Charlie Had His Chance Read online

  Charlie had no idea what was about to happen. He genuinely feared for his life and was whimpering pitifully, despite Klarte’s injunction.

  At that very moment, Lance Savage, sixteen, stalwart of the rugby team and working hard on his fitness, happened upon the bucolic scene. Without a moment’s hesitation, he charged straight at Klarte, wholly ignoring the knife.

  Klarte, never, until that moment at least, having planned to inflict serious injury on anyone, dropped his weapon and started to rise. His timing was perfect. Klarte took the Savage fist straight in the face as his cohorts scattered. It was almost like Tom Brown’s School Days. Klarte had been flattened and humiliated – just deserts for all bullies! Savage warned Klarte off in no uncertain terms and sent him on his way with a vicious kick up the arse. Klarte fired a generalised expression of hatred in the direction of the rescued and the rescuer - and slunk away like the proverbial whipped dog.

  Savage picked up the victim, hushed the whimpering, dusted Charlie off, and made sure he got the boy’s name for future reference then went after the cohorts to warn them off too.

  Savage had just begun his final year so it was as well for Charlie that Klarte overdid it with his next victim – perhaps his frustration at Charlie’s escape got the better of him. Klarte could, as is the case with all evil and twisted individuals, bear a grudge. He was also very patient. He knew that Savage wasn’t going to be around forever.

  The cuts Klarte inflicted on another unfortunate new boy the following day were, however, Klarte’s undoing. He drew sufficient blood to stain the boy’s shirt. The bloodstained shirt drew the attention of mightier powers than Klarte, or even Lance Savage. Klarte was nabbed with knife in pocket and the proverbial ton of bricks landed on him. He was expelled forthwith, together with his two partners in pain and extortion. Rumour had it that even Eton subsequently refused his parents’ desperate entreaties.

  Naturally enough, Savage became Charlie’s idol, and was even decent enough to ask how Charlie was getting on if they ever bumped into each other.

  Charlie was subject to bullying for much of his school life, but never to the extent that Klarte had planned. If you had no aptitude for Rugby or Soccer and found Cricket insufferably boring, you were bound to be bullied, even if you were quite proficient at Tennis or middle distance running – the latter being a usefully acquired skill when it came to escaping the mob.

  Having recognised Lance Savage, Charlie, therefore, couldn’t turn his back and walk away from him, no matter how mad he seemed. There was a debt to repay and Charlie always honoured his debts, however much his heart sank at the prospect.

  Once back in the flat, Charlie rooted around at the back of his drinks cabinet, and found an untouched single malt. He took it back to the kitchen, where he’d parked Lance in a chair.

  Lance glanced at the label. “Cheers, good stuff,” he muttered, opening the bottle and pouring himself a more than generous measure.

  “I don’t know how I got to Victoria,” he announced, after taking a large gulp. “No idea. You not having one? I’m going out of my fucking head, Tiptree.”

  He sat and contemplated this cheerful proposition whilst Charlie filled the kettle. Lance hunched over the table with both hands around his glass and stared into the distance. Charlie took the opportunity to covertly inspect his unexpected guest.

  Lance was tidily but casually dressed, his dark, straight hair was short. He and Charlie were similar in height, six foot one, six foot two or so, but Lance was more powerfully built and was in good shape as far as Charlie could see. He was burly and showed no sign of being overweight. His face was more lined than one might expect of a typical twenty eight year old and those eyes were hardly a feature one would highlight. Having said that, though, he was good looking, regular bone structure, a strong chin and a straight nose, solid without being thick. Rugged, then, and tough.

  “So what have you been doing?” Charlie asked, innocently, as he set down two coffees and took a seat opposite.

  “Army,” Savage answered. “Got out three months ago I think.”

  “Army,” echoed Charlie. He was vaguely aware that the Army had been involved in some fairly unpleasant things in some fairly unpleasant parts of the world for as long as he could remember. What could he say?

  “Bit rough was it,” he ventured.

