Safe from Harm

by RJ Bailey

  I glance up at Gerry, a lad from Leeds who has been trying very hard to grow some manly stubble. His eyes are red from the dust and his lips cracked. He is scanning the ruined houses behind us, with particular attention paid to windows, open-air galleries and rooftops, watching our backs. Good lad.

  I tell him where we have to get to and he nods, as if I’d just said we were popping out for a pint of milk. I know his insides aren’t as calm as his exterior. I certainly know mine are as wriggly as a bag of snakes.

  I wait until he is crouched behind me at the front wheel of the Snatch, count to five and give him the go signal. My feet scrabble on the dirt for a second until my boots find traction and I sprint at a crouch, ignoring the way the medi-pack straps bite into me. Gerry, not so encumbered, skips alongside me, spinning as he goes to cover us through 360 degrees. I hear the chatter of his SA80 and the alarming zip of return fire slicing the air around my head.

  Dust devils dance around the doorway that is our target, as AKs stitch holes along the wall. But it’s our God watching over us that day, not theirs, and we tumble inside, slamming the bullet-riddled door shut and letting the cool darkness take us.

  I wait a minute, my breathing loud in my ears, my eyes adjusting from searing sunlight to a softer gloom. They are watering freely and I blink to clear away the film of water. ‘OK, Gerry?’

  ‘Nominated. Not elected.’

  It would be a line from some old movie he watched with his dad during the long years the old man was dying. I’m not sure Gerry ever actually made it to school, but ask him about the films of Randolph Scott or the story arcs in Home and Away and he is on it. He also has a good working knowledge of antiques and how to buy property in the country.

  The building is just a barren, empty shell of interconnected rooms, many of which, judging by the smell, have been used as latrines, either by the insurgents or us. Probably both. It reminds me my bladder is at bursting point. I’d have to find somewhere soon or piss myself. I had to stop waiting until I could no longer stand the pressure. Urinary infections are the bane of women in this place.

  We find the two of them in the room farthest from the door to the street, which I really don’t like. Too easy to box us in.

  Gerry reads my mind.

  ‘I’ll be out here.’

  My throat is parched from grit, heat and fear. I suggest everyone has a drink and take a gulp of lukewarm water that does little to alleviate my thirst. Gerry does the same and then trots off to take up position.

  It is Big Rex, a Geordie, who has been hit. With him is Charlie, a handsome mixed-race boy from Moss Side, whose good looks are spoiled by the scars from a bottling in a pub when he was sixteen. Four years ago, I remind myself. They are all still boys. But then, I’m still a girl, really. We just grow up a little faster.

  I take off my helmet, unsling my pack and kneel.

  ‘I got the bastard,’ Rex says.

  For the first time I notice the crumpled shape in the corner, the dark sprays of blood up the walls. I don’t feel much about a dead insurgent, not when I have one of ours to tend. I pull on my latex-free gloves.

  My radio comes alive. ‘You OK, Buster?’ It is Freddie, the senior medic, the West Country twang in her voice somehow more pronounced over the airwaves. Buster is my nickname. Because I’m always saying I need a pee. Like in Blockbusters – ‘I’ll have a “p”, Bob.’ So I was Blockbuster for a while. Which, of course, got scrunched over time down to Buster.

  I look at Rex and lift his hands away from his stomach. I do the quickest MARCH-P casualty assessment protocol ever. Basically it’s a to-do list to remind you where and what you should be checking in the patient. ‘I have an AW,’ I tell Freddie. Abdominal wound. Not much I can do about that. It could be he was lucky and nothing much was hit by the AK round. Or he could be bleeding to death as I look at him. ‘Cat-B. I’ll need a casevac.’ Casualty evacuation.

  That was Freddie’s call. It would mean a request to brigade HQ. ‘So do I. I’ve got three Cat-As.’ Category A means danger of death, patient requires immediate surgery. Three? Even for Freddie, that’s a lot. ‘There’s a Chinook incoming. Five minutes.’

  I get the HLZ location. The clearing two blocks away. The Chinook won’t wait long. We had to be there. I hate Chinooks, big, clumsy, noisy and dangerous. But I liked the alternative even less.

