“Well, Em, I guess that just proves that you suck at talking about important stuff too.”
52
“Emma?”
“Noor. Hi.”
“Hi. Are you okay? You sound… Have you been crying?”
“No, no. I’m just tired. I didn’t sleep well after last night.”
“Ah okay, good. I mean… Not good that you didn’t sleep. But good that you’re okay.”
“Thanks so much for helping, Noor. Are they all okay? Zainab must have been distraught. I’ll phone her later. I need to… I need to apologise.”
“They’re fine, Em. Hassan’s been grounded for the rest of the month, but I explained things to her. Said it wasn’t necessarily his fault, that…”
“Thanks.”
“But Em, I need to talk to you. I don’t think you should phone them. It’s… Emma. There’s no easy way to say this, but they’ve decided they don’t want you as a mentor anymore.”
“What?”
“They don’t think it’s appropriate, given Adam’s involvement in what happened. And to be honest I agree with them, Em. You’ve got so much on your plate. You can’t help everyone.”
“They don’t want me as their mentor? Zainab said that?”
“Well, no. Haider. But Zainab was there when he said it, and she agreed.”
“But what… what am I supposed to do now?”
“What do you mean?”
“If I can’t help them… If I’m not helping them… What am I supposed to do?”
“What?”
“What will I do, Noor?”
“Look after yourself, Em. Figure out things with Adam. I’m sorry… I… I had suspicions, but I didn’t realise things were so bad.”
“It’s okay.”
“You’ll be okay, Emma. You’re strong. You just took on too much.”
I say nothing.
“I’m sorry to have to say this, Em, but promise me you won’t call them, okay?”
Silence.
“Okay, I promise.”
53
Now I am no longer mentoring, I return home straight after the art shop in the evening. I know Penny knows what’s happened, but she says nothing. That’s how bad things are.
When I get home today I expect to find Adam there. His truck is in the drive and his rucksack is on the floor by the sofa, but I cannot see him. I walk through the house calling his name and there is no reply.
Back in the living room I call his mobile and hear vibrations coming from the sofa. I push my hand between two cushions and scoop out the device. The anxiety that plagued me during his deployment creeps back, its tendrils wrapping around me. I have heard the stories of what some soldiers do after they return.
I walk around the house again. I am still wearing my shoes and the sound of their thud against the wooden floor echoes around our silent home.
“Adam?” I call. “Are you in?”
Nothing. Breathe, I tell myself. Breathe. But his words spin around my head. It would have been better not to come home at all.
I do not want to look in the garage, but I know I have to. Perhaps he is out there messing around with truck parts or digging out some equipment for work. Before his deployment he spent a lot of time in the garage, especially when he wanted to clear his mind, but since he got back he’s only been out there to stash away his gear in a couple of large plastic boxes.
I open the back door and wrap my arms around myself, even though I am still wearing my coat. I walk briskly across the yard to the garage. The night air bites at my face and I shiver from the combination of nerves and cold. No light glows from the base of the garage door and I know the inside must be in darkness. My hand pauses for a moment over the handle and I consider going back inside. But I have to check. I push the handle resolutely downwards.
The metal is icy to the touch, so cold that it burns, and I pull my hand back quickly. I push the door open with a sleeve-covered arm and the hinges creak. Oiling the garage door was one of the things Adam wrote on his pre-deployment chore list but never got round to. I said I would do it myself, but I came out here so rarely during his deployment that it escaped my mind completely.
“Adam. Adam?” I say his name into the darkness once, twice, but there is nothing.
I might have shut the door and returned quickly to the warmth of the house, were it not for the smell. It is not strong, but out of place. I am accustomed to the smells of grease and old military equipment and stale workout gear that merge together in the still air of the garage. But there is something else in the mix this time. Alcohol.
I step back in shock when I turn on the light, even though it is not what I had feared the most. Adam is sat on the floor against the opposite wall of the garage. His feet are flat on the ground, his knees bent up towards his chest. His head tilts forwards and in a hand by his side is a half-empty bottle of whisky.
“Adam!” I gasp, rushing towards him. He raises his head and peers at me through bloodshot eyes.
“Please, Emma. I just want some quiet. Please just leave me alone.”
“Adam, it’s freezing out here and you’re sat on the floor! Get up!”
“No, I’m fine.”
“No, get up. Let’s go inside.”
I put my hand against his cheek and it is freezing. I have no idea how long he’s been sat here, with the whisky providing a false blanket against the cold. I pull one of his arms over my shoulder and try to lift him, but he is too heavy. I stumble under his weight and he slumps back down.
“No, leave me, Em. Please, just go back inside.”
“I’m not leaving you in the cold.”
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t feel it. I don’t feel anything.”
“Adam.”
“I don’t. Nothing.” He lowers his face into the palm of his hands. I pull his hands away and hold them between mine, trying to warm him.
“Come inside. Get warm. Let me make you a coffee.”
“No…”
He drags his hands back to his face. A tremor runs through his body. I have seen him drunk since his return, but never like this. Never crying. I slide slowly down the wall next to him and put my arm around his shoulders, pull him towards me, try to absorb his cold body into mine. Another tremor racks through him.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“Sorry? Why? You don’t need to be sorry…”
He takes gulping breaths.
