Instead, he asked Acland if he had any objection to seeing his parents before they left. ‘They’re downstairs and they’d like to say goodbye.’
‘Do you have a mirror? I might be more sympathetic if I know what my mother’s been bawling about.’
Willis shook his head. ‘There’s nothing to see except bandages, Charles.’
The lieutenant pointed to the right-hand side of his face. ‘Not on this side.’
‘Yes, well, that’s not pretty either, and I don’t want you taking the wrong messages from it. You’ve got a black eye, your skin colour ranges from yellow to indigo and your face is still swollen . . . but the damage isn’t permanent and you’ll recognize yourself with no trouble in a few days.’
‘I wouldn’t bet on it,’ said Acland with more truth than irony. ‘Mum keeps referring to a photo in her wallet to remind herself what I used to look like . . . and Dad says my appearance was so altered when I arrived here – he claimed my head had swollen to twice its normal size – that he didn’t believe the soldier on the trolley was his son.’
‘That’s not unusual, Charles. Often the impact of injury is greater on the family than it is on the individual. The patient knows what he has to do – survive and get better – but it requires a huge amount of ego-focused energy to achieve it. If he allows his family to drain that energy away, it becomes much harder. Parents and spouses rarely understand that. They subscribe to the myth that love cures everything and feel rejected if their love isn’t wanted.’
Acland stared at his hands. ‘I hope you told my folks that. It sounds like a much better reason for attacking my mother than the real one.’
‘Which was?’
‘Too many bloody questions.’
‘I was told she tried to comb your hair.’
‘That too.’
‘What were the questions about?’
‘Nothing of any importance.’
*
Acland watched the little pantomime of his father shepherding his mother protectively into the room to say goodbye and wondered if his lack of guilt was because he’d finally brought her to her knees. He paid lip service to her need to have every unpleasantness swept under the carpet by saying he was sorry and allowing her to kiss him on the cheek, but they both knew it was a charade. There was a little more warmth in the handshake he gave his father, but only because he knew the kind of recriminations the man was going to face for his son’s misdemeanour.
*
Over time, as some of his memories began to return, Acland asked Robert Willis why the process was so unpredictable. ‘In what way?’ ‘I remember some things but not others.’ ‘What sort of things?’ ‘People . . . briefings . . . a couple of recces that we made . . . the heat . . . the landscape.’ ‘Do you remember your two lance corporals?’ Acland nodded. ‘There’s a cleaner here who smiles the way Barry smiled. I get flashbacks every time I see him.’ ‘Doug, too?’ ‘Yes. They were good blokes.’ ‘Do you have any memories from the day of the attack?’ ‘No. I don’t even remember receiving the orders.’ ‘But you know what they were. I showed you the report. Intelligence had a tip-off that the convoy might be targeted, so your CO sent his best crew to scout ahead. He said he had complete confidence in you and your men.’
‘What else could he say?’ asked Acland cynically. ‘If he’d slagged us off, morale would hit rock bottom. Soldiers would question what the hell they were doing there when even their CO doesn’t stick up for them. It’s bad enough that the British public thinks we’re fighting a rotten war.’
He spent his time watching the twenty-four-hour news channels on the television in his room. Occasionally, Willis took him to task for it, arguing that a concentrated diet of shock-value news gave a distorted view of the world. War was the currency of broadcasters, not of the man in the street. Acland ignored the advice, denying that he felt a personal involvement with the British soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, or that he found each new death depressing.
‘Your CO spoke very highly of you,’ Willis reminded him now, ‘described all three of you as men of the highest calibre. Aren’t you being decorated for it?’
‘Only mentioned in dispatches. If we’d been the best we wouldn’t have been taken out so easily.’
Willis eyed him thoughtfully for a moment, then flipped through the papers on his knee. He withdrew a sheet. ‘This is a paragraph from the investigators’ report. “Lieutenant Acland’s Scimitar was attacked by two improvised explosive devices which were buried in freshly dug culverts at the side of the road and detonated simultaneously as the vehicle passed. The culverts were tunnelled by sophisticated moling equipment and the explosives detonated by remote signal.”’ He ran his finger down a few lines. ‘It details evidence taken from the scene and from a video made by the insurgents, and it goes on: “This suggests an expertise in the construction, camouflage, placing and detonation of IEDs that has hitherto only been seen in Northern Ireland. Future training must include this development to avoid further loss of life. It is no longer enough to alert men to the possibility of a single roadside bomb in a burnt-out car or rubbish bin.”’
He looked up. ‘What they’re saying is that there was nothing you could have done. You and your men were the first victims of a new form of attack, and your only mistake was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.’ He read continued cynicism in Acland’s expression. ‘What makes you think it was your fault?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Did any of your squad express dissatisfaction with your command?’
‘Not that I recall . . . but maybe I’ve chosen to forget it.’
Willis gave one of his dry smiles. ‘You’re confusing different types of amnesia, Charles. Yours – which goes by the general term of retrograde amnesia – is usually the result of head injury or disease, and is not governed by choice. Emotional amnesia – which
