July 2012
"You'll be pleased to hear that we've set a date." said Price, the caterpillar of his thick moustache twitching as his lips stretched into a tight smile.
MacTavish blinked, and hurriedly reversed through the conversation to double-check that Price had just said what he thought he had said.
"Brilliant!" he eventually spluttered, forcing a grin, but Price's statement had reached into his chest and slapped his heart into a startled gallop. He'd been in limbo for weeks, his fate in the hands of the assortment of psychologists, physios and other hangers-on to the military machine. He'd started at every email notification, and raced to gather the morning post the moment he heard it hit the mat, desperate for news that finally his wait was over. Finally, out of nowhere, the answer had finally come.
"Two weeks, 2pm, up in room 4." said MacMillan, his gruff voice distant.
MacTavish shook himself, and tried to focus, but no matter how hard he tried to shut it out, the demon inside continued to taunt him: there were men lining up for this job, it said. Fitter men, younger men, each one hungry to make the grade and here you are, scraping yourself back together, trying to claw your way back in . Pathetic . He concentrated, shoving the voice to the back of his mind. He had done everything they had asked of him. They had their reports, their observations and statements, and in two weeks a panel would finally decide his fate. There was nothing more he could do.
He inhaled, long and slow and deep until he felt the pounding in his chest begin to slow. He nodded, hoping it looked like he was consulting his mental diary. "Great. I'll be there." He said, trying to keep the tremor out of his voice, hoping his faux-cheerful demeanour didn't set the wrong tone. MacMillan stared at him, his expression the usual ice-carved mask that MacTavish found impossible to read.
"We've seen the reports from the physios, but anyone with eyes can see you've been putting the hours in." said Price, smiling warmly this time, the caterpillar arching into a bow.
"How'd you get on in the hills?" MacMillan interjected.
"Not bad. Just over four hours" MacTavish shrugged. "But I wasn't aiming for a PB, just testing myself."
"Good." MacMillan smiled thinly, the expression devoid of warmth. He continued to regard MacTavish with a steely glare. "What about the rest?"
"Sir?"
"Mentally. How are you coping?"
"Uh…" MacTavish stalled, unexpectedly off balance by the directness of this approach, but he gathered himself. "It's... not easy getting knocked off your feet, doing a lot of work just to get back to the same place you were when you started, but once I accepted it wasn't going to happen overnight, and set realistic goals, it was plain sailing from there."
Yeah . He thought. Right . That's exactly how it happened.
Price nodded. "How's our mutual friend?"
The announcement about the panel meeting had sent his anxiety surging, and for a moment, he hopelessly flailed as he tried to figure out what they were referring to, and then he remembered the reason he'd thought he'd been asked here in the first place.
He'd left Riley asleep on his patio, entirely worn out by the morning of hard labour. By noon, he had been trembling and sweating, his skin slowly greying with each passing hour, but still refusing to give up until MacTavish had done the honourable thing and claimed exhaustion for himself. He'd made some excuses after that, frowning at his phone as if there was something else newly claiming his time and made his apologies. RIley was already snoring by the time he had his hand on the latch of the gate.
"He's got a daughter." said MacTavish. "About thirteen, maybe older. Year... 9? She goes to the posh school, scholarship girl. Plays hockey. Wins prizes." Looks like she'll kick the ever-loving shit out of you, no paternity test needed. "That would explain all of the rumours I heard."
Price nodded, and it struck MacTavish that he didn't seem surprised by this information, and then he realised that of course, Price already knew about the existence of Jade Riley. The administrative machine of the regiment would have her logged as next of kin. He considered this, keeping his face expressionless, and wondering why the hell he'd been sent to find out what they already knew.
"And what about the man himself?" asked Price.
"He looks like shit." said MacTavish, feeling that given Riley was obviously a yellow-tinged, partially skeletal version of his old self, there was no point trying to pretend otherwise. "But he's certainly pushing the envelope, and he's bright enough. Up and about, pottering in the garden like business as usual. You wouldn't know what he's been through."
"Good." MacMillan nodded. "Well, carry on."
He doesn't sleep much.
