by A. J. Kirby
‘Don’t move, lad,’ said the voice. ‘You’ll only aggravate your injuries.’
The voice was strong, with a hint of a broad Yorkshire accent. Not Tyke though; that had a more street-wise manner to it. This man’s voice was rich and also rather slow. Probably, the owner of the voice was from uppermost North Yorkshire; probably he was a country boy like me.
After meeting so many folk from so many different places, I’d become pretty adept at reading accents. I was a bonafide cunning linguist, if truth be told. Some part of me wanted to laugh at the thought. Cunning linguist; I wanted to screech with unrestrained laughter just like when I used to feel that same urge to laugh in funerals. You just know that you can’t do it; that it would be the most disgraceful thing in the world, and somehow that makes it all the more funny. And infectious, like someone farting in assembly or making jokes about the girl in the year below that only has a few sickly weeks to live. A spluttering half-cough, half-laugh erupted in the back of my throat.
‘What you laughing at?’ snapped the man in the bed.
‘Nothing,’ I muttered, trying to rein this gust of childish freedom which had somehow blustered into my head. I’d always been a bit sick in the head; easily led astray. And although I tried my hardest to keep myself on the straight and narrow – like by joining-up – I found it hard not to give way to the head-loss. That’s what I’d come to know it as; a wind-wild head-loss which made me just join in with whatever terrible scheme somebody else had dreamed up until it reached its logical and terrible conclusion. And then I felt guilty. Ah! There’s that guilt again, I’d think, and I’d welcome it like an old friend.
‘Sorry,’ I muttered. ‘I just can’t get my head around it… I can’t remember everything…’
I could remember the aftermath of the blast all right and most of what happened before, too. I was buying myself time. I could remember everything but the point of impact, and that was the truly scary thing. Those arms grabbing me… That voice in my head…
‘You don’t wanna remember everything,’ said the Yorkie.
Again, I tried to train my eyes to see again. In the flickering artificial light, it wasn’t easy, but eventually I made him out, or at least, I made out his form on the bed and the terrible fact that although one leg was being held by a hoist, there was no corresponding other leg underneath the starched sheets. I slumped back down onto the pillows and felt bad for laughing. But in truth it was the shock what did it, your honour. People that have been through what I’ve been through are liable to behave like loons for a while, if not for the whole rest of their lives; I suppose it’s the knowledge you have about death, the fact that it’s still waiting, tapping its staff with impatience. And you know too that what he’ll do to you won’t be pretty. Oh, it won’t be pretty at all.
‘What won’t be pretty?’ asked the Yorkie, a new slyness creeping into his voice. I hadn’t realised that I’d been speaking aloud. I’d thought that the thoughts were spinning around my head, crashing into one another like bumper cars, but apparently I’d been speaking after all, like an old drunk that’s got so used to the company of the voices in his whacked-out Ice-Dragon head that they just mumble along without caring.
‘If you’re worried about your injuries,’ he continued, ‘then don’t. You’ll still be a pretty-boy. In comparison to us two, you got out of there with hardly a scratch on you at all,’ he said. Then he whispered something which made my blood run cold: ‘People are saying that you got yourself some kinda guardian angel, son. Someone that pulled you out that building when all hope was lost. Everyone else in that building was fucked, and I mean fucked; but you?’
‘Got lucky,’ I whimpered.
There was a long silence. Uncomfortable; we listened to the injustice in the other bed; the unfairness of that man’s life being chosen instead of mine.
‘Don’t feel guilty for getting out of there alive,’ said the Yorkie. ‘That’s the last thing you wanna do. I been lying here a good few days listening to you talk to yourself and him groaning, and all I thought was that he lost his body but you lost your head. I felt guilty… It ain’t a nice feeling… What’s your name?’
‘Lance Corporal Bull,’ I replied, shifting uncomfortably in the sheets. ‘Kingsmen...’
‘Ah, the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment,’ he said, ‘so you’re from the red rose county then, eh?’
‘I am, mate,’ I said.