“I failed all of you.”
“Failed us? What do you mean?”
“You got attacked and I wasn’t there. I should have told you to leave Iraq sooner. Or found that fucking guy and killed him…”
“No, Adam, no… That wasn’t on you. I chose to be there, you know that. I looked after myself. It wasn’t your call.”
He tries to look at me but his eyes are out of focus.
“I’m supposed to protect you.”
“Not when I’m there, Adam. That’s not your responsibility.”
I hate myself for having told him. Or for not telling him in the first place. I look at him now, shivering, coming apart, and wonder what part I have played in it. How much of this is down to me?
“I didn’t protect you and I didn’t protect Dave…”
“No, that wasn’t—”
He cuts me off.
“You think Dave wasn’t my fault either, Emma, but it was. You don’t understand.”
“I do understand. You did everything you could. The doctors said he didn’t stand a chance. Kate doesn’t blame you. No one does.”
“No. Not that. The guys that killed him, they knew.”
“They knew what?”
He rubs his face again, and then the back of his neck. He looks up.
“They knew we were coming. And when. They knew.”
“But how is…? Why does that make it your fault?’
“It was Kareem.”
“The ’terp?”
“Our ’terp. Our ’terp told them.”
I remember ou
r Skype conversations. He’s… He’s fine… He’s just not Ali. I should have known then that something was up.
“But, Adam… it’s still not your fault.”
“Why won’t you listen to me? It is!”
He is getting agitated as he speaks now.
“I knew something was wrong, Em. I could tell he wasn’t right, but I didn’t say anything. I always tell my guys, ‘Trust your gut, trust your intuition,’ and I was so messed-up about Ali that I didn’t. I fucking didn’t and now Dave is dead.”
The weight of guilt has crushed this man. Shattered him into a million pieces. Perhaps this is why when he tries to piece himself together the edges don’t quite line up. The shape isn’t the same as before.
I kneel in front of him, grabbing his shoulder with one hand and his chin with the other. I hold his face hard and force him to look at me as I speak.
“I know this is hard, Adam, but…”
He throws my hand off him.
“You know this is hard? What the fuck do you know about it, Emma? Just because you knew some Sri Lankan dude who got vaporised in the IZ fun park, you think you know how this feels?”
I lean back on my hands as his words barrel into my chest, forcing the air out of me. I try to speak, but no words come. The wall between us is growing higher, wider, faster than I know what to do with.
Adam braces himself with an arm and stumbles to his feet. He storms unsteadily out of the garage and I hear the back door slam. I hold my breath and wait, praying that I won’t hear the rumble of the truck engine. Nothing. I stand up and move cautiously towards the garage door, which trembles on its hinges. In the upstairs window I see the silhouette of Adam moving around our bedroom. Then the bathroom light goes on and steam from the shower starts to fog up the window.
I sit where I was on the floor, savouring the dull ache of the cold as it slowly creeps into my body. I understand why he sat here. I wait for the cold to reach my brain and silence the whirring thoughts. Of Sampath and Dave and Kate and Ali. And now into my thoughts, hand in hand with Ali, comes Ameena. Did we fail her too?
I thought having been in Iraq myself would make this easier. Now nothing feels further from the truth.
54
One morning when Adam and I were still in Iraq together, I drove to the PX on Camp Liberty.
Adam had asked me to run an errand for him. It was close to his leaving day and he wanted a gift for Ali – a kilo packet of Tootsie Rolls. Ali had a sweet tooth and loved the small cylinders of hard toffee. I was happy to go. Driving to the store felt like a brief moment of normality, even though there was really nothing normal about driving to buy sweets on a military base in Iraq.
I remember the drive in moments. Images paste together to form a collage of the journey in my mind, their order jumbled. Some flashes of the memory may be from a different drive, a different route, a different day.
I drove past one of Saddam’s palaces that sat on a lake lit up by the deepening blue of the morning sky. I watched the giant fish as they broke the surface of the water, gulping at flies. I drove past the rows of CHUs where men who had worked the night shift now slept and then the rows of military vehicles that waited to roll out of the gates and into Baghdad.
Next I drove where water channels flanked the sides of the road, blocked from view by thick reed beds. There must have been a gentle breeze that day, because I remember how the reeds quivered.
There weren’t any buildings in the area of the base where the reeds hugged the roadsides. No unmarked office buildings or warehouses. Not even a solitary “porta-potty”. If you continued far enough you would eventually get to the water field, where packets of plastic water bottles were stacked baking under the sun. The harsh rays disintegrated the wrapping that held the bottles together and caused the warm plastic to seep into the water itself, giving it a strange artificial taste. Some people said that extra oestrogen was added to the water to control soldiers’ testosterone levels. I don’t know if I ever believed that – people said a lot of strange things about life on the base back then.
But I wasn’t at the water field yet. I was still where the reeds lined the road. This is the part where the edges of the memory are sharp. Crisp.
