Would you like to read a story?

 

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Because spring will come …

 

It’s hard to get my head around this new reality. All of us at home, all of the time. The world in stasis. Daily anxious check-in WhatsApp messages to far-away family, many working in hospitals. No more school uniforms to wash. Instead a washing basket full of exercise gear as my teenage daughters go mad for online Booty Buster and Fab Ab classes. No more cheeky Tuesday trips to the pub. No more popping to Costa for a pick-me-up coffee. No more trips to London, or the beach. No more Easter holidays.

But maybe the best thing, the only thing to do right now is to turn that formula around: more time together as a family; more silly laughs at leisurely family meals; more art and music; more garden time, just chilling; more talking and debating and wondering and sharing hopes and plans for the future; more tolerance and patience (mostly!).

And in the spirit of more, here’s a short story I wrote in the Time Before. It’s been languishing on my desktop for ages, occasionally making a short foray into the cut-throat world of competitions, only to return with its tale between its legs:) As I struggle to whip up the motivation to write new stuff, I thought I would give this little guy a dust-off. I think he’s earned it.

So if anyone is stuck for something to do, he’s here for your reading pleasure. Feel free to let me know your thoughts in the comments. Hope you enjoy! (I should say there are a few “bad words” in here though, just in case that bothers anyone and they want to give it a miss.)

The distance between T and no T

Why the hell had he agreed to do this? Cruising for a bruising, as usual.

He tightened the Aston Villa scarf around his neck, wincing as the cheap, polyester threads caught on the ridge of shredded skin under his right ear. The October chill had ice-lumped his hands. He scuffed his trainers against the concrete then jumped up from the bench, as if about to stomp away, or throw a punch but his abrupt energy expended itself in that single movement.

He stood, gangly and unresolved, wiggling his frozen toes in his Hi-Top Nikes. He lit a cigarette, smoking it like a teenager, the fag cupped inside his hand. He wasn’t sure you were allowed to smoke here. That would be ironic.

He looked at his watch. Frank was late. Bloody typical. He had offered to meet him in the car park, but Frank said no. He was always a stubborn bastard. Still, someone must’ve come with him. What was it he had? Nathan tried to remember. Was it a sister, two? They had talked about their families during those endlessly boring breaks in the endlessly stultifying heat before the endlessly terrifying foot patrols, but he had forgotten much of that now. Or maybe he was never listening properly, part of his brain always alert to the unexplained crackle, the distant boom, the tiny click. There was so much he couldn’t remember now and even the things he could, he wasn’t always sure if they were real. Every now and then, he would sit upright as a fragment – a face, the sharp smell of burnt metal, an open mouth, a blast, a song, a particular shade of blue — lodged in his brain like a splinter. He would finger it, pulling it this way and that to see if it was real, teasing and torturing. Once he had placed the half-memory in its rightful place, its true or nearly true context, he would spend days trying to bury it again. He sometimes wondered if his thoughts would ever become tame again.

Some memories hadn’t faded – sharp grass crackling in the heat, pebbles rolling under dusty boots, the siren song of gunfire, birds slicing the air overhead and shrieking like winged traitors. Every sound was jagged there. Every thing was jagged, even the air seemed to want to hurt as it sliced through dry, open mouths into chests bandoliered by fear and Kevlar.

He had been ambushed only this morning by a long-buried shiny bomblet – a harmless one this time. He was dressing in his room, banging his head to one of those songs from before, trying to keep his father’s heavy silence from sneaking under his dented door. He felt bad about the door. He felt bad about his mother’s tears, and his father’s rage, and Darren’s head, but fuck it! He always felt bad.

He was singing along, the noise pounding into his ears through the Beats headphones Darren had given him, tentatively, when he turned 24. It was his first birthday at home for years. Hunched in the armchair, facing his parents and Darren, all seated knees-together-tense on the sofa, he realised, as he unwrapped their gifts, that the only thing that was likely to explode in this bad-movie scene was him. And everyone knew it.

