by A. J. Kirby
I looked for comfort somewhere, anywhere in the room and settled on the fact that although it was cold and impersonal, at least it felt secure; cell-like. And from the look of the weighty door, it did look as though they had me imprisoned, but then I wasn’t worried about getting out, I was more worried about something getting in. In a space so sophisticated, some people better off than me could have readily believed that monsters didn’t exist, but I knew better. I knew about Tommy Peaker and what he’d done to me. And almost as soon as I even thought his name, I was wracked with more excruciating pain from my foot, and from my shoulder and from my chest and I’d find it difficult not to scream.
Okay, I suppose I did scream. And then, shortly afterwards, I saw a face squashed up against the small grilled-window on the door, fogging up the glass with her breath. But presently, the figure slipped away back into the corridor instead of coming in again and administering me with the cure-all, forget-all drug which I so needed. They probably had me smacked up to the eyeballs on methadone or something, but in a country like Afghanistan, they could have got hold of some proper H for me. Hell, in Mayo province alone, they had more opium fields than in the whole of the world’s second biggest heroin-producing country. Hell, they could have reached out into the hospital garden, if there was such a thing, and plucked out a few choice poppies for me.
Why weren’t they coming in? Why weren’t they telling me what was going on?
My mind tripped back to the horror videos I’d watched in my youth. All of the awful things they could do to you even in a hospital as professional-looking as this. I’d seen films about people being kidnapped for their organs. Some spooky surgeon would just cut out people’s hearts without anaesthetic, on beds just like this one, and stick them in the chest of some rich guy that just had to carry on living. I’d seen films about body-snatchers lurking through wards. I’d seen films about… Oh why was I choosing to concentrate on thoughts like that?
I suppose it is part and parcel of bullying that the bullied develops this all-encompassing fear of everything. And in the end, they end up torturing themselves almost as badly as the torment which has been dished out by the bully. Tommy Peaker – whisper the name – hadn’t needed to warn me that he would watch me. Some part of him was already inside me, meddling with the wiring of my brain.
And with that thought, I suppose I screamed again. And this time, as I watched through the glass, a figure appeared. And this time, the figure at the door passed an access badge along a reader. Heavy locks clicked back. The figure ran a hand through his hair, paused for a moment as though composing his thoughts, and then stepped into my cell.
‘I’m, uh, sorry, Lance Corporal Bull,’ he began, absently looking around the room for something; refusing to meet my wild eyes. ‘I’m sorry we kept you waiting, only… Only I’m only just back from trying to scrape two of our own boys off a dirt track. These road-side bombs… Simply terrible.’
I grunted by way of response.
‘Don’t know if you remember me from yesterday, son,’ he continued. ‘I’m Dr. Montaffian and I’m apparently scheduled in to treat you today.’
Treatment? What were they planning to do to me? I studied his face carefully for any signs of what was to come. Dr. Montaffian was a grim-faced little Yankee with salt and pepper grey hair, a goatee beard and a big tattoo on his right arm. He didn’t look like a doctor. He didn’t sound like a doctor either. As he reached over to the foot of the bed and picked up a flip-chart which obviously contained my observation records, he began whistling that old Prince number, ‘Purple Rain’.
If my foot was working properly, I’d have leaped off the bed and clocked him one. He could have at least shown me some respect, no matter that I wasn’t one of ‘his boys’. Instead, I concentrated on staring at him; hoping that my eyes would burn a hole in him. I watched him flip through a couple of pages before he abruptly stopped whistling. Now he started this annoying tutting, occasionally nodding his head, all the while stroking his stupid goatee beard. For some reason, I kept wondering why he was allowed to have a beard, being a doctor. Surely it was some kind of hygiene-risk. And all the time he was reading, I longed for him to start whistling again, because that would mean that I was all right, wouldn’t it? That would mean that it was nothing serious…
Suddenly, he slapped the clip-board against the metal rung at the bottom of the bed and looked me full in the face for the first time as though only now remembering that I was still in the room.