I spotted the parked vehicle long before I passed it. The roads flanked by water channels were long and straight, so you could see far ahead through the shimmering haze of heat. A white truck was pulled up at the side of the road, the driver’s door open, the sun glinting off the roof. It was strange. Wrong.
The speed limit was low on that part of the base and I drove past slowly. Next to the open door, the reeds were bent over where a human figure had pushed through them. Broken.
I did not stop. I was a lone unarmed female on a military base in Iraq. I was barely even supposed to be there. I couldn’t just get out of the vehicle in the middle of nowhere, although some days I think that I should have done. I still do not know whether I wish I had.
I continued on to the PX, where I bought Tootsie Rolls for Ali and a large coffee from Cinnabon for myself. I could have driven back another route to RPC, but I did not.
The white truck was still there when I drove past, but it was not the only vehicle this time. A military police car was stopped behind the truck and an ambulance was parked in front. A policeman stood in the middle of the road and waved me by, motioning for me to keep a distance from the scene. The back of the ambulance was open and I tried to force my eyes away, but not before they had found the shape of a body under a sheet.
That night I dreamt of a man, partially submerged in the slow-moving shallows of a stream. The water trickled over pale flesh, undeterred by the obstacle in its path. It mixed with the blood that seeped from the body, absorbing the bright red fluid until it was no longer visible, and continued on between the reed stalks.
Where is Adam now? Does he stand at the edge of a water channel among the reeds, alert to the sound of an approaching vehicle, hoping despite everything? Or are his lips already closing around cool metal, my vehicle disappearing towards the water field, another person I have failed to save?
55
Anna’s email arrives in early autumn, or “fall” as I have learned to call it now. The leaves have turned to blazing reds and oranges and there is a chill in the air. I am reminded of the walks I took with Kate and Noah this time last year, while the men were deployed. Kate would bend over her pregnant belly to stoop down and collect leaves for Noah’s art projects. Sometimes we bought hot apple cider and wrapped our hands round the cups as we walked. We talked about life and love and what we would do when our husbands were home.
I went on a walk to the same forest a few days ago. I chose the steepest path and walked until my legs ached and my lungs burned from sucking in the cool air. I reached a viewing point and looked out across the changing foliage, but I could find only melancholy in the vibrant shades. Adam wouldn’t come with me.
“What’s the point?” he asked. I didn’t have an answer.
I am sat reading the news in the kitchen when Adam comes in bleary-eyed. He sleeps in the spare room most nights now. He says it is better that way. It is easier for him to rest when he is not worried about disturbing me. But I struggle to sleep anyway. I thought that loneliness was a half-empty bed when he was deployed. Now I know that it is the sound of him breathing as he tries to sleep in a different bed under the same roof.
“Morning,” I say. “There’s coffee in the pot.”
“Thanks,” he says, rubbing at his eyes. He pours out a mug and retreats back upstairs, where I hear the sound of the shower being turned on. There used to be a time when he wouldn’t start his day without giving me a kiss, but not anymore. Sometimes I let my hand linger for a moment when I pass him a plate or the keys to the truck, but he draws away quickly, as if he has accidentally brushed against a stranger’s hand. We inhabit the space around each other awkwardly.
“Do you still love me?” I asked him last week.
“Of course I do.”
“Then why won’t you touch me?”
“I just… Who am I to touch you, Em? I don’t deserve to. I can barely call myself a husband anymore.”
It was then I realised he was punishing himself, not me.
Anna’s email simply says: Can we finally Skype, Emma? Please?
Now I am sat in a café in front of my laptop, waiting for Anna to log on. I would have liked to Skype her from home with a glass of wine like we used to, but it’s hard to talk freely inside the house these days.
Anna types a message. Ready when you are! I put on my headphones and press call. The sound of Skype dialling transports me back to Adam’s deployment and the calls we used to have. For a moment I get the same flutter of excitement that used to accompany seeing his face. But it is Anna who appears.
“There you are, stranger!” she says. “God, I’m glad to see you. It’s been far too long!”
“It’s good to see you too!” I say. She is on R and R and is sat in the tiny kitchen of the London apartment she shares with a friend from her university days. Behind her I can see an open bottle of wine and a takeaway bag by the sink. It is an apartment I have visited myself, during a trip to the UK from Iraq. Anna invited me over and we attempted to cook together. We drank as we cooked and the food ended up burnt. We put it down to lack of practice because of so many chow hall meals, rather than alcohol consumption. We sat at the dinner table anyway, sharing a bowl of olives and talking about Iraq. Her head stayed in that place as much as mine.
“How long’s it been since our last chat? Two months? Three?” I ask.
“It’s been longer than that, Em! We’ve only spoken once since Adam got back.”
“It can’t have been that long.”
“I’m telling you, Em, it is. But anyway, I have you now. So how are you?” she asks. The question I hate.
“I’m good,” I say. “Really good. How about you?” If Anna notices the false cheer in my voice, she doesn’t say anything. Perhaps I am getting too good at pretending. Anna is particularly observant of my moods, which I expect comes from living and working in such proximity. It is another reason I have avoided talking to her for so long.
Pieces of Me Page 25
