Another Life

by Sara MacDonald

  He and Andrew wake to the same noise at the same time and peer up into the muzzle of Kalashnikovs held by two young and nervous Arabs. They are poked roughly and told to get up. Outside the derelict building stand twenty more men, hard-eyed and threatening, who yell into their radios.

  They are quickly stripped of their radios and equipment, watches and Andrew’s wedding ring, and bundled back towards the river. The Arabs seem unsure and argumentative and both Josh and Andrew realize they are not regular militia despite their camouflage combats and equipment. In the distance both men can hear the faint clatter of helicopters. Without warning Josh is suddenly knocked to the ground and made to kneel while his hands are tied behind his back. He feels a knife pressed into the back of his neck, is aware of Andrew also on the ground.

  This is what fear is. Josh prays. Let it be clean. Don’t maim me. Kill me outright. Make it clean and quick.

  He thinks of Marika, of Gabby and Nell and Charlie. Of home. This is what it feels like, the moment before you die. A sudden strange calm.

  Chapter 51

  Josh’s room was still and dark as if holding itself in. Gabby switched on the bedside lamp that he had made at school. The bulb was low and cast a small pool of yellow light into the room. Silver riding cups and coloured rosettes lay in a thin layer of dust on his chest of drawers. His small possessions lay around the room, waiting to be picked up and replaced affectionately when he returned.

  A cricket bat, metalwork and pottery objects, driftwood, a surfboard, school photos on the walls. Lucian Freud, Elan, his own A-level paintings. A photo of a once-loved ginger tomcat stuck into the side of his mirror, curling at the edges.

  Gabby examined his bookshelf. VS Naipaul, John Keegan, Garcia Marquez, and E Annie Proulx. Max Hastings sat next to Wilbur Smith and Bernard Cornwell. TS Eliot and Rupert Brooke sat next to Hornby and Amis. There was a technical shelf of modern warfare and art books. Keeping Bantams; Keeping Goldfish; Keeping Guinea Pigs.

  Outside the window the night was still and thick with silence. Gabby lay on Josh’s bed, under the old dusky-pink eiderdown that was once Nell’s. The BBC World Service was on low and Gabby was alert to every news bulletin. She willed Josh to feel her sitting there awake and know he was not alone. The silence pressed down, crushing her into the room so full of his life.

  Horror crept towards her. Josh could be hunted, frightened, or lying beaten-up in some hellhole, terrified, wondering if he would ever make it home. Her ears picked up Iraq and she turned the small radio up. A journalist was telling a colleague what might happen if any British officers were captured on Iraqi soil.

  He described the kind of humiliation and torture meted out to captured pilots during the Gulf war and listed the various atrocities of Saddam’s Special Guard. He then went on to list in detail the particular dangers any captured servicemen could be facing or enduring.

  Gabby snapped the radio off angrily. Didn’t they realize families would be listening? The sheer crass sensationalism and irresponsibility infuriated her. She got off the bed and went over to Josh’s small chest of drawers, which had once been hers. She stroked the soft wood, curled her hands around the carved handles. She let her fingers wander over the worn indentations as she had done as a child. She opened the drawers and began to tidy each one. She matched socks, folded shirts and placed them in neat little rows one on top of the other. Then she moved to his sweaters, making a little pile of those that looked as if they needed washing. She would wash them in the morning, then she would clean his room out and polish the chest and chair and bedside table so that all was ready for when he returned.

  She touched his riding rosettes, trying to smooth them straight. Josh on his first pony in tiny riding jacket, hat, whip, small legs akimbo on the plump little mare. Over the jumps they had gone, that fat little pony and the small eager child, and Charlie had tried not to look as if he was bursting with pride as the small crowd smiled and clapped.

  She looked down at the yellowing cricket sweater she was going to wash, remembering long summer evenings taking him to cricket practice at school or on the village green. She used to sit with the other mothers drinking tea from a flask, occasionally Pimms. School plays, sports days, detention.

