Black Widow (10 page)

Peter counselled against it, warning that at three hundred feet per second, the pellets could leave red marks if there was no thick or baggy material to slow them down. I didn't like the sound of that, and a further deciding factor was that my Under Armour was a very non-camouflage white.

‘How you bearing up?' he had asked, as we made our way back to base after the second game ended.

‘I'm getting flashbacks to my first tour in 'Nam. It was hell, man.'

‘I mean, are you handling the pace? Do you need a break?

‘Not at all. Though I'm getting more exercise than my usual Sunday-morning regime. Lugging all this metal around fairly works the cardio-vascular system. I usually feel I could keep going for longer when I run, but I tend to get a bit bored.'

‘This gives a bit of structure and purpose to it, I suppose. Do you not listen to some music when you run?'

‘No. I tend to listen to recordings of lectures and seminars, or audio versions of textbooks.'

‘Jeez. Do you not want to give your head a rest, let your mind breathe for a while?'

I had blogged about this once, years ago. I felt quite embarrassed recently when I happened upon it again. At the time I sounded as smug about this multitasking as I did evangelical. These days I was conscious of what a zoid I had become. Even my exercise, a supposedly recreational pursuit, had been augmented in a way that would count towards my work.

‘Maybe I should. And maybe I should do more fun-for-its-own-sake stuff like this instead, before it's too late.'

‘Too late for what?' he had asked, passing me a welcome bottle of water as we came in sight of the muster point where the other players were gathering.

‘Too late for me to be saved from being a boring stick-in-the-mud who nobody wants to be around.'

That was my growing fear. You're forced to give up so much to the job that it makes you unattractive: in non-physical ways, though your appearance can certainly suffer too. It becomes a vicious circle. The job is all you can talk about, all you can think about because there is nobody else at home to change the subject, to occupy your time and your thoughts. Then you reason that as it's the only thing in your life, you might as well dedicate
more
time to it, to be as good at it as you can. Gradually you become a machine, and you can lose your humanity. You begin to lose contact with what it is to be a normal person, living a normal day-to-day life, and once that process is in motion, the prognosis is bleak.

‘Well, you're not there yet, or I wouldn't have invited you,' Peter assured me.

‘You're only saying that because I've got a machine gun.'

‘Mine's bigger than yours. And it's all about balance, isn't it? I think I could use a bit more of what you've got. It's been said – not always with the greatest discretion, hence my awareness of it – that I'm a case of wasted potential. Acting the kid too much. If you want to get ahead, you have to get serious, don't you?'

‘Well, don't stop acting the kid quite yet,' I told him, reloading my magazine with hundreds of the tiny white plastic balls. ‘I'm just getting the hang of this.'

Which was why, sometime later, I was prepared to tolerate the sting of sweat in my eyes and the digging of tree roots into my ribs in order to remain concealed, even when down to my last few rounds.

Peter raised himself up on to his elbows, scanning the trees. I pulled myself into a tight crouch alongside. The woods were so dense that it was dark as dusk, visibility down to single figures and not helped by peering through the aluminium mesh covering the mask's eyeholes.

Suddenly there was movement somewhere ahead, a volley of shots. They weren't aimed at us: merely where someone thought we were. Nonetheless, we reacted instantly, rolling back into the trench. I ended up on top of Peter, only for a moment. Our faces were centimetres apart. We had masks on, and couldn't see into each other's eyes, but I think we both noticed I stayed there a fraction longer than natural momentum dictated.

It was a last-man-standing game, and from the complete absence of friendly armbands we had spotted over the past fifteen minutes, it looked like we were all that remained of the red team.

‘I think we're done,' he confessed. ‘We should surrender, and they can kick off the next game.'

‘Sod that. I'm not losing again.'

‘Don't worry about it. You're doing great. And remember, Serious Girl, it's just for fun.'

He obviously hadn't met many surgeons.

‘Winning is fun.'

‘Okay, so how do you plan on doing that?'

‘Knife. Give me it.'

