The Crocodile Hunter by Gerald Seymour (best summer reads of all time txt) 📕

after lunch was excellent, the new model, electric, really interesting. Sorry, is it not convenient?”

Hardly convenient . . . Put the phone down, skirted the ironing board, caught her ankle in the flex, spilled water out of the iron, swore, picked up the little one . . . God, the stink . . . and shoved the dummy in its mouth, which would, according to her mother-in-law, distort the baby’s face.

She retrieved the phone. Her husband was saying, “. . . so that’s where we are about this evening but most likely we’ll do the overnight, unless . . . Well, I’ve told you that. Anyway, the new electric model is very exciting, it’s incredible. Is it not convenient?”

“Not really, no. Have a nice evening, and don’t drink too much. See you tomorrow . . .” She rang off.

The phone was on the hall table beside the wedding picture. On the rebound, and expensive, and she had thought of him all through the first honeymoon night. She took the baby into the kitchen to heat its food. In the kitchen was a framed photograph of the baby in her arms paid for by her mother-in-law. After the rebound wedding the rebound baby had arrived.

He had been a wonderful shag and he was exciting and different but he had gone and had never said anything approaching a farewell . . . This was her life now, and she fed the baby and had some gurgles in exchange and some wind and some smiles, and then she’d get back to tackling the ironing: the harder she worked the better she was at suppressing the memories.

“Hello, Cameron . . . Welcome home.”

He was sitting in the middle row: across the aisle were the places that would soon be taken by the choristers. Each of the cushions carried the name of an archbishop and the date he had been elevated to the see of Canterbury. He could have sat on John, 1486–1500 or Simon, 1366–1368, but had chosen William who had been in office from 1375 to 1381. He did not move, did not turn.

“All those years, but faces don’t change. Thought it was you.”

He had heard the man sit behind him and imagined it was a tourist, a visitor. The voice had startled him and he might have made a poor fist of hiding his reaction.

“Was it that bad there? As bad as we read about?”

The gentle voice was familiar, but he could not put a face to it.

“But all over now? Pretty hellish if you were on the receiving end, yes?”

The voice was little more than a whisper and Cammy had to strain to hear each word and inflexion in the voice. There was no pretence of sympathy in the words. Cammy could have said what he imagined he would say if he were interrogated – not that he would be – about the propaganda being fed into the minds of the wonderful British public and that the black flag guys – with a few exceptions – were nowhere close to matching the atrocities dished out daily by the Syrian régime or its coterie of allies. He thought the voice cold.

“We had the police and the spooks crawling all over us when it was first revealed you’d gone. Dismembering your life history. Caused quite a stir.”

Should have considered this, but had not. He had made the journey, had been sent to the recruitment camp where they were kept under close guard while the vetting was done, then to the front line. The group had formed, his brothers, and the war had started to turn and what might have happened here had seemed distant. What sort of men and women would they have been, those who came to pick at the entrails of his life, and his mother’s, and who had traipsed around the cathedral and the college, trying to join dots? Boring little people. No respect for them. They would not understand a free spirit, and the excitement of the hammer against the shoulder of the big machine-gun, and the adrenaline pump of the charge across open ground – and the brotherhood, and how strong they had been, all of them together.

“Do not imagine that I make judgements. I see no point in joining the condemning rabble, but your side did seem to take a quite unpleasant approach to conquest. I thought the burning alive of that Jordanian pilot was just horrible. But I am not about to morph into the role of inquisitor, accuser. I just live out my years here and recall good times and some rather lovely young voices.”

Knew of it but had not been there. Cammy had been on the front line, trying to hold positions in the effort to take control of Kobane. The bombing had been incessant but the tide had turned. Accepted no responsibility. He wondered if he should turn his head, peer into the face of his accuser, answer him. Wondered if he should stand up and leave, head left towards the presbytery and the Trinity Chapel and find somewhere else to sit and avoid scrutiny. Or turn right and go out past the quire screens and back into the nave . . . But he had come here to relive the past and to go would be to turn his back on his youth and on the choir – a time when he had soared, been proud. He stayed where he was, did not turn.

“I’m not looking for the sanctity of the other crowd’s confessional though I am quite practised in discretion. There won’t be a price on your head, not here in leafy Kent, but they’ll want to talk to you. What I heard, the sort of gossip we get in this place, is that you were regarded as a serious fighting machine. Some of the Scandinavian countries, so I read, have adopted a policy of greeting their jihadis and putting them on de-radicalisation programmes. Like nothing ever happened, like it was all a mistake and the sort of jape that youngsters get up to. Not the attitude taken here, Cameron. Is it my duty to go