The Poppy Factory (19 page)

d) Sum total of the above, he seems to have lost his sense of fun. Worse than that, although he’s still affectionate with me, he has little interest in the intimate side of our marriage. How will we ever have a family, if this carries on?

Tuesday 16th March

Alfie has lost the battle against his nightmares – they’ve invaded his days as well.

Today, Pa had to close up shop in the middle of the morning because Alfie properly lost his wits and started cursing customers in the shop.

At first Pa asked him politely to leave, but Alfie got even more angry and had to be manhandled into the back room, which is where the butchery proper happens, where they cut up the large slabs of meat. Pa said it was at that point Alfie reached for a knife, so he had to hold him down on the floor and call for help. Apparently he was flailing about, yelling for someone to save his dying friend – I can imagine all too clearly what must have been going on in his mind.

By the time they got him home, Alfie had stopped fighting and shouting, but his whole body was wracked with those terrible animal sobs once more. We sat him in a chair and he just slumped over, weeping and gibbering nonsense. Pa was worried about leaving me alone with him, so he went to ask Ma to come and help. We made strong sugary tea and built up the fire, hoping that the warmth and comfort would ease his pain, but an hour later he was still weeping. There was nothing for it: we had to call out the doctor.

We got him into bed and the doctor made him drink a dose of what he called knock-out juice, and now he is sleeping like a baby. Heaven knows what tomorrow will bring, but I am almost certain that he won’t be going back to the shop again.

It’s such a bitter irony. There we were, worrying about how he would cope with his physical injury but it’s the effect on his mind that is disabling him now. I think it might be what the newspapers are talking about as ‘shell shock’. I barely like to admit it to myself, but I’m terrified that he might never be normal again.

Chapter Five

Jess woke with a start and found herself still on the sofa, shivering with cold.

She stretched and yawned, pushed Milly off her knee, carefully placed Rose’s notebook back into the box with the others and dragged herself upstairs to bed. Around the time dawn broke she woke again, gasping for breath, with cries of terror stuck in her throat: she’d been dreaming of a curly-haired man trying to slash her with a blood-stained knife, surrounded by corpses hanging by their feet from the ceiling of a white, echoing cell.

Once she’d realised that it was just a nightmare, the horrific vision seemed grimly comic, somehow. ‘Christ, the last thing I need is a murderous great grandfather haunting my dreams,’ she said to herself, trying to snuggle back to sleep.

But her mind wandered back to Rose’s words, and her struggle to help Alfie fight his disability and get back to civilian life, to find a proper job, to remind him that life was for having fun, too. The voice in the writing was so strong that Jess could almost hear the shrill exclamation of frustration: ‘I am at my wits’ ends’, or, the calmer, more reflective tone: ‘At least Alfie is alive, even if I hate what that bloody war has done to him.’ I wish I could have been able to talk to her in person, she thought. Rose hadn’t even turned twenty but, for all her youth, she sounded like someone with a very mature head on her shoulders.

The next thing she knew was hearing two male voices booming in the hallway downstairs. Someone – the postman perhaps – talking to her father? Then she remembered her mother saying that her brother was coming home this weekend, with Sarah. ‘They’ve been together nearly a year,’ Susan had said. ‘Do you think it might be serious?’ Jess blinked at her phone with disbelief: it was11.30 a.m.

‘Rough night?’ her brother asked, as she appeared downstairs in her dressing gown.

‘It’s a pleasure to see you too, Jon.’ Jess raked her hair with her fingers. ‘Hello, Sarah. Welcome to Suffolk. Coffee anyone?’

Later that afternoon, when she offered to pick up some items for her mother from the village shop, Jonathan leapt to his feet. ‘I’ll keep you company, shall I? Could do with stretching my legs. C’mon, Milly.’

‘Okay, so what’s up?’ he said, as they walked down the lane.

‘Nothing. Why?’ The dog darted ahead of them, in and out of the high pillows of bramble on either side, trying unsuccessfully to chase rabbits.

‘You won’t talk about work or Nate, you refused a glass of wine at lunchtime and, forgive me, you look like hell.’

‘Charming of you to say so.’

They turned onto the footpath across the heath, the shortcut to the village centre. It was a still, golden day. An Indian summer, the weather forecasters were calling it.

