The Game

by Amanda Prowse

  Their fight couldn’t be attributed to anything so transparent. He hadn’t failed to hoover the carpet properly, left the loo seat up or not put the milk back in the fridge. It was much more than that. They were frightened, yet too scared to admit to that fear.

  It would be difficult to put in order the many things that they were afraid of. Being parted for such a ridiculous length of time was right up there, the possible lack of communication and the loneliness; these were all contenders for the top spot. There was also the unspeakable fear that Martin might get hurt or killed. It was too awful a scenario to share or say out loud, but think about it they did, separately and secretly with faces averted on dented pillows.

  Poppy had wanted to tell him that if he got injured, think loss of limb or blindness, that it wouldn’t make any difference to her. She knew that it would be tough, but she also knew that she would not have loved him any less, confident that they would find a way through it; that they could find a way through anything. At least that’s what she believed.

  One of her many ‘if-only’ scenarios, saw her telling Martin over a glass of wine that he was the one thing that had made her life worth living for so many years. The only constant that she could rely on and she would never regret a single second. She wanted him to know that she would rather have had him for a shortened length of time, than fifty years of average. She hoped he knew that she would miss him every second of every day, that she would never let another man touch her. It was only him, always him, the very thought of anything else made her feel sick. She would be content to grow old alone with her memories; the biggest sadness, of course, would have been that she never got her baby.

  After brooding unhindered for a few days, Poppy was then swamped with guilt. How dare she have fought with him, not given him physical comfort when he was now so far away, facing an enemy in a hostile environment, devoid of love, affection and human touch?

  When these sharpened emotions blunted through the passing of time, she was left with the dull ache of loneliness. Half a year, one hundred and eighty days, it didn’t matter how many times she pictured an event six months previously and thought how quickly that time had passed; it still felt like an eternity, a sentence.

  The officer coughed into his sideways bunched fist, drawing her into the now. She waited for him to speak, not wanting to prompt; there was no hurry. Similarly, she didn’t want to make it easy, hoping he might feel a little bit of the pain that she was starting to feel. Poppy stood rigid, imagining what came next. She heard his unspoken words in her head, wondering which phrase he had chosen, rehearsed. ‘Martin is dead’; ‘Martin was injured and now he is dead’; ‘something dreadful has happened, Poppy, Martin is dead’; ‘Mrs Cricket, we have some terrible news. Are you alone?’

  She’d always imagined what this visit would be like. Try to find an army wife, husband, mother or father that hasn’t played out this scenario. You won’t be able to because this is how they live. Every time there is a lull in contact or a late night when a promise to call is broken, pulses quicken, car keys are mentally located. Muscles tense as if on starting blocks, in readiness to get to wherever they might be needed with the first waves of grief lapping at their heels. Each unexpected knock at the door, or post-nine p.m. telephone call, causes palms to break sweat until the moment passes and breath returns in a deep sigh. The various salesmen mistake the euphoria for buying signals and not simply the relief of those left behind to watch the clock and tick off the days. For the loved ones of these warriors, it is a sweet relief that it’s not their turn, not today.

  Poppy used to practise her reaction in her head. She pictured herself sinking to her knees with fingers shoved into her scalp, ‘Oh no, not Mart! Please tell me it’s not true!’ She thought her practised reaction was very convincing, having once performed it in front of the mirror in the salon. Some might question the need to rehearse, but Poppy worried that if and when it came to it, they might not know how devastated she was, figuring it was best to have this pre-prepared reaction in reserve. She didn’t need it.

  In his early forties, the officer was the younger by a couple of years, but his position gave him confidence over and above his colleague’s experience. He removed his hat as he stepped forward.

  ‘Mrs Cricket?’ his tone was confident, without any hint of nerves. Poppy noted tiny beads of perspiration peppering his top lip; he might have mastered the neutral voice, but would have to work on that sweat thing if he was to be totally convincing.

  She nodded.

  ‘May we come in?’ he spoke as he entered the hallway, turning the question into a statement.

