Fragile State

Prayer

Chapter One

The Past

It all started, as so much often does, with a dream:

~

The single eye of refracting yellow light shredding the heavy sea haar with brilliant precision while juddering manically down the rutted track. It stops at the cliff edge, a moment of silent contemplation; a flash of doubt perhaps? It then turns, the mist closing momentarily and swallowing the retreating figure. Then the night-cleaving roar, an instant regurgitation of light and noise as the machine glides out, wheels spinning on the dynamic surface of the spectral clouds, then a parabolic dive, the single beam reeling and whirling like a demented, effulgent soul, cascading, crashing and finally embalmed by the Atlantic’s funereal shroud...

~

...I was partly awake and not awake; conscious but still unconscious. Chilled morning light, filtered partly by cloud but mostly by the thick layer of grime on my curtains, seeped into my drink-induced sleep and far in the distance I sensed a telephone ringing, drawing me reluctantly towards the day’s grey tempered glint.

I came around slowly, my body aching as though I had been mugged and beaten by sleep itself. I peeked out at the day through the slits of my eyes, confused by the unfamiliar blur of my bedroom. The ringing stopped just as I identified it as the telephone and not my head counting down to a universe-consuming implosion. I reached for my glasses on the bedside drawers and sent a half-filled bottle of Budvar tumbling and smashing with an artillery boom on the bare tiles of the floor. The phone began ringing again and I wanted to die, or better still to end the miserable life of the bastard ringing me so early on a Saturday morning.

With a huge effort I raised my pulsating planet of a head from the pillow and I carried it across the bedroom floor, past the spectacular cotton overflow of my laundry basket and into the desert of my hall, my head throbbing and spinning, and then I was falling...

~

...tumbling through a warm enclosing void, black, tightening space squeezing the air from my lungs and the blood from my brain, tumbling towards the nothing, no stars against the black, free falling...then light; spinning back into the pain of the beautiful piercing light...

~

...I was on the floor, my head numb where it had struck the hard wood of the hall table. I waited in a daze for the pressure to equalise, for my still reclining heart to catch up with my vertiginous head. I waited, stunned, for the sobering faint to pass, gripped by a fear of the unknown, of the unusual, asking myself how and why and if it was fatal; I had never fainted before. My world was a haze and I wondered absently if it were still a dream.

In the living room the answerphone cut off the trill pain of the ring and a Scottish voice asked me to call him back because he has some seriously fuckin’ bad news and I need to call him straight away as soon as I can before I talk to anyone else or do anything in the faintly unpleasant glow of that insignificant Saturday morning, during the last few peacefully hung-over hours of my old life. The machine beeped to announce that it had digested the message, and the earnest regret of Mick’s vernacular tones washed past and over my head like a particularly subtle joke. My only concern at that time was with my own precarious health and the current whereabouts of my incredibly expensive designer spectacles which did not appear to be in the general vicinity of the bed. And how could I find them now with my hopeless eyes and an entire world on my shoulders?

Sitting despairingly on the flattened pile of the hall carpet, I awaited the return of some form of equilibrium, searching my limited memories of the previous day for some clues, but I could find no immediate answer in the pain of the present or the void of the past.

And then it wafted back to me like the embarrassment of some clinging, feculent fart that follows you onto the tube or the bus or an elevator even though you let rip minutes before.

Another day’s drunken profligacy. Another day wasted by being wasted. A morass of booze and drugs that began around opening time and then ended in the unpleasant hours of the morning...but how?

I wandered into the blur of my kitchen and fumbled around until I found the paracetamol. I washed down three of the round, dry pills using the sweet effervescence of Irn Bru as a lubricant. I felt the fizz and the bubble as the orange nectar slid down my parched throat like acid. The Scots invented many things, but Irn Bru is the greatest of them all, and with my second can things immediately began to improve, the corroded workings of my brain began to turn, and reality began to creep back.

I returned to my bedroom, dug out my prescription sunglasses from the depths of a drawer and surveyed the usual devastation through the gloomy optimism of filtered light. I immediately regretted being able to see. The place was a bomb site. It seemed as though I never viewed my bedroom unless drunk or chronically hung-over and therefore never had the inclination or stamina to clear up the mess. And what a mess. The crystal sapphires of glass from the broken bottle were lost amongst the detritus of my life which covered the floor like some huge physical tableau of the world. The jeans and shirts formed the tawny continents; piles of socks and festering pants were brightly coloured mountain ranges; and, at each end, two great oceans, one of beer and one of piss. An image exploded in my head – waking up, desperate, my bladder swollen with a lager-induced flood but too drunk or tired to go to the loo.