‘Seriously, though. Is something wrong?’

‘How long have you got?’

‘In a nutshell?’

‘Okay. In a nutshell: I’ve been having a really crap time since I got back, and the job’s just not working out, so I’ve decided to quit.’

‘Quit being a paramedic? Shit, it’s
that
bad?’ He sounded truly shocked. ‘Why?’

She sighed. ‘A young man died, you see, after he was hit by a car. I didn’t manage to save him and I’m not entirely certain that it wasn’t my fault. I hesitated, just for a few moments, but the delay could have cost his life.’

‘Phew, scary stuff. But surely that sort of thing could happen to anyone, couldn’t it? You can’t save every casualty.’

‘It’s more about not being able to trust myself. I can’t risk it again.’

‘Can’t they put you onto some kind of course, or something, help you get over it? You’ve spent your whole adult life working towards being a paramedic – it’s been your thing ever since James died, hasn’t it? You mustn’t quit now.’

‘I’ve lost confidence. And anyway I’ve felt such a sense of relief since making the decision, I can’t help thinking it must be the right thing to do.’

They’d reached the end of the path where it met the village street, and stopped to put the dog on a lead. Automatically, they both turned to look at the estuary. However familiar, the sight was always somehow uplifting: that great expanse of slate grey water or, at low tide, the purple-brown mud flats, bordered by reed beds and pine trees, and the wide open spaces of sky.

‘Whatever would you do instead?’

Milly was waiting impatiently, looking up with her sad enquiring eyes. The words came out in a rush: ‘Maybe something to do with animals?’

‘A vet, you mean? Doesn’t that take years of training?’

‘To be honest, I haven’t really thought it through.’

‘A veterinary nurse, maybe?’

‘Perhaps.’ The idea was surprising, but not entirely alien. They started walking again.

‘But if you can’t face the idea of humans dying, how would you feel about animals?’

‘Don’t mince your words, will you?’

‘If your brother can’t ask the question, then who can?’

She leaned down and scratched Milly behind the ears. ‘I’d hate seeing an animal die, but it’s not quite the same as losing a person, is it?’ However much she might love her dog, nothing could ever replace James, not to mention Jock, Baz and Millsy.

‘Wouldn’t you miss the adrenaline?’

‘I might, long term. But right now, no adrenaline would be good.’

They walked on in silence. Jonathan seemed to sense it best to leave the subject, Jess felt too exhausted to talk about it any more. They reached the shop, exchanged pleasantries with an elderly couple who remembered them both from their schooldays, and paid for their items. On the way home they passed the bench by the playing field.

‘Let’s stop for a few minutes,’ he said.

‘Shouldn’t you get back to Sarah? Isn’t it a bit unfair to abandon her at the mercy of the parents?’

‘We won’t be long,’ he said, patting the seat beside him. This had been the site of many an adolescent experiment involving illicit substances, bottles of cider and furtive gropings. She’d mooned over James here, longing for him to notice her, and then she’d wept her heart out here, when she heard he’d died.

Even now, she wished he could be with them, enjoying the sunshine that warmed their faces and enveloped the heath in a dazzling golden haze. She missed Nate, too, and made a mental note to ring him when she got home. They’d been texting but she’d felt too stressed to speak on the phone, worried about admitting what had happened to her and whether it might shake his faith in the delicate balance of their relationship.

‘I can’t believe you really want to give up being a medic, Jess. Are you sure?’

‘I think so,’ she said. ‘I told you. After that accident, I can’t trust myself any more.’

‘Tell me about this young man who died,’ he said. She summarised the scene on the pavement, the rain and the blood, the splinters of glass in the butcher’s shop window, and her flashback.

‘The problem is I can’t guarantee that won’t happen again. I’m afraid of myself, afraid that I’ll lose it, somehow. And it’s not only that: I get this uncontrollable anger and lash out at people, and I have terrible nightmares which only go away if I drink, so that’s obviously making things difficult between me and Nate. Sometimes I think I’m going mad.’

‘You seem perfectly sane to me.’

