Captain Cat

by David Shaw

CAPTAIN CAT

  (An audio script)

  By

  David Shaw

  Copyright 2010 David Shaw

  THIS AUDIO SCRIPT HAS ADULTS ONLY CONTENT

  DAVE DAVENPORT -- NARRATION

  Hi, I'm Dave Davenport. I know you're out there, I can hear you breathing.

  That's the last desperate line of a comedian dying on stage, isn't it? Well, no kind of a symbolic death frightens me. Not now. A few months ago I came very close to dying in the only way that matters, in a very easy place to do it: Afghanistan.

  It was my first deployment overseas. In fact, it was my first overseas trip anywhere. It turned out to be a back packing holiday in hell.

  We knew we were going to Afghanistan, of course, as soon as we were badged into the Regiment. We had briefings about the country, we talked to people who'd already fought against the Taliban, we read all the available intelligence files. But in the end it didn't make any difference. Not to two of us, anyway. We ran up against an Afghan who saw us first and shot first. One holy warrior and one bullet, but he did for me and my mate Jason Brand with it.

  We were leading scouts for our section, advancing to contact through a re-entrant that was barely two metres wide, with the rising sun behind us but still below the mountain peaks. Somewhere up ahead, maybe three hundred metres away, somebody fired a single round. I don't know whether the man behind the sights was Taliban, Al Quaeda, a drug dealer, a poppy farmer, whatever. Maybe he was simply an Afghan who didn't like foreigners in his country. Just like every other Afghan.

  Whatever and whoever he was, the bastard could shoot straight.

  (F/X: whip crack of bullet close by, ricochets, a man screams)

  DAVE DAVENPORT

  Jason! Jason! I'm down! I can't see!

  (F/X: Men moving, orders shouted: "Smoke! Give me smoke! Move forward. Medic, up here! Gabble of orders coming over a static filled radio network.)

  DAVE DAVENPORT -- NARRATION

  The bullet hit Jason's head and blew it apart like a turnip blasted by a 12 bore shotgun. I was two metres back, one metre to one side, and fragments of Jason's skull were blown into both of my eyes. Some of the smaller pieces are still inside them. Maybe I should leave instructions in my will that when I die there needs to be a double funeral. One for me and one for the bits of Jason I'll take into my grave with me.

  Mark you, Jason always did tell me that one day he'd make my life a misery. When he got promoted, he reckoned. But the misery came before anybody had any chance of promotion. Even before I was flown back to the UK I knew my time in the military was over. Finished, retired, pensioned off at nineteen. And I didn't care a shit. The only thing I cared about was how badly were my eyes cut up?

  Yeah, well, I found out when they took the bandages off at Selly Oak hospital. Couldn't see a thing. The Defence Centre doctor was an Aussie and not really into bedside manners too much.

  doctor

  (Australian accent)

  Dave, it's bad news. You're as blind as a pommie batsman. And you always will be from now on. You'll have to find a new kind of a life for yourself.

  DAVE DAVENPORT -- NARRATION

  Start a new life! I was gutted, shattered, absolutely totally buggered. If I'd come back as fresh as a daisy but with a bug in my system guaranteed to kill me within six months I reckon could have played the tough guy about it.

  An arm or a leg blown off, I could have dealt with that.

  But to be blind for the rest of my life! Hopeless, helpless and useless! No way. If I'd been able to get my hands on a gun or a knife I'd have killed myself straight away. But while I was waiting for a chance to throw in my hand I kept getting angrier and angrier. Especially with some of the real idiots who kept showing up beside my bed.

  The worst was a prick of a padre. He came along and started preaching a sermon about forgiveness and how natural it was that I'd be angry with the man who'd shot Jason and me. Fecking REMF, what did he know about it?

  I said I wasn't angry with the Afghan sniper at all. I said that if a bunch of foreign troops had walked into Britain I'd be out there shooting at them myself. The only reason I was fighting in somebody else's country was because I was a professional soldier and that was where I'd been sent.

