Andrew O'Hagan - The Illuminations

Life isn’t a photograph, Harry.

Isn’t it, darling?

They walked further down the pier and stopped to look back at the tower and the lights. Luke could see blue reflected light on the ridges of the sea. A man was playing a tin guitar next to one of the sweet kiosks and Anne pointed to him as they passed and squeezed Luke’s arm. ‘We used to go and see all the groups that played,’ she said. ‘Those four boys with the haircuts. The drummer was nothing to look at.’

‘Did you go to the pubs?’

‘Harry loved the bars,’ she said. ‘One of them used to put a monkey on the counter and you’d feed it nuts.’

They sat quietly watching the lights.

‘Do you want chips?’ Luke said.

She nodded.

He brought them back and they sat down on one of the white iron benches. Up on the promenade a tram was passing encased in neon and it was playing the kind of tune you used to hear on the radio. She didn’t look up and Luke could see she was all about the chips. With the colours around them and bulbs lit for miles up the coast, Luke wondered if Blackpool could be seen that night from the moon. A minute later the fireworks burst over the Irish Sea. She looked up, laughed again. Luke felt himself melting away, a snowman on the bench, sitting in for someone else. There was nothing beside her but the essence of Harry.

He breathed out. She would never know. But he’d learned from the letters that they weren’t married and that she had spent

many of her holidays waiting for him. Harry Blake was married to another woman and they had three children and he lived with them in a house in Manchester. All the stories she built around him came from a hope she had, a dream she made, but it was really an affair that proved impossible. He only came to the bedsit when it suited him. It then occurred to Luke, sitting on the bench amid the lights and the smell of vinegar, that the letters had stopped when Anne was pregnant with his mother. Harry Blake, his grandfather, the great Harry, had left her in the lurch, and that was the thing she could never say.

BOSSA NOVA

Anne wanted to remain in the bar downstairs with Sheila’s family. She wanted to ask Luke if that would be all right, but instead she just smiled at the mirror and walked down the hall while he was hanging up the coats. They were about to go upstairs when Sheila emerged and took Anne’s hand and said she was having none of it. ‘We’re a long time dead, aren’t we, Mrs Blake? Come into the lounge and have a glass with the girls.’

Anne sat with a vodka and tonic. The bubbles were nice and she liked the voices of the people. Sheila’s family were all good at laughing and they sat at a round table, balloons taped to the wallpaper, while a man played an electronic keyboard. Anne said: ‘Bossa Nova.’ Then she stared at the beer mats, wondering if Harry would know where to find her. Behind the bar was a popular print of a crying boy and Anne fixed her eyes on it and felt it was a cold winter painting like ones of New York. Luke asked Sheila whether she’d mind if he went out for a couple of hours.

‘Of course, love! Away you go and enjoy yourself.’ She gave him a shove and took a gulp from her glass. ‘A young man like you should be out causing a rumpus on a night like this.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Away!’ she said. ‘I’ll make up your bed in the darkroom and you can just climb in later. Away and do your thing. You don’t have to pass the evening with blob-mouths like us! We’ll look after Mrs Blake and get her up to bed.’ He looked at Anne and actually saw her contentment, her sweet attention, float in the air of the room without quite landing anywhere.

‘It’s nice here, isn’t it?’ she said.

SPROGS

Flannigan was standing in the Washington. He’s one of those guys who knows how to be good-looking as he waits at a bar. It’s the stance, the confidence, the all-round readiness with the glad-eye and the lip. Luke stood at the door and shook his head at the whole performance. ‘Is that an AK-47 in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?’

‘Hey, dickwad,’ Flannigan said, going for the shoulder hug. ‘You’re even uglier than you were in the sandpit, Captain. How’s it shakin’? And I thought you only went to the classy places.’

‘I do. This is old school.’

‘It might be old school but it’s full of losers. Look at the state of that fucken disaster over there.’ He pointed into the corner of the pub where Private Dooley stood grinning by the jukebox.

‘Of all the chairborne motherfuckers in the history of the British army, if it isn’t our own Captain Campbell.’

Luke walked up to him. ‘Fuck sake, Doosh,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know you were coming.’

‘No. We kept it on the down low. I only emerge from the chat-room when I know the real Neanderthals are coming out. So when he told me it was Blackpool, I said “What! Awesome. This boy’s getting on the first Ryanair out of here.” So what you drinking, you lightweight?’

He ordered three pints. Three whiskies.

‘I’m insisting on Irish,’ Dooley said at the bar. ‘None of your fucken sheep-shagging Highland cheeky water tonight.’

‘Listen, dude,’ Luke said. ‘I know you live on the other side of refinement, but everybody knows Scotch whisky is unsurpassed, so suck it up, bitch.’

Flannigan laughed and nodded to Dooley. ‘Oh, we’ve missed the old brain-box, haven’t we, Doosh?’

‘Fucken A,’ Dooley said. ‘You’ve left us with the fucken horror-pigs, man. I’m talking shite hawks.’

‘The other side of refinement!’ Flannigan said. ‘You crack me up, Jimmy-Jimmy. It’s all tossers in the platoon now. We left all the education in a pool of piss in Kajaki. Fucken lady-boys giving it Super Mario on their da’s old mobile. I’m telling you. Boys about thirteen they’re sending us. Miserable as fuck at the base since you and the major fucked off to join Destiny’s Child or wherever the fuck you’ve been.’

Luke noticed Flannigan was now wearing a fancy watch, the same as Dooley. They clinked pints. ‘Get your big fat gypsy lips around that, Dooley,’ Flannigan said. Dooley drank then rolled up his sleeve and revealed a new tattoo. He said he and Flannigan and Lennox got them in Dubai on the way back and it was the most painful one he ever got. Luke leaned in

and Flannigan also rolled up his sleeve. It wasn’t a very typical tattoo, but it was identical on each of them: a short ridge of mountains and a bird above the summit with extended wings, the bird showering down heavenly light and the words ‘Free Afghanistan’. Luke wondered if everything in life was about the image you were left with. Nothing might change on the ground but the movie could be made and the pics could whizz into cyberspace. The turbines at Kajaki would never leave their wrappings but these young men would carry these pictures to their graves.

‘Very nice,’ he said.

‘Here’s to it,’ Flannigan said, lifting his glass. ‘And good riddance to all the bullshit.’ They battered through several rounds, talking about the regiment and what they’d been doing since the tour. They all avoided it for a while and then the business of Scullion came up.

‘I think he was a mess going into it,’ Flannigan said. ‘Like, fucken totalled in the brain. He gave Rashid the baton and that guy was one turncoat motherfucker from the off. You could see it in his one good eye: ANA my arse, he was Terry, bitch, and riding hard for the biff, bang, pow. Remember? Remember his face all kissy to the major, but underneath, man, he was plotting the whole time to fuck us right up. Rashid, man: to him it was open mic night at the Hotel Taliban. It was, as well. And he threw the whole fucken section into the mosh-pit.’