  ‘I am Major Anthony Helm, this is Sergeant Gisby.’ He put his hand out in the direction of the soldier stood behind him. Poppy stepped forward and placed her limp fingers against his palm – she wasn’t used to this shaking hands lark. It made her feel awkward.

  In a controlling role reversal, the officer filled her home with his presence, making Poppy feel confused and slightly angry. He guided her by the elbow. She didn’t like the stranger touching her. She felt queasy and embarrassed.

  He led her into the lounge. The other man walked over to the TV and turned it off. Columbo had been in the middle of his big summing up speech, raincoat flapping, a cigar clamped between his teeth.

  She sat on the edge of the sofa and cast a fleeting eye around the room, the walls needed more pictures and the dried flower arrangement held a latticework of cobwebs. A minute spider was suspended on invisible thread. A tiny abseiler, his destination the ring-stained wood of a pine shelf. She closed her eyes and wished she could go home, only therein laid her dilemma.

  The officer perched on the chair opposite, his colleague stood rigidly by the door. In order to prevent her escape or to facilitate his, she wasn’t sure. Poppy could hear the blood pulsing in her ears with a drumlike beat. Her hands felt cold and clammy, they had finally found their tremor.

  She exhaled loudly and deeply like an athlete preparing to perform, flexing her fingers and nodding, her gestures screamed, go on then, tell me now!

  ‘Are you alone, Mrs Cricket?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her voice was a cracked whisper, strained, the voice she sometimes had when speaking for the first time after a deep sleep.

  The major nodded. He was a plain, flat-faced man, made all the more unattractive by his confident stance. There was the hint of a north-east accent that he tried desperately hard to erase, concentrating on delivering neutral vowels and the right pitch. Anthony Helm was a good soldier, respected by those who served under him and relied upon by those he reported to. His reputation was for straight talking, a man that tenaciously did it by the book and did it well. Ironically, the traits that enabled him to climb the ranks with ease did not necessarily equip him for a carefree existence in the civilian world. The vagaries of modern life were hard for a practical man like Anthony Helm to negotiate; when the structure and rules of his regime were removed, he was somewhat adrift.

  She smiled nervously at the sergeant and bit her tongue. Her smile was fixed and unnatural. She could feel an inane statement wanting to escape from her mouth, ‘Sergeant, is that better than private, but not as good as colonel? Mart has tried to teach me, but I can never remember the order…’ She didn’t know why she wanted to say this – to ease the tension, fill the silent void? Or was it simply manners, shouldn’t she be making conversation?

  Poppy didn’t warm to the major. Her ability to read people told her that whilst he was doing his duty, he would rather have been anywhere else. Mr Gisby smiled back at her, as if reading her thoughts. He had sincere eyes that crumpled at the edges. She was glad that he was there.

  Then Helm began, just as she had known he would, with the phrase she had dreaded every day and night since her beloved husband had stepped into that bloody recruiting office. The words that she had considered with trepidation from the first time he came home with his letter telling him to report to the training department at Bassingbourn and bizarrely a cheque, whic
h Martin had been delighted with, but she had seen as a bribe, the modern day Queen’s Shilling. What was it he had said as he waved the piece of paper in front of her? ‘You knew what joining the army meant, Poppy! None of this is a surprise. I know I should have told you first about joining up, but when I did, you knew that this would be my job. And don’t tell me you won’t like it when we get the house with a garden and the extra pay, or the chance to live abroad. You won’t be moaning then, will you!’

  Poppy couldn’t believe his words; she was stunned that he had fallen back on a shallow argument. He knew she couldn’t care less about houses and possessions. She wasn’t made that way. It made no sense to her; he was choosing to go away, to leave her alone for months, if not years, and had reached this decision without discussion or consultation. Martin had been a maximum of an hour away from her since she was a little girl and the idea of him being out of reach horrified her. The thought of him being in a different city was something she couldn’t comprehend, let alone a different country. Poppy never bought the supper without asking for his preference, yet he had done this thing alone, furtive, duplicitous. She felt excluded and betrayed.

