“Where did you meet?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“When?”
“Three years ago.”
“How?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss special operations.”
We stared at each other.
“What was the nature of your relationship with Melanie?”
“Relationship? We were in the middle of a bloody war.”
Suddenly, in the distance, there was a slurred, argumentative voice raised, complaining. It was Justin. He was fed up with being made fun of, fed up with this hellhole.
Mike, enraged by my questioning, stood up and yelled in the general direction of the voice, “Go home, then, if you’re such a baby. Go on, get the fuck out of here. I’ve had enough of your whining.”
A single shot was fired into the night.
“Fuck,” Mike muttered, as anxious as he was angry. “Where’s the stupid bugger gone?”
He was peering into the night when there was another shot and the sound of a voice, ranting.
“Justin!” he shouted. “Justin!”
About thirty yards from us, a figure emerged into the light thrown by the car headlights. He was walking backward, gun raised above his head, shouting. A child ran up to him, fascinated by the spectacle, and Justin waved him away with the gun. An adult grabbed the child and picked him up, swinging him away from Justin. The boy was crying, his voice rising into the night air and mingling with Justin’s.
“Stop, you idiot!” Mike shouted out, moving forward so that his voice reached Justin. But Justin wasn’t listening. And I realized, in that moment, what it was that had Mike so panicked. It wasn’t the gun. Not only the gun, at least. It was that Justin was wandering drunkenly and witlessly into the minefield.
I started to run toward him, shouting, adding my voice to Mike’s. In the dark it was hard to get my footing, and I stumbled but regained my balance. Still Justin was not listening. Drunkenly, he thought we were shouting to argue with him, not that we were trying to stop him. I was only yards from Justin now, and he was waving his gun around. Next to me, a villager suddenly stopped and grabbed my arm, bringing me to an abrupt halt, too. He pointed at the ground. I could not see what he was alerting me to, but I understood that I was about to step inside the skull-and-crossbones marker that defined the minefield. I stopped short of the minefield and yelled at Justin again. At last, illuminated in headlamps, he seemed to hear us.
Confusion crossed his face, then panic. He took another step backward. He did not see that he was moving toward the small bridge over the gully. I would learn later that no one had dared to walk there for years. Then, as he puts his left foot behind him, there was a tremendous blast that hit us, causing us to stagger backward, deafening us temporarily, spraying debris that reached to our faces, forcing us to close our eyes.
Already my memory of that nighttime drive exists only in snatches. We drive through the night across the potholes, toward Phnom Penh. I’m in the passenger seat, my eye swollen closed, the whole of that side of my face bandaged, blood leaking through the dressing. I’m dimly aware that our driver is casting worried looks at me. Dave is in the backseat, huddled in the corner. Justin lies across the backseat of the car, what remains of his left leg bandaged by Mike, who stopped Justin’s bleeding with a tourniquet, who gave Justin a shot of diamorphine for the screaming pain, and who now holds Justin’s head on his lap.
“Jesus, Kes, what have I done? I didn’t mean this, not this.” I hear Mike mutter under his breath, not once but a hundred times, pleading with Jesus and with Justin’s father, the two entangled, judge and jury who will condemn him for what he has allowed to happen. In my muddy brain, I hallucinate that it is Melanie blown apart in the backseat there with Mike and that we are at the War School, driving through the bomb-strewn woods.
Chapter Four
Hong Kong
WHEN I awoke, it was not fear that immediately enveloped me but confusion. I could feel the cool, clean sheets of a hospital bed on my skin. I raised my hand to my face and felt bandage. I turned my head and peered as well as I could with one sleepy eye at the view from the window. Dense junglelike vegetation, a precipitous cliff, distant blue sea. The door opened, and a middle-aged man entered wearing a white coat and a smile somewhat less bright.
“Miss Ballantyne, I am Dr. Kerry.”
I stared at him. Dr. Kerry had an Irish accent, and to say I was disoriented would be an understatement.
“You’ve been medevaced to Hong Kong,” he said with another of these half-smiles, “and I’m glad to be able to tell you that we were worried, but you’ll be fine. Or at least, I’m assuming you can remember who you are. . . .”
I nodded at him. My name, date of birth, my children, their birthdays. Name of husband? I shook my head and he smiled and shrugged.
He handed me a mirror and peeled off a dressing to show me a rude red weal that stretched from the edge of my eye almost to my ear. The wound had been stitched neatly closed. It seemed a ridiculously small injury to have caused so much blood and pain. I had been hit by a flying shard of metal. Land mines can be packed with objects intended to cause maximum damage to bystanders. Many land mine victims spend the rest of their lives with tiny pellets of metal peppered across their faces and their eyes. I was lucky. One small piece of metal, likely a nail, struck my face just at the outer edge of my eye. Half an inch less lucky and it would have gouged my eye out. As it was, the wound was healing, the bruising would recede, scarring would be covered by my hair if I grew it a little longer.
“When can I go home?”
“Forty-eight hours. With a history of head injury like yours, we don’t want to put you straight on a long-haul flight.”
