We Are All Made of Stars (8 page)

‘And how would you know what's better than a drug?' I'd tease him. ‘Your body is a temple. You don't even take caffeine.'

Sometimes, on days like that, he'd drop me on the bed, sometimes on the rug, and kiss me all over until I pleaded for him to stop. We laughed and laughed and laughed in those early days. Every day we were together was like the first day. Perhaps it was because he was away so much, because we spent so much time apart, that when we were together we were starving for each other – desperate and hungry for every second that we were connected.

The day he bought me these running shoes was a fiercely bright one, full of sunshine and arching faultless sky. He'd presented them to me on one knee, offering the shoebox like a ring on a velvet pillow.

‘Top of the range,' he told me, proudly.

‘And pink!' I cried out, looking at the neon articles. ‘You bought me pink running shoes because I'm a girl – sexist!'

‘You like pink,' he said, still on one knee. ‘Your curtains are pink, your duvet is pink, you have a pink toothbrush and loads of pink underwear. I got you pink because you like it, babe.'

‘Yeah, when I choose pink it's a choice. When you choose pink it's a patriarchal statement of expecting me to conform to your masculine ideals,' I teased.

‘Fuck off,' he said, laughing. ‘Your fucking car is even almost pink – well, purple! Anyway, whatever colour they are, they are exactly the right size for running: your shoe size plus half a size so your toes don't get rubbed.'

And that made me love him just a little bit more, so I accepted the shoes.

On the first day we went out running together, I dragged my feet and complained. I whined like a toddler, and he promised me an ice cream as he ran circles around me. He finally left me waiting for him on a park bench in the sunshine, with my rapidly melting prize, as he disappeared over the brow of the hill. I was still there, dozing, listening to the sound of children complaining and dogs barking, when he came back, shining with sweat, grinning from ear to ear as he collapsed on the bench next to me.

‘How was that?' I asked him, letting him take my ice cream and finish it.

‘Like flying,' he told me. ‘Like launching off a cliff and taking to the air! It's better than ice cream, it's better than sex …'

I saw the teasing glint in his eye as I launched at him, and some of the ice cream was smeared between us, sticky and cold. He caught me and held me and we laughed so hard I had tears running down my face. An old woman walking by took one look at us, tutted and shook her head. You could almost hear her saying, ‘They'll learn.'

But I decided then and there that I never would learn. I
could
never learn not to love this man. There would never be anything that would come between us.

‘You look beautiful,' Vincent had told me, suddenly quiet and still, looking hard into my eyes, that way he often did, when suddenly everything was so intense and so important, especially to me. ‘You are everything that matters, you know. I never knew, I never knew what it was like to be afraid of dying, until I met you.'

‘Poetic for a squaddie, aren't you?' I'd said, looking away because for a moment being loved so much felt a little dangerous, as if we were inviting fate to come and punish our joy. Vincent had kissed me hard, leaving his sweat all over me. We were so connected, it felt like every molecule that made us up vibrated in unison.

Which is maybe why I tried harder, the next time he took me running. It still felt like having my lungs clasped in some great iron clamp, and I told him I thought I might be having a heart attack. He told me I would do, too soon, if I spent my life sitting on my arse. He said he needed me to be alive longer than he was because he wouldn't be able to live without me, so I kept going – he romanced me into trying. I followed him doggedly, praying for the moment to come when he would let me stop.

One time after that it rained and I got soaked through to the skin, mud all over me, turning my girly trainers black. When we got home, he peeled my wet clothes off me, pulling me into the shower with him. I'd stood there, too exhausted to feel sexy, while he washed me down, kneeling in front of me, the water cascading over his shoulders, massaging my aching thighs, kissing the places in between. I decided then, I didn't care how far I ran or how much it hurt. It was worth it because I knew then I'd follow him everywhere; I'd never leave him.

Then one day, just a few days before he was due to go back overseas, I was following him along the canal towpath, with the spring blossom pouring down from the trees, the sun warm on my back, and I felt
joyful
. It stopped being his thing and my torture, and started being
our
thing. The thing we did together. Oh, what a smug couple we were, out running together every morning he was home on leave. If I even mentioned it to our friends, they'd stuff their fingers down their throats and pretend to vomit. Our friends: we had a lot of friends then; people circled around us. We don't have the same friends now; we moved when he came out of the army, and he never wanted to keep in touch with any of the old crew, not my friends, anyway. His relationship with his unit is different – they are the family that he never really had.

Now, Vincent has a lot of wonderful people who are around him all the time, pulling him forward, giving him the purpose, focus and dedication that he displays every day to the world outside our front door. But somehow I don't have him any more, and he doesn't seem to want me. And I am not really sure how that happened, except that after the injury everything changed, including him and me. I changed because he did, because when he didn't want me any more, I discovered I didn't want to be me.

And from the outside, everything looks if not good then OK. It's eighteen months since a rocket launch attack killed one and injured three in his unit. Eighteen months since Vincent escaped death, and now he is fully rehabilitated, at least physically.

I remember when the news came.

I was working, part of a team in A&E, trying to save the life of a little girl who'd walked out in front of a car, while her mother had stood by screaming as her daughter had been flung into the air. She had head injuries, massive internal injuries – the broken bones were almost incidental – and we were working, just like we always did, to reverse death, to defeat it and send it away again. We knew what we were doing, the trauma team. We were gladiators, experts: fearless, brave, perhaps a little bit cocky; each of us was certain that if we played our part, followed the rules, we had a very good chance of sending Death away empty-handed. And that day, the day that I heard the news about the love of my life, we knew we were on the road to saving that little girl. It would be hard, but we could do it.