  ‘Mrs Cricket?’ for the second time the officer used his tone to anchor her in the present.

  Poppy nodded to show that he had succeeded, he had her full attention. Her teeth shook against her bottom lip; she bit down, trying to gain composure.

  ‘I’m afraid I have some bad news.’ He paused, pursing his lips, remembering his training, allowing the information to be received slowly in bite-sized chunks.

  She wanted to say, ‘For God’s sake hurry up. We all know what comes next!’

  Again, he coughed. ‘As you know, Martin is currently deployed in Afghanistan.’

  Poppy tried to control her quivering legs and nodded to show understanding.

  ‘We are here because we have some news about your husband and it isn’t good news… I am very sorry to have to tell you that Martin is missing.’

  It took a second for his words to reach her brain and a further second to digest the fact, two seconds longer than usual.

  ‘D’you mean dead?’ she prompted, loudly. Her wide eyes told him her abruptness was a symptom of shock. Her body wasn’t wasting precious reserves on pleasantries.

  ‘No, not dead. Not at this stage. He is missing.’

  His response only served to confuse her more, not at this stage? So dead, but not confirmed? Dead, but not discovered? Dead, but not yet? All permutations had him very definitely dead. The rest was semantics.

  ‘But that means dead doesn’t it?’

  ‘No. Not dead, he is missing.’ He glanced at Sergeant Gisby, silently asking if he had any better suggestions on how to clarify the facts.

  ‘Isn’t that just because you haven’t found him or had it confirmed yet or something?’

  Major Anthony Helm visibly coloured. She had accurately called the situation and similarly was asking him the question that he’d dreaded the most. Had Poppy looked closely, she would have seen the vaguest twitch to his right cheek; he wasn’t a man that knew how to respond to questions from a girl like her. Despite his years of service, these encounters would always be outside his comfort zone. It was alien to Anthony, sitting in a council flat in Walthamstow on a muggy Tuesday with fish fingers crisping under the grill, telling Poppy that Martin was possibly dead whilst being subjected to questions that he couldn’t answer. It was an element soldiers rarely considered when enlisting, the pastoral responsibilities, the pressing of the flesh, the human face of the MoD machine. It was a world away from kicking in doors and crawling through undergrowth with a gun in your hand.

  Poppy felt his unease and might have felt sorry for him, were it not for the fact that she had decided to blame him. Well, she had to blame someone, didn’t she?

  His tone was clipped, not through any lack of compassion, but because that was how he operated; whatever the task in hand he retained absolute control.

  ‘No, that is not the case at all. Martin at this stage is missing. We have no other useful facts, but we do believe in keeping you informed of every development as soon as we have it. At the moment, that is all the information we have.’

  ‘I appreciate that, Major…’ she hesitated as his surname slipped from her memory, ‘Major Thingy, but what exactly does it mean?’ Poppy hadn’t intended to be rude, but she did want to know what was going on.

  Major Helm licked the sweat from his top lip, lizard-like in his dexterity. ‘It’s Anthony.’ His smile was fleeting. It had taken one slip-up of his name for him to reach a point of intolerance; he was not about to be known as ‘Major Thingy’ especially in front of the sergeant. It had been twenty-four years, eight tours and a clutch of service medals since he had answered to a name he disliked.

  Sergeant Gisby stepped forward. He bent low in front of Poppy, addressing her while resting on his haunches, his fat thighs pressed against the double seam of his combat trousers. ‘What it means, Mrs Cricket…’

  ‘No one really calls me Mrs Cricket. I’m Poppy.’

  ‘What it means, Poppy, is that he was on patrol in Helmand province and he didn’t come back when he was expected to. He went out on patrol in a group of twelve and so far only ten have returned to base. That’s all we know at this point. We are trying to get information for you from those that did come back and as soon as we have more we’ll pass it straight on to you. What we do know, is that something went very wrong on that patrol. Martin and one other infantryman are missing.’

