Jill McGivering - The Last Kestrel

The C-130 was a whale of an aircraft. It rattled and groaned as it flew them over the desert towards the base. The vibrations trembled through her bones as she sat, strapped in place against the aircraft’s outer shell, against a climbing frame of military webbing. The army-issue earplugs had moulded themselves to the inside of her ears, but the noise was still deafening. Too loud to breathe.

All along the edge of the aircraft and down its central spine, sharing a running canvas seat, young soldiers were dozing, their heads lolling forward against their chests. They were solid and thick limbed, prickling with kit, guns upright between their thighs. The low military lights in the ceiling were painting them a ghoulish underwater green, sickly as corpses. She looked down the row of faces. They were hard jawed with sharp haircuts, their skin slackened by sleep, iPods in their ears. The more wars she covered, the younger they got. It was airless. Her muscles were tense with apprehension. She shifted her weight, wiped her forehead.

The two young air crew at the rear unbuckled their lap-belts, clipped on safety lines and started to move round the aircraft, signalling to each other, positioning loads and preparing for landing. The lumbering transport plane slid to one side, then dropped.

She thought of the desert below, endlessly flat and barren and peppered with stones. It would be black there now but when she closed her eyes, she saw it as she remembered it, in daylight, a scarred land, the colour of grey-brown nothingness, a land flayed to its skeleton. Jagged ridges of mountains rising, sharp with shadows and the contours of vast bite marks gouged out of the earth. The only signs of human life were the occasional stick figures of boys, herding goats, and the square compounds of weatherworn houses, their mud walls rubbed smooth like wave-lapped sandcastles, surviving in the middle of all this lifelessness. The only shade was cast by the broad silhouette of the aircraft, running along beneath them, darkening the earth below.

There was a mechanical shudder as the back of the aircraft cranked open, showing dirty night sky. The smell of dust filled her nostrils as it rushed in, coating everything like softly falling brown snow. They were almost down.

As they landed, the dirt rose in clouds, filling the air with fine sand. She ran down the back ramp in sequence, clumsy with the weight of the rucksack on her back and the beetle-case of her flak jacket, into the hot scour of the blast from the aircraft. She followed the dark shape of the young soldier ahead of her, through the swirling sandstorm, over shifting pebbles, to the wire fence that signalled the outer edge of the base.

A young sergeant with a clipboard led her through the warren of structures. Past the NAAFI store where knots of soldiers were sitting idly at Formica tables on a wooden porch, nursing cups of bad coffee. Past the deserted cookhouse and the giant tents, with their male and female ablution blocks, to a small accommodation tent where they’d found her a berth. He unzipped the heavy canvas outer flap and held it for her as she ducked through, her back aching from the rucksack and the cramped journey.

‘Scoff from seven to eight tomorrow,’ he whispered. ‘You’ll find the cookhouse?’

The tent was dark. She ran a torch beam along the row of green canvas camp beds to find the only one without bedding, and dropped her rucksack by it. Dark sleeping-bag caterpillars lay on most of the others. She looked quickly over the spaces between the beds, at the sand-coloured clothes-tidies hanging down from the ceiling, neatly piled with socks and shirts and books. At the rows of flip-flops, trainers and army boots tucked below. The camp bed next to hers, against the end wall, had a leaning cork board, crammed with snapshots of party groups, young women with arms round each other’s shoulders, sticking out tongues, pulling faces, raising bottles of beer to the camera. They were framed by a mess of greetings cards of cartoon bears and kittens and dogs and a giant cut-out heart, emblazoned with the words: Luv ya loads!

The washing line that ran across the back of the tent was strewn with stiffly dried pink and green towels and camouflage trousers. She sat for a moment on the edge of the bed, aware of the heaviness in her limbs. I wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in the army, she thought, looking round. Far too soft. And far too rebellious.

The night air was heavy with stale sweat, overlaid with the perfume of cheap talcum powder and soft with female breathing. The sudden roar of an aircraft engine cut through from outside. She listened, trying to identify it as the sound peaked, then faded away into the night. She nodded to herself. Despite all the discomfort and danger, war zones made her feel more fully alive than any other place she knew.

She dug out her towel and wash-bag and lit a path by torch to the ablution block, where she showered off the dust in a stainless-steel cubicle, punching the valve repeatedly for spurts of lukewarm water to rinse herself off. Army life. She looked at herself in the mirror as she towelled herself dry, taking in the slackness of her skin. One of these days, she thought, I’ll be too old for this. But not quite yet.

Her cot would be stiff and uncomfortable, she knew. But she was exhausted. She’d sleep.

At breakfast the next day, she sat at the end of a trestle table in the cookhouse, absorbing the clatter and chat of the soldiers around her and sawing with a plastic knife at a piece of bacon in a mess of cooling baked beans. Printed notices were stuck to the inner wall of the tent with tape. ‘Your Mother doesn’t work here. Clean up after yourself.’ Beneath it was a list of ‘Rules of the Cookhouse’ in smaller print. She thought of Jalil, wondering if he’d eaten here, what he’d made of life with the British army. It was still hard to believe she’d never see him again.

‘Ellen?’

She looked up.

‘Heard you were coming. You just in?’

John from The Times . She feigned a smile. He was already threading his thick legs through the gap between the chair and the table, dropping his plastic tray onto the table top. It was piled with food.

He looked smug, appraising her instinctively like a circling, sniffing dog.

‘How long you here for?’ His breath smelt sour with hunger. He tore open his plastic sachet of a napkin and plastic cutlery and fell on his breakfast, a mingling mush of hash browns, scrambled eggs, sausages and bacon.

‘A week or so,’ she said. He’d put on weight. He was starting to look middle-aged. She wondered if he were thinking the same about her. They were both the wrong side of forty. The hair at his temples was flecked with grey. The start of a double chin was showing in the slackness of his jaw. ‘You?’

He was breaking a bread roll in his broad fingers, smearing it liberally with half-melted butter, inserting a sausage. His nose and cheekbones were pink with sunburn, his lips chapped.

‘Same. Off to Lamesh today. If there’s a place on the helo.’ He started to chew, spilling breadcrumbs.

Helo. Just say helicopter, for pity’s sake. John was one of those self-important war correspondents who thought they were really soldiers.

‘Saw you were in Iraq last month.’ He was stuffing the bread and sausage into his mouth. ‘You get up to the north?’

She shook her head. ‘Just Basra. You?’

‘All over.’ He swilled down a paper cup of orange juice. ‘Bloody hairy.’

She ripped open a plastic portion of margarine and spread it on a round of toast, the plastic knife grating like a washboard. ‘How’s it been here?’

He spoke and chewed at the same time, swallowing his food in gulps as if he expected to be summoned to breaking news at any moment. ‘Pretty good.’ He nodded at her. ‘Lots of bang-bang.’