Atonement by Adrian Brookes (Third Prize)
This is as far as life goes, then.
The boy’s acceptance was what troubled Nate the most. For a second of eternity his soul had locked with his victim’s. There’d been no sign of shock at the bullet’s impact, just the recognition that life was over and the appalling readiness to let it go. Those pudgy features, the very countenance of unfledged youth, should have moved hands to nurture, not slaughter.
There’d been reports of insurgents in the village, so Nate and his band of brothers had been sent to rout them out. Having readied himself to face some devil-eyed fury, he was baffled to see this meek little kid wander down the path towards him. Barely four feet tall, yet swaddled in a grown-up robe and turban, he reminded him of his own boy, Danny, playing dress-ups.
Except that he’d come toting a very real AK47. Though almost as long as himself and too unwieldy for his spindly limbs to aim straight, its discharge could still have been deadly. In the light-speed of thought, Nate had seen that letting him loose with a loaded firearm would have posed a greater risk to his own side than anyone else, so very likely it wasn’t loaded, and the lad had simply wandered down the wrong path in the process of carting it to an uncle or big brother.
So Nate had paused, and so allowed the boy an extra two half-seconds of life, the first in alarm at the thought of shooting a child, and the next in noting that the boy was, however unintentionally, pointing the weapon straight at him. For himself, Nate later reflected, he still might have given the young fellow a chance, but something larger had imposed itself, some imperious power with an all-embracing name like duty, swatting aside hesitation and making the thing happen without him willing it.
And sure enough, when he’d unstuck the rifle from the lad’s dead fingers, he’d found its magazine empty.
So the break had begun, the severance of the soldier and the man. It unnerved Nate that such a power could lurk within him, quite separate from himself, to disengage his humanity and make him execute its will. In days since, he’d tried many times to trap this thing and haul it to account, but each time it had vanished into some unsearchable space where it could negate its own existence.
Good riddance, then!—or so it seemed. But before long Nate realised he needed this thing, this possessing spirit, for if it didn’t exist it couldn’t be blamed for the vile deed—which of course meant he must have done it himself. No. Better to keep the demon on board than know himself a murderer.
Then he left the army. Over time, he shed its behaviours and fell into the ways and thoughts of civilian life, only to find himself increasingly, and unwillingly, undergoing an exorcism. As the military mindset unravelled, there was no longer any call of duty to appeal to, no demon to take the blame for what he’d done. Bereft of those safeguards, there was nothing to stop the irreparable truth taking hold: he, Nathan Bayley, had gratuitously shot to death a defenceless child.
And on top of that knowledge came to mind the awful noise that had accompanied the killing. It was, he was sure, an outburst of human extremity, but it hadn’t come from the boy, and amidst the ear-bursting clamour of the firefight there was no way it could have been audible. It had come, then, from some other source than the natural; out of some fathomless depth where lies the common ground of all humanity, it jarred him with its haunting dissonance:
The irrevocable call for atonement.
The turning point had come with that lunchtime in the pub. He hadn’t been in a pub for some weeks, mainly because he’d stopped seeing his old mates. The debriefing guy had warned him about things like this—said it could happen any time, even way down the track, and could be a sign that all was not well. Out driving one day, Nate had been pondering the subject, and when the Red Lion came into sight he’d decided on impulse to pull into the car park. He’d never been there before, but it would be a good chance to show himself all was fine. His mates wouldn’t be there, but no matter, he could reconnect with them any time he liked.
Pushing through the bar door, he stepped into a small room whose only occupants apart from the barman were half a dozen men drinking around a table. As they looked up at him he scanned the group to discount the chance of familiar faces, and there was none. Relieved, he went to the bar to order a drink.
‘Bandy Bayley!’
Nate looked up sharply. No-one had called him that since his pre-army apprenticeship days—‘Bandy’ because of a minor bandsaw accident.
‘Well, I never. It’s been a good few years. How’ve you been, Bandy?’
The barman’s features, visions of a past life, gelled in Nate’s memory. ‘Roddy.’ He tried to keep the tone neutral. Roddy wasn’t someone he’d got on with or liked too well. They’d been doing their tech training together before Nate pulled out for the army. ‘I’m going all right. How’s yourself?’
But the barman addressed the group at the table. ‘Hey, you remember I told you about my old workmate who joined the army?’
There was general enthusiastic assent.
‘Saw you on TV, chatting up the prime minister.’