‘Where am I?’ I gasped.
‘You don’t remember our conversation yesterday then?’
‘Clearly I don’t or else I wouldn’t have fucking asked,’ I seethed.
Dr. Montaffian strolled around the side of my bed, bumped one of the machines away with his thigh, and promptly took a seat, almost crushing my arm.
‘Perfectly understandable that you’re a little… wired,’ he said in a new, softer voice. His face didn’t look so grim any more now either. ‘From what the nurses said, you had a rough night. But they checked on you round the clock.’
‘Stuck their heads through the door… Or peered through the window more like,’ I snapped. I wasn’t getting sucked in by his doctor’s smooth-talk. I’d seen it every week on Casualty when I was growing up. Smarmy, lying, untrustworthy sneaks, they are.
‘Well, uh, Gary; they’ve actually been instructed that they are not to set foot in this room,’ he said, quietly. Then, leaning over me so close that I could smell the onion on his breath, he added: ‘Uh, military police instruction.’
‘Military police?’ I yelled.
Montaffian placed a remarkably small hand on my shoulder. I felt the warmth from it. Real human touch for the first time since… Nurse Thomas, back there. ‘Uh, did you really think that you could just show up on a military base from outta nowhere, smash through our security gates and just get away with a stern ticking-off?’
I shook my head, like a good little boy.
‘Well, uh, don’t worry about it anyway, son. Not for now. While you are under my care, they have been instructed that they are not setting foot in this room either. You’re safe here, son.’
I longed for him to say those words again: you’re safe. In fact, I longed for Montaffian to simply keep talking. Once he got into the flow, his voice had a real soothing quality to them, like the kind of voice that you could listen to on one of them stupid relaxation tapes or something.
‘Where’s here though?’ I asked.
‘Well, let me see now, uh; how well up are you on the geography of Afghanistan?’
I wanted to laugh at the irony of it all; here was me that had a fucking near-geography teacher no less talking-talking in my ear all day long about Afghanistan in Sergeant Davis and yet I knew nothing really. I knew where we’d been one day, where we were going the next and that was it. But explaining that to an American –even one of Montaffian’s obvious intelligence - would have been a difficult task. They don’t get irony, do they?
‘Fuck all,’ I said.
‘I’ll make it simple then. Uh, we’re in an American base close to the eastern edge of the Helmand province. To get here from virtually any direction you would have had to pass through hundreds of miles of unforgiving countryside, assuming that you are who you say you are; a soldier from the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment. We’ve looked at the briefings, and from what we can tell, your boys were last stationed way out west… If you’d got your bearing wrong by even a single degree, you would probably have ended up baked by the sun, dehydrated, run out of diesel, or stalked by some animal…’
‘Shit,’ I whistled, not sure whether I would have been more pleased to have simply died out there in the desert, sparing me the terrible knowledge of what was to come.
‘You’re very lucky, son,’ continued Montaffian. ‘Just remember how lucky you are…’
It was the second time in a matter of days that I’d been told I was lucky, or charmed. It didn’t feel like it, not after everything I’d been through.
In fact, if this was luck, give me anything else. I closed my eyes. The light was becoming too harsh. I needed to go to sleep. But Dr. Montaffian’s hand started to shake my shoulder. There was something else he had to say. And suddenly I knew that it would be bad.
‘Son, uh, I hate having to do this to young men like you, but it seems to be my lot in life to have to do it,’ he said. Then he let out this long sigh, and I swear that right in the middle of it, his breath seemed to catch, like there was actual emotion in there somewhere and not just smarmy doctor-emotion. ‘What I was saying earlier about you being lucky. I suppose you could say I did that in order to sweeten the pill. Because the next thing I’m going to have to tell you is that we can’t save your foot. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing we can do.’
For a moment I didn’t say anything. All I could think of was poor Do-Nowt and his amputated leg. They were going to amputate my foot. They were going to amputate my foot!