I followed the uric flow to its source, at the base of my laundry basket where, I remembered, I had pissed during the night. Perhaps I had mistaken it for the toilet? An easy mistake to make when blind drunk and just blind and guided by scent alone.

Sitting on the edge of my bed I prayed for relief, any kind of relief, even death. I prayed for Sam to return from Scotland and save me, to bring me a vast unctuous breakfast of eggs, sausages, bacon, beans and two tattie scones that you can now buy in London from Safeway. But Sam had been gone for three lonely, drink-sodden weeks, during which I had toasted her health frequently, at the expense of mine, and cursed her missing being every night that she had been gone.

I closed my eyes and fell back on the bed, and then I saw it all. My glasses, three hundred quid’s worth of Giorgio Armani frames; an expensive night in the big city. Baron’s Court tube station was wearing them now, lenses ground as fine as sand by the steel of the wheels and spread by the uncaring, sharing wind throughout the capital. Suddenly I was falling again, back into the night before and I am watching the events as though an observer, and I can only feel shame for the drunken idiot whose head is wedged in the giant vice of the tube doors. His hands at his side as though tied, but they are actually grasping straining bags of clinking bottled beer. Then the doors are prised open by the big black guy who can’t bear the embarrassment any longer, and the platform rises to meet him, solid, frigid, its hardness breaking his fall and most of the beer bottles, and his Armanis are tumbling onto the track and beneath the shattering, turning, grinding steel. But he feels no pain, and he ignores the disgusted glances of the commuters as they shake their heads.

– A’m pished, he says, – A’m pished. As though it matters. And I’ve decided to quit this time, because things have gone too far.

– Hugh’s dead, Mick says. – Suicide.

Suicide. Homicide. Genocide. Pesticide. Five-a-side. No it makes no sense. A jumble of vowels and consonants ordered randomly in the past where the language of life and death was first uttered by some monosyllabic caveman sitting at his first fire, wrapped in his animal skin and trying to articulate some new grunt on his infantile vocal cords that will later translate as Shit I’m melting. No sense at all.

– You’re joking, I say, because that’s what everyone says at such a time. Of course he is. I can see the funny side, big fucking joke, what a scream, Mick kills me... And I’m floating somehow, as the world falls away. I’m rising towards the ceiling, towards the sky, miles below a man is still standing holding a telephone handset. He looks like me, but can’t be me because I feel nothing and yet he is crying like a child. And the phone is gently falling from his hand as though trying to distance itself from his grief, and now his legs are buckling. Then I feel the pain, but that is not an accurate description, because it is more like emptiness.

The Soldier

I can see us now, the short-trousered pair of us in that green wood in the fertile past, on that glorious Scottish summer day that is only real in my memories. But I can no longer sense it, smell it, feel it, or taste the high sun and the seeds and the pollen- thick air, and the clouds of chitinous aeronauts gathered around our heads and slipping unnoticed inside our mouths and noses with each intake of breath. And that night we’ll go home and blow our noses and for hours we shall exhume the tiny black bodies in their shrouds of snot.

– Charge, he shouts, and I follow him across the no man’s land of the battlefield leaping over the rubble off the old stone barn and dropping down behind the lumber that seems to have been sitting there in the disused yard for all my childhood.

– Grenade, he shouts, and he launches a rounded rock towards the grey steel mass of the German Tiger Tank (abandoned cement mixer) which has just opened up with both its heavy machine guns scything down the first wave of our attack, and only Hugh and I are left alive.

We’re re-enacting the Battle of Kursk, which apparently, so Hugh tells me, is somewhere in Russia. Which doesn’t really help because I don’t know much about Russia except that they sent a dog into space, which either makes them cool or completely bonkers, I’m not quite sure which. And that Yuri someone was the first man in space and that he was Russian (I’m not too sure about space either). But Hugh’s just been given this book called Tanks And Tank Battles Of World War II and apparently this was the big one, the one that won the war in the East, although I’m not too sure where that is. So there we are in the midst of a bloody battlefield with mangled dead bodies and blood everywhere and it’s dead brilliant, magic, gallus, and we’re going to massacre those German swine because they’re the baddies and Winston Churchill beat them easily during the war. He was the Prime Minister who is the cleverest person in the country and maybe the world.

