It was a lot colder once we got into the mountains.
We’ve already lost access to the stretch of water behind us, so it’s a total guess as to whether or not we’ll actually get the right supplies, or if we’ll have to wait for some daring old lunatic to dash through the wasteland that surrounds us to the South. I imagine him drunk and distasteful and stinking like dried-out fish, and if we saw him we’d all be glad, but he never arrives.
I don’t use that word lightly, either, ‘wasteland’. The primary feature of this place, where we’re trapped—between their side, their guns, and the sea—is that, aside from these mountains, these horrific shoulders of rock where we’re told to stay put, there is absolutely nothing here.
It doesn’t give us anywhere, really, to hide.
Since we realised that, and since they keep bombing the strait behind us—about thirteen miles behind—we’ve been trapped here, and I’m really starting to wonder if we’ll ever make it off this hill, and if we do, under what circumstances.
We’re reasonably sheltered on one side of the hill, a line of defence that runs all the way down into the glen past us, but we don’t get much time there, if any. So here I am with my elbows soaked through, as I crouch in a spot of heather and try to get an idea of what’s going on below.
They’ve been awfully quiet, all things considered. I adjust my position—I can’t help it, my leg’s gone numb—and I get that familiar, pinprick feeling that I’m being watched, as if someone’s brought out a pair of binoculars and is now sketching something like co-ordinates on a map I’ll never see. You can’t let them know you feel it. But like I said, they’ve left us alone, for now.
I’m not sure why. They’ve clearly got the supplies for it: we heard them drawing up something very heavy along the only road out of here—the road they’ve got surrounded.
Maybe someone’s got a very good reason for watching a few bored soldiers on a hillside, but if it’s my own actions they’ve got their eyes on, they’ll be disappointed. Even on a good day, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.
After we lost that town, there were only a few of us that survived. Somehow the right people managed to find us, and so we got fed, clothed, driven away from what was left of it, and dragged into the real army to make sure people like us (their words, not mine) weren’t going to waste somewhere else.
They made it sound like it was a good thing we hung on for so long.
We’re out on the west coast now, well up into the mountains, and somewhat suffering for it: the weather has turned on us early this winter, and although it’s not even mid-October, we already know it’s going to be a bad one.
I sense movement behind me on the heather. It’s only Bennett, so with regret, I hastily put away my knife. ‘What do you want’, I want to snap at him, but he’ll keep me out here for good if I do that, so I greet him in the usual gritted way, partly because of how cold it is, and turn my attention back down the hill so he sees I’m actually doing something.
Bennett sneaks in beside me, with the air of it being an all-boys overnight camp and here he was, stealing into safety with a midnight snack. “It’s going to get very busy,” he advises quietly, looking right along the road below and out to the bog-land on the other side. Apparently, there was quite a bit of fighting before we got pushed back towards this hill, and all the bodies sank into the bog. I don’t suppose they’ll dig them up any time soon.
Bennett is part of the older crowd. Apparently, he was an infantry officer out in Afghanistan all those years back, and I’d certainly believe it: he keeps bringing up stories, leaving out most of it, of course, but it’s like someone has trusted you with the details of their long-lost love while you’re stuck around an open fire and can’t leave because you’d be spoiling the mood. The rest of his personality is something I don’t particularly care for: the guy clearly had a good education (one of those people who think that being infuriatingly calm in all circumstances is the pinnacle of leadership), and played ‘rugger’ or something of the like, and now he walks around like a perpetual royal on the verge of getting interviewed on the recent cricket scores—if this was back in the real world, he’d have a well-versed, thoroughly well-presented profile on LinkedIn.
He might remind you, however implicitly, that he’s very down to earth. Perhaps that’s why he tells us so many stories about drinking out of a petrol can, or why he bothers to spend any time with us at all.
I catch myself laughing at his choice of words. “Busy, eh?”
Even though their side have been concentrating together (it’s obvious, at this point) in some kind of hungry countdown before the inevitable, there’s nothing else alive as far as the eye can see.