  ‘So he could be dead?’

  Sergeant Gisby didn’t flinch. He held her gaze, giving Poppy the impression that he was on her side. ‘Yes, Poppy, that is a possibility.’

  She nodded, grateful for his honesty. There was a minute of silence, each gathering thoughts. ‘When did it happen?’ Poppy addressed the sergeant. She wanted to try and picture what she was doing while her husband was getting into trouble, possibly even killed.

  ‘It was yesterday, yesterday afternoon.’

  Yesterday afternoon, where had she been? In the supermarket, oblivious. Poppy had always thought that if anything happened to Martin she would know. Like the twins you read about in National Geographic, when one breaks a leg and the other feels the pain even though they are hundreds of miles apart. Poppy thought it might have been like that, but it hadn’t. She hadn’t felt a thing. Instead, she’d been perusing the three-for-two offers, trying to choose between pepperoni and Hawaiian, while her man was being killed, going missing.

  ‘What was he doing in that Helmans province, or whatever it’s called? I thought he wouldn’t be in any danger.’

  The major piped up, ‘You should be very proud of him, Poppy. He had been selected to aide an American patrol as part of a special task force.’

  She looked at him long and hard. Her thoughts went briefly to what her husband had put up with every day of his childhood, how he had joined up to give them a better life.

  When they were little, Martin would knock for Poppy after school and the two would head to the Recreation Area, a rather grand term applied to the dilapidated swings in the central courtyard next to the car park. There, they invented games like collecting a stick off the floor while swinging, or daring each other to shout things out. It used to feel really brave when it was cold, dark and everyone else was inside safe and warm, having their tea. They would take it in turns to shout out ‘BUM!’ louder and louder until someone would hang over a balcony and tell them to ‘Shut it!’ That used to make them laugh even more. Poppy’s mum never came to check that she was OK, if she was warm enough, where she was or who she was with. Sometimes it got really late, but still she never appeared. Martin’s mum never came to find him either, she probably thought he was safer out on the streets, taking his chances with the paedophiles and pushers than he was in his own house.

  Poppy and Martin thought about it sometimes and agreed that if they had a little girl, or a little boy for that matter, they wouldn’t let them wander about with
no idea of where they were for hours on end. They would instead have them safe by their side or they’d be outside with them, teaching them the pick up the stick or the shout out ‘bum’ game.

  ‘Oh I am proud of him, very proud, but not because he was helping some Americans doing God knows what, God knows where. And what do you mean special task force? He only finished his training five minutes ago!’

  Major Helm smiled, but kept his eyes downcast, making it hard for Poppy to read his expression. ‘They only select the best. He was a very good soldier, Poppy.’

  ‘Was? So you think he’s dead too?’

  ‘No… I… Is… He is a good soldier.’ He was scarlet.

  Poppy didn’t wait for the major to start uttering further clichés. ‘I haven’t got any more questions right now.’ Her voice sounded sharper than intended, like she was conducting an interview and didn’t know how to wrap it up. It was her polite way of saying go. Please go now. She wanted to be by herself; well, she did and she didn’t.

  The silent tableau was fractured as Poppy leapt from the sofa, alerted by the acrid scent of burning. ‘Oh shit!’ She ran into the kitchen. Pulling the grill pan from the cooker, she watched the tray and its blackened content clatter into the water-filled sink and then, almost instantly, was sick on the floor, retching until her gut was empty.

  Sergeant Gisby’s voice came from the doorway, ‘Can I call anyone for you, Poppy? Is there someone that can come and sit with you?’

  Poppy shook her head, no on both counts. She remained at a right angle, trying to free strands of hair that were glued to her face with vomit. There was only one person she wanted and he was missing, probably dead, in some dusty landscape on the other side of the world. ‘I don’t even know what he is doing out there. It’s so far away.’ She addressed the black and white chequered lino. The sergeant ran her a glass of cold water and steered her back to the safety of the sofa.