‘In the military. Where you ate. The mess. That is what you call it? I’ve always thought that rather odd.’
‘Why odd?’
‘Well, it’s a joke, I take it. Irony. Military humour.’ His eyes flicked up. ‘I mean, you know, are they messy places? One would rather imagine not.’
Between us there was a small mahogany table on which sat a heavy, polished-iron ashtray in the shape of a leaf. I tapped my cigar onto its edge and found myself mentally weighing it. It was big. Hefty.
‘It’s French,’ I told him. ‘From the word “mets”, meaning a dish or a portion of food. It’s not because it’s …’
‘Oh, is that so!’ he said, laughing. ‘Of course. Yes, I should have known. Yes, yes, how silly of me. The French.’ He kind of half-winked in my direction. ‘That was an impressive stab at a French accent there, by the way, Ant. It felt, just for a moment, as if I’d been whisked away to the harbour at St Tropez.’
Yeah, that ashtray had to weigh a good three or four kilos. Maybe more. You could do some proper damage with that. Put a door in. In fact, you could put someone’s head in with that thing. Easily. I’d use the bottom edge. Curl my fingers into the bowl, get some proper purchase on it and wear it like a knuckle-duster. Wallop.
‘I grew up in France, as it happens,’ I told him.
‘In France? Well, I never. Whereabouts?’
‘So I’m fluent in French.’
‘Well, bravo,’ he said, raising his glass. ‘Cheers to you. And I do hope we can come to some arrangement over this company retreat in April. We’ll fly you in first-class. It would be a real morale booster for the firm to have you come along and speak to the troops, even if they’re not of quite the same physical calibre as the troops you’re used to working with. Although, saying that, some of the chaps and chapesses in the office are terribly into the fitness scene – it’s quite impossible to get them out of the gym at lunchtimes. But it gets harder as you get older, doesn’t it? I expect this new phase of your career has come at just the right time for you. Even if you do miss the military life, when you get to our age, it’s … I mean, you’re clearly in very fine shape. I try to keep in reasonably decent order myself. But the selection process. The SAS. Do people our age do it? People in their forties?’
‘Ivan, mate, I’m thirty-seven,’ I said.
‘Of course you are. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to imply … Of course you could still pass Selection. You’d fly through it. You’ve only got to see your television programmes …’ He was beginning to bluster.
‘Ivan, mate, it’s totally fine,’ I said, laughing. ‘Forget it. Fucking forties! What are you like?’
As he relaxed once again, he began telling me about his own fitness regime. No carbs after 6 p.m., forty-five minutes in his home gym three times a week, a personal trainer called Samson. As I listened, enjoying my cigar, I found myself beginning to wonder, what would happen if it all kicked off in a place like this? What if Isis came through the door? A lone shooter or a guy in a bomb vest? What would Ivan do? How would that waiter over there respond? Rugby tackle him? Go for his legs? Or shit himself and dive under the table? I scanned the people around me. They’d go into a flat panic. Every single one of them.
I know what I’d do. I’d head-dive into cover, down there in the corner, and then I’d come around and try to disarm him. I’d use the ashtray as a weapon. I’d crack it right over him. Right around the fucking face. Smack. Cave in his cheekbone and then go straight into a backswing, push his chin up into his nose. God, I would love to see it kick off in here. That old geezer in the corner in the bow tie just turning around head-butting that fat dude with the pink hanky in his top pocket – landing it perfectly between the eyes, knocking the cunt into the fire. That woman in the lily dress giving the terrorist a proper crack in the jaw, bursting his nose open with that massive jewel on her finger. Some old Duke being kicked down the stairs by a minor royal in stilettos. Yes. Yes! What would it take for this place to go up? I would pay good money to see that.
‘To success!’ said Ivan. Suddenly, I was back in my body. The room instantly reorganised itself back into its hushed, murmuring and peaceful state. There was no blood on the walls or scalp on the carpet. The stairs were empty of violence. I was no longer crouched on that £10,000 rug de-braining a terrorist.
‘Success!’ I replied.
I raised my glass and downed it all.
Success. Is this what it was? Warm rooms and expensive dinners? Small talk with top barristers about personal fitness and fat cheques for corporate events? An hour later, as I strode down to Green Park tube past pubs and art galleries and dark human forms hurrying along the wet pavements, I found myself brooding. When I left the Special Forces in 2011, I had no idea what I was going to do with the rest of my life. What could I possibly achieve that would be better than the buzz of leading a Hard Arrest Team in the badlands of various war zones over two intensely frightening and violent tours of duty? Life back home in Chelmsford, I quickly discovered, was not like life in Helmand Province. I found it difficult to adjust, ending up physically assaulting a police officer and serving time in prison. The easiest thing I could have done, when I hit those lows, was to join my friends and associates in their criminal gangs. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t tried hard and repeatedly to recruit me. Someone with my background, I knew, had enormous value to those kinds of organisations – and I’d be handsomely rewarded. I would certainly have ended up wealthier than I was now. And the excitement? Oh, that would have been there, no doubt about it.
As I reached the end of the dark, narrow corridor of White Horse Street, a young couple were walking in my direction. The girl, her pale face framed in a white parka hood, gave a slight double-take when she saw me. I hunched my shoulders and sent my gaze to the floor. Please don’t ask for a selfie. Not now. When they were safely in the distance I went to cross the road and waited at the kerb. The usually busy lanes of Piccadilly were at a rare lull. I looked left and then right. There were a couple of double-decker buses, one coming in each direction, both trailing a stream of taxis and vans behind them. I waited. And then I waited some more, allowing them to get even closer. At the final instant, just as they were about to roar past my face, I darted out, dodging one and then the other, feeling their fumes billow around me as I danced between them.
I knew only too well why so many former Special Forces operators ended up either on the street, traumatised and addicted, or working for a criminal firm. Because success in civilian life lacks something that we’ve come to crave. You can’t take it out of us. It’s in there for life. And it’s not the fault of the military training, either. You can’t blame that. The fact is, we’re simply those kinds of men. We exist on that knife edge. Go one way, they’ll end up calling you a hero, a protector of the public and the nation. Go just a little in the other direction and you’ll find yourself in prison, an enemy of the same public and the same nation. The extreme forms of training that admittance into the Special Forces demands don’t cause us to be these kinds of people. It just takes what’s already there, hones it, draws it out and teaches us to control it. The problem is, this quality doesn’t simply evaporate when you leave the SAS or, in my case, the SBS. It’s still in there. It’s in your blood. It’s in your daydreams. It’s in how you walk. It’s in the way you scan a room the moment you enter it, looking for entry and escape routes, pockets of cover and potential aggressors.
And it’s also in how you cross the road. I’d noticed myself doing that increasingly over the last few weeks. If I was in London, or in one of the traffic-choked streets in the centre of Chelmsford, and I saw a pedestrian crossing with the green man flashing, I wouldn’t run to catch it like everyone else. I’d slow down. I’d wait until the traffic was fast and raging again, and only then would I cross. I’d never do this in front of my wife Emilie and certainly not in front of my kids. To be honest, I was only half-conscious of doing it myself. I hardly even knew how to explain it, apart from to say that it was that edge I was after, that edge I would go looking for anywhere