Chapter 18 #2
I’m unsure as to why that thought hurts so much considering all of the days before these I’d begrudgingly got out of bed, hoping she’d left without me.
But I suppose it just comes down to my pride.
It hurts because I’m embarrassed that kissing me for just seconds is enough to make a woman work on a farm in the dark in March rather than see me.
Sitting in my grandmother’s car, I look over the steering wheel out at the never-ending countryside.
Reliving the kiss over and over in my head for the umpteenth time, I still can’t grasp what it is that I’ve done so wrong.
The urge to march over to her house and demand she explain what is so wrong with me whilst also assuring her, and myself, that I’m not even into her like that, is a hard one to suppress.
‘Of course you know what to do.’ My sister’s words ring around in my head on repeat until I find myself parked out the front of her house, looking at myself in the rear-view mirror, trying to work up the courage to go inside.
‘All right, Arthur,’ Bruce says in his familiarly jolly way, ‘can’t be needing another trim already, lad. What can I do for you?’ I run my hand over the still-stubbly hair that has only grown a microscopic amount since I last saw him.
Finding my way to Bruce’s barber shop took a little longer alone than it did with Beatrice.
Getting lost on housing estates I never even knew existed and then driving into the back of the air force base only to be met with the business end of a rifle wasn’t exactly what I had in mind but I find the beaten-up tin shed eventually after enough of a rushed explanation to the guard.
This time, there is a collection of airmen and women sat around his chairs waiting their turn, and listening to his chatter.
Two airmen in their combats sit close together skimming through a few pieces of Bruce’s adult magazine collection, one admiring the brand of motorbikes chosen for the models to pose topless on and the other adding a monocle and moustache to a Playboy Bunny from 1987 whose perm takes up the majority of the page.
‘I, er,’ I begin to reply as the barber pauses his craft to hear my response.
In all honesty, I drove in this direction instinctively after I saw Beatrice’s grandmother spot me parked outside their house from her kitchen window and I had to make a quick getaway.
But as the fields stretched on and on, I thought more about what Beatrice had said that day before she disappeared: that I should use my contacts for good, that I could do something for Lizzie, or for Jimmy, even with my limited skill set.
Then I thought about Bruce and his stories, his apparent omnipotence about anything and everything that happens in this place.
‘I was just wondering … well … could you tell me about Jimmy? Well, tell me more. Please.’ I have the full attention of all of the airmen now. My fidgeting hands draw their eyes and I tuck them quickly into my pockets, hoping the lining will soak up the sweat that pools at my palms.
‘Jimmy?’ Bruce replies, his wispy brows bouncing with his expression. ‘I thought you’d be after more stories about your old dad.’
I thought about it. Asking strangers all about my family to finally feel like I know them, and yet, my dad isn’t who interests me.
My whole life has been swallowed up by stories of my great father; now I want to hear the tales of all of those people he left behind in his pursuit of fame, all of the people who created the prodigious Eddie Cavendish.
I debate asking him about Beatrice. About her story, why she came home after all of her successes, what happened to her in those weeks my grandmother mentioned, the story that she seems to know but won’t divulge despite having no reservations about gossiping about anyone else.
But I can’t bring myself to. I’m not even interested, I tell myself. Though the thought niggles incessantly.
‘Yeah, Jimmy,’ I reply confidently before sitting beside his current client in the neighbouring chair, and I watch him butcher his hair whilst he begins.
‘Sergeant James Waterford,’ he breathes as though settling down in an old armchair by the fire to read through something from his ancient library.
Everyone else in the little barber shop ceases what they were doing before to listen.
Magazines are slowly closed and set aside, and all other conversations fizzle out as everyone awaits Bruce’s words.
This is what they’re all here for. It doesn’t matter that they have no connection to the people he talks about, there’s just something in his manner of speaking that makes it impossible to not want to drop everything to listen.
‘He was one of the best infanteers the army had back in the day. Joined up at eighteen, dossed it for a little bit as a private, then soon found himself off up in the ranks by the time it started kicking off in Iraq.’ He pauses his work and only the dull buzzing of the electric razor fills the silence of the room as he chooses his next words.
‘Not many of our lot came back with anything to say about that war. No one came back victorious, that’s for sure.
Aside from perhaps some of ’em at the top of the corruption pile that have earned their fortune from climbing bodies.
’ He shakes his head, his knuckles turning pale as his grip on the back of the chair tightens. ‘But that’s a story for another time.
‘No, all of those boys and girls came back different,’ he continues and I find myself holding my breath, not wanting a single inhalation or exhalation to disturb his stream and interrupt anything he’s about to tell us.
‘So many of them left after that. Got out. Got discharged. And the rest of them were just as sick, in body and mind, but they couldn’t afford to leave.
The army is all a lot of the kids around here have.
They never had the chance to go to university, or move to the city for some job in an office with one of them coffee machines that put the milk in for you.
These kids felt like they only had one option, and the military took them in with open arms. That was the case for Jim.
There want a future for him in New York, so he pushed through it.
‘They call it Gulf War Illness now. Say it’s something to do with nerve agents, or vaccines, or whatever other bullshit they can think of so the suits don’t have to take any responsibility.
We all know it exists, but …’ He sighs and waves a hand.
‘Another time. Another time,’ he murmurs to himself and sets himself back on track.
‘No one really knows how bad he had it back then, and if he had it at all you couldn’t tell.
Stories of his bravery in the field and his aptitude in the classroom got around.
He got promoted, married, deployed. Everything seemed to be going well.
Until it wasn’t. It was as if he just one day forgot who he was.
He went from navigating his way across deserts, to getting lost on his way home from work.
From giving orders to a hundred men in the midst of a gunfight to not being able to find the words to have a conversation in the pub.
It made him angry, of course. He got himself in trouble getting in fights or stopping out all night, or just drinking too much, to numb the inevitable I’d assume.
He lost it all after that. His wife. His job. Himself.’
No one in the room makes a sound and I’m sure the same feeling of nausea that has hit me is overwhelming my peers around me too.
‘He won a medal in Afghanistan, you know.’ Bruce shifts his face from grim despair to a little look of pride.
Bruce regales us with tales of Jimmy’s heroics but it all seems bitter now we know the ending to the story.
I want to ask how he knows all of this, hope that he’s somehow got his facts wrong, that it’s all just hearsay. But I’ve seen the outcome first hand.
I can’t cure him. I could never give him his life back. But Beatrice is right: there must be something I can do.