Age of Odin

by James Lovegrove

  So those Afghan kids, I loved to meet them and at the same time it broke my heart. Set me longing for home, pining for my crappy two-up-two-down on the estate near the barracks. Where Cody was. Gutted that I couldn't simply walk into his bedroom any time I liked, with its Star Wars wall border and SpongeBob duvet cover, and find him there messing about with his action figures. Couldn't snuggle up on the settee next to him and endure Toy Story for the kazillionth time or tootle along playing Mario on the Wii with him. The only times I truly resented the army and the government's muddy justifications for keeping us overseas engaged in this spurious conflict with no fixed goal - Enduring Freedom my arse - were whenever I was presented with some reminder of how I wasn't on hand to watch my boy growing up, how I was missing out on those milestones like his first day at school, his first wobbly tooth, his birthdays, Christmases, all that.

  Thank God, or maybe Allah, that the village children had left us alone by the time Ivor "Biggun" Davies stepped on that IED. We were making our way back to the Land Rovers, ready to return to forward operating base. The village had checked out, all well, no insurgents lying in wait, no Taliban or Al Qaeda lurking under the beds, just a normal innocent speck of civilisation baking in the gravelly grey foothills of the southern Hindu Kush. We followed the track back to the main road and our waiting transport, Biggun and me on point -

  They told me afterwards that Biggun was catapulted a full twenty-five feet into the air. Came down minus both legs, intestines trailing behind him like a kite's tail. Me, I was hurled aside smack dab into a wall. Another of our unit was blown clean out of his boots. Literally, he landed on his backside with his socks on, assault boots standing where he'd left them. He was unharmed. The other three likewise. Perforated eardrums was maybe the worst any of them suffered.

  Bomb Disposal examined the site later and figured out that the IED had, as was typical, been cobbled together from all sorts of handy household items. The trigger was made from two hacksaw blades, treading on which completed a circuit that ignited the blasting cap, while the principal component was a common-or-garden pressure cooker packed with TNT. It was a fragment of steel from the pressure cooker that punched a hole in my skull and nearly killed me. Domestic shrapnel.

  I was evac'ed to Bastion by Lynx helicopter and a week later airlifted out to Blighty. I then spent two months at Selly Oak hospital, off my tits on fentanyl most of the time. The ward there was nice, if you don't count the poor sods in the other beds worse off than me, the ones with the missing legs or the missing eyes or, saddest of all, the missing minds. Plump, bosomy nurses with hooting Brummie accents bustled around us the whole time. I couldn't understand half of what they were saying, between the drugs and one ear not working and them speaking like drunken milkmaids on a hen night, but they were kind to me and kept throwing the phrase "war hero" my way, which sounded great even though it was utter crap. Heroic wasn't getting yourself laid out by a bomb made in someone's back kitchen from a saucepan and a couple of saw blades. The only word for that was unlucky. Or stupid.

  But I got better. Slowly, like a car struggling uphill on an icy road, going forwards, slithering back, but I made it in the end. They got me upright and walking once more, although for a while my sense of balance was fucked and I'd keep lurching to the left, into the occupational therapist's waiting arms. Which would have been deliberate if the occupational therapist had been a gorgeous babe, only she wasn't. She was five two, fourteen stone, built like an All Blacks prop forward, and only slightly less intimidating. They also got me thinking straight again, because I'd lost just a tiny amount of brain but enough to give me some "cognitive function issues." Probably this was down to me not having that much in the way of brain to start with. Couldn't spare any of the little I'd got, ha ha. I cracked that joke quite a lot during the speech and language sessions. Amused me, if no one else. Anything to alleviate the arse ache of vocabulary tests, spatial reasoning tests, comprehension tests, logic tests, oral tests - aargh! Like sitting my school exams all over again, but more of them, and harder.

  I fought my way back to normality, or as near there as I was ever going to get. I thought I'd made it.

  But if so, why was I in bed again, being tended to by people? Why was my head bandaged again? Why did bits of me hurt? It didn't make sense.

