His mum had told him once that he’d been born at three a.m., but that had nothing to do with it, it was just a coincidence. And Jack had told him that “born” wasn’t quite the word for it anyway. Jack had said, “That’s when you final y came out.”
He had a backpack and he was wearing al those layers
—less to carry—against the cold. He had rations (he’d better get used to that word) hidden in the Big Barn. And he had Jack’s birthday card, which weighed next to nothing but was like an extra load of blame to carry with him. A big gold
“18” and a big “Good Luck, Tom” inside. He’d kept it for a long while, hidden in his locker. Signing up on your birthday wasn’t exactly like a birthday. If he’d wanted punishment, to go with his guilt, then he’d get it in the army.
But he certainly no longer had the card by the time he was sitting in that pub, watching those cows burning on the tel y. Though maybe the “Good Luck” stil applied, now as then. It had stopped him, so far, from being like Wil is.
Apart from the card, only three other written messages had ever come his way from Jack. Which wasn’t a complaint, since he, Tom, had never written back—or only the once, and briefly. He’d very quickly found out that he just wanted to be out of communication in this world he’d chosen, this world of strangely unresented punishment, his whereabouts unknown.
Now the World is Yours.
The first letter from Jack had been after two weeks or so, and was just a line hoping he was okay and saying that everything at Jebb was fine—which was surely Jack being a wel -meaning liar. And then, since he hadn’t replied to that, there was a long, long gap. It looked like that was that.
They’d real y said goodbye to each other and known it, that December afternoon in the milking parlour. Meanwhile, he’d been moved around a bit anyway.
Then those two letters had come, soon after each other, the first looking like Jack might have spent a whole week writing it and torn up several versions along the way. But the main item was perfectly clear. That Jack was al by himself now, not counting El ie (assuming El ie was stil a feature, and how might she not be?). The old man had cleared off too, so it seemed, in a manner of speaking. And then the second letter had come soon afterwards, about the funeral, since that had to be delayed. And that had included that other item of news: that Michael had left the whole farm—
though Jack had seemed to want to emphasise that there was a whole heap of debt to go with it—to Jack and Jack only. Wel that was no surprise. That had even been the deal.
And he hadn’t replied to either letter. He hadn’t got on the phone to Jebb Farm. He hadn’t done a single thing about either letter, though he’d stared at them both long and hard enough. Those letters reached him, as it happened, in Germany. Before Bosnia. It would have been difficult, but, with that delay for the funeral, not impossible. And there was such a thing as compassionate leave. And he’d felt compassion, definitely. For his brother.
But he hadn’t done a thing. He hadn’t applied to the CO.
He imagined the CO’s face. My old man has shot himself.
He hadn’t lifted a finger. It was a bastard thing to do to Jack, but then, maybe, it had been a bastard thing he’d done in the first place, that night in December.
Al yours, Jack. Now it real y was, and El ie’s too, if Jack had any sense. And good luck to them. But it wasn’t his ticket or what he was made for, he knew that too now.
He was a private in B Company, earmarked for the sniper section, currently stationed in Germany, occasional y on active duty with a Helga from Hanover, when he might have been the owner of fifty per cent of Jebb Farm, of a hundred and sixty acres of England. So be it. He couldn’t go back on the deal, and he couldn’t go back anyway to the place itself, compassionately or otherwise. Couldn’t have gone back to that churchyard to stand by the grave, even for his brother’s sake, and look down and think: it was a fine line, it was a fine bloody line. And Jack maybe thinking it too. And maybe if he didn’t show up and didn’t even send a message it would be like a clear enough last signal. Al yours, Jack. Forget about me.
He’d stared at each letter in turn. So his father had done what no one else, now, would have to have the decency to do for him. He’d done the decent thing himself. He’d stared at both letters together. Reading them was a little like reading Jack’s face, but he’d never have to do that any more. He put the letters away, and he never did speak to the CO. Later, he found an opportunity privately to burn them. The barrack room had an old-style stove with a lid.
Simple. A smal fire, compared with piles of cattle going up in flames. And a smal matter, he’d come to think, compared with some of the things that come a soldier’s way. Bosnia. He’d watched those cattle burning on the tel y six years later, in the spring of 2001. And it wasn’t so long afterwards that a couple of planes had flown into a couple of big towers—another TV picture to remember—giving a whole new meaning to the act of suicide and having a range of consequences, including ones for British soldiers, which would make a spot of cow disease seem piddling.
AND ALL HE’D WANTED was the get-out, the complete alternative package. No finer reasons. He’d never once said to anyone that he’d had a great-uncle who’d got the DCM. (Posthumous.) When he’d walked, that icy night, with his backpack, past the war memorial, he’d never turned his head. He hadn’t felt brave, or even that he was doing something that real y took so much initiative.
He’d started life as a soldier by running away. Which was a common enough story. It was what half of B Company had done in their different ways. What were the alternatives? They’d handed over the problem to the army.
Take me in, please, sort me out please, the whole package. With some of them you could see, clearly enough, that if it hadn’t been that, it might have been prison eventual y, one way or another. You could picture their faces sometimes (and now he was a corporal, he’d sometimes tel them) behind bars.
And that might have been his case too, and it might not have been petty crime either. But that was al taken care of now. He stared at those letters.
BUT HE’D STILL THINK about cattle. They haunted him and helped him, gave him a sort of measure. If he wanted, now, to get bad stuff out of his head, bad human pictures, it helped to replace them with cattle. He could stil remember the wet jostle of the milking parlour, the smel of iodine and udder. He could stil remember that daily treadmil of extracting milk from cows, and the thought that would sometimes come to him while doing it, that it was only the same essential process (so hardly a man’s job) by which human babies were nursed and eased into the world, by which he himself had once been nursed and eased—late and (apparently) tough arrival though he was. And it was a wonder how the grown-up world stil needed, by the churn-load, by the tanker-load, this white, soft, pappy baby-juice.
He’d had that thought, especial y, after Vera died, and wondered if Jack, in the next stal , was having it too. Their mum had died, but these damn cows stil had to calve and be milked. But, at that time, the milking parlour was the best place to be.
What kind of thoughts were they for a future soldier?
What kind of training was milking? But it was a cattle-existence often enough, a cowshed existence. They were mostly hard-nut townie boys and liked to think of him as a softie country boy, a bumpkin. But there were those who were hard outside and al mush inside, you could do without them. And there were those who might look soft on the outside (though not so much of that these days) but were hard underneath, and he knew now he was the second kind. Now and then they’d get a glimpse of it, too, and knew they shouldn’t argue—one reason he’d made corporal, and would make sergeant pretty soon.