Nine
Yes, he’d been sitting in a draughty cell for the last few hours, which was every bit as grim as you’d expect, and obviously he was mildly annoyed that Battersby had been right to warn him about going to the police.
He was cross with himself that ‘Brightside’ Barry had struck again; that he’d been na?ve at best and an idiot at worst to believe that things would get sorted without any fuss.
He was cold and hungry and he missed his dog.
But all the same …
Barry couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt quite so calm.
What happens happens, and in the end there’s not a lot you can do about it.
That was the attitude that had helped him through five tours and it was one he’d brought back home with him, or at least tried to.
A philosophy, if you wanted to be poncey about it.
It wasn’t as though he’d ever expected to be threatened with a knife in the park or end up being indirectly responsible for a man’s death, but that’s what had happened; it was as simple as that.
He couldn’t have predicted that he’d wind up sitting on his increasingly fat arse in a cell at the cop shop, but it didn’t look like circumstances were going to change any time soon, so there was no point getting himself worked up.
No point in losing it, like that time ten years back when he’d decked that copper.
The truth was, depressing as his current surroundings were, they were no more than marginally worse – not having Ruby to keep him company excepted – than the basement he was living in.
Fine, so the comedian a couple of cells along – the one who hadn’t stopped whistling ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’ – could quickly have become massively irritating, but Barry took deep breaths and tried to tune it out and, when he couldn’t, just kept telling himself it was birdsong.
He still couldn’t understand why the toilet in the corner didn’t have a seat, why there was just a metal bowl to complement the bare blue mattress.
He wondered if it was a suicide prevention thing, like when they took your belt and laces, even if, in his case, they hadn’t actually bothered.
Did people really try to beat themselves to death with toilet seats?
He supposed that, if you were really desperate, you’d use whatever was to hand; not that he’d ever been desperate enough to so much as think about topping himself.
He just wasn’t the sort, even when things had been seriously bad.
He’d known a few people who’d done it, of course: one lad in Iraq who’d put a Glock 17 in his mouth, and a couple more who’d found different ways once they’d got home and everything had started to fall apart.
When the noise in their heads drowned out everything else.
Standing frozen at a supermarket checkout, because they’d blinked and suddenly there was gunfire and sand everywhere, spattered with blood and bits of a red-haired corporal from Birmingham.
When they’d discovered they didn’t fit anywhere any more.
It was why, in spite of everything, Barry could never quite bring himself to hate Stacey.
He knew he had every right to, considering where he’d been living then and where he was living now.
How he was living. He couldn’t argue with the fact that the man who’d come back from Afghanistan wasn’t the man she’d married.
Granted, he hadn’t changed quite as much as some – the likes of Neil Battersby – but he knew he hadn’t exactly been easy to live with.
The nightmares and the panic attacks, the jumping at his own shadow, all of that carry-on.
The drinking which, thank God, he’d more or less knocked on the head and couldn’t really afford any more, although sometimes he still wanted to.
Fair to say, though, that he hadn’t expected her to give up on him quite so easily as she had and certainly not to find someone else that fast. ‘Like a rat up a drainpipe,’ was what Battersby had said.
Sodding Darren, with his fancy suits and his top-of-the-range BMW.
Sometimes he wondered if her new bloke had been knocking around all the time he was away. There certainly hadn’t been a great many letters or tearful phone calls between himself and Stacey, even back when he’d first been deployed. Maybe the writing had been on the wall all along.
It didn’t much matter either way.
Barry closed his eyes and listened to the birdsong.
Craig, that was the name of that ginger lad.
The Brummie …