This is Ronnie Cheung’s version of the Socratic method. It is a powerful motivational technique he has developed over many years, which functions best when everyone ignores it outwardly while at the same time being shamed into applying themselves to impossible tasks and thus emerging (in his own words) absolutely top fucking banana. Sergeant Hordle ignores it. He gathers himself up and trots off to one of the groups of trainees and fits himself into the pattern, and it is shortly apparent that he is very, very good indeed.
Ronnie Cheung eyes him with great disfavour, then shouts at a few other people for good measure. Finally, he glances at our corner of the yard, and his gaze sticks. Reluctantly, his attention flickers in my direction, sums me up and doesn’t see much to get excited about. He ambles over. He watches me closely and grunts. I am not using what I have learned from Master Wu. I am treating the whole thing as a new arena. I am learning a hard style as if I have never studied a soft one. Don’t mix and match—learn and combine, but only when you are ready. I am currently punching a sackful of wire wool to toughen my fingers. I am doing so without enthusiasm, because in fact I am under orders to preserve my hands so that I can operate the weapons systems if ever I should be called upon to do so. That I am also under orders to train as a lethal mêlée fighter is a piece of inherently contradictory crap which I have come to understand is part of the functioning of the world as we know it.
“And who’s this bumhole?” demands Ronnie Cheung.
“This is . . . ,” Richard P. Purvis begins, a bit surprised that Ronnie doesn’t seem to know my name after three months, but Ronnie Cheung is not watching me fudge hits on the target dummy, he is glaring at a pile of kit and supplies in the corner of the practice yard.
“No, not that bumhole,” Ronnie says, “this bumhole!” He glowers at a box of blank ammunition and practice knives. “The bumhole who imagines he can hide himself in my yard with some piece of low-rent special forces turdmastery.” And as he says it, he sticks his hands forward and into what I had taken to be the shadow of a packing crate, and emerges tangled in a furious exchange of blows with a broad, lethal figure all in black.
A lot of things happen very quickly. The man—it’s absolutely a man—breaks out a sort of truncheon thingy with a gooseneck whip at one end, and starts belabouring Ronnie Cheung about the head, or what would be the head if Ronnie’s hands weren’t up around his ears, guarding the bits of his face which will have to be stitched back on if the whip connects too sharply. Ronnie doesn’t seem to care that the skin on his forearms is splitting, and just keeps on blocking the thing and falling back. My choice would be to evade the whip and find a long, solid stick to use as a staff, but Ronnie is apparently either too proud to do this or doesn’t give a rat’s arse for staves and would rather suck it up and wait to get close, which he does now, moving as the guy in black makes a mistake with his whip-stick and bashing it out of his hand with a solid crunch which must hurt like hell. There is bone showing through Ronnie Cheung’s skin on his left arm, but there’s not really a lot of bleeding. This is the point of all the training he does: various bits of his body are now essentially impervious to normal injuries.
Ronnie launches a long, involved combination, arrhythmic and solid, with light skipping footwork to change the angle between them and move the centre line of his body out of his enemy’s effective cone of attack. His lighter blows would knock me down, and the heavy ones would almost certainly finish the fight outright. The other guy wards them off, meets them with equal force, and lands a couple on Ronnie which actually seem to have some effect. Finally, though, Ronnie locks the guy’s arms down and pummels him, then swings back and delivers a double-hand punch like the two prongs of a forklift truck hitting a corrugated iron wall, which sends the man in black through the air and onto his backside in a cloud of choking dust. Ronnie waddles over and glares at him.
The guy removes his black headgear.
“Gonzo,” says Ronnie Cheung, “that was crap. You are a bumhole.” He is extremely pleased, because his lips are swelling and he actually has a black eye. Gonzo grins. Then he coughs a bit, and Ronnie helps him up.
“I could have killed you, idiot boy,” Ronnie says, and Gonzo replies that no, he couldn’t, and Ronnie laughs again. Then Gonzo catches sight of me, and his bruised face lights up.
