I reached up for the seat belt and pulled it across my body, braced for another blow, but nothing happened. I glanced across at Padraig. He was driving in a strange hunched position, trying to avoid the blinding dazzle from the mirror, peering ahead. My right hand felt for the anchor point, and I heard the buckle engage as I pushed it home. The car lurched again and I heard a woman’s voice behind us, a muttered oath. I looked round. There were two figures behind, both crouched against the back seat, their bodies half turned. The bigger of the two, the man, was trying to steady the gun against the parcel shelf. The car behind was only yards away. Beyond the headlights, there was nothing but darkness.
I looked at Padraig again. His lips were moving, but there was no sound, nothing recognizable, just the high-pitched whine of the engine. Another bend was coming up. I could see it in the distance, a tight left-hander, a low bank and a frieze of trees beyond. The bend raced towards us, an image from a film, someone else’s life, someone else’s nightmare, and I knew with absolute certainty that we’d never get round. So, I think, did Padraig because the last coherent thing I remember is his hand reaching down, hunting for a lower gear, and the woman screaming, a wild animal yell, and the gun going off in the back, a huge hollow sound that seemed to last for ever.
Briefly semi-conscious, I registered a face above mine. It was a face I thought I knew. I tried to smile but nothing happened. Then I heard a siren and the sound of people shouting and the face wasn’t there any more, curtained by the darkness and the rain.
7
Quite a lot of the next three months or so is indistinct, a blancmange of hospitals, nurses, pain, tests, operations, more operations, more pain and brief bedside interludes with a series of gloomy consultants.
My parents flew over to see me that first week, at the Gransha Hospital in Londonderry, but I remember very little of the detail except the expression on my father’s face, bending over the bed, trying to feed me chicken soup. It must have been Christmas, because there was holly on the wall and balloons on the ceiling, but what drew my eye was the tears running down his face. I remember watching them, quite dispassionate, almost used to the pain by now, thinking that there must be something wrong with him, something that the ward sister could put right with a couple of tablets or a glass or two of Lucozade. The fact that he might have been crying about me, the sight of me, the state of his precious daughter, never crossed my mind. At this point, I should add, the nurses had been wise enough to spare me the benefit of a mirror. Which, under the circumstances, was probably just as well.
From Londonderry, after Christmas, I was helicopted to Aldergrove Airport and transferred on to an RAF plane to London. I was stretchered all the way and ended up in a private ward at the Churchill Hospital, near Marble Arch. Curzon House, ever sympathetic, sent a modest bunch of flowers to welcome me home. Unfortunately, a mix-up over the delivery date meant that they didn’t turn up until Stollmann had appeared for the debrief. That way, the flowers seemed to me to be a sardonic reward for what little I was able to tell him. Padraig, the builder, had seemed on the level. The meal we’d shared at the hotel had been delicious. Events in the car park had been a big surprise. The rest, beyond doubt, he already knew.
Stollmann had noted it all down without comment, sparing me the tonic of small talk. When the nurses arrived to wash the bits of me that still showed, he retrieved his coat from the back of the door and beat an embarrassed retreat. I watched him as he left. He stood outside in the corridor for a minute or two, a stooping, cadaverous figure, studying his notes, shaking his head. Hopes for Padraig had evidently been high, but the yield, as we agents say, was minimal. Three more headstones in the Republican plot at St Joseph’s Cemetery. And a largish hospital bill for little me.
By now, I was word perfect on my tally of injuries. The Escort, according to the report Stollmann had received from our friends in the car behind, had left the road at about seventy miles an hour. It had gone sideways up the bank and turned completely over before hitting the trees. Padraig’s side got the worst of the impact. Both he and the girl in the back were killed outright. The man behind me, not belted in, had been thrown clear. He never recovered consciousness and died three days later.
