The Illuminations by Andrew O’Hagan Read Free Book Online

Jocky ancestors were forming a football team in Glasgow around that time,’ he said. ‘God bless them. They were bog Irish like my own, with hardly a kilo of potatoes between the lot of them. And what do you think was happening over here in that year of Our Lord, 1880?’
‘Death and destruction, I presume.’
‘Correct! A British brigade was massacred by 25,000 Afghan savages. A thousand of our lads. And here we are making ready to bring water to the same ungrateful pigs in their madrasas, still teaching their young how to blow up British soldiers who are out here to help them.’
‘They’re mainly in Pakistan, the kind of madrasas you’re speaking about.’
‘Wherever. It’s all the same.’
‘In any case I would cut that speech, sir,’ said Luke. ‘For the briefing. This is a two-day mission requiring tolerance.’
Scullion was in the mood for firing off questions. Luke had seen it before and knew it was coming. ‘You’ve seen this country from the air a number of times?’ he said.
‘Of course.’
‘What does it look like to you?’
‘Dunno, sir. Empty. Bleak.’
‘No, Campbell. It looks like bundles of brown blankets slung over history. And that is what it is.’
‘You’ve said that before.’
Scullion stood up and took a few steps and drew his finger down some bullet holes in the window frame. A few hundred yards off he could see whorls of razor wire with plastic bags snagged on the blades. The bags didn’t flutter, they were still, it was hot.
‘Did you have a nice time at university?’ Scullion asked.
‘Just normal, I suppose.’
‘And what did you learn?’
‘I learned how to climb. I was in the climbing club.’
‘What else?’
‘I learned how to drink snakebite and blackcurrant. And I learned that nationalism is a false promise.’
‘Well worth the visit,’ Scullion said. ‘I met my wife at Trinity. We used to lie in bed listening to Duke Ellington. Frost on the trees. Early 1980s. The cleaner in the halls of residence used to bring us a lit Carroll’s cigarette and a cup of tea in the morning.’
‘That’s the life.’
‘It was, Luke. It was the life.’
‘You’re upset, sir.’
‘You know something …’ He sat down and his shoulders sank. It’s not ordinary for a man like Scullion to let his shoulders go. He coughed. Luke knew he had recently split up with his wife. ‘A bad marriage can smash a person’s life for years. You haven’t really lived until you’ve been fucked over by a person who claimed to love you. Some people have it in the bag by the time they’re twenty. But most of us get it at forty or forty-five, the lunatic surge, desperate to take you down. They force you out of your own house and claim you left them. Madeleine was so hormonal and dark I think it actually wiped her memory. She can’t remember what she did. The hostility. I never faced a bigger battle.’
‘Come on, sir,’ said Luke. ‘You fought in Bosnia.’
‘Dead on. I’d faced dictators before but none of them controlled access to my dog.’
‘She never hated you, Charlie.’
‘No, she didn’t. Her negatives were just too deeply cooked into the casserole.’ He smirked and sat down again. ‘But she didn’t love me either. She used me, man. She used me as an alibi against the accusation she was messing up her life.’
‘No way, sir.’
‘Oh, yes. She saw me coming along and she thought, “He’ll do. He’s respectable. He’ll take the sting out of it for a while.” It was her father and mother that did it. They were liars, too. By an early age she was totally fucking destroyed as an ethical being. She could speak endlessly about love but her actions were without it. And that’s evil, Luke. That’s badness for you, right there.’
‘Charlie …’
‘They never see it, those people. They never see what they’redoing because they’re too busy doing it. And when you finally find them out it’s part of their brilliant act to deny it, to pretend they are the victim and then