dddk 3 - homefree

« Mum’ll be in a right state.She's gonna be pacing the floor. No, not pacing, she'll be in her chair, tapping and pulling back the curtains; cradling the phone in her lap. She'll have rung everyone. I wonder who she got at the barracks, they'll be pissing themselves into their beer now. « Have you seen my Lee, love? » « Sorry madam, Private Dillon left this morning with the rest of his company. » It really was this morning wasn’t it. Well it won’t be quite the entrance I was imagining. Second best dress is a right bloody mess. Let’s hope the dry cleaners can do something with it. Don’t remember these railings being so tricky. Used to come here all the time when I was a kid. ‘Friendly Gardens.’ You can see the attraction. I’d get home from school, nip down the high street to get mum’s bits, then a slight deviation back up Friendly Street and into the park. I’d sit right here, under this clump of sycamore. I’ve always liked trees, friendly.

People like to make it a problem, this mate thing. I’ve never seen it like that though. They nearly didn’t pass me into second phase training up at the garrison. Loners have trouble with team spirit - but they couldn’t not really, could they. « I don’t go in for blowing my own trumpet, » I tells them, « but I am a bloody good soldier and I don’t have to like a bloke to watch his back. » And then they’re going on about sergeants mess potential and, cut a long story short, I swore the oath. Four years. She don’t know whether to laugh or cry, mum. She’ll love the photos though.

Twenty six weeks I’ve been up there with that mob. Hardly surprising I didn’t fancy adding a train ride back to town. I’ve always liked the idea of hitching. I sat under these very trees and worked out an entire European tour - I was gonna go the day I left school. But I didn’t have any money, and mum hit the roof, so it all just faded into nothing. But I did it this morning. Made myself a sign, London. Got the first bus up to Scotch Corner, planted myself on the southbound services exit and waited. Not long as it happened. The uniform probably helped. Ten minutes I stood there, when this dirty great truck pulls up, foreign writing all over the side - I makes out Barcelona, big red dot on my map that’d been - anyway the door swings open, but I can’t see the driver, then I twig, left hand drive. I pulls myself up and he’s charging back onto the A1 before I’ve slammed it shut behind me.

He’s not that old, the bloke. Not that Spanish either. He’s alright. Turns out he’s living over there, making his cash on expat removals. He brings the failures home he tells me, generally to the north, and picks up the southern hopefuls on his way back. He’s alright. Even asks me if I mind if he smokes. I don’t, but mum’s a right bloody chimney I says, so I’m used to it.

We stop for a coffee at the first services after Leeds, and he tells me his next job’s in Islington and not till five o’clock, so he’s thinking of getting some sarnies and stopping off at Sherwood Forest. « You’ll get another pickup from here no problem. » He says, « or you can join me if you like. » Well, I do like trees, a lot. So I buys a couple of BLT’s. No great rush I thinks. Within the hour we’re sliding off the M1 just south of Mansfield.

He parks up in this glade, grabs a tatty blanket out the back of the cab and motions with his head, « You can leave your gear here, lets go for a walk. » I follow. He knows where he’s going, says he grew up round here. After a while the massive oaks start thinning out and a feeble November sun fingers its way through the spread. We get to a moss embossed broken down stone wall and he lays the blanket in a glowing patch at its base.

Tomato juice has seeped into the home pride and the sandwiches are sitting, sloppy and half eaten on their plastic wrappers. He lies back and stretches out, closing his eyes. I lay back too, but I’m looking up. There’s this beech right over our heads, and its millions of tiny leaves are shimmering. My focus blurs, I’m feeling so good. The weight on my lids is pulling them down, and there’s this tingling on my cheek, sliding, tracing the bones, then drifting, all along my jaw, across my lips. Breath, hot, close, smoky.

My eyes are wide now, popping. But he’s just smiling, and stroking. I wanna rip his head off his shoulders, force it down his veiny throat. Take a knife, the bluntest, twist it, into his guts. Smack that smile right off his sun kissed gob.

I wanna feel, anything.

Air raid sirens are going off in my head. Taste blood. His face, closer, his wet mouth, leeching onto mine, locking the scream. His fingers, burning through my tunic, engraving our initials into my trunk. Air raid sirens are going off in my head. I want his hand, his hand to go down.