My own injuries, by comparison, were minor. Both my legs were broken, one of them in three places. My right arm was fractured between my elbow and my shoulder and a number of ribs were also cracked. I’d sustained a collapsed lung, and there was concern for a while about the likelihood of serious disfigurement. Apparently, the casualty staff at Gransha Hospital had spent most of the night picking glass out of my face, and a deep laceration around my right ear had given the plastic surgeon plenty to work on. The wound had effectively meant re-attaching my ear to the side of my head. The join had taken a total of forty-nine tiny stitches, a long crescent-shaped track around the back of my ear, but the tail of the wound curved down beneath the earlobe and out on to the cheek itself, and there was nothing that plastic surgery could do to disguise the scar. At first, numbed by analgesics and quite unable to distinguish between one source of pain and another, it didn’t concern me. But as my body began to mend and I re-entered the world of mirrors, I became more and more aware of the way that my face had changed.
I’ve never been especially conscious of my face. It’s wide and friendly, with tawny skin and big dimples. I’ve always smiled a lot and enough men have told me I have a nice mouth for me to believe it might be true. Either way, it had always been a face I’d been happy with, in that carefree, mostly unconscious way you simply take things for granted and get on with it. It was a trouble-free face, a face you didn’t have to worry about. Until that night in Londonderry.
After Londonderry, after the crash and the operations and the moves from ward to ward, it became a different face. It became a face that I fretted about, the focus for all that delayed shock, all those nightmares that the pain and the trauma had postponed. To begin with, it was a mechanical thing. The fact was, they’d sewn my ear back on. Consequently, whenever I lifted my head from the pillow, glanced around, nodded or made any other sudden movement I worried that the ear might fall off again. What if the flesh hadn’t healed properly? What if the skin was too thin to take a proper stitch (it seemed very thin on the other side)? What if the stitches themselves had been botched?
These questions dogged me for weeks, making me nervous of the slightest head movement. After a while, one of the nurses got quite concerned, ignoring all my excuses about a stiff neck, rightly diagnosing a near obsession with my still swollen ear. A day or so later, she had a quiet word with the resident plastic consultant, who arrived one afternoon with a couple of textbooks and a pad. Sympathetic, if slightly formal, he drew lots of helpful diagrams, showing me exactly what the guy at Gransha had done and told me that he’d personally give the repair a score of nine and a half on a scale of ten. His tone of voice suggested that I was lucky to have ended up in such skilled hands on a wet night in Londonderry, and when he’d gone I did my best to accept what he’d said. The ear wouldn’t come off. The mend was a fine piece of work. In fact I was bloody lucky to have two ears at all.
To some degree this worked, but as time went on I became convinced that my face was lopsided. In the mirror, OK, it didn’t look too bad. I was pale, certainly, but face-on the scar was barely visible, and even with my head half-turned, the reality wasn’t quite as awful as I’d imagined. Once my hair had grown back and I’d got a bit of colour in my face, it would just be an oddity, a piece of bad luck that I’d simply have to live with. Yet the evidence of my eyes wasn’t enough. Inside my head, where it mattered most, the wound had become grotesque, a hard, livid ridge of raised tissue, a wholly new feature in that familiar stretch of landscape I called my face. It made me not me. It made me different. Above all, it made me uncertain. I’d never been uncertain in my life. I’d never had a problem with men. I could pick and choose as I liked. But now I wasn’t so sure. Who’d want to have anything to do with me now? And what would happen wh
en they’d got over the shock of seeing the scar on my cheek and we’d become friends and they were running their fingers through my hair and they found the rest of it? All forty-nine stitches?
In the hospital, they gave me some liniment called Aqueous Cream. It came in a big white tub and it was cool and rich. I was supposed to work it into the scar twice daily, softening the tissue, but I quickly became obsessed with it, applying it hourly, the fingers of my right hand rubbing and rubbing, as if, somehow, I might erase the bloody thing entirely. The end result of all this was a litter of repeat prescriptions and another session with the consultant. He asked to see my right hand and examined the index and middle fingers. The tips were soft and wrinkly. He looked up at me.
‘It won’t work,’ he said. ‘Not the way you want it to.’
‘How do you know?’
