Superstitiously, I wore prayer beads around my neck, lucky beads, or Terry beads as the lads called them, and out of instinct I touched them. ‘What you should know is that on an IED the fuse is soldered to the charge, and you would think they’re joined, wouldn’t you, and that the join is true, as true as life and death, but you’d be wrong. There is a distance between them,’ I paused, ‘a potential distance through which you could slip an atom, what they call a metaphorical distance.’
‘Goners, man!’ Adrian still had one hand clamped to his head. He peered over me, his lower eyelids swollen and black with soot. ‘That’s the truth.’
In black ink I scratched the position of Black-Spot Hartley onto the map. ‘Private Hartley, as the senior NCO I want your opinion.’
Adrian got down next to me. Rocking on his haunches, he put on a serious face.
‘You always seem to know what’s going on down below.’
He appeared confused but nodded just the same.
‘In Friends do you reckon Ross will forgive Rachel?’
‘Rachel had sex with Joey,’ he said brightly.
‘We only saw them kiss.’
Adrian clutched himself and rocked with laughter. ‘Well, if she made Joey use a condom, Ross might forgive her.’
‘Do you want to watch a bit before shut-eye?’
‘Seen it, Sarge. Next episode moves on to a different story, leaves it open, cliffhanger like.’
I looked at Adrian with a frown. ‘You’re going to spoil my day, Private Hartley.’
Adrian pointed to the map in my hands and smiled. ‘What are the green crosses for?’
‘Terry positions,’ I said. Six green crosses made over the course of the patrol coincided exactly with those made the previous night.
‘Terry’s busy looking over his fat hairy belly at the Grim Reaper giving him head.’
I said without looking up, ‘Better not take it for granted, Private.’
‘Sarge?’ He shook his head for what seemed like a long time, as though deep in thought. ‘It’s spiritual.’ He squeezed his palms together and squinted hard at the join between them. ‘The true distance between the fuse and the charge is spiritual.’
I pretended to yawn. ‘It would have got you that tan you’re after.’
‘Panic tanning, Sarge.’ He stood up and curled a bicep, the tension spreading upwards through his neck and terminating at his clenched chin above which he tried to squeeze out a smile. ‘For my going-home body.’
The sun had risen quickly, and at both east and west, as though bearing down upon us, stood the peaks of the Hindu Kush, close enough that during the night patrol we had shivered under their icy weight. Once illuminated they seemed friendlier, as though painted in as a magnificent backdrop to the movie we sometimes felt we were making. If in years to come we forgot everything else, we would always remember the mountains, against which we posed for photographs during the day whenever a new and unexpected vista opened up, and the cold, the white-cold starlit breath through which we viewed each other during the night.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Section will be wondering what the fuck kept us.’
We doubled back along a crooked dusty path, a low barbed-wire fence separating it from a wood on one side. On the other was a waist-high poppy crop. The only sign of life was an occasional scorpion darting across our boots.
‘When we get back, best not to brag about it,’ I said.
Through a gap in the wire we cut into the wood, densely populated by tall upright pines. The foliage had burned to ochre in the summer sun, and under our feet crunched chestnut shells and the bony, desiccated detritus of fallen twigs. We zigzagged cautiously between the trees, checking the weight of each rustling footstep, and with our rifle sights we slowly scoped the perimeter.
‘Have you noticed something weird?’ said Adrian. I shook my head. ‘Trees seem to be getting shorter.’
The sunlight dappled the wood in alternating shafts of light and dark. When I squinted, the tops of the trees seemed to bend into a downward curve in the middle distance and then rise again in a blur at the far end. Save for birds in the trees and the creaking of foliage in the gathering heat, the morning was silent and still.
‘You get it too, boss?’ Behind me Adrian stood perfectly still, his nose tuned to the air. ‘Smells like. ’ he paused as though wondering whether to continue, ‘love.’
Something else had replaced the night jasmine, a rounded, perfume-like scent that seemed to be growing stronger.
‘Just roses,’ I said. ‘Big deal here, roses.’
‘Boss, Black-Spot Hartley has reminded me, I haven’t done my death letter.’
‘Just count down the sleepovers,’ I said.
‘Could you help me write it?’
‘Count off seven and you’ll be waving out the window at the Hindu Kush and oiling your biceps,’ I said.
‘I need it all set down, on paper, signed and witnessed. Something for Britney — maybe, as well, something for her mum.’
‘Hustling in pubs for an arm wrestle and shagging anything that moves.’
‘Gonna go up to Old Hill and see her, make amends.’ He lit up another cigarette, blowing the smoke out of his nostrils.
‘Thought you said it was a one-nighter — she got one in the oven and you did a runner?’
Adrian threw the empty cigarette packet to the ground, crushed it under a boot. He coughed violently. ‘Makes no difference. Girl’s mine. Want to be a proper dad.’
I touched my prayer beads and whispered a Bismillah for his kid.
‘The lads, it gets on their nerves when you pray in Paki, but I don’t mind.’
‘I bet they don’t believe in the Angel Gabriel either,’ I said.
‘What’s it called, when you squash the rose petals inside a book?’ said Adrian.
‘Get her chocolates instead, from duty free on your way back.’
‘I’ll take her out. Steak meal and all the trimmings.’
‘What makes you think she’s waiting for you?’
‘I could. ’ He nodded slowly. I waited, but he didn’t finish the sentence.
‘Your England,’ I laughed, ‘all that beef and gravy, it’s fiction.’
‘My Britney is going to get roses,’ said Adrian, picking up his pace. ‘I’m in need of roses.’
‘It’s called pressing. You press the flower.’
We followed the rose scent. Shorter, colourful pomegranate trees had replaced the evergreens. Their branches spread low with dense green foliage; from them hung the large round fruit, not in abundance but dotted here and there, like a picture in a child’s book. The fruit was blood red with a thick leathery skin, and beautiful against the green leaves — too beautiful, as though unreal, painted in. The pomegranate orchard was well tended, with narrow irrigation channels running parallel to each row of trees.
‘You smell love? For me love is an easy walk down to the local where no one calls me a Paki.’
‘And out of the window of your local you can see the estate and that shithole you call a mosque?’
‘Green fields, mate. Green fields.’
‘That’s your fiction,’ said Adrian, plucking a pomegranate off a tree.
‘Steady,’ I said, ‘this patch has never seen the white man.’
‘Then I’ll be earning the roses.’
I listened to the sound of his teeth tearing at the leathery pomegranate. He turned and smiled, blood-coloured seeds dripping from his lips. ‘Don’t you ever feel,’ he continued between noisy mouthfuls, ‘like back at base when we do an ammo count, that you did nothing more than just blast the fuck out of anything within a thousand yards of Terry? Don’t you ever think you’ve got to earn something, anything, earn that shitty view from the pub window?’
‘Last contact the lieutenant wrote off twenty-two thousand 7.62, twelve RPG and two Javelin. A lot of money for a sandcastle.’