  “Yeah,” said Lance, softly and distantly. “Yeah, it was a bit rough at times.”

  His words reminded Charlie of what Lance had been shouting at the station.

  “But hard to understand if you weren’t there?”

  Lance’s head snapped up. His sunken eyes focussed on Charlie for an instant then faded into the distance once more “Yeah,” he murmured. “You could say that.” He took another gulp of whisky.

  Charlie had been through various experiences with determined drinkers before, but they’d always involved friends who’d fancied themselves in love, and spurned. The drinking was going to be solid, and with the express intention of rendering the drinker drunk to the point of losing his pain. He guessed that with this traumatised war veteran, and his rate of consumption, the point might be reached even quicker than normal. Charlie therefore judged there was no time to waste.

  “Look,” he suggested. “You need to tell your parents where you are. They’ll worry.”

  “Glad to see the back of me,” Lance muttered, picking up the bottle again.

  “Give me their number then,” Charlie said. “I’ll call, let them know where you are.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  Charlie grabbed a piece of paper and scribbled down the number. “I’ll ring later,” he said, picking up his coffee. “Do you want to tell me about it? I’m not rushing off anywhere.”

  For all his late nights and reappearances at his flat in a less than sober state, Charlie was not the heaviest of drinkers – he would not have been able to party all night and walk, however unsteadily, at four or five in the morning if he had been. As a consequence of his relative sobriety, he’d found himself listening to the maudlin ramblings poured out by drunks of either sex for as much as an hour or two at a time.

  He’d been the recipient of some miserable confidences on various occasions. Drunken unplanned fornication resulting in pregnancy, abortion and regret were not uncommon. Abuse as a child was another and a couple of times he’d heard about incest. The incest was a surprise, but then he supposed it might be more common amongst the upper echelons of society than in the lower - after all, if your house has a lot of space, no one can hear the screams. And if you enjoy it, no one is likely to catch you at it if the place is so big you rattle around like peas in a drum.

  As one might imagine, searing though these experiences might have been for him, nothing Charlie had heard before was even the remotest use in preparing him for Lance’s reminiscences. Lance talked for hours, quietly, insistently and horrifically. Had he not been so shocked, Charlie might have broken down and wept.

  There was the training at Sandhurst, the passing out parade, the proud parents (at that stage in his career). There was the assignment to his unit as a raw second lieutenant, the distance one had to keep, as an officer, from the NCOs and the other ranks, not vast, not conducive to good team work if so, but a gap nonetheless. There was the training, the endless training, the camaraderie that built up, the friendships and the network of mutual respect. And then there was the inevitable deployment. And once deployed there was the heat, the discomfort, the boredom of the patrol and the sudden horror of contact, the sharp fire-fight in the night, the pitched battles when you ran a serious risk of being overrun and massacred or taken hostage. More often than not, though, it was the IED which killed or maimed in a flash - followed by the sniping as ‘they’ hoped to watch a wounded man bleed to death with one of his legs torn away and his unit pinned down.

  “The worst thing was the guys who went in to clear an IED once we’d clocked one,” Lance told him. “You had to watch them lying there working away, knowing that same bloke you�
��d been bantering with as he came up could get blown away any second. I don’t how they could do it, day in day out and there were never enough of them. I don’t know how many we scooped up, faces half blown away, arms torn off. And it’s almost worse that they can keep so many of them alive. It’s amazing, guys who’ve lost both legs and an arm, they survive. I got on well with one of the Sergeants. He’d been to Uni like me but hadn’t wanted to be an officer. I wasn’t there but he was out one day, lost both legs, blinded in one eye by shrapnel. Shit, Charlie, I went to see him on leave when the tour ended. Three months he’d been in hospital; they were getting his legs sorted out, but what a life, Charlie. Half a man. Fuck it! And he was so upbeat! I couldn’t fucking bear it! They’d worked as hard on his mind as his body.”

