Jack’s mind had wandered. He returned to his letter and current dissatisfaction with army life.

“I bet you’re laughing to read this,” he wrote. “I know you think I’m in this situation because I wanted to embarrass Mom and Pa. I still can’t believe that. You actually think I joined the army because Mom wore a see-through blouse to my high school graduation! You’re such a jerk, Harry. You just can’t bear the simple fact that however bored I may feel right now I love the army. You hate the fact that somebody with virtually identical DNA to yours actually loves and respects the armed forces of his country. Just like you love your damn chairs or washstands or whatever it is you whittle out of trees in your stupid wood in Ohio. I didn’t join the army because all the guys in my class got to see my mother’s nipples. I joined because I want to kill people in the cause of peace and freedom, OK? Something I am unlikely to get the chance to do at RAF Greenham Common, the shithole of the planet. If England had haemorrhoids, believe me they’d be here.”

Jack had hated the Greenham base the day he had arrived, and the three grim years he had spent there since had done nothing to change his mind. Three grinding years. Years that lived in Jack’s memory as one, long, wet miserable winter’s afternoon. He supposed that the sun must have shone at some point during the previous thirty-six months but if it had it had made no impression on him. Concrete and steel, steel and concrete, that was what the camp meant to Jack, and the very sky itself seemed to be constructed of the same joyless stuff. A Cold War sky, grey, flat and impenetrable, like the belly of a vast tank. Jack had spent a thousand ghastly hours of duty staring up at that gloomy canopy. He often thought that if ever the missiles for which he and his comrades were responsible were to be fired, they would just bounce off that sky and fall right back to earth, blowing them all to hell.

He took an absentminded sip at his coffee and immediately wished he hadn’t. He continued with his letter.

“Then, of course, there’s the singing. Harry, that awful, awful singing beggars belief. Worse than when you were trying to learn ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’ on the guitar. From dawn to dusk, and back again from dusk till dawn. Whenever a guy gets remotely near to the wire his ears are assaulted by those seemingly endless dirges. I cannot believe it, Harry. The one thing I thought was when I got in the army I would not have to listen to any more fucking hippies. Now I’m surrounded by them! They’ll be singing now, those appalling women, if singing isn’t too grand a word for it. Keening, I’ve heard them call it, which sounds to me like something cats do in alleys, which would be about right as far as I’m concerned. They stop around midnight, but some nights I still can’t sleep for the din. Those damn dirges are still running around my brain, like a tone-deaf rat with a megaphone is trapped inside my head. I can hear them even now, Harry, even as I try to concentrate on writing this letter. Here’s what they were singing yesterday. Show Mom. She’ll probably think it’s beautiful.

You can’t kill the spirit.

She is like a mountain.

Old and strong.

She goes on and on and on.

You can’t kill the spirit.

She is like a mountain.

Old and strong.

She goes on and on and on.

You can’t kill the spirit…

You get the idea, Harry. They repeat it ad nauseam, and believe me, the emphasis is on nauseam …”

A woman struggled past carrying two children and leading a third. One of them managed to spill orange fizzy stuff onto Jack’s letter. He sighed and called for the check. He could sit in that restaurant no longer. The noise and the smell were getting on his nerves. Old chip fat and baby sick were competing for supremacy in his nostrils, and BBC Radio One was clashing with the dirges running round his head. The song playing was called “Karma Chameleon”, sung by some kind of transvestite called Boy George who seemed suddenly to have become more famous than God. Jack had noticed that when the British liked a song they liked to hear it a lot and “Karma Chameleon” had been number one for ever. Jack had liked it at first, but in that depressing place it seemed as tinny and irritating as the three girls who were singing along to it while simultaneously drinking milkshakes and smoking cigarettes. Jack liked to smoke himself but he never ceased to be amazed at the smoking capacity of the British teenage girl. He bet they could do it underwater. Jack finally gave up on his grubby coffee cup, scarcely having tasted its gloomy contents, and got up to go. For all its soulless concrete and its dreadful women, RAF Greenham Common was beginning to look preferable to his current surroundings.

Then, rather abruptly, Jack sat down again.

An old couple looked up from their all-day breakfasts and stared. They were no doubt glad of a moment’s diversion from eating their meal, from the unpleasant task of consuming the formless mess they had unwittingly ordered under the mistaken impression that they would be brought food. They were more than happy to take a break from fossicking about on their plates to find a bit of bacon that had actually been cooked. They were grateful for the chance to look, if only for a moment, at something other than the snot-like puddles of raw eggwhite that surrounded the chilly yokes of their partially fried eggs. What a disaster. Yet they would no more have dreamt of complaining than of robbing a bank.

They stared at Jack for a moment and turned wearily back to their disappointing meals. Jack had not noticed them anyway. His attention was absorbed elsewhere. The reason he had sat down again was because, just as he had risen, a young woman had entered the restaurant. She was accompanied by a middle-aged couple, probably her parents, but Jack scarcely glanced at them. He was only interested in the girl. He recognized her the moment he saw her.

She was the interesting one. The beautiful one.

The one with the pink streaks in her hair. The one he always looked out for when he drove into the base, slowing his jeep down in plenty of time to make sure he got a good look. Each time Jack surprised himself at just how attractive he found this girl. He had certainly never been taken by any of that monstrous muddy regiment before, and the young woman in question was scarcely what he might have thought was his type. Her eyes were often surrounded by great dark purple circles of eyeshadow, which made her look like a negative photograph of a Panda. On some occasions she had the female gender symbol painted on both cheeks. Jack feared that she might be colour blind because of the green lipstick she sometimes wore, although usually it was a garish, aggressive red. None the less, despite all of this, the girl’s fresh, sparkling beauty never failed to shine through. She had the sweetest face that Jack had ever seen, and the neatest of bodies, like a dancer. Jack always tried to get a good long look at her as he drove past and now fate had afforded him the opportunity to absorb her properly. The more Jack looked, the more absorbed he became. In fact it would not be putting it too strongly to say that he was transfixed. His mouth watered and his eyes became lost in dreamy contemplation.

The women at the till wondered if perhaps the coffee was improving.