War Torn

by McNab, Andy

  ‘OK, maybe we’ll wait a bit longer.’

  ‘I’ll tell her we’ve spoken but morphine got in the way. How’s his leg?’

  The doctor paused again.

  ‘Well . . . it’s a bad injury and we’re still fighting to keep things under control. And if this call had taken place earlier in the day he’d have been a lot more lucid.’

  When the call ended Dave sat staring into space. People were looking at him, waiting for him to say something, but he surrounded himself instead with a ring of silence.

  ‘Do I conclude,’ asked the OC eventually, ‘that Rifleman Buckle isn’t doing so well?’

  Dave remembered how Steve Buckle was one of the quickest, funniest lads in the platoon. Just when Billy Finn thought he’d had the last word, Steve would always come back with a killer punch line.

  ‘He’s making a physical recovery. It’s just he doesn’t sound much like the Steve I used to know,’ Dave said quietly.

  ‘Early days,’ the major said.

  Dave’s call to Jordan Nelson was a picnic by comparison. The machine-gunner could remember almost everything up until the moment of the blast.

  ‘Did you see me, Sarge? Did you watch me flying?’

  ‘Poetry in motion, mate,’ Dave assured him.

  ‘I haven’t looked in the mirror yet. I expect I look like Tutan-fucking-khamun. And they won’t take the bandages off for weeks.’

  He paused. ‘How’s Steve?’

  ‘Stable,’ Dave heard himself saying.

  The constant use of this word since Steve’s accident had pissed him off big-time, but now he understood. You could take refuge in the sheer dependability of a word like stable. Without really thinking what it might mean.

  Chapter Sixteen

  VICKY WENT TO NURSERY FOR TWO HOURS ON A WEDNESDAY AND Jenny had a list as long as her arm of things to do in that two hours. But she had no sooner got home in the empty car and begun to tackle her chores than the doorbell rang.

  She sighed. It might be Leanne, armed with a twin on each side, saying she needed to talk. She had to talk to someone, poor love, since they still hadn’t let her talk to Steve.

  But it was Agnieszka. Luke was in his pushchair throwing his arms up and down in that strange way of his and Agnieszka stood there, white-faced, tight-jeaned, barely smiling. Jenny felt resentful until she reminded herself that, in the superstore, she had actually invited her.

  ‘Come in!’ she said. ‘And just don’t look at the mess.’

  ‘I don’t see any mess,’ said Agnieszka. Although there was plenty.

  Agnieszka left the buggy on the doorstep and carried Luke into the house. She sat stiffly, holding Luke, while Jenny made coffee. She didn’t want any herself. The very smell of it revolted her at this stage of her pregnancy.

  ‘We’ve got some baby toys Luke might like to play with . . .’

  Jenny dragged herself upstairs to the box under Vicky’s bed. She selected so many toys that she could not see the steps properly when she came back down and three from the bottom she tripped. She lurched forward, losing her balance, pulled by gravity and her own unaccustomed bodyweight towards the floor. She saved herself by grabbing the banister just in time. The toys thudded down the stairs as she swung there. She felt so much like a big baboon that she wanted to cry and laugh at the same time.

  Carefully she disengaged herself from the rail and her feet found the ground. She picked up the toys and went back into the living room where Agnieszka was drinking her coffee. Luke did not need the baby toys. He was lying on the sofa across his mother, falling asleep.

  ‘Have you heard from Jamie?’ Jenny asked brightly as she sat down.

  ‘He try to phone every day.’ Agnieszka could have no idea of the minefield she was crossing.

  ‘Every day!’ Jenny attempted to keep her voice even. Her heart was still thumping from her near-fall on the stairs; Agnieszka’s words made it beat harder still. ‘How does he manage to call so often?’

  ‘He not always manage. Sometimes three whole days without one word. But he buy other men’s minutes.’

  The thought that Dave might sell his minutes so that other men could call their wives made Jenny feel as though her body was made up of thin tubes, all of them hollow. Then, just as quickly as they had hollowed, the tubes filled with anger. But she remembered that, as sergeant, Dave would not be playing the system. Her anger abated. He would not sell his minutes. Although her Dave would certainly give them away to a man in need. She felt another surge of anger. He would give them away, forgetting that his own wife had needs too.

  ‘That your father?’ Agnieszka, pinned to the sofa by the sleeping Luke, gestured to a picture.

  Jenny put aside her thoughts of phone minutes and heaved herself up to fetch it from the shelf. She grabbed a wedding picture too.

  ‘Yep, this is my dad.’ She handed the first frame to Agnieszka. ‘He died when I was ten. This is the only good photo I have of him.’

  Agnieszka studied the picture carefully. ‘Where live your mother?’

  ‘My mum lives in south London, about a mile from Dave’s mum. Isn’t that strange? They’ve become mates since we introduced them. Although Dave and I grew up in the same area we didn’t know each other then. And we went to different schools.’

  ‘So how you meet?’

