The Book of Daniel (11 page)

The confusion my young mind felt as it took in its unfamiliar surroundings overwhelmed the feelings of my present, dead consciousness, and I was demoted back to the role of spectator once again. I was in a medical facility of some kind, that much was obvious. The bed I occupied was of the large, sturdy-framed variety that is only ever assigned to the very ill, and a drip stand holding a bag of clear liquid stood guard over me, feeding something into my arm via a catheter. I strained to pick up any sound, but the place was as silent as the grave that I had so narrowly avoided. I started to look around, but my field of vision was restricted, and I became aware that the side of my head was heavily wrapped in bandages. I instinctively reached up to touch my face, but stopped when a voice said, “No, don’t do that.”

I gingerly twisted my neck round and saw a nurse sitting beside my bed. The sun streamed around her silhouette, giving her an almost divine radiance. “I wouldn’t try to talk much, either, if I were you. Your cheek’s been torn to shreds, and if you’re not careful, you’ll work the stitches loose.”

“Where am I?” I mumbled though clenched teeth, feeling like a bad ventriloquist.

She stood up and moved out of the sun, towards the foot of the bed. “You’re in the Intensive Treatment Unit at Camp Bastion. You’ve been unconscious for almost forty-eight hours, some of them while you were undergoing surgery.” She picked up my chart from the end of the bed. “And judging by this, you’re lucky to be alive.”

“I don’t feel particularly lucky. What happened to Lewis? Is he okay?”

I already feared the worst, but a small voice of hope said that maybe I had only imagined his death, and that even now he was in a nearby bed, on the road to recovery. My question hung in the air, and then the nurse flicked her eyes downwards for an instant. That was enough to tell me all that I needed to know.

“I’m sorry, but you were the only one they brought in. At least, the only one alive.” I caught her looking at me intently for a moment, and then she looked away and continued. “I know I’m supposed to try to be upbeat in front of the patients, but oh, it was horrible. So many bodies. I’m sorry. I’ve only been working here for two months. They told me it could be bad, but I never expected anything like this.”

She made an effort to regain her professional air, and shook her head sadly. “The guys carrying the stretcher didn’t say much. They never do. I guess they’re under orders. But one of them came in here just before he left and gave me a message to pass on to you: ‘Sorry about your mates.’ That’s all he said, just as blunt as that, and then he went. No-one else has been in here to see you since.”

So that was it then. ‘Sorry about your mates’ was the best epitaph anyone could manage for Lewis and the rest of my comrades, and the disappointment I felt was like a slap in the face. It was a sobering realisation to come to: that grunts like my fallen brothers and I were actually little more than cannon fodder in the grand scheme of things. As far as those higher up the chain of command were concerned, I was just a statistic, a resource that needed to be healed up and then reassigned elsewhere, repeat until death or retirement. The stretcher-bearer had summed it up perfectly. To the masters we served, I was just the latest in a line of faceless nobodies (in my case, now almost literally, ha ha), and those four words of human kindness, ‘sorry about your mates’, were all that one cog in the machine could spare for another. Of course I had known others who had died during my years in the Army, but none of their deaths had affected me so strongly, because being able to share their passing with my friends had always lessened the impact; only this time there was no-one left to share with. Up until that moment, I had thought of the Army as my family, but with Lewis and the others all dead, I realised that was wrong;
they
had been my family, not the Army, and what was left after their deaths was almost as hollow and empty as my life with my father had been.

“I’m sorry about your friends, too, really I am. It’s awful working here. I came here because I wanted to help people, but most of the people they bring in are already way beyond any kind of human help. I’m only glad that we were able to do something for you, or at least start to. I’m afraid you’re not in the clear yet, Captain Stein.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the preliminary results indicate that you’ve got some kind of infection from your wound, but until we run a few more tests, we can’t tell for sure what it is. Your immune system’s going to kick in and try to fight it off in the next few days, and that could get a bit rough, I’m afraid. It’s happy hour for painkillers at the bar right now,” she said, indicating the bag on the drip stand, “and we’re dosing you up with a mixture of broad-spectrum antibiotics, too, but because we couldn’t get to work on treating you straight away, whatever it is has already got a foothold. It doesn’t help that you lost an awful lot of blood, either. All things considered, it’s a miracle you’re still alive.”

