by Medina, KT
She wrenched her arm from his grasp, shoved past him and broke into a run, her feet slipping, heavy combat boots dragging at her legs, flak jacket pressing against her chest, making it hard to breathe. Her heart lurched as she passed the red-and-white mine tape marking the edge of the field, but she didn’t stop.
He looked calm now. Sit back and sunbathe. Don’t get burnt. His eyes were closed and he was silent, his breath slow and shallow. I certainly don’t intend to. Only the blood didn’t fit. She couldn’t believe how much there was.
It poured from the ragged remains of his calf and the shrapnel wounds on his face and neck, slick underneath him, forming a glossy halo around his head. His skin had darkened to navy blue around the edges of the wounds. A stain was spreading across the front of his shorts. The burnt, twisted case of the anti-personnel mine lay a couple of lanes away, and next to it, a boot – a splintered, sopping boot.
Forcing her mind to blankness, Tess lowered herself gently down beside him. Knelt in his blood. Smelt scorched flesh and fear. Felt the shade of the tree on her face. Gripped his hand. Gestured for the first-aiders to come forward – It’s clear! I just ran down the fucking lane, there’s nothing else here! It’s clear! – listened to the slop of their boots in the mud, to the rustle of the stretcher, to the static from a radio somewhere in the distance, to Johnny saying something that didn’t come out as words, just babble, before he groaned and coughed a red mess on to his flak jacket.
She looked from his jacket to his face and saw that his eyes were open now, flickering blue lights that were brightening, dimming.
4
The complex was situated on the fringes of central Battambang, on a potholed road, tree-lined and oddly peaceful given its location. Tess drove through the gate into a dirt courtyard shaded by palms and a huge, spreading frangipani tree, and hemmed in on three sides by shabby, single-storey whitewashed buildings. Each building was rectangular, with a deep covered veranda running down the side that faced the courtyard. Their glassless windows were dark behind mosquito mesh.
Cutting the engine, she slumped forward, pressing her forehead against the steering wheel and closing her eyes. The pain in her skull, which had come on the moment she’d seen Johnny loaded into the ambulance, refused to subside. She fought a wave of nausea, panicky at the thought of seeing him again, maimed – bitten, she found herself thinking, remembering the boot. She had tried to maintain her professionalism at the field – ducking behind a Land Cruiser, out of sight, to throw up – but she knew that she must stink of it. Vomit, and his blood, which had dried to brown paste on her trousers.
Sitting back in the seat, she opened her eyes and took a few long breaths, sucking the hot air into her lungs. For a moment, her mind flashed back to England, where winter would now be approaching. She suddenly yearned to be cold. Flipping the rear-view mirror down, she glanced at her reflection. Drawn and pale. She shoved a strand of hair behind her ear, moistened her fingertips with her tongue and scrubbed at the tracks on her cheeks, until the lines merged into the rest of the dirt. She detested herself when she cried, couldn’t start out in Cambodia like this, whatever had happened. The woman who cried had to be left behind with the bills on the mat and the rancid milk she’d forgotten to empty from the fridge. Giving herself another quick glance in the mirror, she climbed out and slammed the door.
The three buildings facing the courtyard were nearly identical. The one to her right was in semi-darkness, wooden slat blinds pulled low over the windows. The building at the back of the courtyard was also deserted, but a couple of metal chairs rested on the veranda and two lines of faded washing hung listlessly. To her left, doors were open and she could see the outlines of people moving around inside, hear the gentle hum of conversation. Two Khmer men were sitting on a low bench in the shade of the veranda, watching her in silence. She made her way over.
One was young, in his teens she guessed, with dark curly hair. The leg-hole of his green shorts sagged around a pinched stump; his other leg was pitted with scars. The other man was old, white hair, eyes glazed by cataracts. His right arm was a knot of rough skin hooked over a wooden crutch, his left ankle a swell of distorted flesh, with no foot attached.
‘A man, a white man, Barang, was brought in here a few hours ago. He trod on a land mine. Could you please tell me where he was taken?’