  Josh. A whole childhood and growing-up with Josh that she had never taken for granted, painfully aware, even while she was living them, the days were precious and finite. She had wanted to be there for all the big and important events in his life because she knew what it felt like not to have anyone care enough to chart the course of your childhood.

  There had been no danger of Josh’s landmarks slipping by, for as well as Gabby there had always been Charlie, Nell and Elan, as well as the older farm-workers all rooting for him.

  Josh had always seemed to sail through life. The good die young, suddenly shot into Gabby’s brain and she shook it away with a small moan and got back into Josh’s bed and turned the lamp off. Her eyelids were heavy and dry with tiredness.

  She thought of Clara. Clara is Josh’s grandmother. Was she still alive? Would she read and connect Josh to Gabby? Would she even remember the name Ellis?

  Of course not. Why was she even thinking about it? Clara would either be in a home or dead by now. Gabby had hardened her heart long ago. It had been impossible to explain, even to Nell, who had insisted Clara had a right to know when Josh was born. Clara had never acknowledged Nell’s card. Gabby knew she wouldn’t and it was the last time Nell had ever interfered.

  It had been the hardest lesson of her childhood to finally understand that a drunk had to really want to stop drinking. And if she couldn’t, she found others like her, until suddenly one day you could not remember anything nice about her, only the smell of gin and a house full of drunks and a life you didn’t understand which had become dangerous. You had no chance of looking out for the mother you loved, despite everything, because you were too busy looking out for yourself.

  Clara had had one sister, Bella. Bella was nice and fat and jolly. Gabby had liked her more than anyone and she would often get a bus to the other side of Bristol after school. Then, Bella left England for a new life with a new man in America. She had offered to take Gabby with her, but Clara would have none of it, and Gabby had never understood why.

  Bella had said before she left, ‘I’ll write, kiddo, as soon as I have an address. Now, you are to write and tell me if things get worse. I’ll come back and get you.’

  ‘Won’t Chuck mind?’

  ‘No, he won’t. He says your mum’s got a screw loose …’

  Bella had said she hated leaving her but she had gone all the same.

  ‘Don’t believe all your mother says, kiddo. She knows exactly who your father was. All I know is that she met him on holiday in Plymouth and got her heart broken. She was always an odd little girl …’

  She bent to Gabby. ‘I told you our mother died when we were tots. I was older and I coped better than Clara. Dad was an odd one, too …’

  She stopped abruptly. ‘You’re fourteen and bright. Get out as soon as you can, kiddo … Please don’t cry. I am only a plane ride away, I’m not forsaking you.’

  But she had. No word came, although Gabby had waited and waited. No letter with an address ever came. Clara had said, ‘You silly little honey-bun. Did you really think Auntie Bell loved you more than I do?’

  Gabby, lying in the dark, heard Elton John start up his crowing. Soon Charlie would get up for milking. Gabby had a sudden sense and shape of herself and her life as she lay where Josh had slept. She heard Reverend Mother’s voice: We pay for our sins.

  In crisis we regress, Gabby thought. What we scorned in childhood we confront in terror at the first hint of tragedy. My mother. She could have so easily been that child again, believing that if you loved someone as hard as you could they would eventually love you back. She could have turned in the dark and whispered some of these thoughts to Mark, but she must shut her mind to Mark.

  I dare not, must not, let him into my thoughts or this house.
She bargained with her God. Pleaded. She was sure of only one thing. If anything happened to Josh she did not want to go on living.

  Chapter 52

  The next morning, Darren deposited flowers, plants, bread, casseroles and eggs up by the back door of the farmhouse, all messages of hope and support from the village. He also delivered an array of the national newspapers. The stricken helicopter crew had made all the headlines and it was a weird, sick feeling for Nell, Gabby and Charlie.

  Simon had rung first thing that morning, and assured Gabby that there was an alert and concentrated search going on to find the crew of the helicopter. There had been no intelligence regarding the capture of any British soldiers.

  ‘Let’s hope today brings us good news, Mrs Ellis.’

  Charlie came in from milking. ‘I can’t lie in bed. I’m better doing what I always do.’

