poppy seedcake that he’d ordered from a Polish shop in Hounslow. That soup, Bobbie thinks, is lost to them now. Her father never learned how to make it – he’s tetchy about picking mushrooms for ecological reasons – and Grandpa was not one to write his recipes down.
She sits on a stump among sweet chestnuts. The chestnuts are warped and dying, their flanks blackened by fire. Bobbie drinks from her water bottle and the cold makes her teeth ache. She lowers herself into stillness as her father taught her, trying to expand her peripheral vision – casting a web of attention to see what lands in it. She hears aircraft noise, traffic on Nine Mile Ride and the A30. Nearer, fainter, there is the shaken bell of a robin, the breeze in the pines. She tries to give herself to this moment, to stake a claim in it, but there are human voices at the edge of hearing and her wide-eyed stare contracts. She perceives, so dimly it might be a twinge of gristle in her jaw, the squeak of bicycle brakes. She stows the water in her rucksack and touches as she does so the patterned stone in its inner pocket.
She retrieves the stone. It soothes her to roll the familiar shape in her palm.
Her father found it twenty years ago – long before she existed – on a dig at Silchester. She imagines him with a full head of hair, on padded knees in a trench, scraping off the dirt with his thumbnail. The stone is shaped like a withered pear and carved with ribs and pockmarks. It was never knapped to kill or cut – its markings are odd, with hatchings like decoration about what Bobbie thinks of as its waist and neck. It’s impossible to guess its age – it might have been carved by a schoolboy on a field trip, or a soldier resting on manoeuvres. Bobbie likes to claim it’s prehistoric. No roads back then. No England. Only foraging and hunting, small groups of people your only shelter and hope of survival. When he presented her with the stone, her father had been circumspect. ‘I can’t guarantee that it’s of archaeological interest.’ Even so, it matters that the stone is hers, that it came into her keeping. In the first hand that held it, it would have felt the same as it does in hers.
She puts the stone in her left trouser pocket and picks up the footpath towards Surrey Hill.
Here he is, slouching behind the sports hall of the country park hotel. There’s gash everywhere: smashed beer bottles, cans of Red Bull, plastic bags with dogshit inside. It’s a relief to get under the trees. In the beech wood there’s a girl, or maybe a boy, of ten or so, thrashing old bracken with a stick. He doesn’t often see kids here, mostly dog walkers and lads from the estate on their way to the pub.
This path was one of his favourites on the Yamaha, taking turns with Donnie to punish their guts on its roots and stones. On foot, the gradient is starting to cost him. How can he be short of breath already? He’s seriously out of shape. Not that the weather helps. Never known an April like it. Still, chilly after Helmand.
Ten litres a day he got through at first, the water warm and tasting of bottle plastic. Sweating like a pig out in the ulu. His arse-crack like a river. Mid-summer it got so hot his brain went numb. He only wanted to sit and breathe, and even that was like sucking the air inside an oven. But there were duties to perform, orders to keep them knocking about while the heat squeezed the sweat out of him and even the flipflops were sitting it out in their hovels, waiting for nightfall.
He makes it to the top of the hill. Twenty-three and he can still hack a bit of exercise. A few more paces and the trees give way to patchy scrub. He trained on land like this in Germany, but the sand and soil were no preparation for Afghanistan, its thin dust a powder over everything – in his skin, his hair, the parts of his rifle. Some days the dust was a beast, surging up in the downdraught from a chopper as if it wanted to smother it. Like the brownout when the Slick came for Chris and Gobby.
Who washed the dust out of their wounds? Did some of it travel home in their plywood coffins?
Fuck it – he lights a bine.
What is he going to say to Bekah? What arrangement of words can he come up with that would change anything with his sister?
He walks across the Poors Allotment, treading down the heather, dropping ash into it. He sees the burnt-out car, its rusted hull pierced by birch saplings. Strangely comforting that, knowing even the ugliest things will disappear. Or maybe that’s wishful thinking. What could grow out of him to obscure the sights in his head? They come at him in the day but worse at night. Sometimes, too anxious to sleep, he walks up and down Church Road or into the dark of the forest. Last Saturday, after pub closing, he kept going along the A30 as far as the golf shop on Jenkin’s Hill. Stood in its empty car park thinking: top spot for a sniper, you can see a mile down the road.
He is level now with the telecoms tower. It stands behind gates and razor wire, though it wouldn’t be hard to get in if the fancy took him. He drops his fagbutt on the gravel and crushes it under his boot-heel. Has a quick sniff of his armpits. Tests his breath. She won’t chuck him out if he pongs, not without a second reason. Still, a man has his pride.
In the Old Dean estate, people are either at work, asleep, or plonked in front of breakfast TV. Plenty of curtains are drawn and there’s nobody about on the pale grass between houses. Outside Bekah’s block he looks for Stu’s van, but it’s not there.
He rings the buzzer and waits a long time. Probably she’s trying to pick Annie up, or yelling at Barry to turn his music down.
‘Hello?’
‘Bekah, it’s me.’ The intercom breathes static. ‘Can I come up?’
She lets him in and he goes slowly up the stairs. The echoey landing, the dead tomato plants outside 2C, then ARCHER, Stu’s surname where theirs used to be.
Bekah has put the latch on. He steps into the hallway that smells of last night’s supper and the nappy bin. There are noises from the utility space, where he finds Bekah putting a load on while Annie sits playing with an empty bottle of Fairy Liquid. His sister presents him with a hard, perfumed jaw to kiss. His niece pays him no attention – she knows Aitch has nothing for her.
‘You didn’t tell me you were coming over.’
‘It’s not exactly far. Where’s Barry?’
‘How should I know?’
‘Stu’s at work, is he?’
‘Where else would he be?’ Bekah closes the drum of the washing machine and selects the economy cycle. Annie has shaken a drop of soap from the bottle and is spreading it with her foot on the lino.
‘I’m parched – can I get a glass of something?’
‘We’re out of squash.’
‘Tap’s fine.’
Aitch escapes to the kitchen and pours himself a glass. He does a quick recce in the drawers and finds a pack of fags under some fliers. He shakes it at her when she comes in. ‘Silk Cut? That’s like inhaling air.’
‘Oi, thief.’
‘When d’you start on these?’
‘I haven’t,’ says Bekah, ‘they’re just in case.’
‘In case you give up?’
‘Go on, you can have one.’
‘Hardly worth it.’ Yet he scrabbles for a cigarette and steps out on the balcony to smoke it. A hand appears behind him and shuts the French window.
When he’s down to the filter, he flicks the butt to the pavement and knocks for readmission. Bekah has made a brew and he sits beside her in the living room, Annie squatting on her heels making marks on the Etch A Sketch.
‘You just come to say hello?’ asks Bekah.
‘As opposed to?’
‘As opposed to having news. Job interviews, getting on benefits.’
‘I’m not a scrounger.’
‘Neither am I, but I take what’s owed to me and the kids.’ Bekah pushes a plate of chocolate Hobnobs his way.