Peter reached down to his belt and handed over a foam-plastic dagger.

It had been explained at the start that if you could successfully ‘stealth' an opponent and tap them on the shoulder with one of those, they were out, and unlike when they were shot, they could not yell out ‘Hit!', as it would give away your position.

‘You've got the big gun. Draw their attention. I'll do the rest.'

I grew up with two brothers who would have loved to exclude me from their games, and doubtless would have succeeded had I been younger and smaller, but I wasn't. I became adept at sneaking up on them; at sneaking up on anybody. I learned balance, how weight distribution affected footfalls and other sounds, and in particular I learned to be very slow and very patient.

In this game for bigger boys, I only had to be particularly stealthy once: when I was sneaking back through their slowly closing circle. Then I was behind them as they closed in on where they thought Peter was holed up, their attention concentrated exclusively upon any sound or movement that might give away his position or herald a shot from his rifle.

I tapped them on the shoulder and said: ‘Shh.' One by one they fell as I moved in my silent spiral, until only Peter remained. And then I snuck up and tapped him.

He sighed in defeat, then turned around and saw that it was me.

Somewhere in the woods, a guy with a megaphone was announcing that the red team had won.

‘You're absolutely lethal,' Peter said. ‘Nobody saw you coming.'

‘Nobody ever does.'

They walked slowly along the side closer to the river, scanning for indications that a car had gone over the edge and down the slope. The water ran twenty feet or so below the level of the road at this stretch, at the foot of a steep banking.

‘No crash barrier,' Rodriguez noted. ‘Is that not a bit remiss if it's a known blackspot?'

‘The previous casualties haven't been people going off the road. It's eejits smacking head-on into oncoming vehicles because they've misjudged the bend, or more commonly round here, they're trying to overtake in a completely inappropriate place. Wait till you've been here a while, you'll see: some of them act as though they've got radar.'

Rodriguez kept crouching low to the ground, running one hand along the top of the grass, the other training his torch a few feet in front of him. Ali was pointing hers down towards the water. The beam picked out tufts and bushes before the flat blackness. It didn't shimmer so much here: it was slow and deep.

‘Got tread marks, I think,' Rodriguez announced. ‘The grass is flattened here.'

Ali pointed her torch where he was indicating, and then a few feet along. There was a second indentation, around six inches wide.

‘Looks parallel,' she said.

They proceeded cautiously, picking out every step with care under the beams of both their flashlights. The indentations were sporadic, vanishing and then resuming again, sometimes visible on one side, sometimes the other, but always the same distance apart.

Ali stopped Rodriguez a few yards from the edge. They played their torches down the rest of the slope, picking out where their progress ended.

‘Shit. I'm going to be popular.'

‘Why?'

‘Because we'll need to scramble a helicopter to search along the river, and we'll have to call out a diving team as well. There's no choice, but I'm about to put a big hole in the budget for nothing. It's what, quarter past three now? That call went out at about two forty-five. Anybody who went into that freezing water half an hour ago and didn't come straight back out is already dead.'

You never forget the first time you kiss somebody. A tender act somehow more intimate than when you first sleep together, because in that moment, you are so utterly vulnerable: it feels as though so much is at stake, like everything can change in one delicate act, one exquisite touch. No matter what happens after that, for good or bad, it is a memory that plays back via all the senses, a point in time you can return yourself to with absolute clarity. It is a precious treasure at the heart of the growing hoard in a relationship that strengthens and endures, and it is the bittersweet remnant you cannot purge from your mind when everything has turned to ashes.

Bittersweet, yes: not merely bitter, because it is the sweetness that burns. It is the feelings of joy and excitement and desire and hope that remain so painfully vivid. If I close my eyes right now I can feel, see, hear, smell and taste everything about that kiss, and I can become again who I was in that moment. I can see the future as it appeared to me then, and remember the two of us as the people I believed us to be.