  ‘He going to be OK?’ hisses Charlie.

  I give him a look that tells him he shouldn’t be asking. Not in earshot, but I give an optimistic reply. I clean up the wound as best I can, apply SwiftKlot to stem the bleeding – I know it isn’t quite the miracle dressing the makers pretend, but there are times when it is just what the CMT ordered – and give him a ten of morphine intra-muscularly. Just enough to take the edge off, not enough to reduce him to a dead weight.

  I explain we are going to have to move. I tell Charlie to look at the map and work out a route. It’s partly to distract him while I find a corner of another room, pull down my trousers and take a long, satisfying pee.

  Outside there is a lull in the fighting. It means nothing. The insurgents don’t take tea breaks. They are probably regrouping.

  When I return Charlie tells me there is an alley out back. If we do a right, another right, then a left, we’ll be at the Helicopter Landing Zone. I pull Rex to his feet and he shrugs me off. ‘I can walk.’ Fit, proud young man that he is, he probably can, even with a bullet rattling about somewhere in his abdomen. He picks up his SA80, and we gather at the door to the street.

  I imagine – or maybe I don’t, maybe they’re real – the familiar deep thwap-thwap of the Chinook’s blades slicing the air. I prepare for the blast of heat that will hit us as we step outside, the temporary blindness caused by the unforgiving sun.

  ‘OK,’ says Gerry, ‘let’s go.’

  We open the door and freeze. It seems every insurgent in Iraq is out there. All with either an AK or an RPG raised, pointing at us. Gerry makes to close the door, but it won’t come. The hinges are frozen. We all try. And then the first rocket is fired, whooshing towards us . . .

  I sit up, aware of how wet the sheets are. The dream, as always, is not entirely accurate. We didn’t lose a Snatch driver. I usually carried my own SA80, although I can only use it under strict LOAC rules, the Law of Armed Conflict that tells soldiers who, what, why and when they can pull the trigger. Big Rex was shot at a command post. It was a head wound, not stomach. He died instantly.

  But some things were true – I was always hot, sweaty, thirsty and I always needed a piss.

  I padded down the corridor to the bathroom, checking on Jess en route. The sassy, manipulative teenager disappeared when she was asleep. Her features were set in a relaxed half-smile, as if her dreams were sweet indeed. She had thrown one leg out from under the covers, pinning her one-eared monkey beneath it. I wondered how long the one-eared monkey had left as a favoured sleep companion.

  I went over and kissed Jess, as softly as I could, like a butterfly landing on her. She made the sort of sound you make when you are trying to get a hair out of your mouth, and rolled over. Monkey fell to the floor and I scooped him up and tucked the poor thing next to Jess. ‘Love you,’ I said. Neither the monkey nor Jess responded.

  I went to the kitchen, poured myself a large glass of iced water and drank it in one. It was strange, I never had combat dreams when I was with Paul. All the bad things, from the army and before, were boxed and put in some cerebral attic. He was like the proverbial little boy with his thumb in the dyke, stopping them bursting through. Now he was gone, they were free to flow at will. And I sometimes felt I was drowning in them.

  Or maybe it was the fight with Bojan that had triggered the dream. Technically you might say I had won the bout, but I was all too aware that I had been lucky, that my winning tactic was hardly a blow for sexual equality. In retrospect I thought maybe he hadn’t been frozen by the sight of my chest. What he’d done was take a long look to show me he had the time to window-shop. It was another ta
ctic aimed at humiliating me. I was fortunate that his timing had been off and mine, for once, had been spot-on. But the victory, if that’s what it was, had come at a price. I could see that cost written on my body. Nothing was broken, but my right kidney was throbbing fit to explode and my muscles felt like I’d run a marathon. It simply wasn’t used to that much adrenaline, I guess.

  I looked at the clock as I gulped down a second glass of water. Four in the morning. I walked back along the corridor and, on impulse, I went back to Jess and slid in next to her. She gave a little grunt and snuggled against me. I could feel her warmth radiating through the cotton of her pyjamas and onto my damaged skin. It was like balm. I had a few precious hours before I had to put my black-and-blue body into smart clothes once more and see the Sharifs. And I wanted to spend those hours with my baby girl.

