember how much I enjoyed being in Africa. Rhodesia especially, but Kenya too. Isobel didn’t. It was all soured by her first marriage, I think. Or had been by the time I met her.
His lunch finished, knife and fork tidy, the old man was looking out through the windows at his back garden, both hands resting in front of him on the table.
– Funny. I didn’t think she was attractive at first, not really. I was getting better by that time, less tired, but there wasn’t much I could do until I was fully recovered. This young woman became a diversion, I suppose.
Joseph put down his fork because it was hard to eat when the old man wasn’t. David wasn’t looking at him, but it still felt rude, chewing while he was meant to be listening. The old man said he used to watch Isobel leaving for work from his seat on the veranda, remembered her wide hat and gloves, her round shoulders. The Sumners’ granddaughter stayed at the house for a weekend and Isobel taught her easy pieces on the baby grand in the drawing room. She spoke to the girl as they played and, from where David sat, he could hear Isobel’s accent, but not what she said. When she wasn’t working, she’d take the Sumners’ car into town, and would come back around lunchtime with a pile of library books tucked under her arm.
– Once at breakfast, I asked whether I might take the car to the library with her. I told her it was deadly boring, being a convalescent. And I thought, rightly as it turned out, if I asked her in public, she wouldn’t be able to refuse. I presumed I would need to make conversation, but once we were in the car she was rather candid.
David was smiling. About himself, it looked like: taken aback by the woman he went on to marry.
– While we were driving, she told me her husband had fallen in love with someone else. I suppose you’ve heard. She said it was an occupational hazard out there. Or maybe just a hobby. That’s how she put it. Told me other people didn’t seem to mind so much.
Joseph watched the old man talking and thought: he should be telling Alice all this, not me. Her grandad’s eyes were still on the garden, and he was laughing at himself.
– I couldn’t look at her after she’d finished speaking. I remember all the houses passing outside the car window and I could name the mimosa and bougainvillea growing in the gardens, but I didn’t know how to continue the conversation. It was the cynicism, I think. And Isobel knew she’d shocked me. We didn’t speak much in the library, or on the way back to the house. She wasn’t at breakfast in the morning, but she came and found me later when I was downstairs, reading. Said she’d told me things I didn’t need to know and she was sorry. That surprised me too: I didn’t think she had to apologise.
Joseph could see the unfinished walls from where he was sitting. He couldn’t quite make out the clock, the light from the window was reflecting on the dial, and he didn’t want to crane his head round, be that obvious, but the afternoon was getting on. He was half-interested in what David had to say, but only half. The pictures and papers up in the attic had been more like it: Joseph didn’t know what had gone on in Kenya, thought he wouldn’t mind hearing about it. He liked the old guy, but most of this was just too personal. Remembering his dead wife. Saying how their library trips became regular and longer, and they would go and drink Italian coffee in one of the city centre tearooms afterwards, or walk through the park to stretch out their time away from the house.
– We met in public mostly, so our conversations had to stay reasonably formal. Isobel told me she’d had fun there, in Kenya, the first few months, while she was still working. Most of the girls she’d applied with in Scotland had gone to Salisbury, but she’d made new friends quickly in Nairobi. There were always nights out being organised, and clubs to get involved in, but that all stopped after she got married, gave up nursing. Life was very different, not at all what she’d expected. Sounded very dull, actually, the way she described it, for the wives at least. Endless coffee mornings and nothing to talk about except each other. It might have been different if they’d had children. Isobel used to give music lessons, private classes, for something to do as much as anything. She told me she was supposed to decide to stay with her husband. It’s what both families wanted, and I believe he was willing. But I’m afraid that’s not likely. I remember the tone of voice exactly. Resolved. I admired her for it, she had to face a great deal of disapproval, but Isobel didn’t think the place was any good, Nairobi. The expat existence. She told me people would be watching us, of course. Speculating over their sheet music in our absence. Pink gins and loose tongues, that’s what she said. They would have started long ago, and there was nothing we could do to stop them now.
The old man broke off for a moment, and it looked to Joseph as though he’d lost his place.
– It did bother me, if I’m honest. I’m sure our romance was tame by Happy Valley standards, but I was very aware of being a guest, for one thing. Not causing a scandal for the Sumners. I’d started to feel the curiosity, at those cocktail evenings. All eyes on us if we were there at the same time, hoping for a sensation. But she was beautiful to me by then, Isobel. I remember her in the park especially, under the flame trees, and the very British bandstand. In her white hat, with the wide brim. When we passed out of the shade, the holes in the weave let through bright spots of light. Like so many pin pricks of sun scattered across her cheeks.
