17. Carl
17. Carl
For a moment, our lips were about to touch – then she twisted away from me, said something about not being able to do this, and rushed out of the kitchen.
I should never have got that close to her. I don’t know what I was thinking. Sarah is still with Danny, no matter how complicated things have become between them.
How could I be so selfish?
As if Danny hasn’t been through enough. As if Sarah hasn’t. She shouldn’t have to be the one to put a stop to it. I should have the decency to do that myself.
After she disappeared upstairs, I lay awake on the sofa. Then I got up early this morning, before Sarah was awake. I didn’t want to see that agonized look of regret on her face again.
Jenni begged me to stay for breakfast but I made up an excuse about having to get back for the dogs.
Cherub could tell there was something wrong.
He reached for my arm as I was about to get into the taxi. ‘Everything all right?’ he asked.
His concern only made me feel even more ashamed.
I thought I’d feel relieved to be out of there, to be on the train on my way home. But as Newcastle city centre shrinks behind me, replaced by open countryside and spiky, leafless trees, the shame grows.
I took advantage of her. Plain and simple. And I took advantage of Danny too. An image flashes before me. His face, rigid with shock, staring at Sarge in the aftermath of the explosion that killed Fridge.
Is that when it started? At the time, I thought he’d been one of the lucky ones. Flesh wounds to his arm and hand, and some deep shrapnel cuts on his face. They patched him up and sent him straight back out there.
Now I wonder. Did a door open in Danny’s mind then, letting the horror of what he saw flood in, and then slam shut. Does that awful scene play forever on a loop inside his head?
Poor bloke. I know of other guys it’s happened to. Post-traumatic stress disorder – PTSD. Brian talked about them a lot. The poor souls who disconnect from the world for good, because they can’t forget the terrible things they witnessed in battle.
Brian talked about it because he saw it in me. And he’s right. There are times when I can feel myself slipping down that road. Like when I get into the van and turn the key in the ignition. The radio crackles for a moment with static before the music kicks in. In that moment I’m frozen with fear, back in one of the army trucks, waiting to be driven out on patrol.
Other times it’s a smell, a news story, a bad dream. But then it passes, and I wrench myself back to the present. To Maggie and Elsa and the steady rhythm of my new life. I realize now just how lucky I am to have been given another chance. To have been allowed to move on when lads like Danny can’t.
The rain outside slams against the train window, making me jump. I turn to watch it lashing furiously against the glass and am taken aback to see my own haunted reflection staring back at me.
I clamp my eyes shut, but it is Danny’s face I see then. Danny as he was when he first arrived in camp, not the man Sarah described last night.
I think of him clutching a rugby ball, rolling it across the flat of his hand and then back down again, without letting go of the ball.
Singing. Always singing. He loved the limelight. Being up onstage. But I think what he really liked was making people happy. And no one more than Sarah. He lived to hear her laugh. I try to imagine a world where Danny would hurt Sarah, and find that I can’t. Danny adored her. That’s the truth.
Before she even got to Bastion he couldn’t go a day without talking about her. And then, when she arrived, it was as if something inside him lit up. He would grin from ear to ear whenever Sarah walked into a room, reach for her hand, listen rapt to whatever it was she had to say.
He was dead proud of her, too, for what she was doing out there. He used to tell me how brave she was, how clever she was. How he couldn’t believe his luck that she was his.
No. There was never any doubting how much Danny loved Sarah.
It’s why I closed down any feelings I might have had for her. Why I walked out of the launderette that afternoon, even though every cell and fibre of me wanted to stay.
‘It’s complicated,’ she’d said when I asked her about him. I know she was trying to tell me something, but I cut her off.
I had to. I didn’t trust myself. The flimsiest suggestion that all was not well between them, and I wouldn’t have been able to resist her.
And I was right, because look at what happened last night – I told myself that Sarah had feelings for me, and that getting close to her was okay because Danny didn’t deserve her.
He had hurt her.
My mind flinches at the memory of the scar on her arm. At the thought of him causing her pain.
It may have been the PTSD, but he still hurt her.
And now I have too.