Army of You & Me Read online

  Army of Me & You

  By

  Billy London

  Copyright © 2013 Billy London

  Editor: Katriena Knights

  Cover Art: Marteeka Karland

  ISBN: 978-1-304-24724-7

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews. This is a work of fiction. All references to real places, people, or events are coincidental, and if not coincidental, are used fictitiously. All trademarks, service marks, registered trademarks, and registered service marks are the property of their respective owners and are used herein for identification purposes only. eBooks are NOT transferable. Re-selling, sharing or giving eBooks is a copyright infringement.

  The irony of Madeline Mpoyi's choice in a career was never lost on her. Being that her days as a girl in a war torn village, suffering the horrors of an innocent Rwandan child started off as anything but sweet most would find it incredibly funny that as a woman she'd be manufacturing treats to send to the soldier that saved her life. Or at least she thought it was the soldier that saved her life. Errr...technically it is...being that he has the same name and comes from the same bloodline. Although Major Nathaniel Goldsmith Sr. has long retired, his son is carrying on the family tradition as a Captain in the army. A Captain that has come to depend on both Madeline's sweet letters and even sweeter care packages. And it would seem that said Captain has Madeline in his sights...eager to sample whatever else she's willing to offer...

  Publisher’s Note

  This book is written by a genuine Brit, the spelling the slang, the vernacular are all honest to goodness Queen’s English. Therefore, rest assured there are no spelling errors, grammatical errors (other than the ones we all make when speaking in everyday life), it was written as it was supposed to be. Thank you for your purchase!

  ~ Shara Azod, LLC

  Contents

  Chapter One. 6

  Chapter Two. 16

  Chapter Three. 22

  Chapter Four. 28

  Chapter Five. 39

  Chapter Six. 49

  Chapter Seven.. 56

  Chapter Eight. 64

  Chapter Nine. 72

  Chapter Ten.. 92

  Chapter Eleven.. 103

  Epilogue. 107

  Chapter One

  “My pleasure.” Madeline smiled at the last customers of the day as she closed the door behind them. She turned the Closed sign to the front and slid the bolts into place.

  Not a bad day, even though she’d been interrupted in her time with the Standard newspaper. She couldn’t really turn customers away, not in the current economy, even for a few minutes of much-needed peace. Wednesdays were always busy in the shop. Mainly with school kids, some of whom had very sticky fingers, and she didn’t hesitate in slapping hands or catching them by the scruff of the neck and turfing them out. Madeline had a sharp memory for faces—even sharper for little thieves. The ones who came back usually came back with money and a careless apologies. That was when she hooked them with sherbet and Space Invaders and chunks of buttery fudge. Speaking of which, she needed to make some for the Saturday stall in the local market.

  Returning to the counter, she went back to the newspaper. Rather than looking at adverts, she read the news. It was a ritual she’d never grown out of, but she always scanned for his name. It wasn’t there, thank God. She closed the paper and thought about cashing up. The money in the till would need to go into the safe, for banking tomorrow. With a sigh, she glanced up and yelped in shock.

  A man had his face pressed to the glass, trying to see inside the shop. He saw her and knocked on the glass. Approaching the door, she folded her arms across her belly and said loudly, “I’m sorry, we’re closed!”

  “Madeline?” he asked. His voice, booming but still very proper, cut through the door. “I’m Captain Goldsmith.”

  “What?” she yelled.

  “Captain Goldsmith.” He dug into a bag and pulled out a crumpled paper. “You were sending care packages to my platoon.” He held up the paper against the glass and she recognised her own handwriting. What on earth was going on?

  Cautiously, she opened the door, not taking her eyes from him. She realised he was in full dress uniform. Even so, she let him inside and kept the door within reach. British soldier or no, she would never be alone in a room with a man without an escape route.

  “Hello there!” Captain Goldsmith grinned at her, holding out a hand. “Nice to finally meet you.”

  Madeline stared at him. He couldn’t be the Captain Goldsmith she’d known fifteen years ago. He was too young. Far too young. Fifteen years ago, he’d probably been fumbling under a girl’s T-shirt behind the school bike sheds.

  Captain Goldsmith’s hand still hovered in front of her, and she slowly took it. She suspected the Afghan sun had baked his skin that glorious golden biscuit colour and bleached his hair a sandy blond. His eyebrows were nearly white at the edges, and freckles scattered over his nose. A lush-lipped smile was surrounded by a strawberry-tinted beard. He almost crushed her fingers in his grip before releasing her hand.

  “This shop is brilliant. I just wanted to come and say hello and thank you in person.” He took in the shop, turning his huge body in a half circle. “Before you sent photographs, I used to imagine this was Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.”

  “Right... I’m sorry, what’s your first name?”

  “Cain,” he replied then sent her another smile in apology. “I’m still used to formalities. Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you or shock you into speechlessness.”

  No, this couldn’t at all be right. “I’m confused. I thought Captain Nathaniel Goldsmith was serving with that platoon.”

  “No. My dad hasn’t been a captain in years. He’s a major.”

  “What?” she repeated.

