CHAPTER 5
I should have expected it. We dropped everything off, went straight back to college, and by the time I had ridden home my mother had put everything away.

“Your transvestite stuff is in the wardrobe in the spare room, John”

What exactly had Dave said about my parents? Her next was easier to answer.

“You have no brassieres, John, and no nightwear. “

“You may have missed it mother, but I am without breasts, and Jane would have noticed the nightwear”

This was definitely removing me from any territory I was familiar with. She kept on, criticising some of my choices, praising others. Now, I know that I am seen as an odd fish, Dave had just been telling me exactly that, but this was surreal. I made a small prediction, based on her current train of thought, and she fulfilled it.

“So, when do I get to see you in your finery?”

When pigs fly. Dave was right, I needed to get out to my own place. The problem would be cash flow until I sorted the joint finances. Deep joy clearly awaited me, and it would probably involve being asked to dress for dinner.

The next week or so was awkward. My mother kept on, Dave and I did another run to collect the bikes one evening, and I spent hours trying to work out what the script was telling me. The schemata usually involved a heated discussion between spouses, but that never happened in my case.

She was calm incarnate, and to what should have been no great surprise on my part, given Dave’s revelation of how long liaison had been in session, she had a whole financial settlement planned out for us. Apparently, Mark was selling his place and would buy me out of the mortgage. I realised two things at that point.

The first was that my arrival while they were in bed was probably not at all accidental. It may well have been Jane’s way of making a point even I could not miss. The other made my head hurt.

I have taken pains to try and explain how I see the world, bow my mind filters it. You can only see as far as your stance allows, and I found myself trying to see around corners. There were big issues here, and I could feel the thing the doc had described as a form of Asperger’s Syndrome wrapping round my thoughts. I stand outside situations, I look at them, I perform my own little dance of Russian Formalism, and here I am analysing my own analysis.

I do not truthfully think I can make any headway in explaining how that feels. That was connected to the other thing that pushed its way into my mind, and that was that I really, really had to find some way of meeting other people in their own world. I had had three, no, five interactions that had thrown me. One of them, an offer of sexual bribery, was exactly the sort of thing that I realised could land me in prison in the wrong circumstances. I had to learn how to be human, which is no easy task. I resolved to take Pete up on his offer of a drink, as a start, but I would try and get Dave along as an interpreter. It involved beer, so I would be back on safer and more predictable territory. I could only hope that I would be able to speak without going into fugue for minutes.

I tried to explain all this to Dave, but he simply said to me “Do you know you just stand with your mouth open for ages when you are stressed?”

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I had a small moment of panic when I thought I had lost the paper from Pete, but found it in G,E,B marking an interesting digression on how to prove all ravens are white. I rang him that evening, and he suggested the Barn, as it was not far from the station. That would allow me a pleasant enough ride up by way of Lee and Warsash, and then a post-drink train back to Fareham and a much shorter run home. I suggested a Thursday evening to avoid too many crowds, and Dave leant on Sharon to drive.

“Why don’t you come in the car with us, John?”

“I think better when riding”

“What, nearly 30mph, mouth open and away with the fairies? Not safe at all, that”

I knew what Dave meant, but he was wrong. I didn’t do that at all when riding, it was too natural a process for me. In the end the ride was pleasant, running up the Solent and across the end of the Meon before following the Hamble past other people’s obsessions floating at their moorings. Well, mostly floating, there was at least one rowing boat that seemed to be exploring a deeper role in its life.

I was there before anyone else, and I was not impressed. The place was indeed close to the station, but the bar staff were more interested in each other than me. Dave and Sharon pulled in after twenty minutes, Dave driving the Volvo, Sharon dismissing the bar menu with a shudder. Five minutes later, Pete’s chair came into the car park, at quite a speed. It seemed I had been right about the components, it was a sports car for cripples. He too was not impressed, and suggested we move on to the Barleycorn, more than a walk away. Dave looked at his chair.

“Does it fold? If so, we can stick it in the back with his bike. Pop your wheels out, John.”

The next pub seemed more in keeping with the men’s ambitions, and they were straight into their beer, Sharon and I settling down for an evening of sobriety as the designated drivers.

“So, if it’s not too rude a question, Pete, what the hell happened? John said something about a bomb?”

“Out in Helmand. It’s odd, I’ve known him since infants’ school, but there’s such a gap it’s like talking to a stranger. Where to start?”
I settled my hind brain into following his story, while I watched Sharon in particular for clues on how to behave. There were patterns there, her posture and other non-verbal communication, her avoidance of ideational function in favour of the interpersonal. She wasn’t quizzing him, which would have been more efficient, she was letting him talk with the occasional empty comment. It was a long story, and partway through I realised how much I had missed from observing Sharon when I saw her getting a tissue from her handbag for Pete, who I suddenly saw was in tears.

He had moved to York, of all places, to be with his father’s parents after the sudden death of his mother. It appeared his father wanted a complete clear out after the shock, and at 12, everything sold, he had moved to Acaster, just outside the city. He described a good pub there, which did not surprise me considering how many pints were being disposed of.

School, restlessness, a sort of rebellion, and from 16 he was in Arborfield learning to be a Craftsman with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, the REME. Catterick, Bovington, Sennelager, all followed in their usual sequence.

“I was lucky, avoided all the nasties, not much call for a Tiffy in some of those places”

Sharon looked puzzled. “Tiffy?”

“Artificer. Engineer, mechanic, that sort of thing”

He got to staff sergeant, eventually.

“ I was due out this year, as it happens, off to find a job with my dad’s people, probably, running lorries. Not really up to it now, as you can see.

“That day was a hot one. We had found this Coke machine, and it did the proper old-fashioned bottles that you never see any more, and they come out of the bottom with a bang, all covered in dew, so I’d collared one, and we were on a shout to deal with a mechanical on a Warrior.

“It’s odd out there, you watch the crowd, and when they gather in numbers you get more careful. We’d dismounted to have a recce, and I remember I was on one knee behind the vehicle with my weapon in my right hand and I thought I would just have a swig while it was cold, you know? Put the vehicle between me and the hostiles, just in case, and I should have known better, they were doing the same. The bomb was on our side.

“One of the other lads saw it, you know? He saw the kid, about thirteen, pull out a mobile and press a button. I didn’t hear the bomb, you understand, I just saw the bottle smash, and there was this ‘SPANG!’ as something hit my ceramic, and I couldn’t stand up, and there was an awful lot of blood.

“I really couldn’t understand what had happened, I just realised that Lefty had thrown himself over me after the blast to protect me.”

I was away from Sharon now, fully on Pete. There was a look in his eyes I had read about, where they are focused on things that happened elsewhere but are still happening internally.

“The other boys got my bleeding stopped, and they got a patrol of bootnecks in to cover my casevac, and I was stabilised and flown back and, well, here we are. Trying to make a new life.”

I felt I should really contribute something.

“I suppose you owed Lefty a pint”

Pete started crying openly now.

“Oh, John, you don’t watch the news at all, do you? Lefty didn’t throw himself over me, what was left fell on me. They flew him back to Wootton a few days after I got back”

I really did not know what to say. Once more I was trying to find some way of bringing a pattern to this, but violent death was so far outside my sightline that was lost. How did the others react? Sharon was now hugging him, and Dave had a hand on his shoulder. I reached out and took his right hand, and in a moment of inspiration unlike me I said quietly,

“This is not a good place for conversations like this. Dave and I have rooms at college, if you ever need space or privacy, and whatever we can do to help we will. Right, you two?”

I saw Sharon staring at me open-mouthed.

“Are you a pod person? What have you done with the real John?”