“Thanks for the pep talk.”

She blushed and looked down. “Sorry. Like I said, I don’t think I’m really cut out for working in a place like this. I…”

“Hey, I was just kidding. I appreciate your honesty. And don’t worry, I’ll be fine. I’m a survivor.”

She smiled gratefully at me, but hushed me nonetheless. She knew that I had done enough talking for the moment and needed to rest, and she was absolutely right. I felt exhausted. The loss of my comrades, the death of my closest friend, my injury, my polluted blood and my newfound despondency about the Army: each of these jigsaw pieces assembled into a larger image of fatigue, and I gladly relaxed back into the pillow, letting the mystery cocktail percolating into my arm carry me off into a dreamless sleep.

* * *

W
hen I next awoke, I quickly wished I hadn’t. The sun that had spilled across the bed earlier was gone, replaced instead by the pale face of the moon staring down at me unsympathetically. Whether I had slept for just a few hours or a few days, I had no way of knowing, but what I did know was that I was feeling very sick. The pain in my cheek was the first to announce itself, and then the other pains and discomforts swiftly followed: a heavy, persistent ache throbbed in my muscles; I was hot; my throat felt like I’d swallowed broken glass; and I had a bastard of a headache.

I reached for the button that would summon a nurse, but almost immediately I felt a cool, damp sensation on what little part of my forehead remained exposed. I looked to my left, straight into the reassuring smile of the nurse I had spoken to earlier. “Hello again.”

I moved my mouth to reply, but nothing came out.

“Shhh. Don’t try to talk. Just concentrate on getting better. I’m right here to keep an eye on you. I’m supposed to be off duty, but we don’t have many other patients in at the moment, and, well, after seeing all those bodies come off the helicopter the other day, I wanted to make sure at least someone survived. Not that I think you’re in much danger. I mean, you’re still young and fit, and if you were going to… well, you wouldn’t have made it this far if things were that serious. But you’re not… out of the woods yet, I’m afraid, so just try to take it easy. There’ll be plenty of time for talking later,” she said, with a strange look whose meaning only became clear a few days afterwards.

I gave her what I hoped was a compliant smile rather than a grimace, and dutifully passed back into an uneasy state of neither unconsciousness nor wakefulness. I bobbed in and out of awareness, occasionally lucid, but often fevered, my body sweating as it continued to fight a battle that had already ended several days earlier for the rest of my squad. Now and then, I would be aware of doctors reading the chart at the foot of my bed, but I could rarely hear what they were saying. They seemed to know what they were doing, though, and after five days, the signs of my sickness had almost completely vanished.

Throughout it all, the nurse was rarely far from my side, or so it seemed. My mind was certainly not at its most reliable, but all the same, I distinctly remember several occasions when the look of concern I caught on her face far exceeded that to be expected from mere professional courtesy. Not that I minded; I was not so delirious that I didn’t notice how pretty she was, and the sound of her pleasant voice as she talked or read books to me gave me something to focus on as I struggled against the infection. But beneath the surface, there was often a sense of there being something more serious on her mind, something itching even more than the stitches in my cheek to get out in the open. Who knows, maybe my curiosity about her behaviour was just as big a factor in my recovery as all the rest of my treatment.

On the morning that I was officially deemed to be once again fit, she could no longer contain whatever it was that had been troubling her. The door had barely closed behind the doctor before she came out with it.

“Good news, eh, Captain Stein? I knew you’d be alright! The fever’s cleared up nicely, and although you’re going to have a heck of a scar, at least you’ll live to tell your children about how you got it one day.”

“I think that’s largely down to you and the rest of the medical staff. Thanks for looking after me so well. I’m sure I owe you my life.”

She looked pleased. “You’re welcome. But it’s God you owe your life to, not us. He’s the one who did all the hard work.”

“Hmm.”