‘No,’ I said, quietly. ‘Let me out of here and I’ll make my way back to…’ ‘There’s no way I can let you out of here… Disease will spread from it if we do not act now,’ he said. ‘You won’t survive.’
He probably expected me to fly off into a rage, because rather too quickly, he swung his legs round and climbed off the bed. But he hadn’t reckoned with the fact that this wasn’t the scariest thing I’d heard recently. Not by a long chalk. I closed my eyes yet again and breathed a heavy sigh.
‘I’d like a second opinion,’ I asked him calmly.
‘Son, uh, son. I know that this must be a shock you… You can get angry; I’d understand,’ he muttered. He was the one that didn’t understand.
‘Okay, I’ll get angry,’ I said in this awful monotone voice that came from somewhere deep within me – perhaps the Tommy part. ‘I don’t believe anyone so stupid-looking could ever have made it through seven years of med. school. So bring me someone that doesn’t whistle fucking ‘Purple Rain’ while they read med. charts and I’ll say no more about it.’
Of course, Montaffian took it all with a pinch of his salt and pepper hair; he showed me the x-rays and I couldn’t really argue against that evidence. Yet still, he brought one of his colleagues to see me for the fabled ‘second opinion’. The new guy was a tall, vampire-like man that simply looked at my foot and shook his head before leaving the room as though I’d really wasted his time. The lanky twat didn’t even bother to speak to me; it reminded me of the two sergeants up on the ridge before we went down into the gully, before the building and before Tommy.
When he came to collect me to take me down to the operating theatre, Montaffian was flanked by two burly looking orderlies that looked as though they’d been through a spell in the marines. The doctor nodded to me as though acknowledging the absurdity of the situation; as if I was going to escape. In fact, he looked a little guilty about the whole state of affairs. Part of me wanted to tell him that it wasn’t his fault, but I’ve never been that guy. I’ve never been the kind of person that will go out of his way to make another people feel better, I know that about myself. And I reckon that I’m pretty much excused any recriminations considering the fact that I was about to have my foot amputated.
It was strange the way that I couldn’t seem to get properly angry about what was to happen to me. The old me would have kicked and screamed so much that they would have needed five or six of the big, mean orderlies to restrain me. But the old me hadn’t had so many other things on his mind. Meekly, I allowed myself to be lifted onto a gurney and then wheeled out of the room. As we went through the door, the gurney jolted against the door jamb. Pain shot through my foot. I met the eyes of the meaner looking orderly and he gave me this revolting sneer as though he’d done it on purpose. I grinned back at him; he’d just given me the last feeling that I’d probably ever have in my foot.
I didn’t feel sorrow or anger or even fear. Just numbness. As I was wheeled down the sterile corridors, I spotted the military police. There were four of them; all had their arms folded tightly across their chests and their chins jutting out. When they saw me, they stood up even straighter, if that were possible, and one of them tipped me a wink. Later, the wink said. After the operation, your ass is ours. At least, I thought that was what the wink said. It would probably have had an American accent after all.
I twisted my head and looked the other way. And I just so happened to see the black and white chequerboard tiles on the floor of the corridor. Just like at Newton Mills School. It had to be a sign from Tommy, it just had to be. And if he could infiltrate this place, then I had nothing to worry about from the damn military police. Assuming I wasn’t just imagining the whole thing.
It was only when we reached the swinging double-doors that led directly to the operating theatres that I realised that it was really happening, and it was happening now. That it wasn’t a dream; I really was going to lose my foot. That Tommy or no Tommy, something awful was happening. It wasn’t just some faraway event like when the doctor broke the news to me, or even when the mean-looking orderly bashed the gurney against the door to my room… It was happening now.