The young man gave a shy smile, the old man nodded and grinned, but it was clear that neither had understood.
‘Un homme blanc. Accident. Il arrive ici, deux heures . . .’ She waved her hand. ‘Ago . . . Where . . . Où? Où est-il?’
It was poor. She waited, chewing her lip. Slowly a hand was raised. The old man pointing, with his good arm, across the courtyard.
‘Ça c’est l’hôpital.’
*
At the far end of the building, the corridor opened out into a small waiting area, where narrow wooden benches were set against the wall.
A dark-haired man was slumped on one of the benches, legs stretched out in front of him, head hanging, smoke curling from a cigarette in his hand. Butts made a pile on the floor by his feet. He was wearing navy-blue MCT fatigues, shorts and shirt, long-sleeved despite the heat, faded and stained with tidemarks of sweat. As she walked through the doorway, he lifted his head and she recognised him from his photograph on the team-room wall. Alexander Bauer: early thirties, dark brown hair, eyes so dark they had looked almost black. ‘Croatian,’ MacSween had told her. ‘Keeps himself to himself. But he’s good. Tough, reliable and knows his shit.’
In the photographs he had seemed a broad, tall figure. Here in the hospital waiting room, his size was magnified – the bench he was sitting on seemed absurdly small and delicate by comparison.
‘Alexander, Alex? I’m—’
‘I know who you are.’
He took a drag of his cigarette and blew the smoke slowly through his nostrils, dark eyes fixed on her face.
‘What’s happening?’ she asked. ‘Where’s Johnny?’
He answered with a tilt of his head. She glanced towards closed double doors on the far side of the waiting area, which bore a sign written in Khmer.
‘Operating theatre. No entry. Operation in progress,’ he read, slowly, sardonically.
‘How did you hear about . . . about Johnny?’
‘Radio, it is open band. We all heard.’
‘Do you know where MacSween is? Is he coming?’
‘He’s meeting local military commanders. Sweet-talking. He won’t know yet probably. When he does, he will come.’
She nodded. ‘I followed as soon as I could.’
‘You didn’t need to.’ His eyes were hard.
Tess slumped down on one of the benches; Alexander stayed where he was, smoking, looking at his hands.
The double doors to the operating theatre swung open and a small Khmer in green surgical robes slipped out. Head down, eyes fixed on the floor, he hurried up the corridor, and returned a few moments later clutching two transparent sacs of blood.
Alexander held out his arm. ‘Ohm.’
The orderly paused; Alex spoke quietly in Khmer. The orderly replied in monosyllables. When they had finished speaking, he whirled past Alex and into the operating theatre.
‘What did he say?’ she asked. ‘How’s Johnny? Did he tell you?’
Alex stood without answering and moved over to the window, where he raised his arms, using splayed fingers to rest against its frame, staring through the mosquito netting.
‘Is he OK? Is he alive?’
Alex nodded. ‘Alive.’
She fell silent, stared at his back, at the contours of his shoulders and arms tense against the material of his shirt. Her gaze slid past him to the outside, where a group of Khmer mine victims were walking around a brightly painted obstacle course, some stumbling at every hurdle, others coping better on their prosthetics and battered wooden crutches. Alex watched them. After a while he cast the butt of his cigarette to the ground, reached in his pocket for the packet, ope
ned it, but didn’t take one. Instead, he turned back towards Tess, leaning against the windowsill.
‘Why are you here?’
‘What? In Cambodia? Or in this hospital?’
‘What brought you to Cambodia? Why are you doing this?’
Tess waited a beat before answering. She had never worked for a humanitarian mine-clearance charity, but had five years in the Royal Engineers under her belt, including three tours of duty clearing mines in Afghanistan. She had more than enough experience to make her valuable to a small charity like MCT – and to provide a convincing cover story for her being in Cambodia. She wasn’t about to open up to Alex, or to anyone else, about the real reason.
‘Why not? There’s nothing else I’m good at.’