As he listened to the music, he was thinking idly, to prevent any other kind of thought. He remembered the singer, vaguely, from before. Crew cut, earring, baseball cap, crooked teeth, smart-ass Londoner. He had liked him, identified with his wide boy persona, his easy, streetwise rap. They were both 17 the same year. What did that mean? Nothing. He had long ago given up trying to shoehorn his experience into ‘real life’. The ‘whys’ could kill you. Or they could make you kill someone else. Like your soldier-dad, who insisted he knew what you felt, just because he’d served in Belfast in the fucking 80s, another planet.

That’s how the door got dented. Too many fucking ‘whys’, and ‘why can’t you be like me?’ and ‘why is it different for you?’, and ‘why don’t you snap out of it?’ In the end, Nathan had thrown a punch just to stop the questions. But he missed, of course. Sergeant Michael “Rottweiler” Taylor was still fast, despite the one eye and misshapen face, the results of a stupendously bad decision to go out drinking one Monday night in Ballykelly in 1982. Nathan had tipped forward, swinging into the empty air like a clown in oversized pants, all exaggerated uselessness. Darren couldn’t help it. He laughed. Nathan recovered his balance, swivelled and slapped him round the head. That’s when his father threw his own punch, straight into the door. Nathan couldn’t be sure if he’d missed him on purpose. His father stomped off, his long step still military in its extension, its heaviness, its unflinching, fuming certitude. Beyond the fury in his face, Nathan glimpsed the mask of horror from that Monday night in the Droppin’ Well. The moment the bomb went off would be forever preserved in the crooked nose, scarred cheek and glass eye. Nathan’s mother stood in the hallway, her tears silent and accusing as she grabbed Darren to her. Nathan saw fear struggle with pity in her face, and stormed into his room, slamming the door behind him. He felt bad, but he always felt bad. It was just a question of degree. It would always be just a question of degree.

He was replaying the scene as he listened to the music. He saw himself flailing at his father, ridiculous in his baggy pants. Baggies. That was the bomblet. He suddenly remembered, like a slap, that Frank was a West Bromwich Albion fan. He remembered Frank telling him as they marched through a stubbled field over there. He could see full Frank laughing, all teeth under tinted eyes. That’s why he wore the Aston Villa scarf to this place today – he didn’t even fucking support them. It was just to piss Frank off. Just to make this all a bit more normal. As if they could be normal again, pulling the piss just to pass the time. The scarf was an innocent cruelty, and this made Nathan happy.

“Nathan! Wotcha!”

He spun round. He’d been staring at the monument’s white stone, the broken circle, and the spear-like trees ranged round it, like useless sentinels. Jesus, he’d met a fair few of those. The anger he’d felt as he walked through the gates earlier was swelling. It wasn’t enough that he had had to spend 12 months over there. Even back home, he had to be part of it. He’d paid his dues. This was what he was trying to forget. He didn’t want to pay tribute to the dead, or to honour them. He wanted to forget them.

He looked down at Frank, hoping to feel grateful, but it didn’t work. For a while, after that day in Helmand, Frank had made him feel humble, but that was wearing off. Frank annoyed him now. He was a constant reminder of what had happened, how it had happened, what it had cost, and worst of all, of the fact that Frank was trying to fit back in, to ‘make things work’ while he, Nathan, was stuck in a toxic mental stew, unable to go back, unable to go forward, caught on those bloody shards of glass in his brain.

Nathan swallowed, chucked his cigarette into the grass, realizing even as he stretched out his arm that the gesture was too grand for the flimsy butt and for him, something stolen from a movie probably. He punched his friend on the arm. A girl in a green parka, her face half hidden by wet, straggly hair and a furry hood, gripped the handles of the wheelchair. She nodded at Nathan, and there was something defeatist in her stance as if the wheelchair was defining her too.

“Wotcha, yerself. You’re late, man.”

“You got something else on?”

Frank was smiling. He’d always been the quick one in their eight-man section. Now, it would be a 6 ½ man section, except that it didn’t exist anymore. Sections, divisions, units, combat groups, fireteams – they were all as unreal here as Death Eaters and Thestrals. They had no place in this treacherous symmetry that suggested order and dignity in death. Stone lies.

It had been Frank’s idea to come here today. Nathan had agreed reluctantly, maybe because it was hard to say ‘no’ to a man in a wheelchair. But now he felt as though he had been tricked into something worse than betrayal, a kind of false nostalgia that demanded he surrender his anger on that flat altar in the middle of the fractured circle where a bronze laurel wreath lay, useless as all flowers were.

