She started to move away but Acland used his free hand to catch at her skirt. ‘How did it crash?’
‘Say again.’
He took the words back into his throat like a ventriloquist and repeated them in slow, guttural fashion. ‘Khow . . . di’ . . . i’ . . . khrash?’
‘How did what crash?’
‘The plane.’ He tried again. ‘Khe khlane. I was on a khlane.’
‘Don’t you remember what happened?’
He shook his head.
‘OK. I’ll ask someone to explain it to you.’ She patted his hand again. ‘But don’t worry, love. You’ve got a few wires crossed, that’s all. They’ll right themselves eventually.’
*
Time passed and nothing happened. The nurse returned at intervals, but her complacent smiles and inane comments annoyed him. Once or twice, he attempted to remind her that he needed explanations but, out of stupidity or bloody-mindedness, she refused to understand what he was saying. A scream was circling around his head and he found himself struggling with anger in a way that he didn’t understand. Everything, from the curtained cubicle he was lying in to the sounds from outside – muted voices, footsteps, a phone ringing – conspired to ratchet up his irritation. Even the nurse had lost interest. He counted off the seconds between her visits. Three hundred. Four hundred. When the interval reached five hundred, he put his finger on the buzzer and kept it there. She bustled in with a stupid laugh and attempted to remove the plastic egg from his hand, but he wrestled it away from her and held it against his chest. ‘Fuck you.’
She had no trouble understanding that, he thought, watching her smile disappear. ‘I can’t turn it off if you keep your finger on it,’ she said, indicating a bleeping light on a remote receiver clipped to her waistband. ‘You’ll have everyone in here if you don’t let go.’
‘Good.’
‘I’ll disconnect it,’ she warned. ‘You’re not the only patient who’s had surgery today.’ She held out her palm. ‘Come on, Charles. Give me a break, eh? I’ve made the call. It’s not my fault it’s taking so long. This is a National Health Service hospital, and there’s only one psychiatric consultant on call at the moment. He’ll be here before long. You have to trust me on that.’
He tried to say he didn’t need a psychiatrist. There was nothing wrong with his brain. He simply wanted to know what had happened. There were other men on the plane. Had they survived? But the concentration needed to speak the words (which were incomprehensible even to his own ears) was so intense that the woman easily deprived him of his buzzer. He swore at her again.
She checked the PCA, saw that he hadn’t used it. ‘Is it pain that’s making you angry?’
‘No.’
She didn’t believe him. ‘No one expects you to be a hero, Charles. Pain-free sleep will do you more good than staying awake and becoming frustrated.’ She shook her head. ‘You shouldn’t be this alert anyway, not after what you’ve been through.’
*
When the psychiatrist finally arrived, he said much the same thing. ‘You look brighter than I was expecting.’ He introduced himself as Dr Robert Willis and drew up a chair beside Acland’s recovery-room trolley. He was mid-fifties, thin and bespectacled, with a habit of staring into his patients’ eyes when he wasn’t consulting a computer printout of their notes, which he placed on his knees. He confirmed Acland’s name and rank, then asked him what his last memory was.
‘Khetting o’ kh’ khlane.’
‘In England?’
Acland stuck a thumb in the air.
Willis smiled. ‘Right. I think it might be better if I do the talking. We don’t want to make this painful for you ...orfor me. Give me a thumbs-up for yes and a thumbs-down for no. Let’s start with a simple question. Do you understand what I’m saying?’
He watched the lieutenant’s thumb shoot up.
‘Good. Do you know what happened to you?’
Acland jabbed repeatedly towards the floor.
The man nodded. ‘Then we’ll take this slowly. Do you remember arriving in Iraq? No. Do you remember anything about Iraq?’ Repeated downward jabs of the thumb. ‘Nothing at all? Your base? Your command? Your squad?’
Acland shook his head.
‘Right. Well, I can only go by the medical and regimental reports that came with you, and the newspaper coverage that I’ve just taken off the net, but I’ll tell you as much as I know. If there’s anything you want repeated, raise your hand.’
