Knots And Crosses

  Part Four

  THE CROSS

  22

  I had been in the Parachute Regiment since the age of eighteen. But then I decided to try for the Special Air Service. Why did I do that? Why will any soldier take a cut in pay to join the SAS? I can’t answer that. All I know now is that I found myself in Herefordshire, at the SAS’s training camp. I called it The Cross because I’d been told that they would try to crucify me, and there, along with the other volunteers, I went through hell, marching, training, testing, pushing. They took us to the breaking point. They taught us to be lethal.

  At that time there were rumours of an imminent civil war in Ulster, of the SAS being used to root out insurrectionists. The day came for us to be badged. We were given new berets and cap-badges. We were in the SAS. But there was more. Gordon Reeve and myself were called into the Boss’s office and told that we had been judged the two best trainees of the batch. There was a two-year training period in front of us before we could become regulars, but great things were predicted for us. Later, Reeve spoke to me as we left the building.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’ve heard a few of the rumours. I’ve heard the officers talking. They’ve got plans for us, Johnny. Plans. Mark my words.’

  Weeks later, we were put on a survival course, hunted by other regiments, who if they captured us would stop at nothing to prise from us information about our mission. We had to trap and hunt our food, lying low and travelling across bleak moorland by night. We seemed destined to go through these tests together, though on this occasion we were working with two others.

  ‘They’ve got something special lined up for us,’ Reeve kept saying. ‘I can feel it in my bones.’

  Lying in our bivouac, we had just slipped into our sleeping-bags for a two-hour nap when our guard put his nose into the shelter.

  ‘I don’t know how to tell you this,’ he said, and then there were lights and guns everywhere, and we were half-beaten into unconsciousness as the shelter was ripped open. Foreign tongues clacked at us, their faces masked behind the torches. A rifle-butt to the kidneys told me that this was for real. For real.

  The cell into which I was thrown was real enough, too. The cell into which I was thrown was smeared with blood, faeces, and other things. It contained a stinking mattress and a cockroach. That was all. I lay down on the damp mattress and tried to sleep, for I knew that sleep would be the first thing to be stripped from us all.

  The bright lights of the cell came on suddenly and stayed on, burning into my skull. Then the noises started, noises of a beating and a questioning taking place in the cell next to me.

  ‘Leave him alone, you bastards! I’ll tear your fucking heads off!’

  I slammed at the wall with fists and boots, and the noises stopped. A cell door slammed shut, a body was dragged past my metal door, there was silence. I knew my time would come.

  I waited there, waited for hours and days, hungry, thirsty, and every time I closed my eyes a sound like that of a blaring radio caught between stations would sound from the walls and the ceiling. I lay with my hands over my ears.

  Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.

  I was supposed to crack now, and if I cracked I would have failed everything, all the months of training. So I sang tunes loudly to myself. I scraped my nails across the walls of the cell, walls wet with fungus, and scratched my name there as an anagram: BRUSE. I played games in my head, thought up crossword-puzzle clues and little linguistic tricks. I turned survival into a game. A game, a game, a game. I had to keep reminding myself that, no matter how bad things seemed to be getting, this was all a game.

  And I thought of Reeve, who had warned me of this. Big plans indeed. Reeve was the nearest thing I had to a friend in the unit. I wondered if it had been his body dragged across the floor outside my cell. I prayed for him.

  And one day they sent me food and a mug of brown water. The food looked as though it had been scooped straight from the mud-crawl and pushed through the little hole which had suddenly appeared in my door and just as suddenly vanished. I willed this cold swill into becoming a steak with two veg, and then placed a spoonful of it in my mouth. Immediately, I spat it out again. The water tasted of iron. I made a show of wiping my chin on my sleeve. I felt sure I was being watched.

  ‘My compliments to the chef,’ I called.

  Next thing I knew, I was falling over into sleep.

  I was in the air. There could be no doubt of that. I was in a helicopter, the air blowing into my face. I came round slowly, and opened my eyes on darkness. My head was in some kind of sack, and my arms were tied behind my back. I felt the helicopter swoop and rise and swoop again.

