Aggressor Page 5

  He put his arm around his wife. I sat back in my chair, not sure what to say to avoid adding to the wreckage.

  ‘Don’t worry about it, lad, you weren’t to know. We kept it to ourselves pretty much. Didn’t want GMTV round, filming us going through the family album.’

  Hazel looked up and gave a brave smile. She’d probably got over the worst of it during the last ten years, but it must have been a nightmare.

  Silky drifted in, breaking the moment, smelling of soap and shampoo. She’d put on a pair of pale blue cotton trousers and a white vest, and her wet hair was combed back.

  There was an awkward silence. Hazel busied herself pouring another glass of juice. ‘I bet you feel a lot better for that.’

  ‘The shower or the singing?’ Silky smiled as she came and sat beside me. Whatever she was about to say next was drowned out by the blare of a car horn.

  Hazel looked relieved. ‘Julie.’

  Seconds later, a flurry of feet and young voices bomb-burst into the house, shouts and shrieks echoing off the wooden floors. The door flew open and four boys with sticky-up crew cuts and untanned skin ran into the room. The older two, about eight and seven, came up to me and thrust out their hands. ‘You’re Nick, aren’t you?’ They had strong accents. Their two little brothers ran back outside.

  I bent down and shook. ‘And this is Silky.’

  ‘That’s a funny name.’

  ‘You pronounce it Silk-a really. Nick calls me Silky because he’s not very good with complicated words.’

  Silky loved kids. Her older sister kept sending pictures of her twin seven-year-old boys to Silky’s PO box in Sydney. Every time we stopped in anywhere for more than a few days she got her mail forwarded and I would have to sit and listen to Karl and Rudolf’s latest adventures.

  ‘Where are you from, Silky? You talk funny!’

  ‘Funnier than Nick? I come from Germany. It’s a long way away.’

  Julie and her husband Alan came in with Charlie, the two younger kids hanging off his leg. We made the right noises as we shook. Alan’s hands were big and rough. He was a bushman to his marrow, and wasn’t particularly fussed up about the visitors.

  Charlie took charge. ‘Right! I’d better get that barbecue lit, hadn’t I? Who’s coming to help me?’

  It was obviously the standard call to arms. All the kids jumped up and down with delight and charged outside.

  3

  Two hours later, everybody was stuffed full of chicken, steak, prawns and Toohey’s. Silky sat with Julie and Hazel on the settee; conversation flowed like they’d known each other all their lives. Alan sorted out a DVD for the kids, who were flaked out on cushions on the floor. He threw it in and, maybe sensing Charlie and I could do with some private time, sat down to watch it with them.

  ‘Why don’t you jump any more?’

  Charlie was standing with me by the jug of coffee on the sideboard. We weren’t ready for it yet; we were both still on cans. ‘Wasn’t fair to Hazel. Her nerves were bad enough as it was.’

  Silky joined us with three empty cups. She nodded at the gallery as she poured. ‘Charlie, you were in the army?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You haven’t changed, have you? Look at you!’

  Charlie smiled at the picture of his son. ‘I’ve put on a few wrinkles since then – and lost a bit of hair.’

  I shot a glance at Hazel. She was smiling at Charlie for being so kind. Silky poured their coffees and went back to the other two, completely oblivious.

  Charlie held up his can to me in a toast. ‘The good old days.’ We touched tins and he took a swig. ‘What about Silky? Any plans?’

  ‘Nah, I’m just letting her sleep with me till I find somebody better.’

  He frowned at my bad joke. ‘You’re a knobber then. She seems a really good girl. Make the best of it while you can, lad.’ He looked at the sofa then back at me. ‘So, you want to come and watch the sun go down, or what?’

  He couldn’t have made it more obvious he had something he wanted to talk about if he’d tried. He lifted two new cans and I followed him out onto the veranda.

  He leaned on the rail. A couple of hundred metres away, a group of horses kicked up dust in the paddock.

  Charlie sat on a bench and motioned me to a swing seat opposite. Whatever was on his mind, he didn’t seem ready to talk about it yet. My eyes followed his to the horse grazing on its own in a corner.