  Obviously I'd had some kind of relapse. I'd been ambulanced back to Selly Oak. How soon after I'd last been there? How much time had passed?

  All very perplexing. Not helped by the fact that the place I was in didn't actually look much like a hospital. Not even private medical facilities stuck you in a comfy feather bed with a heavy brocade counterpane in a room with a fireplace, a flagstone floor and a bona fide fucking tapestry hanging on the wall. And the people who came in to see me didn't wear scrubs or uniforms or white coats. They wore everyday clothing. They looked ordinary. The one who was in charge of taking care of me was quite old, too. In her sixties at least, past retirement age for a healthcare professional. Well preserved, though. Looking pretty good for an old bird, actually. A lady of advanced years who'd lived right and enjoyed herself and wasn't afraid to let it show. She had ash blonde hair with a few streaks of white in it. A round, jolly face, laugh lines, bright eyes. I liked her the moment I saw her. She reminded me of my mother, but in a good way. My mother as I preferred to remember her, the warm cuddly creature of my childhood, not the bitter-to-the-point-of-dementedness divorcee she became after my dad walked out on her to go and play housey with a receptionist at one of the hotels where he worked as a lift service engineer. The girl was all of nineteen, just five years older than his son was at the time.

  I couldn't stop laughing when the old woman told me her name, though.

  Frigga.

  I mean - Frigga!

  How could I be expected not to laugh?

  She took it well. Wasn't the first time, clearly. She just smiled at me, fondly, like you would a child who'd just fathomed how hilarious the word "bottom" is.

  "You'll get over it," she said.

  And surprise surprise, she was right. I sniggered the next couple of occasions I used it, and then that was that.

  I slept a lot. At odd hours, for odd lengths of time. I ate whenever someone brought me food. I relieved myself in the chamberpot provided, which would invariably be emptied and rinsed out when I next needed it. I let Frigga put poultices and bandages on my various injured parts and I drank the medicine she gave me, even though it tasted like boiled sweatsocks, because it took away the pain better than any pharmaceutical I'd ever known and because I could almost feel it and the poultices fixing things inside me, knitting bones, calming contusions, patching torn flesh back into place. I tried to piece it all together, where I was, how I'd got here, and gradually random thoughts surfaced, memories returned in snippets, and it was maybe my fourth day of recuperation when I finally got everything straight. Of course this wasn't a hospital. The snow storm, the car crash, the forest, the wolves, the women on snowmobiles... Asgard Hall.

  And Abortion. Poor old Abortion.

  Made me quite sad, remembering him and what he'd done, saving me from that wolf at the cost of his own life. I blubbed. Proper crying, tears and all. He was a useless tit but still, he'd been a mate, and I didn't have many of those. Arguably, I didn't have any now.

  That time when he spent half an hour chatting up this German girl in a nightclub just off the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, and came back to us boasting about how he'd pulled, and he couldn't understand why we were all pissing ourselves laughing until eventually someone explained that his ladyfriend wasn't as much of a she as she looked like, and he went back to check, and then spent the whole taxi journey back to barracks muttering about a shim, a fucking shim, you all knew and you never told me...

  That time in Belize when he went into a seedy bodega in Cayo West to score some dope off a man there, and we'd told him beforehand that the phrase "hijo di puta" was considered the height of politeness, the Spanish equivalent of "my dear sir" in English, and h
e came running out five minutes later with two massive great moustachioed Mestizos chasing after him with machetes...

  That time on base when he crashed out drunk and we got a black marker pen and wrote "Sergeant Major Phillips" on his forehead, "is a" on his right cheek, and "cunt" on his left cheek, and he spent half the next morning frantically trying to scrub it off before parade at noon...

  God, we were mean to him.

  Abortion.

  Carl.

  Mate.

  Six

  Fifth day, I had a visitor. I woke up from a snooze to find this bloke had pulled up a chair beside my bed and was sitting there, hands laced together on his lap, studying me.