The scene swam before Nate’s eyes and he swore under his breath, for Roddy had taken him straight back to where he didn’t want to be. He was referring to what Nate dismissed as his five seconds of fame, when the PM had visited the troops.
‘Yeah,’ Roddy pressed, oblivious to Nate’s reserve, ‘just a glimpse, but it was you, all right.’
Somehow Nate found himself seated at the head of the table. A full glass appeared in front of him, and the men gathered themselves into an audience, with Roddy presiding from the bar.
‘I remember that,’ someone said. ‘What did you say to him?’
Nate held his voice steady, his face unsmiling. ‘I can’t remember, mate. Nothing meaningful. We had to look pleased to see him.’
His reserve took them aback.
‘Yeah, well, good on you, mate,’ someone ventured. ‘You go and deal with them over there before they come over here to get us.’
The terrorist bombings of a transport system had been in the news. There were grunts and nods of approval, assuming Nate’s assent.
Nate merely nodded.
‘Modest man,’ one of them said, keen to excuse his silence. ‘But you did us proud over there, mate. Drink up, I’ll get you another one.’
‘No.’ Another drink would mean a longer stay and a growing obligation. ‘I’m not a big drinker.’
Again his unwillingness perturbed them. This wasn’t their gracious hero. Or maybe it was them who’d got it wrong.
‘That’s good,’ one of them offered, ‘not to take to drink. I know some do after they’ve been over there. It can’t be easy.’
‘No,’ Nate said again; but still they wanted more. ‘Look, it was a while ago now.’ His tone was meant to tell them those days were done and he’d moved on, but they were still set on showing their admiration.
‘A proud thing to have done with your life. Though I suppose it stays with you—things you can’t forget.’
And right on cue, behind the eager red faces, the child appeared, now warmly alive, now putty-dead. Steadying his right arm, Nate swilled his beer. ‘It does.’
Again they waited for a more loquacious response. There were shuffles and pained looks. They were on his side, so why the attitude?
‘We were all right behind you, mate,’ another man tried, and stalled. ‘I mean, totally on your side, you know…’
With an effort Nate shut out the dead face, but the vision had set free a clamour of thoughts that were reaching for words, a pressure wanting to burst. ‘Yeah. But why?’
‘Why?’ There was open bewilderment in the faces. The hero wasn’t playing his part. ‘You mean, why were we on your side?’
‘Or why did you go and do your bit for your country?’
An older man intervened. ‘Yeah, well, there’s one thing I can tell you—it’s not the nicest experience. Not at all.’
The boy’s face appeared before Nate again, the expression hardly shifting as the small body hit the ground. ‘Look.’ He fought to keep the rancour out of his voice. ‘I went because I was in the army. That’s the only reason.’ He was going to blow it if he didn’t hold it in. ‘No great patriotic ideals. You go where you get sent. You do what you have to do.’
But had he had to do that?
Now there were sympathetic looks: your job. You might not like it but you’ve got to go along with it.
But Nate’s face was flint. ‘You don’t know what it’s like before you go.’ The thoughts were seizing the words they’d sought. ‘Or what you’ll be like when you come back.’ His voice turned to a snarl. ‘It’s an accident of birth: if we’d been born over there, we’d be them. If they’d been born here, they’d be us.’
They couldn’t, didn’t want to, see it. Sympathy soured into suspicion. They’d reached out to this man in good faith and got bitten.
Roddy sought to assert the authority of the bar. ‘Hang on, Bandy.’
The nickname riled Nate and would have tipped him over the edge if not for a growing awareness of something formative shifting inside him.
‘Look, Bandy, all we’re trying to do is show you our appreciation for the bloody hard job you did for us. Matter of fact, we know a bit about how it stays with you and how hard it can be when you come back. We know you’ve got to deal with that PS…’ He grappled with the acronym.
‘PTSD?’ His own cheeks flaming, Nate glared into the faces around him. Having spoken its name, it fell into place. ‘Yeah, dead right,’ he blurted. The admission, once made, was irreversible, and he stuck out his chin in defiance. ‘Messed me up, hasn’t it? Good and proper.’ He banged his fist on the table. ‘Come on, then, tell me. It has, hasn’t it?’
He thrust back his chair and jumped up. Those near him shrank away, fearing a blow.
‘Look!’
They all turned to the empty space where he was pointing.
‘See the kid?’
They looked back and forth in bewilderment.
‘No, you don’t, do you? But I do!’