‘White rose through and through, myself. I’m in… I was Corporal in the Second Yorkshires…’
I suddenly felt thoroughly sick of all of the formalities. Here we were, blasted to fuck in some godforsaken country that most of our relatives back home couldn’t even locate on a map, and all we could talk about was our proud regiments. The same proud regiments that had got us blasted to fuck in the first place. And it wasn’t just the fact that he ranked higher than me that rankled; something about the fact that his injuries were far worse than me rankled too. Hell, he’d probably be up for at least one blag rag for getting so badly injured.
‘Look,’ I interrupted, ‘call me Gaz. Gaz Bull.’
‘Good name that; sounds kinda like a footballer’s name,’ said the Yorkie, sounding more convivial than he had before. ‘What’s your dad’s name? Terry?’
I’d heard it all before; dad called Terry-Bull, mum called Una-Bull… Most of my friends just called me Bully; always had, always would. I knew that this stranger would end up calling me by the same name; Bully by name, bully by nature. Maybe it was in my genes to be this way. Maybe, no matter how hard I tried, there was no other way that I’d have turned out.
‘What do they call you?’ I asked. Gradually, my eyesight was starting to return. I could make out the Yorkie’s thick dark hair and his unshaven chops. I could see his jutting forehead, like the overhang of a cliff, and reckoned that he would have been adept at the head-butt. Hell, he probably made the head-butt his special-move.
‘Dean,’ he said, creasing up his heavy forehead with concentration, as though it was a struggle to remember his own name. ‘Dean Howitt. Or Do-Nowt to me pals.’
I chuckled to myself; in his soft country accent, Dean Howitt did sound a bit like ‘do-nowt.’ I wondered if he was similarly cursed by his name. Had his name caused him to be a lazy bastard that couldn’t be bothered to do much of anything? Probably not, I concluded, on account of the fact that like me, he was stuck in this military hospital. People don’t just get their legs blown off for no reason. He must have been doing something to cause it. Perhaps his name was one of those ironic names.
‘Sorry about your leg, Dean,’ I said, trying to take all emotion out of my voice; trying to sound sympathetic as most people would have done in this kind of situation. Or perhaps ‘most people’ wouldn’t have even mentioned the leg at all. He fixed me with his bloodshot blue eyes for a heavy moment and then gave me a reassuring smile. Evidently surviving an incident like we had allows you to say just what the hell you want and people just oblige.
‘So am I,’ he said, making this grimace as though to show how hard he was. ‘But to tell you the truth, I was sick of being out here, and this means I can go back and do-nowt for the rest of my days. Sit down the pub and not have to worry ‘bout work. It’ll take some getting used to, but I’ll do it… They used to call injuries like this one a blighty one back in the old days. Me dad told me about it.’
‘How did you get out?’ I asked.
‘Me an’ Bolton there was hanging back, you know, in case of anything unexpected coming up from the rear. Tell you the truth, I was glad about it when our sarge told us… There was something about that building…’
I knew exactly what he meant. Wondered whether he’d seen the strange purple light that day too.
‘Once that first blast went off, it went awful quiet,’ said Do-Nowt. ‘Then, after a few seconds, we could hear all the shouts and screams from the men we’d been with for the best part of our lives, and they sounded like babies or something. It were horrible. Horrible. He could
n’t hack it, could Bolton. He just went charging in there, mad-like. I tried to stop him; I could kinda sense there’d be another one. I could feel it in the dust, like. And I suppose that was how he got done so bad when the second one went off like that, worse than the first… And by that time, I’d got too close an’ all.’
‘Shit,’ I commented. It was about the only response I could formulate.
‘Shit is right,’ said Do-Nowt. And for a while, we were quiet. Remembering.
The silence soon became too painful for me though. I had to change the subject again.
‘Does it itch, the leg?’ I said, remembering some story I’d heard or seen once about missing ‘ghost’ limbs; it must have been one of those awful horror flicks that Twinnie used to rent down at M and S Video Supplies. Fuck: why was I remembering Twinnie at a time like this?