Luckily, her enthusiasm to talk about other things forestalled any deeper theological discussion. “Look, now that you’re better, I
have
to ask you something. I’ve been wanting to do so ever since they brought you in, but I didn’t want to risk upsetting you all the while you’ve been ill. I hope it’s okay for me to ask you now, though. Sorry if this is a bit personal, but… well, are you the same Daniel Stein who used to live in Hirston?”

That was a bolt from the blue. In the brief moment that passed between her question and my answer, a flurry of different ideas, emotions and scenarios exploded into my mind, mixing and colliding with each other like a school of startled fish. She looked at me expectantly, but I was temporarily unable to meet her eyes. I felt an overwhelming need for caution. I had spent so much time trying to put that part of my life behind me,
way
behind, that I was reluctant to drag it back out again. I considered denying everything in the interests of self-preservation, but I knew that I couldn’t do that. I owed this woman—whoever she was—a great deal, and the least I could do would be to exchange a few vague reminiscences about Hirston before I was discharged from the hospital. Besides all that, caught in the golden lasso of her gaze, I found it impossible to lie to her.

“Yeah, that’s me.”

“I thought so! This is incredible! I mean, I knew you’d joined the Army, but what are the chances of us meeting like this? Oh my goodness! Sorry, where are my manners? I’m Joanna, Joanna Ridge. Jo. I don’t know if you remember me or not, but we used to go to the same church. You helped rescue me when I got lost in the woods, when I was seven.”

Yet again, the crazy duality of experiencing the same situation from two different perspectives hit me, and it wasn’t getting any easier to cope with. In the mind of the old Dan stirred an uncomfortable memory of that day all those years earlier—the day when we had unearthed a frozen little girl and her friends at the foot of a tree. This Dan’s response was a cautious acknowledgement. “Yeah, sure, I remember you. Small world, huh?”

The reaction of the new and improved (and dead) Dan was quite the opposite. As soon as she introduced herself, the scales were suddenly lifted from my eyes. Even though on some level I already knew that she was Jo of course, her true identity had somehow been kept from me so that I hadn’t consciously recognised her—or been allowed to recognise her—until that moment. Like so many other aspects of this strange re-treading of my life, I can’t really explain it, but whatever the reasons, the instant I knew who she was, a chain of emotions rattled through my brain in rapid, jarring succession: relief that she was okay; happiness at seeing her again; and grief because I knew she was now dead. With the passing of the last link in the chain, it crumpled into a cold, heavy heap at the bottom of my mind. This sudden reappearance of Jo, my Jo, right here in front of me made me ache for all these flashbacks to end. I was fed up with this nonsense. Enough of the past; what of the present and the future?

Despite the emotional storm raging in my dead consciousness, my attention was unmercifully forced back to the familiar—yet unfamiliar—dialogue occurring between my younger self and the woman who was to become my wife. The seeds of love were being sown in even the tiniest details of our exchange: a shared smile at the memory of my mother, back in the days before things turned sour; an intense look in Jo’s eyes whenever she looked at me, the meaning of which would soon become clear, but which certainly did nothing to distract from her beauty; the bright enthusiasm she displayed when listening to the tale of what had happened to me since I’d left Hirston. That was the weirdest part: being in the midst of a flashback of my life, hearing myself telling the same story that I had literally just relived.

Whereas my current self had the benefit of hindsight to notice all the nuances of this gently blossoming romance, the former Dan was less aware of these subtleties. He at least knew that he found her attractive, but back then I was a master at keeping that sort of thing in check. It wasn’t for lack of interest or opportunity, but more a matter of self-preservation, of fear that I would inevitably lose yet another person that I cared for to some event outside of my control. But with Jo, it was different. I had always thought that I’d had enough of loss, but instead of reinforcing that feeling, the deaths of Lewis, my other comrades and my belief in the Army all seemed to have the opposite effect. Maybe the void left by their sudden departure from my life was too large to leave unplugged. Or to put it another way, perhaps the wound that their deaths had inflicted needed stanching—and who better qualified to do so than a nurse? Whatever the reason, I was looking at Jo, and life, with a new perspective.