8. Sarah
8. Sarah
Wales
At work in the Intensive Care Unit, when awful things are happening around me, it’s reassuring to listen to the voices on the radio burbling away in the background. To know that out there – in the rest of the world – the safe, mundane banalities of everyday life rumble on as usual.
Here, too, in Danny’s mum’s house, where these days it feels dark no matter what time of day it is or how many lights are switched on, the radio is reliably cheerful. Annie keeps it on all the time, as if its noise alone will make the house, and her son, happy again.
Through the open living-room door I can just make out Danny’s face as he stares, unseeing, at the TV. He has that faraway look in his eyes. The thousand-yard stare. Or, to give it its medical definition: ‘The unfocused gaze of a traumatized soldier who has become emotionally detached.’
His hair is so long now, it falls below his shoulders. Matted and greasy and black, it mirrors the wild, unkempt beard that obscures the bottom half of his face.
Danny used to take such pride in his appearance. When we were younger, the other lads in his rugby team used to tease him about how long he spent on fixing his hair. Not any more.
‘Is it possible,’ the DJ asks over the airwaves, ‘to cook an egg in the bath? Or even,’ he pauses, a smile in his voice, ‘in a dishwasher?’
He must be a stand-in, because I don’t recognize the voice, and yet there is something familiar in his northern accent and easy charm. A memory pulls at the edges of my mind.
‘There you go, lass,’ he says, handing the show over to his co-host.
And suddenly I am transported fully back there, to a crowded military canteen. Deep blue eyes, warm skin pressed against mine for the briefest of moments as he shakes my hand.
Whenever I think of him, it is always his face on that first morning that I recall, before he knew I was Danny’s girlfriend. Before the shutters came down and locked me out.
The kettle boils, spewing out angry steam. I pour the bubbling-hot liquid into two mugs and fish out the teabags quickly – he doesn’t like it too strong – and toss them in the bin. Then I take a deep breath, paste on a smile, and carry the mugs of tea through to the living room.
Gently, I sit down on the sofa.
‘Sweetheart, I made you some tea.’
Carefully, I hold it out for him, but his hands remain rigid, steadfastly gripping the edge of his armchair.
Hands I would know anywhere.
The purple thread of veins that twist and pop below the thin, shrapnel-scarred skin. The slightly crooked middle finger, broken in a schoolboy rugby tackle. How they used to turn bright red like a pair of gloves in the cold – even getting something out of the freezer would make them change colour. He would fold his hands in mine to warm them up again.
He doesn’t reach for my hands any more. In fact, he barely acknowledges me at all.
‘Danny?’ I try again.
They say that every war has its after-war. This is Danny’s. His mind separated from his body, forever stuck in some desert battlefield. A place where none of us can visit him.
He may not have been a direct victim of a bomb or a missile, but Danny is another casualty all the same. The deep psychological injuries have never healed. The old Danny – the sweet, gentle, uncomplicated Danny with the happy, dancing eyes – the boy I fell in love with when I was seventeen years old, is gone.
Back then, he didn’t have a care in the world. Life came easily to him. School, sport, friendship, girls.
The first time I ever saw him, he was onstage rehearsing for the school musical. A bunch of girls were whispering and giggling as they watched him through the doors of the school hall. I went to see what all the fuss was about.
The fuss was Danny.
After that, I’d notice him around school, always surrounded by a gaggle of cool friends. So I couldn’t believe it when, a couple of weeks after first setting eyes on him in rehearsal, he waved at me as I crossed the playground at the end of the day.
We had been back in Mum’s Welsh hometown barely a month by then. I was still feeling lost and lonely, without any of my old friends, without my dad who had stayed in London, now living with his new girlfriend. I felt invisible. At the very least, not worth noticing.
So when Danny lifted his hand in my direction, I turned around, expecting to see the popular kids he normally hung out with. But there was nobody else there. Only me.
‘Hey, London girl,’ he said, casually throwing a rugby ball up in the air. ‘Can I walk you home?’ He caught the ball and casually raked a hand through his ink-black hair, pushing it out of his eyes which were the same pale grey as the Welsh sky above us.
He smiled, and I saw that one front tooth ever so slightly overlapped the other. It was the only thing that wasn’t absolutely perfect about him.
‘Sure,’ I said, trying to sound casual.
When I closed the front door of the hated new house behind me that afternoon, it felt for the first time like it could become a home for us after all.
Mum peered at me from behind one of the removal company’s enormous cardboard boxes, still stacked in the kitchen.
‘You look different,’ she said.
Mum was right. Being with Danny changed everything for me. Until then, I had missed London. Missed my friends. Missed my running club. And I was angry with Mum for taking me away from them. Almost as angry as I was with Dad for leaving us.
Danny made up for all of that. He was sweet and funny, and he made me feel good about myself at a time when Dad, because he had chosen to leave us, had made me feel like I wasn’t good enough.
Danny introduced me to his friends, invited me to watch him play rugby, rehearse with his school band. He listened patiently as I told him about Dad’s new wife, new baby on the way. He came running with me, laughing and joking as he chased me across fields and valleys and mountains that had been carved in the Ice Age. Their peaks and slopes felt epic after the flat expanses of south London.
Our teenage romance felt epic too.
Mum got a job as an estate agent. Her face was no longer permanently red and swollen from crying. She dyed her hair blonde, bought herself some high-heeled boots. And then one day, towards the end of my first term, I noticed that she’d started to laugh again. We both had.
That Christmas, our first without Dad, Danny’s mum invited us to spend the day with them. Annie and Mum got tipsy and burned the turkey while Danny and I kissed under the mistletoe he’d picked himself that morning.
‘ Nadolig Llawen ,’ he said, as he held it above me and smiled. ‘Or as you English like to say, Happy Christmas.’
‘ Nadolig Llawen ,’ I replied happily, pulling him down next to me to kiss him.
We were sitting on this same, worn blue sofa.
The same spot where we played charades later that day.
Where, weeks later, Danny told me for the first time that he loved me.
Where we drunkenly fell asleep in each other’s arms on Saturday nights.
Where we opened the envelopes that held our exam results.
Where Danny told me he’d signed up.
‘I want to see the world before it’s too late like it was for Dad,’ he said. ‘There wasn’t enough time for him. But there is for you and me. We should make the most of it.’
I breathe out a long sigh. That time stretches ahead of us like a curse now. Minutes and hours and days and months, while we all anxiously wait to see if Danny will get better – or worse. Whether he will hurt me any more than he already has.
‘Fifty per cent of veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder commit wife-battering and domestic violence,’ the doctor on duty told me matter-of-factly the first time it happened. ‘It’s not Danny, not the Danny you knew, who did this, it’s his illness.’
Now that’s what I focus on. I tell myself it wasn’t me he saw the first time he wrapped his hands so tightly around my neck that I thought I was going to die. Or when, a year after we came home, he smashed a vodka bottle against my arm.
‘Please forgive me, Sarah,’ he begged, full of remorse when he came back to himself. ‘ Please .’
But there is never anything to forgive.
Because how can I be angry with him for doing something he has no idea he is doing? That’s what makes all of this so hard. I can’t speak out about it, or complain about it, or escape from it.
Because none of this is his fault.
And because the women whose husbands and partners never came back to them have it so much worse. Like Ellie, the young bride I wrote to, whose husband’s last words were about her. And all the other widows too.
Danny’s arm jerks involuntarily.
I reach out and carefully lay my hand on top to steady it, as if by touching him I can absorb some of his pain. Bring him back from wherever it is he has disappeared to.
But there is no bringing him back.