“Hey!” He leaps on me, delivers a great lunging hug, and I feel the muscles in his shoulders and chest. Gonzo was big a year ago. Now he is a titan. “Fuck, yeah!” says Gonzo, and because he likes to appropriate prowess by declaration he adds, “Have you seen this guy? Voiceless Dragon. Silent and deadly!” And Ronnie Cheung’s unblemished eye falls upon me with cordial loathing.
“Kept that quiet,” says Ronnie Cheung. “I thought they were all gone. Disappeared.” And when he says “disappeared” he waggles his hands in the air to indicate mystery and fog. At the same time he is giving me a look, which I recognise as a look of measurement. I am saved from any questions he may have (and Ronnie Cheung is blessed with a fondness for gossip which would make a dowager duchess blush) by the agency of Riley Tench, who looks at Gonzo and finds it necessary to attempt some male bonding.
“Total fucking ninja, man,” enthuses Riley Tench, slapping Gonzo on the back. He grins, and there’s one of those oh shit silences where everyone wishes they were somewhere else. Gonzo looks sickly, and Ronnie Cheung goes completely still. He is not tense. There is no sense of doggish aggression. He’s all relaxed and loose, the rooster strut falling away from him and being replaced by a perfect calm. This is a bad thing. It means he is absolutely ready to kill someone. He is five metres away from Riley Tench when he says “I do not train,” and he is standing very close to him, having crossed the intervening space without appreciably passing through all the necessary points along the line, when he says “ninjas.” He says this quite quietly and without particular emphasis, from a distance of about six inches. It is apparent that, even with Gonzo, Ronnie Cheung was holding back. He is faster and more dangerous than you would imagine is possible. He repeats himself, and Riley Tench sort of stops breathing and goggles at him. Ronnie Cheung says it again, turning his head slowly, so that when he says the full stop, which he somehow does, he is looking right at me.
“I do not train ninjas.”
He nods once, very slightly, and I realise he is apologising to me for Riley Tench. I nod back.
“All right then,” says Ronnie Cheung. “You,” and he points at me, “and Spunkbubble here,” and he indicates Riley Tench, who has just realised that he will not after all die today, and is measuring this glad news against the fact that he will hereinafter and for evermore be known as “Spunkbubble,” “will now engage in a brief sparring match in which you will show him why soft forms are the dog’s mighty man-grapes and hard forms are fit only to wash the back end of an incontinent cow. Make a space, boys and girls, for we shall see might and subtlety unleashed like my erection in the presence of a very expensive tart. Guard . . . Ready . . . Fight!”
Bugger.
So now I am in combat, not for real, but for a damn sight realer than I was twenty minutes ago. Ronnie Cheung watches me for signs of slacking, of holding back, and tells my opponent to make a bona fide attempt to injure me. Riley Tench, fair buzzing with fight/flight and desperate to regain some ground, charges in full weight. He almost makes it easy. He attacks high and hard, a basic opening, and I weave and step, brush and twist, and here’s a lock, briefly, which throws him that way and then the other, and he is on the floor. He leaps up. Ronnie Cheung throws him a practice knife. Riley lunges for my gut, then turns the movement into a slash. I am inside it. I strike him with my hips, and he goes “Whuff” and tenses, so I wrap the knife arm around myself (incidentally crunching my shoulder into his chest so that he comes with me) and then unwrap and lock it against my chest. As he counters that, I follow his movement and wrap his arm around him so that the rubber blade brushes against his neck.
It is a distressingly intimate thing. For a moment, hi
s face is layed over an agonised canine muzzle, coughing blood, in that tiny shack outside Cricklewood Cove. I ignore it, and flip him flat onto his back, following him down through the air so that the practice knife never wavers. He lands hard (which was admittedly the idea) and I move the knife lightly to indicate that Riley Tench has just joined the ranks of the honoured and exsanguinated dead. Ronnie Cheung calls a halt, and looks at me with distant interest, as if he has just found me on his sleeve and doesn’t know from which orifice I have emerged.
“Volunteers?” he says, gesturing at me. Richard P. Purvis steps up and I win against him too, albeit it’s scrappy and Elisabeth would sniff at me. Gonzo begs off. Ronnie Cheung shrugs, squares up to me, then beats down my defence and flattens me in about a second—but he does so, to be honest, with huge restraint, and when he says “Bumhole” it is in a thoughtful way. He hums and nods to himself, and the day comes to an end in a bar somewhere. Ronnie Cheung forgets himself as far as to buy the first round.