MacTavish had found Donna Riley, unseen matriarch of the household, perched on her front doorstep enjoying a sly cigarette and surveying the now-empty front lawn like an enthroned queen.
He nodded at her as he paused on the drive, and gruffly grunted hello. He felt bad enough pretending to Riley that he had genuinely come to help him, but lying to his mother felt like an unholy transgression.
"How are you boys getting on?"
When she'd stood up, she'd come up barely level with his shoulder. Her hair was unnaturally dark: a solid, severe, raven black so extraordinarily uniform that even he recognised it as artificially achieved. Despite the contrasting tanned skin, something he suspected was equally unnatural, he spotted the similarities in the nose, and the electric blue of her eyes that she shared with her son.
"You'll be Iain, then?" She had looked MacTavish up and down cooly as she took a long drag from the cigarette dangling between her fingers.
"Uh… yeah. MacTavish."
"I'm Donna." she said, and held out her hand. He shook it, but she didn't let go. She turned it over in her own hand, brough the palm up.
"Now, you can tell a lot about a person from what this says." She winked at him, and ran a finger along his palm, from the base of his middle finger to the edge of his wrist.
His throat tightened, shocked at the sudden intimacy of this gesture. He fought the urge to jerk back as she swept an elegantly painted fingertip over the skin. He winced at the sensation, surprised that it felt almost painful, and realised that this was the first time that anyone, bar the rotating assortment of nurses and physios that oversaw his rehabilitation, had intentionally touched him for months.
He swallowed, dryly and then smiled to cover his awkwardness. "Oh? Does this future include meeting a beautiful, dark-hair stranger?" He asked, innocently.
"You cheeky bastard!" she had laughed. "You can come by anytime."
He had smiled then, genuinely warmed by this playful, meaningless flirtation. "I'm needing to head off." He'd said, and she nodded understanding "And he's nodded off anyway. I think he's wiped out." He'd jerked his head in the direction of the garden.
She paused, and the warm light in her face dimmed a little. She took another drag of her cigarette and fixed him with a particularly penetrating stare before saying "He doesn't sleep much. I hear him around the house in the night, padding about, trying to be quiet. I don't know. Is that normal?"
He saw the pain behind her eyes then, and he looked away, first embarrassed and then appalled at his own cowardice. He had nothing to offer but a casual, offhand shrug, and the usual stammered platitudes: oh it was different coming from what you had gotten used to, to a hospital and getting used to that before it all changed again and you were back home. You had to adjust to the new pace of life, to fit into other people's lives and catch up. It took time. Blah. Blah. Blah.
He felt his face flush with shame as he trotted out the old lies, understanding that she was wise enough to know that there was something wrong. She'd followed Riley from base to base, with his kid in tow. She'd been there for the start and end of all his tours, and she knew this time was different.
He sighed "It gets better." he said, eventually, trying to sound more sure of himself than he felt. "And… at least he's got folks looking out for him, keeping him fed and watered" There had been food on the picnic table when they'd stopped, a pork pie the size of a curling stone taking centre stage, surrounded by boulders of cheese and sandwiches that could have been used to wedge open blast doors. "And… you know… keeping yourself busy is good, not just for the exercise. Good to have something to work on. Good to have a goal to focus on."
Work your body into exhaustion and hope the mind follows . He wondered what Riley saw when he closed his eyes, what had really happened out in the malaria infested swamps of Lake Chad. What warped version of reality he had seen in his fevered delirium that kept him awake at night? A memory rose, and for a second his vision swam, the scent of mown grass vanishing as the wind blew in the stench of smoke, powdered concrete and the foul odour of scorched flesh.
He bit down on it, hard, taking a long breath with his eyes closed. It was in the past , he told himself. In the past. When he opened his eyes, and looked back at her, he saw her searching his face with her shrewd gaze, and knew that she knew him then: she had seen the pause as he wandered through another time and place, reliving something that she couldn't comprehend. She'd smiled at him, her face touched with sorrow until they'd said their goodbyes, and she'd looked away.
He wasn't telling MacMillan any of that.
Oh sure. They'll give the statutory required lip service to any initiative about better mental health between the boys, but mark my words: Angus will can anyone who shows a moment of what he considers weakness. He considers it a moral defect of character. Fucking Calvinist bastard.
