10. Carl
10. Carl
I turn the heavy card over in my hand, then brush my fingers over the embossed words in their fancy, looping black italics.
Jenni Jane Richardson and Michael Dermot Cooke
Request the honour of your presence at their wedding
On the fifth of December at two o’clock in the afternoon
At St Edward King and Confessor Catholic Church, Clifford
Dinner and dancing to follow at The White Hart Lodge Hotel
Dress code: Black tie
There’s a handwritten note from Cherub inside saying he can’t wait to catch up. That Sarah is going to be Jenni’s bridesmaid. And how great will it be to have the gang together again?
Sarah .
Just the mention of her name makes my heart beat in a way I thought I had taught it to forget.
‘What’s up with you?’ Maggie says, straining forward to peer at the invitation. Her brow furrows. ‘Who are Jenni and Michael? You’ve never mentioned them.’
She’s right. I haven’t. It was just so much easier not to, to try and forget about that other life. Coming back home to Yorkshire after Afghanistan, after everything that happened, well, it wasn’t the best of times.
It was hard living with Mum and her new fella. They kept telling me how lucky I was to be back, how blessed I was to have made it home in one piece. I would smile while my insides twisted with rage at the notion that I was somehow fortunate.
When they moved up to Scotland for his job it was a relief. It wasn’t their fault. I know they tried their best to be there for me. But how could they possibly understand? How could they think I was lucky when all the people I cared about had gone?
I told myself I was better off alone. I closed the door of my run-down, mouldy council flat the Veterans Welfare Service had found for me on the outskirts of Leeds, and locked myself away from the world. I never imagined I’d live anywhere else.
My heart hurt all the time, it still does, but I’ve got used to that. I’ve learned to live with all the loss. And that’s okay. I’m not the only one – so many people lost someone over there. All those young lads with their lives ahead of them. All those families they didn’t return to. So much conflict. So much death.
A familiar wave of sadness washes over me.
‘I better get going,’ I tell Maggie, ignoring her questions and heading for the door. I whistle for the dogs, who eagerly follow me, and before she can say anything I am outside.
I pull my jacket on, easing it over my shoulders, feel the satisfying burn of the new tattoo smarting beneath it, and set off across the blustery moors. Blood is still pulsing in my ears, like it always does when I think back to the war now. But I know that if I just keep putting one foot in front of the other I can walk myself back to being okay. Or if not okay, at least calm. This is the one place that can force the noisy chatter in my brain to keep quiet.
The Chevin towers above me, the wide ancient ridge of rock that soars over the town of Otley, guarding us like a soldier in a watchtower. Fridge and I were brought up here once on a school trip. I remember the teacher telling us that stone quarried from the Chevin was used to help build the Houses of Parliament, and that Oliver Cromwell’s army had gathered beneath its protective shadow in the market square on the eve of the Battle of Marston Moor. We all cheered when the teacher told us that they’d drunk the pubs dry before trouncing the enemy the next day.
It makes me wince to think of that now. We were naive schoolboys who thought war was cool. Who grew up to fight in one, still thinking it was cool. Look where that got us.
I take a deep breath. One foot in front of the other. Just keep going. One foot in front of the other.
It was Michael who brought me back up here – after Mum had moved to Scotland. Those are the words he said to me the first time he came to the flat and knocked on the door. He suggested we go for a walk but I refused, mumbled some excuse about not feeling great.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘The fresh air will do you good.’ Then he smiled. ‘I know it’s hard, but one foot in front of the other, lad. One foot in front of the other.’
And so we walked. We didn’t talk about anything. He didn’t ask me about Fridge. He didn’t ask me about the war. He didn’t ask me about my plans for the future. We just walked.
He kept coming back. He kept not taking no for an answer. And slowly I found myself looking forward to his knock on the door. To our walks across the moors. To the cup of tea from Michael’s flask, sitting in his car at the end.
On the days he said he was coming I started to wait for him outside the door, with my coat and trainers on already – just like I used to do when I was a kid, when he and Fridge would come to pick me up in the van.
Sometimes, after one of our walks, I would go back with him for tea. One of Kathleen’s delicious home-made chicken pies or lasagne. Michael and I would talk about the state of Leeds United, and Kathleen would talk to me about her vegetable patch while we did the dishes afterwards.
Then one day Michael turned up at the flat and said, ‘It’s time.’
‘What for?’ I asked, puzzled.
‘To get you some proper help. I’ve found a charity that helps ex-servicemen get back on their feet. You’ve got an appointment this afternoon.’
No bit of me wanted to go with him. But how could I say no to this man I loved like a father who had done so much for me?
It was over an hour’s drive from Otley to the small town of Beverley, but Michael talked all the way, so I didn’t have time to think about where we were going and what we were doing.
He chatted about his sister, Jean, who ran an animal rescue centre in Leeds, and about some Labrador puppies that had been brought in. He thought we should go and visit.
I told myself I was doing it for Michael, right up until the moment he knocked on the scruffy front door. I didn’t see how some well-meaning counsellor could possibly help me or understand what I had been through.
But then the door swung open and an enormous, jug-eared bald man appeared wearing a red T-shirt that said ‘I went to Afghanistan and all I got was this crappy false leg’.
And I realized straight away that of course he understood. I could see it in his eyes. He led me into a small, chaotic office filled with piles of paperwork, unwashed coffee mugs, an antique computer and a precarious tower of Poppy Appeal collection boxes.
Brian fussed around making us coffee, then he sat down in front of me.