Do-Nowt sighed, as though having lost a leg for – what was it; five? six? days – suddenly made him the word-leading authority on the subject. ‘You know sometimes and you’re drunk and trying to watch porn and you feel all light headed and think about having a wank and then you look down and your poor old dick is just lying there, numb. That’s what it feels like; like I’ve sat on it too long or something and that if I just give it some care and attention, everything’ll be okay.’
‘You’ve not…’ Even I couldn’t bring myself to ask the next question.
‘No!’ snapped Do-Nowt, almost too quickly. ‘And if you’d have seen some of the nurses, you’d know how I know that!’
Ah! It had started already. Here we were, lucky to be alive, and already we were making up brag-stories in our scratchers. Give it a couple of hours, and I would have convinced this guy that while he was asleep, I had this amazing threesome with two buxom nurses… Even now, we have to talk-up our masculinity. Legless, he had even more reason to talk about his third-leg, I supposed.
Suddenly, we heard sounds of movement from what must have been a neighbouring building. Only when we heard the sound of the creaking door and the scrunch of footsteps upon gravel did we realise how eerily silent it had been, apart from our stupid voices of course. Immediately, I felt the fear creeping up inside me, slivering like a parasitic animal into my bowels. What if it was the enemy? What if they were coming to finish us off?
What if it was whatever had pulled me out of the building?
The thoughts that I’d been trying not to acknowledge gathered around me and clung to me like cobwebs. Deep down, I knew that whatever it was that had touched me was not human. And deep down, I knew that it had plans for me. My survivor’s-guilt told me that; my dreams told me that.
Finally, we heard the door to our building being unbolted. We heard the rattling of keys and the slight sound of breathing. Like a baby, I pulled the sheet up higher. I pulled it up until it was almost covering my face, ignoring the pain which was ringing out from my arms.
And then I heard the chuckle from Do-Nowt’s bed and smelled the unmistakeable smell of a woman – one of the nurses surely – as she entered.
‘Good evening, Dean,’ sing-songed a posh, Southern voice. It sounded like the best voice I’d heard in my life. ‘And how are you feeling today?’
Already, I could picture her from the voice. She was probably early-thirties; experienced enough not to sound as though she was going to faint at the sight of blood but using that kind of disassociating voice in order to distance herself from the full reality of the situation. She was probably not much of a looker, despite Do-Nowt’s earlier protestations; most likely she was the tom-boy outdoorsy-type that usually volunteer for these thankless jobs in thankless places.
‘He’s awake,’ I heard Do-Nowt say to her. Then I heard her clip-clop sensible shoes crossing the room until she reached my bed. Gingerly, I lowered the sheet from my face.
‘Welcome back to the land of the living, Lance Corporal Bull,’ she said, smiling broadly as our eyes met. She was an uncommonly tall woman, I saw, with deep red hair which was almost spilling out of an elastic band. She was wearing faded blue jeans and a tight black T-Shirt; in all, she was nothing like the Florence Nightingale that I’d expected.
‘Um… hello,’ I said, my voice sounding weaker than I’d meant it to.
‘Not still feeling sorry for yourself, are you?’ she asked, hands-on-hips in a pose just like one of my old teachers used to have when they confronted me about another terrible excuse for not doing my homework.
I was taken-aback. I’d been expecting her to be cooing over me and fussing with the sheets and pillows. I’d been expecting her to at least show some sympathy for my predicament. Evidently, she didn’t have time for sympathy.
‘You’ve been yammering and moaning away through the night since you got here,’ she said. ‘Nice to see that you’ve finally agreed to allow your fellow patients a little bit of rest.’
Then she started to walk away, back to Do-Nowt.
‘Um… Do you not need to do tests on me and stuff?’ I asked.
She turned and again looked at me as though I was a disobedient child. ‘Tests on what, Lance Corporal Bull? You are in pretty good shape, physically. If you are talking about mental tests, then I can get in Dr. Fisher…’
‘My arms!’ I blurted. ‘I can hardly move them.’
She tutted. Unbelievably, she tutted at me. ‘Lance Corporal Bull; a lot of people pull muscles in their arms in everyday, normal situations. You dragged yourself out of a building that was about to blow-up. I think you can expect a little strain.’
