This was a meet-cute scene from The Adulterants that I deleted for good reason.
Military Fitness
Before I knew Garthene’s name – before I even knew Garthene was a name – I carried her on my back through the trees along the edge of the lake, sweating, her breath hot at my ear. We were being pursued by a kind young veteran named Raphael who wore olive green fatigues and sixteen eyelet boots and shouted “I’m proud of you guys; you’re doing great.” There were twenty of us in total, split into pairs. I admit that I had joined military fitness training with the explicit intention of experiencing mild trauma in the company of women my age.
Afterwards, as we sat in the dirt, in various shapes of weariness, Garthene and I watched
Raphael high-fiving people as they left the park.
“I thought the whole point was that he was going to abuse us,” I whispered.
“I know,” she said. “He’s too nice.”
“I want to be called a worthless worm. That’s why I signed up.”
Raphael was now holding a clipboard. He knelt down to give someone a direct debit form.
“I’m pretty sure he’s never been to war,” she said.
We walked out of the park together. I refused to ask her name or her job or where she lives.
That’s the way it is now, with the hyperinflation of people’s expectations of romance. You can never
ask a normal question.
“Would you ever join the army?” I said.
She thought about it. “You mean the real army? Or like the T.A.s?”
She had me at “the T.A.s”.
“No, I mean front line. Combat. Service. I’m asking you if you’d kill for your country.”
The streetlights hung above us like sodium flares.
“I could maybe drive a tank,” she said. “I would need something between me and the
people I was killing, otherwise it’d be too much.”
“You could pilot a drone?” I said.
“I reckon so,” she said. “All those little pixellated…” A bead of sweat rolled off her left
eyebrow, gathered speed as it ran down the wing of her nose, gaining weight as it went, entering
her mouth at the moment she said “…combatants.”
The world turned slow-mo with trumpets. Life partner music.
After each session, we walked together to the bus stop. It became a running joke between
us – our first joke – the ways in which we imagined Raphael was faking his military experience. He
had this duffel bag with sew-on badges – one for the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, another showing a
curved dagger – that we learned you could order from a website called dropzone.com. He had a
waterproof notebook and waterproof pencil which we only ever saw him use for writing down
people’s contact details.
“In the heat of battle, the smell of sulphur, I held my dying friend in my arms,” she said, “and
took down his email address.”
I looked towards an imagined horizon, though we could only see the tops of heavy goods
vehicles as they rattled down the Eastway. I spoke in the voice of a dying man: “Promise me you’ll
send a message to all my starred contacts.”
She banged her fist against my chest. “You’ve just gotta tell me your password, buddy. Tell
me!”
I looked up to the starless sky and croaked: “Cool guy on tour all one word.”
“And with the knowledge that he had passed on this responsibility, his soul drifted away.”
We walked on, laughing.
It was the tang of bad taste, that these were jokes we would not feel comfortable making in
front of our parents or our colleagues, that made the moment special.
A few weeks later, Raphael gave us a lift home in his boxy metallic Ford Cortina and we
saw, in the footwells, a foot-long catheter tube and sterile wipes and white boxes with prescription
labels. While in Afghanistan, he’d lacerated his bladder in a motorbike crash and now had a
suprapubic catheter. Because the crash had occurred during recreational time, he didn’t get a full
pension. And that’s why he was now doing military fitness three times a week, even though it was
uncomfortable, running around with a bag of piss strapped to your thigh. He dropped us off at the
town hall. We watched him drive away and then looked at each other.
“We’re terrible people.”
“We really are.”
We kissed.