  “Would it help things if I explained that Nathaniel is my first name, but people kept getting me and my dad confused, so I go by Cain?”

  She lifted her shoulders helplessly. “No, it would’t.”

  He nodded. “Right. Do you have any tea?”

  ***

  Cain dwarfed the small room at the back of the glorious sweet shop that had made him, his platoon, and some fast-fingered children in Afghanistan pretty happy. Madeline had her back to him as she bustled with milk and the kettle.

  “Do you want Earl Grey or Breakfast Tea or Yorkshire Tea or Darjeeling...?”

  He blinked slowly. “That’s a lot of tea.”

  She bit her bottom lip. “What takes your fancy?”

  You do? “Breakfast Tea. Thank you.”

  She nodded and turned back to the kettle. Dressed in a full-skirted dress in a green and white print, she looked like a 1950s housewife. He supposed it went with the vintage sweet shop. The only thing that was out of place was the bullet wound on her bare arm. Didn’t fit the mould of squeaky clean shop owner. But then, what did he really know about her?

  The first time he’d even heard of Tutti Fruitti, it had been raining solidly for a week in Helmand. Everyone was depressed.

  “It’s like fucking England here now, boss,” one private had complained. The mail couldn’t have turned up at a better time. As Cain was handing out boxes of letters and gifts for the platoon, he caught sight of the large, hefty package with his name on it. The writing was unmistakably feminine, and he wandered off to open it, ignoring whistles and catcalls from everyone else. “Boss has a bird? Thought he was a sausage smuggler.”

  Inside the box were packets upon packets of sweets. Not ones that any newsagent carried, but sweets from his childhood. Cola cubes. Rhubarb and custard. Chocolate mice. Those spaceships with the sherbet inside. Drums
tick lollypops. Strawberry laces. Bon bons. There were also boxes of truffles. Marc de champagne. Marc de freaking champagne! He scrambled for a letter, something to explain what and why but mainly what the hell. He found it right at the bottom of the cardboard box. Again in the same feminine handwriting.

  Dear Captain Goldsmith,

  I know you’re in the middle of a difficult tour. So I wanted to do my bit by giving you and the other soldiers some reminders of home. Please do keep the Marc de champagne for yourself. They’re one of the bestsellers in my shop. This, all these little things, is to say thank you. Thank you for protecting us, for doing your job. To say we’re all proud of you. Keep going. And come home safe.

  Best wishes

  Madeline

  Owner of probably the best sweet shop in London

  The address was neatly printed at the top in immaculate penmanship. How had she known? Did she know his parents? A thought trickled through him. Christ, did she know his ex-wife? Were the sweets all poisoned? That was foolish. If Sarah knew anyone who owned a sweet shop, he’d have inherited those friends in the divorce. Sarah didn’t touch sugar.

  “Tommy!” he yelled, shoving the note into his pocket.

  “Yes, boss.” The young private loped over to Cain’s little mud hut of a cubbyhole.

  “Hand these out.”

  Tommy’s eyes widened like golf balls. “Fuck me! It’s Christmas in here!”

  “Yeah. We got lucky.”

  Grinning, Tommy bounded outside to hand out the sweets to the rest of the platoon. Cain juggled the small box of truffles in his palm and glanced down at the letter. It touched him. To be thought of with kindness by someone he didn’t even know. Soldiers had been given little more than grief since the war in Afghanistan started. He’d had bottles thrown at him, physically broken up fights between drunken men and soldiers in uniform heading to their barracks. People had accosted him in the street for starting illegal wars, then cited World War II as their argument. Some of those same people knew that every male in his family since the eighteen hundreds had served in the military. Those who didn’t, were even more incensed that he was blindly following family tradition rather than protesting against the government’s hidden agenda for invading the Middle East.

  Gradually, attitudes changed. Not all of them – he still got grief if he wore the uniform—but it shifted. As soon as the first soldier was killed, and his coffin, draped in the Union Flag, was broadcast on television, his father told him how close it was for everyone in the country to see a young man return home dead. A terrible version of six degrees of separation, everyone knew someone who was serving and eventually, would know someone who died serving.

  “It’s not just principle any more,” his father wrote to him. “It’s someone’s child. Someone’s spouse. Someone’s sibling. It’s now real to people because they know the dead soldier. They went to school with them. To the pub. Probably used to babysit for them. They can argue illegality all they want but as soon as they’re at the funeral of someone they know? They understand life’s not black and white. It’s death.”

  Maybe that was part of it. Someone just being kind to him after all the misery. The care packages came with regularity – not regular by normal Royal Mail standards, but by the date of each of her letters, Madeline was sending packages each week. Not just sweets and chocolate, but wet wipes, which were a godsend when the showers and toilets stopped working. Deodorant for the times when the heat was so intense, they could barely carry out patrols. Wotsits - God, he’d missed those crisps, and munching his way through a packet whilst reading a brand new Lee Ryan novel was simple luxury.

  Madeline didn’t seem particularly au fait with emails, even though he printed his own clearly on his thank you note, so he wrote to her. Nothing about operations and missions that he could go into detail, but he’d describe the bazaars in the little villages. A game of volleyball between the troops. The song a member of his platoon sang with bawdy enthusiasm before they all went to bed. An Afghan child exchanging words in English with him.

