Pink Fairies

Pink Fairies

  by

  J L Blenkinsop

  Copyright 2015 J L Blenkinsop

  This ebook is published free for any reader. This ebook may not be sold. If you enjoy it, please leave a review on the site where you obtained the book.

  Pink Fairies

  Captain Uglov was searching for a ball-point that worked when Khloponin clattered into the dingy office and dropped into the chair beside him.

  “Okay?” Khloponin enquired. He leaned back and fished for cigarettes.

  “Loving it,” Uglov replied. He threw another pen into the corner and sighed theatrically. “If I’d wanted to write pay sheets I would have stayed in Omsk.” He held out a hand, snapping his fingers until Khloponin gave him a cigarette. The two men bent their heads together to share the light. As the smoke rose blue in the still air Uglov relaxed, leaned back in the creaking office chair and crossed his ankles beneath the battered desk.

  For two minutes the men smoked in silence.

  “Do fish feel joy?” Uglov asked, eventually. His companion thought on this.

  “Should they?”

  “I watched a documentary last year. About sharks. Rays jumping out of the sea and making belly-flops. Doing somersaults. It looked like joy to me.”

  “Whales do that too.”

  “Whales aren’t fish.”

  “So what? They’re still wet... It’s fish tonight.”

  “What?” Uglov was alarmed. “We’re miles from the sea. Where does it come from? I bet it’s off.” He leaned forward and picked up another pen from the box in front of him. He scribbled on the pad. Nothing. The paper tore. He threw the pen behind him.

  “If you don’t watch out,” observed Khloponin, “People will think you’re a character in a Russian novel.” Uglov laughed, and relaxed.

  “What’s on for tomorrow?”

  “We advance on the German positions before Füssen. Missile support tonight, they should be all shook up by the time we get there.”

  Uglov looked around for the map and found it on the floor. He spread it on the desk and looked for the lake, then the airport the battalion had been flown into two days before. Between the lake and the airport was Schwangau, and autobahn 17. “Here we are.” Füssen was south-west, at the base of the lake. The battalion’s orders were to take a military installation east of Füssen. Just a few miles and they would have it, but those few miles were crammed with men and armour.

  “Come on,” said Khloponin, tipping his chair back on its feet and standing. “Come and eat joyful fish.”

  Uglov smiled, just a little, and stood too. He put on his cap and looked in the spotted mirror that hung crookedly on the wall. The pink of his uniform jarred in this small brown room, but by now he was used to it, its brightness, its jauntiness. A bright and jaunty pink. He tugged the bottom of his jacket, straightened his cap, and, hand in hand, Uglov and his boyfriend, Lieutenant-Colonel Khloponin, sauntered out towards the school hall that was now serving as a mess for the Pink Fairies.

  The school had been built in 1990, and was old and shabby now. The two men walked across a blacktop playground scruffy with weeds. The sky was greying into evening. Spring was taking the nip out of the air. To the south-west there was a flash which could have been lightning, but was the first of the cruise missiles which would decimate the German defenders during the coming night. There was a rumble that was not thunder. Outside the school gates a few women stood, smoking, not chatting, waiting for the Russian men who would not be coming. Are they colour blind, thought Uglov.

  The school’s dining room had been divided into two zones, the Officers’ Mess and the soldiers’. The difference was apparent in the quality of the tablecloths and the provision of waiter service; the food was the same. Men carrying their food on trays wandered mostly in pairs to find a table, their uniforms uniformly uniform and uniformly pink. Conversation was a low buzz.

  An orderly met Uglov and Khloponin and ushered them to the Officers’ area. Khloponin acknowledged a smattering of polite applause from his staff as he took his seat at the head of the table, and a wolf-whistle from the men’s side. The day’s action had been swift and well-conducted: The school had been their forward choice for a billet and had been secured two hours before with no loss of life on either side, except for a few civilians who had got in the way of one of the IFVs. The German conscripts had shot off a few mortars and rifle rounds and run away, down towards Füssen. As the night’s bombardment geared up many of those men would be wishing they had stayed where they were.

