by Rodney Hall
Of course, the question that seeks out every cavity of his being and fills it with cold air is: why were we sent to Iraq when there were no weapons of mass destruction? Surely a country can’t be invaded without something being proved against it?
He opens a new file.
now everyone knows there were no wmds. yet we were still sent to fight. we went ahead and declared war. we invaded someone else’s country. me too.
Adam faces the fact that the only limits to possibility are in himself, as a new life takes over, a life of the mind free from the familiar boundaries. Past and present interchangeable. He can dip in and out. People, places, ideas, all fit the pattern of a new grand plan. The book he’ll write.
His good ear picks up stifled sobs. Of course, of course. That’s Bridget, face to face with reality in her room. Well, there’s reason enough for grief. She lived her own life while he was away. And now she’s being asked to give it up.
Long afterwards a door opens up there, wide enough for wifely words to come down the stairs like wooden balls bouncing his way.
‘By the look of things, your medics have arrived.’
Retrospectively there is the sound of an approaching car. Confirmation. A new routine of regular home visits. Rehab. This is certain to be tough. He has a fair idea what to expect.
‘How many. Are they?’
The delay is explained because she must wait to see.
‘Two. One of each.’
Bridget knows she faces a delineating moment. How much is she willing to be part of the treatment? It’s her choice. Ought she, or oughtn’t she, to commit herself? If she is ever to break free, now is the time to speak out. Whichever way it goes, she will no longer be who she was: confronted by either the dead-end duties expected of an invalid’s partner or life at large as a woman with regrets.
Like a spectator—helpless to change her unfolding life—she accuses herself: I am not strong, I am not forgiving, I have no vocation.
Her fate will be sealed the moment she lets these visitors in. She will have accepted responsibility for her husband in the state the army has delivered him. Nothing more dreadful than that. And there is nothing more dreadful than that. Yet her heart fails at the very thought of what he has suffered. She cannot dwell on her own needs for any length of time. Hence the difficulty. It’s for him that Bridget weeps. Oh yes, for a while there (when the death notice was withdrawn), she expected him to stay just long enough to arrange where he would go, or whether—if he preferred to keep the house himself—she would be the one looking for another place to live. Before she saw him. Before she suspected there was more to this than met the eye. Before she began gnawing the gristle of doubts about why, while he endured so many operations, she had not been told.
She’s still only twenty-seven, after all.
She mops her tears, pats her hair and runs stumbling downstairs. In the hall mirror she glimpses a passing wraith, eyes deep and lustrous as a night-time predator. She flings open the front door. The support team, loaded with equipment, is already climbing her rockery steps. She watches their bent heads.
The woman, clearly in charge, leads the way. And looks up.
‘I’m Vanessa, your counsellor. This is Josh, your physio. We are from the psychiatric unit PDSD.’ And Vanessa squares herself, consciously overweight, her short skirt stressed and legs slightly bowed. Badges flashing, she pushes past Bridget in a friendly way and ploughs across the hall rug to confront the patient himself.
‘Hi,’ Adam greets her. Then adds with intuitive humour, ‘I’ll try not to. Ar. Give you. Too much trouble.’
Her neat head a powerhouse, Vanessa copes with her first assessment of his condition. Though the shock ‘knocks her for six’, as she is later to say, she lets no hint show. A professional—and used to coping with crises—she comes good. She reaches some sort of credible encouragement.
‘More and more he should feel less and less,’ she generalizes, using the third person to bypass him, to maintain her steadiness by addressing the wife who has followed her in. ‘Key to everything is keeping active. He needs to be out and about.’ She notices the CSAAD already assembled and ready. She pats it approvingly. ‘This is special. So how does he feel about his job as test pilot?’ She looks pleased with her own wit.
Josh meanwhile sets up a collapsible therapy bench, testing it for firmness.
‘Pilot?’ Adam answers for himself, even while his clothes are expertly removed and his flesh—stark naked because he cannot manage underwear—stretched on the rack. ‘Sure. You betcha. Wait till the. Gas kicks in.’