  ‘You know what, Charlie? You were the one that I picked. I never told you that, did I?’

  The training major always gave just one piece of advice to the newly badged troopers. ‘When you get to your squadron, shut up, look and listen. Then pick one man you think is the ideal SAS soldier. Don’t let him know you’ve picked him, but watch and learn. There will be times on operations when you don’t know how to act or react. That’s when you ask yourself what your man would do.’

  Charlie had started out as the one I picked, but he very quickly became even more important to me than that. In my mind, I awarded him the highest accolade one soldier could ever give another. I could honestly say that I would have followed him anywhere.

  He took another swig and rested his can on the rail. ‘I know, lad. I used to see you watching me. You learn much?’

  ‘I think I did. In fact I thought about you on the last day of that Waco job. Do I deck the bloke or not? I know I made the right decision.’

  ‘I’m not sure everybody at Waco did.’ Charlie turned his head to look at me. ‘Remember that young lad from DERA, the gas man? He killed himself a year later.’

  I hadn’t heard. I’d left the Regiment by then. ‘His name was Anthony. He was all right.’

  He sat back in his chair. ‘Good men, fucked over by the system. It’s nothing new.’ He picked up his beer with a trembling hand, as if the emotion of the moment was getting the better of him. ‘You know, I fell for it when I was a lad. I really did believe all that shite about Queen and country. We were the good guys, they were the bad guys. It took me thirty-seven years playing soldiers to realize what a load of old bollocks it was. Maybe you got there sooner? That why you got out?’

  Charlie wouldn’t know what I’d done after I left, and he would never ask. He knew that if I wanted him to know, I’d tell him.

  ‘Sort of.’

  He looked back at the solitary horse in the corner of the field. ‘Did you know I was in the troop when my boy was on foot patrol in Derry?’

  I nodded. A couple of guys had had sons in the green army, and all of them had been operating over the water at the same time.

  He gave a little self-mocking laugh. ‘I used to kid myself that every PIRA guy we dropped meant one less who could take a pop at my boy. Kind of felt I was looking out for him. But we weren’t doing the job full throttle, were we? We were only dropping the ASUs [active service units] that Thatcher and Major thought would hold up the peace process.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘We were actually protecting Adams and McGuinness so they could have secret talks with our “We do not deal with terrorists” governments. Seemed there were good baddies and bad baddies, something I hadn’t really thought of before.’

  I shrugged. No-one had ever officially admitted it, but we had all known what was going on. Eliminate the ones who were objecting to any sort of progress, then hope the rest were going to fall in behind our guys, Adams and McGuinness. ‘Maybe it worked. We’ve got a sort of peace.’

  ‘Whatever. Only thing that mattered was, all the time I was running around working was time I didn’t have to sit and worry about Steven.’

  He gazed at the horse, lost for a moment in a world of his own. ‘And afterwards . . . after he was killed . . . I didn’t care how they did it, just so long as they kept me busy.’

  I lifted the can. ‘Must have been grim, mate.’ I hesitated. ‘I’ve kind of been there myself . . .’ I tailed off again, because I wasn’t sure what I was going to say next. In any case, Charlie was giving me that slightly challenging look you see in the eyes of the ber
eaved when people say, ‘I know exactly how you must be feeling,’ and they have no fucking idea. I shrugged. ‘She wasn’t my own, but fuck, it felt like she was. If it had hurt any more, I couldn’t have taken it.’

  Charlie shifted in his seat. ‘Who was she? Stepdaughter?’

  ‘Kev Brown’s kid – he was in Eight Troop, remember?’

  Charlie tried to, but couldn’t.

  ‘He and Marsha had made me guardian in their will.’

  ‘Oh yeah, I heard about that. Shit, I had no idea it was you who’d stepped in.’ His voice dropped. ‘So what happened to her?’

  ‘She got killed two years ago in London.’ I stared down at the can. ‘She was fifteen. I took her back home to the States and buried her, then, well, I buried myself, a bit like you.’

  Charlie nodded slowly. ‘Then you just wake up one day and wonder what the fuck it’s all about . . .’