  In between letters to his parents and to various friends, he always thought carefully of what to send back to Madeline. She was his Wotsit dealer; he had to of course keep her on side. As little as he gave away in his letters, Madeline gave away even less. She’d write reams on celebrity gossip that brought him back down to earth. That silliness was carrying on in the world, even whilst insurgents were planting IEDs and colleagues were losing limbs and lives. It cheered him. Kept up his morale. She’d write about the news—political affairs, world crises, the stock markets. She’d tear the back pages from the Financial Times and she’d complain, like a typical Brit, about the weather. Never once did she write why she chose to send him the care packages, and she never answered him as to how she knew him.

  But here he was, sitting in probably the greatest sweet shop in London, waiting for a cup of tea from the woman who had made each day of that pretty boring-arse tour bearable. Madeline placed a large mug in front of him, and he glanced at the print. Home Sweet Home. Cute.

  “When did you get home?” she asked, sitting at the far end of the table.

  Again side-stepping. “Last week. Took a few days for my mum to let me out of her sight. How are you? How’s business?”

  “Could be better,” she admitted. “I suppose I’m luckier than most business owners at the moment. I’m not bankrupt, and I don’t owe the bank any money. Before the crash I bought the lease from the landlord outright, so the premises are fully mine. No mortgage. I rent out the flat above. Nice tenants. Clean.”

  Clever, distracting little thing, he thought admiringly. “That’s marvellous. So, how do you know my dad?”

  She started and overturned her mug of tea. Cain righted the mug and stepped around her to unravel a roll of kitchen towel and mop up the hot liquid. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled.

  He placed the ruined papers in the bin and stood next to her. Madeline got up and put the table between them. That’s odd... On paper she had been more than friendly. Now he felt as if she were intimidated by him. “It’s fine. How do you know him?”

  “Why do you assume I know him?”

  “Because you can’t send unsolicited mail to soldiers. It has to be addressed to them by name. And you thought I was my dad. So, how do you know him?” She seemed so hesitant to say so. He couldn’t fathom his father having an affair. Not that Major Goldsmith could keep a secret from the world and his neighbour, but he didn’t seem inclined to infidelity.

  “He helped me. When I was a child.” She gripped her hands together and chewed on a knuckle. “I looked him up. I saw the name and I just...” She seemed to lose her nerve and her gaze lowered to the table. “Look, I haven’t talked about this to anyone. In a really long time.”

  Something in her voice made him back off. “It’s all right. I didn’t mean to spook you.”

  “You... It’s not your fault. It’s mine. I got things mixed up.” Her huge, dark eyes were so full of worry; he picked up his bag, ready to leave.

  “I’m sorry, Madeline. I just wanted to say thank you, in person. I know you think you made a mistake, but what you did was a lifeline to the rest of the world for all of us, that we weren’t there alone and forgotten. I can’t thank you enough for it.”

  She lifted a shoulder. “But you would have had your wife or girlfriend or boyfriend and family writing to you as well. I just wanted to do my bit.”

  He chuckled. “Not that I have any of those three, but you did. More than your bit.”

  Madeline scooted past him to open the shop door. “I’ll let you out.”

  He paused as she swung the door open for him. “Madeline, if you think you owe my dad for something, you don’t. He was doing his job.”

  “His job. My life,” she said slowly. Holding out her hand, she spoke again, her voice a mere whisper, “Thank you for coming all this way.”

  He gave her hand a perfunctory shake and turned to leave. “Hold on!” she called to his back. The b
ell on the door trilled as she turned back into the shop. A few minutes later she came back and handed him a box. “The truffles. I made them today.”

  “How much...?”

  She slapped his arm. “How dare you? Just take them.”

  “Oww.” The slap cut through his clothing. She had to be a mother. Only mothers knew exactly where to slap the hell out of people.

  “Take the damn chocolates.”

  “Cheers,” he said quietly. “Nice to meet you, Madeline.” Sending her a half smile, he made his way back to the bus stop. It was a two-hour journey back to Cambridgeshire, and all he had for the journey were questions.

  Chapter Two

  The village was overrun. Her father heard the screams of the women who had been their neighbours and pushed Madeline back inside their home. He whipped off her T-shirt and wrapped her budding breasts with bandages. Not even having a moment to feel shock at being nude before her father, he explained in between puffed breaths, “I’d rather they shoot you than violate you.”

  “Daddy...”

  He shoved the T-shirt back on her and tucked the remaining roll of bandages inside her underwear. “They’re coming.”

  With brutal strokes, he cut through her twists of hair, leaving patches and cutting the scalp until she felt trickles of blood running down her neck. Gathering up the shorn locks, he shoved them inside her pillowcase. “The bag under your bed. Get it.”

  She pulled out a plastic bag and looked to her father for guidance. He had another bag in his hand and slung it over his shoulder. “Go! Go!” He shoved her towards the back of the house as the screams from their neighbours intensified.