I couldn’t argue. Forty-eight hours was nothing, of course. I understood that in the greater scheme of things, but I wanted to be gone that very minute. I felt fine. A little woozy, perhaps, but basically fine. I was alive, after all. So I felt as though I’d been told my plane would sit on the tarmac for the next forty-eight hours, with me on board.
“You can help to cheer up the boy who lost his leg.”
I stared at Dr. Kerry. Somehow, ridiculously, it came as a shock to hear that Justin was still without his leg. The scene, Justin staggering backward, shouting drunkenly, came back to me, then the blast. The awful car ride, Mike in desperation in the backseat, cradling Justin. I remembered Mike arguing with doctors, fighting to clamber aboard the small aircraft on the Phnom Penh airfield, being gently pulled away, airport officials explaining the plane was full . . .
“Justin really wasn’t himself,” Dr. Kerry was saying. “He’d drunk an astonishing quantity of vodka, and on top of that it seems the poor lad may have had a little bit of a psychotic episode.”
“How can you be a ‘little bit’ psychotic?”
“He was taking antimalarial drugs, and they can bring on temporary psychosis in a small number of cases. He’s lucky to be alive, but he doesn’t feel lucky. And although he’s stopped taking the antimalarial drugs, they’re still in his system, so he doesn’t feel himself at all.”
“What about his parents?” I clutched at straws. I was sorry for Justin, but I was pretty sorry for myself, too.
“I understand his mother died several years ago, and the father has telephoned to say he’ll meet his son at the airport on his return.”
After Dr. Kerry had gone I practiced getting out of bed a few times, and in between I practiced lying down a few times. I could not work out why I was so exhausted. Then I tottered pathetically along the corridors until I found Justin, in a private room. He lay on the bed, his face turned toward the window. He was hooked up to an intravenous drip. His left leg, what remained of it, was in some type of cast. When I went into the room, he turned his face and looked at me, but he didn’t say anything, and after a moment he turned his face to the window again. I went and stood by the bed.
“How are you feeling?”
He didn’t reply, so I sat in the ch
air next to his bed and read the newspaper to myself. A doctor came in, introducing himself as Dr. Lam, and I got up to leave, but he waved me back into a chair and pulled a face at me.
“You don’t have to go,” he said. “She doesn’t have to go, Justin, does she? I just want to give you a rundown on how you’re doing. Usually when I do this, there is some family or a friend here. She can remember the bits you forget, so you don’t have to bother me to say it all over again tomorrow. What do you think, can the young lady stay?”
There was a moment’s silence and then a low, cold voice from the bed:
“She’s old enough to be my mother.”
I stood up to go, but as I pulled the door open, Justin spoke again, this time in the childishly courteous voice I remembered from before the accident:
“I’m sorry. She can stay.”
“Biologically,” I told him, settling back into my chair, “I am barely old enough to be your mother. For practical purposes, I’m at most an elder sister.”
“Don’t flatter yourself, Aunty,” the doctor said, and Justin gave a small grunt of appreciation. Now that he had Justin’s attention, the doctor continued. “Okay, now let me tell you what’s going on here. Justin, I want you to look at me, and see where I am pointing. Okay. Your leg was blown off here, midcalf. Look, here. Originally, there was more leg, but the wound was very untidy, the bone was shredded above the ankle. Land mines are designed to tear people up, so I had to neaten the wound for you. Look, Justin, look where I’m pointing, don’t keep looking away. At the moment you have a rigid cast on your leg, it helps control the swelling. Of course, it won’t always be bandaged like this. Soon we’ll change the dressings, but we have to control the swelling for some time, so we will use elastic bandages, perhaps, or a compression sleeve. I had to cut off more of the bone also because it must be shorter than the skin, because the skin has to be stretched over the stump and sewn together, as if I’m wrapping a parcel, you understand?”
I glanced at Justin’s face, but there was such raw shock there that I looked away. Instead I watched Dr. Lam. It was clear he had done this before and that he had perfected this blunt, upbeat style to bring his patients face-to-face with their new reality.
“The good news is that you still have your knee joint, and that will make things much easier when you have your new leg and you start to have physiotherapy. Soon we will give you a cast designed to take a simple training prosthesis called a pylon, so that you can soon learn to stand and walk. They will make your new leg for you in England. There’s no point in fitting it until the healing is done, because the leg will change shape a little bit, the muscle will wither, the swelling will subside. You can go home as soon as your wound is healed a little more, and when you are comfortable in a wheelchair. Most important over the next few weeks is hygiene for the wound, and making sure the dressings are clean, because what we do not want is infection. Any questions? . . . No? Okay, you are wondering what is there in your drip? These are antibiotics also to guard against infection. We are also giving you painkillers. And these will continue for some time. Right now, if we didn’t give you painkillers, your leg would hurt all over. You might even feel pain from the part of the leg that is not there. It is called phantom pain. We have to find ways to control this.”
“Is there anything he won’t be able to do?” I asked, embracing Dr. Lam’s principle of learning the worst.
“Did you have plans to play football for England, Justin?” he asked.
Justin was by this point incapable of speech, incapable of even shaking his head, but Dr. Lam assumed a negative.
“That’s okay, then, you will have a normal life.” And on this airy assurance, Dr. Lam took his leave.