He doesn’t respond to this, and presses on as if he’s in need of delivering a message in a great hurry. His outright sincerity at times makes him hard to hate, and equally hard to like. I don’t know why he seems so invested in all this, as if he’s got it all figured out, as if he’s the only one who doesn’t dread staying in this place any longer than we have to, and that he’s got plans to settle down here, as is, if necessary.
If he’s lying, he’s fucking brilliant at it. “We’ll get started at six o’clock, and once our boys have caused a bit of a mess, we’ll get on with what we agreed last night, alright? How are you doing for supplies?”
Like he gives a shit, I scoff in my head. ‘Last night’, like we’re actually a team. That was a fun trip, alright, all the way back in that empty cottage they now keep for a headquarters of some sort, and being sent back in the dark by myself to relay it to everyone else, having to dodge the rabbit holes in the peat and pray I didn’t break both ankles by the time I got back here, well into the early hours and only lucky that this lot downhill didn’t spot me swapping places with the last guy until I was already there. Bennett didn’t even bribe me with any food, never mind alcohol, for my troubles, either—because they didn’t have any—which is the reason I know we’re truly done for. If they can’t even spare a biscuit or two, it means we’re properly under, and from what I overheard in that cottage (he insists, like any good Englishman, on calling it a ‘bothy’), we’re not likely to get anything up here until the week after next.
It’s at these words, as I pat my pockets and lie to him, telling him I’ve got enough for the damn month if I need it, that I realise we’re not getting swapped out this time. I won’t get back to the relative safety of the other side of the hill: I’m out here until it’s an actual convenience for anyone to replace me. He knows that, and I know that. I shift my sodden elbows in the peat and give him a smile. He usually manages to keep himself relatively clean (with him, I don’t have to suffer through the bouts of aftershave that the other men usually throw on, as if it’s the only thing that will make this life normal), but this morning he stinks of alcohol, as if he’s hurriedly borrowed it from someone—he’d never keep any of his own—and I know it’s because he’s scared.
“I’ll be right ahead, of course,” he says, nodding down at his own position, which is only about ten metres below. If it’s more or less exposed than mine, I can’t really tell from here, and it doesn’t make much of a difference, anyway. “Give me a shout if you need anything.”
Capt. Chris Bennett is the only one I’ve come to really respect since I got here. He might be annoying, but he’s clearly competent, and tries to stick to the rules, even out here where it doesn’t really matter anymore. For that strange reason, I actually quite like him. Our section had a meeting of sorts a little while after I got here, and I watched him listening to them talk away with his eyes shut, the bridge of his nose pinched tightly—apparently, he’s not afraid of looking like a complete prick when someone else is talking, which was a nice surprise. ‘Wanker,’ I want to say (fondly, of course, in a form of farewell as he creeps down the hill without another word) but I keep that sort of thing to myself and stick to the usual routine of silence.
He was one of the ones who looked out for us when we first got here, one of the few who said—quite rightly—that we likely had no business being trained up at all and should be sent off somewhere else to recover. I suppose he’s doing whatever he can, in the meantime.
He doesn’t know about what happened to Emily, but I think he can tell. You don’t get people looking at you like that if they don’t at the very least suspect it. I overheard him once, after we’d had an informal chat. “I think that what I suspected, and what we discussed,” he was saying to some official, who was looking over my file, “is very likely.”
I didn’t get to hear what they were talking about, and nor would I like to. I suppose he thought he was being rather discreet, but it couldn’t be any clearer what he was talking about. I just kept to myself, and continued on back to my group.
He’s moved off now without so much as another wave, without a goodbye, and the sudden absence irritates me enough to distract me from my last, final hour of peace. This is the problem I have with these older ones being so friendly: you know as soon as it’s time to part ways, they’ll shut up all doors, as if a great storm is coming in and they’d better prepare for it, regardless of whether they actually like you or not, and you’ll never speak again.
I don’t want them to fire. I want to stay out here on my own.