I wish I could erase all of it, but I can't. I wish I wasn't so easily taken back there by hearing a song on the radio, or catching a scent of curry on damp clothes. But mostly I wish I could delete what I said to him the instant before our lips met, because that is what truly mocks me now.

I felt exhausted but exhilarated as Peter drove us both back to Inverness. In a day replete with me surprising myself, for an encore I realised that I couldn't wait to tell people at work what I'd been doing. In the past I'd have been looking forward to telling colleagues about the seminar or conference I had attended over the weekend, but this prospect was so much more exciting. It was the thought of shocking them, of seeing their perceptions of me given such a shake. I even rather malevolently fantasised about phoning up and telling my father, to appal him. The boys-and-toys factor would have rubbed salt too.

‘Thank you so much for today,' I said to him, as we pulled up outside my house. ‘And thank you for not telling me. I think I'm starting to remember what fun is.'

‘Yeah, if you ever need a dose of enjoyable pointlessness in your life, I'm your man. Honestly, when I have kids, they'll be the ones dragging
me
away from the play-park. That's half the reason I'd want to have them: an excuse to do silly stuff; to just play.'

I caught myself noting that he wanted children. I tried to pretend it was an idle thought, but I was fooling nobody.

‘Kids
should
do silly stuff,' he added, looking more reflective. ‘I had a little too much seriousness, too much properness in my childhood. That's why my inner kid is a bit too close to the surface: he's finally got the keys, so he's driving half the time. And that's why I'm glad I met you. You say you're boring but I think you're inspiring. You make me want to screw the nut and make more of myself.'

‘Thank you.'

I reddened, my fingers gripping the door handle. My instinct was to feel awkward and thus to bail in a heightened moment like this, and then inevitably I'd go away and over-analyse it later. The thing was, right then I didn't feel awkward, and whatever was heightened about this moment, I wanted more of it.

‘Actually, and I feel slightly guilty about this, but can I undo my good influence and tempt you not to screw the nut for a few more hours? Pub and a curry? You weren't going to change everything with one evening's programming anyway, were you?'

‘That's precisely the internal logic that's kept me from being a millionaire. I like your thinking.'

Despite being the one who had proposed an evening at the pub, I took the car into town. This was for two reasons: one was that I had a laparoscopic colectomy in the morning and needed to be sharp; but more immediately I wanted my judgement to be as keen the night before. While I was getting showered and changed, I had been struck by an unaccustomed feeling of giddiness, of which I was instinctively wary.

As I took my seat opposite Peter, watching the overspill pool on the dark wood at the bottom of his pint glass, I felt a sense of freedom. Normally on a Sunday evening my mind would be already on the next day's work, yet being in the pub with its sights and smells and the hubbub of chat served to remind me that Sunday evening was still the weekend if I wanted it to be. Emily was often posting on Facebook about going out with colleagues and students, referring to Monday-morning hangovers with what was ostensibly ‘old enough to know better' regret, but which I recognised as perverse pride.

I could barely remember the last time I had done this. I used to go out with friends – colleagues – but these days they all had kids or spouses. There didn't seem to be as many girls' nights as there once had been. It was only really at Christmas that the department went out together: big gatherings, trying to show a social side to the trainees. Even then, it tended to be one or two drinks then off to a restaurant where they had a mass booking for about thirty people. To me it seemed to defeat the ends of socialising to go out in such a huge group, as in practice you only got to talk to the four or five people sat closest to you, and if you were unlucky they were the four or five people you had been hoping to avoid. That said, maybe I was the one that most people didn't want to get stuck with. Certainly the younger trainees seemed rather skittish around me.

But that Sunday night was like the nights out I remembered from when I was younger, when I felt like I was winning. Simply chatting, laughing and enjoying an atmosphere that seemed all the more convivial because of the awful weather that had blown in all of a sudden. There's nothing quite like rain lashing the windows to make you feel snug, and I was feeling particularly cosy that evening. It was starting unmistakably to resemble a date. Apart from there being only the two of us, the conversation was venturing ever deeper into getting-to-know-you territory.