War Torn (3 page)

Jordan Nelson had recently joined 1 Platoon from another battalion. He was liked, but not yet fully integrated with his new section. He was unmarried but had talked about his family in Watford a lot. He was the oldest of three boys. Or was it four? Jordan talked about his younger brothers as though he was their father. Dave imagined the mother and brothers answering the doorbell, standing in a hallway full of muddy football boots and hooks piled with too many coats. He tried not to think about the silence in the hallway when the Families Officer told them the news.

A Families Officer would also be standing on Steve and Leanne’s doorstep back in Wiltshire in a few hours. The other women in the street would be at the window; they’d see the Families Officer ring
the bell and fear the worst. Dave’s wife Jenny would be sure to see. Leanne and Steve lived right across the road. Sol’s wife Adi was a few doors up but she would know, because she always knew everything. Jamie’s wife, Agnieszka, who lived up a side street, would probably guess what was going on, even though her English wasn’t that good. And like all the others, she’d cry. Both with sadness for Leanne and relief for herself because it wasn’t her own husband who was maimed for life.

‘You all right, Sarge?’ Jamie Dermott asked quietly.

Dave was thinking how only the stoppage in his weapon had brought him down into the Vector just before the bomb had exploded. A few seconds earlier and it would have been him flying through the air to the left while his leg flew to the right. The stoppage had saved him. It had cost Steve his leg and maybe his life.

‘Sarge?’ said Jamie.

Dave’s escape today had been the narrowest. It should have been him. And at this moment, thinking of Steve and Leanne and the twins, he wished it had been him. He shut his eyes.

He said: ‘I’m fine.’ His throat was so dry the words scratched their way out of his mouth. He imagined his home, in a quiet street in the quiet camp in England. It seemed nearer than Afghanistan. He knew that, in a few days, the madness of Helmand Province would be home and quiet Wiltshire would be some strange, faraway place.

The Vector proceeded to the Forward Operating Base in total silence.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN JAMIE BEING AROUND AND JAMIE NOT BEING
around was that everything went wrong the minute he walked out of the door. The dishwasher had spluttered to a halt before his plane had even landed in Afghanistan. It had been the same with Iraq: the washing machine had stopped, the bathroom pipes had been blocked and the phone had gone kaput within three weeks of his departure.

Agnieszka could cope with the dishwasher because in Poland she had managed without one. But now it was the car. There was a clunk from deep within its bowels. It was the kind of noise you couldn’t ignore, the kind which said the car would stop on the motorway just when she was taking Luke to the hospital tomorrow. It was the sort of clunk which said that Jamie had gone and nothing was going to be right until he came back.

So now she was on her way to the garage. She’d shovelled the big pushchair into the back. Luke was crying. And halfway there she realized she should have rung first. Which would have meant speaking on the phone. Which she hated because communicating in English over a phone line was about fifteen times harder than when she could see people pulling their faces into shapes which filled all the gaps in her understanding.

There was nowhere to park at the garage. There was nowhere to park in the road outside. She hovered, wondering what to do. A car hooted behind her.

She drove slowly around the block. Only one parking place, a
whole street away. Luke was asleep now. She would wake him if she lifted him into the pushchair and then he would cry again. And she would arrive at the garage and they would say: ‘Well, where’s the car?’ Then they would probably give her an appointment in two weeks.

Agnieszka put her head on the steering wheel and wept. When Jamie was at home, loving her, adoring Luke, taking him when he cried, holding him while he had a fit, fixing broken gutters and unblocking pipes, looking after them both, then life was good. But he never was at home. There had been Catterick, Canada, Iraq, Kenya and now Afghanistan. Afghanistan. Just the word made her cry. It sounded like Pashtu for sadness.

Even after the sobbing stopped, the tears kept falling silently.

She finally managed to pat her face dry and check her makeup. Her mascara hadn’t run because she had forgotten to put any on. Good. She reached into her bag, shook the tiny tube and rolled the brush under her eyelashes. She watched herself in the mirror. Despite the tears her eyes had retained their penetrating blue. Her long lashes curled around the mascara.

‘You don’t need that stuff,’ Jamie had told her the first time he saw her putting on her makeup.

‘I need for give me confidence,’ she said.

She disentangled the feat of engineering that was Luke’s pushchair, smoothed the sheepskin liner and lifted him into it very, very gently. At first she thought she had completed this manoeuvre without waking him but then he opened his eyes wide, stared at her and screwed his face into a tight ball. She braced herself. A second later, his roars of displeasure began. Tears burst out of his face like a sprinkler. She hoped he wouldn’t have a fit.

She walked towards the garage. By the time she got there Luke was still shrieking. She knew any discussion about the car would be impossible so she kept on walking. She walked around the block. When she passed the plumbing supply shop, someone inside wolf-whistled. Perhaps she had imagined it. But then she glimpsed herself in the tile-shop window. Her legs looked very long today; it was amazing how they seemed to change length. So maybe the whistle had been for her. She flicked her hair back over her shoulders.

Back at the garage, Luke was still wailing so she decided to walk
around the block again. This time, as she passed the plumbing supply shop, the whistle was unmistakable. It came during one of the pauses in Luke’s cries. She kept right on walking as though she hadn’t heard, murmuring a few words to Luke to show that she was oblivious to it.

By the time she reached the garage again, Luke was quiet. Should she go in now? What if his tears came in bursts like her own and he started up again? She decided to walk around a third time.

