He still hadn’t told me what he wanted. Up until now, his pronouncements had been disconnected and interspersed with silences. All I could do was listen. Wait until he decided to get to the point. Not yet though, it seemed. He looked weary. More than that. Spent. Worn out perhaps by the tiredness that sleep doesn’t cure. I’d never seen him like this. Hollow cheeked, unshaven, shadowy half-circles beneath his eyes, shoulders slumped. He looked like a man at the end of things. Then he spoke again. “Love’s a cold flame,” he said. “A cold, bastard of a flame. Uncompromising. Get too close and it’ll burn you through the bone.” He paused. “Unless you’re pure of heart of course.” Paused again. Snorted. “Yeah. Pure of heart.” Then he laughed, if it could be called that. It was a bitter, sawing noise that had abandoned all pretence at humour. He glanced at me. “Are you pure of heart, Paul?” The question was rhetorical. Then he looked away once more, staring at something only he could see. I pulled up the collar of my jacket with hands that were still gloved. It was cold in this mean little room in spite of the fire he’d built in its smoke-blackened hearth. The wood he’d cut was green. Two small lamps sat at each end of a crude wooden mantelpiece. Their grimy porcelain forms were crazed and chipped. One shade had been pink once and had the remains of a fringe; the other was blue with a tarry-edged hole where the heat of the bulb had burned it. Their uncharitable light only enhanced the depth of the night. The windows were curtainless. Sharp gusts of wind rattled their frames impatiently as if to tell me I didn’t have long. But I did. I had as long as it was going to take. I could feel the springs beneath me, jostling to escape the thin, soiled material of the old, stuffed armchair. But I kept still. Danny sprawled on his back on the matching sofa. One of its feet had been replaced with a brick. Someone might have been proud of this furniture once. But this was a cheerless scene, now. Then he said: “Your mouths and eyes fill the heavens and I am afraid.” Maybe he was on some kind of spiritual kick. Only he knew, or whatever god he might be petitioning. What I did know was that he remained a potentially lethal specimen of humanity. Explosives, guns and all the other paraphernalia of his type of specialist soldier were just extensions of function to him. There were no armaments in evidence but that didn’t mean a damned thing. For all I knew he’d rigged this wretched little cottage to thermally combust at the twitch of an eyebrow, turning it into little more than a smear on this remote Scottish hillside, and him and me with it. So I waited. Best not to rush these things. He’d been a bit of a legend, had Danny. Quite the warrior. Allowed to stay in longer than he should have been. Decorated, looked up to, feared, respected above all, until the incident in Lashkar Gah. That had changed things a bit. Created a bit of a fuss. A major flap in fact. He’d become a different kind of legend then. We’d just about got it hushed up, kept it out of the goddamned media, then he’d disappeared. Ghosted off into the Afghan landscape. And that had got everyone very worried. Which is why we’d been trying rather hard to find him. “Yeah,” he said. “Love. It’s like this fucking great flame arching through the universe. But it’s pure see? Touch it at your peril. Unless you’re clean. Squeaky fucking clean. Know what I mean?” “I get the picture.” “Do you?” He sighed. Drank once more from the bottle which had never left his right hand. "We are the Pilgrims master; we shall go always a little further: it may be beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow, across that angry or that glimmering sea.” ‘Oh for God’s sake,’ I nearly said. Not that maudlin nonsense. But I bit my tongue. Danny must have sensed it, though. “Not a fan of Mr Flecker, then? Don’t think much of the lines on the cemetery clock tower?” “I’m not a romantic,” I replied. “No. You’re not. You never were, really.” The comment irritated me. I wasn’t sure why. “And I’ll bet you’re all booted and spurred right now,” he added. “Mic’d up as well.” I was both. What had he expected? “Course you are,” he said. “Well, it doesn’t really matter.” Then he swung his legs down and leaned forward to face me. <> “So, you found me,” he’d said as he opened the door to my knock. “No, Danny. You found me.” “But you had been looking?” “What do you think?” We’d been looking hard for months. But then he’d made contact. Just a squirt over a sat phone. Name, number, co-ordinates and a request for my presence. That was it. “Why did you get in touch, Danny?” “Come in.” So I pulled the door behind me as a pale meniscus of winter sun melted over the horizon and down the slope of the world, and night stole across the land once more. “You’re not alone, of course.” he said. Damned right I wasn’t alone. Most of the team were parked up in a modified Transit van, out of sight at the end of what passed for an access lane to this sad little pile of stone and slate. One or two of them had infil’d out onto the surrounding hills. They were very much booted and spurred. We didn’t want him disappearing again. So, there I was. And there was Danny. <> “I want to separate the past from the present,” he said, placing the bottle on the floor beside his right foot. “Bit tricky, that.” “Possibly,” he said. “We’ll see.” “And that’s why you asked me to come here?” “Pretty much.” I wasn’t sure what he was talking about but all I could do was keep listening. He’d take his own time. And we needed to know certain things. “We used to be a team you and me,” he said. “Remember? The two musketeers. Two for one and one for two. Buy one get one free.” “That was a long time ago, Danny.” “Yeah. But we made a good little crew all the