Everything seemed to click into focus. It was as though, for the first time in my life, I realised that there was such a thing as consequence. Only in that moment had I realised that the world was turning; a spinning dance-floor of momentum from which I couldn't escape. For so long I’d been living in that one moment, head-lost. Now I understood that this terrible thing was going to happen to me and I would have to live with the physical consequences of it for the rest of my life. And although that life might not have been forever, it was still real. This moment was still real. More real now than in my most desperate moments of the previous sleepless night. More real now than even a few moments ago, as we passed the military police. Before, the situation was abstract. This could happen to you at some point in the future. Now, there was no avoiding the fact. My foot was going to be amputated. I would no longer be whole. I would forever be defined by what was missing. If there was to be forever. For now, what I had to worry about was the very real possibility that I would be fleeing Tommy Peaker a cripple.
I gripped onto the metal struts of the gurney with white-knuckled hands, started chanting in my head: this can’t be real. This can’t be real. But I couldn’t convince myself. I knew. I knew.
‘Is there no alternative?’ I pleaded.
Montaffian solemnly shook his head. He looked tired. More tired than I’d seen him even yesterday after he’d had to scrape two Americans off the road. Big black saddlebags hung from his eyes. His beard looked more unkempt.
‘No way we can delay it?’ I begged.
Montaffian looked away for a moment. But then he looked back at me.
‘Give us a moment, will you boys,’ he said to the orderlies. And they immediately left us alone, clomping off down the corridor muttering between themselves.
‘There’s no going back, Gary,’ he said, softly. ‘You need to understand the reality of the situation. If you do not have this operation, you will die. And I know that, uh, in your current condition, you may believe that death is a viable alternative to this. After all, what fit and healthy young man could consider themselves an invalid… But at some point in the future, you will value life again. I promise you.’
I stared into his milky blue eyes. I both hated and loved him in that moment. Montaffian told me what I needed to know; which was unlike my experience with the rest of the medical profession. People who usually wanted to keep the cards close to their chests, not revealing anything of their hand until the very end, if at all. Dr. Montaffian told me his hand from the off. He also told me my hand. And when you’re dealing with the devil, that’s very important.
Our eyes still locked, Montaffian shouted back to the two orderlies.
‘I think we’re ready now.’
I nodded and succumbed to consequence.
At first there was darkness and I was not aware of anything. Not time, not space, not my mind or my body. In this time, I suppose I was fl
oating. Drifting, like someone that’s lost at sea. Next, a vague awareness washed over through me; not feelings per se, but rather the humming emergence of some kind of consciousness. Faraway sounds. Dappled light. Colours. Like falling from a great height. And at the bottom came more confusion.
I was drowning in an enclosed space filled with mud and leaves. I could sense the edges of my known universe, as though my mind was sending out distress signals and they were simply bouncing back to me off the walls. Somewhere else, voices became louder and more distinct. I felt that if only I had the strength, I could push on through to the other side. The walls weren’t rigid at all. Somehow I knew this as a law of the universe before I knew much else. I knew I could get back. But I had no strength. I didn’t know who ‘me’ was. But I knew that whoever this ‘me’ was had crossed over onto the wrong side of the fence. I wasn’t supposed to be here. And deep within this new place, I knew that fear was my first reaction.
Nevertheless, voices became louder. Somewhere, faraway, dazzling lights were being shone through the walls, trying to reach me. But they wouldn’t reach me. Not through all of the mud and leaves which teemed around me.
I’m here, I wanted to shout. Just push through the walls and help me out.
But the voices did not respond. The inane chatter continued. Somewhere in the distance, music was playing. Two records at the same time, blended into this awful cacophony. Past and future mingling into some discordant present that just didn’t sound right.
And then my mind was finally clicked off stand-by. I clutched at the lifejacket of awareness and I tried to push. The voices finally sounded as though they were being directed towards me. I reached for the voices. I kicked up from the depths, not caring whether some kind of interstitial bends would render me half-senseless for the rest of my life. I had to get away. And I was getting away. I could feel this ‘me’ growing into the empty shell of my body. But just as I woke, I felt icy claws raking at my shoulders, trying to pull me back in. Just as I woke, my nostrils were filled with the overwhelming stink of fish.