  ‘Something like that. I always used to pretend I didn’t give a fuck, but, well, you know, I loved her. Losing her fucked me up big-time. Next thing I knew, I was sitting at the wheel of a combi with long hair and a wrist full of these things.’ I jiggled the friendship bracelets.

  Charlie smiled. ‘I guess everybody deals with it the best way they can. Know what Julie bought me for Christmas? Slippers. Fucking slippers! Ever since Steven died, that’s how she and her mother want things to be. They want to live in a bubble. Everything nice and fluffy, and Steven’s a happy face in a photograph. That’s what this place is all about. It’s Hazel’s own self-contained eco-climate, like a fucking Eden Project for happier times.’

  He took another swig of beer and looked me square in the eye. ‘Coming here was the worst thing I could have done, lad. Far too much time on my hands. People look at me and think I have a slice of paradise, but it’s driving me fucking mad. If you keep moving, keep doing, there’s no time left to think. But now I spend half the day thinking about him. It’s that same old feeling I had over the water, that I should have been there, should have been looking after him. I know there was nothing I could have done, but that doesn’t stop you thinking it, does it?’

  He gave me a rueful smile as he nodded over towards the paddock. ‘You see that one in the corner, the bay? He was a stallion once. In his prime he covered three or four mares a day, and spent the rest of the time kicking down stable doors. He doesn’t get to use his gear at all these days. Too knackered. Only difference between him and me is that instead of eating grass and shitting all day, I’m pruning the fucking gum trees and watching the sun set. You know the best thing I could do for him?’ His jaw tightened. ‘Put a fucking gun to his head and put him out of his misery.’

  I chanced a smile. ‘Or buy him slippers, mate.’

  ‘Yeah, or buy him slippers. But some guys do it for themselves, don’t they? Guys like Anthony. I used to think they were copping out, taking the coward’s way, but I’m not so sure any more. Maybe they’re the smart ones.’

  I didn’t know where he was going with this, and I didn’t get the chance to find out. Julie pushed the door open and hurried from the house, a child’s hand gripped in each of hers. She had a horrified look on her face, completely at odds with the bright tone in her voice. ‘That was a silly film – come on, let’s go. It’s bedtime anyway.’ Something not very good had happened inside, and she was trying to make light of it. She shepherded them down the steps just as her mother appeared in the doorway. Hazel looked distraught.

  Charlie got up and took a couple of steps towards her, then jerked his head at me to go and check.

  I pulled open the screen door and went in. Silky and Alan were standing in front of the television. This was no kids’ DVD; the screen was filled with jerky, urgent images. I heard screams and the rattle of automatic gunfire.

  Silky turned to me. ‘It’s near Russia somewhere. A siege. They’re shooting children.’

  The picture cut to soldiers trying to make entry into a big square concrete office block. The rolling captions announced that terrorists were holding an estimated three hundred people hostage. The town of Kazbegi was in the north of Georgia, on the border with Russia. Many of the hostages were thought to be women and children.

  I watched as a small group of soldiers fired their AKs wildly into the windows and others tried to make entry with sledgehammers.

  The camera shifted to an armoured vehicle ramming into a door. Screams filled the TV’s speakers.

  Women and children tumbled out of the building, only to be caught in vicious crossfire. Black smoke billowed through broken glass. Elsewhere, I could see panic-stricken faces pressed against the panes.

  Soldiers gesticulated wildly to get them to stand aside, but it wasn’t happening. They were frozen to the spot.

  The picture cut again to a reporter hiding behind an armoured vehicle, her pretty dark eyes wide as saucers as she extracted and processed information from the chaos. All around her, what looked like half the army was popping up and firing pistols and assault rifles. I was watching a gangfuck, Georgian style.

  As two attack helicopters rattled overhead, she shouted into her microphone, in an Eastern European accent with an American twang, that the building was a regional government office; a census was being conducted and that was why there were so many people inside. The attack was thought to be an Islamist militant group protesting against the Caspian pipeline. Fuck knows how CNN had got someone there so quick, but they had. The breaking news caption now put the death toll at thirty.

  Silky held her hands to her face. ‘Oh my God, those poor kids!’