– Follow me, he cries, and he breaks cover heading for the tank. It’s 110-mm gun roars (Hugh tells me) and the ground shakes beneath us, but we keep going our guns firing, brrrrrrrrrr, budabudabuda, tototototototo and our grenades throwing, pooowwww. And then I’m hit in the leg and fall, but Hugh comes back for me and helps me up. I limp on until the other leg is hit, then my arm, my shoulder, and I can’t go on.

– You go Hugh, I say, – I’ll be fine. Just leave me some water and some ammo. I’ll save the last bullet for myself, because the Germans aren’t very nice and they shoot you anyway especially if you try to escape (The Great Escape, my favouritist film in the world).

So Hugh goes on and reaches the squat, bulldog shape of the tank and gets on top and opens the hatch and throws in a grenade and we’ve won. He wanders back cheering in celebration of his latest victory, one of his many because he always wins and never dies. But it is too late for me, my wounds are too great and I slip bravely into eternal sleep knowing that I died heroically and that God will be waiting to welcome me into heaven (according to my mum and the Bible Class teacher. The one that preaches love and forgiveness and then smacks terrified five-year-olds over the head with his ancient heavy bible, or pulls their ears until they scream, scaring them to death and making them sick with fear as they are dragged to his class in tears by parents who could never understand, or don’t believe you because it has been too long for them and he’s such a nice man. And sometimes I wonder what became of that little shit, and assuming that he’s dead now, if his God hit him over the head with the Ten Commandments and sent him packing down under for all the young souls he had turned away from the church).

– Get up, he says.

– I can’t, I’m dead.

– Naw yer no’. We won.

– You always win. Why can’t a blow up the tank for once?

– Because a’m destrictable.

– Naw yer no’.

– Aye a um. You don’t even know whit it means.

– Aye a do.

– Naw ye don’t. Whit is it then?

– Jesus Christ, I shout (because I’ve just found out it’s a swear word), – A’m no’ tellin ye. But I know it’s no good. – You don’t know either, I add.

And this goes on for minutes or hours or days until he threatens to batter me and I back down. Because he’s tougher than me. So I threaten to get ma uncle who’s a Chief Inspector (whatever the fuck that is) and he retaliates by getting his only uncle who’s in the army, and so on.

But it’s no use because he’s bigger and stronger and brighter and he’s the best fighter in thelcass, and he once fought a boy two years older and won. And that incident sticks with me for some reason, because although Hugh was protecting me, I had a sense of that boy’s shame, even then. The endless jibes of the other kids his age, and I can see the tears of anger and shame as he flees the playground ahead of the hurtful childish chants of his playmates.

It’s Superman, he says. He’s destrictable (and he’s right of course, although I have no real idea of what it means).

GM Phone Home

I called Mick back. I clawed together the tattered remnants of my being, picked up the phone, wiped the tears, blew my nose and dialled the number hoping that it was all a mistake, some perverse slip in space and time, a quirk of the quark, a phantom of the quantum. But I knew it wasn’t.

I listened, weeping silently, bleeding internally, to the sparse details of my best friend’s death. And what a way to go. To drive up to the very northern limit of the country you love, to the farthest point on the Scottish mainland, and to ride off the hard edge of this world and into the cool welcoming waters of the next. That boy had style.

There was a note to his sister asking for understanding and forgiveness, but little in the way of explanation. Just a mounting burden of things. Just life really. Just life that we all endure and love and suffer through and some just can’t bear it, or simply don’t like it, and make their choice and pay their money and take their chance at something better or just not worse. Details were scant. There was his marriage break-up and his floundering career, stalled and sinking in the swamp of the Ministry of Defence career non-structure. His parents were dead so there was no one to worry about, except his sister, but there are always innocent casualties in death.

So his mind was made and the decision taken and then it was all planned in his usual clinical way and the execution was simple. There were also no religious constraints to tie him to this world because Hugh believed in nothing. We come from nothing into something, we live, we die, and then we return to nothing. The concept was easy for him, a leap of faith if you like; to see it, to understand it, to accept it. Nothingness, naughtness, nullity, voidness, nihility, an absolute state of purity that science seems unable, or unwilling, to grasp. He embraced it.

