'Frank, please, I'm trying to understand – don't get angry. Talk to me, help me… the Falklands was a long time ago, I know you wanted to go to the Gulf -'
Dillon pushed past her, slamming open the sideboard cupboard to get a bottle of Famous Grouse and a glass, poured out a large measure. 'For your information, there's still a war going on in Ireland,' he said, scathing, as if talking to a cretin, his face ugly and twisted. He took a huge gulp and yelled, 'Steve… Steve! Get down here!'
Susie walked out – very nearly. At the door she turned back, gave it another try. He was her husband, she loved him, he deserved that much at least. 'I knew it wouldn't be easy, Frank, but…' she hesitated, 'the bills have to be paid, and I've been thinking – with the kids at school now – I could get work.'
Dillon's knuckles showed white on the hand holding the glass, the scotch jumping and splashing his fingers. He barked hoarsely, 'I can provide for my wife and kids!' Black rage seeping out of his pores, making his eyes hot.
'I don't want to be provided for with a dead man's pension,' Susie told him calmly.
Dillon swung round, his face so tortured and strange she feared for her safety. As if, without a single qualm, he could have smashed the bottle and gouged her eyes out with the jagged edges.
'Steve!… STEVE!'
Steve burst in. He only needed one look at Dillon. He gripped Susie and bundled her roughly out of the room and before she could open her mouth slammed the door in her face. Susie furiously gripped the handle, ready to storm back in, freezing as she heard the splintering crash of the bottle and glass being flung to the floor. Another crash, more glass breaking, and then came a high-pitched whinnying laugh that chilled the blood in her veins. She stood, unmoving, staring at the door, listening.
'I'm going crazy, I'm going crazy… For chrissakes I'm dying… Don't let them bury me here… ' That awful weird, whinnying laugh again. 'All night he screamed "Help me, I'm dying, I'm wet, my chest is bleeding"…'
'No – he said his – heart – was bleeding.'
Tears streamed down Susie's face. Turning, she slowly began to mount the stairs, then paused on the third step at the sound of her husband's sobbing. Wiping her eyes with the heel of her hand, Susie went back down and opened the door. Shards of glass littered the carpet. Over in the corner the toppled lamp standard lay broken, it's flowered shade bent and torn, and in the dim glow of the vari-flame gas-fire she saw Dillon and Steve crouched together on the sofa, arms around each other's shoulders.
Suddenly aware of her, Dillon seemed to cringe away, hiding his wet face.
Very softly, Susie murmured, 'Turn the fire off when you come to bed, Frank… Goodnight Steve.'
Steve looked at Susie, and gave her a kind of tentative half smile. Then a small wink. It was then, in that moment, that she knew – for the first time realised the truth. That it wasn't Steve who needed Frank. She'd got it totally, completely wrong. It was Frank who needed Steve. Needed this boy with the shattered throat to help him heal his own wounds. Frank's were different from Steve's, his were inside, raw and open, he needed Steve to heal them, and Susie would simply have to wait, he hadn't really come back to Civvies, yet.
Susie silently closed the door and went to bed. She lay curled up, waiting for him, hearing laughter from below, hearing the muffled sounds making it impossible for her to sleep. She tossed and turned, and hours later heard the thud-thud of them both coming up the stairs, heard through the thin wall Frank making sure Steve's filter was cleared, the strange, garbled interaction that she still found difficult to understand, yet Frank was able to carry on long conversations with Steve, as if he were so in tune with his gasping burped sentences there appeared nothing unusual, and the truth was, she had witnessed with her own eyes Steve's transformation. His confidence was growing stronger every day, whereas Frank seemed more and more unsure of himself.
At last Susie heard the click-click of lights being turned out, of toilet flushing and still she waited, waited for her husband to come to bed. Eventually, she got up and crept from her bedroom. Standing on the landing she caught sight of Dillon in their kids' bedroom, standing staring at the old Habitat felt board with all his photographs pinned up. She hesitated, and then inched open the bedroom door.
'It's very late Frank', she whispered.
He nodded his head, and then turned slowly towards her, he seemed so vulnerable, so at a loss. She reached out and took his hand, and he allowed himself to be drawn from his sons' bedroom into his own. She helped him undress and then folded away his clothes as he slipped into their bed, wearing just his jockey shorts. He lay back on the pillows, and she got in beside him and snuggled close, not too close, she was content with just being near him, feeling his body heat. Everything inside her wanted him to reach out, hook his arm around her and draw her even closer, but he remained distant, staring up at the ceiling.
'Steve is gonna be okay,' he whispered.
'Yes, yes I think he is…' Susie didn't say what was in her mind or ask all the questions she wanted to ask, she knew intuitively that he meant that he was going to be all right. She could wait, she had got used to it over the years, and she loved her husband deeply. It was Susie's understanding that had kept their marriage steady, when many of their friends' had fallen apart, and, as if he knew it, Dillon drew her to him, easing his arm around her, pressing his hand in the small of her back until she was cradled beside him. He was maybe unaware of the impact this simple gesture meant to Susie, he had always done it and she had never been able to describe to anyone what it meant to her. She could never, or would never, make the first approach to him, it was not in her nature, but when he reached out and drew her close to him, it was, to Susie, like a great warrior claiming his woman. She liked that, liked his domination of her, and trusted him totally, not only to take care of her, but of their sons.
'I am so proud of you,' she whispered.
He looked down at her, the scar etched in his face, white and translucent in the darkness, and then he smiled… and he was no great warrior, no sergeant, he was the man she had fallen in love with, and when he gave her that sweet gentle smile, seen so rarely, but a smile that altered his entire face, she felt for the first time he had come home.
Rifles held aloft, grinning through blackened faces. A pair of boots, steaming gently, inscription: 'Wally's Boots!' An Argie with half his face missing, the other eye hanging on his cheek. Steve clowning around, draped in a Union Jack. A gang of them in the NAAFI canteen at Port Stanley, toasting the camera with fifteen Budweisers. The enemy dead, stacked three deep. Dillon, Harry Travers and Jimmy Hammond on their haunches, raw-eyed, bone-weary, a soiled dressing above Dillon's right eye. Four or five of them grouped round a subaltern (an anonymous hand sticking up behind giving the vee-sign). Three shivering Argie prisoners, smiling scared at the camera, waving. Drunken Taffy pissing in the snow, writing his name.
Steve tapped this last one, shoulders shaking, the jerky wheezing breath that passed for his laugh puttering out of his gaping mouth. He wiped his eyes. Dillon, grinning, turned a page, and this set Steve off again. He'd had it, helpless, wiped out. He pointed at the photograph in Dillon's album, tears dripping off his chin.
Dillon straightened up, stuck his nose in the air, and did a perfect officer's accent, braying, 'What -? What did you say, Harris?'
Dillon put his hands to his ears, miming headphones, and did Steve's part. 'Tank. It's a tank, sir! Tank.'
Officer: 'Where's the bloody tank, man?' Neck straining forward, peering through binoculars. 'Tent you blitherin' idiot! TENT. That's a ruddy tent on the beach, not a tank!'