  ‘Windsurfing.’ Jenny laughed. ‘I moved down to the south coast with a boyfriend and when we split up I stayed there because I was enjoying the windsurfing so much and I had quite a nice job. And one day Dave showed up. We met wearing wetsuits! Then we arranged to meet with our clothes on and we didn’t recognize each other. But one thing led to another . . .’ She held out the wedding photo.

  Agnieszka took it. ‘You look beautiful.’

  Jenny smiled. She knew she did look good in that picture. Tall, slim, her hair swept back and her makeup perfect but, most of all, she looked genuinely full of joy. And Dave wasn’t one of those awkward grooms. He looked like a man who had found the right woman and knew it.

  ‘You marry in London?’

  ‘No, here.’

  ‘Dave already in army when you meet?’

  Jenny was still smiling. It was good to remember those times. The first tentative dates, the feeling that she had met someone really special, then the knowledge that he was not just special but significant for her and finally the understanding that she wanted him to stay significant for ever. There had only ever been one problem. The bloody army.

  Her smile faded.

  ‘Yeah. It was the only thing I didn’t like about him.’

  Except that all the things which made him a good sergeant also happened to make him an attractive man. He was tough and fair, compassionate without being soft, reliably strong and a man who could take responsibility. Jenny loved him for all those things. So did the army.

  ‘Why you not like army?’ asked Agnieszka. ‘Lots of men looking for work but our boys got safe jobs.’

  ‘Safe?’ Jenny gave an empty smile. ‘Safe? Try telling Leanne that.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, but you know what I mean. We got somewhere to live, we got our house.’

  Jenny glanced around her. Actually, there were days when she hated the small, nondescript box with its magnolia walls. She occasionally had inspired ideas about turning it into something more. But she was always defeated by the cost or the practicalities or the endless regulations.

  ‘If you just see some apartments in Poland . . .’ Agnieszka said quietly. ‘If you just see some places where people live and think they very lucky. Then maybe you understand this not such a bad place.’

  Jenny felt ashamed. Agnieszka, of course, was right. If you compared it to a lot of other homes in the world, or in the UK, then of course army housing was good. Only when you compared it to your friends’ houses did you feel despair at the mould, the flooding, the malfunctioning drains, the insipid design and the sameness of it all.

  She asked Agnieszka about herself and how she had met Jamie and Agnieszka told
her Jamie had been a university student working in a hotel during the vacation and she had been a barmaid at the same hotel. She had done nothing to dissuade Jamie from walking out on his education and joining the army: she could see it was what he really wanted. But his parents had associated her arrival in his life with his decision to leave university. They had tried desperately to persuade him to wait until he had a degree so that at least he could go to Sandhurst. But Jamie had not wanted to be an officer.

  ‘So they blamed you?’

  ‘Yes, they blame me. They live in big house. They invite us for weekend and make me sleep in another room from Jamie. They say: Agnieszka, try to make him change his mind! And I say: Mr, Mrs Dermott, his mind made and Jamie very stubborn. After this they don’t like me. Not before wedding, not at wedding, not after wedding.’

  ‘They must love Luke . . .’

  Agnieszka shook her head.

  ‘Luke disappoint them very much.’

  They both looked at Luke. There was a sweetness about him which Jenny loved but something was not right, you could see it even as he slept. The shape of his head or the way it lay at such a strange angle, as though he was trying to escape from himself.

  ‘What does the doctor say?’

  Agnieszka’s face had closed itself into a discontented pout as she talked about her in-laws. As she talked about Luke’s doctors, the pout didn’t disappear.

  ‘Tests, tests, more tests and then they say it too early to tell.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jenny said gently. ‘It’ll be easier for you when you have a diagnosis. When you know what’s wrong, you’ll know what to do.’

  She felt her own baby kicking and longed for the day she could cradle him in her arms and know he was safe and well. She held her bump with the same tenderness with which she would soon be holding the baby.

  ‘I just want to know!’ said Agnieszka and there were tears in her voice.

  Jenny felt her own throat constrict. How often, she thought, does Agnieszka cry alone? How often do we all? She remembered the sight of Agnieszka, alone, in the café. In a sudden rush of affection, Jenny said: ‘Listen, next time you feel like a cup of tea at the superstore, tell me and I’ll come with you.’

  Agnieszka’s face lit up. ‘Thank you.’

  And then Jenny remembered that Agnieszka hadn’t, in fact, been alone. She’d been with a man. A thought crossed her mind. It was fleeting but it left a small bruise behind. Had Agnieszka come today for some sort of reassurance that Jenny hadn’t seen the man: was it this reassurance which had triggered that radiant smile?

  Luke was waking up now.

  He opened his eyes and looked around and in an instant stepped from sleep’s quiet bliss into an outpouring of misery. His mouth opened so wide it seemed to be swallowing up his face. He could barely breathe he was yelling so hard. The room was filled with his roar. His arms and legs waved.