He hated himself for not having the balls to say ‘no’ to the half-man in the wheelchair. Nothing was straightforward anymore. He couldn’t be himself and he was somebody else, but he didn’t want to be that person either. He wasn’t sure he could be that other person – that veteran, that messed-up cliché with the PTSD that everyone talked about but no one understood. The unicorn on the medical rainbow.

“Why d’ye want to come here, anyway?” Nathan muttered as they moved towards the ramp that led up the Armed Forces Memorial.

It started to rain. Frank gave his scarf a sideways sliver of a look. Nathan grinned. Happy moment. Frank wasn’t wearing a scarf or a hat, just a thin red jacket and jeans that had been clipped up around his knees. In the days after the ambush, the doctors thought they could save the bottom half of his right leg, but it became infected, and so both legs ended at the knees now. At least he was balanced, Frank often said, laughing loudly.

Nathan was a long way from being able to joke about Frank’s legs. The war had calcified his humour – or maybe it was not fair to say the war. It was really just that day in Helmand. This day, one year ago. How had he survived a whole year? What had he done? Nathan couldn’t remember and as he puzzled over this conundrum, he forgot to listen to Frank, his eyes on the mute memorial.

Why didn’t they include sound effects with these things? A high-pitched screaming would be about right, men yelping like hurt children. But that wasn’t completely true either. What he remembered most about that day in Helmand was the silence-filled buzzing that had filled his ears after the bang that started, and ended, it all.

“I thought we should mark the day. It’s like an anniversary, or something,” Frank was saying when Nathan tuned back in.

A lot of Nathan’s days were like that. He would remember snatches of conversation but most of the words, words, words that were thrown at him missed their mark. He thought sometimes that his brain was full.

They got closer. Nathan hated the inevitability of their slow progress. A man in a wheelchair. A sister, who had been stripped of her right to tease and given the shite job of nursemaid, and no right to complain. And a 24-year-old former soldier who couldn’t hack it, who didn’t have the balls to go back, or whatever was needed to go forward. They were inside the cold, white arms of the memorial now.

“You know, I don’t remember a fucking thing about the attack,” Frank said.

Nathan pulled his eyes from the statue showing a dead soldier being lifted up by comrades. Nearby, a forever-young child clung to its mother’s knees while an older couple keened together.

“Look at this,” Nathan gestured, wide as the movies again. “It’s nothing like this.”

“Easy now, easy.”

Frank’s sister moved away for a smoke. She was standing in the opening of one of the half-circles, huddled beside the wall, looking out towards the obelisk and the grey, dirty River Tame beyond. He wondered what she was thinking. He wondered if they’d go for a drink somewhere after. He could do with a drink, and a snog. Or a shag. She might be sympathetic. Fuck.

Frank wheeled himself over to the slab of rock where names of the dead were carved. For a moment, Nathan heard nothing but the wind keening at the edges of this monument to an idea of death that was the worst betrayal of all. The blood rushed in his head, twisting those glass shards deeper into the soft tissue of his brain. He braced himself.

“Here he is.” Frank pointed to the name.

It was one of the newest ones, carved at shoulder height, but Frank could only point, his neck straining as he tilted his head back.

Gilman, D.

Nathan traced the letters, like a child compelled to squeak his finger down a misted window. Or was this too something he had seen in a film? So this was it. That Saturday morning had been reduced to these seven letters. Those 40 minutes that stole Frank’s legs, and parts of his soul. This is what it meant back here, out of the rabbit hole.

Danny would tell him to cop on to himself. He’d pass him a freshly rolled joint, pungent weed from an Afghan soldier’s stash, and pat him on the shoulder. At 23 and on his second tour, Nathan always felt older, duller, more stodgy than Danny, the ginga with the little-boy freckles, foul mouth and one of the deadliest aims in the battalion.

Gilman, D. didn’t do Danny justice at all.

