tomorrow.’
‘Christ, mate. You’ve come on leave too early – if I could I’d be all over it like the itches. I’m having trouble even looking at these women. You’re not nancy or anything, are you? I’ve always suspected.’
‘I wouldn’t worry, mate,’ said Leon. ‘You’re enough woman for the both of us.’
Cray put down his drink and clutched at imaginary breasts on his chest. He made to push them up and let his tongue loll out of his mouth, reaching towards his imaginary lady nipples. Leon took a photograph. They laughed and left it alone.
In the morning the swimming pool was a solid block of blue like it had a lid to it. Leon watched his feet change colour as they went in. Things looked dead under pool water. He tried to imagine his parents sitting out on a beach somewhere, enjoying the sea spray, but he couldn’t. In his imagination they were like cardboard cut-outs, smiles drawn on. He’d have to get to them when he got back, that was clear. He shouldn’t have let her go alone, but truthfully he couldn’t quite bear the thought of the state of his mother. It had been like something was confirmed for her and she gave up in those few strange months; decided it was best to go and live with a man who stalked her in his sleep. She hadn’t mentioned anything in her postcards about Leon going off to Vietnam, but he could see it now, the wobble-eyed look he’d get, the tears and the fights. Like Rod’s mum, who couldn’t bear to acknowledge he still existed in case he stopped. He imagined what her face would look like if she had watched him kill that boy. If she had seen him slapped on the back and known that he was proud of it, and that something at the time had felt right about it.
No one was up. Cray had caught the dawn plane back home to see the bub and lovely Lena, who maybe fitted back into her flower-print dress by now. Something tickled the back of his neck and he slapped it hard, but his palm came away clean.
A woman dressed in white wheeled a trolley that rattled with glasses and knives and forks. The smell of breakfast from the kitchens was thick and rich and foreign. A strange bird flew overhead, a cross between a magpie and a parrot, with long red legs that trailed behind it and a thick orange beak. It should have been in the jungle. He missed the covering of the jungle canopy and the heavy understanding of his gun.
Later on, when people were lolling around thinking about their first drink of the day, Leon took himself off to explore. He walked along the beach where men slept in the sun or smoked, and he wet his feet in the sea, which was shallow and hot. He smoked a cigarette, something he had started to do more and more, whenever his hands felt useless, whenever they remembered the hard weight of his gun. It gave you time as well; if someone asked you a question, you could draw out the answer by lighting up or inhaling deeply and letting the smoke float out of you slowly. The bars on the seafront were open, and the roadside stalls were filling up with people getting bowlfuls of noodles and soup, and roasted meat. Some guy back at the compound had insisted he’d eaten the tail off a dog at one of these places, but the smell was good and it made Leon’s mouth water. The money he’d been given felt fat in his pocket, but he didn’t want to spend it on food or drink. He could drink until beer came out of the pores on his face, but he fancied having something he could hold in his hand and consider.
He could go to bed with one of those girls with the black hair all the way down to her tailbone, the tiny-waisted women who seemed to find all the dirty, tired men endlessly funny, and who seemed to want nothing more than to look you right in the face and listen, smiling and nodding, and then take you away somewhere where no one else could see. But Leon imagined the wide-awake night while she slept next to him. The too light impression she would leave in the bed. So he found himself in a stall that sold and engraved silver lighters, the ones you