‘It just won’t. Believe me.’
I withdrew my hand, embarrassed and angry, knowing he was right, not wanting to accept it.
‘OK,’ I mumbled, ‘so what else do you suggest?’
Convalescing, back in Devon in early March, I told my mother about the exchange and about my obsession with my wrecked face, the first time I’d discussed it with anyone. She understood exactly what I meant at once, brushing back the newly grown hair from my temples, running her fingers over the scar, reassurance, benediction.
‘Do you really?’ I said. ‘Do you really understand?’
‘Yes. Of course.’
‘How? Why?’
She smiled. ‘It happened to me once,’ she said.
‘Did it?’
I blinked. My mother’s face was flawless. Fifty-three years had left barely a wrinkle. She nodded, still smiling.
‘I got stung by a bee. On the upper lip. Here.’ She touched the corner of her mouth. ‘Your father was abroad, thank God.’
‘Why?’
‘It blew up like a football. I felt like Quasimodo, you know, all wrong.’
‘Yes … all wrong.’ I frowned, my right hand straying involuntarily upwards, probing for the ridge of scar tissue. ‘That’s it exactly, all wrong.’ I looked at her. ‘So what happened?’
‘It went down again.’
‘And?’
‘I still felt all wrong. For months. Then…’ she shrugged, ‘your father came back, and it was suddenly all right again.’
‘And did you tell him?’
‘Good Lord, no, of course not.’
I nodded, smiling, trying to apply the lessons of this parable to my own life. My mother, as ever, got there first.
‘You need a little entertainment,’ she said. ‘Someone to take you out of yourself. I’ll see what I can do.’
Rory called the following weekend, phoning first, ever the gentleman. He was down for a bash at CTC, the Commando Centre at Lympstone. Ruth was with her mother in Cheltenham. The kids were at school. How did I feel about a couple of miles along the beach at Exmouth and a pint or two afterwards? I smiled down the phone. It sounded fine to me. With my ear on his blind side, it might even be mildly therapeutic.
Rory appeared an hour later. By now, I hadn’t seen him for nearly four years, an interval that had done nothing to sort out exactly how I really felt about him. Were we still friends? Could we pick up where we left off? Or had that single indiscretion, that one brief flirtation with the truth, moved the relationship on to a different track? Standing in the front room, watching him push through the gate and saunter up the garden path, I hoped not. He was wearing his usual civvies – cotton shirt, jeans, thin leather jacket, impossibly Spartan gear for such a chill March day – but his head was up, his hair was blowing in the wind and he was whistling some tune or other, way off-key, the same old Rory. I went to the door. I was off the crutches now and out of plaster, but I still had to walk with the help of sticks. Rory stood in the sunshine, looking at them, grinning.
‘I’ve left the Kawasaki at home,’ he said. ‘Probably just as well.’
We took the bus to Exmouth, five miles to the west, where I’d worked in the nursing home. The town has a lovely beach, and a slightly fifties feel. Out of season, it’s quiet and restful, and we walked along the promenade, beside the rows of wooden beach huts. The tide was on the ebb, the water pouring out of the estuary, the tidal stream dotted with windsurfers, stitching back and forth to the sandbank offshore. Rory watched them as we walked, his arm through mine, a steady pressure, what my mother calls ‘the Marine two-step’, sympathy with menaces.
Beyond the big green buoy that marks the edge of the shipping lane, Rory jumped down on to the sand and I followed, waving away his proffered hand. The beach slopes away towards the water and I tottered down without a thought, no pain, no anxiety, listening to his running commentary on this performance or that. Rory himself was an excellent windsurfer and in this – as in most other things – he took no prisoners. One particular guy got the full treatment. The man was out of his depth. If he was very lucky, he might survive. If he was even luckier, his girlfriend might take his board away and give him something more appropriate. Like a wheelchair. He stopped in mid-sentence, aghast, and looked at me.
‘Shit,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘No need.’
‘No, really. It can’t have been much fun.’
