AN ANSWER TO THE MONK — an extract

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Carlisle shakes the tobacco pouch at Malcolm in lieu of asking; the filter's still pinched between his lips.

      'No thanks, I've quit.'

      Carlisle removes the filter and starts to roll. 'Good for you. How long?'

      'Four months, nearly.'

      'Wedding present to Sarah, was it? I remember her complaining about the smell the last time I visited the two of you.'

      'I'd just got the will, at last, I think. Remember how your mum used to go on at us?'

      Carlisle seals the pouch. 'She used to say that you never quit the habit entirely, but were only ever in the process of quitting. Forever provisional. Usually before she tried to bum one off us, of course.'

      Malcolm laughs. 'I'd forgotten that part.'

      'Mm,' Carlisle fishes a lighter out of the pocket behind him and stands, leaving his coat draped over the back of the chair. 'I'm going to smoke, anyway.'

      'I'll join you.'

It's still warm outside, and they take seats on opposite sides of the bench Carlisle had sat at earlier. The shirtless men have apparently had their fill of chips and are making their way back down the High Street in the direction of the pub.

      'I'm sorry,' Malcolm starts, slowly. 'About your mum, I mean.'

      'No need to apologise,' Carlisle replies, staring at a point in space somewhere above Malcolm's right shoulder. 'You didn't kill her.'

      'Well. Sorry I didn't make it to the funeral, anyway.'

      'You had a wedding to organise. Wish I could've been there.'

      'Don’t worry about it — couldn't be helped.'

      'How were the in-laws? I vaguely remember you telling me the dad wasn't too keen about the whole thing. Didn't make any last-gasp attempts to derail proceedings, did he? 'Speak now or forever hold your peace.''

      'Jeremy? No, we're fine with each other now.'

      'Well. Probably for the best.'

      They sit in silence for a moment, watching the topless blokes wend their way back to The Crown and miss the bucket by the door with their flicked fag butts on the way in.

      'How're you feeling, then, about it all?' Asks Malcolm, over the rattle of the doors.

      Carlisle shrugs. 'She would have hated to linger. No complications.'

      'Not like your dad, then? Must be strange her not being around, I imagine. For you, I mean.'

      'Mm. I didn't see her that much, really. Home drinker, you know. Not that into the pubs.'

      'I suppose not. How was everyone else about it?' Malcolm looks up and down the High Street, a small gesture which takes in the whole town.

      'As you'd expect,' Carlisle assumes the gravelly-voiced intonation of one of the locals whose name Malcolm can't remember: '"Sorry 'bout yer ma. Terrible business." Still trying to find a buyer for the house.'

      'Ah. Well.'

      Malcolm can see the estate agents from where they’re sitting, on the other side of the min-roundabout at the bottom of the High Street. Carlisle probably passes it several times a day.

      'Look, I—' Malcolm clasps his hands together on the top of the bench, like he’s about to launch into prayer. '—There was something in particular I wanted to talk to you about, what with your mum — with your mum not being around anymore.'

      'You and Sarah planning on moving to the country? You can probably find better than that old place, if I'm honest.'

      'No — no, we're quite happy where we are. I was thinking more of what happened with your dad—'

      'The veranda-thing outside the back door is probably going to collapse any day now, for a start. All that's holding it up is a pile of rubble, reportedly. No support beams to speak of. Lintel-less.'

      'I only mean, with her gone you could put some things behind you. That flat you rent in town, what sort of contract you on?'

      'Rolling monthly. Cash in hand. You know how it is.'

      'Right. So. Why not come down to London and stay with me for a bit? We've got a spare room, and—'

      'I can't stand the city,' Carlisle interrupts, his voice thoroughly level.

      Malcolm opens his palms. 'Well, it doesn't have to be London. It's just that now would be the perfect time to—'

      'Do you remember your 18th?' Carlisle asks.

       'I — yeah. I remember.'

      'We ended up out the back of my mum's at five in the morning, smoking a joint with Rich and Tom and waiting for the coke to flush out of us. Taking the edge off. Tom was with Karen at that point, I think. Rich might still have been seeing Lottie, I can't quite recall.'

      Malcolm relaces his fingers. 'I don't see—'

      Carlisle stubs out his cigarette on the top of the bench, adding one more scorch mark to the deeply blackened wood. 'We came up with the most perfect concept for a long joke that night, the two of us. It just came back to me. Remember, with the pair of soldiers in World War II?'

      'I remember. Look, you don't have to—'

      'Or was it World War I?'

      The question's inflection is almost cartoonish, and Malcolm's suddenly struck by an image of the bench they're sat at as a set of scales, his side precariously balanced several feet above the paving, pushed upwards by the weight opposite. Of course he remembers. He mirrors Carlisle’s raised eyebrows for a second, then redresses the balance with a slow exhalation. 'It was World War I, yeah.' These things are always easier in the imagination.

