Cards
Cards
I stopped writing back to him in 1991; he'd been married a couple of years by then, and he was happy, and it was.... hard. Didn't stop him writing though, I always said he never needed any contribution from me to have a conversation, and twice a year, my birthday and Christmas, I'd get a card (to Bodie love Ray and Indira), and a letter, and once or twice a photograph.
I could never work out whether getting them made things easier or harder. About a week before it was due, I'd find myself watching out for the post, hoping for one of those big square envelopes and the sight of that odd, spiky handwriting of his. Christmas 1993 the envelope was typed, and it was ten minutes before I could bring myself to open it -- was frightened I'd been demoted to the ranks of office-sent cards. Turned out he'd bought himself a PC. The letter might have been printed off on some fancy laser-jet thing but reading it was still just like hearing him talk, still made me laugh, still made me miss him something fierce.
Ironic really, we'd worked together for 10 years, known each other for 13, and I didn't realise I loved him until the day he got married. I knew I cared about him, best friend I ever had or ever will, but it was his wedding day that laid it all on the line.
It was an enormous affair, these Indian do's are apparently, lasted all day and I'm damned if I could work out what was going on half the time. Couple of hundred guests, constant eating and drinking, people coming and going. Not that anybody was unwelcoming or anything, they were a cosmopolitan lot, cousins from half the countries in Europe and beyond. Someone called Uncle Sayeed had been deputised to look after me and we got on fine. I felt uncomfortable, but I just put it down to a roomfull of strangers, mostly speaking a language I didn't, and the hangover I had left over from the drinks the night before. In the eight months since I'd last seen him, I'd somehow managed to forget just how much Ray can stick away.
Anyway, halfway through the afternoon, I spotted Cowley trapped in a corner, trying to escape from this tiny granny who was pumping him with a ruthlessness the KGB would have envied. I turned to share the joke with Ray and there it was. He was sitting on a cushion on a dais next to Indira, and they were laughing quietly, privately, their own little world, his head turned so he could whisper in her ear. And all at once I knew.
It hurt, that was the first thing: a physical pain like a knife in the ribs -- or how you always imagine a knife in the ribs will feel until you actually get one. I didn't know. Until that moment, I honestly didn't know. I'm still not sure how the hell I'd managed it all those years, but I honestly didn't know. I sat at the back of the room, stunned and angry and closer to tears than I'd been since I was a kid. I managed to hide from the Cow and Murph and the others for the rest of the day, and waved the happy couple off on their honeymoon. I left England the next day and I haven't been back since.
I sometimes wonder if the Cow knew, or at least suspected. He had a quiet word with me towards the end, when it had become obvious that CI5 and Thatcher couldn't coexist, when the bent Minister was left in office, when the arms deal with added sweetners went ahead and nobody cared, when the mandatory retirement age was enforced and the name of his successor was announced. That was when the Cow brought CI5 down around our ears rather than see it prostituted. Bit like that poem - "Sink me the ship Master Gunner, sink her -- rend her in twain. Fall into the hands of God not into the hands of Spain." That sort of thing.
A couple of months before it finally ended, he invited me out for a drink and made his pitch. Told me the Police wanted Ray back, had been keeping a spot warm for him for years, Anti-terrorist Squad, rank of DCI and the promise of more.
I can see Cowley now; we were in the Prospect of Whitby because it used to be a decent boozer, but the yuppies had got to it and it was all mobile phones and bottled beers with fancy names. We were sitting in a little wooden booth at the back and he looked small and pale against the dark wood. "Don't hold him back, Bodie," he said. "Doyle needs to be in the public service almost as much as the service needs him. There aren't near enough honest men about."
I couldn't argue with that. Even if I could see he was trying to get Ray into a position where he could keep the CI5 vision alive; didn't mean he wasn't right. Ray needs to be on the side of the angels; he has to feel he's making a difference in the world. Trouble was, I could see there was nowhere for me in that life. The police wouldn't want me, my past was too murky for SIS (even if I'd been willing to join the slimy bastards) and I was too damn old and too damn independent for the Forces. The Army says it wants initiative, but what it means is it wants the kind of initiative that doesn't rock boats -- and 10 years in CI5 had left me with an advanced degree in boat rocking.
Too old for the Forces and too honest for the Jungle. That was a bit of a shock to tell the truth, seems all those years with Ray and the Cow had rubbed off on me. All those years partnered with the only man in CI5 who didn't try to fiddle his expenses had left their mark. I told him once he was the most ridiculously honest man I'd ever met. He just laughed and said, "The lesser honesties are the easy ones." I know now what he meant.
Eventually I found an old mate from 3 Para who'd started a bodyguarding/security firm in the States, with a bunch of lads from the Paras and SAS; apparently the combination of army training and English accents went down a bomb Stateside. I had some money put by from Africa and some from after, the wages in CI5 were crap but we never got much chance to spend them so that had mounted up too, and I went in as a partner.
