The men were just below him, coming around the corner in the armoured trucks, when the spotter shouted out to him. A small child – a little boy – running from the other end of the street. Everything froze, apart from the small running figure. Doug realised the boy looked bulky. He was wearing a jacket several sizes too big for him. And he was running straight towards the men. He was only about five years old. Hardly even a proper little boy yet, hardly older than a toddler. But immediately Doug was thinking: bomb. He knew what he had to do. He took aim through the viewfinder. Tracked the boy. His finger was on the trigger. He was ready. But he wanted to get a better visual. He couldn’t see any proper evidence of a device, other than that bulky jacket.
He had perhaps ten seconds. Then nine, then five, then three. The spotter was screaming at him, but it was as if he was underwater: his brain and body seemed to have slowed. He could not shoot.
And then everything exploded. The men. The trucks. Half the street. All in the same second that he finally managed to exert the required pressure on the trigger.
The therapist he saw told him that his reaction had been completely understandable – that the situation had been an impossible one. And yet this didn’t help him explain it to himself, or to the families of the dead men who visited him at night. This is why he does not sleep: because as long as he is awake, he does not have to see their faces, and answer to their silent interrogation. Though lately, they have begun arriving even in his waking hours. He sees them approaching in the middle of the landscape. So real that he swears he could reach out and touch them.
This is why he is lucky to have this job. In any other, he might not be able to hide it. Someone would notice that he was acting oddly, and report it, and that would be it. But here there is no one to notice. There’s Heather, in the office, but she gives him a wide berth. And perhaps she has some hiding of her own to do. Why else would a young, thirty-something, attractive woman come and live in a place like this on her own? He doesn’t ask her her reasons, and she in turn doesn’t ask him his. It’s an unspoken, mutual agreement.
He was lucky that the boss didn’t care about the other thing, even though he had to declare it on his application. ‘The boss,’ said the suit who interviewed him, ‘doesn’t mind about all that. He wants you to feel you have a clean slate here.’ A clean slate. If only.
He switches on the TV and immediately regrets it. All it shows, of course, are thousands of happy faces: families snug together on the bank of the Thames, eyes lit with red and gold flames as they watch the display. He wonders what Heather is doing, over in her cabin. He has seen her lights on, late at night. He knows she does not sleep well either.
He could go around, with the bottle of whisky, as he has thought of doing on more nights than he would care to admit. He recalls that night, when she opened her door to him – when she had heard the sound. He remembers everything about it, a picture clear in his mind: the flush of her cheeks, her dark hair mussed about her head, the giant pyjamas swamping her. She had invited him in – and then she had blushed, as she realised how it sounded. He had refused, of course. But he has imagined following her in. He has imagined a lot more too, in the lurid, sleepless small hours of the night, when he has glimpsed the light on in her cottage. He has imagined pushing her up against the wall, her wrapping her legs around his waist, how her mouth might taste on his … He will not go around there. Not tonight, not any night. Someone like him has a duty to stay away from someone like her. She does not deserve the catastrophe that he represents.
That sort of life is closed to him, now. He leans over, towards the fire. He raises a hand, and, with the dispassionate regard of a scientist, holds it in the flames, so that the skin sears like steak.
NOW
2nd January 2019
HEATHER
Doug stands in the doorway, frowning at me.
‘Come in, Doug,’ I say. ‘Close the door.’ He comes to stand in front of the desk, towering over me.
‘Doug,’ I say. ‘I shouldn’t have done this. But I have something to confess. I googled your name. I found out about the court case.’
He says nothing. His eyes are on the floor.
‘What happened?’ Explain it to me, I think. What you did. The violence. Make me understand. Although I’m not sure that he can. I can’t see how there can be any way he could explain it.
He takes a breath, and begins.
He had been in a bar in Glasgow, he says, with friends, about three months after returning home from his tour. ‘Tour of Afghanistan, six months.’ He’d had one too many, or rather several too many, but he was feeling loose and relaxed for the first time in as long as he could remember. And then this bloke swaggered over to him. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘I recognise your face. I know you from somewhere.’
‘I doubt it.’ He’d barely glanced at the guy.
‘No,’ the man said, ‘I do.’ He took out his phone, did something on it. He held the screen up. Facebook, a photograph, it was him. It was in Helmand. ‘My best mate, Glen Wilson. I knew it. This is you, isn’t it? In the photo with him. I know it’s you.’
He could hardly bring himself to look at the photograph. ‘Then I’m sure you’re right,’ he’d said, feeling the beer sour in his stomach, still just trying to brush the guy off. Maybe this would placate him. ‘It must be me.’
‘So you were there?’ The man was standing too close.
‘Yes, I was there. I knew Glen. He was a great guy.’ He wasn’t, actually. Not one of the best – always picking fights – but you didn’t speak ill of the dead. And he knew so very many dead.
‘You were in his regiment?’ The man’s face, beer-stale, was squared up to his own. He was speaking too loudly. There was a pugnacious twist to his face, his shoulders set. Doug could sense the interest of those surrounding them quickening in the background, the irresistible lure of confrontation. Something’s going on.
‘Yes,’ he said, trying to stay measured, to speak calmly, to counteract the man’s tone. The therapist had taught him some breathing exercises – he could try those. ‘I was.’
‘But I don’t understand,’ the bloke said, smiling, except it wasn’t a smile at all, it was more like a snarl. ‘I thought everyone in that regiment was killed. I thought they were all surrounded, and blown up by the Taliban.’
Doug closed his eyes. It was al-Qaeda, actually. ‘They were. Most of us …’
‘Then how did you manage to get away, eh, mate? Look at me, I’m talking to you. How are you standing here, alive and well, drinking a fucking beer, mate? While my best friend is lying dead in Durka Durkistan? Can you explain that to me?’
He could feel something rising inside him. Something dangerous, rapidly growing outside his control. ‘I don’t have to explain it to you. Mate.’ He tried breathing in through his nose, out through his mouth. It didn’t seem to be working.
The man took another step forward. ‘I think you do, actually. And we’ve got all night. I’m not going anywhere until you explain it all to me, piece by fucking piece. Because I loved that guy like a brother. And from where I’m standing, shall I tell you what it looks like?’
‘What?’ he managed – he was still fighting it, the thing rising in him. ‘What does it look like?’
The bloke prodded him, hard, in the centre of his chest. ‘It looks like you’re a fucking coward.’
That was when the mist had come up over him: the red mist they talk about – though it was more like a flood. If anything, he was most purely himself in that moment – more than he had been in months. More so than he had been since the good days at the beginning of the tour.
He had lunged forward and grabbed the man by the front of his shirt. ‘What’s your name?’
The man gulped, but didn’t speak.
‘What’s your name, laddie? Forgotten how to speak?’
The man had made a kind of garbled noise in his throat, and Doug had realised then he was actually holding his collar too tightly for him to get any words out. He relaxed his grip infinitesimally, and roared in the bloke’s face: ‘What’s your fucking name?’
The man’s friends, it seemed, weren’t interested in helping him out. ‘Some mates you’ve got, eh?’ He looked at them. He felt as though he could take all of them on, if necessary, and he wondered if they knew it, too.
‘It’s – it’s Adrian.’
‘Well. Let me tell you, Adrian. I don’t think you should go meddling in things you don’t understand, got it? I don’t have to explain myself to anyone – especially not a little dipshit like you. What do you do for a living?’