by Mat Ridley
* * *
When I next awoke, I quickly wished I hadn’t. The sun that had spilled across the bed earlier was gone, replaced instead by the pale face of the moon staring down at me unsympathetically. Whether I had slept for just a few hours or a few days, I had no way of knowing, but what I did know was that I was feeling very sick. The pain in my cheek was the first to announce itself, and then the other pains and discomforts swiftly followed: a heavy, persistent ache throbbed in my muscles; I was hot; my throat felt like I’d swallowed broken glass; and I had a bastard of a headache.
I reached for the button that would summon a nurse, but almost immediately I felt a cool, damp sensation on what little part of my forehead remained exposed. I looked to my left, straight into the reassuring smile of the nurse I had spoken to earlier. “Hello again.”
I moved my mouth to reply, but nothing came out.
“Shhh. Don’t try to talk. Just concentrate on getting better. I’m right here to keep an eye on you. I’m supposed to be off duty, but we don’t have many other patients in at the moment, and, well, after seeing all those bodies come off the helicopter the other day, I wanted to make sure at least someone survived. Not that I think you’re in much danger. I mean, you’re still young and fit, and if you were going to… well, you wouldn’t have made it this far if things were that serious. But you’re not… out of the woods yet, I’m afraid, so just try to take it easy. There’ll be plenty of time for talking later,” she said, with a strange look whose meaning only became clear a few days afterwards.
I gave her what I hoped was a compliant smile rather than a grimace, and dutifully passed back into an uneasy state of neither unconsciousness nor wakefulness. I bobbed in and out of awareness, occasionally lucid, but often fevered, my body sweating as it continued to fight a battle that had already ended several days earlier for the rest of my squad. Now and then, I would be aware of doctors reading the chart at the foot of my bed, but I could rarely hear what they were saying. They seemed to know what they were doing, though, and after five days, the signs of my sickness had almost completely vanished.
Throughout it all, the nurse was rarely far from my side, or so it seemed. My mind was certainly not at its most reliable, but all the same, I distinctly remember several occasions when the look of concern I caught on her face far exceeded that to be expected from mere professional courtesy. Not that I minded; I was not so delirious that I didn’t notice how pretty she was, and the sound of her pleasant voice as she talked or read books to me gave me something to focus on as I struggled against the infection. But beneath the surface, there was often a sense of there being something more serious on her mind, something itching even more than the stitches in my cheek to get out in the open. Who knows, maybe my curiosity about her behaviour was just as big a factor in my recovery as all the rest of my treatment.
On the morning that I was officially deemed to be once again fit, she could no longer contain whatever it was that had been troubling her. The door had barely closed behind the doctor before she came out with it.
“Good news, eh, Captain Stein? I knew you’d be alright! The fever’s cleared up nicely, and although you’re going to have a heck of a scar, at least you’ll live to tell your children about how you got it one day.”
“I think that’s largely down to you and the rest of the medical staff. Thanks for looking after me so well. I’m sure I owe you my life.”
She looked pleased. “You’re welcome. But it’s God you owe your life to, not us. He’s the one who did all the hard work.”
“Hmm.”
Luckily, her enthusiasm to talk about other things forestalled any deeper theological discussion. “Look, now that you’re better, I have to ask you something. I’ve been wanting to do so ever since they brought you in, but I didn’t want to risk upsetting you all the while you’ve been ill. I hope it’s okay for me to ask you now, though. Sorry if this is a bit personal, but… well, are you the same Daniel Stein who used to live in Hirston?”
That was a bolt from the blue. In the brief moment that passed between her question and my answer, a flurry of different ideas, emotions and scenarios exploded into my mind, mixing and colliding with each other like a school of startled fish. She looked at me expectantly, but I was temporarily unable to meet her eyes. I felt an overwhelming need for caution. I had spent so much time trying to put that part of my life behind me, way behind, that I was reluctant to drag it back out again. I considered denying everything in the interests of self-preservation, but I knew that I couldn’t do that. I owed this woman—whoever she was—a great deal, and the least I could do would be to exchange a few vague reminiscences about Hirston before I was discharged from the hospital. Besides all that, caught in the golden lasso of her gaze, I found it impossible to lie to her.
“Yeah, that’s me.”
“I thought so! This is incredible! I mean, I knew you’d joined the Army, but what are the chances of us meeting like this? Oh my goodness! Sorry, where are my manners? I’m Joanna, Joanna Ridge. Jo. I don’t know if you remember me or not, but we used to go to the same church. You helped rescue me when I got lost in the woods, when I was seven.”
Yet again, the crazy duality of experiencing the same situation from two different perspectives hit me, and it wasn’t getting any easier to cope with. In the mind of the old Dan stirred an uncomfortable memory of that day all those years earlier—the day when we had unearthed a frozen little girl and her friends at the foot of a tree. This Dan’s response was a cautious acknowledgement. “Yeah, sure, I remember you. Small world, huh?”
