by Owen Sheers
But when I told them, the nurse asked me
to look at his shoulder.
‘Is this,’ she said, ‘Hayden’s tattoo?’
My stomach dropped. I wanted to be sick.
I traced it with my fingertip
then looked up at his face again.
It was swollen, bruised about the eyes,
four days’ growth, singed dark along his chin.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s him.’
I gave him hell when he came back with that new tat.
He was just sixteen but adamant. A coiling dragon,
its tail wrapped about his arm.
It was up to him, he said, now he’s a man.
I grounded him for a week, but of course he got out.
He was that kind of kid. Still is.
School couldn’t hold him,
more energy than his brother and sister together.
Which is why I was so pleased when he got that job at Next.
At last, I thought, he’d quieten down, earn some cash,
find a girl, maybe, up at the Mall.
Stop hanging out with those older lads.
Some hope in that. That wasn’t Hads.
But then, nor was this. A living lie –
This boy in the hospital bed,
dried blood below his ear,
the sheet going flat
a couple of feet too soon,
just nothing after his thighs.
What have they done to him? – That was all I could think.
What have they done to my lad, my boy, my Hads?
HADS
Just this high ringing.
Like something left on too long.
That was all I could hear.
I remember the sky too.
Blue, clear.
But that was all.
They brought me round in Bastion,
then put me under, more or less, for a month.
Induced coma.
Four weeks of living dreams,
of contacts, torture, the lot.
Back home in a flash, but not.
When I finally came to
I thought I was still dreaming.
Of course I was. I’d soon wake again, and maybe again,
until, one day, I’d be back in my life,
the one I knew.
But I was already there, and the day that dawned,
it did so in a second.
It was something in the look of the nurse,
in the way that she said it.
This is you now, Hayden, but think,
it could have been so much worse.
You have to try to count the blessing, not the curse.
I cried.
For two days solid. Didn’t eat, didn’t sleep.
I’d got no fucking legs.
That was it. One step back and Terry had got me.
Nothing where my legs had been
or in my future either.
It was over, at just eighteen.
And then it wasn’t. I still don’t know why
but on the third day I stopped.
My eyes were raw and my ribs were sore,
but my mind was clear.
I was only eighteen but I was alive.
I was going to live for loads more years
without legs than I ever had done with.
I’d survived, and if I was going to carry on
I’d better make the living I’d got left worthwhile.
That’s what I told myself anyway.
As soon as I did, my worrying switched.
Had the others been hit?
If they had I’d never forgive –
ARTHUR
– No. We were good, and it wasn’t your fault.
We all got back that day. JTAC called an Apache in,
emptied its load on that tree line, blew it away.
Back in the FOB though, everything changed.
You were the first, you know?
We’d been lucky. It had been getting hot, but till then …
For the rest of the tour all I wanted
was to see them drop.
The other lads too. We wanted revenge.
The older blokes tried to talk us down,
they’d been here before,
but we hadn’t.
It wasn’t just doing a job any more.
It was about killing them,
for you and all the other shit they’d done.
About stopping their hearts, their brains, their lungs.
HADS’ MOTHER
At least I knew. I wish it hadn’t happened, of course.
And he’d promised, just the one tour,
so yes, he was halfway there.
But the waiting had been almost as bad.
The not-hearing for weeks then just minutes on the phone.
I’d turn up the volume when the news was on,
dig my nails into my skin, thinking, ‘Thank God it’s not him.’
And then it was.
But yeah, now it had happened, what’s done was done.
So we had to look forward, didn’t we? What else could we do?
As soon as they’d let us we got him into a chair,
took him off the ward and out,
for a fag and fresh air.
HADS
It had rained the night before.
I’d heard it from my bed against the window.
So when we came out those doors, backwards of course,
that was the first thing to hit me.
That rain-on-tarmac smell.
Summers down the Shire as a kid,
going out to play after a downpour in June.
Then Mum swung me round and I saw the grass,
a strip of it between the two car parks –
greener than I thought any grass could be.
For over four months I hadn’t seen a blade,
not like this.
In Afghan there were crops, reeds,
but everything was yellow or brown when we were there.
The ground outside the FOB just dust, bare.
I asked her to push me on to it, and she did,
tipping me back to lift the wheels off the kerb,
till I felt the change, the softness of the turf.