  They spread the papers out over the kitchen table and read them all with a sense of terrible unreality.

  HELICOPTER CREW SHOT DOWN ON RESCUE MISSION IN IRAQ

  HELICOPTER CREW MISSING FEARED CAPTURED

  Charlie read slowly, trying to understand what Josh had got himself into.

  ‘The danger of this “forgotten war” being waged daily in the skies over Iraq was dangerously highlighted by yesterday’s downed helicopter containing a crew of four British servicemen taking part in “Operation Thunderbird”, a multiservice operation.’

  Nell was skimming because she could hardly bear to read. It seemed a military spokesman had refused to discuss rumours that a covert operation involving an SAS undercover unit was involved, and that the Lynx had been on its way to pick them up.

  She glanced at Gabby, then down at the page. Gabby was reading intently.

  ‘The fear is that if any of these pilots are captured by Saddam’s forces we will have to face the spectre of them being paraded and beaten through the streets of Baghdad. The Foreign Office were quick to make clear that British pilots fly over Iraq with UN sanction and any capture of British servicemen will be viewed as an act of aggression …’

  ‘Lovie …’ she said gently, ‘it also says that the capture of any service personnel under the auspices of the UN will have grave political repercussions … I am sure, Gabby, the Iraqis won’t risk an international incident.’

  But Gabby’s eyes were still riveted to the acres of newsprint. ‘As part of a covert operation these soldiers would receive little mercy from Saddam’s men.’

  There it was in black and white, not someone else’s son, but theirs. Gabby turned the newspaper so Charlie could read it.

  ‘The British soldiers will be out there, isolated and hiding in the heat of the day and moving at night when the temperatures plummet. They will all have been trained for such an eventuality as being shot down over hostile territory, and could be making for some arranged point for rescue. But unlike SAS officers they will not have had extensive survival training. Each day that passes diminishes their chance of rescue and increases their chance of capture …’

  ‘Enough!’ Charlie jumped to his feet and gathered the papers up and placed them in a pile on the table. Nell went to make more coffee. Charlie touched Gabby’s shoulder.

  ‘What are you going to do today? Will you be all right if I go out? I can’t sit by the phone, Gab, I’ll go mad.’

  Gabby, in a daze, looked up at him. ‘I’m OK. I’m going to wash some of Josh’s sweaters. I have to stay by the phone, Charlie, I have to, but you go out, it’s pointless two of us waiting. Don’t turn your phone off, and keep within range for the mobile, please.’

  ‘Of course I will. I’m going to go up to the barley field and then I’ll be in the office. It will take me minutes to get back home. OK?’

  Nell walked out into the yard with him. ‘Keep faith, Charlie. I won’t leave Gabby. Try and keep occupied.’

  Charlie looked down at her. ‘It’s so bloody real when you see it in print, Nell.’

  ‘I know,’ Nell said, ‘I know, lovie.’

  She turned and saw Elan and John Bradbury walking down the lane.

  ‘Could you do with some company, some moral support, or are we imposing? If we are, we’ll disappear, you know us well enough …’

  Nell burst into tears. The whole situation suddenly seemed insupportable and she had never been so glad to see anyone in her life.

  The day was hot and they opened the French windows to hear the phone and sat in the little walled garden. Gabby saw how hard Nell had been working in there while she had been in London and was guilty that she had not noticed before. She kept looking at the phone, moving it slightly in case she had not replaced it properly. The radio was next to them so that they could listen to the hourly bulletins.

  Josh’s sweaters were soaking in the old scullery, but Gabby had forgotten them, and Nell, when she went back inside, rinsed them and hung them on the dryer. At lunchtime Gabby rang Simon, desperate for news, but there was none.

  The day crawled, the heat pressed down, and Nell and Elan made jugs and jugs of iced tea. Charlie came in at lunchtime. Alan had been right; he kept finding people trespassing on his land and was infuriated. The only positive aspect was the press were busy with eclipse stories and seemed to have left them alone so far.