He was studying her face, searching it for clues. She met his gaze unblinking. There was truth in what she’d said, and the rest was none of his business.
‘What about you? Why are you here?’
He didn’t speak for a few moments. ‘It’s a long story, and not one that is very interesting.’
‘You’ve never been injured clearing?’
He shook his head. ‘I’ve been lucky. But once, almost—’ He broke off, turning back to the window. It had begun to rain, a soft patter against the mesh. Somewhere out in the street a tinny radio blared hip hop, and a rooster squawked. ‘I got too close to someone else’s fuck-up.’
Her mouth was suddenly dry. ‘What happened?’
‘Not important.’ His fingers tapped against the windowframe. ‘You should go home.’
She shook her head. ‘I’m happy to stay.’
‘Go home. There is no need for you to be here.’
‘I want to stay, see that Johnny’s OK.’
‘Go,’ Alex hissed. ‘Just go. This has nothing to do with you.’
*
He watched her walk across the yard to the Land Cruiser, watched the tense set of her shoulders. He had watched her come too, had felt the extraordinary pull of those green eyes, of her aloofness and her vulnerability. She was wound as tight as a spring. She was everything he’d expected.
Holding the cigarette against the back of his hand, Alex watched the dark hairs curl and melt, the flesh start to blister under the red-hot ash, felt the heat sear right through to his nerve ends. He held it there longer, closed his eyes and ate up the pain, feeling the tide of anger and guilt receding. Lifting it free, he gazed dispassionately at the other burns on his hands and the scars of knife marks threading their way up his wrists to the cuffs of his shirtsleeve, as though they were words set down in a language he’d forgotten how to read.
5
Luke had come into the kitchen one morning last summer, mud from his boots flaking on to the lino, smiling, self-conscious, contrite.
‘I’ve got something for you.’
She had tried to smile back then, reading his mood. Her mouth still tasted of blood and her lips felt puffy and lopsided. But it was easier to move on, pretend nothing had happened. Her brain processed quickly, running through a range of low-risk answers, stopping to select, like a sixties jukebox picking records.
‘A present?’ she murmured, aware that her thick lip was making her slur a little, hating herself for it. ‘Diamonds, maybe?’
He smiled and stepped towards her and automatically her back went rigid, her pulse rose a few notches. He sensed the change and hurt flashed in his eyes. But the walk had calmed him and he was obviously determined not to spoil the moment; his voice didn’t falter. ‘Close your eyes and hold out your hand.’
She watched through the crack of her eyelids as something soft fell into the palm of her hand. ‘What is that?’
‘A sock. A baby girl’s sock.’
‘Where did you get it?’
‘I found it on Salisbury Plain. Lying on the ground.’
‘And you just picked it up?’
He shrugged and grinned, relaxing into the moment, conscious now that she was going to let him move on, pretend his outburst an hour ago had never happened.
‘It’s a good omen. I know it is. It’s going to happen, soon.’ He smiled, his eyes growing warm again. ‘It’s what I want . . . what we both want, isn’t it?’
Tess forced a smile of acquiescence, her heart fluttering in her chest. ‘It’s filthy. And you’re nuts,’ she whispered, regretting it immediately.
‘Of that,’ Luke said, with a tiny smile, ‘there is no doubt. But you’re crazy too, Tess. That’s why we love each other so much.’
Tess shivered. ‘I’m throwing it away.’
But for some reason, she hadn’t. She’d made up some excuse about having to get dinner on, to get away from him, and left it on the hall table. When she had remembered and come back, it had disappeared. He had taken it.
The next time she had seen the tiny pink sock was in a battered envelope with a Cambodian stamp on it, which had landed on her doormat a month after Luke was dead and buried.
The address was typed, and there was nothing else on the packet to betray who had sent it, and nothing else inside. She had turned the envelope upside down, and shoved her hand right up inside to make sure. Luke had gone to Cambodia as a single man, knowing their marriage was over, that she had finally found the guts to leave him. Who there knew about her? Who cared?
