So those Afghan kids, I loved to meet them and at the same time it broke my heart. Set me longing for home, pining for my crappy two-up-two-down on the estate near the barracks. Where Cody was. Gutted that I couldn't simply walk into his bedroom any time I liked, with its Star Wars wall border and SpongeBob duvet cover, and find him there messing about with his action figures. Couldn't snuggle up on the settee next to him and endure Toy Story for the kazillionth time or tootle along playing Mario on the Wii with him. The only times I truly resented the army and the government's muddy justifications for keeping us overseas engaged in this spurious conflict with no fixed goal — Enduring Freedom my arse — were whenever I was presented with some reminder of how I wasn't on hand to watch my boy growing up, how I was missing out on those milestones like his first day at school, his first wobbly tooth, his birthdays, Christmases, all that.
Thank God, or maybe Allah, that the village children had left us alone by the time Ivor "Biggun" Davies stepped on that IED. We were making our way back to the Land Rovers, ready to return to forward operating base. The village had checked out, all well, no insurgents lying in wait, no Taliban or Al Qaeda lurking under the beds, just a normal innocent speck of civilisation baking in the gravelly grey foothills of the southern Hindu Kush. We followed the track back to the main road and our waiting transport, Biggun and me on point -
They told me afterwards that Biggun was catapulted a full twenty-five feet into the air. Came down minus both legs, intestines trailing behind him like a kite's tail. Me, I was hurled aside smack dab into a wall. Another of our unit was blown clean out of his boots. Literally, he landed on his backside with his socks on, assault boots standing where he'd left them. He was unharmed. The other three likewise. Perforated eardrums was maybe the worst any of them suffered.
Bomb Disposal examined the site later and figured out that the IED had, as was typical, been cobbled together from all sorts of handy household items. The trigger was made from two hacksaw blades, treading on which completed a circuit that ignited the blasting cap, while the principal component was a common-or-garden pressure cooker packed with TNT. It was a fragment of steel from the pressure cooker that punched a hole in my skull and nearly killed me. Domestic shrapnel.
I was evac'ed to Bastion by Lynx helicopter and a week later airlifted out to Blighty. I then spent two months at Selly Oak hospital, off my tits on fentanyl most of the time. The ward there was nice, if you don't count the poor sods in the other beds worse off than me, the ones with the missing legs or the missing eyes or, saddest of all, the missing minds. Plump, bosomy nurses with hooting Brummie accents bustled around us the whole time. I couldn't understand half of what they were saying, between the drugs and one ear not working and them speaking like drunken milkmaids on a hen night, but they were kind to me and kept throwing the phrase "war hero" my way, which sounded great even though it was utter crap. Heroic wasn't getting yourself laid out by a bomb made in someone's back kitchen from a saucepan and a couple of saw blades. The only word for that was unlucky. Or stupid.
But I got better. Slowly, like a car struggling uphill on an icy road, going forwards, slithering back, but I made it in the end. They got me upright and walking once more, although for a while my sense of balance was fucked and I'd keep lurching to the left, into the occupational therapist's waiting arms. Which would have been deliberate if the occupational therapist had been a gorgeous babe, only she wasn't. She was five two, fourteen stone, built like an All Blacks prop forward, and only slightly less intimidating. They also got me thinking straight again, because I'd lost just a tiny amount of brain but enough to give me some "cognitive function issues." Probably this was down to me not having that much in the way of brain to start with. Couldn't spare any of the little I'd got, ha ha. I cracked that joke quite a lot during the speech and language sessions. Amused me, if no one else. Anything to alleviate the arse ache of vocabulary tests, spatial reasoning tests, comprehension tests, logic tests, oral tests — aargh! Like sitting my school exams all over again, but more of them, and harder.
I fought my way back to normality, or as near there as I was ever going to get. I thought I'd made it.
But if so, why was I in bed again, being tended to by people? Why was my head bandaged again? Why did bits of me hurt? It didn't make sense.
Obviously I'd had some kind of relapse. I'd been ambulanced back to Selly Oak. How soon after I'd last been there? How much time had passed?
All very perplexing. Not helped by the fact that the place I was in didn't actually look much like a hospital. Not even private medical facilities stuck you in a comfy feather bed with a heavy brocade counterpane in a room with a fireplace, a flagstone floor and a bona fide fucking tapestry hanging on the wall. And the people who came in to see me didn't wear scrubs or uniforms or white coats. They wore everyday clothing. They looked ordinary. The one who was in charge of taking care of me was quite old, too. In her sixties at least, past retirement age for a healthcare professional. Well preserved, though. Looking pretty good for an old bird, actually. A lady of advanced years who'd lived right and enjoyed herself and wasn't afraid to let it show. She had ash blonde hair with a few streaks of white in it. A round, jolly face, laugh lines, bright eyes. I liked her the moment I saw her. She reminded me of my mother, but in a good way. My mother as I preferred to remember her, the warm cuddly creature of my childhood, not the bitter-to-the-point-of-dementedness divorcee she became after my dad walked out on her to go and play housey with a receptionist at one of the hotels where he worked as a lift service engineer. The girl was all of nineteen, just five years older than his son was at the time.
I couldn't stop laughing when the old woman told me her name, though.
Frigga.
I mean — Frigga!
How could I be expected not to laugh?
She took it well. Wasn't the first time, clearly. She just smiled at me, fondly, like you would a child who'd just fathomed how hilarious the word "bottom" is.
"You'll get over it," she said.
And surprise surprise, she was right. I sniggered the next couple of occasions I used it, and then that was that.
I slept a lot. At odd hours, for odd lengths of time. I ate whenever someone brought me food. I relieved myself in the chamberpot provided, which would invariably be emptied and rinsed out when I next needed it. I let Frigga put poultices and bandages on my various injured parts and I drank the medicine she gave me, even though it tasted like boiled sweatsocks, because it took away the pain better than any pharmaceutical I'd ever known and because I could almost feel it and the poultices fixing things inside me, knitting bones, calming contusions, patching torn flesh back into place. I tried to piece it all together, where I was, how I'd got here, and gradually random thoughts surfaced, memories returned in snippets, and it was maybe my fourth day of recuperation when I finally got everything straight. Of course this wasn't a hospital. The snow storm, the car crash, the forest, the wolves, the women on snowmobiles… Asgard Hall.