He studied me for a while as he sipped from his mug, then finally he said, ‘I see lads like you all the time. You think that if you’d done your job better your friends would still be alive. You’ve seen things, terrible things, that no man should ever see, and you can never unsee them. And you come back home and you’re not sure what to expect, but it isn’t this. It isn’t mood swings and nightmares and flashbacks and rage. But you don’t want to ask for help because you’re so wedded to your rough, tough soldier image, you don’t know who you’d be without it, and you think because you haven’t lost a leg you don’t deserve any sympathy.’ He paused. ‘Sound about right so far?’
I nodded.
‘You can tell me you’re fine if you want, and I’ll let you go on your way. Or you can accept you’re not fine and consider the possibility that I might be able to help you.’
Neither of us spoke for a while. I stared at the floor.
Then Brian started to talk again, but his tone was softer this time. ‘It’s like living behind glass, isn’t it? Feeling like you don’t connect with people?’
That’s exactly how it did feel, and when I looked at him it wasn’t pity I saw written on his face, it was understanding. The relief and shock of somebody not just getting it but saying it out loud made me cry.
Brian leaned forward. ‘Let’s see if we can’t do something to help you, eh?’
I must have looked startled, because then he said, ‘It’s all right, lad, I’m not going to hold your hand and sing “Kumbaya”, I’m just going to sign you up for a couple of workshops.’
The first workshop was a business experience course, and that’s where I met Roz – Maggie’s mum. Roz was the accountancy teacher, and on the last day of the course she arrived for class with an enormously fat dog in tow.
‘She was my dad’s dog,’ she said. ‘I know it sounds stupid but I honestly think she’s been depressed since he died –’
She broke off, looking at me as if making her mind up about something. I waited for her to continue.
‘He’d have liked you, my dad. He was a soldier himself once upon a time. He was devoted to Hatty. They used to go on long treks over the moors. He knew those moors like the back of his hand. But then he got Alzheimer’s and started to lose his way. He’d turn up all over the place – pubs, hotels, strangers’ houses, a caravan park once – generally wet and covered in mud, hungry and confused. Hatty would always be there with him – she never left his side. Then, last summer, Dad died very suddenly. My poor brother found him dead in his armchair, Hatty lying at his feet.’ She paused at the memory. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, wiping away a tear. ‘I don’t know what made me tell you all this.’
‘You don’t have to say sorry,’ I smiled. ‘I know what it’s like to lose people.’
The dog sighed and relaxed her head on my leg. I realized she was mirroring me; just stroking her made me feel better. I felt calm. The panic I had been feeling all morning about not having a ready-to-launch business idea had disappeared.
I imagined Hatty on her walks over the moors with Roz’s dad. I thought of her never leaving his side all those times he got lost and then at the end, still guarding him, reaching up to nuzzle his wizened old hands as they relaxed their grip on the edge of his armchair.
I thought of my walks with Michael, how much I’d grown to love them, and suddenly something the careers guidance officer had said sprang into my mind. He’d said that not all jobs have to be behind a desk, that I might be more suited to something active and outdoors.
‘What if I walked her for you?’ I said to Roz.
‘Really? Would you? I’d pay you.’
So that was that. My ready-to-launch business idea. Although it’s never once felt like work. I loved Hatty from the get-go, and I felt honoured to be taking care of this dog for Roz’s dad, the gnarly old soldier of my imagination.
Then Elsa made two. I took up Michael’s offer to go and visit the Labrador puppies at the animal shelter where his sister worked. Elsa was the runt. She needed me as much as I needed her.
A couple of months after that, I was walking them both in the park when someone I’d bumped into a few times walking her Border terrier asked if I’d look after him for a couple of weeks while she was on holiday.
Someone else did the same when they saw me with the Border terrier, and before I knew it I had so many dogs to look after that Roz, who was helping me sort out a business grant, suggested her daughter Maggie – who had just left school – might give me a hand.
As the months passed, I spent my days literally walking away my grief. Exhausted from the fresh air, I started to sleep for longer stretches at night. I’d found a new purpose for getting up in the morning.
I still have my bad days, and long stretches of the night when, tormented by flashbacks and grief, I lie awake for hours on end, desperately trying to calm my fractious brain.
But right now, striding across my beloved moors with my crazy pack of dogs, well, it’s enough. More of a life than I could ever have hoped for. Maybe more than I deserve. That’s what the tattooing is about. An acknowledgement that I might be moving on but I will never forget my friends who can’t.
I’d been thinking about it for a while. Robert, a lad who used to work with Caroline in the kennels at the camp, had a tattoo of his dog’s paw on his arm. The dog, Rixo, was a beautiful, dark brown cocker spaniel with flapping ears and boundless energy. She was killed when his squadron came under fire – shot while Robert was trying to pull her to safety in a ditch. She died in his arms.
Caroline burst into tears when he showed us the tattoo. ‘It’s so beautiful,’ she said.
‘It’s to remember her,’ Robert explained. ‘She saved so many lives, her life should mean something too.’
I wanted to do something similar, I just wasn’t sure what. And then, last Remembrance Day, I thought of the poppies. It was one of those light bulb moments when something just feels right. I looked at the sea of poppies being worn by people on the telly standing in front of the Cenotaph, and I knew that was the tattoo I was going to have. The symbol that represents all those who have lost their lives on active service.
But remembering lost friends is one thing. Having to face the living is very different. I just don’t think I’m strong enough. I’ll ring Cherub. Tell him I can’t face the thought of being with all those people, that it would be too hard.
I won’t be lying. Without Fridge or Squadron by my side, the thought of going to a big social occasion like Cherub and Jenni’s wedding is flat-out terrifying. For so long, I’ve managed not to feel too much. Why go reminding myself of everything I’ve tried so hard to forget?