  He was old, like Frigga, but wore his age less well. It seemed to hang heavily on him, the weight of years, bending his neck, stooping his shoulders. The lines on his face turned the flesh into little separate pouches. He had long white hair and a bushy white beard, like Santa Claus, but a Santa with manic depressive tendencies.

  I could only see his right eye. The left, if it was there, was hidden beneath the brim of a big battered leather hat. The hat was cocked and the wide brim bent so that most of that side of his face lay in shadow.

  The other eye shone brightly enough for two, however. It was grey like the North Sea, and there was intelligence in it. The deep, sad kind. Wisdom. I had the feeling that eye had been looking at me a long while, and I imagine that that was how it looked at everything. Steadily, for a long while. With care.

  "Good evening," the old man said.

  "Yeah, is it? I try to keep track, but..." Outside the window it was dark and snowy. For a change.

  "You are on the mend?"

  "Getting there. Things are sore, but I feel like I've been fixed up well."

  "You have. My wife is an excellent nursemaid and a gifted healer."

  "Frigga." The corners of my mouth twitched, but that was all.

  He nodded. "She tells me you came in with quite a litany of woes. Three cracked ribs. A dislocated shoulder. A cut to the head. A torn Achilles tendon. And of course that chewed and broken wrist."

  "I was going for the record. World's most beaten-up man."

  "You're lucky to be alive."

  "I know."

  "Had the Valkyries not found you when they did..."

  "The who?"

  "Valkyries."

  "The three snowmobile birds? That's their name? What, are they in some kind of band or something?"

  "You're surely familiar with the term Valkyrie."

  I racked my brains. "There's that boring Tom Cruise movie. Oh, and a piece of music, isn't there? The one in Apocalypse Now. When the helicopters come. Wagner, 'Ride Of The Valkyries.' Dah dah-dah Dah dah, dah dah-dah Dah dah..."

  "Indeed."

  "They took their name from that?"

  He didn't answer, only grinned. There was something about it, that grin. Something I didn't entirely warm to. Reminded me of the wolves. Yeah, that was it. Definitely a wolfish look about it.

  "Tell me," he said, "you were searching for us, were you not? You and your companion."

  "If this is Asgard Hall..."

  "It is."

  "And the Valhalla Mission..."

  "It is."

  "Then yes, we were."

  "It was an effort to get here."

  I flashed him a stating-the-bleeding-obvious smile.

  "I'm sorry that it was," he went on. "It does seem that many of you have to suffer in order to fetch up on our doorstep, and a few don't make it at all. Wolves in the forest are a perennial problem, of course, but there are worse things."

  "Really? Such as?"

  "You'd laugh if I told you, so I won't."

  "No, go on."

  "I could mention the word trolls."

  I laughed.

  "See?" he said with a shrug. "I'd have been better off keeping my mouth shut. My name's Odin, by the way. Odin Borrson."

  "Gideon Coxall."

  "Pleasure to meet you, Gideon."

  "I prefer Gid. Less of a mouthful."

  "Gid," he said, musingly. "Almost 'God' but not quite. Missed it by a vowel."

  "Never thought of it that way."

  "Whereas I am forever prone to spotting such things. Perhaps over-prone. Looking for patterns and connections and concordances which may or may not exist. It's a failing of mine. A burden."

  He slapped his thighs and stood.

  "Well, I shan't take up any more of your time, Gid," he said. "I just thought I'd drop by and make my number with you. I try and see all the new arrivals as soon as I can. We'll talk further when you're more rested and recovered. There's much to show you, much to explain. But in the meantime, anything you require? Anything that might make your life easier?"

  "Any way I can phone my ex, just to let her and my kid know I'm all right?"

  "No phones. Not here."

  "Oh. How about internet, then? I could drop them an email."

  "Ha. Such things are... not possible at Asgard Hall. We lack the necessary sophistication."

  "Broadband not reached here yet?"

  "Something like that. If you're bored, I could arrange for someone to bring you something to read if you wish."