The old man’s fingers shifted across the tabletop, a small movement, involuntary, caught up in the memory, Joseph didn’t think he was aware of it. David looked down at his teacup: undrunk, cold, he stirred it. He didn’t speak again, his eyes unclouding, back in the room. Joseph thought it was probably over now, but he’d wait until the old man moved. They’d clear the table soon and then he could get on. Another couple of minutes sitting with him now wouldn’t make much difference.
– Is he being alright to you, my Grandad?
– Made me lunch today.
– Did he?
Joseph could hear Alice smiling on the phone. She was having a fine time up at her mum’s: they’d been away, the two of them, walking on Swaledale, staying up at the old farm. She told Joseph about it when he called. Just in from her grandad’s and he was a bit tired, didn’t listen to it all properly, just liked hearing her talk for a while. About a ridgeway she drove past on the way back to York, and how they should go there when it got warmer again, camping in the spring, maybe, if he had some time off then. Joseph sat on the edge of the bed and rolled a cigarette, receiver jammed in against his shoulder. He wanted to tease Alice about the school photo her grandad had shown him, specs and messy hair, see if he could make her laugh. But he thought about it a bit too long and then couldn’t. She might want to know how he’d got to see it, the picture. Sitting up in the attic with David felt a bit difficult to explain down the phone, so he left it. Told her about the maps instead.
– Oh, I’d like to see those. My Gran would have used them too. Will you bring them with you?
– Yeah, course.
After she hung up, Joseph didn’t know why he couldn’t tell her. Your Grandad was looking at old photos, showed me a couple. But it was hard to feel that casual about it. He could see David sitting on the trunk in his neatly tied shoes. Polished leather, patterned with holes, narrow laces, well-kept soles. His trouser legs pulled up by his knees, the section of pale skin above the dark sock showing underneath, hairless and thin. Joseph knew he wouldn’t be able to tell Alice about today either. Lunch and maps, yes, but not what David told him after. The old man never asked him to keep it to himself, but Joseph thought he didn’t have to: it was all private, about his wife, that was obvious enough, and he’d tell Alice himself if he wanted her to know. It even annoyed Joseph a bit then. Being let in on someone’s secrets. When you haven’t been asked.
He thought about the old man and his tropical trees. All the schoolboy stuff David had told him yesterday too: deserts and mountains, bird’s-eye, pilot’s-eye views of snows and oceans, evenings by the radio with his dad’s atlas open on his knees. His small head must have been full of it, Joseph thought. But maybe the old man was aware of that too. Hard to say with him and the way he spoke about things, sometimes. When he said his dad was proud of him going to Rhodesia, or how he enjoyed being in Africa, it felt to Joseph like he was careful, choosing his words. Passing comment, or at least waiting to see if Joseph was going to. His son-in-law would, maybe. Alice too, in her way. Joseph remembered her out on the patio that evening, blinking about the barefoot servants. He thought her grandad must have noticed: Alan would smile about that. The old man acknowledged it himself, so she could keep quiet.
So maybe David was testing things out on him, but Joseph didn’t know why. When they were in the attic, Joseph had thought David was waiting for him to ask. Questions about the air force, maybe. Or tell him something about when he was in the army, even. Join in the conversation, swapping tales of Osnabrück and South Armagh for Norfolk and Nairobi. But it didn’t feel that way, not really. The old man talked, but always a bit like he was keeping his distance. Not expecting something in return in any case. And then this afternoon, it was all about Alice’s gran anyway, being in Nairobi with her, nothing to do with why he was out in Kenya in the first place. Joseph wasn’t even sure if David knew he’d been in the army, although it had occurred to him, up in the loft, that Alice might have told him.
But even if the old man didn’t know, or wasn’t waiting to be told, it was hard not to think about what it was like back then. Joseph couldn’t stop himself making the comparison. The whole evening alone at home, after he’d said goodbye to Alice and hung up the phone. Didn’t have photos to look at, but enough in his head, and the same thing kept coming back to him.
Contractor got killed. New RUC station being built and he was the plumber, meant to be going in to fit the toilets. Had a van load of cisterns, and they blew him up on his way there. IRA, INLA, one of them, some set of initials anyway, Joseph couldn’t remember. It was Republicans, and their bomb probably wasn’t meant to go off until the van was parked by the building.