As she looked in her handbag to find us a lighter
I forgot for a second why we were there.
So I reached for it, leant forward from my chair,
but as the blades brushed my fingers,
something was wrong. I kept going,
nothing to stop me.
I hit the ground with my stumps, end on.
ARTHUR
By the time that happened to Hads,
we’d already lost two more lads. IEDs both.
It was Sangin’s bumper crop that year,
and it was us who were harvesting them,
from tree lines and ditches, fields and walls.
Terry himself was becoming a ghost, hardly seen,
but still always there, inside our heads.
He wanted us dead and the feeling was mutual.
Cos yeah, we dropped them in numbers,
but the anger, it only got hotter, deeper,
like a hunger we’d never satisfy,
however many we shot,
however many we saw die.
Time to go.
Hads is swinging from the sofa
into his chair again,
and wheeling himself to the ground-floor room
his parents converted for him.
They’ll be back soon, along with his brother and sister,
from the firework display on George the Fifth Fields.
Hads asked them to go there without him.
Nothing worse than being the burden,
so yeah, he told them to go enjoy
the bonfire, the burning guy,
the autumn air, the rockets sailing high.
Back here, he’s got his own display anyway,
<
br /> one he knows is coming as he swings into bed.
Look at him, tensing for it, knowing as soon as his head
hits the pillow and he shuts his eyes –
An IED explosion
Every time.
He lies there a moment, recovering in its wake,
his heart slowing, before rolling on to his side
to try and get some kind of rest.
Let’s leave him now, as he curls up under the sheets,
or does what he can.
Hads Gullet, twenty-one, half a tall man trying to sleep,
holding what’s left of his legs to his chest,
as he tells himself,
on hearing his family come through the door,
that of the half of him gone and the half of him left,
it isn’t the cursed he should count, but the blessed.
3 TAFF’S STORY
Dubstep, loud, then fainter.
Rising footsteps, a door opening, then closing
ARTHUR
Here’s Taff,
emerging from the Tunnels back into the light,
rising from his barrow
like a walk-of-shame lover.
A long night of taking cover
from the fireworks and the bottle,
of losing himself in the electro-beat,
of dancing, full-throttle,
of drowning for hours in Bristol dubstep.
Of moving not thinking,
for fear in stopping
he’ll remember and weep.
Let’s follow him now, as he walks up the street,
past the Empire Museum,
his breath like smoke in the November air,
last night’s litter blowing round his feet,
his dancing sweat still drying in his hair.
Wouldn’t think him a soldier, would you?
But he was. One of the best, right from the off.
Taff loved basic, he did. He was ripe for it.
That night in the Thekla,
he’d agreed before he’d finished his pint.
Like he’d said, it made sense.
Time for us to get out of here.
And we did.
But then we came back,
bringing ‘there’ with us –
the anger, the dreams, the dead.
TAFF
Aw, shut it, Arthur!
It’s first thing in the morning,
I could do without you inside my head.
Can’t you leave me alone, just for a bit?
Always bloody talking. Give it a rest.
And when did you get so wise anyway?
You was so thick at school
you couldn’t pass a urine test.
ARTHUR
Just saying, that’s all. You were good, the best,
and you know it.
TAFF
Were. You said it. In the past innit? History.
ARTHUR
Yeah? Looks like it too. If that’s the case
why you been hiding down there all night?
TAFF
I wasn’t bloody hiding, right?
Just … you know how it is.
ARTHUR
Yeah. I do. How’s Lisa, the kid?
TAFF
Fine. I’ll be seeing him this week.
He’s five now y’know?
ARTHUR
Five!
How old was he when we left? One? Two?
TAFF
Look, Arthur, I gotta go.
Gotta get my head down.
I’m in the project at ten, so yeah,
see you later is it?
ARTHUR
Yeah, alright. See you then.
No, you wouldn’t think Taff a soldier.
Not now. The muscle turns to fat after a bit.
And then the meds, they soon add to that.
And the drink.
He must have put on two, three stone since he got back,
but even so, it wasn’t his body what got to Taff.
Take this street he’s walking down now,
deserted, empty, Sunday-morning dead.
Harmless.
But all Taff’s feeling is the threat.