He gasps as the preliminary bendings and stretchings begin. He will never admit to his limits being reached. Now he’s turned over. And turned back. The more the damage is exposed the more determinedly he refuses to accept that his future dwindles. Silence amplifies facts. Nothing can disguise the terms of his survival. Earth mercilessly tilts toward the sun. ‘Those raghead fellas. Got too good at. Target practice,’ he pants. ‘No sense of. Humour.’
‘So, tell me,’ Josh invites, removing his own jacket to reveal bare arms tattooed with a sleeve of flowers, ‘how this happened?’
‘A missile. Hit me.’
‘Sthat all?’
‘Yeah. And I’ll. Tell you what. Mate.’ Adam cracks the shell of pain. ‘Their best weapon of. Ar. Mass destruction.’ Heaving with effort he drives the words out. ‘Was a. Fizzer.’
A veteran of active service himself, the physio has seen more than enough mutilations in his time. He ruminates. ‘More damage here, too.’ An ever-deepening silence tells its own story, the examination being now conducted in the language of touch, the exposed flesh is handled with possessive confidence. Exploratory fingers seek the locus of pain. A man and a stranger, Josh leans close. Assessing the tender tormented flesh he is overwhelmed by what he finds. ‘Suturing everywhere!’ he murmurs. ‘I never saw the equal.’
‘All of the. Ar. Bits and pieces are. Mine.’
‘Talk about burns!’
‘Ninety-two percent toast. So. They say.’
‘Some surgeon! You got lucky with that surgeon, sir.’
Adam growls and grits his teeth against the pain.
‘There’s been a. Whole. Ar. Fucking battalion of. The bastards.’
Though the extent of damage is clear, the bearable limits of mobility are yet to be negotiated. The sufferer sinks himself in his concentration on being manhandled.
‘So. Who trained you,’ he gasps. ‘Spanish Inquisition, was it?’
Josh chuckles. He is obligingly conspiratorial.
Meanwhile Vanessa sits down with Bridget, realist to realist, and immediately probes the heart of the matter. ‘His needs will be taken care of. No worries in that quarter. He’s not the issue. We’ve booked him in for the long haul. So, what now for you?’
Adam overhears the question. Also a pause shared by the two women, in the absence of reply, which suggests some connection from which he is left out. He cranes to see. No use. Their expressions waver just beyond his field of vision. He improvises.
‘I reckon if. Stephen Hawking can. Investigate black. Ar. Holes in space.’ He stretches his twisted mouth for workability before barking, ‘I can find. My own.’
An eerie rippling tremor clouds his vision.
‘Strange they gave approval to put money into this place.’ Josh offers his opinion, looking across the room and into the newly equipped bathroom. ‘A house without access to the street.’
Adam says, ‘Home.’
‘Even so. When we get you fully mobile you might think about moving.’
Having noted this comment with approval, Vanessa returns her attention to Bridget.
‘What now for you?’ she persists.
‘So many decisions,’ Bridget begins . . . but cannot control her lips.
‘Relax as much as possible, sir,’ Josh murm
urs.
‘No sir. Not an officer. Ever.’
Vanessa tackles the negotiations from a fresh angle.
‘He’s doing well, by the look of things, if he can manage the CSAAD already. Soon he’ll be properly up and about,’ she concedes soothingly. ‘Who knows? One day he might be well enough to travel.’
Adam hawks a laugh.
‘You bet. Next stop. Timbuktu.’
Once he is released to rest on the bed and covered with a warm towel the agony subsides. The tide sinks. Blood stops its spinning razors. Vanessa folds her arms and Josh folds his bench. Adam is allowed a break. He regroups. There are forms and disclaimers for Bridget to sign. She feels herself sinking deeper. When the time is right Josh suggests a demonstration of the equipment. ‘Standing up is good for you,’ he apologizes. Always game, Adam struggles to oblige. And here he is, scissoring about with stupendous clumsiness.
Bridget nods approval. Oh, he is beyond anyone. What’s more, his grit somehow shames her, even while seeds of rebellion can be felt germinating in her heart.