Joseph’s patrol got there about ten minutes after it happened, had to wait for bomb disposal, seal off the area. Tyre shreds all over, van doors, coat sleeves and what was left inside them. Took a while to work out there had been two in the van. Turned out it was his son who was with the plumber. Didn’t usually work together, but he’d been on the dole a while and his dad was probably paying him a bit, or a favour for a favour. Joseph could remember laughing. About the body parts: too many of them. And about someone having to make a phone call to ask if the plumber had a mate. That and the toilets all over the road, had them all creased up, even the Corporal. The plastic balls that float, to make the water stop running. They were everywhere you looked: bright blue and yellow at the side of the road, in the hedgerows. Ballcocks. Someone said that’s what they’re called and then they were off again, pissing themselves over ballcocks and body parts. Townsend was puking. One of the other soldiers. Kneeling on the verge, bulking his breakfast up into the grass and laughing.
Joseph put up the new wallpaper at David’s on Thursday. The old man made him a cup of tea when he arrived, but went out soon after he’d brought it in to him. Put his head round the door to say goodbye and then didn’t come home until the room was finished, and Joseph was packing up in the garage.
– You’ve done a fine job.
– I put all the furniture back where I remembered.
– Yes. It all looks very good. Thank you.
It was drizzling a bit, so the old man stood just inside the garage doors, nodding while Joseph got his things together.
– I hope the weather’s kinder to you up in Scotland. Joseph smiled. He’d thought at first David might invite him into the house, but the old man was just saying goodbye. In his awkward way.
Joseph smiled. He’d thought at first David might invite him into the house, but the old man was just saying goodbye. In his awkward way.
– I’ll see what jobs I’ve got on when we get home, give you a ring. Get the rest done in a oner if I can.
Not in the mood for a cup of tea and a story. The old guy could see that. Probably why he spent the day out too: left Joseph to get on with it. All the stations were playing crap today, so he’d turned the radio off for a change. The old man’s garden backed onto empty playing fields, and there was a golf course at the end of the street. No through traffic, no buses or people on the road outside, and it all felt very still. Just the odd train passing, or a plane overhead, a few birds singing. Joseph didn’t stop for lunch, worked through the day and was glad of the quiet.
Over three years in the army and Joseph didn’t think he was ever, not ever, by himself. A fly wank in the bogs once in a while, or a sly fag maybe, but nothing else, not even alone at night to go to sleep. Six in a room over in Armagh. Not like any base he’d known before, more like a bunker. It had been the village police station once, before the army came, but Joseph only knew it covered in barbed wire and reinforced concrete. Thinking back, it was like the place had no windows: nothing that would leave them open to incoming mortars. Everything done together, washing, eating, working, cleaning, TV, pool table, bar. Knew each other’s smells and sounds better than their own. And all that talking: someone always mouthing off, always asking something, pissing themselves or whingeing all the bloody time. Joseph remembered walking corridors, trying hard to find a place where no one else was. Sat on the toilet and could hear the others cracking up about him, his slow bowels, but at least it was a small room just for him, for a while.
Always tired. Sixteen hours on, eight hours off and waking up all the time. Always too hot in his bunk, they kept the heating on constant, and Joseph woke at all hours, dry eyes and parched, tongue pasted to his teeth, like a hangover without the drinking. Learnt to sleep when you could. Was a relief when you were sent to get your head down, but you could kip anywhere after a while, anytime you were waiting. If your patrol was on standby, even on quick reaction, sitting there in all your kit at thirty seconds’ notice, just close your eyes and you’d be dreaming. Mad things, twenty different stories and all in the space of seconds. People talking, noises outside your head making their way in: awake and asleep mixing together. A phone ringing somewhere in another room and in your dream you’d be patrolling, walking down the road and into a house to answer it. But there’s no phone when you get there, just an Irish family in the front room watching telly, all getting up and heading for the door when they see you and your rifle. Only it’s not them heading for the door, it’s your patrol called out and moving, and so you’re up and running too, outside sometimes before you were awake again.
Drumshitehole was what the outgoing soldiers called it. A main square and five roads off it. Three took you north and east, into fields and hills, the other two ran south into bandit country and west to the border. Down three streets, turn the corner and you were back where you started, everything still just the way you left it. Phone box, post box, chip shop. Joseph could remember how they joked about it, saying the Provos had left the shitehole to them, all fucked off over to England:Warrington, Bournemouth and the NatWest Tower all bombed the same year Joseph was in Ireland. A small place and it was quiet for weeks on end. More Protestants there than Crossmaglen, and it was nothing like the mad, bad days of the seventies, but they shouldn’t be fooled, Jarvis said. Ops room full of photos, known operatives, suspects. Sometimes felt like half the town was up there on the walls, even girls and grannies: no one you didn’t need to be watching. B Company had ninety men to cover the place and the eighty square kilometres around it. A crossroads between the province and the republic.
– Smack bang in the IRA’s fucking back garden, and that’s not potatoes they’re planting.