‘It wasn’t.’ I glanced up at him. Just being with the man made me want to smile. ‘It’s OK now though.’
Rory frowned, his hands deep in the pockets of his jeans. He looked genuinely astonished.
‘You’ve got over it?’ he said. ‘Already?’
I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said, ‘that’s not what I meant.’
‘It’s not?’
‘No.’
‘Oh…’
He hesitated a moment, half wanting me to go on, but I knew I was trespassing again, the stretch of wild country that lay the other side of the last evening we’d spent together, and I shook my head.
‘About that pint,’ I said brightly. ‘I’m freezing.’
By nightfall, I was back home in Budleigh Salterton. Rory stayed for supper, and afterwards he and my father pulled up their chairs around the fire and compared notes about various Corps issues. This was another Rory, one I’d never really met before, infinitely more serious and grown-up, a man who weighed his words with great care, treating my father with exactly the right blend of informality and respect. Listening to them both, watching Rory’s face in the firelight, his body bent forward, his elbows on his knees, the way he used his hands, I sensed what it was that made him such a good leader, why men followed him, what it was in his voice and manner that gave them the confidence to risk their lives. It was nearly ten before he left, running up the road in case he’d missed the last bus. I shut the door behind him. My mother was at the foot of the stairs.
‘Well?’ she said.
‘Well what?’ I looked at her, quite lost, still wondering about the bus.
‘Did it make any difference?’
‘Difference to what?’
‘Your…’
She touched the side of her head, behind her ear, and I gazed at her a moment longer, still none the wiser. Then it dawned on me. My scar. My wound. My poor lopsided face.
‘Didn’t give it a thought,’ I said truthfully. ‘Not once.’
I returned to London at the end of March. I felt, after Devon, immeasurably better. My legs still ached from time to time but I could walk without sticks and I began to put back some of the weight I’d lost. My other bones were well and truly mended and I’d finally found the courage to throw away the tablets that I’d more or less relied on for a decent night’s sleep.
Drug-free, I also began to ask myself some of the more obvious questions about the cause of my injuries. If the cover arrangements at Londonderry had extended to the hotel car park, why on earth had I been allowed to walk into a trap? If they’d seen Padraig’s friends get into my car, why hadn’t they intervened? The answer, of course, was all too obvious. The hotel car park was only the start of the trail. The smart money
was on holding off, on keeping a low profile, on seeing where the trail led. But if that was the case, why turn a simple piece of surveillance into a car chase? Why declare your hand? Why frighten them? Why drive them, quite literally, off the road? To this latter question I had no answer, and the more I thought about it, the stranger it became.
Back in my flat, I settled in. Jenny, a colleague from work, had been popping round since Christmas and the place was spotless. The shelves in my tiny larder were stocked with food and there was fresh milk in the fridge. There were flowers in a vase in the living room, and three months’ worth of calls on my answering machine were neatly transcribed on a list by the phone. Most of them I’d already dealt with, friends who’d tried to get through to wish me well and had later phoned the hospital. But down towards the end of the list was a name I didn’t know. It was someone called Karen. There was no second name. Just Karen. She’d phoned twice, first a couple of weeks back, 17 March, then again three days later. Each time the message had been the same. I peered at Jenny’s careful script. ‘Please get in touch as soon as you can,’ it read, ‘it’s really urgent.’ There was a phone number beside the message, a prefix I didn’t immediately recognize. I lifted the phone and dialled the number. After a bit a woman answered, a flat Midlands accent, slightly nasal.
‘Karen?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s Sarah. Sarah Moreton.’
‘Who?’
‘Sarah Moreton. You left a couple of messages. On my answerphone.’
‘Oh…’ the woman’s voice went faint, then came back again: ‘it’s you.’
‘Well?’
‘It’s about Mrs Alloway.’
‘Who?’
‘Beth. Beth Alloway. She’s had a breakdown. She’s in hospital. She… I can’t talk on the phone like this. I’ve got her daughter here. Laura.’ She paused. ‘Are you still there?’
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