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practically invented Thrash. Them and Metallica.’ Lennox began poking himself in the chest. ‘I’m telling you, man. I was into them before any other kid at St Gerard’s.’
‘Cop on, Lennox, you daft bitch. Get real. You were about two when Countdown to Extinction came out.’
Lennox pondered this. ‘I was definitely listening to Youthanasia when I was in primary school, so I was.’
So the conversation went, all day, half the night, between joints and scran, boredom and mortars. The time to start worrying on a mission, Luke always said, is when the boys are being too nice to one another. And in a firefight, you only panic when the boys go silent.
He smiled and walked off the road. He could see the wavering line of the horizon and everything in the distance looked like a form of sunstroke. There was a mud house by an irrigation ditch, a smell of shit and rotten hay, a man in a pink turban strolling with his goats. Out there, the ragged mountains appeared like a video still, not reality but a screen-grab. The whole scene looked parched and ruined. A clear picture came into Luke’s mind of a fresher landscape, Loch Lomond in the black-and-white summer of an old photograph at his grandmother’s. He could almost taste a pint of lager, and taste Anne’s art. He didn’t think that any of his Helmand images would end up in a frame.
There was heat inside the heat. Sweat ran down the back of his neck and between his shoulder blades. Luke hated the hours it took to dig out landmines and the wait for incoming fire. Scullion said the mission would be the biggest logistical task of the war. Two hundred vehicles and a shitload of grunts desperate as fuck to get out there and banjo the Taliban. Luke felt weak. Just asthere was heat inside the heat, there was weakness inside his weakness. Everything is dense with itself out there; everything is thick with its own crazed lack of known limits. Things could escalate. You could sense it in your nerves and feel it on your skin.
Jesus, the boys were mad for action. They were mad for wild-eyed bogeymen covered in rags, for teams of degenerates to appear on the horizon wearing beards and mucky sandals, pouring through the heatwave with their sabres held high. By late August the men in the platoon were chin-strapped and breathing through their arses. They needed a story to tell and they needed pictures. They longed for something they would hate the moment it arrived. But they wanted it and their want appeared to seep into the deadly hot distances that surrounded them.
‘Jesus,’ Luke said. They’d given up on the famous victory long ago and now they gave a toss for nothing but the regiment. To everybody it was a cluster fuck where nobody wins.
‘Mad out here,’ he said quietly.
Luke walked a dozen yards away from the convoy. The horizon was a bundle of grey and brown garments, a heap of old linen, surely not stones and mountains. The distance seemed to come and go in the heat, it appeared to liquefy before him and he felt lost on the empty map with the troops and vehicles ranged at his back. At Bastion he’d told the boys to write their last letters. A quick note just in case. Two seconds. They wrote them while waiting for their turn on Xbox.
It began early on that first day. It began with the melting horizon and the threat of forces lying outside his vision. He felt the Kajaki Operation was cursed and he wanted to be out of there. He felt the pressure of his younger self, the one who missed his father, the boy in touch with beautiful ideas. Back then, Luke oftenwalked through Kelvingrove Park in Glasgow to spend the day with his gran. Anne was a woman who lived quietly and knew how to disappear into her own experience. He could still see her standing near the window with a magnifying glass and an old catalogue, sitting him down to explain things. Even when speaking to a boy she spoke as a person not only ready to invest in you but ready to bear the costs to the end. In Helmand, he