He imagined her next to him there, slouched against the side of the office block, staring out through the trees and over the grass to the hangers beyond. He knew that she wasn't really there . That she was the manifestation his own frustration with the system reflected back at him, but when she said it, it seemed easier to bear somehow.
He slumped back, resting the flat of his foot against the wall, and lit up.
"Too right, though" He said, shaking his head.
"What's too right?"
MacTavish jerked upright at the sudden sound, startled to find that Price had rounded the corner whilst he'd been daydreaming.
"Uh…" MacTavish stammered, feeling his face flush under the sudden scrutiny. He floundered for something to say. "... I was just thinking that I was...reading the paper this morning, and my horoscope said I was going to get some unexpected news." He Price gave a sheepish grin.
Price raised his eyebrows, looking at MacTavish as if he was crazy. "Oh right? You go in for that, do you?"
"No. It was just there, and it caught my eye. I'd forgotten about it until now. Just thought it was kind of funny…" He tailed off, seeing Price's expression "Anyway, how are things with you?" he asked, brightly.
Price shrugged. "Oh… Keeping myself busy."
He slid a cigar from an elegant silver case and lit up. Both of them looked out through the trees for a few minutes, at the empty apron in front of the hangers shimmering in the haze. The sun was still creeping towards its zenith, the day still heating up. The little cluster of silver birches screened them from the worst of it, letting the breeze through unhindered and creating a small patch of dappled shade. MacTavish looked out over the scorched grass beyond until he could stand the press of the silence no longer. He took a deep breath, and asked "How's Sam?"
Price smiled. "Starting to show now."
"Wow." MacTavish considered this. He had avoided the subject until then, sensing that there was no way to broach it without yanking the ghostly chains of the long-dead Harriet Price, and dredging up all the pain she'd wrought with her spectacular exit from the living world. It had never bothered him up until that moment, but suddenly all the tiptoeing around, walking on eggshells for fear of setting off a landslide of complex, messy emotions disgusted him. He scowled. He was sick of it: the lie of the stiff upper lip, the mask of normality.
He doesn't sleep much.
Fuck it! He thought.
"And how are you.." He gestured into the empty air with his cigar, trying to find the right words and failing. "Uh… coping?"
There was silence, and he worried he'd gone too far until he heard Price sigh.
"I'm alright." he shrugged. "I mean, it's normal to worry about them, in that condition."
"Aye. Natural." MacTavish agreed.
Oh yes! said Vivianne, sarcastically. Normal to bite off all the skin on your fingers?
MacTavish looked at Price's hands, and saw, for the first time, the scabbed and ragged edges of the cuticles, the gnawed skin around the nails. He frowned, wondering if that was new, or if he'd just never noticed it before.
Beside him, Vivianne rolled her eyes. She slumped against the render, looking up at him with a sly smile.
He's always done it. It's part of why you get… antsy before a bad job and you don't know why. He's good at hiding it, because he has to be, but you've seen him pull his gloves off in the heli and gnaw his own flesh raw, even if you didn't notice it at the time.
MacTavish considered this, and knew that she, that he was right. He'd spotted it subconsciously before, but somehow he'd never mentally made the connection until now.
Price inhaled deeply, and for a moment MacTavish though he would go on, but instead he jerked his head towards the space beyond the trees.
"Here comes trouble." he said, with a snort.
MacTavish looked up to see two men taking a shortcut from the road, cutting across the grass towards them. He smiled, recognising the larger of the two as Sammi, a Fijian giant, who, like Riley, had been on the edge of MacTavish's social circle before his deployment. He spotted MacTavish and grinned, swerving off his trajectory to grab MacTavish's extended hand and crush him in a bear-like embrace.
"How the fuck have you been?" he demanded.
"Been through the wringer, but I'm back on my feet." MacTavish opened his arms wide, presenting himself for inspection.
"Good stuff!" said Sammi. He turned to the man he'd been accompanying. "Hey, Sundance. You remember Soap?"
