Gerald Seymour - Beyond Recall

Gaz lived with jargon, the script of the Special Reconnaissance Regiment unit which he served with, and was regarded – he acknowledged it, but humbly – as one of the best at Close Target Reconnaissance. It was about a camera battery. Too much of his work was determined by the miniaturisation of batteries, how long they would last, and how often the bloody things needed replacing. To get good quality pictures beamed back to the FOB required a battery capacity that could not be sustained if the camera and its lens were housed in minimum space: this one was in a hollowed-out breeze-block. Not ideal, the best was not often the easiest. He rated the combat as seven, perhaps eight, miles down the road, and thought there might be mortars in use or small calibre artillery, but vicious in intensity, was unsettled by it.

He had walked in through darkness, the wind stinging dirt against his body. The others would by now have been on the far side of the village, south of it and to the west. The camera was built into a low wall, once the base of a superstructure beside the main highway where someone had probably tried to set up a soft drinks stop. Perhaps they had also sold fruit or vegetables or bottled water, or fags; the war would have killed off the chance of a budding entrepreneur making it rich. The road bypassed two indistinct front lines – a combat no-man’s land. Seemed months since he had been here to extract a single breeze-block and return it to the Base, since the technicians had worked on the colour and the texture of the concrete dust, since the camera had been mounted to keep watch on the road. They – staff and intelligence back at the Base – wanted warning of any probing advance by the Iranians up the road because this was their sector. Gaz came every two or three weeks. He had modified and deepened his hide and made it, admitted with a suspicion of pride, a work of art: his art was that of the Special Reconnaissance Regiment. Sometimes the hit men, the Hereford gun club, drove them in but more usually the helicopters did the lift and left them to walk the final leg. Always in darkness and weather not negotiable. He would arrive during the night, lie up for the day, then go forward when the sun had sunk beyond the village, do the work and then get the hell out, taking everything that had been in the hide; including his waste and his food wrapping. Four pick-ups, lights off, swept off the main highway and careered down the sloping track towards the village. The dogs barked and charged at the wheels.

The mission to the village, the change of batteries and the collection of the camera images, had become almost routine…

Also routine would be the presence of the girl, and her goats and her dogs. Not that they spoke, or touched, and barely made eye contact. Everything he knew about the girl was listed in the debrief sessions back at the FOB. Twice he had moved the hide but she had come looking for him and the goats had always gathered close and grunted and he had caught the merriment in her grin. It had seemed easier to move back to his first hide, the best, and allow the goats to forage near him, and hear her plaintive songs and know that the dogs would guard her with their lives. At that distance, less than a quarter of a mile and with the spreading light helping him, he saw the village youths as they cut the pick-ups’ engines, jump out and scurry into doorways. Easy enough for Gaz to believe that they’d been down the road to the Iranian camp and had shot it up and had a fun deal out of the experience, then had made it back, and the follow-up firing that came after them would have been random and not aimed and frustrated. It was bad news, like tugging at an elderly lion’s tail and believing the beast too moth-eaten and toothless to respond. Bad news and likely to be a bad mistake. The gunfire was closer, he was sure of it. He had the new and fully charged battery in his Bergen bag and enough water and dried food to see him through the day, and had the panic tit… But the dogs had gone quiet and the firing of the mortars and artillery still seemed far back. It was unusual for Gaz to feel apprehension and he hoped to shrug out of it. The wind steadily rose and blew eddies of sand and grit.

It was because of the storm. It was better for Gaz since he had come to the island than it had been before. The place he had fled to was a refuge, almost.

The force of the changed weather would not reach Westray for three or four days but the advance warnings were already over the bared hillsides, where sheep and cattle fed, and the long stone walls that would have broken the backs of the builders more than a century before. Where washing was hung out, shirts and underclothes, sheets and towels, flying horizontally, and the singing had started in the overhead cables.

A psychiatrist, hired for him by the unit, had said that the black dog days were pretty much inevitable. Powerful medication might block their access to his mind, but would send him to a state of vegetative collapse. Did he want that? Or would he prefer to live with the demons? He’d refused the medication and the next best thing that the psychiatrist had offered was long-distance flight; to head away to a place that was remote, where his history was not known, somewhere he could bury the hours of the day in agricultural and handyman work. He had hit a girl. The girl, Debbie, had thought they were an item, a relationship developing faster in her mind while he was on deployment than he had reckoned for. A nice enough girl and thinking him a catch; pressure building on him but unable to talk about the ‘what’ and the ‘where’ of his work, and memories spiking in his mind, and her not understanding. Had hit her in the face, sobbing as he did so, and it was a piece of luck that he had not broken the bridge of her nose and left her disfigured: if he had, it would likely have been a prison sentence… would have been shoved into a closed van, put in the wire cage and off through the gates and behind the high wall, and would have joined the scores of former servicemen for whom black dog days were classified as post-traumatic stress disorder. The unit, his former home and his only surviving family, had pushed for a psychiatrist to speak for him, an attractive woman with a winning smile and skilled at shifting the magistrate’s prejudices. He should go away. He should grab the chance. He should find a place where stress did not eat at him day and night. On her advice he had made a quite sincere apology to the girl from the dock, and had travelled to the far north and had immersed himself in gardening work and minor property repairs and dog walking… but it came on bad when the storm winds blew.

He was slumped on his spade, vulnerable and weak, a shadow of what he had been. The storm made chimes of memory ring in his head, hard enough to split his skull apart. Stress was to be avoided, the psychiatrist had said and smacked a fist into the palm of her other hand, avoided like the plague. He should run from stress, she’d said, not permit it to confront him. If he were free of it for a long time, years not months, then there was a chance he could put the experience behind him, just a chance.

In her cell block, she was ticking off the days. Natacha had only those left to serve that could be counted on the fingers of one hand. She wore a soiled tunic, and a drab prison skirt. She was filthy from dirt and sweat and she kept her hair hidden in a light wool cap.

She had been given a four-month sentence, all of it to be served in the bleak red brick prison in old Murmansk. Probably one of the first buildings put up in the city on the inlet to the west of the Kola peninsula, the extreme north-west of the Russian land mass. The cell stank of the urine and faeces and period blood of the five women she shared it with. There was a murderess and a brothel owner who had refused to pay a cop-bribe, a seller of heroin powder, and a thief who had burgled her way into foreigners’ Radisson hotel rooms in the centre of the city, and there was a girl similar in appearance to herself who had painted slogans denouncing the President as a thief. Natacha had been told often in the last week that she would be missed… She was slight, bony, with a flat chest and a flat stomach, and she might have a dose of HIV or might not but had not bothered to be checked. She would be missed because she possessed a smile that few models on the cover pages of fashion magazines could match, and with the smile she made them laugh. She had a mimic’s eye for detail and screeches of laughter came from their cell when she did her impersonation of key members of the prison staff, and she was, in a quiet way, anarchic in her sense of defiance: not political but merely to point up the pompous stupidity of the rule book.