  Nell had cobbled salad and ham together and everybody tried to eat something, except for Gabby. She went inside and read the papers all over again. Folded them obsessively into the right creases.

  By six o’clock there would be some news, they were all sure of it. But there was none. Then Simon rang to warn her there was a rumour, but it was only a rumour, that two British soldiers had been picked up and were on their way back to Kuwait.

  John Bradbury left at four. He was going to say an Anglican Mass for the missing soldiers in the village church and afterwards the bell-ringers wanted to peal.

  Dusk came. Charlie and Outside Dog had seen the cows back to the fields and the birds sat up in the small cherry tree singing their evening hymns. The bells rang out suddenly into the still evening and Gabby, Nell and Charlie stood and listened to them in the garden at the farm, and for the first time Charlie turned his face to the fields and wept.

  How did you bear it if something terrible happened to your son? How did you bear it? Knowing each morning you woke that your only son died so far from you.

  Gabby turned to the sea. Small, becalmed white sails dotted the horizon. Over the fields came the poignant and dramatic sound of those bells, filling the air, making people stop in their tracks, chilled at the ancient sound of warning. Gabby thought of the bell-ringers eagerly giving up their time, ringing out with all the heart they could muster because it was the only way of showing the Ellises up at the farm that they were not alone; there was always hope. Gabby was touched and humbled by the solidarity and kindness of it.

  Standing in the garden she had a sense again of the reason she had wanted to stay here all those years ago. Something she had perhaps taken for granted. The comfort of being part of a place, part of the land and a community that dug in close to its own when anything threatened a part of them. Gabby supposed this was how people got through; when tragedy struck they had to turn to each other. The sea had taken so many, how could the people here not understand what Gabby, Charlie and Nell were going through? Whole generations of fishing families had been lost in one night.

  Elan put supper together from the array of dishes that had arrived on the doorstep. Gabby was talking to Simon on the phone and Charlie was sitting at the kitchen table, watching something on the television which he was obviously not taking in. Elan heard Outside Dog barking and saw a man climbing the fence in the corner of the top field. He whipped outside and intercepted him before he got into the yard.

  ‘You are trespassing.’

  ‘Are you Charlie Ellis?’

  ‘I am not. Will you please leave before I call the police.’

  The man got out a card. ‘Look, I’m not a weirdo. I work for the News of … I just want to offer my condolences and to ask how it feels �
�� to have your son as a hostage …’

  ‘I suggest you leave now before I clobber you one. I don’t know how you lot sleep at night …’

  ‘Now, come on, I’m …’

  ‘I don’t care who the hell you are …’

  ‘All I want is five minutes …’

  He stopped as Charlie came out of the kitchen. Charlie was much bigger than Elan and Shadow was with him making a low threatening warning in her throat. Charlie unleashed Outside Dog and then went on walking towards the man with the two dogs each side of him eager and growling nastily.

  The man started to back away. Charlie said softly, ‘If you are not out of here in one minute I swear I will set both these dogs on you.’

  The man turned and started to move away quickly. Charlie rang the police car at the bottom of the lane. Darren was off-duty but the copper inside was waiting for the unlucky reporter when he arrived.

  ‘Well done,’ Elan said to Charlie.

  ‘You spotted him. Right, you two dogs can stay out here, on guard.’

  They went back into the house and said nothing to Nell and Gabby and the second day crawled to an end.

  From somewhere behind them comes a screamed order. They are lifted roughly to their feet, blindfolded and made to walk. The men holding them argue incessantly as they jerk and pull Josh and Andrew along.

  They reach a village – they can hear chickens and children – then suddenly they are thrown inside a small hut. Their blindfolds are taken off but their hands left tied behind them. The bare room is about six foot by twelve with a grille in the door.

  Both men know straight away these are only ordinary Iraqis who have little idea what to do with them, but it will not be long before the arrival of the militia who will know exactly how to extract information.

  This is when I find out how brave I am, Josh thinks. He turns to look at Andrew but his throat is so dry he cannot form words.