Joseph’s Corporal again. He said the people spoke better down there, it wasn’t like Belfast barking, but Joseph still got to hate the voices. Wound him up, even years later, hearing them again on Streatham High Street, or London buses. Prods would look at you while they were talking, that was the theory, how you could tell the difference. Joseph never thought that worked: everyone spoke at the back of their throats, out of their noses. Like they were talking past a mouthful of something they wanted to gob at you.
One of the sangars, where they did their guard duty. Big fuck-off cage of a place, metal fortress on a bogstandard street full of houses. All black steel and razor wire. You froze your balls off in there in winter, a sweat box in the summer weather. Nothing to do, just waiting and watching and sod-all happening. Old guy in the house next door had a garden. Big lawn with trees in it, flowerbeds round the edges. He was a pensioner, Joseph thought, because he was always out there, never working. Trousers ironed into creases and grey hair combed sideways, but you could still see his bald patch because you were always looking down on him. His grass was the thing Joseph remembered. Great black sangar and the watchtower on the hill behind it, mad spikey poles in the sky of the transmitters and receivers. And then this garden, just next to all that, this lawn like a big patch of velvet. Snooker-table green and perfect. Old man with a paunch and grey moustache, raking it clear of moss, aerating it with a fork. Beautiful and soft, rain keeping it lush.
The Troubles had been going on for years already. Over twenty, plus the hundreds before, which the army told them about and Joseph had forgotten most of before he even got on the ferry. He could still remember he was one of 18,000 British soldiers in the province. An extra battalion deployed; early nineties and the Irish were busy killing and maiming each other. Semtex, Armalite, Red Hand Commando. Nationalist, Loyalist, Paramilitary. Words Joseph knew from the telly and the papers, and then he was over there, and in the middle of it all.
Only knew about the IRA before. Got sent to Ireland with a whole new bowl of alphabet soup to swallow: UFF, UDA, UVF, UUP. One of them was a political party, but he could never remember. Riots in the cities, the summer he arrived, and the police attacked by Loyalists, which Joseph didn’t understand at the time, because the RUC were Prods too, weren’t they? Though you weren’t supposed to say that.
Belfast was the only part you ever saw on the news: all burnt-out cars and huge murals on the gable ends, a long coil of razor wire they called a peace line and kerb stones painted sectarian colours. Red white and blue, green white and yellow. Or gold, they called it. Joseph never knew that Ireland would be beautiful. Days in Armagh when it didn’t rain and you could see the high mountains away to the south. The country below was riddled with fields and grey stone barns. Lanes only just wide enough for two cars, hedgerows growing high along the sides, like green tunnels, twisting as they pelted down them, gaps in the branches letting flashes of day across the windscreen. Joseph remembered the wet ground out there, shivering grass and sunshine on his skin. Held the backs of his hands up under his nose to get the best of it, breathing that warm smell of them in. The only colours were brown and green and blue, but the shades were better than any he’d seen. Loved it then, being out on Ops. No one ever had to beast or bully him into getting moving, the tabbing miles on end that he’d hated in training. More soldiers killed there than anywhere else, but there were days when Joseph forgot all that, or it didn’t seem to matter. Sleeping out and seeing the first light in the trees, hearing the sound of a stream before you got to it. Still days and sky, cold air, sparrowhawks flying. A few bright minutes by the lough: last white flare of sun on grey water before evening and the rain came on again. Feeling afterwards like his head had been cleaned out and his lungs been filled. Lying in his bunk and searching out the bruise on his arm where his rifle butt kept knocking; that great tired ache in his legs and shoulders; the strange calm that meant he was almost sleeping.
Joseph was there six months. Summer to winter. First part in Omagh, then down to the shitehole and all the Tullies and Ballies and Killies around it. That spring, a soldier from the outgoing company had been blown up at the border. Sniper near Forkhill got his fourth a few days after Joseph got there. Not someone he knew, from another company, but for days after he could feel it at the back of his neck, between his shoulders. Reminded of it anyway, every time he put his flak jacket on and his helmet. Not war but terror. Protection felt like an invitation over there: they were Green Army not special forces. Uniform target with a porcelain breastplate. Tail End Charlie, last man on patrol always walking backwards. A woman gave sweets to soldiers at Christmas: a two pound tin packed full of plastic explosive. They all pissed everywhere, against cars, trees, walls: like dogs, Joseph thought, marking out the province. On foot patrol, they found a body in the morning. Cold and just getting light, and there it was between the waste ground and the garages. Punishment beating, legs twisted under, lying among the dog shit and clumps of grass. Sometimes the whole place felt like that, all quiet and cruelty.