  That night, while I slept with Jess tight in my arms, Ben’s computer system was hacked and left with more viruses than an influenza ward. He blamed me for that. He was right.

  SEVENTEEN

  The blood hung in the air, a crimson arc caught by the low sun and, for a moment, I thought how beautiful it looked against the mist rising off the canal water, like a monochrome rainbow. And then the frozen second was gone, and the liquid made an ugly splatting sound onto the towpath.

  I ran past for a few steps, propelled on by my momentum, and then turned back, heart thumping loudly in my ears and my breath scouring my throat. I couldn’t actually speak, so I stepped on board the boat and pulled myself up onto the roof. A spray that size had to mean arterial blood.

  The man who had cut himself was sitting on the top of the small, electric-blue narrow boat – the Slim Pickens – watching the blood pulse out of the wound with what appeared to be bemusement.

  I took off the sweatshirt I had tied round my waist and quickly wrapped it around the wound. He didn’t resist. I remembered my dream and I wished I had a SwiftKlot dressing.

  ‘You OK?’ I managed to gasp.

  He nodded. ‘It’s not as bad as it looked just then. I flicked the blood off my arm. It’s not an artery, if that’s what you were thinking.’

  I noted the cutters and the red-flecked tinplate next to him and put the scenario together. He had been installing a small array of solar panels on the roof. He’d been trying to cut a piece of metal for a housing and had slipped, the raw edge slicing into his forearm.

  ‘Even so, that’s a lot of blood. You have a first-aid kit?’

  He nodded. ‘But I can manage.’

  ‘Not as well as I can.’

  I stepped down into the stern and ducked inside the boat. ‘Next to the fire blanket,’ he shouted.

  I took in a very neat and clean, but pretty old-fashioned, wooden galley – this was no Elle Deco boat – although much of it was taken up by a coffee machine that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Milanese café. I grabbed the green pack with the Red Cross off its hook and went back outside.

  I was trying to run off the aches and bruising from the day before. I’d pounded the towpath from my flat, east to Broadway Market, and was on my return leg when I saw the accident. In truth, I was glad of the excuse to stop. It was going to take more than a run to undo Bojan’s damage.

  I clambered up on top once more and sat next to him and caught my breath. I hoped the smell didn’t knock him out. I hadn’t sweated so much since childbirth.

  ‘Let me see.’

  ‘Just give me a plaster.’

  ‘Let me see,’ I insisted.

  ‘What are you, an angel of mercy?’

  ‘Something like that. Give me your arm.’

  He did so. He was wearing just a T-shirt and chinos so at least there was no clothing to cut away once I had unwrapped my by-now dark-red top. His arm was corded with sinews and streaked with blood oozing from the gash. I used one sleeve of my top to fashion a tourniquet around the top of his arm, then examined the wound. It grinned at me.

  I looked it over. A voice in my head from long ago said: ‘Cat-C’. No shit, Sherlock. ‘It’s going to need stitches.’

  ‘No, it isn’t.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Well, it isn’t going to get any.’

  I looked into his face. He had a week’s growth of beard and grey eyes. He was probably about Paul’s age, maybe a little younger, although the tanned skin, wind-coarsened by the outdoors, made it a difficult call.

  ‘It’ll leave a scar.’

  He held up his other arm. There was a deep gouge running along the top. ‘At least I’ll have a matching pair.’

  ‘Maybe you should give up DIY,’ I said, even though I knew that second wound was probably from a bullet. ‘I’ll do what I can with Steri-Strips.’

  ‘You a nurse?’ he asked as I set about cleaning the cut.

  ‘CMT.’ Combat Medical Technician, but I was curious to know if he recognised the acronym.

  His eyebrows went up. He recognised it all right. ‘Where?’

  ‘Iraq.’ I usually didn’t mention my time in Afghanistan, mainly because there wasn’t that much of it. ‘You?’

  ‘What makes you think I’m army?’

  I nodded at his right arm. ‘I know what a bullet wound looks like. Drug dealer or army. I vote army.’

  He nodded. ‘Right. Once upon a time.’

