This Means War: Arsenal

‘I once had Gerry Adams in the crosshair of my rifle.”

He smiles coyly at his opener, looks over my head at the drenched pitches. Strokes his grey stubble like Men with Stories do. A sallow-skinned George Clooney, the flabby layering suggests the massive hardbody that once lay beneath. Ex-Forces, I know the type – the only men who can decode my hybrid accent from a simple car-park Hello.

We are ambushed by the downpour outside ARSENAL FC YOUTH ACADEMY. A passing clatter of studs cuts between us. “Cuppa,” he says, and I take the bait, follow the scent of story through the red doors up a concrete stairwell. “Divis flats,” he continues, taking the steps three at a time with a springy heft. “Crossmaglen, Portrush, Antrim, I’ve been all over.”

He shoulders through the swing doors into a makeshift café. You’d nearly do a whipround to replace the bald carpet. There’s a trophy cabinet of dusty memorabilia. And a bar hatch that might slide open for some grim social. He taps the notice board and in among the team sheets is a training schedule for the under 12s that would make you weak at the knees.

“When were you there?” But he’s already over by the table where a tower of plastic cups leans against the wall. A Tupperware pitcher of squash. A tea machine that wants 50p. And in all this temporariness, a pale platter of shortbread laid out like embalmed fingers on a slab. There’s a woman’s hand somewhere in all this – and there is even a Ladies. With a chipped basin, an open window and a battered door.

The dryer blasts cold air into the February chill. Here in Hale End, E17 4JP, with 10 lanes of traffic hurtling past on the North Circular. The butt end of nowhere that is the beginning of hope for boys with big dreams.

Through the streaming windows I watch a free kick mannequin getting battered in the warm up. “At least they don’t have to cover their balls.” He hands me a mug. I do not drink tea.

“Before we shipped out, we spent months training in this place called the Tin Hut.”

“Where?”

“A model village, like a set.” He ignores the question. “Twenty-four hours of things detonating all round you with no warning. Getting shot at when you turned a corner. Funnily enough, Belfast was a real anti-climax.”

He picks up a thick finger of shortbread, turns it over like he’s checking for damage.

He nibbles and a sugar shower clings to his stubble, lends a Christmassy air to the proceedings.

"Dublin, intya." It's a confirmation not an inquiry. He's not a question kind of guy, all the important ones are answered by his anchor to firm ground, looking through the scope at the crosshair. A queasy scent of bleach rises from the carpet. He makes sudden eye contact, still chewing and I turn away to the window. I know what he's thinking, I've lived here long enough. He's thinking your lot. Southern pussies singing Danny Boy, eating vodka jellies on Paddy's Day in Cricklewood.

Your lot, I cut my teeth on ex-Forces with Navy Boy years ago. He’d left school at 15, spent four years in a sub. He took me to the Imperial War Museum and I climbed into the head, a child’s size bunk they all sleep-shared. Is that for real? I said and he fled outside for a fag. Did you know this place used to be Bedlam, the janitor told me, and I could picture the big stone entrance hall full of lunatics, shuffling about in chains chewing on their hair. He said Bin Laden used the Reading Room, I told Navy Boy.

Fucksake, you’d talk to anyone.

And I could understand then how he’d lost the taste for any intimacy that wasn’t sex.

Maybe, I said, it’s like human versus dog time? So a year under the sea takes, like, five on land to acclimatise.

Did you ever see any action? Ciara asked him one night in the Tottenham.

Underwater action, he snorted.

So you just floated around for four years?

This fella, I shared my best joke. He goes for interview with the Irish Navy. Can you swim? says the captain. Why, have yez no boats?

Ciara and me laughed our socks off.

Fucksake. Your lot would laugh at anything.

Koooooh, I made the sonar sound and Ciara copied me, Koooooh, and then we just couldn’t stop, tears spilling down our cheeks, Koooooh.

Fucksake, he said.

Moo- deee she mouthed over her vodka. And we were off again, roaring.

“Here they come,” Ex-Forces raps the glass. And there they are, his Striker and my Centre-mid jogging out of the dome, hair slick with rain. “You don’t like tea then.” He takes the mug from my hand.

Rain batters down on my hood, my jeans suck it up till my legs are like waterlogged stumps. We line up beside men with square heads, folded arms and small eyes that see things your untrained eye does not spot. Like footballers of the future in these pitchside wars.

We are white. They are red. And they are all boys full of grace and speed and lost in the moment, while we adults stumble about like restless cattle. They are still at point and shoot. Soon they will be turning things over and finding complexity.

“Always wanted to go down South for the fishing.”

“So what stopped you?”

“Not allowed.”

“Why?”

“After my tour I spent three months walking around in civvies, just watching.”

“You mean undercover?”

“Couldn’t go back for six years. Risk of being recognised. After that I just didn’t get ’round to it.”

The white goalie hoofs it down the pitch straight to red feet. “Jesus. Every single time.”

I watch my Centre-mid’s feet. For weeks he’s been praying for rain so he could switch from molds to studs: Adidas World Cups, his first all-leather boots, soft as puppies.

“Went fishing in Thailand instead.”

He shakes his head at the curl of my lip. “Oh I know what you’re thinking BUT –”

What I’m thinking of is the City boys I know who went to Bangkok and it wasn’t for the fish.

