6
All I could see of him were his eyes, his cold, black eyes that stared at me from beneath his turban. He showed no emotion but simply raised a rusty Kalashnikov to his shoulder.
I fired at him, but he continued to lift the gun. I fired at him again, over and over, but without any visible effects. I was desperate. I emptied my complete magazine into him, but still he swung the barrel of the AK-47 around towards me, lining up the sights with my head. A smile showed in his eyes, and I began to scream.
I woke with a start, my heart pumping madly and with sweat all over my body.
"Thomas! Thomas!" someone was shouting, and there was banging on my bedroom door.
"Yes," I called back into the darkness. "I'm fine."
"You were screaming." It was my mother. She was outside my room on the landing.
"I'm sorry," I said. "It was just a bad dream."
"Good night, then," she called suddenly, and I could hear her footfalls as she moved away.
"Good night," I called back, too quietly and too late.
I suppose it was too much to expect my mother to change the habits of a lifetime, but it would have been nice if she had asked me how I was, or if I needed anything, or at least if she could come into my room to cool my sweating brow, or anything.
I laid my head back onto the pillow.
I could still remember the dream so clearly. In the last couple of months, I had started to have them fairly regularly about the war. They were always a jumble of memories of real incidents coupled with the imagination of my subconscious brain, unalike insofar as they were of different events but all with a common thread-they all ended with me in panic and utter terror. I was always more terrified by the dreams than I remember ever having been in reality.
Except, of course, at the roadside after the IED.
I could remember all too vividly the terrible fear and the awful dread of dying I had experienced as Sergeant O'Leary and I had waited for the medevac helicopter. If I closed my eyes and concentrated I could, even now, see the faces of my platoon as we had passed those ten or fifteen minutes-minutes that had felt like endless hours. I could still remember the look of shock in the face of the platoon's newest arrival, a young eighteen-year-old replacement for a previously wounded comrade. It had been his first sight of real war, and the horror it can do to the frail human body. And I could also recall the mixture of anxiety and relief in the faces of those with more experience: their anxiety for me, and their almost overwhelming relief that it wasn't them lying there with no right foot, their lifeblood draining away into the sand.
I reached over and turned on the light. My bedside clock showed me that it was two-thirty in the morning.
I must have been making quite a lot of noise for it to have woken my mother from the other end of the house. That was assuming that she had actually been sleeping and not lying awake, contemplating her own troubles.
I sat up on the side of the bed. I needed to go to the bathroom for a pee, but it was not as simple as it sounded. The bathroom was three doors away, and that was too far to heel-and-toe or to hop.
I now wished I'd accepted the hospital's offer of crutches.
Instead, I went through the whole wretched rigmarole of attaching my false foot and ankle just in order to go to the loo. How I longed for the days of springing out of bed ready and able to complete a five-mile run before breakfast, or to fight off a Taliban early-morning attack.
Once or twice I had done just that, half asleep and forgetting that I was sans foot. But I had soon been reminded when I'd crashed to the floor. On one occasion I'd done myself a real mischief, opening up the surgical wound on my stump as well as splitting the back of my head on a hospital bedside locker. My surgeon had not been amused.
I made it without upset to the bathroom along the landing and gratefully relieved myself. I caught a glimpse of my face in the shaving mirror as I clumsily turned around in the enclosed space.
"What do you want from life?" I asked my image.
"I don't know," it answered.
What I really wanted I knew, in my heart, I couldn't have. Flying an airplane with tin legs, even a Spitfire, was a totally different ball game to commanding an infantry platoon. The very word infantry implied a foot soldier. I suppose I could ask for a transfer to a tank regiment, but even then, the "tankies" became foot soldiers if and when their carriage lost a track. I could hardly say, "Sorry, chaps, you'll have to carry on fighting without me," as I sat there with my false leg waiting for a lift, now, could I?
So what were the reasons I had so enjoyed being an infantry platoon commander? And could I find the same things elsewhere?
I went back to my room and back to bed, leaving my prosthesis standing alone by the bedroom wall as if on sentry duty.
But sleep didn't come easily.
For the first time since my injury I had faced the true reality of my future, and I didn't like it.
Why me? I asked, yet again. Why had it been me who'd been injured?
Yes, I was angry with the Taliban, and also with life in general and the destiny it had dealt me, but almost more so, I was frustrated and fed up with myself.
Why had I allowed this to happen? Why? Why?
And what could I do now?
Why me?
I lay awake for a long while, trying to find solutions to the unanswerable puzzles of my mind.
In the morning, I set to the more immediate task at hand: identifying the blackmailer, recovering the papers and my mother's money, and making things good with the tax man. It sounded deceptively simple. But where did I start?
With Roderick Ward, the con man accountant. He had been the architect of this misery, so discovering his whereabouts, alive or dead, must be the first goal. Where had he come from? Was he actually qualified, or was that a lie too? Were there co-conspirators, or did he work alone? There were so many questions. Now it was time for answers.
I called Isabella Warren from the phone in the drawing room.
"Oh, hello," she said. "We're still speaking, then?"
"Why shouldn't we be?" I asked.
"No reason," she said. "Just thought you were disappointed."
I had been, but if I didn't speak to people who disappointed me, then I'd hardly speak to anyone.
"What are you up to today?" I asked her.
"Nothing," she said, "as usual."
Did I detect a touch of irritation?
"Do you fancy helping me with something?"
"No bonus payments involved?"
"No," I said. "I promise. And none will even be requested."
"I don't mind you asking," she said with a laugh. "As long as you don't mind being refused."
I wouldn't ask, though, I thought, because I did mind being refused.
"Can you pick me up at ten?" I asked.
"I thought you said you'd never let me drive you again." She was still laughing.
"I'll chance it," I said. "I need to go into Newbury, and the parking is dreadful."
"Can't you park anywhere," she said, "with that leg?"
"I haven't applied for a disabled permit," I said. "And I don't intend being qualified to."
"What do you mean?"
"I want to be able to walk as well as the next man," I said. "I don't want to be identified as 'disabled.' "
"But parking is so much easier with a blue badge. You can park almost anywhere."
"No matter," I said. "I don't have one today, and I need a driver. Are you on?"
"Definitely," she said. "I'll be there at ten."
I went out into the kitchen to find my mother coming in from the stables.
"Good morning," I said to her, still employing my friendlier tone from the previous evening.
"What's good about it?" she said.
"We're both alive," I said.
She gave me a look that made me wonder if she had thought about not being alive this morning. Was suicide really on her mind?