JUST ANOTHER COG IN THE BOY MACHINE

Starts out as a throwaway line any of them might say: those three-hand dialogues as they pass on the corridor, hand over shifts, or sit around in the largest, most anonymous corporate food and beer outlet they can find. They are here for R and R. They are also here to not attract attention to themselves. Goes without saying they are a bunch of seven US military personnel (six males, two Asian, one Dual Heritage, four Caucasian) sitting around drinking beers and eating English breakfasts like non-invasive non-natives doing regular army shit. 



The off-base rules are easy enough for any grunt to get:
#1 Don’t be too loud. #2 Don’t be too American. 3 Don’t be too anything. Period.
 
These words echo those she now mutters to herself quietly in a lull around the pub table, as a coupla three drift off to pee and fiddle with smartphones. Don’t be too butch. Don’t be too fem. Don’t be too anything, girlfriend.

The army was the perfect camouflage for her crystallization from borderline personality disordered Midwest nobody to self-directed tattooed heroine. Heroine. The extra “e” for safety. It's been a while since she's had to self-medicate, self-harm or self-analyse, so busy has she been self-actualizing. Only the second woman in the Marine Corps to make infantry officer: specialism Intel, logistics and communication. But this is just data. Like a chrysalis in reverse, the hard casing of her latter development grew when she joined up: a shell-like coating over her nerve endings to protect her from the pain.

As she waits, her out-of-placeness is more than the normal psycho-geography that hits when they leave base. She’s queasy with the rhythm and rhyme of what she’s become. If what she has become is essentially who she is, why does she feel so other, so alien? And that line, “Just another cog in the boy machine, sister.” Total comic book. Who’d say that? Wasn't Dino Tee Boy. Bit advanced for 100% Basic Nutrition bonehead. Was it her fellow Intel officer? He wouldn't be seen dead in a T-shirt message, on or off-base.

What’ll it be, darling?

Excuse me?

Your order.

Can I get one traditional breakfast... And coffee?

Got your table number? Can’t take an order without a table number, darling.
……..

Sorry, darling?

53

53, you sure?

I’m not on war drill today, sister, or I’d take your ass out the back and grind it into a gory pulp. I am so not your mother fuckin’ darling.

Guys. What’s the table number?
 ……….

I’m certain it's 53, ma’am.

That’s five pound fifty, please.

Why so surly, sister? Least in the States most minimum wagers try to mean it. If she was any more English, she’d be a cartoon: fully-drawn, life-sized; controlled and manoeuvred from below the counter; a perfumed Paddington Bear after electrolysis.

She examines her nails. It’s on the checklist. She unclasps her arms, extends her unclenched fists and looks to see if any dirt has accumulated. One thing she cannot tolerate in certain quarters of the sisterhood: dirt under nails; the insidious invasion of personal space. How do they get so black so quickly? She absolutely refuses to get them painted or manicured. Her worst horror: varnished fingernails, a cache of garbage under each. 

She’s all but obliterated girl and its traces from her off-base look. She retains the capability to unleash its power only in the abstract. It is the basis for her entire operation. That there remains an evident remnant of female in the low maintenance/high performance military hardware show in which her personality resides is testimony to its success.

Hair, tightly-packed into a sumo fighter’s roll, tells of straightforward functional style, a Queer re-invention. She fits into the newly formed hole so fluidly, square corners no longer chafe as they are squashed into compliant cow mush. Square bashing her gay Brit friends would say, if she had any. She stopped doing girlfriends when she quit skag and K and drinking and boy sex. All those names ending in -a. Anna, Maria, Vanessa, Silvia. She thought it’d stop in Europe, but no... Kristina, Lyudmila, Radka, Ivanka. I shit you not!

Tattoos of Eagles and Patriotism conceal currents of teenage pain where rivers of razor blades scratched chaos into Middle America. She much prefers Middle England, on the base, surrounded by a fence, on the UK’s largest aircraft carrier. The locals call it East Anglia. Sounds like Game of Thrones. And the place names. Lakenheath. Mildenhall. Okehampton Detention Center. Pure Harry Potter, man.

Just another cog in the boy machine, sister. She should get it tattooed down her left shin. Embrace the binary. Or maybe it’s more of a T-shirt slogan. She muses on today’s choice of tee: an Apache Helicopter Silhouette. Not too butch, but much too obvious. She reads her colleague’s Dino tee. One T-Rex to the other: Hey dude, did you eat the last Unicorn?

Only occasionally uncrossed to go through girl checklist, she is careful not to over-expose fleshy forearms. In their conversations with her, her six male comrades mostly keep theirs around beer glasses, or else also folded. Fingernail dirt. There is none. She avoids beer. Too much history. She sticks to water and coffee, listens, nods and keeps an eye open for available girl. A heron on an arid river bed, her gaze stalks the tables covertly, constantly, casually. It hasn’t rained for five years. She is tired of the charade. She is sick of the waiting. 

“No fish today, Ms Ex-Dope Fiend!” As she misconstrues the paper bubble above her head for another special offer banner, she eyes up a pair of rigidly-bobbed, silver blondes - too poor, too plain to be cougars, but plenty animated by the cheap coffee and perfume. 

Beer, bladders, messenger groups all exert their pull factor away from the breakfast table. She slowly notices jerks and movements. The team is breaking up piece meal, organically. She lets go her arm fold and dusts down her elbows. It is time to return to type. 

A line of dialogue emerges from her table companion’s mouth a half-second before the words. This isn’t the first time. Dude, this has got to be a Special K wormhole. Dino Tee’s grimace is so fixed she cannot believe it is going to ever change.

Finally, when internal monologue escapes from her temples and forms a thought bubble above her head, discomposure strikes. Low blood pressure. She whites out, flops forward and unfolds onto the floor of the pub.

In rapid well-drilled moves, two of her colleagues roll her up and take her back to base.