start at the Royal Military Academy after his degree was done.
The last time he saw Jennie before their graduation she materialised before him from out of the throng on Saddlergate, for once without her boyfriend at her side but going the opposite way on a thoroughly drizzly late June day.
‘Seriously, David? The army? Oh my lord. Why?’
He had been so resolved and yet suddenly he was back in the seminar room, struggling to sound coherent. She spared him.
‘Look, I really hope you’ll do all what you say. Really, David. Take care of yourself, okay?’
His fellow cadets at Sandhurst came to consider him a monkish figure – ‘a stiff-necked sort of a prick’ in one hostile view. He quickly understood that to be in the army and yet seemingly indifferent to the quest of screwing anything in knickers was to put oneself in the line of a particular kind of fire. But one by one the others’ long-distance relationships had failed the further they travelled from the civilian world. Blaylock, though, stayed true to the girl he had left behind – or who had, rather, left him standing in the rain. However mad his scheme of self-overcoming had seemed, it had been made on a wager he would meet Jennie again and things would be different. And the plan had worked, on the surface. Yet there had been, in its origins, a fatal flaw.
*
In his bedroom Blaylock flicked on the television to catch Newsnight and found a panel in keen debate over a filmed package they had evidently all just watched on the subject of ‘Britain’s Secret World’. The filmmaker, Nick Gilchrist by name, was in full flow, describing a ‘surveillance state’ into which Britain had sleepwalked, and calling on the UK’s secret service – if Blaylock heard this right – to appoint human rights campaigners in key roles overseeing its operations. A big, lantern-jawed, expressive man with a luxuriant mane of greying hair, Mr Gilchrist struck Blaylock as the sort who oughtn’t to be so paranoid.
Blaylock stripped off his clothes and repaired to the bathroom. There he felt the gaze of his reflection – his double – in the long mirrored cabinet, and he turned and gazed back.
Nowadays he didn’t much care for the look of himself. The muscled gauntness he’d acquired in the army was long gone. His brow and jaw arguably retained some ‘character’, but with jowly traces of gloom that seemed to him the manifestation of some creeping, unreliable element in his personality. Likewise, the tremble of flab round his waist seemed to spell a succumbing to the earth and its earthiness that felt to Blaylock unmanly – as, weirdly, did the sag of his undercarriage, formerly a good virile weight, increasingly in his eyes a disused, rather mournful oddment. Idly he rapped his penis with his knuckles – a gee-up gesture of sorts – and it swayed, a glum pendulum.
He shut off the light, settled under the covers, and had not lain long before he felt the usual hard sheet of discomfort behind his shoulder blades. He turned and turned again, massaging himself, but the ache resisted manipulation or any effort to ‘lie flat’. Gradually, though, he felt his weight sinking across the mattress, breaths steadily coming shorter, his fatigue rolling over him like the tide over shingle.
He was rudely awakened by his phone and knew straight away that it was the early hours, darkness still heavy behind the blindsas he scrabbled about to locate the slim pulsing oblong on his bedside table.
‘Hello?’
His ear was stung by a blast of incoherent babble. He looked at the screen ID – UNKNOWN – then pressed phone to ear again. The babble was breaking into parts: he could make out wailing sirens, stray shouts, street noise, a war-zone ambience of mayhem and panic.
‘Hello? Who is this?’
Out of silence he was answered by a voice that was female, albeit a robot’s monotone. ‘ Do you hear that, Mr Secretary? It is – terror. It is – your future. It is – going to
The last time he saw Jennie before their graduation she materialised before him from out of the throng on Saddlergate, for once without her boyfriend at her side but going the opposite way on a thoroughly drizzly late June day.
‘Seriously, David? The army? Oh my lord. Why?’
He had been so resolved and yet suddenly he was back in the seminar room, struggling to sound coherent. She spared him.
‘Look, I really hope you’ll do all what you say. Really, David. Take care of yourself, okay?’
His fellow cadets at Sandhurst came to consider him a monkish figure – ‘a stiff-necked sort of a prick’ in one hostile view. He quickly understood that to be in the army and yet seemingly indifferent to the quest of screwing anything in knickers was to put oneself in the line of a particular kind of fire. But one by one the others’ long-distance relationships had failed the further they travelled from the civilian world. Blaylock, though, stayed true to the girl he had left behind – or who had, rather, left him standing in the rain. However mad his scheme of self-overcoming had seemed, it had been made on a wager he would meet Jennie again and things would be different. And the plan had worked, on the surface. Yet there had been, in its origins, a fatal flaw.
*
In his bedroom Blaylock flicked on the television to catch Newsnight and found a panel in keen debate over a filmed package they had evidently all just watched on the subject of ‘Britain’s Secret World’. The filmmaker, Nick Gilchrist by name, was in full flow, describing a ‘surveillance state’ into which Britain had sleepwalked, and calling on the UK’s secret service – if Blaylock heard this right – to appoint human rights campaigners in key roles overseeing its operations. A big, lantern-jawed, expressive man with a luxuriant mane of greying hair, Mr Gilchrist struck Blaylock as the sort who oughtn’t to be so paranoid.
Blaylock stripped off his clothes and repaired to the bathroom. There he felt the gaze of his reflection – his double – in the long mirrored cabinet, and he turned and gazed back.
Nowadays he didn’t much care for the look of himself. The muscled gauntness he’d acquired in the army was long gone. His brow and jaw arguably retained some ‘character’, but with jowly traces of gloom that seemed to him the manifestation of some creeping, unreliable element in his personality. Likewise, the tremble of flab round his waist seemed to spell a succumbing to the earth and its earthiness that felt to Blaylock unmanly – as, weirdly, did the sag of his undercarriage, formerly a good virile weight, increasingly in his eyes a disused, rather mournful oddment. Idly he rapped his penis with his knuckles – a gee-up gesture of sorts – and it swayed, a glum pendulum.
He shut off the light, settled under the covers, and had not lain long before he felt the usual hard sheet of discomfort behind his shoulder blades. He turned and turned again, massaging himself, but the ache resisted manipulation or any effort to ‘lie flat’. Gradually, though, he felt his weight sinking across the mattress, breaths steadily coming shorter, his fatigue rolling over him like the tide over shingle.
He was rudely awakened by his phone and knew straight away that it was the early hours, darkness still heavy behind the blindsas he scrabbled about to locate the slim pulsing oblong on his bedside table.
‘Hello?’
His ear was stung by a blast of incoherent babble. He looked at the screen ID – UNKNOWN – then pressed phone to ear again. The babble was breaking into parts: he could make out wailing sirens, stray shouts, street noise, a war-zone ambience of mayhem and panic.
‘Hello? Who is this?’
Out of silence he was answered by a voice that was female, albeit a robot’s monotone. ‘ Do you hear that, Mr Secretary? It is – terror. It is – your future. It is – going to
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