  Charlie didn’t see any servicemen in his usual haunts. He knew that people got injured in wars. Everyone knows that, but Lance had been there and seen it, the blood, the horror of it all, everything. Blood, death, hate, endless stress, tension, betrayal by your supposed allies – and he’d been expected to set an example to his men! Charlie had no idea what to say but as the evening drew on he pulled a couple of ready meals out of the freezer and fed the two of them. He thought it best not to talk much. What could he say, really, that would make any difference? He listened. Lance made no other demands. He was almost lost inside his own head.

  As the level of Scotch dropped, Lance began to yawn and seemed to have reached a point where he was about to drop. Charlie suggested that he might want to get some rest and Lance raised no objections. Charlie was quite surprised. Lance didn’t strike Charlie as unduly drunk for someone who had worked his way steadily though somewhere between a half and two thirds of a bottle. He gave the impression of being more dazed than drunk, as if he wasn’t quite there in the room.

  Charlie found a spare toothbrush and a spare pair of pyjamas and left Lance to it. He went back to the kitchen, tidied up the worst of the mess and then wandered along to the lounge. Lance had left the door ajar and Charlie listened for a second at the gap as he passed. He could already hear the sound of rhythmical breathing.

  “At least he’s asleep,” he muttered, closing the lounge door behind him. Charlie picked up the mobile he’d forgotten about in all the drama. There were a couple of missed calls and texts. He read the texts and listened to the messages. The night was young – it was only ten – and his absence had already been noted.

  Keira’s do in celebration of her new three month internship with a modelling agency was, abruptly, somehow a less appealing a prospect than it had been the day before.

  Charlie was far from speedy when it came to sending texts, normally preferring to call a person and actually talk. That night he laboriously picked out a couple of brief messages rather than have the bother of speaking to anyone. They wouldn’t understand, he thought – and then smiled faintly at the irony.

  He didn’t want to leave Lance alone in the flat and he really wasn’t in the mood to party, so as soon as he’d finished making his excuses, he turned off his mobile and picked up the landline.

  Lance’s father answered at the fourth ring.

  “Mr Savage,” Charlie began. “You won’t know me but I’m someone Lance knew at school, Charlie Tiptree.”

  “Oh yes,” Mr Savage replied neutrally. “He’s ended up with you has he?”

  “He has,” Charlie told him eagerly. “It was the strangest thing. I hadn’t seen him for twelve years and I bumped into him at Victoria.”

  “How unfortunate for you.”

  “Well, er I gathered you’d had a bit of a row.”

  Mr Savage sighed. “He flies off the handle if you so much as speak to him. Is he staying with you then?”

  “Yes, at the moment. I thought I’d let you know he’s safe.”

  Mr Savage paused. “Yes, well thank you. His mother was worried.”

  “He seems to be in a bad way,” Charlie ventured.

  Mr Savage sighed again. “He won’t ask for help. We persuaded him to go to our GP, but he refuses to take sleeping pills. We suggested counselling but he doesn’t want to know. He sits around the house when he’s not out running. He won’t apply himself to anything. He can’t sit around forever. He needs something worthwhile to do.”

  “Well yes.” Charlie was hesitant on that score. After all, he wasn’t the most productive member of society.

  “I expect it has been tough but it’s what he chose,” Mr Savage continued. “Neither of us was very keen, but his heart was set on it. We try and be supportive but he only seems able to sleep when he drinks himself stupid, and he won’t listen to suggestions.”

  “It sounds as if it was pretty rough, what he’s been through.”

  “Never wants to talk about it.” Mr Savage’s voice had a vaguely offended note to it.

  “I didn’t hear much,” Charlie told him quickly. “Got a general impression I suppose.”

  “His mother would say that he always has a bed here but I don’t know.” Mr Savage senior was suddenly weary. “We can’t seem to get on. I hate to watch as he fritters his money and his life away.”

  “At least he’s not on the streets,” Charlie consoled him.

