Belinda Bauer - Blacklands

It wasn’t all good. At first, soldiers meant they moved from sneak-thieving and shoplifting to all-out noisy attacks, using threats, diversionary tactics, and confusion to cover their actions. Military strategy, they learned to call it.

There was a hiccup in their game when they found a dull black pistol in a box in the shed. It had MADE IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA down one side with the letters CZ inside a circle at either end of that. It was dirty and scratched and was the most beautiful thing either of them had ever encountered. For a heady six hours, Mark and Gary Lumsden held each other hostage, gunned each other down, pressed bruising rings into each other’s temples and backs with the muzzle of the pistol in a barely suppressed excitement of violence.

Then their father caught them with it and beat them both black and blue.

Mark had no ambition anyway and the beating laid to rest any daring he possessed regarding the CZ, but slowly—with the memory of the heavy pistol in his small hands always fresh—Gary started to aspire to a gun.

A big gun.

A gun he could call his own. A gun he would not even have to steal. A gun he could—possibly—fire at real people with minimal repercussions.

The British Army beckoned loudly, and Gary Lumsden was far from deaf.

He picked up leaflets, he called Freephone numbers; he learned that a criminal record would bar him from recruitment—and he cleaned up his act.

For seven years Gary Lumsden had talked and dreamed of little other than achieving that gun. He joined the army cadets and was the only boy who attended every week, come rain or shine. Intellect that had not been exercised in English or history classes was suddenly stretched by signals, rule books, drill patterns, boot polishing, and uniform pressing. He hated it all, but every shined button, every measured turnup, every jealous insult hurled by other blue-eyed boys on the estate—each brought him a few seconds closer to the gun.

And everything he’d been through—the pain, the hard work, the humiliation, the fear, the poverty—everything had become worth it the second he pulled that trigger and felt the rush of holding death in his hands.

Although his turn to shoot was over for now, Gary Lumsden did not join his mates in shuffling into a more comfortable position on the wet grass, or in turning to watch his fanned-out companions pull their own triggers.

Instead, he drew another bead on his target and relaxed his breathing. His finger hardened on the trigger and—with difficulty—he took it away entirely, fearing a reflexive squeeze that would mean an unauthorized discharge of his weapon and all kinds of shit pouring down on his head once they were back in Plymouth.

He lined his sights up with one of the four small targets on the card, knowing he could hit it, waiting, waiting for his turn to come round again.

A crack, a zing, and scattered laughter to his left meant someone had hit something so off target that it merited derision. Gary Lumsden didn’t bother taking his eye off his card. Both eyes open—the way they’d been taught. Ignoring the left, using the right.

Something moved in his blurred eye’s vision. Lumsden refocused and saw a man walking across the firing range—a long way behind the targets, maybe a quarter of a mile away, heading north.

Lumsden frowned, lifted his head minutely, and glanced left and right to see whether anyone else had spotted the man. His nearest colleague, Private Hall, was twenty yards to his right, facing his own target, so he was turned slightly away from Lumsden. Hall was black, which meant he suffered at the hands of the bigots in the platoon. To his left he could see only the boots and wet camouflage fatigues of Private Gordon, who had red hair and so suffered at the hands of pretty much everyone else. Neither was looking towards the man.

Lumsden swung his SA80 so he could look at the man through the sights, but even then he was too far away to fill them. The man was walking but didn’t look like a walker. Lumsden could see no stick, no backpack. Instead the man was carrying what looked like a plastic bag! Like he’d just popped down to Tesco’s! The man didn’t even have a waterproof jacket on—just a shirt that looked blue from this distance, and jeans. Jeans were the worst thing a walker could wear. Hot in the sun and cold, heavy and slow to dry in the much more frequent mist and rain. It confirmed Lumsden’s first opinion that the man was out of his depth on the moor. For a start, he couldn’t have checked the firing notices that were bread and butter to every experienced walker on Dartmoor. With a single call on their mobile phones they could find out when live firing was taking place on the ranges that covered the northeast quadrant of the moor. This man couldn’t have checked. And if he’d seen the red and white warning signs, then he’d either ignored them or been stupid enough to cross them into the Danger Range.

Private Lumsden’s finger slid gently back over the trigger of his own personal SA80A2.

The guy was just asking to get hit by a stray bullet. Or a not-so-stray one.

Lumsden followed the man’s progress under the crosshairs, his hands steady, his breathing calm.

If he were to pull the trigger now, he might even hit him, he realized with a thrill. He wasn’t going to shoot, but the sensation of holding the man in his sights while the cold steel warmed itself under his finger was almost dizzying.

Off to his left, another crack and he heard Private Knox say “Fuck” quite loudly, but he didn’t flicker for a moment.

Every cell of his body was focused on the walker. Every ounce of his self-control kept his finger from squeezing the trigger the way it wanted to.

Discharging a round without authority was serious trouble. Discharging it in the direction of another person outside a war situation was grounds for court-martial. Deliberately firing on a civilian out for a stroll on Dartmoor would almost certainly mean prison. And he’d battled so hard and so long not to follow his father and Mark down that road. There was no way he was going to blow it now—not now he’d finally got the gun.

Lumsden sighed inwardly—to sigh outwardly would have made his aim waver.

Four hundred yards. That was the range of his weapon. The walker was probably beyond that. Despite the ease with which he held the man in his sights, Lumsden knew that the chances of hitting him, if he were to fire, were slim. Although the weather was good by Dartmoor standards, there was rarely less than a stiff breeze to contend with. After four hundred yards, the round would begin to lose thrust, lose direction, become unpredictable.

The man disappeared behind some rocks and Lumsden gently moved his gun to anticipate his reappearance, feeling another thrill as the man walked straight back into his sights.

He was approaching a small tor about fifty yards ahead of him. If he reached it, Lumsden would lose him.

A sense of urgency made his finger tighten on the trigger and he had to make a conscious effort to relax it again. His breath hissed between his ears and, although the platoon were still firing at their targets, the shots sounded thick and distant to him.

Lumsden admired his own self-control. He was still young, but the basic training had knocked the remaining child clean out of him, hardened him up, shaped him into a man. He knew he was already a better person than his father or brother or any of his half brothers would ever be.

Here in his hands he held the power of life and death. Gary Lumsden, the boy, would have fired; Private Gary Lumsden, the soldier, was tougher than that. He felt an unaccustomed swell of pride.

The man walked on, head down, through a patch of sunlight and Gary Lumsden held him in his sights, steady and careful. The tor was approaching, the kill shot would be lost, but it wasn’t about the kill shot, he told himself; it was about being in control, doing the right thing, growing up and being a man.