They sat without speaking for a few seconds, listening to a bird singing in the bush behind them. A robin, perhaps, or was it a blackbird? She thought of Rose and her mother at the very first Remembrance Day, how only the birdsong broke the silence among all those thousands gathered around the wooden cenotaph in Whitehall, how the ceremony seemed to help give them solace.

‘It’s the strangest thing, Jon.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Something very similar happened to our great-great grandfather after the First World War,’ she said.

‘The one who had a wooden leg?’ As children they’d always been fascinated by the idea – imagining him to look like Long John Silver in the cartoon. It had become the stuff of family mythology.

She nodded. ‘That’s right: Alfie. Married to Rose. She wrote these amazing diaries. Mum discovered them at Granny’s. I was up reading them till late last night.’

‘What do you mean, something similar happened to him?’

She tried to summarise what Rose had described of Alfie’s homecoming, how his leg had to be amputated because of gangrene, and how he struggled to accept the disability. The job hunting and then getting laid off, then the nightmares and anger, his drinking, how he reluctantly agreed to try working for Rose’s father at the butcher’s shop but couldn’t face the blood and raw flesh because of what had happened to his best mate.

‘He had a breakdown, Jon. They called it shell shock in those days but he got through the shelling in the trenches okay and made it to the end of the war almost without a scratch. But it was his friend dying that he couldn’t cope with.’ She gave an involuntary shiver, remembering how Alfie hadn’t even bothered to wipe away his tears as he described what Tommy had whispered:
Take me home, mate
.

‘Are you okay, Jess?’

She took a deep breath. ‘Rose said she was afraid Alfie might never be normal again.’

‘And?’

‘It’s got me worried that perhaps it’s going to be the same for me.’

She caught the glance of concern in his eyes as he swivelled on the seat to face her. ‘You mean
you’ve
had a breakdown?’

‘Not as such. But I feel terrible much of the time. I tried taking tranquillisers and the nightmares went away for a while but they made my head all fuzzy, and when I stopped them everything came back, the anger and nightmares and the rest.’

‘Does Mum know about this?’

‘Some of it.’

‘Have you seen a doctor?’

She shook her head.

‘You ought to. It’s very common, this sort of thing. Post-traumatic stress and all that. You of all people should know about it.’

‘Do you really think that’s what it is?’

The alarm in her voice made him backtrack. ‘Could be. Mild version or something. Have you thought of counselling?’

‘I’m sure it’s not as serious as all that.’

‘You said yourself it’s affecting your work, your relationship with Nate. I really think you could do with some help, Jess.’

‘It’s just that …’ he waited as she struggled to find the words. ‘The thought of spilling out all my personal problems to a stranger just makes me feel rather queasy,’ she said, finally. ‘Besides, it’s expensive, counselling.’

‘You served your country, for God’s sake, the Army ought to support you. Promise me you’ll go and get help?’

‘I’ll give it some thought,’ she said. ‘Come on, Sarah will think I’ve abducted you.’

By the end of the weekend they’d ganged up on her. Jonathan talked to their mother, who talked to Jess and offered to pay for five sessions of counselling, ‘just to get you back on your feet again, love’. There wasn’t any point in resisting.

She also managed to persuade Susan to let her borrow the rest of Rose’s notebooks, so that she could finish reading them at home. ‘Take great care of them, won’t you? Don’t get them wet, or lose them? Remember I haven’t read all of them myself yet.’

‘I’ll guard them with my life, promise.’

The counsellor’s room had to be the blandest, most featureless space she’d ever entered: beige walls, oatmeal carpet and curtains, straw-coloured furnishings. It smelled neutral, too, somewhere between dust and emulsion paint, and there was nothing to see out of the window except the off-white wall of the building opposite. Today, even Alison the counsellor – a pleasant woman in her middle years with grey eyes and greying hair in a sensible cut – was wearing shades of cream and taupe.

Jess could hardly bear to drag herself back to this room again, to face the kindly half-smile that seemed to be Alison’s default expression, but she felt a sense of obligation to her mother and brother to see it through.
To prove it wouldn’t make any difference
, is what she secretly thought.

At the first session, the previous week, she’d found herself instantly irritated by Alison’s ordinariness and the anodyne questions she asked. How could this middle-aged, middle-class do-gooder ever understand in a million years what she had been through? For a while they sat in silence as Jess grappled to find the right words.