I hated it; but in an odd way I'd been expecting to, so it didn't matter. I missed everything: CI5; the adrenaline; the weather; the food; the beer (American beer always reminds me of that old joke about horse piss). The blokes I was working with were decent enough lads but they weren't the men and women I was used to, they weren't as sharp, they weren't as funny, and they weren't as good. In the middle of all that, the fact that I missed Ray got.... not lost in the crowd so much as swamped. I expected to be unhappy and I was -- so nothing strange there.
We wrote a lot of letters back then. Every couple of months I'd get a huge envelope from him, part letter, part diary and mine weren't much shorter. He was hating it too -- new people; new restrictions; the loss of day-to-day life on the streets; the smothered contempt for a man who had killed in the service of the state. It was a comfort in a way, knowing he was as pissed off as I was; and as frustrated; and as lonely.
I even managed to get back to England once or twice and we had some high old times the pair of us: not out on the tiles -- he was Superintendent Doyle by now and had to be careful -- but together, that was the main thing. Once we rented a farmhouse in the Dales and invited some of the lads (and Susan and Julia) up for the weekend, did a bit of drinking and a lot of talking.
Then the letters started to mention this woman he'd been seeing, a doctor. He met her on one of the committees he complained took up so much of his time. I honestly thought the reason I didn't like the sound of her was because I was afraid he'd get his head in his hands again -- he's not had much luck that way, Ray.
And then he married her. And then I found out.
I'm not saying I went into a decline or anything. I had a life and I tried to make the best of it. The firm was doing well, we expanded into industrial security and counter-espionage, which was more like the sort of thing I was used to. I even tried to find someone else; there was a woman called Maddie I saw for a quite a while. When that broke down, I tried it on the other side for the first time in a long, long time. Not the whole gay scene thing, it was all a bit flamboyant for me, (I'd never kissed women in public, I was damned if I was going to start with blokes), but quietly, discreetly. After a couple of false starts -- the kind of bloke who seemed to fancy me was not the kind of bloke I fancied at all -- I met Gary and we stayed together for over a year. That collapsed as soon as I realised who he looked like and what I was trying to do. No wonder the poor sod never lived up to expectations.
The letters kept coming, and for a while I wrote back, but I couldn't keep it up. It wasn't that I didn't want him to be happy, that wasn't it at all, but it hurt. He still wrote, and my birthday 1990 I got a photograph with the card (to Bodie love Ray, Indira and Amita), a picture of him holding a new-born baby. She was going to have her mother's hair and eyes, but father and daughter had identical expressions of slightly stunned amazement. I sent a card and present but I didn't go back.
And that's how it stayed. It wasn't a bad life, it just wasn't the life I wanted or the life I'd had. The worst thing about it was the suspicion that it was all my fault things had turned out the way they had. Once or twice in the old days, I'd had half an idea that Ray might have been interested in taking it further. He never made any secret of the fact that he went in for what he called a "varied diet"; and he never said or did anything anything definite. It was just that sometimes there was an air of .... acceptance about him , a willingness if I were willing -- which I wasn't at the time. I'd got used to not thinking about blokes like that, had decided it was all a teenage mistake. I was straight and Ray was a mate (funny how the dual sense never occurred at the time) and that was all there was to it.
Besides, even if we had taken it further, it would only have caused trouble back then. We could never have stayed together once CI5 closed down. 1980's Britain was not ready for a gay senior policeman and Ray needed the Police. It just one more irony when I realised that in the 1990's, when hardly anyone would care about us being together, he was happily married with a kid and everything,
There was no proper resolution to any of this, and if I wasn't careful I could spend hours chasing the damn arguments round and round in my head, until they disappeared up their own whatsits, like the OozleWoozle bird. So I tried not to think about. It was just, some times, some nights, I couldn't help it.
Life went on. Gary was something in a brokerage house, and I started to play the markets. It was, after all, just another jungle, and one where the snakes were mostly joke shop rubber ones compared to the snakes (animal and human) I'd known in my time. I did well at it, probably because I didn't take it as deadly serious as some of them. I dropped out of my share of the company admin. -- I'd always hated it -- and went back to full-time investigations and security, and that's what I was doing in October 1994.
I was in a motel in some godforsaken armpit of a town in the middle of nowhere, waiting for a little rat called Eberhart to come and sell me the chipset he'd stolen from the man we were both working for.
Every country I've ever been in has its own kind of lousy town and this was the American version: a long thin strip on either side of the road with two used car-dealers, a petrol station, a mini-mart, a video rental, a couple of establishments selling something that might have been fast but certainly wasn't food and one of those miserable bars where everyone sits in the dark to get plastered, presumably so they don't have to look at the other punters. I'd forgotten to bring a book and there was nothing to read on sale anywhere in town, except the sort of magazine you read one-handed, and supermarket tabloids full of the love lives of people I'd never heard of.
So, there I was in Scrotum Illinois, or whatever the hell it was called, lying on the bed in my room, watching CNN and composing a nasty letter to the Gideons demanding to know why they use that bloody horrible translation, and suddenly there was Ray's picture on the screen.
It's an official photograph, in uniform, and for a couple of seconds I'm convinced he's dead.