And then she had noticed, on the other side of the envelope from its stamp and postmark, a tiny scribble. It had meant nothing to her at the time: a doodle of a reptile, like a pictogram, so small that she couldn’t even tell exactly what it was supposed to be. A gecko? A lizard?
The sock was here now, on the coffee table in the centre of her room in the boarding house. She bent and curled her fingers around it.
The room was large and airy, with a small kitchen and white tiled bathroom leading off it, on the first floor of a two-storey new build, set back from the road in a walled garden, and overlooked by a jostling crowd of palms. The walls were white-painted and bare: she had nothing personal to hang up, and the floor, bed and sofa were clear of scattered belongings.
She had forgotten to close the balcony doors when she had left in the morning. Orange light streamed through the glass, casting twin rectangles on the floorboards. There was a puddle of rainwater on the wooden floor and the bottoms of the white curtains were opaque with damp. Beyond them the sun was sinking.
*
‘I know I shouldn’t be calling,’ Luke had said, the first time he telephoned from Cambodia. ‘I know we agreed. But I wanted to speak to you. That’s OK, isn’t it? Just sometimes? You know that I don’t have anyone else.’
She had been on the verge of telling him that he didn’t have her any more either, but now that he was on the line it felt petty, vengeful. She had assumed, after all that he had done to her, that her anger would never subside. That she would be able to close him off – be rational and emotionless in their dealings. But the reality was far less binary. There was history and memory. Love – gone now – but more intense than she had felt for anyone else, ever.
He had been so self-contained the first time they had met, at a summer ball in the officers’ mess four years ago. She had noticed him immediately: something to do with his height perhaps. He was half a head taller than most of the other men in the room, and well built, not in a body builder’s way, but loose and athletic. He had sandy blond hair, cut short, and the palest blue-grey eyes she had ever seen, the colour of a clear winter sky. But, attractive as he was, his physical features weren’t the main reason she had noticed him. He was standing alone, and what drew her to him was how comfortable he was in his self-containment, surrounded as he was by a heaving mass of drunken extroverts. She had seen a reflection of herself in him. That same distance, that same separation she felt from other people. The image she retained of their meeting brought to mind the Robert Doisneau photograph of lovers kissing, freeze-framed against the blur of a busy Paris street.
She had felt a fierce love for him virtually from the moment they met. She realised, soon after they were married,
that the love she felt had blinded her to the reality of his personality. Controlling behaviour had seemed protective; overly intense and uncompromising behaviour, adoration and concern; introversion and suspicion of others, mysteriousness. As the only child of a single father overwhelmed by his parenting responsibilities, who had farmed her care out to friends and an ever-changing roll call of nannies, she wasn’t used to being the centre of someone else’s world, and that feeling had been intoxicating.
Now she just felt exhausted by it all, empty.
Why did it matter if he called her? She was never going back to him. Distance protected her, made her strong enough to resist. She could speak to him without being sucked back into that same old pattern of needy love, violence, guilt and apology. She placed a hand against the flat of her stomach.
‘It’s fine, Luke.’
He was managing a troop of thirty Khmer clearers, teaching them Western military disciplines so that, in time, they would become skilled enough to be self-sufficient. He sounded softer, more relaxed than she’d known him in a long time, and she felt relieved that he had found a life beyond her that might make him happy. But a couple of months after he arrived, his tone began to change.
‘It’s different when you get under the surface,’ he said one time, his voice rising against the static crackle on the line. ‘You start to see the other side.’
‘What do you mean? What other side?’
‘You remember when you called me outside because there was a cat in the garden? What, two summers ago?’ She was baffled by the non sequitur, and then a burst of interference and the faint words of someone else, another conversation, crossed the line.
‘Luke, I can’t hear you.’ The memory came into focus though. A stray cat hanging around in the back garden one morning. When they’d approached it, they’d seen the fur on one flank stirring, the pale, bloated bodies of maggots. It watched them with unperturbed green eyes; leapt the fence when Tess had tried to tempt it close enough to catch with a saucer of milk.