same didn’t we?” And we had. The fights and the scrapes and the girls. They’d always taken to him. Easily. I’d always had to work at it. He was the crazy one and I was calculating. Or so he maintained. But we’d backed each other up. Always. Particularly when I’d gone down one night with a boot to the head on our way home and Danny had broken the guy’s arm and chucked him over the side of the footbridge. Then taken the bottle out of his pocket, smashed it off the handrail and challenged the other two, waving it towards their eyes. They’d backed off, and he’d got me home. A year later, we’d both joined up. Taken different directions. And that had been a long time ago too. “Like I said,” I added for emphasis. “Not a team now, then? All done with that are we?” “I’m doing my job, Danny. What are you doing?” <> Her name was Forozan, the girl in Lashkar Gah. Dark-haired and with the strange blue eyes many of them have. No one knew how or why Danny had taken up with her, particularly. But he had. His commander had taken him aside and warned him. But Danny wasn’t for warning. Someone told me he reckoned Danny had been going to come out and bring the girl home with him. Then her family had found out. She’d been killed. Ritually. Brutally. Her body dumped outside the city. Left for dirt. It wasn’t just that he’d then killed her father and two brothers. It was how he’d done it. He’d broken in one night. Tied and gagged them. Taken wood from their house and used their tools to build crosses in their walled compound. The work wasn’t craftsmanlike but it was effective. Then he’d crucified them. Had to have used a hammer or something similar to get the nails in. Amazing he wasn’t heard. Then he’d left them there on view. Luckily… Luckily? God, no. Miraculously, we’d found them first, thanks to Mehrzad. He was on our payroll. Dodgy little bugger, but he was worth the money. We told him he’d get his reward in heaven. He said he’d prefer it now, thanks. US Dollars would be best. Used ones. And he’d shrugged, then smiled, reminding us without words how easy it was for information to leak out. We said he’d have the money in three days. Three days would be okay, he confirmed. We’d paid on time. It was just after that that Danny had disappeared. <> “I suppose you want me to come with you, then,” he said. The fire was just charred wood now, dribbling smoke. “What we’d really like to know is how you got back from Helmand to the UK and…” “Wasn’t that difficult, really,” he interrupted. “Just took a while.” “…and, whether you’ve told anyone else about the incident.” He laughed, long and loud. This time there was something resembling humour in it. “The incident,” he said, finally. “God, that’s good. The incident.” “It was murder, Danny. Whichever way you look at it.” “Don’t try that on with me.” I stared at the fire for a moment before looking up again. “Look,” I said, “this can still be fixed. Your service record’s undeniable. You…” “And don’t give me that shit, either. I wasn’t fighting for my queen or fucking country. You know that. You do it for all sorts of reasons. Because you want to. Loyalty to your mates. To yourself. Whatever. The rest’s bullshit for muppets.” “It can still be fixed,” I said. “No, it can’t.” He looked at me, then. Flat-eyed. Then he looked away. Shook his head slightly. Picked up the bottle, stood, drained it and threw it into a corner where it bounced without breaking. Then he leaned down and pulled a small cardboard box from under the sofa. “It’s all in here,” he said. “All you need.” He pushed it over to me with his foot. I picked it up. It was sealed with packing tape. I turned it over in my hands. “You’d best get going,” he said. “You know where the door is.” “Danny…” “ ‘Bye, Paul.” So, I stood. Walked out clutching the box. Didn’t look back. Not easy to do. <> “Give him ten minutes,” I told the team leader, back at the van. “He’s not going anywhere.” But it didn’t take ten minutes before the place went up or, rather, folded in on itself, bright white, then hot, angry red, lighting up the hillside before finally collapsing under the weight of night. <> The investigative report arrived on my desk a couple of weeks later. There had been no sighting of him exiting the cottage but no human remains had been found in the wreckage. He hadn’t been at the end of things yet then. There was a priority order attached to the damned thing stating that I was to start looking for him again. Right away. I opened a drawer in my desk. Pulled out the box he’d given me. All it had contained was his medals. And a ragged clipping with a quote from someone called Arthur Stanley Eddington: ‘We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown.’ And, right at the bottom, a short note. Very short. 'Best they don’t look for me any more. Tell them.' No signature. I sat for a while. Thinking. Vaguely aware of some square-bashing squaddies being yelled at somewhere outside. Time passed. Lost track of it for a bit. Came to, eventually. Sat up. Tossed the report in the bin. “They can fuck right off,” I told the empty room. “Right, fucking, off.” Wondered what I’d do with the rest of my life. Wondered if we ever find out whether we make the right decisions while we’re alive. Maybe I’d talk to Danny about that some time. Maybe not. I put the medals and newspaper clipping in my briefcase. Put the note in the internal mail, marked for my superior's attention. Then I started the letter resigning my commission. <<<<<>>>>> ENDS... © Joe Miller All Rights Reserved One Million Stories Creative Writing Project |
Conspicuous Gallantry
Joe Miller
Joe Miller
| We like this story because: There is more to this world than meets the eye and we think Joe might have seen something we missed. |
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