Bomb me, fucking bomb me.

« We’ve gotta go. » He says, eventually. I get up and start pulling myself together. He’s already picked up the blanket and headed off back the way we came. I can hear him singing. « They’re changing guards at Buckingham Palace, Christopher Robin went down on Alice… » Swinging his arms and laughing.

We don’t say much, the rest of the way. But it’s ok. He drops me off at The Angel. As I turn to open the door he grabs my arm. « You ever come to Spain Lee, look me up, » and he slides this card into my hand, « I’d love to see you in your Busby. » He throws his head back. He’s got this amazing laugh, wide open. I stand on the pavement looking at the card. ‘Homefree Removals’. I slide it into my pocket and trot down to the tube.

It’s not till I come up for air at London Bridge that I start coming down. There’s a Deptford train about to pull out so I leg it down the platform and heave into the first carriage. It’s chokka, faces on faces. I press in as we push off. With the rocking and the rolling, kilowatts of commuter generated heat ease through the fibres of my uniform. The stench starts to rise - I can feel my nostrils flare, it’s like I’m trying to suck up every last evidential atom of stale sweat and rancid spunk - My face burns, I can feel the disgust, arrowing me from all sides, see the eyes, sliding away, refusing all contact. I feel sick, really sick, and I’m skittering along the platform and heaving against the wall before the train has come to a stop. There are flecks of tomato skin on my boot.

The bridge is deserted when I finally hoist my bag over my shoulder. I don’t know where I’m going, got to move that’s all. I straight line it down to the river, but the water’s just a stroppy reflection of the sky - cloudy and heavy - it aint going nowhere. I move, from one puddle of streetlight to the next, hiding and seeking all the way back up to the high street.

I know she’s waiting, but I’m just thinking not yet.

That’s when the shining beacon of Wavelengths illuminates my goulashed brain. I pay in, trunk up, and sigh into and under the artificial blue of the lagoon. It is a leisure pool, but the deep bit at the far end is just begging for the beating my spastic arms whack out as I crawl from corner to corner. Then they start up the bloody wave machine, and my flabby imagination’s attempt to transform the pounding into a goose-greased cross channel marathon flounders. I paddle over to the waterfall and ease myself under and up. Planting my feet wide as the oxygen charged water hammers my skull and sheets over my face. Saint Johns cleansing torrent peters to a trickle, then stops. The lights flicker their morse signal and the few punters wade out in the direction of the lockers. As the water and snot string down from my nose I see this bloke, propped under a plastic palm. He’s bogging me out and making no bones about it - eyes sliding up and down - and I’m thinking, this is not real, but my trunks tighten and he smiles, and I know that it is.

When I come out of the cubicle there’s no sign of him. I step into the night, resolved now, I turn and start off in the direction of the flat. « Evening soldier. » It’s almost whispered, as he shadows out of the dark, cutting across my path and heading towards the bridge. He continues for about twenty feet, then stops, turns and winks. Right at me. He sort of hovers for a sec, then slowly carries on his way. My damp hair is freezing against my head. What the fuck is happening? I follow.

He hesitates on the corner of Resolution way, then cops a sharp left towards the arches. We’re deep into wino city when he stops. I can make out the orange haloed heads of figures clustered round a small fire, bobbing as they hack and spit, the occasional shout echoing out to no one. He edges round the corner into the next arch and as I trail in his wake I feel an arm clutching at mine, pulling me down onto a stinking mattress. I gag as I fuck.

The screaming brings me round. I can feel his soft head in the crook of my arm. The warmth of a body, weighing me down, deadening my leg as it lays, balled into my groin. I push him away as I sit up, sucking air into my cramped lungs. But it razors down, and I’m coughing it out. My eyes are open, but I’m blind. Tears are running down my face. The sick making smell of burning plastic jumps a neurone path, binging alarm bells of recognition, and now I can see the darkness moving, it’s depths morphing, as waves of blackened grey roll out into the night. Then the flashing blue, piercing. And sirens, and wailing. And I’m on my feet now, choking, as I leg it down the strobe lit alley.

I’ve run all the way here. Fucking lunatic. Hurled myself over the railings. Ripped my coat. Got my breath back now, but I think I lost my senses.

Not now mum, not now… »