And Gonzo: what the hell is he doing there? How is G.W. Lubitsch, heading when last seen for a merchant bank with thunderous initials offering salaries like phone numbers—national dialling codes included after five years—and perks and possibilities beyond the dreams of mortal men, how is Gonzo William Lubitsch leaping out like a pantomime villain from behind a packing case? How does he know Ronnie Cheung? The answers are supplied over crisp beer and salty nuggets cooked in saturated fat. Gonzo has a uniform, although the precise name of his unit is classified. Gonzo is also in training, for tasks more direct and warlike than those General Copsen apparently has in mind for me. More cogently, Gonzo spent three weeks at his new job and decided, “If I stay here I will be found at fifty-five, naked under two secretaries with my feet tied to the bedposts and a lemon in my mouth, and I will be dead and fat and no one will cry except the shy woman living opposite who has always had a crush on me but could never tell me and who might have saved me from myself, but didn’t.”
By this strange logic, it seems reasonable that Gonzo would opt for a military life, and inevitable, once that decision was made, that he should seek the special forces and the dirty deeds done dirt cheap for the good of those who must never know. Gonzo could never be a line officer or a grunt. Gonzo could only ever be a Mysterious Stranger, dispensing justice and retribution in alleys all around the globe.
And with that, he orders another round and refuses to talk about it any more, because he has not, as yet, done any of these things, he has only trained for them, and Gonzo hates to talk about himself in anticipation—it does not suit him to say he is, as yet, a rookie.
In my memory there are no strippers. Gonzo swears, the day after, that there were dozens.
Chapter Five
Un-war, hells, and cakes;
a date; the red phone rings.
GREY-BROWN EARTH and green mountainsides; misty air. In the distance one of the lakes of Addeh is giving up its moisture to the heat. When the wind comes from that direction, there’s a smell of water, and diesel. When it flicks listlessly round, it comes off the Katir mountains, and carries pine and some kind of flower. Whatever direction it blows from, it doesn’t make my tent any cooler or any less isolated in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by other tents and men and women just as lonely.
This is Freeman ibn Solomon’s homeland, and the gun-mountain he was so unhapppy about has turned out to be a volcano. The country is no longer even known as Addeh Katir; mostly people call it the Elective Theatre, which suggests in some way that there is a clear decision-making process behind what is happening here. That suggestion is extremely debatable.
In the distant past, in what might be described as the Golden Days of War, the business of wreaking havoc on your neighbours (these being the only people you could logistically expect to wreak havoc upon) was uncomplicated. You—the King—pointed at the next-door country and said, “I want me one of those!” Your vassals—stalwart fellows selected for heft and musculature rather than brain—said, “Yes, my liege,” or sometimes, “What’s in it for me?” but broadly speaking they rode off and burned, pillaged, slaughtered and hacked until either you were richer by a few hundred square miles of forest and farmland, or you were rudely arrested by heathens from the other side who wanted a word in your shell-like ear about cross-border aggression. It was a personal thing, and there was little doubt about who was responsible for kicking it off, because that person was to be found in the nicest room of a big stone house wearing a very expensive hat.
Modern war is distinguished by the fact that all the participants are ostensibly unwilling. We are swept towards one another like colonies of heavily armed penguins on an ice floe. Every speech on the subject given by any involved party begins by deploring even the idea of war. A war here would not be legal or useful. It is not necessary or appropriate. It must be avoided. Immediately following this proud declamation comes a series of circumlocutions, circumventions and rhetoricocircumambulations which make it clear that we will go to war, but not really, because we don’t want to and aren’t allowed to, so what we’re doing is in fact some kind of hyper-violent peace in which people will die. We are going to un-war.
The first rumbling of un-war was nearly a year ago, when I was back in Project Albumen learning how to kill a car. Erwin Mohander Kumar, priapic president of Addeh Katir and stooge to the international financial system, defaulted on his obligations regarding the nation’s debt. Rumour has it that he spent the last hundred million in Addeh Katir’s bank account to obtain the services of every employee of a noted Dutch sex establishment for a three-year period. Almost everyone in the world now acknowledges that Erwin Kumar is unfit for dog ownership, let alone government. So much is obvious.