Science tells us that energy cannot be created or destroyed. But it can simply slip away, ebb from us without us noticing like a retreating king tide. I have the proof, irrefutable, empirical, first hand evidence in that boundless, endless, limitless supply of gut-busting, voice-breaking, ear-thumping energy of childhood and that unshakeable faith in humanity and life and your family. And now it’s gone, reduced to nothing but cynicism and an absence of hope. Nothing, the sum of all human knowledge in universal terms - nothing, nada, zilch. Where Hugh now was. Or wasn’t.

I was missing him already, and could feel the hollow reality of his loss begin to move in, to inhabit that place within me that was reserved for him. And there it would stay forever like an ache, claiming its squatter’s rights, gradually diminishing in size and threat, but always there as a painfully necessary reminder of our past.

There were other even less welcome feelings. Like anger and betrayal. I felt impotent and helpless, and the child in me was hurt, the child who charged the tank and was shot all those years ago, and was still with me, part of me. He was hurt because Hugh had not left him a note or spoken to him at the end. Given him some final, parting acknowledgement that they were friends and that it mattered. But then I’m sure he had other things on his mind other than my fragile ego, and I was suddenly struck by the extent of my inherent selfishness, that at that time, on hearing of my best friend’s death, I could only think of myself.

It was impossible to believe. He was always the one in control, the one who listened to my problems and helped me to cope with life’s vicissitudes. But I am told this is not atypical. It is often the strong ones, the quiet ones, the ones we least expect because they never complain and therefore we never consider that they may be in trouble or suffering and are at threat. These are the types of people that don’t dwell, they do; and they do it with precision and in earnest and by then it’s too late, it’s all over, but no one is on the pitch because the game’s already finished and the players have gone to the big football stadium in the sky.

Strange as it may seem, after the initial shock, suicide was easier to accept than an accident or disease, a far better option than the tragically explosive denouement of an aneurysm or the slow clawing agony of cancer or AIDS. At least it was his choice, and after all it was his life and who am I to tell anyone how to live it or how to end it? It would have been unfair of me to expect him to continue in his state of misery or pain or terror, or whatever the real reason, just to spare my feelings or assuage the guilt I would always feel at not being there to help. And like all things in his life he did it properly, fixed it totally, completely, utterly.

But I was sure that there was more to it. Things that we didn’t know and would probably never find out, and that, besides the loss itself, was the hardest thing to accept. I had my suspicions though, and in the hanging court of my mind I had the chief suspect tried and convicted and sentenced to eternal damnation – I blamed the army and his decision to join it, now more than a lifetime ago.

Winter

The fire was roaring. It was February and it was fucking freezing outside, a typically wet winter evening in the west of Scotland with a ball-brassing arctic wind billowing down from northern Siberia, perhaps as part of the Soviet Cold War strategy of trying to freeze us into submission.

– A’ve joined the army, Hugh said, and then he took a long drink as though he had just commented on the weather.

– My arse, I replied, knowing that he would never do such a treacherous thing but completely aware that he had.

– Naw, seriously, a’ve done it.

– Whit? Och fir fuck sake man. Ya crazy bastard, I said. He just shrugged. – They’re the enemy, the auldest enemy. You’ve signed up fir an army of occupation fir Christ sake. And I had a vision of Hugh up against the wall after the revolution bargaining for his life on the strength of our friendship. He would have to die of course, they all would. We will all need to make sacrifices for the good of the party. – You’re just like those stupid bastards from the Highlands or the Borders that built their fucking Empire while they stepped over the bodies of their comrades, their own people. Like those brave but deluded fools that walked to the slaughter on the killing fields of France and all fir an inter-family tiff. Have we learned nothing?

– Don’t talk a load a shite Glen, he replied. I could see that I had hit a nerve and I sensed the tension build behind the insouciant facade as the neutrality of his features gave way to a pink tinge of annoyance. I decided not to push too far and instead gave him my most pitying look.

We were in our sixth and final year of high school and had only recently begun to seriously consider the future. We both had unconditional offers from Strathclyde University (Hugh had one from Glasgow too), having already obtained the grades we required in our fifth year. Six year was a luxury then, a chance of a year without serious study, playing sport, getting drunk and experimenting hopelessly in that crazy adult world of pubs and clubs and first crap sexual experience. We were trying to find our grown-up legs, and like most people we were a bit unsteady on our newly grown limbs.