      Carlisle smiles. 'Of course it was. World War I being more tactically rich, allowing more space for gratuitous detail.'

      'Something like that,' Malcolm removes his glasses and rubs the corners of his eyes with finger and thumb, pinching the flesh on the bridge of his nose.

      'You've got these two friends at the core of the thing, right? Stop me if I go off course.'

      A group of builders walk past, strips of silver tape on their hi-vis reflecting sunlight into Malcolm’s eyes. He blinks away the black spots which momentarily obscure his vision, rendering the world as a set of rapidly-cycling slides, or the shuddering numbers of a film reel countdown.

      'So. It starts with a load of childhood stuff, right? The friends are born at the same hospital, meet each other before they even meet their dads, that kind of thing. I’m not sure we got into too many specifics — except to ensure that there was plenty of space within this coming-of-age bit for digressions.'

      'Digressions being — what was it Rich used to say?' Malcolm asks, eyes still twitching.

      ''The engine of shaggy dog stories,'' Carlisle quotes, laconic and Richard-esque.

      'Although he sort of hated them,' Malcolm notes, hopefully, aware in reality that the moment for conversational derailment has well passed.

      'So,' Carlisle continues, 'you’re setting up the boy’s childhoods. You could talk at length about how one of them was bullied at school and the other came to his defence, for instance. Or how they both had their first crushes on the same girl; how their divergent academic or practical interests threatened their connection; how one set of parents had a difficult, unamicable split and the other a solid marriage—'

      'It's all a bit kitchen-sink, isn’t it? Did I point that out at the time?'

      'Maybe. Class issues tend to muddy the waters rather, though, don't they?'

      Malcolm smiles, despite himself.

      'The vital thing,' Carlisle stresses the syllables, 'is that amongst the myriad details you highlight in particular the boys’ experiences in their local Army Cadet corps. Above all else, make sure you establish their sense of national pride, their love of country, their willingness to serve.' Carlisle has one elbow on the table, forearm up, as if preparing to arm-wrestle. His other hand begins to gesticulate. 'What's most important to the joke working, thematically — indispensable, in fact — is that by the time they get to sixteen or seventeen years old you've established this close-as-kin bond between the two, however you do it.' He pauses for a second and looks at Malcolm, with an expression like a request for permission.

      A sigh. 'Go on.'

      'So, when war rolls round, you've got these two young men, filled with vim and vigour, ready to enlist. And they do. You then go on to describe — again, with as much detail as you can muster — their exploits in the early war, how they move up the ranks in their unit and end up specialising as a sniper/spotter team, the best in the business.'

      'Seeded earlier on, presumably? One of them being a crack shot and the other having 20/20 vision, or something?'

      'That would be the idea, yes. So, tell a few stories about successful missions, heroic feats, daring rescues — boy's-own stuff, you know — leading up to some kind of risky crescendo of a job which gets them noticed by top brass and valorised. The whole Africa Corps thing was World War II, right?'

      Malcolm mumbles something affirmative through a mouthful of stout.

      'Of course. Well, whatever: freshly bemedalled and very much on High Command's radar, the boys volunteer to undertake a dangerous assassination mission beyond the limits of the Western Front. This mission, too, can be as winding and convoluted as you dare make it, with side plots, lost children, agonising moral choices — the works. Your audience should, at this point, expect things to culminate in a moment of extreme drama. And so it transpires that during the course of this mission one of the boys — the gunner — is shot by a counter-sniper who has been tracking their position and harrying them throughout. A nemesis figure.

      ‘The boy lies in his friend's arms, bleeding out and breathing his last with a stirring death-speech, his last words an entreatment to live on and be happy, while bullets pop and whizz around their heads. You can just picture the scene, right? Complete with soaring music and an increasingly blurred-at-the-edges filter on the lens… After, the spotter, injured but alive, manages to drag himself out of their nest and, after one final look at the still, peaceful body of his friend, slips out of the building with his life.

      'It takes him hours to get back to the British lines, during which journey he has all manner of thoughts; about the killer, about his desire for revenge—about how he had proposed to his friend's sister in a letter, had just received a reply and was waiting until after this one, final mission to tell him she'd said yes—you get the idea. When he finally reaches safety he's raving to himself—his commanders relieve him of duty and send him to the nearby military hospital to recuperate. Remember what happens next?'

      Malcolm is in the middle of taking another hefty sip of his pint, whose level has dropped below that of Carlisle's for the first time, and doesn't manage to answer.

      'He demands to be returned to the battlefield — immediately. Post-haste. The brass refuses, of course, until he reveals that he had seen his friend's killer through his binoculars, and wants to return to the scene to take his revenge before the man in question is moved to another post. He doesn’t ask: he insists.'

      'Wouldn't they refuse?' asks Malcolm, leaning forward, while Carlisle takes a sip of his own. 'Given the circumstances, I mean?'