The screech of his tyres brought him back to himself—he scorned the idiots who burned rubber like that, and he certainly wasn’t going to join them. He suppressed his tension, drove deliberately slowly from the pub car park and pulled into a lay-by a little way down the road. There he sat still, regulating his breathing and letting his racing thoughts subside; and in calming, they folded inwards like fingers of the soul exploring newfound scars.
It was some time, maybe an hour, before he allowed himself to face the truth: he was a damaged man. The harm had long lain dormant, awaiting the situation that would trigger it. His first reaction was renewed anger, at first irrationally against the boy for being where he was and letting himself get targeted; but of course it wasn’t the boy’s fault. The lad had all along been just one of too many helpless victims caught up in the theatre of history, and Nate had only taken his victimhood to its inevitable, if all-too-early, conclusion.
But why had the lad been in harm’s way in the first place? It was a far greater issue than the simple errand of delivering a rifle. The scope of the question ballooned upwards from the small corpse, with every foot of height revealing ever more complexities. Finally, in a sweeping, 4-D panorama of space and time, he saw laid out below him a vast terrain of historical malignance, the fog of pretence and fine rhetoric blown away to expose the pitiless, timeless, abuse of the weak by the strong.
There beneath him lay the whole mad maze of colonial and neocolonial conflict: a world region of some half-billion people from which arose not merely the smokes of airborne ordnance but the virulent reek of seething rage against his and other similar countries. Centuries of exploitation had led to the inevitable outcome of a deep-rooted, generational hatred which he personally had perpetuated as part of a cutting-edge killing machine unleashed on simple village folk.
All to treat mere symptoms! For that was, incredibly, what all the fuss was about, reacting back and forth to the skin-deep blemish, not the chronic, long-term disease of history. But since the real cure could only be administered through the mockeries of modern-day politics, change for the better was a squandered hope—especially since generations of suffering would require so many further generations of healing.
And so the pinnacle of political wisdom was to send fools like him to kill children—to put him on a level with the most reviled inmates of his home country’s jails, sent down for doing the very thing he’d done; yet instead of a prison’s protection cell, his award from the powers that be had been a service medal.
So, no, the matter went way back before his fateful visit to the Red Lion, and even long before the killing; its birth was of a bygone age, the issue of a rape-child empire. The pub had only laid bare his own peculiar plight, the fleeting turns of one small, mangled cog in the grating machinations of history, whose twisted tale had corrupted him as one amongst the artless minions it had schooled in its painted-turd patriotism. To the trump-tarump of gleaming instruments, splendid uniforms marched in perfect step to the massacre of native populations. Right from those earliest imperial conceits of straight lines on a map, the assumption for those of lesser worth had been servitude to the death; whether on one side or the other, each and all had been used to gratify the will of the elect.
And what of the upshot of it all—that awful call for atonement that had risen from the roots of humanity to form the whole dissonant context of his life? He now knew it as the howl of a father’s unspeakable anguish.
Back home, he sat and pondered its meaning: to have a son in whom resided a posterity of pride and hope, and then to have that future, at the squeeze of a finger, decease. Just as the child’s natural father had imparted life to the child, he, Nate, had fathered his death. The living lad’s fate had been in his hands, Nate’s alone to preserve or extinguish. Those two eternal half-seconds had evolved into an unattainable desire to undo an event of ultimate finality, reworking the incident over and over in the yearning for an impossibly different outcome. Now again he saw the pudgy features and longed to bestow in them the spark of youth, to see the dead eyes blaze into life and hope, to run to the boy not with a gun and a bullet but a father’s kiss, conferring all the blessings a young man could want.
But… unattainable; dead forever.
And now beside the boy, another figure appeared. Its steady eyes looked into Nate’s with ominous expectancy. But we are not enemies, Nate implored the eyes—we both wanted the best for him, truly! The eyes ignored the plea. You killed my boy, they said; now there is an atonement to make: you must suffer as I do.
For many days Nate fought to deny the justice of the assertion, but its devastating certainty forswore any denial.
The muted light from the landing shone into Danny’s room. Nate sat on the bedside chair, watching his son’s tranquil features and the rise and fall of his breathing.
Atonement.
‘Son,’ he muttered.
But there had been two sons.
‘Danny.’
But the eyes were watching him.
‘I’m sorry.’
But sorry is not enough.
‘Danny!’
Is it done?
Wait.
The howl of a father’s anguish.