  ‘Awake are you?’ A butt prodded me. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Now give me the name of your regiment and the details of your mission. We’re not going to fuck around with you, sonny. So you better do it now.’

  ‘Get stuffed.’

  ‘I hope you can swim, sonny. I hope you get the chance to swim. We’re about two-hundred feet above the Irish Sea, and we’re about to push you out of this fucking chopper with your hands still tied. You’ll hit that water as though it was fucking concrete, do you know that? It may kill you or it may stun you. The fish will eat you alive, sonny. And your corpse will never be found, not out here. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

  It was an official and businesslike voice.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Now, the name of your regiment, and the details of your mission.’

  ‘Get stuffed.’ I tried to sound calm. I’d be another accident statistic, killed on training, no questions asked. I’d hit that sea like a light-bulb hitting a wall.

  ‘Get stuffed,’ I said again, intoning to myself: it’s only a game, it’s only a game.

  ‘This isn’t a game, you know. Not anymore. Your friends have already spilled their guts, Rebus. One of them, Reeve I think it was, spilled his guts quite literally. Okay, men, give him the heave.’

  ‘Wait ...’

  ‘Enjoy your swim, Rebus.’

  Hands gripped my legs and torso. In the darkness of the sack, with the wind blowing fiercely against me, I began to feel that it had all been a grave mistake.

  ‘Wait ...’

  I could feel myself hanging in space, two-hundred feet up above the sea, with the gulls shrieking for me to be let go.

  ‘Wait!’

  ‘Yes, Rebus?’

  ‘Take the fucking sack off my head at least!’ I was shrieking now, desperate.

  ‘Let the bastard drop.’

  And with that they let me go. I hung in the air for a second, then I dropped, dropped like a brick. I was falling through space, trussed up like a Christmas turkey. I screamed for one second, maybe two, and then I hit the ground.

  I hit solid ground.

  And lay there while the helicopter landed. People were laughing all around me. The foreign voices were back. They lifted me up and dragged me along to the cell. I was glad of the sack over my head. It disguised the fact that I was crying. Inside I was a mass of quivering coils, tiny serpents of fear and adrenaline and relief which bounced through my liver, my lungs, my heart.

  The door slammed behind me. Then I heard a shuffling sound at my back. Hands fumbled at the knots of my bonds. With the hood off, it took me a few seconds to regain my sight.

  I stared into a face that seemed to be my own. Another twist to the game. Then I recognised Gordon Reeve, at the same time as he recognised me.

  ‘Rebus?’ he said. ‘They told me you’d ...’

  ‘They told me the same thing about you. How are you?’

  ‘Fine, fine. Jesus, though, I’m glad to see you.’

  We hugged one another, feeling the other’s weakened but still human embrace, the smells of suffering and of endurance. There were tears in his eyes.

  ‘It is you,’ he said. ‘I’m not dreaming.’

  ‘Let’s sit down,’ I said. ‘My legs aren’t too steady.’

  What I meant was that his legs weren’t
too steady. He was leaning into me as if I were a crutch. He sat down thankfully.

  ‘How has it been?’ I asked.

  ‘I kept in shape for a while.’ He slapped one of his legs.

  ‘Doing push-ups and stuff. But I soon grew too tired. They’ve tried feeding me with hallucinogens. I keep seeing things when I’m awake.’

  ‘They’ve tried me with knockout drops.’ ‘Those drugs, they’re something else. Then there’s the power-hose. I get sprayed about once a day I suppose. Freezing cold. Can never seem to get dry.’

  ‘How long do you suppose we’ve been here?’ Did I look as bad to him as he looked to me? I hoped not. He hadn’t mentioned the chopper drop. I decided to keep quiet about that one.

  ‘Too long,’ he was saying. ‘This is fucking ridiculous.’

  ‘You were always saying that they had something special in store for us. I didn’t believe you, God forgive me.’