***
They do fire, of course. You’d think I’d have learned to expect it by now, but the shocks still manage to throw me off-balance and my eyes feel like they’re about to shake out of my skull, so I grab my helmet and try to sit it out for as long as I can. What I need to do, for my own survival as much as the others, is really think simply, step-by-step, keeping my thoughts as small as I can. It’s the worst thing you can do, I hear Bennett saying, having imagination in places like this. There’s only one thing I have to do after this, and if I can see it clear enough in my head then I don’t need to think about anything else, that I know I will get thrown off if I give any thought to the utter barrage going on around me, and if I do, then I’ll run—or I’ll forget what I’m supposed to do, which is worse.
What scared us the most, out of everything, was when we started to understand what they were saying if they got too near—not in the way you might expect, where someone might dig up some good in all this and say ‘well, it wasn’t all bad, then; you learnt a few words out there’, but in the way that these soldiers were talking the same way we’d seen in films growing up, that we could quite freely match their speech, pattern for pattern, if we liked.
Unfortunately, our discovery meant that things were going to get a lot worse. If you’re looking at it from a numbers perspective, we were already well under requirements even for a stalemate, and now we know the real truth of things, it’s gotten to the point where even the most stubborn of us are terrified that we’re going to lose—and violently, at that. I’ve seen them from my lookout: they’re fit, healthy, and look like they haven’t had a decent swing at things since the war started; you can tell they’re pent-up from the way some of them spring up at any sign of an order, their hard laughter—not from hard experience, as you might think, but from the effort of having all that reckless energy to exert—their ease as they scramble for food, rather than stumble in a long slog of a line as we do, if we’re able to get moving at all. I’ve been watching them jump from one foot to another as they shift forward into position. They’re going to tear us to pieces if they do get their hands on us.
Maybe all this is a ploy, and they’ve got their real soldiers in the back, and they’re just as tired as we are, but it doesn’t look likely: it’s only been about six months for them, and we’ve had the full lot of years to catch up with us; I can already feel it in my face as it drags down at the corners, and I can’t seem to do anything to shift the weight—it sits heavy like mortar on my cheeks, my mouth, my eyes, and I might as well be carved right into the earth.
It rained a couple of nights ago, and even that has had the same effect. My boots are still cold and damp, and even though it’s better to keep them on when it gets like this, I can’t help existing in a half-state of frenzy as I think about tearing them off my feet, and getting towards some real shelter for once. There’s got to be some cottage out here, a real one, some little old granny who’s kept her fire going, who can put all of us up for the night.
The mountain shivers, then settles and turns in response to my dream. If I wasn’t here in a state like this, if it were only the matter of it being some hiking trip, and I was left to my own sorry, soggy devices, I could well convince myself that this was all worth it, that it was actually fun to challenge yourself in weather like this, that I’d have something to properly brag about when I got home. But all I have are my own thoughts, or someone else’s, to keep me going. I’m not out here alone, the fact of which I can’t work out whether or not I despise.
I found myself truly alone on that walk back from the cottage, the bothy. (I hate calling it that. I hate that I’m still here.) For some reason, Bennett wanted me there to hear out what they’ve got planned for the winter, what we’re going to have to do to stick it out. It’s very clear what they’re trying to imply: there is no more support.
Bennett doesn’t seem to care; he can work with this kind of arrangement, and he waves his hand as if these are only details and he can figure them out in the long run. He even pushes once or twice for my input, swings right round to me in front of the others as if I had any authority on it at all. “You’ve got a bit of experience,” he’d said, when I’d arrived a little earlier than everyone else. “I don’t want that to go to waste, not when we’re in the state that we are.” I think he thinks my role in the defence of that fucking town was bigger than it really was. I hate that he trusts me, and I hate that he shows that he trusts me in front of these people.
I have no business being here, and they ought to know it.
The rest of my section are alright. I’m surprised they’ve not been asked to sit in on these meetings ahead of me. I can see why they don’t go to Cat, an ex-shipyard worker whose only job was to let the real workers onto the docks; she’s been up here for a good few months now, and is just as unapproachable as I am. She’s my favourite of the lot, but I don’t talk to her, and she doesn’t talk to me. If we were men we’d call it ‘mutual respect’.
Maybe someone like Christy would be a better choice: he was a mathematician before all this, and a good one, too; it’s just that you wouldn’t expect someone like him to handle a weapon properly, and you’d be absolutely right, in this case. He fumbles with the last bit of his rifle, and announces to nobody in particular that he’s going to clean it again, but can’t seem to get to grips with how to do it.