Acland learned that he’d spent eight weeks attached to one of the UK military bases near Basra. He had taken command of a four-Scimitar, twelve-man reconnaissance troop whose task was to search out insurgent crossing points along the Iraq/Iran border. He and his troopers made two recce patrols, each of three weeks’ duration, which were described by his CO as ‘extremely successful’. Following a few days R&R, his troop was then deployed to recce ahead of a convoy on the Baghdad to Basra highway. As commander, Acland was in the lead Scimitar with his two most experienced troopers, Lance Corporals Barry Williams and Doug Hughes. The vehicle had been attacked by an improvised explosive device buried in a roadside culvert. The two lance corporals had died in the explosion, but Acland had been thrown clear. All three men had been recommended for decoration.
Willis turned a piece of paper towards the young lieutenant.
It was a printout of a newspaper article with a banner headline saying: Our Heroes. To the side, under a photograph of him at his passing-out parade, were two portraits of smiling men, posing with their wives and children, over the caption: devastated families mourn brave dads. His own caption read: seriously injured but alive. ‘Do you recognize them, Charles? This –’ he touched a face– ‘is Barry Williams and this is Doug Hughes.’
Acland stared at the pictures, trying to find something he remembered – a feature, a smile – but he might have been looking at strangers for all the recognition he had of them. He suppressed a surge of panic because he’d shared a Scimitar with these men on two extended recce trips and knew how close he must have grown to them. Or should have done. It didn’t make sense that he could forget his men so easily. ‘No.’
Perhaps Willis noticed his concern, because he told him not to worry about it. ‘You took a hell of a knock to the head. It’s not surprising you have holes in your memory. It’s usually just a question of time before things start to return.’
‘Khow khong?’
‘How long? It depends how bad your concussion is. A few days, perhaps. You won’t remember everything all at once . . . We tend to retrieve memory bit by bit, but—’ He broke off as Acland shook his head.
‘Khow khong –’ he pointed to himself – ‘khere?’
‘How long have you been here?’
Acland nodded.
‘About thirty hours. You’re in a hospital on the outskirts of Birmingham. It’s Tuesday, 28 November. The attack happened on Friday and you arrived here early yesterday. You had a CAT scan during the afternoon and an operation this morning to plate the bones in your left cheek and above your left eye.’ Willis smiled. ‘You’re in pretty good shape, all things considered.’
Acland raised his thumb in acknowledgement, but the conversation had done little to allay his fears or his sense of resentment.
How could he forget eight weeks of his life? How could thirty hours have turned into an eternity? Why had the nurse said his wires were crossed?
What was wrong with him?
*
The days that followed were difficult ones. Acland lost count of the number of times he was told he was lucky. Lucky he’d been thrown clear before the vehicle turned over. Lucky the insurgents were too few in number, or too poorly armed, to follow up the attack by shooting him. Lucky the shrapnel hadn’t entered his brain. Lucky he still had the sight of one eye. Lucky the blast hadn’t destroyed his hearing completely. Lucky he was still alive... For whatever reason, he’d been put in a side room away from other patients. Acland suspected it was his mother’s doing – she had a habit of getting her own way – but he didn’t complain. If the choice was between being stared at by his parents or being stared at by every Tom, Dick and Harry who entered the ward, he was better able to tolerate his parents. But he found their constant presence draining. His father was the worst culprit on the ‘lucky’ front. Unable to understand what his son was saying, or too impatient to work it out, he would take up a stance by the window and keep repeating phrases like ‘The gods were smiling on you that day’, ‘Your mother can’t believe how close we came to losing you’, ‘They told us it was touch and go at the beginning’, ‘Damnedest thing I’ve ever come across.’ For the most part Acland pretended to be asleep, because he was bored with playing the ‘thumbs-up’ game. He didn’t feel lucky and he saw no reason why he should pretend that he did. At twenty-six, he had his whole life in front of him, but it didn’t look like being the life he’d chosen for himself. He felt a cold knot of fear every time his father mentioned the future. ‘The army gives grants for retraining, Charles. What do you think about signing up to an agricultural course for a couple of years? You might as well learn the modern way of doing things at