The Dreams of Max & Ronnie (6 page)

– Oi, says the rider on the tank. – Talking to yew, butt. Gunner listen then?

The grinner and the Ned just go on with the game.

– We're dying, says the rider. – Dying in the desert. Yew gave us bugger all to live for and do on our estates like and then yew offered us jobs as soldiers and then yew sent us to war on lies and we're dying, mun, dying in the sand. This morning, Private Billy Pugh of Ton-yr-Efail, shot by a sniper he was, one shot, head, clean kill. Well, clean for the sniper, I mean; I spent an hour washing the boy's brains out of my hair. Never get to celebrate his twentieth birthday, now, young Billy Pugh. Yew listening to me?

The grinner and the Ned play the game.

– I'm talking to yew. Yewer sending yewer country's young men off to be killed, mun. Yew talk about national defence. About bloody homeland bloody security. Yew send tanks to Heathrow as if they're gunner be any use against a kamikaze hijacker so that we'll all feel under threat so that we'll support yewer bloody crusade. We're dying for yewer lies, mun. I don't mind fighting, Duw, that's what I joined the bloody force
for
, mun, but there needs to be a bloody reason. And say this island
was
attacked – what then? No one yer to bloody defend it. All them women without husbands and children without fathers and parents without sons. See, what yew don't understand is...

The rider continues to speak but his tank is now reversing, back into the crowd, chugging backwards into and then through the mad maul of people. The rider talks as he moves backwards on his machine, still talking, but Ronnie can't hear his words, just watches his mouth move, and he is transported backwards beyond the crowd and down the valley until he vanishes from sight.

– Ned, says the grinner. – Your move.

They finish that game and begin another. Their appetite for
Killzone 2
, it seems, with its big weapons and loud noises and bright flashing lights, is insatiable; they tackle each new game with a relish undiminished. Ronnie, some bones and flesh around emptiness, just watches them play, watches them kill each other's avatars, sees yet another game come to an end and hears the nearing of yet another tank.

 
Rhys is the first to wake. A scumble-headed, lip-plapping, eye-encrusted scarecrow he is as he wakes on the couch in a taste of cheesy Doritos and beer and fags, rubs his squeaky eyes, looks around him in the cold and smelly room. There's Robert, all curled up on the floor next to the cold gas fire, beneath a jumble of coverings, an overcoat and a hairy blanket and what looks like a beach towel. There's Ronnie, still sleeping, still, it appears, dreaming, on his lucky moo-cow rug, his hands wafered beneath his cheek, his knees drawn foetally up to his rising and falling chest. Helen's not in the room, but Rhys can hear her sleepy-grumbles through his ceiling, her floor. He sits up and farts and looks at his watch; just gone ten. Can't remember falling asleep, but it must've been before Helen came home, and after a hell of a lot of cans. He has vague memories of vodka, too. He levers himself groaning off the sofa and thumps upstairs and releases a stream of thick and orange pee into the toilet then rinses his face with cold water and groans again and brushes his teeth with his finger then goes back downstairs and enters the kitchen. Fills the kettle, flicks it on. The house silent but for three soft snorings. Sees a half-eaten loaf of sliced white on the counter top next to an empty bottle and toasts and magarines six slices of it, then makes three mugs of tea and carries everything into the front room. Places the tray on the floor and gently shakes Ronnie's shoulder but Ronnie just mumbles and goes on sleeping and dreaming on his lucky moo-cow rug. Rhys shakes him harder but Ronnie will not respond. Rhys looks down at Ronnie for a moment then turns to wake Robert but Robert is already awake, lying on his back with his hands behind his head, looking up at Rhys.

– He still won't wake up?

– No. Getting worried about him.

– He's breathing, inny?

– Yeh.

– Well then he's alive.

– Aye, but what if he's in a coma or something? Could be brain dead in that head of his. No telling what was in that pill.

– Nah, look at him. He's changed position since last night; remember he was on his back? And he's making noises. Coma victims don't do that.

Rhys looks back down at Ronnie, sees his eyelids ripple and move. Do comatose people dream?

– I made you some tea and toast, Rob.

– Good man. I'm fucking starving.

Robert sits up and slurps tea and crunches toast. He gulps his tea quickly and wants more so he drinks Ronnie's, too.

– What time did we nod off last night?

– Can't remember. Must've been late.