‘Meet Nurse Thomas,’ laughed Do-Nowt. ‘She’s a fuckin’ proper trooper!’
Nurse Thomas narrowed her eyes at Do-Nowt: ‘That’s enough of that language in here,’ she chided, but from the way she said it, I could tell that she didn’t mean it. I watched her apply soothing lotion to Do-Nowt’s stump out of the corner of my eye. It felt like I was intruding on some private ritual. And all the while, I started to wonder whether what she’d said had been in fact what had happened. Had I dragged myself out of that building?
When she finally left, Do-Nowt seemed to want to talk some more. He didn’t seem to sense my extreme anxiety. And indeed, what he said next chilled my blood:
‘Do you know the weird thing, Gaz?’ he asked. ‘Bolton was only by the door when the explosion went off, and even though me leg were fucked, I managed to drag him away, like. But once I put that call in over the radio, I laid down next to him. And I swear there was nobody else in that courtyard. Not one of us Second Yorkshires; none of you Kingsmen, neither. Exactly when did you pull yourself out?’
Chapter Three
“Bad news on the doorstep”
My sleep had been ragged again, full of tortuous dreams and memories which I’d thought long-forgotten. When I woke up, there was a fishy smell in the air and for a while, I was sure that I was in the presence of somebody from the old days; somebody long buried for fear that he might haunt the rest of my years: Tommy Peaker. Why was I being assaulted with such recollections now, of all times? Why was that name uppermost in my thoughts?
Psychologically-speaking, I suppose that it may have come from my worries about what might have happened to Selly and the rest of the lads back in that building in the gully. But there was something else too. Something even darker which lurked in the past, and now it seemed to be sharpening its fangs and preparing to bite me on the arse.
In my dream there’d been the usual group of us – Twinnie, Cross-Eyed Lion, Dick and I – arranged in a circle around the smaller boy, Tommy. Tommy was curled up into this foetal comma and had snot trailing out of his nose. He was whimpering something under his breath that might have been a prayer. We were taking it in turns to kick him in the kidneys. Eventually, we kicked him so many times that he pissed himself. And I laughed so hard that I thought I’d burst my appendix.
‘Tommy Squeaker’s pissed himself, pissed himself, pissed himself,’ chanted Dick, to the tune of London Bridge is Falling Down, ‘Tommy Squeaker’s pissed himself. What a fanny.’
The exciteme
nt of seeing Tommy’s collapse had given us the blood lust. We all lost our heads a little. Part of me wanted to keep on inflicting this misery on him. I wanted to see his little freckled face destroyed. Because through the tears, snot and piss, for some reason Tommy was smiling that gap-toothed, not-all-there smile of his; it must have been the nerves, shot to hell.
‘You little scrubber,’ I yelled. ‘What the fuck have you got to smile about?’
He turned his face into the loose gravel of the playground and kind of tried to slither away from us a little. He left a trail of blood behind him like in some horror movie.
‘We should stop now,’ said Cross-Eyed Lion, the biggest of all of us, but also the one least enamoured by the intoxicating violence which we habitually doled out. But as I watched, Twinnie carried on. He took it too far. He started kicking little Tommy in the face. He mashed up his nose badly and knocked out a few teeth but he kept going. The rest of us were now standing in silence. Before we’d been laughing and shouting, but now… Now Twinnie had taken it too far. And with every new connection that his spanking white Nike’s made with Tommy’s head, this great big crack started to appear. Parts of Tommy’s brain started to seep out and blood; oceans of blood. It soaked into Twinnie’s Nikes, but he didn’t care. He kept going. Tommy wasn’t making a sound at all now, but Twinnie still kept going. In the end we had to drag him away. In the end, Lion had to smack him one, just so’s he’d stop screaming and foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog. In the end, Tommy didn’t come back to school for a good few weeks.
I tried to shake off the clinging remnants of the dream and my guilt. I was always going to feel this way, I knew it; trying so hard to make up for what we’d all done to that poor kid. But the debt was too great. No matter how many things I added to my plus column, the negative column was always going to tot up to something far, far weightier.
