compass

From the distance you can’t tell. The dog could almost be walking itself, alone in the Tuesday morning sunshine, pacing the perimeter fence. But a little closer and you see the figure, sand-green combats against the pale green grass, stepping one-two, one-two close up against the netted wire. 

Closer still and you notice the tidy blonde bun below the beret, and a tautness in the cloth of the combat trousers, pulling a curve in the fabric over the buttocks.

The dog is straining on the leash, shiny coat like a crow’s wing, saliva beginning to drool from the muzzle. She gives a sharp tug, tells him to heel, and the leash goes slack again. The ground is soft underfoot, the air yellow-warm. 

A sideways turn of her head and she looks, beyond the fence, into the back gardens of houses, chopped up into sideways squares by the mesh: trampolines and rusty barbequeues, grass kicked to dirt and discarded footballs. One garden has gnomes. The sound of pop music drifts choppily from an open window.

When she was a little girl she’d always wanted to live in a house like this: a house with an upstairs, and a dad – not just a succession of unrelated ‘uncles’. The other girls at school had friends over for tea. Their mums remembered parents’ evenings. They thought ‘brown’ was just the name of a boring colour.

She turns away from the back gardens and focusses ahead. Hesh is tugging again and she gives his lead a yank. The cloth of her trouser legs swish against each other as she walks. Her nose prickles with pollen. There is a sudden stutter of fire from the range, but Hesh barely blinks. He’s a good dog. She has no idea why he always growls at Adam like that. Adam says it’s jealousy. He says he doesn’t want to be in competition with a bloody dog.

The sunshine catches something in the long grass, a sharp reflective stab of light – broken glass perhaps? She bends down to look, and Hesh pauses, panting.A transparent rectangle of a compass, half hidden by a dandelion, dropped during one of the orienteering exercises the other week. She picks it up, watching the needle spin wildly, finding direction. She puts it in her pocket and feels it push against the other thing in there. The thing she’d been trying not to think about: the white plastic stick with the thin blue line on it – or not on it.

At NAAFI break she’d been across the road to the chemist’s. She wasn’t one to check dates. It was Adam who’d noticed how long it had been, said he wouldn’t mind if she was, that they could get married, get a quarter. He said she should give up work, though. He said she wouldn’t want to have anything to do with that bloody dog when she had a baby to look after.

And she hadn’t said anything.

After NAAFI break she went to the toilet. It was like pissing on a biro; she’d got it all over her hands. Ten minutes, she read off the box, before she threw it in the bin. Ten minutes: long enough to get Hesh and be right at the edge of camp, past the range and the woods, away from it all.

Here she was now. Thirty-year-old Lucy: Adam’s girlfriend, Hesh’s handler, with a directionless compass and an unread pregnancy test.

She takes one last glance at the back gardens through fence, feels for the plastic stylus in her pocket and draws it out. She holds the innocuous white stick up to the spring sunlight and looks.

Is that line blue?