She glanced surreptitiously into the plumbing shop as she drew near. A young man, tall with a shaven head, grinned at her familiarly from behind the glass. As if he knew her. When all she had done was simply pass his shop a couple of times. She didn’t smile back. She found herself blushing. Supposing he thought that she was walking past deliberately again and again?

This possibility was so shameful that she felt she owed a few Aves to the Holy Virgin. Muttering them under her breath she returned to the garage. Luke was fast asleep now.

Hesitantly she pushed him into the dark workshop. A car was raised high on a ramp. A man stood underneath it.

‘Erm . . . I bring my car here because . . .’ Her voice sounded small in this great cavern of a place. Someone in the corner was spinning tyres on a machine which sounded like a gun firing.

‘You shouldn’t be in here! Reception’s around the side!’ the man shouted. The machine-gun noise did not stop. Agnieszka did not understand. She hesitated.

The man gesticulated angrily. ‘Round the side!’

She nodded, certain he was telling her to leave, uncertain where to go. Another small humiliation. Until she’d met Jamie, just going into a shop and asking for something was a humiliation. She emerged from almost any situation red-faced, struggling to understand English people and their language. Then along came Jamie and everything changed. When he wasn’t away in Catterick, Canada, Iraq, Kenya or Afghanistan.

She walked around the building heaving Luke with difficulty between cars and over kerbs. Then she saw a door and somehow manoeuvred the pushchair inside. This must be the right place. It smelled of workshop but aspired to be an office. The scent of oil and car parts reminded her of her father back in Poland.
He had worked in a small engineering firm until his death.

A man behind the counter discussed a bill with a customer, who was running his finger down the invoice, pausing at each figure. Agnieszka did not care to listen. It was almost summer but she was cold in her T-shirt and it was warm in the office. She closed her eyes and the men’s voices sounded like a radio station broadcast from far away in a foreign language. It would be easy to imagine she was in her father’s workshop now, a child again, warmed by the brazier, lulled by that comfortable oily smell, falling asleep in her nest of rough blankets while adult words and adult voices washed over her.

The previous customer was leaving, pinning himself against the wall in order to navigate around the pushchair.

‘Can I help you?’ asked the man behind the desk. She opened her eyes.

‘Like to sit down?’

He smiled at her and gestured to a tiny waiting area with a couple of dirty armchairs, a coffee machine and last week’s free newspaper. ‘You look knackered standing there with your eyes shut.’

Agnieszka stared at him.

‘Come on . . .’ His face was friendly. ‘I’m having a tea; I’ll get you one too.’

Agnieszka found herself squeezing into the waiting area and sinking onto one of the chairs. She glanced at Luke. He slept deeply. His head had fallen to the side.

‘Milk? Sugar?’

She nodded. A moment later the man handed her a plastic cup, stirring its contents vigorously. He removed the spoon and the tea continued to turn in slowing circles.

The man sat down in the other chair, his hands cupped round his own tea. The two chairs were so close together that it was hard to avoid his legs. Agnieszka swung hers out to the side.

‘Now, what can we do for you?’

‘My car not working.’ Her voice was hoarse. The cup warmed her hands.

‘Won’t it start?’ He sounded as though he knew how your whole day was ruined when your car didn’t start.

‘It start but it make terrible noise and smell not too good,’
she said. ‘I think it stop any minute, maybe on motorway.’

‘Yeah, in the fast lane, that’s when they usually let you down.’

‘I go on motorway tomorrow morning to hospital so I think I come this afternoon to get car fixed but maybe you tell me not today. Also, no parking. So my car is far away.’

‘Which hospital then, the Prince of Wales?’

‘Yes. My baby see specialist at Prince of Wales Hospital.’

‘That sounds like a bit of a worry.’

Yes it was. Tomorrow the specialist would ask questions and take notes without smiling. Jamie was in Afghanistan. Her mother was ill in Poland. Her parents-in-law barely spoke to her. The dishwasher was broken. Now the car was planning to stop the moment she got into the fast lane of the motorway. It was all a bit of a worry. It was enough of a worry to make her cry. She did not trust herself to speak so she just nodded.

‘How far away is this car of yours?’ he asked gently.

‘Afghanistan.’

‘The car? In Afghanistan?’ The man raised his eyebrows and grinned at her so comically that suddenly she felt herself smiling.

‘I thought you said how far away my husband is!’

‘Oh, he’s in the army, is he?’

She nodded. ‘Husband in Afghanistan. Car in street that way. Not in first street. Next street.’

‘Elm Road?’

She wasn’t sure but she nodded.

‘Well, let’s go and see if we can’t sort this problem out. Then you can get to the hospital tomorrow no trouble.’

He stood up, smiled at her again and she smiled back. Here was a good man. Agnieszka felt the same relief she felt when Jamie came home. Everything was going to be all right.

AS THEY JUMPED OUT OF THE VECTORS EACH MAN STOOD STILL AND
felt the silence. No firing. No vehicle noise. No movement.

Dave counted them. As well as himself, the boss and the company sergeant major, there were twenty-six men: three already undermanned sections of 1 Platoon plus a signaller, an engineer, a medic, a sniper and a mortar man. He had counted twenty-eight into the Vectors at Bastion and had expected to count twenty-eight out at FOB Senzhiri. Twenty-six was a bitter number today.