Free The Life Business by John Grant Page A

complaining
about the change to what now hit me in the face – and that was
exactly what it felt like: being slapped across the face, not too
hard, by a hand that was soft and quite small. A girl's hand. The
shock came not from the strength of the blow but from its
determination.
    I was brought up by
the sea, so I'm no stranger to what salty water and decaying
seaweed and the occasional carcase of fish can conjure up between
them, but this was something different. Away in the distance was
the smooth surface of the lough, and beyond that the hills of
Donegal loomed, an ancient purple against the sky's grey readiness
to rain. The scorched-looking grass, kept tuftily short by as yet
unseen wildlife or just by the hostility of the soil so close to
the water, added to the sudden sensation I had that I could have
stood here a thousand years ago or even a million and not very much
would be different except the Nissen huts and the pings and pops of
the cooling bus and the yells of my schoolfellows and the
masochistic masters – or cadet-force officers, should I say – who'd
come with us to try to keep us under control.
    There's a low-security
prison at Magilligan Point now. Years before the prison came, those
three dreary Nissen huts were replaced by H-blocks where the Brits
kept suspects during the Troubles, but I imagine everyone who's
ever had to be there, for however long, has breathed that same
strong, unsettling air.
    The place smells of
time, and antiquity, and of people who walked here long before our
kind.
    "Are you just going to
stand there dreaming, Greenham?" said Drac Johnson, the maths
master, only he was Sergeant-Major Johnson for the next two weeks
and I'd better not forget it. "There's supplies to be stowed before
we can get our supper tonight. Get a move on! Chop, chop!"
    He shoved my kit bag
into my midriff and pushed me away in the general direction of the
nearest hut.
    ~
    We stowed. We squabbled
over bunks. We cooked. We ate. Darkness fell.
    We discovered the
latrines.
    Even the timeless
odours of Magilligan Point couldn't disguise those latrines from us
– which was strange, because whoever had designed them had had a
clever idea. The shed containing them was built straddling a
biggish, busily flowing stream. Inside the shed were two long
wooden benches with rows of standard lavatory-seat ovals cut out of
them. There weren't any partitions or anything, no fear. To the
British Army, crapping among the enlisted men was a spectator
sport, with everyone being both performer and audience.
    I'd been off the idea
of public crapping since toddlerhood, and saw no reason to rethink
my attitude now. I resolved to steal some bog roll and make do as
best I could for the next fortnight out in the surrounding
tundra.
    I could see everyone
else making the same decision.
    ~
    The days passed.
Although it was part of my self-image at the grand age of fifteen
to distance myself from my contemporaries – I hadn't managed to get
as far page fifty-two in L'Étranger for nothing, you know –
I had a pretty good time. We were up every morning before the sun,
of course, but I quickly got used to that. Although there was a
certain amount of drilling and polishing of boots and brasses
forced upon us, most of the time we were doing stuff like
mapreading and hiking; a bunch of us even went up one of the local
mountains, which was no Everest but offered from its summit a view
of a satisfyingly large slab of Irish countryside.
    We all peed on a cairn
up there, watched by only clouds and birds.
    ~
    From the bus window, as
we'd been arriving, we'd seen a black corrugated-iron shanty in the
middle of a rape field with the word PUB stencilled in enormous
white capitals on its roof.
    Chickenhearted that we
were, none of us dared go there. It took us most of the first week
to work out that the masters – officers – were sloping off to PUB
at nights after they'd bedded the rest of us down. They probably
went not so much for the drink as to