  “Perhaps if he was he might get some help. Look, Mr Tiptree was it, I should say thank you for taking him in, but what I really mean is good luck.”

  Charlie replaced the handset and sat back in his chair.

  “Charlie boy,” he asked his print of the Laughing Cavalier. “What are you getting yourself into? You’re going to be in bed before midnight.”

  Chapter 2 – Morning (Year 1 – May)

  By the third morning Magda wondered for a moment if she was becoming as mad as this Lance man had seemed to be. Never before had she encountered Charlie two days in a row, let alone two mornings in succession. Three was completely unprecedented.

  As a scientist, however, Magda could approach things rationally. She knew she wasn’t really mad. She hadn’t indulged in any hallucinogenic substances either the night before or on the bus that morning, even if her journey might, thereby, have been considerably improved. Charlie was undeniably present in the room. She could see him with her own eyes. She could hear him with her own ears. She could smell his aftershave and he was clearly physically present when she brushed against him. That was sufficient sensory evidence for her. To test using the fifth sense would have been too much, even for someone as fiercely wedded to the scientific method as her – it might also have shaken Charlie to the core to have his ear licked by his cleaner.

  Magda was also beginning to wonder whether the unexpected arrival of Lance in Charlie’s flat was going to make her shopping more problematic. The highly convenient local ‘purveyor’ of fine foods and wines had a limited number of employees. The second bottle of whisky purchased inside three days had evinced a raised eyebrow. When Magda had said that it was for her boss she would have preferred an outright laugh to the faint sneer she received. The muttered suggestion that her boss must need help was not what Magda enjoyed hearing. If Lance’s consumption continued at this rate, she thought, she would have to go out of her way to find an additional booze source – or even see if she could arrange to have the stuff delivered by the case. The worst thing about it was the suspicion that she might be buying this bitter English provincial brew for her own consumption. Magda didn’t drink much but, when she did, sherry was her favoured tipple – the legacy of a very hot holiday memory from when she was young…..

  There had been no shouting since Lance had arrived. As far as Charlie knew, Lance was sleeping reasonably soundly whilst Charlie was now struggling to get off, certainly on that first night. Charlie’s body clock was also out of synch. Combine this with the nightmare visions Lance had described and sleep deprivation had its effect. Charlie was a bit peaky and light-headed for a couple of days.

  As to the puzzled texts and calls he received from friends, Charlie had taken refuge in the Norovirus – projectile vomiting and chronic diarrhoea tend to discourage even the mos
t solicitous of would-be visitors. Brighton had also been cancelled.

  ~~~

  The first morning after filling Charlie’s head with horror, Lance had seemed more with it, or perhaps less out of it. He had suggested Charlie should talk to him. He’d grunted a question by way of signifying this.

  “So, Charlie, school, then what?” he asked. “Uni?”

  “Sort of,” Charlie told him, sheepishly. “There’s a college at Oxford, caters for halfwits like me, The College of St Nicholas. It’s not part of the University but you pay out plenty in the way of fees, go there for three years, take exams, and they give you a degree. Someone’s told me since he’s the Patron saint of liars. I’ve never dared research it.”

  “So you can say you went up to Oxford, sort of.”

  “Yes, although that didn’t really matter to me. It was a few of the blokes from school going so I tagged along.”

  “Results not good enough for the real thing?”

  “No Lance, nothing like. I passed everything but the grades weren’t exactly stellar.”

  At this stage Charlie was still slightly unnerved by Lance’s blank, unfocussed stare. He supposed that Mrs Fotherington had been even more unsettled by it – possibly a very valuable revelation. The man was paying attention, as Lance had demonstrated by responding to what Charlie had said, but it was with his ears rather than his eyes.

  That was it! Charlie suddenly clicked. It was like talking to someone blind, like the man whose white stick he’d tripped over a couple of weeks before. Something was missing from the usual sensory experience of conversation. Occasionally, Lance might achieve an abrupt, brief flash of full attention but then he was away again, lost ‘out there’ somewhere.