  I also told the God botherer that the most blood thirsty bunch of fanatics I'd met in Afghanistan were the ones with (American accent) 'bibles in their field packs'.

  Clergyman or not, the guy was a total prick, and what with being pestered by him and how low I was already feeling, I totally lost it. I picked up a bunch of grapes, threw them at his head, missed, and accidentally hit a nurse on the other side of the room. Not just any nurse either but the ward charge nurse.

  Hardcore military, that one. She was an Army captain but she came down on me like a super trooper Sergeant Major.

  Called me a stupid fecking kid and said if I did anything like that again she'd hit me over the head with a bed pan.

  It was the first time anybody had given me a real bollocking since I'd been wounded and somehow it made me feel a whole lot better. The funny thing was, while she was leaning over the bed to tell me off I was breathing in her perfume and getting a raging stiffy I had to try to hide underneath my blankets. I think it was her voice that had me going. She sounder older than the other nurses, and I've always had a thing about older women. She was a senior nurse with a sexy voice, that was for sure.

  Anyway, it was better being reamed out like a soldier than being talked down to like some half witted primary school kid, the way people like that Padre spoke to me. I'd lost my eyes, not my brain. And that diamond cutter was the first time I'd been fired up sexually for quite a while. I even began to think maybe the worst things of all hadn't happened to me. I might have been in a wheel chair or in an iron lung with my balls blown off.

  OK, maybe I couldn't see any more but I could sure as hell still get it on with a woman. And maybe the charge nurse had seen what was going on underneath my blankets. Anyway, she came back later and we both apologised to each other for losing our tempers. She told me her name was Marie Lee. Then she said she knew I wasn't married but did I have a partner or girlfriend who wanted to come and see me?

  I said no, ever since I done my selection course I hadn't had the time for anything more than occasional one night stands I'd picked up.

  Of course I wanted to keep talking to Marie. Just to listen to her voice. I'd talk about anything as long as I could keep her near me. So I told her I'd been thinking that morning, while I was still half asleep, about a movie I'd once seen. An old movie, I couldn't remember its name but it was set in a Welsh fishing village and there'd been a blind character in it, an old sea captain called Captain Cat, played by Peter O'Toole.

  There was a scene in the film where O'Toole had stood by his cottage window and listened to the people in the village and knew exactly what was going on out there just by what he could hear. The names of all the school kids in the playground and those that were absent, which one of them had hit another kid, which was the one who was crying, which villagers were walking past, which of them was the postman, all the houses he was stopping at.

  Marie immediately said she knew the movie I was talking about. She said it was a film version of a very famous play called 'Under Milk Wood'. She told me it had been written by a Welsh writer called Dylan Thomas.

  I'd never heard of him before Marie she said he'd written some very well known poetry -- and then she suddenly stopped talking and I had a feeling she'd said more than she'd wanted to. So I asked her what other poetry he'd written and she finally told me she remembered a couple of lines. She recited them to me.

  MARIE LEE

  'Do not go gentle into that good night,

  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.'


  DAVE DAVENPORT -- NARRATION

  Yeah, well, it was the first time that poetry had ever meant anything to me but those words caught me right in the guts. And lit a fire in them as well.

  Listen, I said, maybe I can't go out on the streets running any more, but I can run as much as I like on a treadmill, can't I? And I can still work my way around a gym circuit, right?

  Marie said of course I could. When did I want to start?

  As soon as possible, I told her.

  So next day they sent me down to the physiotherapist and I got back into my running and circuit training. I made a sort of game of it in my head, pretending to myself that it was just another gym and just another day, except the Regiment was making things difficult as usual by having the place in total darkness, so I'd have to learn to find my way around in it.

  Of course that was a piece of piss. Third time there I did everything I wanted to without needing any help, not even to change the weights on the bars. And I worked my arse off because it made me feel better.

  But it was Marie who helped me most. Talking to me, helping me