Sundance looked MacTavish up and down with a slow, measured stare. Unlike Sammi, both a competent soldier and mobile roadblock in one, Sundance could have taken up an observation post as a scarecrow without arousing any suspicion. Where Sammi's uniform strained around his massive bulk, Sundance's gaped and sagged around his stick-like frame. MacTavish knew it was an illusion, that packed into his ripcord muscles was enough strength to haul his own bodyweight in supplies across the Hindu Kush.
"Aye. I mind him." said Sundance, coolly.
MacTavish remembered him dimly, as a figure that always seemed to be on the perimeter of every conversation, who mysteriously found his way into every event of note, invited or not. MacTavish had been in quiet conversation more than once when he felt the strange prickling feeling of being watched and turned to find that Sundance had appeared, cat-like to perch nearby, his ears attuned into the private conversation. MacTavish guessed that was how he was always in the know, always ready to dispense some hearsay he'd caught wind of, and then watch the fall out, the laughter visible in the mad light of his eyes.
He tried to think, as he watched as Sundance hand Price a clipboard, where he'd heard the name recently, but it escaped him. Sundance rattled off something in his impenetrable, rapid-fire Geordie that MacTavish stood too far away to make out. Price laughed and nodded. He flicked through the sheets before signing where he was instructed.
Sammi was speaking, and MacTavish grunted absentmindedly as he watched the clipboard change hands again. Sundance began to saunter over, but he stopped short, staring past them for a few moments and giving a low, appreciative whistle.
MacTavish looked round and saw a lone figure striding over the road, a bouquet of red roses cradled in her arm. The large, floppy black straw hat obscured the face, until she glanced round, but even with sunglasses covering half her face, he recognised Vivianne Bradley immmediately, and his heart clenched in his chest.
"The widow swanky." said Sundance. "Coming to pay her respects." He snickered.
The shock of seeing the real Vivianne had sent an electric surge punching out of his stomach and crackling through every nerve in his body. In its wake, a nebulous wash of emotions churned. He was suddenly embarrassed at seeing her in the flesh; it made his little internal fantasy suddenly seem so pathetic, so stupid. He felt a flush of suffocating shame that left him suddenly light-headed, as if, despite the open countryside surrounding him, there just wasn't enough air to breath.
He heard Sundance say something, and then saw him grin, but he couldn't make it out over the rushing of blood in his ears as the feelings inside burned and fused within him, They were laughing at her, he realised. Mocking her.
"What did you just say?" MacTavish snapped.
Sundance went silent. He looked at MacTavish, a confused frown on his face, and then his eyes narrowed. For a moment his eyes searched MacTavish's face, sizing him up. "What's it to you?" he sneered. Then, before MacTavish could reply, his face broke into a wide, malicious grin and he spoke again "Ah. Canny lad's got his eye on a prize."
"Fuck you." snapped MacTavish. He threw the half-finished cigar aside, and advanced on Sundance, who regarded his bristling approach with bored insouciance. "I watched Gareth Bradley die." snarled MacTavish, his voice low and dangerous. His blood pounded in his ears, a wild righteous indignation burnned in his belly. He squared up to Sundance, well into his personal space, forcing him back. He jabbed him, hard in the chest with a pointed finger. "I'm not going to stand here and listen to you disrespect the woman he loved."
"Oi. Leave it, lads." said Price.
The sound of his voice sobered MacTavish instantly, and he paused, his hand frozen in the air, about to fly forward into a sharp shove that would send Sundace stumbling. The two of them stared at each other, Sundance with barely concealed derision and MacTavish with incandescent rage. Eventually, Sundance rolled his eyes to look at Sammi, and then, glanced back at MacTavish, a broad, smug grin on his face. "Come on, lad." Sundance jerked his head back into the direction of the offices. "We've got shit to be doing."
MacTavish watched them go. He turned to Price, who had gone back to quietly smoking, lazily watching the road beyond the trees, at the disappearing form of Vivianne as she worked her way to the clocktower. "You just going to let him carry on like that?" asked MacTavish.
Price shrugged. "I'm sure her ladyship can take care of herself."
MacTavish stared at him, slack-jawed with disbelief. "Are you serious? I thought we looked after our own."
But Price just exhaled a long, smokey breath, and looked away.