It’s moments like these where I actually feel sorry for someone like Bennett. I have this idea in my head that he’s gone from a somewhat competent team to cleaning up after a group of kids who can’t do it for themselves, although some of us—Cat—are pushing forty. He really does deserve a better team. I suppose he’s got a family out there somewhere, and they’re probably very proud of him. But here he is, after all that, kneeling in the heather with the rest of us, as if he hasn’t been to the weddings and funerals of those opposite, as if he hasn’t woken up as badly as the rest of us and shared the same food, shaved from the same can of dirty water, laughed his guts out at their strangely familiar ways. Out of everyone, Bennett will know how they talk, how they think, how they fight; he knows them better than any of us—and worst of all, he will know that there’s nothing anybody can do.
***
There’s an image I sometimes see in my head, when the weather’s not too bad and I’m finally able to settle out onto the heather (you’d think the turn in events might make the fighting conditions a little better, but we barely move despite the obvious improvement), that she’s crawling towards me in the heather, settles between my legs as if we’re staring out at the sea, watching the ships come in; I feel the weight of her, a welcome weight, this time; she turns, and I expected it to happen like this, and there’s a gentle warmth I’ve not felt in so long…
It doesn’t matter, of course. I’ll never have it.
We get interrupted by a bit of firing from their side, and hear the jeers that they’d usually save for the likes of a softball game; I have to sort myself out very quickly and get back into the right frame of mind for this shit; it really is frustrating when all you want to do is dream, and they take even that from you.
I try to stop myself, sometimes, from wandering down that street in my mind, but I can’t really help it, and then it always leads to other streets that are horribly familiar: sometimes I’m hanging around there for hours, looking up at each window as I remember it, walking from one kerb to another, even sitting in the middle of that now-deserted road if I have to, knowing what it must have looked like from every pavement corner because I’ve spent so much time there.
They can all tell, I think. There’s a reason I’m so often in my own world, and I don’t think they know exactly what it is, but I’m certain they hate me for it.
There’s a particular type of event, the kind where you arrive once the inevitable is already happening, and that’s where I’m stuck. I don’t even bother to use the same words as my team: I’m sure they’re very happy calling the equipment, the officers, the tactics that they try so fruitlessly to put into place, by the right names, but it all feels so false.
It was Christy, actually, who said it first. “This is the last one,” he muttered, looking up at the sky above, a sky that is supposed to be miserable and yet has turned on us once again, giving the last lot of blue that it can until it goes full into winter, as if it already knows it’s going to betray us. “We’ll get pushed right down to the South, out of the mountains, and that’ll be us finished as a country. They’ll have every major city, then.”
We’re both very quiet. Christy is already skinny, but it’s only recently that I’ve realised he looks physically ill. How the hell is he supposed to do anything if we really have to get up close with these people, when he’s already smaller than me? They’ll destroy him, and it won’t take much to do it.
The only time I’ve seen him in any normal kind of state is when they managed to haul a crate of alcohol up the mountain for the ones who weren’t on duty. He sat there, rocking forward and back over a beer, sitting out on the ledge with a smile on his face; he wouldn’t talk to anybody, even then, and that’s all I ever got to know about Christy beyond his crisp, rheumatic exterior.
He doesn’t say a word as we watch what’s happening below. The plan they talked about last night has gone to shit, and now they seem to have changed their minds about who’s moving forward, or back, and in trying to intervene, Bennet has got knocked off his feet by someone firing at him and completely lost his balance. I bet they’re down there now, having a great laugh, waiting to see if they can send him diving in the other direction. I see him scrabbling around for cover in the wildflowers that pucker out from the side of the hill.
He does manage to drag himself into one of the smaller patches of heather; from our position, we’re still able to see him, although he quite purposefully doesn’t look round. None of those years of cricket did him any good, in the end.
To be fair, he ought to have hidden himself better, but there’s not much you can do in a place like this. We’ve all been able to guess that, basically, if you do get injured out here, that’s the final word and you’re going to have to find some way of accepting it.