  ‘This wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.’

  ‘It is us they’re interested in though.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  It had been only half a thought until now, but now I was sure.

  ‘Well, when our sentry put his nose into the tent that night, there was no surprise in his eyes, and even less fear. I think they were both in on it from the start.’

  ‘So what’s this all about?’

  I looked at him, sitting with his chin on his knees. We were frail creatures on the outside. Piles biting like the hungered jaws of vampire bats, mouths aching with sores and ulcers. Hair falling out, teeth loose. But there was strength in numbers. And that was what I could not understand: why had they put us together when, apart, we were both on the edge of breaking?

  ‘So what’s this all about?’

  Perhaps they were trying to lull us into a false sense of security before really tightening the screws. The worst is not, so long as we can say ‘this is the worst’. Shakespeare, King Lear. I wouldn’t have known that at the time, but I know it now. Let it stand.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘They’ll tell us when they’re good and ready, I suppose.’

  ‘Are you scared?’ he said suddenly. His eyes were staring at the raddled door of our cell.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You should be fucking scared, Johnny. I am. I remember once when I was a kid, some of us went along a river near our housing-scheme. It was in spate. It had been pissing down for a week. It was just after the war, and there were a lot of ruined houses about. We headed upriver, and came to a sewage-pipe. I played with older kids. I don’t know why. They made me the brunt of all their fucking games, but I stuck with them. I suppose I liked the idea of running about with kids who scared the shit out of all the kids of my own age. So that, though the older kids were treating me like shit, they gave me power over the younger kids. Do you see?’

  I nodded, but he wasn’t looking.

  ‘This pipe wasn’t very thick, but it was long, and it was high above the river. They said I was to cross it first. Christ, I was afraid. I was so fucking scared that my legs wobbled and I froze there, halfway across. And then piss started to run down my legs out of my shorts, and they noticed that and they laughed. They laughed at me, and I couldn’t run, couldn’t move. So they left me there and went away.’

  I thought of the laughter as I had been dragged away from the helicopter.

  ‘Did anything like that ever happen to you when you were a kid, Johnny?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Then why the hell did you join up?’

  ‘To get away from home. I didn’t get along with my father, you see. He preferred my kid brother. I felt out in the cold.’

  ‘I never had a brother.’

  ‘Neither did I, not in the proper sense. I had an adversary.’

  I’m going to bring him out

  don’t you dare

  This isn’t telling us anything

  keep going

  ‘What did your father do, Johnny?’

  ‘He was a hypnotist. He used to make people come on stage and do stupid things.’

  ‘You’re joking!’

  ‘It’s true. My brother was going to follow in his footsteps, but I wasn’t. So I got out. They weren’t exactly sad to see me go.’

  Reeve chuckled.

  ‘If you put us into a sale, you’d have to say “slightly soiled” on the ticket, eh, Johnny?’

  I laughed at that, laughed longer and louder than necessary, and we put an arm round one another and stayed that way, keeping warm.

  We slept side by side, pissed and defecated in the presence of the other, tried to exercise together, played little mind games together, and endured together.

  Reeve had a piece of string with him, and would wind it and unwind it, making up the knots we had been taught in training. This led me to explain the meaning of a Gordian knot to him. He waved a miniature reef knot at me. ‘Gordian knot, reef knot. Gordian reef. It sounds just like my name, doesn’t it?’

  Again, there was something to laugh about.

  We also played noughts and crosses, scratching the games onto the powdery walls of the cell with our fingernails. Reeve showed me a ploy which meant that the least you could achieve was a draw. We must have played about three-hundred games before then, with Reeve winning two-thirds of them. The trick was simple enough.

  ‘Your first O goes in the top left corner, and your second diagonally across from it. It’s an unbeatable position.’

  ‘What if your opponent puts his X diagonally opposite that first O?’

  ‘You can still win by going for the corners.’

  Reeve seemed cheered by this. He danced round the cell, then stared at me, a leer on his face.