  "I'm not much of a reader."

  "A book does help pass the time."

  "Really, not much of a reader. Last time I opened a book was at school. Great Expectations. It didn't live up to them. Oh, and David Copperfield. I was expecting a bit more magic in it than there was. He didn't even make the Statue of Liberty disappear once. The only thing I can really remember about that one is the first line. 'Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or... something, something, something...' Obviously can't remember it so well, can I?"

  Odin chuckled and left the room.

  And I thought, Nutter. Not in a condemning way.

  Well, not completely.

  But Odin Borrson was clearly not a hundred per cent sane.

  Eccentric, that would be one word for it.

  After all, trolls.

  Trolls!

  And he'd seemed serious when he said it. As though he sincerely believed things like trolls existed.

  Despite what I'd said about reading, a book did appear. It was lying on my bedside table when I next woke up. Big fat hardback that looked like it had been read several times. Bumped around a bit. Jacket creased and torn at the edges.

  I peered at the large gold lettering on the spine.

  Only President Keener's autobiography. Her life story, her small-town-girl made good saga. From Wonder Springs To Washington. Last year's big bestseller. I'd heard she got a ten million dollar advance for it.

  I left it well alone.

  For about an hour.

  Then curiosity - and/or boredom - took hold. I grabbed the book. There was the prez, gazing winsomely out from the cover. Off to some fancy function, some Republican party fundraiser maybe. Hair all coiffed. Evening dress on, showing a hint of cleavage but not enough to be trashy. Clutch bag. Diamond necklace and earrings. Teeth all sparkly white like only an American's could be. Belle of the ball.

  That face - so wholesome. So shiny and corn-fed and true.

  But you could tell. You could just tell. She was a dirty bitch. It was in her eyes. Get her behind closed doors, down under the covers, she'd be all filth and knickers. She'd do stuff no good girl ever would and not every bad girl would either.

  Or so it was nice to think.

  I started flicking through. Scanned a paragraph here, a page there.

  Soon, in spite of myself, I was engrossed. Engrossed as you might be by a glossy soap opera or a grade-Z slasher flick.

  Seven

  Passages from From Wonder Springs To Washington:

  If somebody asks me where I come from, I always tell them, "I come from where you come from. I come from a small town where the people are kind to each other and look out for each other and go to church on Sunday and bake stuff like there's no tomorrow and always have time for a 'good morning' and a 'h
ow do you do?'"

  But should this person press me, I'll say, "I come from Wonder Springs, Georgia. Location: thirty miles south-west of Savannah. Incorporated: 1936. Population: Just right. Weather: Never less than perfect."

  I was born there. Raised there. Have kin there. Still own a home there. I'm a Wonder Springs girl through and through. The name of that burg is tattooed on my heart. Whenever I can get back there, I go, and whenever I'm wandering down Main Street, that wide old avenue where the cottonwoods are draped with Spanish moss like chiffon accents on a gown, everybody greets me as though I've never been away. It isn't "Oh, lookee here, if it ain't Miss Grand High Mucky-muck, come down from Washington to see how us ordinary folks are gettin' on with our lives." It's "Hi there, Lois!" and "Long time no see, Lois!" and "You drop on by for some iced tea, gal, y'hear?"

  Wonder Springs exists. You'll find it on a map. You can visit. You'll be welcome.

  But for me, it's way more than just a place. It isn't even home.

  It's goshdarn Heaven.

  I was all the things a woman of my age and social standing was expected to be. I was a mom, a homemaker, a baker of cakes, cookies and cobblers, a supportive wife to Ted, a good friend to my gal pals. I was on the PTA at Brian and Carol Ann's elementary school. I volunteered as a parishioner at the First Baptist Church on Mulberry Drive, helping hand out the hymnals and straighten the hassocks. I worked one evening a week at the soup kitchen down on Okefenokee Lane, doing my bit for the homeless. I drove Brian and Carol Ann to more soccer games and cheerleading practises than I care to recall!