  A soldier ran across the screen. Cradled in his arms was the limp body of a child, his clothing charred and smouldering.

  There was an explosion inside the building. The camera shuddered as a rapid flash hit the windows on the first floor. Glass blew out, then smoke billowed from the holes.

  I could hear a series of shouted orders, but the chaos continued. Usual story; more chiefs than Indians.

  A couple of soldiers who had successfully made entry jumped back out of a ground-floor window, one of them with flames dancing on his uniform.

  The camera zoomed in on a fleet of ambulances coming down a road, some civilian, some military. The two helicopters still rattled overhead.

  Two blood-covered women dashed from the building, gathering up whatever dazed and bloodied children they could as they ran.

  There was another prolonged and totally indiscriminate exchange of gunfire as the camera zoomed in on two kids jumping from a first-floor window to escape the flames.

  Hazel hit the remote and the TV died. ‘Enough. Not in my house.’

  4

  I sat next to Silky on the veranda as the sun came up, listening to last night’s events being endlessly dissected on the radio as I cut orange after orange for her to put through the juicer. Getting the Tindalls breakfast seemed the least we could do to repay their hospitality, and I hoped it might help put a spring in their step. The atmosphere had been pretty subdued after Hazel switched off the TV. We’d helped clear up in near silence, then gone to bed. Hazel hadn’t been at all happy about the way the real world had come in uninvited, and Charlie had been tense, preoccupied.

  ‘Hear that?’ Silky whispered. ‘They now estimate about sixty dead and a hundred and sixty injured.’ She poured another few oranges’ worth of juice into a jug. ‘That’s over half the people who were in the building. It’s terrible.’

  ‘It’s not so bad, you know, as sieges go.’ In the corner of the paddock, the old bay was treating himself to an early-morning dust bath. ‘You have to work on the basis that they’re all dead from the beginning anyway. Even a single survivor is a bonus in a situation like that.’

  She stopped squeezing and straightened up. ‘I keep thinking about that poor child. The one who’d been burned. Did you see the soldier holding him?’

  I cut another couple of oranges and passed them across. It seemed to be taking an awful lot of fruit to produce not very much juice. ‘The place was probably rigged wi
th explosives. We saw one lot go off. I’m surprised there aren’t many more dead.’

  ‘But all those soldiers looked out of control. They didn’t know what they were doing.’

  ‘You know, if twenty per cent or fewer get dropped it’s a success. What those soldiers were doing was reacting to what was happening, whether it was the correct thing to do or not.’

  ‘Dropped? What is dropped? Killed? For a panel-beater, you seem to know an awful lot about these things . . .’

  ‘Don’t you box-heads read Time magazine?’

  Silky pulled a face before going back to her task. ‘You certainly don’t. The only magazines you read have parachutes on the cover.’

  I was still laughing when Hazel appeared in the doorway in her dressing gown. Her hair was a mess and her eyes were red and shiny.

  Silky jumped to her feet. ‘Hazel, are you all right?’

  Atear rolled down her cheek. ‘He’s gone.’

  ‘Gone?’ I said. ‘What are you on about?’

  ‘He’s not here.’

  A lot of thoughts raced through my mind in the next split second, and all at a thousand miles an hour. Charlie had withdrawn into his shell after the news broadcasts. ‘That stuff really seemed to get to Hazel,’ I’d said. ‘She’s been like that ever since Steven died,’ he’d replied. ‘She wants to shut out the real world, keep us all from being hurt like that again. That’s what this place is all about.’

  He’d been very morose all evening, come to think of it, but I’d put that down to the Toohey’s; it had been looking more and more like he had a drink problem. And all that stuff about shooting horses . . . fuck, he wouldn’t have taken it into his head to drive off into the night and top himself, would he? He wouldn’t have been the first.

  Silky wiped her hands on her jeans and wrapped her arms around Hazel. ‘Charlie has gone somewhere? Would you like some coffee, or maybe some tea?’

  I glanced across at the parking area at the side of the house. The Land Cruiser was missing. ‘Maybe he’s gone to fetch some croissants.’ I gave her my biggest smile. ‘I noticed a little bakery about a thousand miles back.’