*
Bridget twists and turns in bed. Heat and humidity are so cooked into the walls that all through the night the house scarcely recovers more than a couple of degrees. Her sweaty skin disgusts her. The maddening thing is that, every time she seems on the point of being engulfed by sleep, some premonition kicks in to alert her to the threat of crisis. Well, because she knows the discomfort will be every bit as bad downstairs. It’s why she left his windows open and a fan turning. That room tends to trap a stubborn backwash of stagnant air. And, naturally, so much scar tissue creates a problem with perspiration. Quite suddenly seized by the need to check, she gets up. She listens. The suburban silence absolute.
Has he died or something? She ghosts down to see. What confronts her there stops her in her tracks. Profoundly asleep, Adam has shed his wrap. Spraddled at an angle and snoring faintly, he lies naked on the mattress. His erection—all too large and inappropriate—startlingly and disturbingly familiar.
Anyway, that’s the answer to that.
He wakes. The nightlight glows blue. A clench of pain blurs his vision. Vertigo leaves everything ashimmer. With the buoyancy of a bubble he weighs nothing. The joke being that he is the lucky one—the others in the vehicle died—he can wake when he wakes, he can eat when he feels like eating. He is alive, therefore feels pain. The ointments and antihistamines repeatedly fail, so he lets himself go out among the galaxies, dwindling to a vanishing point. He dares, regardless of curled yellow edges spoiling his field of vision, the rasp of fabrics on itchy skin, surgical parchment breaking to scabs and an ant colony on the march taking over unreachable parts of his anatomy. But the humble tyranny of the bladder brings him back to reality.
He must learn to stand and walk all over again. And, doggedly victorious, does.
The green glass bowl on the windowsill fills with light—a specimen flask of the perfect—pure light, sufficient to itself. Is this what joy feels like? He is delivered to another day of life. Is this what death feels like? The wise clear transparency in a shell of pain? Out there through the window suburban houses stand around like big pieces of ancestral furniture. He consolidates his progress with the Contraption. Here he comes, completing the circle now his bathroom needs have been satisfied, lost in thought, propping himself in view of the fiery ball of another dawn, because the beauty of the sky surpasses everything. Whichever—rising like this, or setting to indigo obscurity—it’s worth the effort.
He chooses the window seat where she usually sits, lowering himself on to it. Difficult manoeuvre.
Memories take over because he has not yet paid his full respects. Where was he? Out on the plains of Iraq in the dangerous night, yes, and escaping by mobile stairway with Private Fletcher. The only hitch happened when they ran out of fuel. Lost and hungry they knocked at the door of the nearest mud hovel. An ancient man answered, uttering a cry of welcome as if he expected them. And invited them to put away their weapons. He gave them a perfumed drink of unidentifiable flavour. And then lifted from a battered cupboard the book he kept there. This he opened. He tapped the page with three fingers. He touched his heart. Enough that the strange script was not Arabic. An illustration showed two men chest-deep in water—it was a baptism—the turbaned one, his free arm around the other, held a cross in his hand.
The Christian survivor shared his secret, tears welling. He brought his palms together in prayer before replacing the treasure in its cupboard, relic of an ancient sect. ‘What the fuck’s he on about?’ Killer demanded, quietly neutral, though nothing could be more obvious. Adam remembers saying, ‘If you ask me he just put his life in our hands.’ Silently praying his own prayer that Fletcher would not shoot the poor fellow on the spot. Which worked, apparently, because Killer chose to see the humorous side, scoffing, ‘You too? Is it contagious?’ . . . but even he let out an admiring whistle when their host produced a can of fuel from a lean-to out the back. ‘Bugger water into wine’—he smiled his slow smile—‘this guy’s miracle’s the bomb.’