  ‘You’re just like the brother I never had, John.’ There and then he took my palm and nicked the flesh open with one of his fingernails, doing the same to his own hand. We touched palms, smearing a spot of blood backwards and forwards.

  ‘Blood brothers,’ said Gordon, smiling.

  I smiled back at him, knowing that he had become too dependent on me already, and that if we were separated he would not be able to cope.

  And then he knelt down in front of me and gave me another hug.

  Gordon grew more restless. He did fifty press-ups in any one day which, considering our diet, was phenomenal. And he hummed little tunes to himself. The effects of my company seemed to be wearing off. He was drifting again. So I began to tell him stories.

  I talked about my childhood first, and about my father’s tricks, but then I started to tell him proper stories, giving him the plots of my favourite books. The time came to tell him the story of Raskolnikov, that most moral of tales, Crime and Punishment. He listened enthralled, and I tried to spin it out as long as I could. I made bits up, invented whole dialogues and characters. And when I’d finished it, he said, ‘Tell me that one again.’ So I did.

  ‘Was it all inevitable, John?’ Reeve was pushing his fingers across the floor of the cell, seated on his haunches. I was lying on the mattress.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think it was. Certainly, it’s written that way. The end of the book is there before the beginning’s hardly started.’

  ‘Yes, that’s the feeling I got.’

  There was a long pause, then he cleared his throat.

  ‘What’s your idea of God, John? I’d really like to know.’

  So I told him, and as I spoke, lacing my erroneous arguments with little stories from the Bible, Gordon Reeve lay down and stared up at me with eyes like the full moons of winter. He was concentrating like mad.

  ‘I can’t believe any of that,’ he said at last as I swallowed dry saliva. ‘I wish I could, but I can’t. I think Raskolnikov should have relaxed and enjoyed his freedom. He should have got himself a Browning and blown the lot of them away.’

  I thought about that comment. There seemed to me a little justice in it, but a great deal against it also. Reeve was like a man trapped in limbo, believing in a lack of belief, but not necessa
rily lacking the belief to believe.

  What’s all this shit?

  Sshhhh.

  And in between the games and the story-telling, he put his hand on my neck.

  ‘John, we’re friends, aren’t we? I mean, really close friends? I’ve never had a close friend before.’ His breath was hot, despite the chill in the cell. ‘But we’re friends, aren’t we? I mean, I’ve taught you how to win at noughts and crosses, haven’t I?’ His eyes were no longer human. They were the eyes of a wolf. I had seen it coming, but there had been nothing I could do.

  Not until now. But now I saw everything with the clear, hallucinogen eyes of one who has seen everything there is to see and more. I could see Gordon bring his face up to mine and slowly - so slowly that it might not have been happening at all - plant a breathy kiss on my cheek, trying to turn my head around so as to connect with the lips.

  And I saw myself yield. No, no, this was not to happen! This was intolerable. This wasn’t what we’d been building up all these weeks, was it? And if it was, then I’d been a fool throughout.

  ‘Just a kiss,’ he was saying, ‘just one kiss, John. Hell, come on.’ And there were tears in his eyes, because he too could see that everything had gone haywire in an instant. He too could see that something was ending. But that didn’t stop him from edging his way behind me, making the two-backed beast. (Shakespeare. Let it go.) And I was trembling, but strangely immobile. I knew that this was beyond my ken, beyond my control. So I forced the tears up into my eyes, and my nose started to run.

  ‘Just a kiss.’

  All the training, all the pushing towards that final lethal goal, it had all come to this moment. In the end, love was still behind everything.

  ‘John.’

  And I could feel only pity for the two of us, stinking, besmirched, barren in our cell. I could feel only the frustration of the thing, the poor tears of a lifetime’s indignation. Gordon, Gordon, Gordon.

  ‘John ...’

  The cell-door burst open, as though it had never been locked.

  A man stood there. English, not foreign, and of high rank. He looked in on the spectacle with some distaste; no doubt he had been listening to it all, if not watching it. He pointed to me.