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 – a brief moment of danger to keep my heart beating and my spirit alive. That threat, that trouble, that fear. I was constantly looking for opportunities to push myself, test myself and add a little dose of risk to my otherwise overwhelmingly safe days.
So that was it. That was why Ivan had provoked a host of strange and uncomfortable emotions to come bubbling out from deep within me when he’d asked if I was enjoying what he called my ‘new life’. Of course I enjoyed its trappings. Who wouldn’t? It felt great to achieve so much in these areas of popular culture that I’d never have even dreamed of entering just a few years ago. You couldn’t deny I was successful. But this wasn’t my kind of success. I felt as if I were somehow losing my identity. And the problem was, my identity was beginning to fight back. I could feel it punching and kicking, whenever I was in meetings with guys like Ivan or in places like 5 Hertford Street. The warrior inside me would rise out of nowhere and take over my thoughts. I’d find myself daydreaming about terrorist attacks or mass brawls breaking out, building my strategy for dealing with the madness, assessing everyone around me in terms of how much of a threat they’d be and how I could take them out. This could happen to me anywhere – in the ground-floor canteen at Channel 4 or on the set of This Morning, waiting to be interviewed by Phil and Holly in front of millions of viewers. It was like I was being possessed by the ghost of the man who used to be me. And the really worrying thing was, these weren’t waking nightmares that left me in cold sweats. They weren’t PTSD-like moments of dread and horror. They were fantasies. I was willing them to happen.
After the deep orange darkness of London’s November streets, the lights inside Green Park tube station felt too bright, and I squinted a little as I ran down the long flights of stairs towards my platform, racing the people descending the escalators on either side of me. I found a quiet seat at the end of a carriage and jammed my hands into the pockets of my jacket. A few seats away from me a couple of girls sat opposite each other. They looked to be in their early twenties, and were giggling and laughing in that drunk schoolgirl way. One had taken her high heels off, and her bare toes were now blackened from the tube floor. An unopened bottle of WKD Red stuck out of her lime-green handbag. Another, open and half drunk, was clutched in her hands. The other girl wore a tight white mini-dress and had a tattoo of Michael Jackson on her arm. Her faux leather jacket lay on the seat beside her, along with their crumpled Burger King wrappers and boxes.
When I stepped into the carriage they’d been cackling loudly, but once they clocked me they fell into a hushed chatter, interspersed by periodic piggy, nasal snorts of laughter.
‘Here we go,’ I thought. ‘I’ve been spotted.’ But then I checked myself. Maybe not. One of the things about finding yourself unexpectedly well known – among certain parts of the general public, at least – is that it’s easy to become paranoid. You start to think that everyone’s watching you, wherever you go, even though most members of the public would never have even heard of you. Anyone who’s been on the TV for more than ten minutes has an embarrassing story to tell about a stranger coming up to them in the street, and them presenting their finest prime-time Saturday-night smile and preparing to quickly scribble out an autograph, only for that person to ask if they know the directions to the nearest McDonald’s.
The girls were now leaning into each other and whispering intensely. I wondered what they were they doing. Plotting their next assassination? I kept noticing their eyes swivelling out from their dark huddle and looking in my direction. Then they abruptly sat back, now not saying anything. Suddenly a phone appeared. It was in a black case with Michael Jackson picked out in fake diamonds, one hand on his trilby, the other on his crotch. The girl