Over the Top

In his dream he was on the wrong train and ended up in a part of the city he’d never been before, ran into Dee Halstone who was with Trent Ferdinand and a few other guys and after a coupla beers in a coupla pubs they were running through the streets, music booming from somewhere, the chant rose up from Trent in his wheelchair: THIS IS ROCK AND ROLL! THIS IS ROCK AND ROLL! – and clattering down a set of stairs into the hole of a tunnel where an unfazed working man stood by the closed doors saying ‘Sorry, lads, it’s six am,’ which gave him a jolt of anxiety, seeing as the company were on manoeuvres at nine, but fuck it, do the whole day through –
+++++- whoosh. The delta waves echoed away into his head. No worry about work after all. All gone in a few hours, but he still had enough memory to understand that he and Dee (Dee and I) had met several times that week, juddering towards each other on grass and precinct, and he wondered whether the dream world kept going when you were awake, some kind of parallel life where the rules were different.
+++++ Corvair was standing by the kettle. ‘A brew, Lance-Corporal?’
+++++ ‘Wouldn’t mind, sir.’
+++++ A crash shook the room. He sidestepped a little but kept his balance; Corvair didn’t react. The men in the bunks barely stirred; you wouldn’t expect them to. Lossario had always said that the soldier’s greatest talent is to sleep on command. And speak of the devil –
+++++ Corvair handed him his brew in the MCFC mug. The captain offered a cigarette, waited till it was lit before he spoke. ‘I’ve heard from the man. We move at some point within the next four hours.’
+++++ ‘Good stuff. Climbing up the fucking walls here!’
+++++ Typical squaddie gallows humour, you might have said and yet there was truth in it. It would be good to get out of this bulletproof box where they’d been since the debacle at Heliom, nothing to do but chat and read and work their way through the spoils of looting. Even though the alternative was almost certain death at the Faith’s guns. Would everyone feel this way, that oblivion is better than boredom and stasis?
+++++ ‘Good timin, I suppose. I see you’re running out of book, there.’
+++++ Schiazzi’s old man had given him Shelby Foote’s entire Civil War opus. Schiazzi had no interest in reading, and had told his father so, but the old man had just shook his head and said: You never know when you’re gonner get bored, son. Dad had been right, as he generally was. The past month he’d been racing through the Foote omnibus, cannibalising the read pages for kindling and bog roll.
+++++ The others stirred awake. Schiazzi knew that there would be no momentary where-am-I shit, not for his kind. Breakfasts of Pot Noodles and Rustlers readymeals were made from kettle and microwave. More brews, cigarettes rolled and lit, and Corvair slapped open the chessboard crying winner stays on, as he always did. He shared his news which was received in a deep and abiding indifference. The guns rolled as if to underline the point.
+++++ ‘Well, if that’s the case,’ said Edlington, ‘might as well break out the moonshine now.’
+++++ ‘We start drinking your latest batch,’ Corvair said, ‘there’ll be no need to go over the top. Man, at least the Faith guns are quick.’
+++++ Atkinson: ‘In any case what happens if the big lads get here, and we’re all like: Tally-ho, old England! Rarr, ya fuck-fugh-fugh. He mimed a sloppy, drunken salute that made Schiazzi think of Red Dwarf.
+++++ ‘Come on, no one’s gonner care about that now. Anyway, beer improves fucking performance. When I won the Blackwater Cross at Torry Astell.’ The rest of this was submerged in mocking groans: they had heard the story many times.
+++++ ‘Mention that one more time, soldier, I’ll put that medal in a place where you’ll always be reminded of its significance,’ Corvair told him. ‘But you’re right. Might as well start drinking early.’
+++++ Edlington’s amateur moonshine was brewed over three-day periods, using Alliance-brand sachet sugar, a bushel of wheat they had found in a bombed-out farmhouse in Trestle, and medicinal ethanol; and tasted pretty much how you’d expect. On this day, however, it did its job. Corvair beat them a few go-rounds on the board and Schiazzi read about Pickett’s charge, but within a couple of hours they were all bouncing off each other’s ideas and lying back laughing, and Schiazzi now changed his mind, that he didn’t want to leave, they were having a good laugh, and the wonder and absurdity of their situation (from that to this?) didn’t detract from the atmosphere. The guns rolled again at that point, making Schiazzi think as always of the crunch of boot on Cheshire gravel, the sound their Volvo made as it turned into his grandfather’s driveway.
+++++ They were singing ‘David Lossario’s Men’ now, which Schiazzi hadn’t heard since it had been pounded into him at process centre. The company got into its second verse before memory failed and they were rocking back on their pallets again with laughter, toasting each other with mugs and water-cooler cups.
+++++ Atkinson stood up – just about. The others cheered at his compromised gait. He said: ‘Christ, this is bad.’ He pulled out a bag of Wine Gums from under his bunk.
+++++ ‘Fuck’s this?’ Schiazzi laughed.
+++++ ‘Saving ‘em for a special occasion.’ He opened the bag and started chucking them out.
+++++ ‘Most soldiers keep paw-now-graphy under their beds!’
+++++ ‘Hey, we’re gonner be ripping the veils off peasant girls this time tomorrow,’ Schiazzi said.
+++++ Corvair spat out a mess of red gelatin. ‘Man,’ he declared, ‘that Wine Gum was more trouble than it was worth!’
+++++ Schiazzi wondered if it was all over soon whether the parallel track of his dreams would keep on going. Would these adventures be derailed by the bullets tearing into his prefrontal cortex? Outside the guns rolled and then stopped and then rolled again.
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Max Dunbar was born in London in 1981. He recently finished a full-length novel and writes regular criticism for 3:AM Magazine. He is Manchester’s regional editor of Succour magazine, a journal of new fiction and poetry. He blogs at MaxDunbar. Max lives in Manchester and can be contacted on max.dunbar@gmail.com.