The Age of Odin - James Lovegrove [99]
"And then when they've heard you out and start trying to kill you..."
"Then, and only then, the shooting starts. Just try not to get trigger-happy, Coco Pops."
"Oh for fuck's sake!" Cy exclaimed, exasperated. "My surname's Fearon. If I have to have a nickname, why can't it be something to do with that? No-Fear Fearon. How about that? Works, don't it? Or what about Cyanide? Get it? Cy. Cyanide. As in, deadly as... That'd be all right. I could live with that."
"Sonny, there's nothing you can do about nicknames. Once you've got one, you've got one and that's it. Tough, but there you go."
"What did they use to call you, then? In the army?"
Our RSM had come up with Cocks-Up. Gideon Coxall. Cocks-Up. See what he did there? He'd tried his very best to make it stick, but it hadn't. Mainly, I reckoned, because I wasn't the type who cocked up, not when it came to playing the army game at any rate. A nickname had to have a kernel of truth to it if it was going to work.
"Just Gid," I told Cy, straight-faced. "Nothing else."
I wasn't sure he believed me, not if the Whatchoo talkin' 'bout, Willis? look he shot at me was anything to go by. But he let it lie.
"I've got a question for you," I said. "You said you and the army life didn't get on."
"Yeah, so?"
"So why hook up with this outfit? Was it just the money?"
"Dunno. Probably. I'm a bit hazy on it myself, to be honest. Suppose I felt I was all out of other options, and fighting's the only marketable skill I have. I'd been on the dole for ages. Jobseeker's Allowance. Hah! There's a joke. Fifty quid a week doesn't allow you to do much except sit at home and watch daytime TV and eat tinned beans. And then I'd see all the dealers on the estate, how much they were making, the stuff they had, the cars with the thirty-two-inch subwoofers and the under-chassis strobe lighting and that... It didn't seem right, y'know? Didn't seem hardly fair. And there's soldiering in my blood. My granddad was a squaddie too, see. Mind you, it fucked him up good and proper."
"Second World War?"
"Nah, he missed that," Cy said. "Too young. But after. Did his National Service and liked it so much he enlisted. 'Took the Queen's shilling,' he used to say. He was white, by the way. My mum's dad. He married black, so that makes me, I dunno, eighth white or something."
"That might explain the -"
"Don't even start," he said, wagging a warning finger. "But the Queen's shilling wasn't worth shit, not after what they did to him."
"Which was what?"
"Christmas Island. Operation Grapple. The nuclear tests. Him and about a thousand other servicemen, the army just plonked them down on a speck of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, lined them up on a beach and blew up a fucking hydrogen bomb in front of them. My granddad said it was the weirdest thing he'd ever seen."
"His own bones visible through his hand?"
"Yeah, exactly. He had his back to the explosion and still his hand went all X-ray. There were no shadows anywhere, the light was that bright. And the noise... the noise was incredible. 'Like the planet splitting in two,' he said. And then a few days later his palms all blistered up, and so did the soles of his feet, and he got pretty sick. Then he got better again, and he thought that was it, end of. Only it wasn't."
"Cancer?"
"Funnily enough, not. He should've died from that. Plenty of the others did. And he smoked like a fucking chimney all his life. One way or another a tumour should've got him. But what happened was a whole lot more peculiar. One day, when he was in his fifties, he woke up and suddenly he couldn't remember who he was. No idea. Complete blank. He didn't recognise the woman lying in bed beside him. Didn't know her name."
"Well, we've all had mornings like that."
"Yeah, but she was his wife. They'd just celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary. And he had no memory of who she was, or what his own name was either, or where he lived, what he did for a living, any of it. This is a true story. My gran took him off to hospital, and he stayed there