It was a regular patrol, but that wasn’t telling it true either, Nathan thought. No patrol was regular. How could it be regular to walk, taut as a curse through winding, sand-blown streets, swinging wildly when you realised you were in front of a gaping doorway you hadn’t spotted? He was behind Gilman, D. But when it began, he forgot that fact. It began when the first soldier, who would later prove to be Frank, entered the deserted market square, and stepped with pointless caution onto the buried mine. The dull thud that followed mangled his legs, and rent the air. Frank was screaming, the other men were shouting, and the air was whining as machine-gun fire poured down on them from the roofs of the concrete buildings around the square, which was no longer a safe square of predictable angles but a shifting quadrant of death, its perimeters defined by the puffs of dust that marked the range of the unseen fighters. Nathan was bringing up the rear, so he ducked back into a dark doorway halfway down the street they had just crept quietly through. Such a waste, that toe-crimping, breath-stifling crawl of just minutes before. Their enemies had always known they were coming. They thought they were being careful but caution doesn’t count if the men who will kill you are already in place, fingers steady on triggers.

He saw Gilman, D. fall. He registered that first bullet exiting from the soft place behind his knee. If, at that moment, he had remembered it was Danny, he would have thought about how the bullet had smashed the kneecap with the wolf tattoo, all bared teeth and red eyes. But he did not remember it was Danny. And he did not recognise Frank in bits on the ground ahead. It was as though, in seeing what was happening, knowing what it would mean, his mind, already weary of this hot, fucked-up, saviour-less land, had raised its eyebrows, sighed and turned away with a teenager’s “whatever”. Because this was a teenager’s war.

The girl was back, pushing Frank towards the opposite wall and another tally-fucking-ho representation of death. Here, a woman and man were preparing a prone body for burial, while another man chiselled the dead soldier’s name into the wall, and a fourth person pointed through a slightly open door carved into the stone.

Nathan trailed behind them, his eyes on the doorway, his screams held tight in his chest. On that day, when he slipped into his own doorway, and watched Danny fall and then jerk like a crisp packet under heavy rain, until they stopped pouring bullets into his body, he knew there was nothing left. He still did not let himself know about Frank. He did not want to know about the rest, and refused to admit to himself that the mangled body just feet from his hidey-hole was Danny. He didn’t even register the piece of stone that zipped out of the wall into the soft skin under his ear. He just ducked and fired, ducked and fired for however long it took.

Sometimes now, he would wake drenched in sweat, but what woke him was not the remembered sound of the bullets slamming into the stone beside him, or the peculiarly wet sound of lead screwdriving through Danny’s vital organs. It was a soft moaning, protracted, vowel-less. He didn’t remember hearing that on the day, was not even aware he had registered it, but he knew now that it had been Frank, or half-Frank, lying in the dust, his left leg five inches to the left of his left thigh and his right leg twisted and awful and dying too.

“Do you remember moaning and groaning that day?” Nathan’s voice was high-pitched and harsh. He meant it to be.

Right now, right here in this place of hard lines and soft lies, he wanted to pierce through the bullshit.

“You whimpered like a baby, mate,” he said.

Frank had his back to him, and the girl was at the other side of the circle, reading the cards on the rain-battered bouquets of flowers left at the base of the wall like rubbish from a party. Part-ay! That’s what they all thought Afghanistan would be. And the commanders and officers and all the others ranged above them in spit-polished-glory let them believe their own teenage nonsense.

“Shut it, Nate,” Frank said.

He turned the wheelchair slowly so that he was facing Nathan. They were just feet apart, both vertically and horizontally. Nathan felt a kind of heartbreak when he looked down at his friend, at the sharp cheekbones he had never had before, the deep lines that had appeared like brackets around his mouth, the cripple’s crow’s feet around his eyes. But he couldn’t do pity.

“Yeah, like a baby. I could barely hear the gunfight you was moaning so loud.”

Frank shook his head, and turned away. He wheeled himself towards the exit, flinging “Cath” over his shoulder. Cath slouched away from the flowers and joined her brother. They started down the ramp. Nathan went the other way, down towards the river, across the Disney World grass. He walked fast, mind empty, rain smacking him on the head, eyes watering in the damp breeze. He would always love the rain now. He rushed through a copse of whispering oak trees, crunching the dried leaves under his feet like bones. He felt like running, but where to? A brace of pigeons exploded from the tops of the trees. He jumped and fell to one knee, arm extended with an imaginary gun. His eyes caught up with his ears. He stayed as he was for a split-second, just long enough for his brain, in its turn, to catch up, and then, slowly, he bent to retie the lace of his Nikes. He stood wiping the mulch from his jeans. He was not embarrassed, not any more. The PTSD duck-drop-and-dawdle. When a waiter dropped a tray of glasses behind the bar in the restaurant his parents took him to on his birthday, he had done the same, somehow pulling the tablecloth and cutlery onto the floor with him, so that nobody looked at the blushing waiter with his oil-sheened hair but at the other man who was on his knees, arm lifted, eyes scanning the horizon of napkins and wine glasses.