The newscaster has one of those faces like a Thunderbirds puppet, all hard and plastic and shiny, and she's doing her best to look interested. "Two wanted men got an unpleasant surprise in Miami yesterday when they tried to hold up a car," she says. "This time the driver was not a helpless tourist. This time the driver was Commander Raymond Doyle of Scotland Yard's Anti-terrorist Squad -- a security video shows what happened."
The video film is as grey and grainy as these things usually are, and seems to be shooting down through a first floor window. A car pulls up at traffic lights, two men converge from either side and one shoves a shotgun through the open window on the driver's side. There's a brief pause. The men are waving their arms about.
Suddenly the gun disappears into the car, wrenched from its owner, and the man on the passenger side flies backwards, obviously shot in the chest. The other man turns to run and is brought down by a shot in the leg.
"The carjackers have been identified as Carl and Michael Hutchinson, wanted for a series of carjackings including the kidnap, rape and murder of a Swedish tourist last month. According to eye-witnesses, a passenger in the car tried to administer CPR to one of the injured men. Carl Hutchinson was later declared DOA."
A shot of Ray refusing to comment, unfamiliar and fucking ugly hair cut, and familiar grey look under his holiday tan.
"This incident brings to 54 the number...." I tuned her out. My heart was pounding and I felt sicker than I had in a very long time. I stayed up half the night waiting for the bulletin to be repeated, watching it over and over again, just for the few seconds of him on screen, trying to work out if he was all right.
I would have got in touch with him then, but I didn't know whether he was still in Florida or whether he'd have taken his family home. By the time he must have got home, the urge had worn off. What could I have said? "I'm glad you're not dead"? He might have asked me why I didn't write and what could I have said to that? "I love you and it hurts that you're happy with someone else"? No, better to let sleeping dogs lie. He wouldn't know I knew about it.
Even so I was on tenterhooks waiting for the card the following Christmas. When it came, I wasn't sure how to take it. He told me about the incident, but there was none of the black jokes there'd have been if we'd been in it together. They'd gone over to see some of her family and to take the little girl to Disney World, and it had all ended in blood. She, Indira, had tried to save the dead boy and was reacting badly to the fact that he'd died. Sounded mad to me, what the hell did she expect Ray to do? Let them hijack the car and do god knows what with them?
Ray seemed oddly understanding about it. I don't mean it was odd he understood, more that he seemed to agree with her; not on the surface but underneath. He'd never got used to the killing, he got better at hiding it, but he never got used to it; and in a way I even admired that --- it never became routine for him. But it meant that when anyone reacted against him, part of him thought they were right.
Be that as it may, she wasn't a stupid woman and she knew there was something not right about the way she was behaving. So, she'd been seeing some kind of shrink at the hospital where she worked, and he had hopes it would all work out.
It wasn't difficult to read between the lines. He was hoping but he was afraid.
I heard nothing until the following July, when the card (to Bodie love Ray, Indira and Amita) arrived. The letter was a real mess, and I didn't know whether or not I should be glad I seemed to be the only person he could let it all out to.
It all started out quite rational, but it fell apart towards the end. The marriage was on the skids; she could hardly bear to have him around. Seeing the shrink had only told them where the problem lay, and did nothing to get them past it. Seems she was Ugandan Asian, one of the poor sods pushed out by Amin, and some of the things she'd seen as a child had left scars even she hadn't realised were there.
"I think she married me because I made her feel safe, senior policeman and all that," he wrote. "Now I don't make her feel safe any more. Seems the rest isn't enough."
The last page was obviously written some time later, and it was obvious he'd been badly upset when he'd done it. "I'm losing them, Bodie," it said, "and I don't know what to do." There was something else, something heavily crossed out it the same biro as the terrible scrawl of a signature. It looked as though he'd been drunk when he wrote it.
I struggled with my conscience for over a week, but I ended up taking it to the labs. I cut most of the letter off and asked them if they could remove the biro and leave the laser ink.
They could, and it said what I had hoped and feared it would. It said, "Fuck it, I ought to be used to it by now. Everybody I love leaves in the end."
I'd never realised until then what a callous bastard I am. I knew it was wrong, is wrong, and cruel and all the rest, but I started to hope. I started to hope for the end of his marriage; for the loss of his wife and child. I started to hope for a chance for us both together.
It's mad and ugly and stupid, there's a good chances he resents me for going, for not writing. If I do try with him, there's a good chance he'll just resent me for not being her. I'll be lucky if I don't get a right cross by way of hello.
You see, I've got a seat booked for London. Had a hell of a job getting one this close to Christmas, but I pulled in favours and spent a small fortune, and I'm going home. It's probably madness, I know it's selfish -- I feel like a vulture or something -- but I'm going to back see him. Because the card this year was signed just, "Ray".
I could try kidding myself I'm going to be with him while he's in trouble, friend in need and all that, but I've never been much good at lying to myself. Truth is, I'm going to find out if I'm in with a chance.
Some friend I turned out to be, eh?
THE END