The echo of when a village went like this back there,
when the women and kids melted away.
That’s what he’s trying to keep at bay,
plugging in his headphones,
turning the volume right up.
Stalling for time till later in the day
when the project will bring him into harbour again.
But right now he’s alone, and half of him’s on tour,
remembering with a memory that’s now
the fear, the tension, and of course the four
who didn’t make it back with him –
Big Ash, Stevo, Lee and Tim.
TAFF
Arthur’s right, I did love basic.
Everything we were meant to hate – the PT,
drill sergeant shouting in your face,
being woken at three to go on guard,
the route march, the beastings – I loved it, I did.
It was what I’d been waiting for.
It made me, all of it.
I remember, when we were just over halfway through,
going into town with Arthur and Hads,
stopping by a butcher’s
while we waited for some of the other lads.
Our first time off base since we’d stepped off that bus,
three boys leaving home for Catterick, nervous, young.
I looked in at the meats what the butcher had hung.
Chickens to the left, beef to the right.
I tapped the glass and pointed to some chicken legs.
‘See that,’ I said to Hads.
‘That was us four weeks ago. Scrawny little fuckers.’
Then I tapped the window above the shoulders of beef,
heavy with meat, packed around the bone.
‘And that,’ I said, ‘is what we’ve become. Strong.’
He nodded, cos it was true. We could see ourselves reflected,
the three of us in line, bigger at the shoulder and the chest,
thicker in the neck, an ache in our arms and our thighs.
Just over a month since we’d left, and we’d changed.
ARTHUR
Yeah, they built us up alright.
Built up the muscle, layer by layer,
just as they took us away, layer by layer.
Fair exchange perhaps –
three hots and a cot and a packet of pay,
the promise of duty and seeing the world,
not much, I guess,
for handing them your body
and giving what’s left of your mind away.
So yeah, they fattened us up
good and proper,
fattened us up for –
TAFF
– Don’t say it, Arthur. Don’t.
Cos it ain’t right. They made us fit.
That’s what they did.
Fit in, and fit for fighting.
Fighting fit.
Anyway, easy for you to say. You didn’t have a kid.
I did. So that packet of pay?
Yeah, that made me too,
even more than the training, the uniform, the kit.
Lisa had Tom when we were sixteen.
I was a father before I was grown.
So when we came home
it was that pay what made me stand tall.
Not just the rest of it. I was earning, providing,
doing what I can.
I was only eighteen, but those six weeks basic,
they were like years for me.
They made me a man.
LISA
They did. When I saw him again
it wasn’t just his body what had changed,
it was Geraint – all of him.
Like something up there had made him whole.
; So yeah, the army made him.
But then they broke him too, didn’t they?
And who had to pick up the pieces then?
Not all the king’s horses I can tell you,
or all the king’s men.
It was like suddenly I had two kids, not one.
Geraint, as well as Tom.
Falling asleep on his meds, middle of the day.
Not talking, then next minute having it all to say.
Howling, crying, throwing tantrums.
Waking in the middle of the night,
pissing the bed. They both did that.
Only Tom never hit me when I tried to hold him,
like Geraint did.
Or stared into my eyes, soaked with sweat,
looking at something countries away.
Tom didn’t have the last year of his life
flashing like a trailer across his mind all day,
or a habit of letting fags burn to his knuckle,
then blister his skin.
He didn’t have this look that said ‘I’ll never let you in’.
And he didn’t have a father either, or at least
not the one who went away.
He had Geraint instead,
drinking, popping pills, his face tense with pain.
A man who used to be his dad, but now just there,
broken by war into a boy again.
I swear, if I could meet that pilot now,
what I’d do to him –
A bit of his own bloody medicine.
And I’d have the right, too, I reckon.
Cos that night he didn’t just take the lives
of Big Ash, Stevo, Lee and Tim.
No, he took Geraint’s too. And mine. And Tom’s.
And that’s why I’d do it,
not for my sake or for Geraint’s,
but for my son’s.
TAFF
They used to call it ‘friendly fire’,
but not any more.
Too close to the bone.
So no, it’s ‘blue on blue’ now.
That’s the words they use,
to describe what happened that night.
Blue on blue.
Blue on blue.
Blue on blue.
However much I say them though,