And then I was called away, and they told me Vincent had been badly injured, that he was being airlifted first to Camp Bastion to be stabilised, and then to Birmingham. And the first thing I thought was that I couldn't go back to working on the little girl. I couldn't because, if there was only one life that was allowed to be retrieved that day, I didn't want it to be hers.

It was a dark thought, a terrible, irrational, selfish thought, but I had it. And sometimes now I have to think about it; I make myself think about it – about the strange cosmic choices that we think we have, the vows we will make, the prayers we will send out to a god in which we don't even believe. Take her, not him. Please, God, don't take him.

They sent me home, of course. Another nurse stepped in and took over my role, and the little girl was saved. I remember it seemed like years for the call to come through that Vincent was stable enough to be brought back to the UK, that the doctors felt that he was going to make it. I got in my purple car and drove up to Birmingham right away. I wanted to be at his side the moment he arrived.

Things were touch and go for a while, but at the hospital everything was taken care of with military precision, even though it wasn't a military hospital. The nurses took me under their wing, looking after me especially well as I was one of their own. They told me they ran the wards with the servicemen on as if they were in the army. Having people in uniform, having a routine, comrades in arms, it all helped the men and women they treated get better. When Vincent had healed enough, he was transferred to Headley Court to be fitted with a prosthetic leg and to learn how to walk again. I didn't see him so much then, in those four months; he didn't want me to come. He said he didn't want to see me again until he could be standing on his own two feet.

I fought him on that, of course. Even if he didn't want to see me, I wanted to see him. To know what he was going through, to know that I could be near him, to see him, touch him, while he went through what was almost unbearable. But he was insistent, cool to my pleadings. I thought it was his way of coping, of maintaining dignity. I thought, what's a few months out of a lifetime if it makes him feel better? We talked every day. We emailed, we skyped, and it was like we let ourselves believe that nothing had changed, that everything was the same, because, after all, ours was a romance that had always been lived down the wire.

And then on the day I went to pick him up, he greeted me at the top of the steps, standing tall, and I ran into his arms. And as I ran I thought, this is it, the proper beginning of our real life together as man and wife. We've been granted a miracle: he lived when others died. He'd survived and healed, and he could go on to do anything he wanted. The few months of pain, and worry, and uncertainty, were over; this was the minute that everything was back to how it should be.

It was in the car on the way home that he told me he was leaving the army.

‘But you don't have to?' I'd been shocked. ‘They haven't … I mean, have they said you have to?'

‘No,' he said. ‘I could stay on. They've plenty of roles I could take. They don't even rule out you going back to active service, these days.'

‘Yes, when I was in Birmingham with you, during those first bad weeks, I found out about what could be next for you. Liaison officer is one thing. Working with other veterans, support roles – you can even go back to your unit, with the right support …'

‘I know.' His tone was terse. ‘I thought you'd be pleased. To have me home, out of harm's way. I … I don't want to go back. I'm not …' He paused and I thought he was going to say something more, to tell me what it was that had changed in him, but he finished the sentence making it clear the decision was already made. ‘I'm not going back.'

‘Of course I'm pleased.' I reached over to touch his knee, remembering just a little too late that one of them wasn't there any more, and stupidly withdrew my hand. ‘Of course I am, it's just … what will you do?'

‘Well, I can do anything I want to,' Vincent said, turning his gaze out of the window. ‘Everybody says so.'

‘So what do you want to do?' I asked him.

‘The first thing I want to do is have a beer,' he'd said. ‘And then after that, have another one.'

CHAPTER EIGHT

I'm not big into winter: I don't like the dark afternoons or the cold walks home from work. I like a proper hot summer: shades on, girls in summer dresses, glimpses of brown skin and cleavage. But not my mum. Winter was the season she always loved best when I was a kid. She used to say she loved drawing the curtains and turning on the lights. She'd put the gas fire on and lay out a blanket, and we'd have tea together before Dad got in from work – crumpets or toast in front of the fire, its plastic coals glowing orange and red. Sitting cross-legged, her long blonde hair still tangled from an afternoon that she had slept away, Mum would tell me stories while I watched kids' TV.

Her stories came straight out of her head, and were probably far more scary and bloody than a boy of my age should have been listening to, but also they were magical, fantastical, epic and far-ranging and full of wonder. My dad was the finest man that I know – the best person – but I think that my curious mind, and what academic brains I have, came from Mum. It was just that she never had the kind of life where she could explore her potential. And anyway it didn't matter if she was telling me stories of knights lopping off heads, or witches chewing on the bones of children, somehow it didn't matter, because my mum had this way, this warmth, this enthusiasm, that made everything seem OK.

I was never afraid of monsters under my bed, or demons lurking in the wardrobe, because I assumed that nothing scary would ever be so stupid as to try and come face to face with my mum and her stubborn determination to laugh in the face of any kind of danger. Her fierce brightness would obliterate any shadow – that was how I thought of her: she was like a night light personified.

After crumpets and stories, she might fall asleep on the sofa, and I'd play, happy to be solitary, until Dad got in from work and made proper dinner. I remember it would take him some effort to wake her up for supper; he had to shake her and call her name, a little louder each of the many times. But eventually Mum would wake up, her pretty hair messed up and her eyes sleepy, and she would come to the table – the same table I still sit at. She would smile at me all through dinner, barely eating a bite before going to bed, while Dad talked at length about his day and would ask me about mine. I don't think I realised that he rarely spoke to Mum directly during those times. I don't think I realised it until quite recently.