I sat there for a while after he had gone. I couldn’t think of anything to say, comforting or otherwise. And Justin was similarly silent. After a while, I heard him clear his throat. Then he said, “When’s my dad going to get here?”
I got up and went over to the bed. His face looked waxen, his blond hair a sickly yellow against the stark white of the pillowcase, his pale gray eyes silver with pain.
“Did they tell you he’s coming?” I asked.
“No. I just thought—”
“I don’t know,” I said quickly. “I thought he was waiting for you to come back home, but maybe I’m wrong. I can check. It’s just a few days.”
Justin closed his eyes, and later I left, hoping that he would sleep.
That night I called home. My mother was worried and tearful. Dave had already told her what had happened, but I had to go through everything again, and only when she knew every detail did she seem to feel better. I spoke to the children, who had no idea anything was wrong, and I spoke to Carol, who lives with us and looks after the children while I work. I cried a little when I hung up, but that hurt, so I had to stop.
Then I called Finney, who had heard the basics from my mother. He sounded exasperated.
“What on earth is going on?” he demanded.
“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“What were you doing in a minefield?”
“I wasn’t in a minefield. I was at the edge of it. These things spit out shrapnel.”
There was silence from his end.
“Does it hurt?”
“Well”—I tried to jolly him along—“I’m not going to have a face lift if this is how it feels.”
That night, the telephone beside my bed rang. It was Maeve, spluttering more with frustration than condolence. Why couldn’t she reach me on my mobile? Was I in pain? When would I be back? Would I need time off work? But once I’d reassured her that I was not at death’s door, the cloak of concern was rapidly shed.
“Robin,” she said, her voice tense, “it occurs to me that I can’t quite remember what you’re up to out there. I’m sure you’ve run it past me, but could you just remind me?”
I took a deep breath. The time for keeping Maeve out of the loop was past.
“I’m putting Melanie Jacobs into my series on missing people,” I told her, “and I discovered that the last man to speak to her had met her before, which the police weren’t aware of. He left England after Melanie disappeared and came to Cambodia.”
There was a terribly long silence as my words bounced off some distant satellite and found their way to Maeve and she absorbed them and exploded back into the stratosphere.
“But you can’t. You simply can’t do something like that without informing me!”
“Why not?”
“You know as well as I do,” Maeve retorted, “that Melanie Jacobs is not just anybody. She’s a Corporation employee, and as such there are procedures that must be respected.”
“Okay, I respect the procedures.”
“You do?”
“I’m informing you, aren’t I?”
“Robin, I know that you have never, ever, respected any procedure in your life. At times I have even admired that lack of respect. But in this case it’s not that simple.”
“Why not?”
There was a knock on my door, and a nurse peered into the room, looking concerned at my raised voice. From the other end of the line, there came a sigh of exasperation.
“Do nothing,” she told me, “speak to no one, arrange no further interviews, don’t even think about Melanie Jacobs until you have talked to me. Do you understand?”
I told her that I understood, but of course I didn’t. I had expected a slapped wrist, not a gag order.
When Dave came to visit, he brought my laptop. I rigged up a connection through the hospital telephone and found an e-mail from Finney.
Saw Veronica Mann at a meeting today. Haven’t seen her in ages now she’s transferred. She sends her best wishes. She said I probably hadn’t been properly sympathetic. Sorry about that. She also said I should try and make you laugh. I said I’d feel more like telling jokes if you could find a way to steer clear of major head injury in the near future.
I read through the e-mail a few times,
hoping to find a smidgeon of comfort somewhere, but if it was there, I couldn’t see it. He hadn’t even put my name at the beginning of the e-mail or signed off at the end. I wasn’t expecting a row of hugs and kisses, but a simple “Love from” wouldn’t have gone amiss. A message from my mother, however, disclosed the newsworthy fact that Finney had dropped by at my house while she was there. This was the first known instance of Finney seeking out my family when I was absent. He had even been persuaded by Carol to read a bedtime story to Hannah and William, which he had done, my mother wrote, “in the same Tone of Voice he’d use if he was giving Evidence in court.”
When I went to visit Justin the next day, I found him seated out of bed and more animated than he had been. He was, however, extremely upset. Once he started talking, he couldn’t stop. It was as though all the pent-up emotion of the past days, and perhaps even of the past few weeks, was pouring out of him.
It was the thought of going home that sparked the outburst.
“Who’s going to look after me? Dad’s not a nursemaid.”
“You’ll look after yourself,” I kept telling him. But it seemed as if Justin felt he had no choice but to be dependent from now on. He could not see things getting better. In his mind’s eye, he would be lying flat on his back or sitting in a chair for years to come.
He talked and talked about the time he had spent with Mike, seeming to blame him for the catastrophe that had ripped his leg off. Justin, it emerged, felt that Mike had bullied him mercilessly. When I asked him for specifics, the bullying he described was not so much cruel as insensitive, as much about Justin’s own sense of inadequacy as about Mike’s urge to rub his nose in it. He talked about Mike’s friendship with his father, Kes, a friendship that to Justin embodied an overwhelming weight of machismo.
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