The reaction of the new and improved (and dead) Dan was quite the opposite. As soon as she introduced herself, the scales were suddenly lifted from my eyes. Even though on some level I already knew that she was Jo of course, her true identity had somehow been kept from me so that I hadn’t consciously recognised her—or been allowed to recognise her—until that moment. Like so many other aspects of this strange re-treading of my life, I can’t really explain it, but whatever the reasons, the instant I knew who she was, a chain of emotions rattled through my brain in rapid, jarring succession: relief that she was okay; happiness at seeing her again; and grief because I knew she was now dead. With the passing of the last link in the chain, it crumpled into a cold, heavy heap at the bottom of my mind. This sudden reappearance of Jo, my Jo, right here in front of me made me ache for all these flashbacks to end. I was fed up with this nonsense. Enough of the past; what of the present and the future?
Despite the emotional storm raging in my dead consciousness, my attention was unmercifully forced back to the familiar—yet unfamiliar—dialogue occurring between my younger self and the woman who was to become my wife. The seeds of love were being sown in even the tiniest details of our exchange: a shared smile at the memory of my mother, back in the days before things turned sour; an intense look in Jo’s eyes whenever she looked at me, the meaning of which would soon become clear, but which certainly did nothing to distract from her beauty; the bright enthusiasm she displayed when listening to the tale of what had happened to me since I’d left Hirston. That was the weirdest part: being in the midst of a flashback of my life, hearing myself telling the same story that I had literally just relived.
Whereas my current self had the benefit of hindsight to notice all the nuances of this gently blossoming romance, the former Dan was less aware of these subtleties. He at least knew that he found her attractive, but back then I was a master at keeping that sort of thing in check. It wasn’t for lack of interest or opportunity, but more a matter of self-preservation, of fear that I would inevitably lose yet another person that I cared for to some event outside of my control. But with Jo, it was different. I had always thought that I’d had enough of loss, but instead of reinforcing that feeling, the deaths of Lewis, my other comrades and my belief in the Army all seemed to have the opposite effect. Maybe the void left by their sudden departure from my life was too large to leave unplugged. Or to put it another way, perhaps
the wound that their deaths had inflicted needed stanching—and who better qualified to do so than a nurse? Whatever the reason, I was looking at Jo, and life, with a new perspective.
Over the next few weeks, very little occurred to challenge that perspective. Once I had risen from what could very easily have turned out to be my death bed—physically or mentally—we got on with the business of falling in love properly. I had been worried that our relationship was going to be hard work, what with all of my issues of trust and independence, but she made it very easy for me. The age difference that had been a barrier to even basic interaction fourteen years earlier had dwindled into insignificance, and we found that our conversations were as comfortable as if we had known each other for years. It was a refreshing experience for me to enjoy such openness; and much as I shared the details of my life with her, so she told me all about herself.
It seemed that Jo’s misadventure in the woods outside of Hirston had had more of an impact on her than was at first apparent. In that resilient way of the very young, she had quickly recovered from her exposure to the cold and the mental stresses of the ordeal, and the doctors had no problem in declaring her fit and well. But Jo had been so impressed by her time in the hospital that, from that moment forth, she was determined that she was going to work there one day. Her parents humoured her, thinking it was one of those phases that all children go through, but the indomitable will that she had shown in the forest—refusing to give in to the cold’s tempting caress—now turned its attention instead to her newly decided career plans, and she worked hard to make them become a reality. And once she had made it, by all accounts she was very good at her job, too; so much so that six months before our encounter at the hospital, her supervisor had encouraged her to think about putting her talents to use in the Army Medical Corps. She had initially been wary of the idea, having only just recently been transferred to the accident and emergency ward, but if you remember, Jo was a lot more religious than I—not hard, I know—and she prayed about it, and felt that that was where God wanted her to go.
The first time Jo told me about this last part of her tale, I did my best to hide my scepticism, but I obviously failed.
“Why are you looking at me like that, Dan?”
I paused before answering, but it was probably as good a time as any for us to bring our religious differences out into the open. “Well, I don’t want to turn this into a big issue between us, but I’ve got to be honest with you, Jo. I know I used to go to church and all that, but I don’t really believe in God anymore. Or, to put it more accurately, I believe in Him, but I don’t want anything to do with Him, and I’m pretty sure the feeling’s mutual. Let’s just leave it at that.”
She looked as if I’d just slapped her, and because of the hurt on her face, I felt as guilty as if I had. “Oh. But Dan, you used to have such a strong faith. Don’t you remember what Mr Wright called you when you found me in the woods that day? He called you an agent of God, I’ve always remembered that. Only people with real faith can hear God’s voice so clearly. What happened to change you?”
“Do you really need to ask? Maybe God tearing my parents’ marriage apart and then driving my mother to suicide had something to do with it.”
“But those things weren’t God’s doing. It was your father’s decision to leave you and your mother, and Geraldine’s interference that… made things worse. If you must blame someone, blame the human influences in your life, not God.”
“Yes, but all of those human influences have direct links to God, or claimed to be acting in His name. If God had nothing to do with it, and they were just following their own selfish instincts, then that’s only because He made them the way they were. And He could easily have intervened to stop them at any point, too. Whichever way you try to look at it, it’s His fault. And there’s no sign of Him letting up, either; just look at what happened to all my friends in that ambush. Exactly why the hell should I worship Him?”