– Drank a fuck of a lot of lager.

– Too right we did. Look at that.

Rhys nods at a pyramid of empty beer cans next to the TV, on the other side from Ronnie. Maybe forty of them.

– Seen Helen?

– No, but she's back. Still asleep. Heard her snoring when I went for a slash.

Robert crunches toast. – We need to go home, don't we?

– Why?

– Got to see me mam before I ship out. She'll be worried sick. Me dad as well. So will yours.

– I'll ring 'em later. Got to wait for Rip Van fucking Winkle to wake up first, haven't we? Whenever that'll be.

– Aye. Fucking war'll be over by the time that idle bastard gets his arse in gear.

– Talking of which.

– What, arses?

– No. Wars.

Rhys picks the remote up from the catshit-spotted carpet and turns the telly on. Flicks through the channels for the news and sees images of tanks at an airport.

– The fuck's going on here?

– Turn it up.

Rhys does. Quick thoughts of invasion but then the voice-over explains that the tanks are at Heathrow airport to deter terrorists. Prime Minister has said that he's deployed the army to deter terrorists and to make people feel safer. Shots of people with baggage walking past tanks and looking terrified.

– What? What are they gunner do if a plane's hijacked, shoot it down? What use are tanks against suicide hijackers?

Robert nods. – Aye. Should all be in Iraq, anyway. That's where the fucking war is.

A microphone is held to a soldier's face. He speaks in the accent of southern England about ‘sending a message to the terrorists'. Another soldier in a beret speaks in the accent of the Welsh valleys about how he'd rather be ‘doing his bit in Iraq' but he goes where he's told to go and if that means making Heathrow airport a safer place then so be it. Then another soldier speaks in a lowland Scottish accent about how terrorists will ‘think twice when they see all this hardware' and then the country's leader himself is speaking from a podium about ‘sending a message to the terrorists' that ‘the peoples of this ancient democracy' will not be ‘frightened into inaction' and will ‘defend themselves by any means possible'.
We will not surrender to terrorism
, he says, several times.
The terrorists must not win.

– Still don't see the point of putting tanks in airports, Rhys says. – Should be in Iraq. Should be going up against the Republican fucking Guard, not sitting outside Costa fucking Coffee at bloody Heathrow.

Robert nods. Ronnie grumbles and shifts position a little and Rhys and Robert watch him then look back at the TV screen when it's clear he's not about to wake up.

– You sure he's alright?

Robert nods. – That pill was a horse trank or something, that's all. It's just knocked him out. He might've woken up in the middle of the night but we were asleep then, weren't we? He's alright. He'll be awake soon. With a bad head.

There's a crowd on the TV now. A crowd of people bearing banners and placards that read ‘NOT IN MY NAME' and ‘NO WAR FOR OIL' and pictures of the Prime Minister's grinning face splattered with red paint. The crowd is chanting something. It is a huge crowd in central London, filling the city's streets, crammed into the canyons between the old stone buildings, the big grey buildings, filling the windy tunnels between them with a mass of moving, noisy flesh. The face of a famous actress fills the screen, a Trafalgar Square lion behind her.
What a wonderful race we are
, she says, and then she's followed by the face of a famous footballer as the programme switches to an article about the coming European Championships and the various ‘celebrity endorsements' of the England team that will be competing in them, and there are the faces of footballers and pop stars and the wives and girlfriends of those footballers and pop stars and these people are strobed by the flashing of a thousand cameras and rocked by the screams of a thousand worship-pers and the skin on the faces of these people is stroboscopically bleached and bled by a need not their own. Their features in rapid flickering like machine-gun fire, flash flash flash, the pointillistic projection of their smirks and satisfaction against the colourless backdrop of a colossal emptiness.