They’re making their way up the hill now, and because everyone else has largely gone, they’re able to do it without much pushback from our lot. Even to start with, they never actually tried to run up the slope: all they’ve done is, quite leisurely, at an even pace, taken one foothold at a time, and done it all with the sort of effort you’d expect from a moderately challenging Sunday stroll.
When they get to the same elevation as our side, that’s when they begin to pick off into groups. Some of them are clearly headed off to check on the soldiers of our own, who are now mostly silent and scarcely respond to the interruption, but another has stumbled off on his own in search of the wider patch below us.
The soldier seems to be searching for something.
I see Bennett shift. There’s no way he’s going to make it back up here. I’m trying to work out what he’s thinking: he seems to be mulling it over, toying with the heather at his shoulder, testing each sprig, then he stops as the soldier plants another foot in the grass somewhere below him. It’s not his fault they’ve given us one rifle for every ten people, not his fault I’ve barely eaten all morning and my own hands are starting to whiten from the effort of watching him this closely. If I’d had it my way, I’d have shot the guy outright already.
As it happens, our last working rifle is with Christy, which wouldn’t be too much of a problem except for the matter of who he naturally is. I throw a quick glance in his direction, about seven or eight feet back up the hill; he’s staring down at the same scene with his eyes wide, and his boots loom out over the rocks above me.
It’s only the simplest of matters, of course, and I already know the answer as to why he’s stock-still: that Christy, of all things, is a terrible fucking shot. He’d end up drawing too much attention to himself, and I suppose that’s the reason he seems to hesitate over the trigger.
Another reason is that he’s simply too stubborn to do so. I told you he was a mathematician, and he takes it to the extreme: he always said he wasn’t happy killing anyone, and that means he isn’t happy killing anyone, even if it’s clearly the right thing to do.
I’ve half a mind to pull myself up over that rock and grab the rifle from him, but he’s too far above me for that to be of any use now.
Bennett will just have to fend for himself, like the rest of us.
It’s not fair, is it? I had to fight for myself, back in the early days, and now he’ll have to do the same. Maybe he’ll feel the same as I did, maybe he’ll realise that the real battle is knowing that the title you carry will never properly protect you, that at the end of the day, you’re on your own, and it doesn’t matter how many people you’re responsible for, how many families and futures you think will go to waste because of your decisions, that you’re still after your own skin and blood, that it’s no one else’s fault if you can’t look after yourself, that you live alone and you die alone, and that’s all any of us have to do, and why should I care if he’s made a mistake in going down there? I’m not the one who joined up on purpose. I’m not the one who chose to get promoted, who took it all on as if it would change a damn thing, who chose to throw themselves into everything in the state that it is, to assume they’d be able to make any impact whatsoever except to chase the inevitable boulder further up the hill, as if another rank, another star, would be enough, as if any words of encouragement from someone you begrudgingly respect would stop me from getting ripped apart on a hillside, out in the open, who’d blame it on someone else—or worse yet, blame it on no one at all but himself, to take all infuriating responsibility and be so fucking decent about it all that I can’t even take issue with him once he’s dead.
I don’t know if he’s worked out a plan: maybe his idea is to grab the guy, bring him down to the ground, and get on top of the situation that way. I’ve never seen him with a knife, and I don’t want to.
But it’s too late to think about that.
The soldier has found what he wanted. He’s holding something down in the heather, stifling it down with his free hand, as if it’s a nervous rabbit in the wilderness and he’s trying to coax it into accepting the knife at its throat. Bennet is crying.
I can’t see the knife anymore. After a while, he gets into a short, stuttering rhythm, until he slows, and each repetition is careful. I can see him working it out in his head, this slow experiment of his, like he’s putting a lot of thought into where his knife will go and why, and is still endlessly fascinated by what he finds. It doesn’t seem to matter that Bennett is taller than him by some margin, or clearly more experienced.
He only stops this exploration with his knife, this mere curiosity of cause and effect, when one of his own claps him on the shoulder, ruffles his dark hair, calls him a faggot; his friend laughs. They retreat from the heather patch in the same manner as one might abandon an unfinished meal at a restaurant.
We’re very much alone after that.
***