“Thing is, what a lot of people don’t know is the fishing outside Bangkok is unbelievable. We go back, a bunch of us, every year. Though four years ago, I got sick. Total gut rot. Not being too graphic, but it was pouring out of me every which way.”

“I had dysentery in Vietnam.”

But Ex-Forces is not interested in my Nam story. “My mates had to leave me behind.”

“They went home without you?”

“You know how much it woulda cost to change flights? Go, I told them. And this woman took me in, it was the fishing place where we were staying. So I’m lying there in this basically hut, and I’m thinking this is how the story goes. All that time in Belfast I coulda had a bullet to the head and this is where it ends. Here in some Thai shithole, on a fishing trip.”

Left-wing raises the ball like a chalice for the throw in. My Centre-mid skims past so close I can hear him breathe, ball at his toes and then he’s toppled.

“I can see her now, standing there, tiny like the women are. Small, delicate hands. Fed me with a spoon. Looked after me like a baby.”

He doesn't look like a baby at all. I try to imagine the tiny Thai woman and this huge Gulliver. Her fine-boned hand soothing the massive brow. I try to imagine this rain as a tropical deluge. Instead I'm seeing Apocalypse Now and a girl lingering in the shack doorway.

“She found a doctor, he gave me some shots, some antibiotics, other stuff – herbs and what have you. Night and day she sat there, like an angel.” He shakes his head wetly.

Smiles at the ground. “She saved my life.”

“Or maybe it was the antibiotics.”

Striker Boy slides, hobbled in the goalmouth. “I told him eat your breakfast. Now look at him. Jesus.” Whites are fading, outdone, outrun.

“So what was it like?” I turn to him.

“What?”

“When you had him in your crosshair.”

“Like doing my job.” He tugs on his dripping hood .

“Which was?”

“Following orders.”

“He was the target?”

“I was monitoring the situation.”

“But why would you have someone in your crosshair if you weren’t potentially going to –”

“He looked small.”

“What did it feel like?”

“You’re the writer.”

“How do you know?”

"Boys saw something in the paper. There's a writer down the football club." He snorts, like it's a grand joke. And I have a sudden urge to belt out The Foggy Dew at the top of my lungs. Right proudly high over Dublin town they hung out the flag of war/ 'Twas better to die 'neath an Irish sky than at Suvla or Sud el Bar.

But instead I tell Ex-Forces, “I saw him once on stage at a book festival. He did a reading. The story of his first confession.”

Ex-Forces barks, flings his head back laughing wildly even as the rain batters his open mouth. The square heads swivel. You don’t laugh pitchside at Arsenal.

“Your lot,” he mops his face. “Christ, I’ve heard it all now.” Shakes his big head at all the terrorist-harbouring Southern pansies who haven’t got the balls or the government to Get Involved, so the Brits who we are supposed to Hate, have to send their boys off to risk life and limb in a poxy game of shoot out where they are not allowed to do what they want. Which is take out the bad guys.

He slips out a two-fingered KitKat. Big, blunt fingers expertly strip it down to the bare sticks. I can smell the chocolate.

“Want one?” The grass is damp and loaded.

“No thanks.”

He pops the KitKat whole into his mouth and crunches, watches his Striker boy nutmeg the Centre-back. He grins. “We’ll be reliving that move all the way home.”

I want to tell him about some things that weren’t funny at all – like when our canteen was blown up on Bishopsgate. Or when I walked out of the office in Docklands just as a bomb went off, the trembling quiet of the air in the seconds before the siren scream.

But I have never looked in a crosshair. Though I have a cartoon favourite from the New Yorker pinned to the fridge. Two polar bears stand side by side facing the scope, one bear points at the other.

“I’m on a rooftop. Looking down. Radio in my ear. Lead slates. It’s raining. It’s always fucking raining in Belfast.” He crinkles the silver foil. “Car pulls up across the street. Black, that’s in the script. We are expecting. Car door opens. Finger on the trigger. I shift the nose an inch to the right. And out he steps. I have him in my crosshair.”

“What are you thinking?”

“I’m not thinking.”

“You’re thinking something.”

“I’m in the moment.”

“That’s it?”

“I’m doing my job.”

“You’re not thinking, you’re just there with your finger on the trigger.”

“Ever get tired asking questions?” He sighs heavy, like it’s all unravelling. “I’m thinking what I think whenever I have one of them in my sight. I’m thinking: there’s that cunt.”

Still, it’s a shock and a comfort both. The dull thwack of the banal like a stun gun to the head.

“Your lot want some war poet holding history in his scope.” The whistle blows.

“There’s no story here, there’s just the moment.” He jerks his thumb at the pitch where my Centre-mid is bending over to line up the dead ball. He straightens up, faces the Gunners’ red wall.

“Your boy’s not thinking now. He’s doing his job. Thinking gets in the way.” Centre-mid, chin raised, taut as a wire, places one foot behind the other.

“History is your lot’s problem. My problem is war.”

Aifric Campbell is an Irish writer based in London. She spent 13 years at Morgan Stanley where she became managing director on the London trading floor. Her novel On the Floor was longlisted for the Orange Prize 2012. Previous novels are The Loss Adjustor (2010) and The Semantics of Murder (2008).