Rhys and Robert watch the TV, watch these faces, and say nothing. Ronnie dreams on on his lucky moo-cow rug. Then Rhys and Robert cheer as they are fed images of a desert landscape dotted with tanks and flown over by jets and helicopters and the screen is filled with the dusty face of a British officer mouthing words like ‘victory' and ‘prevail' but then complaining about the sub-standard equipment his men have to face ‘the enemy' with and Rhys and Robert and maybe Ronnie too all feel a lurch inside their guts as the planet spins in space, tips their country once again on the arc towards nightfall, guides their eyes across countries then continents, out of the cat-shitted house that smells of fag smoke and stale beer and cheesy Dorito farts, out of the village which goes on silently existing, out of the country that howls in either protest or adulation under a vast umbrella of longing and frustration, out of the airports guarded by idling machines of war, the airports where signs everywhere say DON'T DON'T DON'T DON'T DON'T andwhere tannoys fill the air with prohibitions saying DON'T DON'T DON'T DON'T DON'T, across a continent and into a cowering land of sand that has been shocked and awed by decades of deprivation and is now blistering and shrivelling under flame from all directions, where a boy watches the high circling of a jet in the bright blue cloudless sky and sees two spurts of smoke from that plane's underside and hears a shrieking as he runs, a shrieking that has become deafening in two of his child's strides that in two strides is splitting his ears and shredding the world, this boy who in two minutes will be in the arms of his mother who weeps and wails as she holds and rocks his body, the brains of him pooling in her heaving lap, the blade of shrapnel that scooped the top of his skull away still smoking on the sand next to the mother's jerking knee.

– Can't
wait
to get over there, man, Robert says. – Wake that fucker up and let's get out of here. Waste some fucking ragheads.

He nods towards Ronnie as the world for a moment stops spinning. Ronnie continues to sleep and dream on his lucky moo-cow rug.

 
The Ned and the grinner finish their game and Ronnie is unsure who has won because the crowing of the victor is drowned out by yet another commotion, the grunt and bellow of another war-engine approaching. Ronnie notices that the crowd has stopped, at least for the moment, destroying itself and has stilled and he can now make out individuals within the mass, specific people standing there panting and crazed of eye, some missing limbs or noses or ears and all of them agleam with sweat and blood, some of the blood hardened to a black crust and some of it still fresh and redly pumping. The crowd's collective panting mirrors the sound of the approaching war machine, the beating groan and pump of hot exhaust, and the crowd parts to let it emerge, another tank of course, this one all painted a dark blue with a big white X across it and ridden on by a burly young man with reddish stubble across his pale face, dressed in the same sandy-hued camouflage fatigues as the first two riders and wearing on his head a beret with a small patch of tartan stitched to the front of it. And like the first two he too carries a rifle with a sand-clogged barrel and his boots too have warped and shrunk tightly to his feet and the hands that protrude from the sleeves of the uniform and that tightly grip the gun are split and cracked and streaked with scabs. The eyes of this rider are pale blue marbles set deep in inflamed circles of pink skin, pink swollen skin, and Ronnie thinks that they look sore, those eyes, very sore, scorched and sunken as they are, and he feel his own eyes begin to water in sympathy. Those eyes have been burnt by the sun and had their moisture stolen by drifting dust and heat and are plaqued by what they have seen, scored through by what they have witnessed. The tank approaches Jack and halts with a terse gnash of gears mere inches from that banner and its two sit-ters, the Ned and the grinner, still clutching their handsets but both now looking up at this new rider.

– Mah troop, he says. – Mah entire fuckin comp'nih. Wiped oot. Alla them. Deid. Fuckin roadside bomb, bang, body parts ivriwhir. Snipers picked the survivoors oaf. Me, Ah wis luckih; knocked oot, flung oot the jeep, thih thoat Ah wis already deid. An see mah troop? Some ay thim the finest fuckin soojirs these islands ivir hud. Tellin ye, man. Best fuckin soojirs yiv ivir seen, bar nun. What will ye do noo, man? Yir fuckin armih's dyin. An yeer sendin mair young men intae yon fuckin meat-grinder? Ye havnae fuckin clue, man, tellin ye. Call it oaf. Call the whole fuckin thing oaf. See in ten years' time? We'll be comin haim and nuthin'll be any fuckin different. Sept the bloodied patches ay sand whair the boays of these islands got blewn a-fuckin-pert.

The grinner gives every appearance of having listened to this speech, looking thoughtful at the rider for a minute or two, but then he points a finger at the Ned and says: – That last game was mine. So I've won, and the Ned wordlessly and seemingly without any emotion stands and stamps his handset under his shoes and then does the same to the console. He kicks it over and then stamps on its face again and again, sparks fly and smoke spits and hisses and glass explodes. He does this, the Ned, as if it is the only viable reaction to loss; as if there isn't any choice whatsoever open to him other than this, that the line of causation goes directly from loss to destruction and will never, could never, branch or deviate.