I could see tears in her eyes, and that hurt, but once I had got started, I couldn’t stop myself. All the years of pain and bitterness I had bottled up inside of me shot the words right out of my mouth, and poor Jo just happened to be in the line of fire.
“Dan, it’s not like that. You know that God loves us. Why do you keep that Saint George medallion of yours if you don’t believe that, somewhere deep down?”
“Because it was my mother’s, that’s all. It’s got nothing to do with God, apart from reminding me how he keeps shitting all over my life.”
The tears fell. I realised that my fervour on the subject had gotten the better of me, and that I was hacking away at one of the central pillars of Jo’s world with the axe that I’d had to grind. I tried to rein myself in.
“Hey. Don’t do that. There’s no need to cry. Listen, Jo, I know this is important to you, and I’m sorry I can’t give you the answers you want to hear. I can’t help feeling the way I do. Maybe if I were in your position, I’d find it easier to believe, too. From what you’ve told me, everything in your life has worked out pretty much just the way you hoped. But haven’t you ever questioned your faith? Haven’t you ever had something go so wrong that you wonder why God is doing that to you? It’s happened to me too often for me to be able to just shrug it off, or pray it away, or whatever it is I’m supposed to do.”
She looked downwards, hiding her face and her tears from me. In a low voice, she said, “As a matter of fact, my faith is being tested right now.”
“What do you mean?”
She raised her eyes to search my own. “Don’t you think it’s amazing that you and I have come into each other’s lives again like we have, especially after everything you’ve been through? Don’t you think there might be some higher power behind that, and that maybe our meeting up, our… what we have together already, even after such a short time… is some kind of expression of God’s love? That He’s saying to you, ‘Dan, here, after all the bad things that have happened to you, here is something good’?”
“Maybe. Or maybe what He’s saying is, ‘Here’s something good, maybe the best thing you’ve ever known, but just you wait. That’s the next thing I’m going to take away from you, just like I did with your family, just like I did with all your friends, just like I did with your face.’ I’m sorry, Jo, but my experience of God is that He’s vengeful, not merciful, and that for whatever reason, He’s got it in for me.”
Another tear dropped from her eye, landing in her lap with a soft, audible plop. “Let me tell you something, Dan. I didn’t want to tell you earlier because I was worried that it would sound weird to you and scare you off. Maybe now isn’t the right time either, but I have to help you see the bigger picture. You might think I’ve had an easy life, and maybe in comparison to yours I have, but I wouldn’t have been able to see my way through as far as I have under my own steam. God really does give me the strength to get through the tough times, and later, I can usually see the reason why He’s put me through them in the first place.
“But here’s the thing that’s testing my faith at the moment, and it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to deal with. You see, there were really two parts to the path I was called to follow after I got lost in the woods—and yes, I really do believe that it was a calling, not just an idea born out of my own determination. Becoming a nurse was only half of it, and despite a few minor stumbling blocks, that’s been easy to believe in, and, well, here I am. The other half… I’ve never believed it could happen, because it’s always sounded crazy. I thought it was impossible, even for God, because you disappeared. You might think that I was so keen to join the Medical Corps out of some crazy hope that you and I might meet up again, but the thought never really crossed my mind; over the years, I’ve sort of forgotten about the second thing that God called me to do, dismissed it as a silly fantasy. And yet here we are, just as He said.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“Dan, the second part of my calling was that you and I were meant to be together. Th
at one day, you would be my husband.”
By comparison, the sniper’s bullet that had hit me in the head seemed like a mosquito bite.
The idea of being married to Jo was a thrilling one, no doubt about that, and something that had drifted idly through my mind on more than one occasion since we had met. But so far, that’s all it had been: a gilt-edged fantasy. As I had told her, I was still fighting against my inner doubts, worried that I would only be opening myself up to whole new realms of pain if I were to let her into my life so completely and then lose her to God’s next malicious whim. The implications behind her words—that any freedom I felt was an illusion; that meeting Jo as I had was all according to His plans—soured the whole fantasy, turned the gilt-edging green with corruption. It all reminded me too much of the way I had been used—manipulated—by God to locate Jo and her friends after they had gotten lost.
“Look, I know you must think I’m a total nutcase,” she said, “but just listen for a minute and I’ll tell you the full story of what happened that day.
“When my friends and I got lost and the daylight started fading, three of us wanted to keep on going, hoping that we’d find someone to help us, but Penny was scared because she thought she’d heard a bear. She wouldn’t budge, no matter how hard we tried to convince her, so in the end, we all sat down under that tree together and started shouting for help. But after a while, as it got darker and darker, Penny’s idea about the bear didn’t seem quite so silly anymore. Even Mary thought she saw something moving amongst the trees, and she was always the sensible one. As soon as she said she saw something, that was it—we didn’t argue anymore. We huddled even closer around the base of the tree, piling the snow up around us to build a shelter, hoping to keep out the bear, or whatever it was.