The mist had drifted back over the river again so that it looked as though the water was alive and breathing warm sighs into the cold air. If he could really believe that the water was warm, would he have the balls for it? He didn’t want to be cold in those last minutes. And it would be minutes. Drowning was not fast, but he imagined you would lose consciousness pretty quickly.

Danny had not lost consciousness quickly enough. Even after his body jerked countless times, and even when silence fell over the market square because the faceless ones in the clouds were rearming, he was still alive. Nathan had been close enough to see his lips move. Maybe he was praying, asking for help. But please, not from him, not from ‘My Mate Nate’, as he used to call him. Because Nathan couldn’t move. He could no more move from that fetid, sweltering doorway than he could fly.

He knew, deep as a heartbeat, that all his anger and loathing came from that moment. And this would never change. Nathan thought he could have been okay if he had helped Danny. He chose, if that is the right word, not to. In the end, it was a false choice because here he was again, deciding between life and death. He would be tested until he got it right.

“Nathan, Nathan!”

It was Cath, running across the billiard-green grass, her hair flying behind her, the limp strands suddenly alive.

“Frank’s only gone and fallen out of the wheelchair. Come on!”

Nathan followed her. The river could wait. There was always tomorrow. Other rivers.

Frank was lying sprawled on the gravel. He had lifted his chest and was trying to sit.

“Fuck it,” he growled as they approached. “I practiced this. Let me try again. Just bring the chair closer. Here, no HERE!”

Cath did as he said, glancing nervously at Nathan. He stood, feeling his arms long and useless against his sides. He watched as Frank levered himself into a sitting position, grabbed onto the wheels and tried to pull himself into the chair. Sweat rose on his brow, tiny drops of spit flew from his mouth at every gasp, and Nathan felt splinters shear from his soul.

“Frank, let me help you, wont ya?”

Cath was crying as she reached an arm around her brother’s waist. He shrugged it off. She turned her back, walked away, her shoulders heaving.

“I can’t. I fucking can’t.” Frank hissed the words.

Nathan bent his knees, got his arms around his friend’s body and lifted him into the chair. The legs made a difference alright. He would never have lifted full Frank like that. Full Frank had been stocky, muscular, legs like a farmer’s. The lads called him Lardy Arse. He was all bone now. Nathan stood back, panting slightly but only because he was trying not to cry. Tears had a habit now of not stopping if they started, and they had to get home. Or at least out of this place. Danny would have hated this place. Danny would have jeered non-stop, he would have guffawed at the statues, and if he had been drunk, he might even have pissed on the wilted flowers. That was Danny.

“Drink?”

“Fuck, yeah.”

Frank tried a smile. Cath was wandering back, eyes shifty. Frank looked at his sister.

“Sorry,” he mouthed.

“Don’t fucking do it again,” she said, but then she smiled, and punched her brother on the arm.

“There’s a pub in Lichfield, by the station. That’ll do,” said Nathan, pulling his fags from his jacket and lighting up.

“Gimme one of them, will ye?”

He handed the pack to her. She smiled at him properly now. She looked better: the anger and run for help and the rain had reddened her cheeks and loosened her hair. Her teeth were crooked, like Frank’s, folding over each other in the front, but on her, it looked okay.

The pub didn’t have a ramp, so they sat outside, downing pints like the end of days. Cath sat on the bench beside Nathan. Her thigh was warm, comforting, and moving more than was strictly necessary. As night fell, they got drunker and louder and Frank spilled his beer and needed the loo, so Nathan got another lad from inside to help him lift the chair up the steps, and then he held onto Frank while he peed. It could’ve been awkward, the stubbornly sober part of his mind said, but they were drunk and so he swore at Frank for getting piss on his shoes, and Frank said, “Well, at least I don’t have to worry about that anymore, eh?” And Nathan laughed so much he nearly dropped his friend.

