prospect of meeting Nate’s work colleagues, her resolve crumbled and, with trembling hands, she took a couple of slugs to steady her stomach. It worked a treat. Vorny arrived early – they’d planned it that way – and they had a couple more discreet glasses together.
Nate’s friends were two couples, Matt and Louisa, Benjamin and Aleesha, and his head of PE, Mary, a tall, rangy woman of about forty. Jess submitted herself to their scrutiny: ‘Good to meet Nate’s mystery woman, after all this time’, and, ‘so you’re the tough girl who went to the front line in Afghanistan?’ She enlisted Vorny to help with the inevitable interrogation, which ranged from the benign: ‘Did you actually volunteer to go out there? You must be so brave, I’d be terrified,’ to the incredulous: ‘Did you really have to carry guns? Even as medics?’
They were nice enough people, but conversations with civilians always made her feel like a stranger from another planet. It was impossible to explain, or for them to gain any understanding beyond the most superficial level, what being on tour in a country like Afghanistan is really like.
The arrival of Jonny and Sarah was the excuse she needed, and she left Vorny fielding questions while she opened more bottles of wine and took the opportunity to slosh a whisky top up into her innocent glass of coke.
Sarah was a tall, slim girl with a dark-eyed seriousness about her – quite a contrast to her sturdy blond brother, whose open face was always ready with a joker’s smile. Jess could tell immediately that she was different from her brother’s previous girlfriends – less glamorous and self-absorbed, more poised and alert to the world around her. From their secret smiles and his soft looks it was clear that this relationship was the real thing, and she was glad for him.
In the past, to the anxious bewilderment of their parents, he’d dropped out of two university courses in consecutive years, and seemed to be settling for a life of minimum-wage drudgery. Then, with the help of a string-pulling uncle, he’d landed an IT post in a law company. The boss had recognised his potential, sent him on several training courses and promoted him twice. It had been the making of him, as their mother liked to say.
She’d never thought of her brother as much of a looker, but his new sense of self-esteem had magically given his features clearer definition, helped by the fact that he seemed to have lost weight and revamped his wardrobe. He’s quite a catch, Jess found herself thinking.
It turned out that Sarah was a teacher too, so it became a party of two halves: the school gang having a heated conversation about education, while Jess joined Jonny and Vorny sneaking a clandestine smoke in the tiny patio garden. Away from Nate’s sharp eyes she drank steadily and happily, sharing old jokes, enjoying the way her brother and her best friend sparred with each other. Everything was going perfectly.
The rest of the evening passed in a flash, until everyone had made their excuses and left, except for Vorny, who was staying the night, and Matt, a short and slightly balding man with an incipient beer-belly whose girlfriend had fallen asleep in the bedroom. Jess and Vorny sat in a happily intoxicated blur on the sofa, half listening to the boys having a rambling, slightly drunken discussion about politics.
Without warning, Matt turned his unsteady gaze towards them. ‘What do you Army girls think we should do about Syria then? Are we just going to let them go on killing each other till there’s no-one left except crazy radicalised religious zealots?’
You Army girls. How could Nate be friends with such a plonker? Neither seemed willing to reply until Vorny piped up in a quiet, reasonable voice: ‘There’s no right answer of course. It’s a tragic situation but it’s really complex, and I don’t think there’s much we can do to resolve it without creating even more trouble for the future.’
That should shut him up, Jess thought gratefully.
It didn’t. ‘What, shouldn’t we be riding in on white chargers this time, ready to implant the blessed gift of peaceful democracy? Like we’ve done in Iraq and Afghanistan?’
It was a deliberate challenge; Jess felt sure he’d been waiting all evening for the opportunity. She dug her fingernails painfully into her palm and tried to take a deep breath but her chest felt as though a large pair of hands was crushing her lungs. The anger flowed like a dangerous fire through her body, making her head ache, blurring her eyesight, cramping her stomach.
‘Let’s not go there, Matt,’ she could hear Nate cautioning, but it was too late.
A voice in her head warned her to stop, but it was easily ignored. Her tongue loosened itself and the words spilled out, without consent from her brain. ‘I suppose you’ve travelled widely in these countries, talked to many experts?’
‘Jess, don’t you think …?’ she could hear Nate trying to intervene, but she talked over him. ‘So, have you? Have you? And if not, then I’m just wondering what gives you the moral authority to prognosticate about the impact of military intervention in these countries?’
His piggy eyes stared back, widening with alarm. ‘I was just asking your opinion. From two people who have been there.’
Nate was now sitting upright, on high alert. ‘Enough, Jess. Lay off the dogs. This has been a nice evening. Don’t ruin it.’
‘I don’t think for one minute you were asking for our opinion,’ she heard her own voice, low and dangerous. ‘You were giving yours. And you think you have the right to have an opinion, in your safe little job a million miles away from any conflict, having probably never even had a single conversation with an Afghan or an Iraqi, and certainly without an iota of understanding about what we have been trying to achieve for them out there. Or of the fact that good people, much better people than you will ever be, have given their lives to help free the people of those countries from oppression. And you have the nerve to take the piss.’
Matt rose unsteadily to his feet.
‘I’m sorry to have offended. It’s time we were going home.’
Jess stood too. Discovering that she was, in her heels, slightly taller than him made her feel invincible. She could have floored him with a single blow.
‘Is that it? You run away, the moment anyone challenges you?’ she snarled. ‘What a great example you must be for your students. A pathetic, clever-dick, know-it-all little …’
‘ENOUGH, Jess,’ Nate bellowed, grabbing her by the arm and pulling her away, down the corridor into the bedroom, and throwing her roughly onto the bed. Shocked by his strength, she offered no resistance and she fell like a rag doll, arms and legs akimbo. The bed was still warm from Matt’s girlfriend, who had disappeared. There were groaning noises coming from the bathroom. Nate slammed the door behind him but a moment later it reopened and Vorny was by her side.
‘Christ, Jess, whatever happened there? You certainly know how to blow it, don’t you?’
‘He deserved it. The idiot.’ Her anger was cooling now.
‘You’re not wrong, but you shouldn’t call your boyfriend’s boss a “pathetic, clever-dick know-it-all”, however much he deserves it.’
‘His boss? That was the other woman, the tall one, Mary.’
‘No, Matt’s his boss. Mary’s the maths teacher.’
Icy fear replaced the vestiges of her fury. ‘That little fat man’s the head of sports? You’re quite sure?’
‘’Fraid