Adam gazes into the glass bowl. Such green light. The transparency sufficient to itself. His clock declares a sequence of stilled statements. Clouds wait in the sky above for the sake of being watched. All sensation passes like playing cards dealt by the arch-swindler. Well, gambling suits him. He begins to uncrack his torso as a counterbalance to the deadweight of legs. Feeling a bit better, he assembles his parts. He steadies his weight against the wall. Luckily a corner. The Contraption props him up. This takes forever. Then, hey presto, he’s dressed. Did he manage this unaided? A coffee aroma arriving from the kitchen transports him straight to the stopped heart of the present. So, Bridget is home (this answers one question). And not just Bridget but a friend from the old days hovers, half in and half out of the porch, to all appearances sinister—backlit, a fellow whose expression is obscured by the dazzling world he has come from—fierce halo surrounding his head. He speaks.
‘I could swear you were asleep standing up.’
Adam adjusts the Contraption to square his shoulders.
The visitor’s head turns, the naked question in his eyes reveals him as Zac. So, it’s only Zac—the cousin.
Bridget levitates across the glossy floorboards. ‘Breakfast’s on the way,’ she says. Bare feet of an angel. Robe clinging. Glorious tints play in her long dark hair. ‘Yours won’t be long, darl.’
‘It’s too much. Ar. Trouble to. Eat.’
‘Zac’s here,’ she explains.
‘I notice.’
‘Did you say hello?’
He did not and still doesn’t. He is too unprepared. His own estranged cousin appearing like this. He blinks to shake off the impression. And begins the business of sitting himself down.
‘Hi,’ Zac volunteers, not bothering to detach his lips from a notably opaque mug he has just been given. ‘Salutations.’
‘How are your parents?’ Bridget asks.
‘Good. I think. It’s five years since Dad got his job in Doha. They seem to like it there. I rang to tell them Adam’s home.’ Resentfully, ‘It’s them that sent me round.’
To brush off the lack of acknowledgement from Adam himself he puts the drink down and digs in his pocket. His hand plunges with concentrated effort. ‘See here, on my mobile.’ He produces the thing and taps the screen. ‘I still keep your wedding photo.’
Accepting the warm phone, Bridget grimaces at the sight of her own image (dressed in white for the sacrificial lottery) standing beside the boy Adam as he used to be, his hunched shoulders and naughty grin giving the game away. Zac himself with a carnation buttonhole! The actual Zac, receiving it back, cradles the image in both hands, lurching Adam’s way to thrust it under his nose too. But Adam cannot see. Mercifully stone eyes do not work before lunch.
‘. . . cool set up,’ Zac concludes comfortably, looking around at the altered room as he pockets his phon
e. And then, not able to imagine what else might be done, reaches out to test the strength of the Contraption’s struts.
Adam shuts down, in some sense ashamed. Memories of that rash wedding with its routine vows—till death do us part, so help me God (indeed!)—as a cheeky game to trump the other boys. And, besides, she’s gorgeous. So who’s complaining! Twinges mesh throughout his mutilated flesh to encase him in spiky wire netting. He’d like to think of something witty to say but his mind just won’t reach. Not yet. It’s Zac who supplies that.
‘Have they fitted this thing with cruise control? Ha ha.’
‘Zac’s become a politician,’ Bridget puts in hastily as she senses something wrong.
And he at last coughs up a couple of words, ‘I notice.’ Which will have to do.
‘A senator for the No Gay Marriage Party.’
Now it happens.
The old Adam says, ‘To stop them. Ar. Breeding?’
Bridget lets out a little shriek of laughter. Left with no choice Zac pretends to be amused, gulps some coffee, checks his watch and seizes the opportunity. ‘Well, mate . . . must be off. Two committee meetings to attend. It’s what I do when not kissing babies. No such luxury as weekends any more. Glad to see the nation’s taking care of you. Give me a bell if there’s anything you need. I’ve got mates in high places these days. As of yesterday the Minister for Rehabilitation’s a friend of mine.’
And he’s gone.
Bridget, out on the verandah, waves. A hand sprouting from the Range Rover’s open sunroof waggles in reply.
‘Fancy Zac in politics!’ She invites Adam to share her disbelief. ‘So young still.’
‘He’s dumb enough. Ar. After all.’
And that’s that for visitors. Perhaps there will be no more. Ever. With any luck Cousin Zac may be the last sentimental reminder of a life lost.