their loss acutely. Dave had been hearing Steve’s screams inside his head. He’d listened to men screaming in agony before. Sometimes he heard it again months later when he was far away. In his sleep, or without warning in the back of his head late at night when he was driving on the motorway. As though there was a casualty lying on his rear seat.The boss yawned. Dave yawned too. Around them men were falling asleep. Dave felt ready for some kip himself. He’d just phoned home, talking first to little Vicky and then to Jen. It had been the usual chatty stuff. Gradually the Wiltshire camp with its wide, wet streets and its rows of houses and his own living room had formed again in his mind. But when he put down the phone it had all vanished in the hot Afghan air.
JENNY KNEW SOMETHING HAD HAPPENED. DAVE WASN’T ALLOWED TO say anything about anything on the army phone but she could still tell that he was keeping something from her.He’d used up every one of his thirty allocated minutes. He and little Vicky had cooed idiotically at each other for at least ten of them. The strange gaps, the overlaps, the complications that always occurred when there was a two-second delay on the patchy line never mattered to Vicky. It only mattered when two adults had things to say to each other.Jenny had told him all the small stuff from home. Everyone said this was the right way to talk to your man when he was away and over the last few years she’d been given plenty of opportunities to perfect her technique. So it was a quick reference to the broken gutter before moving swiftly on to what the nursery had said about Vicky being ahead of her age, the date the hospital was going to scan the baby, her mum inviting his mum over . . . she sometimes listened to her own voice, wittering on, and wondered what he was thinking. Did it mean anything when people were trying to kill you in an alien land that the gutter on a house in Wiltshire was leaking? They both had to pretend it did. But today he wasn’t pretending as well as usual.She put the phone down with that all too familiar feeling. Loss. Regret. Disappointment. The knowledge that all the important things had not been said. Phone calls were a brief interlude in her life and his. And then they went away and lived in their separate worlds, waiting always for the next disappointing call.She picked up Vicky, who seemed to share her sadness. They stood at the window. A grey day was melting into a grey evening. The street was wet. Irregular patches in the pavement were filled with water. The houses looked ugly. Sometimes, when the lights were on in the living rooms and the TVs flickered, she felt cosy on a dark evening. Not tonight.Headlamps travelled slowly up the street. As the car passed Jenny could see it was Agnieszka Dermott’s old Vauxhall with Luke in the back. Where had she been? Agnieszka never shared the details of her life with the other women. Within a day of the men leaving for Afghanistan the wives at the camp had got together in each other’s houses. Even if they hadn’t said anything in particular there was a sort of strength in knowing that everyone felt the same way. But Agnieszka hadn’t joined in.Jenny and Vicky stood at the window so long that night fell and the glass began to throw their own reflections back at them. Jenny saw herself, tall, blonde, angular, Vicky sitting on her hip with one leg stretching across the bump of the baby.More headlamps. A car drew up outside Leanne Buckle’s place. And in that moment, Jenny knew what Dave hadn’t been telling her.There was an endless pause before a man got out. He was carrying a briefcase. Jenny recognized him at once. The Families Officer. That could only mean one thing. Jenny felt her throat constrict and tears press behind her eyes. She tried not to cry for Vicky’s sake then saw with relief that the child had fallen asleep.So she let her tears spill as the Families Officer walked up the front path to Leanne’s door. She watched him ring the bell. Leanne’s bell didn’t work and when nothing happened after a few minutes he had to knock. Leanne answered, carrying a twin, legs hanging. The other one was probably behind her somewhere, bawling, the way they did when Leanne only picked one of them up.Jenny couldn’t see Leanne’s face but, before the man even had time to speak, it was clear she had guessed why he was there. Her hand went up to her head as if she was warding off a physical blow. Her body swayed. The man stepped inside and the door closed behind them.Jenny’s face was wet with tears. It hurt too much to think about it. She tried not to think.The phone rang again. She grabbed it before the noise could wake Vicky. Her whole left side ached now where she had stood too still holding the child for too long. She sank onto the sofa without letting go of Vicky, and put the phone to her ear.‘Oh, Jen, there’s some bad news . . .’ Worry could not remove the warmth from Adi Kasanita’s voice. Jenny loved Adi. She had exchanged another life in a sunnier world for rain and tax credits which never stretched far enough, and yet she was always cheerful, always kind. She never joined in the gossip and ignored the petty rivalries. And when she detected an undercurrent of anger or unhappiness, she confronted it without flinching. If we wives were soldiers, Jenny thought, I’d want Adi to be my sergeant.‘Something must have happened to Steve Buckle,’ Jenny whispered. She didn’t dare to speak because she might wake Vicky. No, that wasn’t true. She didn’t dare to speak in case her voice cracked and she started to cry.‘You looking across the road?’ Adi lived about five doors away.‘The Families Officer’s just gone in.’‘Jen, I knew you’d be really upset so I’m ringing to tell you that he’s not dead.’How did Adi always know everything? She just did. But she never told unless there was a good reason.Jenny swallowed.‘How bad is it?’‘Lost a leg.’‘Oh, Christ, oh, shit . . .’ Jenny tried not to swear in front of Adi but she couldn’t always help it. Adi and Sol Kasanita were Christians. They never talked about it, Jenny didn’t ask.‘Lost a leg and a lot of blood but they think he’ll survive.’‘Is anyone else hurt?’‘That new lad in 1 Section, Jordan Nelson, he’s got some bad burns. I don’t know him. He was in Germany and he’s not been here long.’‘I don’t either. Is he married?’‘No, lives in the barracks.’‘Are they flying home?’‘Jordan Nelson will soon be on his way to Selly Oak. But they can’t fly Steve out until he’s stabilized. They say his condition’s critical.’Jenny swallowed again. Critical. The word sounded like the crack of a whip.‘What are we going to do about Leanne?’‘You take my kids, they’re practically asleep anyway. I’ll go over to her when the Families Officer’s finished.’Jenny felt relieved. Always ready to listen to anyone’s problems, right now she felt unable to deal with a hysterical Leanne. She just wanted to go to bed.‘Are you sure?’‘Get your mattresses down and I’ll be over in half an hour.’‘OK . . .’ Jenny felt so tired she could hardly stand up. ‘OK, Adi. You take care of Leanne tonight; I’ll go to her tomorrow.’‘There is something you can do . . .’‘What?’‘Phone Agnieszka.’Before he left, Dave had particularly asked Jenny to look out for Jamie Dermott’s wife. Jenny liked Jamie a lot and knew he was worried about her. She was Polish, alone with a child who seemed to be handicapped and without family here except her snotty and unhelpful in-laws. But looking after a woman who wouldn’t join in anything had proved difficult. Jenny had asked her round and offered to baby-sit. But the one time she had come over and Jenny had tried to introduce her to everyone, Agnieszka had wrapped her long and beautiful legs around the bar stool in the kitchen and said little. She’d looked as though she wished she was somewhere else, with someone else.‘Can I call her tomorrow? She’s only just got home, I saw her.’‘Oh, sure. You sound so tired; you get all the kids into bed and then you go yourself, honey. We only need to make certain she hears the truth from us first and not some horrible rumour.’Jenny put Vicky to bed and pulled out a couple of mattresses onto the little girl’s floor for the Kasanita kids. She stood looking at her daughter’s sweet, sleeping face. The rounded jaw, the pink cheeks, the wisps of hair curling around her forehead.‘Don’t marry a soldier,’ Jenny whispered to her. ‘Whatever you do, don’t marry a soldier.’She wished she hadn’t. She wanted to be Dave’s wife, but not an army wife. It was just too much. The intensity of living with all the other army families, the knowledge that their burdens were your burdens, the dull ache at the emptiness on the other side of the double bed where Dave should be lying. And beneath it all, the fear. The fear when you woke up and when you weren’t even thinking about it and when you were asleep. It wasn’t a surprise when there was a knock on the door one damp, dark afternoon and the Families Officer was standing on the step. Because in your heart you were expecting it all the time.She decided now that she must persuade Dave to leave the army, and soon. Before there was a knock at her door.
DAVE ROLLED HIS SLEEPING BAG OVER AND LOOKED AT THE SKY. The mountains, many kilometres away, were glowing a thousand shades of red and purple in the dawn. Everyone back in the UK calls this place Theatre, thought Dave. We are In Theatre. It is the Theatre of War. But no one ever tells you that the scenery’s bloody marvellous.He lay still, watching the light change and the mountain colours lose their depth. He was thinking about Jordan Nelson, how his little brothers and worried mother would be sitting miserably under the strip-lighting of a hospital canteen while surgeons picked shrapnel out of his organs.He got up and stretched. A Company and the civilians had first call on the washing area, the toilets, the cookhouse. He could see them moving around at the heart of the FOB. As soon as he could, he would try to find out if there had been any news on Steve or Jordan overnight.But first, compulsively, he counted bodies. Twenty-six.He stretched again and yawned. He looked up. And
