Read The Fighting Man (1993) for Free Online Page B

mother had a live-in, but then he hadn’t seen her, hadn’t wanted to, since he had come back from the Gulf.
    Gord saw his mother in the shadow behind the guy. She was in a tent of a nightdress.
    ‘Hello, Mum.’
    There was her embarrassment, and the introduction. He was Bill, he was the lodger. He helped with the shop. Not Gord’s business if his mother was shacked up. Not for him to query, from a high horse, why the lodger needed to wear his mother’s dressing gown and be on hand to help in a shop that had been closed for seven months.
    He told her that he was going away.
    ‘You could have telephoned . . .’ said critically.
    He told her that he didn’t know when he would be back.
    ‘You didn’t have to just pitch up . . .’
    He told her that where he was going he would not be able to stay in touch.
    ‘You joking – how long since you were last “in touch” . . . ?’
    He told her to look after herself.
    ‘You got a funny way with words, you think you can just pick people up, drop them. Damn you, you’re your father’s son . . .’
    It was two hundred miles to be there and it would be two hundred miles back. He didn’t ask himself inside for a cup of coffee and it wasn’t offered. He had not been asked where he was going, and why, and when. He wouldn’t have told her. He turned away. He headed off down the narrow street. He had gone because it was what his father would have expected of him. He heard her call, perhaps frightened, perhaps in late good will. He didn’t stop. He didn’t wave.
    He went down the steps leading to the harbour. He had to watch his feet for the dog shit and the broken bottles. His sister was somewhere in the north of England and teaching at an inner-city primary school and likely still to be wearing a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament badge, and she was contemptuous of him. His mother had made room in her bed for a guy who was, certain and sure, fleecing off her the money she’d made when she’d sold up in London. That was her business and only hers, and she had no room in her life for him.
    It was only for his father that he’d come.
    The last public goodbye to his father had been the memorial service at St Bride’s, the hacks’ church in Fleet Street. They’d been in the pews behind him, the old muckers of Theo Joseph (TeeJay) Brown, and they’d have been glancing down at their watches and working it out, how long until they could get outside and light up, and how long until they could get into the pub and start the rounds of doubles. They’d sung out of tune, off scale, and he’d blessed them because he’d heard the nose-blowing of the old bastards close to tears. There had been the hacks and the florid-faced men in their dark suits from Regional Crime Squad and Flying Squad and Drugs Squad, and there had been barristers’ clerks and the solicitors who wouldn’t have been happy to share a bench with a detective. The lesson read by the chief sub who’d started on the same newsagency as TeeJay, and the address given by the last editor to fire him. Gord had never been able to reckon out whether his father would have approved of the service; sure as hell, wherever he’d gone, he’d have been cursing that he’d missed out on the piss-up in the pub round the corner afterwards.
    Gord Brown had no other business to detain him.
    He would fly with the men who wanted him.
    So goddamn alone, and lengthening his stride, hurrying to get to the taxi rank beside the bus station.
     
    When Colonel Arturo heard of the shooting dead of the two subversivos he ordered that the bodies should be brought down to the village for display.
    He watched from in front of the small whitewashed church that was close to the military compound as they were carried by the Civil Patrollers, brought down from the tree line that clung to the rising ground around the cleared area where the new community of Acul was settled. He could recite the statistics, because each time that a gringo bastard came