  Agnieszka had placed the photos on the arm of the sofa. Jenny tried but failed to leap up in time to rescue them from Luke’s flailing hands. By the time she had lumbered over, it was too late. They fell to the floor, smashing against each other. Jenny’s father’s smile was jammed against his daughter’s wedding. Splinters of glass lay across the carpet. One frame was dented.

  As Jenny bent to rescue the pictures, she saw that her father’s forehead had been cut. She stared at the gash, half expecting it to bleed.

  It was impossible to say or do anything while the storm went on. She looked at Agnieszka, sitting passive and expressionless in the face of Luke’s fury, waiting for it to end. How could a mother watch so silently and do nothing to calm him? Jenny told herself that Agnieszka had probably tried many times. But still she had to resist the urge to pick up the baby herself.

  Agnieszka saw the broken pictures but made no attempt to apologize. She seemed unmoved by the damage to the only picture of Jenny’s father.

  Jenny looked anxiously at the clock.

  ‘I have to pick Vicky up from nursery!’ she called over the noise. ‘Do you want to stay here?’

  Agnieszka was rooted to the spot while Luke screamed. She said she’d leave when she could. She’d pull the door shut behind her.

  ‘Mind the glass on the floor!’ Jenny left Agnieszka on the sofa with the roaring baby, a small pile of glass splinters at her side, the broken photos on the sideboard. She tried not to think of all the things she had promised herself she’d do this morning.

  When she returned from the nursery, Agnieszka and Luke had gone.

  Vicky was being difficult because she was hungry. Jenny normally had her lunch ready when she got home but today, instead, there had been Agnieszka. She turned on the TV for the little girl and tried to make her promise not to go near the splintered glass. But, when she put her head around the door, Vicky was dancing on the carpet barefoot. Jenny began to pick up the glass by hand and then by vacuum and while she did so Vicky’s lunch burned dry.

  As the smell of charred beef burger leaked into the living room, Jenny rushed back to the kitchen leaving the vacuum on to keep Vicky, who was frightened of it, away from the glass.

  She threw the lunch in the bin and was starting again, the noise of the TV competing with the vacuum in the living room, when the phone rang. Her first instinct was to let it ring. But it might be Dave. She picked it up.

  ‘Hello . . .’ His voice was far, far away.

  She wanted to cry.

  ‘Dave!’

  ‘Are you OK?’ He sounded so distant.

  ‘Look, talk to Vicky for a minute,’ she said. ‘Her lunch just burned and there’s glass all over the floor. Talk to Vicks while I sort it out.’

  She heard his silence echoing back at her. In that silence was the space between England and Afghanistan. Seas and landmasses. Plains and mountains.

  ‘Oh!’ she said, dismayed.

  ‘Vicky?’

  ‘No. No, this is still Jenny. Saying I miss you. And I wish you rang more often and didn’t give other men your phone minutes. And I wish you rang me in the night when it’s quiet and we can talk properly.’

  ‘I don’t give other men my fucking minutes,’ he said. ‘And when I ring you in the night you don’t fucking answer.’

  ‘You’re not talking to one of your men now,’ she snapped. ‘Can’t you stop being a sergeant and start being a husband for just a few minutes a week?’

  Suddenly the line became clearer and she heard his sigh. Was it resignation? Or regret that he had called at all?

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. Dave, I’m sorry. I don’t want this kind of phone call. I was with Leanne most of yesterday and so the house is a tip and then Agnieszka came round this morning the minute I’d dropped Vicks off at nursery so I didn’t get anything done. And Luke smashed the photos from the living room and the one of Dad got cut and Vicks is hungry but there’s glass all over the floor and I burned her dinner and . . . and I know you don’t want to hear all this. You don’t have to sound patient with me because I know how boring it all is compared with killing the Taliban. And I know you’re wishing you hadn’t made this call. I know the reason you hardly ever ring is that, when you do, all you hear is this stuff . . .’ She glanced at Vicky and closed the kitchen door, dropping her voice. ‘You don’t have to say it because I already fucking know, Dave.’

  Dave said: ‘Jen, I do love you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  She had heard. She just needed to hear it again.

  ‘Jen, I love you. I don’t give other men my minutes. The reason I don’t phone you more often is that I try not to think about you because when I do I want you and miss you. OK? Do you know that too?’

  She started to cry.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘A bit uptight.’ She sniffed.

  ‘You don’t say!’

  ‘Like when air support comes along and drops a bomb on something but it doesn’t actually go off? But you’re all sitting in
your trucks thinking it might any minute?’

  ‘Oh, like that. Yeah, that’s uptight. How’s the baby?’

  ‘Kicking a lot. And I’m enormous and no one can believe I’ve still got so long to go.’

  ‘So did Agnieszka come round just so Luke could smash our photos?’

  ‘She came round to make sure I hadn’t seen her with some bloke at the superstore. But I had.’

  ‘What bloke?’

  ‘I don’t know who he is. She was having a coffee with him and she didn’t want me to see.’