      'Well,' Carlisle continues, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, 'you'd think so, right? However, there's been a spate of high-profile assassination jobs undertaken over the past few months by the Hun, you see, and despite the perpetrator's rapid ascension to folk-hero status in the eyes of the Germans, counter-intelligence can't find a single image of him.'

      'Ah, and I suppose they can't rule out this recent killing being another one?'

      'Bingo. The friends were decorated soldiers, right? Natural targets. So, despite their reservations, the commanders on the ground have no option but to agree to the boy's demands, with one stipulation: he doesn't go alone. They line up a series of specialists to accompany him, and — after arguing his case, leaning on all of the unspoken but deeply-felt moral imperatives of self-sacrifice he and his friend developed during their years together — he grudgingly takes his pick.

      'You can take a bit of time to outline the different team members, here: the classic Vinnie Jones hard man; the waspish, bespectacled demolitions expert; the young kid who idolises our heroes — your standard Rambo-cum-Dambusters archetypes. The more description the better, really, because what follows is the mission itself. The climax of the whole thing.

      'Unto the breach, then: you build and build the tension to a great crescendo over the course of their operation, in a sequence which takes our hero and his band of experienced, crack soldiers across the battlefield and into the trenches. They sneak across no-man's land in the dead of night, pick their way through the enemy lines and onwards into the villages and mortar-sticken fields beyond.

      'Reaching the sniper's last known position, the team finds a graveyard of shattered, bullet-pocked buildings which they navigate inch by inch, step by well-trained step. As they go, the members of the squad are picked off one-by-one by the unseen enemy, who seems always one step ahead of them — an impossible ricochet shot here, an improbable booby-trap there… until finally our hero scales the rooftop with the last member of his squad—the young man who takes him for an idol — a mere boy, shot point-blank the moment he pokes his head above the parapet, falling backwards, over our hero, out of sight and into the rubble below. The sniper was ready. Unfortunately for him, the rifle he uses is bolt-action — an antique, his father's, from the Great War — and in the time it takes him to chamber another round our hero has scaled the last rungs of the ladder, darted across the roof, tackled him to the ground and, tearing the sidearm from his fingers, found himself, finally, brimming with anger and vengeance, face to face with the man who killed his best friend. His oldest friend. His brother—'

      '—I remember now, I remember,' Malcolm interrupts. 'Can I do the ending?'

      Carlisle remains stalled mid-flow for a moment, before raising his eyebrows in acknowledgment and lifting his glass to his lips.

      Malcolm continues: 'OK, so, he's on the roof — the surviving boy — and he has his gun trained on the German soldier who killed his friend. The soldier's terrified. You added a problem here, I think, where the boy realises that killing him goes against all of the codes which he and his friend loved, didn’t you?'

      Carlisle nods, 'Because it's in cold blood.'

      'That's it. Despite this, he decides that he'll kill the soldier for the sake of his own honour — and for all the other people the man's murdered. Ah — but, before he does so, he's going to give him the respect of explaining why. That's it. He says: 'I'm going to kill you, right now, on this rooftop. But first I'm going to tell you why.'

      'He begins: "You killed a friend of mine; someone I loved and viewed as a brother. How can I explain… We first met at the hospital, when we were only hours old — before we met our fathers, even. Our mothers had been placed in beds next to each other…" and so on. Basically, the gist is that you tell the whole thing again, from the start; everything that's just been said. That's the idea, isn't it?'

      'Only with the pronouns changed,' adds Carlisle, smiling.

      'Eventually it dawns on the people listening what you've done—what you're doing—that they're going to have to sit through the entire thing again to get to the ending. And then, after you've gone through the whole story again, in every minute detail—at least, the bits about the boys together, I suppose, which is most of it—our hero looks to the soldier and asks: "Do you understand, now? Do you see why I can't let you live?" He asks the question, and the man looks back up at him from the ground, terrified. Finally, after a long pause, the man answers, in a thick German accent: "I am sorry, mein Herr. I don't speak English."'

      Carlisle bangs his palm down on the table, the sound echoing around the High Street like a whip-crack. 'Perfect! You know, it just occurred to me that if you had a bi-lingual audience you could tell it again in German, provided you could speak it yourself. I suppose there wouldn't be any punchline, then, but who honestly needs one?'

      'I remember. Can't help thinking that any sane person would leave long before the end.'

      'Mm, you're probably right.' A moment of silence, during which Carlisle taps thoughtfully at the pockets of his trousers. 'I'm going get my coat.'

      'Maybe get some more drinks while you're in there?' Malcolm holds his empty glass out, as Carlisle stands. 'And a packet of crisps?'

      'No problem.' He takes the glass from Malcolm's hand. 'Do me a favour, will you? Don't go on to me about that fucking London stuff again when I come back, alright? Or my dad. I don't want to talk about it.' He picks up his own pint from the table, and heads inside.