  But then, if they had stayed in Schwangau, the Pink Fairies would have got them, and the Pink Fairies never took prisoners.

  There’s a long history of homosexuality in the service of war, all the way from the Spartans to the present day. The theory is that men who bonded in mutual love would fight for one another, and it did indeed seem to work. Uglov thought about this as he chewed through his potatoes, sauerkraut and fish fresh from the lake. Putin’s Generals had been scandalised when the Premier had suggested that the Army could use Russia’s degenerates rather than wasting roubles on executing them. He had quoted from books about Sparta, and how the Romans had not considered homosexual acts to detract from their virility, so long as they were not the passive partner.

  Uglov, thinking about it, could not imagine Putin as the passive partner.

  As a plan it made some sense. The execution, on the other hand, left a lot to be desired. The Military began a search for gays in the ranks. Men began to disappear from their regiments, transferred out to an undisclosed location.

  Word soon got around. Behaviour changed. No-one wanted to be caught up in what looked suspiciously like a cull.

  So it became ridiculous. A man’s heart would skip a beat if he dropped the soap in the shower. Men scrambled – too late – to remove incriminating material from their social media accounts. Mess-time conversations became monosyllabic. Rumour had it that many normal men (by Russian standards) were being caught up in the net, and perhaps the rumours were true, for sometimes men reappeared back in their own units, men who would not speak of what they had seen.

  After a while, the Military must have realised that a regiment comprised of gays needed gay officers too, and it was then that Khloponin was spirited away from his Captain’s position in an elite Corps and promoted. He was flown to Balakhna, near Nizhniy Novgorod, where he found an utter chaos.

  The camp, previously the home of an Engineering battalion, was now a hotbed of decadence. It was cafe culture meeting Sodom. The first thing that was thrust into Khloponin’s hand after the exhaustive medical was a bunch of fabric swatches (he was entitled to vote on the uniform, it appeared); the second was the privatest part of the medic who had just signed him off as fit.

  By the time Uglov was turfed out of his comfy billet in the Pay Corps Balakhna had settled down and discipline was being imposed. Relationships had become established and bonds were forming that the High Command hoped would establish the Regiment as a tight-knit fighting force. The last straight men had been packed off back to their points of origin. And the uniforms had been voted on.

  Uglov hated pink. Apart from the obvious fact that it was hardly a camouflage colour, and would tend to draw fire, it was the same scratchy cloth as any other uniform in the Russian Army. But hey, the vote had been taken and this was the result.

  Uglov would have preferred black satin.

  When Putin’s retrieval of the old USSR’s buffer states triggered Europe reluctantly into declaring war the Pink Fairies showed their mettle in a spectacular operation in Poland, helping to take three heavily-defended cities in two weeks. They showed no quarter and took no prisoners, but treated civilians with courtesy unless they were crossed. Propaganda footage showed some Pink Fairies giv
ing the Warsaw apartment of an elderly gay Jewish couple a magnificent Belle Epoque makeover. The Pink Fairies became heroes in Russia. On the anniversary of their founding, Vladimir Putin himself donned the pink uniform and saluted them.

  Russia spread across Europe like ink. Its battalions crushed the opposition. Its aircraft bombed, its missiles struck, its navy bombarded, its troops overran. Years of financial crises had left the Old World sick in heart and purse. NATO collapsed when the Americans refused to join in. Britain told everyone they were right behind them, which in a sort of a sense they were. France surrendered when Poland fell, just on general principles and a sense of tradition, but nobody noticed so they kept quiet about it. The Scandinavian countries hoped that everyone would forget about them. Italy just went on as usual. Uglov fought and killed, gave orders that led to death and mutilation, slept with the battalion commander, washed in the morning and stared over whatever sink in whichever billet at a face that increasingly, he felt, was aged and crumbling. Nobody loves a fairy when she’s forty. He was only twenty-six, but he felt sixty. What was it all for?

  The Fairies, with their policy regarding civilians, were a high-profile exception to the general rule of war. Around