  There was something in those few words that didn’t invite further enquiry. I let it pass. Some like to talk about it, others don’t. ‘You live here? On board?’

  ‘Continuous cruiser,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that mean?’ I began to lay over the Steri-Strips. It wouldn’t take much to dislodge them and I tutted at his stubbornness.

  ‘Of no fixed abode. The rules say I can’t stay in one place on the canals for more than fourteen days.’

  ‘That’s tough.’

  ‘I rarely last more than three.’

  ‘I could stitch this if you had the right gear.’

  ‘You’re doing fine . . . sorry, I don’t know your name.’

  I told him.

  ‘I’m Tom. Tom Buchan.’ One day, some way down the line, I would find out that was a whopping lie. ‘Buck to my friends.’

  I released the tourniquet and began to wind a bandage over the wound, making sure it was tight enough to give the strips a hope in hell of staying in place.

  The footpath was filling up with more joggers and the first of the tourists wobbling uncertainly on their chunky rental bikes. The sun had driven off the mist and it was good to feel it on my neck. I didn’t recognise the next feeling at all. Someone said that being happy is all about being in the moment, which is why it is so fleeting. Like good sex, happiness is all about letting go, dropping out of time, forgetting that past or future exists. It was a long time since I had bandaged a wounded man. The last time, someone had been shooting at me. This was better.

  I just need a cock in my cunt.

  I felt myself redden and cleared my throat, as if he could hear that unbidden instruction, echoing down the years. ‘There you go, soldier.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He did that thing of bending his arm and twisting it to make sure it still worked. Everyone does it, as if you’ve given them a new limb that needs to be tried out. ‘I owe you a new top.’

  ‘It’ll wash out.’

  I went to reach for it, but he snatched it away.

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘I’ll get you a new one. Least I can do. That and a cup of coffee.’

  While his machine clanked and hissed we sat on the bench that ran across the stern beneath the tiller.

  ‘How do you make a living if you never stop?’ I asked him.

  He pointed to his dressing. ‘Contrary to the evidence, I fix things. Normally without opening a vein.’

  ‘What kind of things?’

  He shrugged. ‘Engines. Gearboxes. Mechanical things, not computers or shit like that.’

  ‘Is that what you were in the army? A mechanic?’

  His face tightened. He really didn’t want to go there. ‘No. My dad own
ed a garage, back when you could still fix cars with a hammer and screwdriver and didn’t need something called diagnostics. I got it from him. The mechanical thing. Sugar?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  It was black because he had no milk and that was fine because dairy was one of the many, many things I was meant to cut down on. While we drank I found myself telling him about Jess, about being a PPO and, yes, about Paul.

  ‘Tough break,’ he said.

  ‘I always think if I hadn’t called him and asked him to pick up some baked beans and shit from the shop—’

  ‘Don’t.’ He shook his head vigorously to emphasise his point. ‘Don’t think like that. You know in the army, when you lose a guy you can always point to a dozen things, which, if done differently, might have saved his life. It’s like football. You know?’

  ‘How is it like football?’ I didn’t much care about the answer, but I was enjoying listening to him speak. He had a warm-butter kind of voice.

  ‘If you study any match closely, you can follow how one bad pass, a missed tackle, a fluffed corner, a reckless clearance or an untrapped ball could, after seven, ten, fifteen further moves, be responsible for a crucial goal. It is all cause and effect. Just like life. If you dwell on how one little thing you did caused the death of someone . . . well, it becomes a form of madness if you let it.’

  I had a feeling he was speaking from experience.

  We drank our coffees for a while. I watched a fat Dutch barge, painted matt black as if it were a stealth bomber, come huffing by. At the wheel was a heavily tattooed young woman in very tiny denim shorts and a halter-top. She raised a hand when she saw Tom.

  ‘Where you headed, Liz?’ he shouted over the thrum of her engine.

  ‘Limehouse. You?’

  Tom pointed in the opposite direction.

  ‘Pity. See you around.’ She raised a hand in farewell as the barge made its stately way east.

  ‘Must be strange,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Living on the canals all the time. It’s like its own little world. Own people. Own customs, I suppose.’