– A know how ye feel about the English and devolution and...

– It’s no’ the English Shug, they’re jist people like us. It’s those Tory cunts in Westminster who govern by remote control, or lack of control more like. We’ve no say in running our own country and they don’t give a fuck, and a man of your intelligence should see that.

– A know whit yer sayin’, but a’m desperate. A need the money otherwise a cannae afford tae go tae Uni. A’ve got ma Mum and Jackie tae think about, ye know whit a struggle it is even tae come oot fir a pint. Anyway, a always wanted tae join the army, he said finally, as though it had been predestined. I felt like a shit and wished I hadn’t said anything.

– Listen mate, a’m sorry. A know yer daen’ whit ye need tae dae but I jist cannae forgive the bastards for whit they’ve done, and are still daen’ tae this country.

– Glen, the Highland clearances were a long time ago and it’s no’ as though we’ve no’ had oor chances to break away. Whit aboot the devolution vote?

– Rigged, I said, ever the paranoid conspiracy theorist.

– That’s nonsense. Anyway, they’ve accepted me fir sponsorship and all a need is tae get a degree and then a’m off tae officer training. Tally ho, and all that.

– Is that no’ the air force?

– Whatever.

– How much dae ye get?

– Five grand, he replied. I almost choked on my pint and suddenly it seemed like a very good idea if only I wasn’t already unfit and overweight and a pathological coward.

– And you can still dae Geography? Ye don’t have tae dae engineering, ye know, tank building or something. What aboot mining engineering tae help wae planting land mines etcetera for the efficient despatch of innocent women and children.

– Aye, Geography’s fine, anythin’ really, he said while completely ignoring my subtle-as-a-nuclear-warhead jibe. – Anyway, get tae the bar. A’ll have the same again.

– Jist joined up and ge’in’ orders already.

– Aye, that’s right, and don’t forget the crisps or ye’ll get this in your gob. He made a fist and a threatening gesture.

– As long as it’s ma mooth big boy, I replied, camping it up, flickering my eyelashes at him seductively.

– You’ll be lucky, I go fir a richer breed of man, he said. Better breeding, old money.

– Oh you army types you’re so masterful, I said in a poor attempt at a John Inman accent.

– Women go fir men in uniform ye know.

– Women! I repeated in mock surprise. – Who said anythin’ aboot women? All those upper class lads thegither in the altogether in the shower, scrubbin’ each others’ backs. They’ll awe be desperate for a bit of rough, a bit of virgin arse. Nice and tight too. They’ve awe been to public school and Oxbridge, been shaggin’ and gettin’ shagged up the arse fir years, arses like close openings. They’ll be fightin’ tae get at yer ronsen lighter. You could charge them, make a fortune, buy back your commission and be oot in a couple of months. You’d huv a promisin’ career in the City when you’d finished. Well, Soho is fairly central. For emphasis I thrust my forefinger into my tightly clenched fist and then into the middle of my empty pint glass.

– Before and after, I said. He just smiled and shook his head as you do with an annoying child.

He was right of course; I was a wanker. His logical pragmatism. My irrationality. My ingrained working class prejudices against economic necessity. And if I’m honest they were not even my own views but had been borrowed or stolen from television. From newspapers, from older more worldly people which didn’t necessarily make them real or true. I had just turned eighteen, still at school, what did I know about anything?

It was also a good career move for him at a time when Defence was still a growth industry with little prospect of decline, and graduate entrants were paid well and promoted rapidly if successful. This was before the Cold War peace broke out prematurely and walls came crashing down to thunderous world applause, and before the economic reality of the Eastern Bloc’s non-economics was fully realised. There were decent military conflicts to be found, before the only legitimate warring was to play impotent policemen in hopeless internecine conflicts while the UN stuck its incompetent head up its bureaucratic arse. Now in order to generate viable sales figures the world’s arms dealers can be found in the various ethnic tension zones around the globe trying to instigate local atrocities that will hopefully be a catalyst for a nicely profitable war.

– You are possibly the funniest guy on your side of the table, he said. – Ye know that liberal cynicism shit of yours is a contradiction in terms. It’s