The Age Of Odin

Five

It wasn't me that trod on the Improvised Explosive Device, it was someone else. My oppo, Private Davies. I had no memory of the event itself. I could remember everything leading up to it, and fragments of what came straight after, but simply nothing about the actual kaboom. Total blank. Perhaps the morsel of grey matter on which it was recorded happened to belong to the small section of my brain that leaked out through the hole in the side of my head. Gone for ever. And better lost, I'd say.

We were foot-patrolling through a remote village not far from Sangin in Helmand province. Six of us on a routine little meander. The village wasn't a hotbed of insurgency or militancy. Not according to the intel, at any rate. Supposedly friendly, and nothing we'd seen so far had given us cause to doubt that. Usual deal for an Afghan village. Flyblown, dust-ridden. Low drab houses in walled compounds. Market area with stalls with corrugated iron roofs. Goats a-go-go. The smells of cooking flatbread, standing water, open-air latrines. No women out and about, only the men, and plenty of kids: skinny little things darting this way and that, yelling, with the brightest of eyes on them, the liveliest of smiles.

A bunch of them knew the drill. They came up to us, holding out battered old packs of Wrigley's Extra which they expected us to buy off them for fifty Afghanis apiece or, better yet, one US dollar. They'd probably been given the chewing gum by the last patrol to pass this way. It was daylight robbery, and we, like mugs, dug in our pockets and paid up, because local economy, spirit of entrepreneurialism, hearts and minds, all of that. And because why not? It wasn't these nippers' fault that British troops were on their turf, was it? They weren't Taliban, were they? None of them was called Bin Laden. So why not be nice and give the saucy tykes something to smile about?

In every eager little face that peered hopefully up at me I saw Cody. He was seven by then. Seven years old, and I'd barely seen him. Maybe spent a year with him all told, in the breaks between tours of duty. Every time it looked like I might be getting a decent dollop of home leave, weeks if not months to spend with wife and son and try and be a family unit with them, boom, along came another compulsory call-up and I'd be off back to Hell Manned, back to Camp Bastion and the tents and dust and heat and mess cuisine and my trusty SA80 and the same old army bollocks all over again.

Letters, photos, emails, phone calls, a few minutes of webcam interface here and there, these were a substitute for the real thing — for contact — but not enough. As each tour stretched on, one after another, I could feel it slipping away, what lay between me and Gen, what lay between me and Cody. My two main relationships, cracking apart slowly in different ways. Gen becoming cooler towards me by degrees, more distant. Couldn't blame her for that. Cody becoming blanker, less comprehending. Couldn't blame him for that either. He was just losing a sense of who I was, what I meant to him, this man he called Daddy but barely saw, this man who wasn't like most of the other kids' daddies, daddies who dropped them off and picked them up, daddies who were home in the evening and at weekends to play footie with them and read them stories and kiss them goodnight. His daddy was a ghostly, uncertain presence, a voice, a pixel-blurry face who sounded like a Dalek, a signature on a card. A stranger.

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.