my God, Nate. Do you really mean it?’
‘Of course I bloody mean it. Hurry up and say yes before we freeze to death.’
‘Then of course I will, you idiot.’ She jumped into his arms and knocked them both to the ground, finding herself flooded so powerfully with joy that she almost forgot to breathe. How lucky she was to be alive, so happy, with the man she loved and all their lives in front of her.
But even as they lay there, flat on their backs in the soft snow at the side of the track, looking up at the stars, the memories intruded into her consciousness. She was reminded of the times she and Vorny would lie in the dust of the compound looking up at those same ribbons of brilliance in the blackness of the desert night sky, and how the lads used to tease them for it. Where were they all tonight, those boys, how were they adjusting to life at home? She hoped they were happy, too.
And then, out of the blue, she was hit by a wave of anger about James and the others, for the fact that she would never see them again, that they would never experience the joy of lying in the snow on a starry night with the person they loved. The anger quickly cooled into sorrow, and she began to weep silently, only this time the tears were from profound, irretrievable loss.
Where did these crazy, over-the-top emotions come from? She’d always prided herself on being level-headed, not prone to over-dramatics. These days her reactions seemed to be all over the place. It must just be the ‘adjustment’ they all talked about, she said to herself, it would pass, just as soon as she got back to work. She wiped away her tears, leaned over Nate and kissed him. ‘I love you,’ she whispered. ‘More than you will ever know.’
The following day, for no reason she could fathom other than she had a hangover and their lovely holiday was over, she found herself becoming irritated by tiny, silly things: the way he insisted on tying a red ribbon on the handle of his suitcase so that he could recognise it on the luggage carousel, the way he opened every drawer and cupboard in their room to make sure nothing was left behind, the way he checked the hotel bill carefully, item by item.
Why should such small and perfectly reasonable acts annoy her so much? She simply couldn’t understand it but, each time, she felt the anger prickling the back of her head, the nauseous churning of her stomach. She cursed herself for being so impatient – he was only taking care of her, after all.
‘You okay? You’re a bit quiet this morning,’ he said, on the bus to the airport.
‘Oh I don’t know. I feel a bit rough, but it’s probably more the thought of having to go back to work,’ she said.
‘I know what you mean. Year Nine first thing on Monday,’ he said. ‘At least you’ve only got three months to go, haven’t you? Light duties and all?’
She grimaced. The prospect of ‘light duties’ made her feel even more irritable. She would be stuck in barracks, away from Nate all week staffing a daily clinic for malingering squaddies with sore throats and ingrowing toenails, being on the rota for out-of-hours emergency call-outs, serving time until her early release came up. Now they knew she was on the way out, there’d be no more advanced training courses, no going out on exercise, no requirement to keep fit.
She’d just have to grin and bear it. A job with the London ambulance service was waiting for her after Easter, she would move in with Nate and they could start to plan their future together. It’s all good, she told herself, firmly. Stop being such a misery.
But grinning and bearing it did not come easy.
The clinic sessions at the barracks were as dull and dispiriting as she’d feared. Time dragged more slowly than ever as she examined a succession of soldiers’ smelly feet with their blisters, veruccas, and minor sprains or, for light relief perhaps, a touch of man flu, earache or tonsillitis. The highlight of her first week was being called out late one night to the Military Police cells for a soldier covered in blood and so drunk he could barely speak. He had a six centimetre gash from one ear to the back of his neck, obviously from falling backwards onto something hard.
The last time she’d seen this much blood was after a Taliban RPG had landed in the compound, knocking her out and sending shrapnel flying everywhere. She’d come round to a scene of carnage, lots of head wounds and blood everywhere because the soldiers had been at rest and not wearing helmets or body armour. Ignoring her own dizziness, she’d scrambled to her feet and set to work. When she and Vorny had finished checking everyone over they discovered that, by some miracle, most of the injuries were shallow cuts which needed only simple stitching. Only a couple of lads were more seriously hurt and needed evacuation, and they later heard back that both of them had survived and weren’t likely to suffer any long term after-effects. ‘Saved their bloody lives, those two lassies of yours,’ the surgeon told her CO later.
She checked the drunken squaddie over, swabbed him down, shaved an unnecessarily wide strip of hair on either side of the wound, stitched him up and told them to wake him every half hour to check for concussion, with a bucket of cold water if necessary. That’ll teach him, she thought to herself.
One day she diagnosed a case of ‘housemaid’s knee’. The spotty lad gazed at her in confusion: ‘I ain’t been doin’ no housework.’
‘It’s an inflammation of the tissues in front of the kneecap. You just need to take it easy for a couple of weeks and it’ll sort itself out.’
‘Can’t tell me sergeant I’ve got housemaid’s knee,’ he muttered. ‘Never bloody live it down.’
She would normally have found this funny, but for some reason his pathetic embarrassment irritated the hell out of her. She took a deep breath, wrote ‘Prepatellar Bursitis’ on a note and passed it to him. ‘Will that do?’
He tried to pronounce the Latin and gave up.
‘Thank you, ma’am,’ he said, with a brazen smile. ‘Fancy a drink sometime?’
‘Get lost, you cheeky bastard,’ she said, showing him the door.
‘I just can’t cope with the pettiness of it all,’ she shouted to her mother as they struggled along the shingle beach in the face of a bitter cold wind whistling off the North Sea. She’d been given a few mid-week days off and, to be honest, was pleased to have her parents to herself. ‘Their stupid little complaints. I feel like slapping them, telling them to man up.’
Her mother had suggested the walk after she’d come downstairs at three in the morning to find Jess watching the shopping channel with a large glass of her father’s whisky on the table in front of her.
‘What’s up, love?’ she’d asked, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. Jess noticed for the first time that her mother’s hair, the gingery side of auburn like her own, was turning grey.
‘Can’t sleep. It’s just too quiet here,’ she replied, trying to make light of it. ‘What are you doing up, anyway?’
‘Saw the light on when I went for a pee.’
Jess had been looking forward to a few days by the seaside, where she could take long walks in the sea air and hopefully knock herself out with physical tiredness, but it hadn’t worked like that. For the second night running she had lain awake for hours before giving up and going downstairs to raid her father’s drinks cabinet.
‘You shouldn’t drink so much of that stuff,’ Susan had said, looking pointedly at the glass.
‘Don’t