The difficulty is what happens next, which is that various nations and groups of nations who are notionally friendly to one another and here for identical, similar or compatible purposes get into disagreements. The good kind of disagreement comes to an end with harsh words and apologies, but disagreements between men and women trained to kill and armed with the best weapons available, who know that they are disagreeing with people who are similarly trained and equipped, are generally the other sort. Giving someone a jolly good talking-to becomes an exchange of warning shots and suddenly there’s a minor battle going on. Minor battles become international incidents; international incidents foster distrust; distrust fosters conflict.
As a consequence of several small disagreements, we are now at unwar with:
• the Joint Operational Task Force for Addeh Katir (which is supported by France, Vietnam and Italy, and commanded by Baptiste Vasille)
• the Addeh Defensive Initiative (which is run by a frosty woman from Salzburg named Ruth Kemner and distinguished by a membership so varied and changeful that not even she actually knows on whose behalf she is fighting)
• the United Nations (white hats, sidearms, slightly less scary than an Addeh sheepherder, maintaining an airfield upcountry for the inevitable humanitarian disaster to come)
• the Army of Addeh Katir (Supreme Generalissimo Emperor-President Erwin Kumar commanding, largely concerned with draining the last dregs of prosperity from the national cup)
• the Free Katiri Pirates (Zaher Bey’s collected thieves, patriots, arsonists and larcenists, who will steal anything from anyone at any time)
• the South Asian and Pan-African Strategic Fellowship (helluva nice people, actually, and fortunately camped so far away that we have only met them once since the initial misunderstanding and things are calming down a bit)
• and on several regrettable occasions also: ourselves, because accidents will happen.
It’s almost as if, now that this place exists as a war zone, everyone feels it would be rude not to use it.
WHEN I WAS studying with Master Wu, I learned that his grandmother believed in a truly enormous collection of hells. In her mind the netherworld was like a great vizier’s palace or hall of government, and every floor was given over to a different aspect of suff
ering. There was a Hell of Crawling Flies and a Hell of Scratchy Undergarments and a Hell of Lukewarm Soup and just about every hell, however vile or trivial, that you could imagine. There was a Hell of Standing in Line and a Hell of Loneliness and a Hell of Chattering Neighbours and a Hell of Silent Grief, all the way to a Hell of Boiling Pitch and a Hell of Smashed Fingers and other hells she declined to detail but delineated with significant noddings and rolling of eyes. These hells were arranged in no apparent order (except for a sequence of hells defined by their orderliness), presided over by guards of utmost probity and administered by sadists and reformers and all manner of intransigent folk, who absolutely would not be deterred from hauling or heaving or leading or shoving you into your appointed hell. There was even a Hell of Uncertain Anticipation where you simply sat around waiting to find out which hell you were eventually going to. For ever.
If there can be such a thing as the Hell of Not Getting Shot, I am in it. There is a war going on (or at least an un-war so much like a war as to be indistinguishable from the thing itself) and I am left out. I am in the thick of it, and yet I am not part of it. Men I know and men I do not are marching, patrolling, sometimes getting killed. I have trained and prepared for this, and still I am, as Ronnie Cheung would have it, a spare prick at an orgy. My moment has not come. I have been given subsidiary moments, auxiliary roles, because George Copsen does not waste resources, but these are sporadic and unsatisfying. Thus I wait and think about great and weighty matters. I am doing this now.
The walls of my tent are blue. It is possible for me, lying on my back on my bed, to reach up with my left big toe and snag a little silky thread which hangs from the roof liner and tug on it. My right foot is somehow just out of reach. I have concluded that this is owing to the angle of approach, and not to a disparity in leg lengths, although I know that my legs, like everyone else’s, are of slightly different lengths; it just seems more likely that it’s about angle. Yesterday I had reached the opposite conclusion. Then I changed my bed around so that the head end was the foot end, and now I’m sure it’s about angle. I have developed this discussion as a defence against boredom. It doesn’t work.