And then they went outside and Cath’s face was soft in the moonlight and Nathan kissed her, tongue thrusting past the crooked teeth, while Frank tried to light the wrong end of a cigarette, finally succeeded, realised his error on the first drag, threw it in the road, and tilted his head up to the stars above the pub and yowled.

And then Cath took Frank home and Nathan moved to the next pub. And then a few more. He got tired of beer and drank whisky. A few guys bought him drinks, guys he didn’t know but who recognised what people in books always called the “thousand-yard stare” but which he thought made the blankness sound too grand. As if it was a superpower.

And finally, after grabbing a small, skinny guy with a briefcase by the front of the shirt and calling him “a faggot” and spitting in his face with all the bile of the past few hours, Nathan was kicked out onto the street, harsh guffaws and slurred curses spilling out around him as he staggered into the gutter, and then stumbled down the street, heading for the park and the idea of a bench. He needed to get a bus home, but he didn’t fancy another row. He could sit on a bench for a while.

He was stumbling along the canal, thinking about distance, the tiny ‘t’ between here and there. My foot here could be there, in the water, and then I would be there, and it would not be here, and that might be good, and it’s really only a question of inches, and with this much alcohol in my body, I’d go down pretty fast. It might actually be nice. It might be worth a try. I bet Frank thinks about it. But he’s too bloody-minded to give up. That’s not right. It’s not giving up. It’s just not going on. It could be as simple as that. Danny didn’t go on, and maybe he was better off. What was Frank going on for? What was he, Nathan, going on for? What the fuck was left when inside his head was fried.

A hand grabbed his jacket. Nathan teetered and in that second, that infinitesimal space between ‘t’ and no ‘t’, decided to lean back, decided to wake again to the daydream. The man who pulled him back had a mournful black Labrador on a leash. Nathan tried to pat the dog. It growled. The man asked for his phone.

“Who’d’ye want me to call, mate? You should get someone to collect you. Who’d’ye want me to call, eh?”

His father came later, his face taut, the scar marks like pattered paths across his cheek. He was wearing his old donkey jacket, and Nathan noticed it hung more loosely on him than it had before. His father had shrunk, or maybe the whole bolloxed world was shrinking around Nathan, pressing him further into himself, pressing the little sharp pieces of glass further into his brain.

“C’mon, let’s go home.”

It was barked as an order and Nathan obeyed it as an order. He was in no hurry anyway. He could think about distances another day. Those four or five inches between here and there, and this and that, and all or nothing would be there tomorrow and the day after and the day after, world without end.

In the car, he felt his father’s eyes – one real and one false – on his face.

“You have to pull yourself together, son. You have to learn to live with it. There is no other way. I know what you’re going through and God knows, I had my own but you have to push through. All soldiers go through the same. We’ve all been through it.”

The anger was gone. His father was tired, but it was not enough.

“Yours was a different war, Dad. You know fuck-all about ours. At least, let us have our own fucking war. At least, give us that respect!”

Nathan pulled a cigarette from the pack in his pocket. His father motioned for one. Their hands crossed for a second – hands with matching stubbly fingers that didn’t really know what to do now they were back at home.

“It’s all the same war.”

His father’s voice was quiet, the barked cadences smothered by the nicotine. Maybe it was the same voice he had used to whisper into a sharply pretty Northern Irish girl’s ear that night in the Droppin’ Well before someone pulled the plug on them all, fizzing them in unnatural poses like the images on screen when ancient televisions lost the signal.

“It’s all the same drama and the same pain and the same fucking mental roundabout. And you’ll never forget. Never. And you might not be able to go on. Plenty weren’t. You’ll need help. I found it in the bottle, and it looks like you’re heading the same way. But that can’t go on. You have to build your own box for what happened, and then bury it deep as the fucking sea.”

Nathan closed his eyes. The dull thrum from the last bar was still ringing in his ears. The beers were slowing his heart and his brain and his lungs, and he just wanted to sleep.

And on this tomorrow at least, he would wake up.

“You’re only 24. You’ll find a way.”

Nathan thought, I’m only 24.