23. Sarah
23. Sarah
Annie’s hair is white now. It looks like candyfloss, the sort Danny always used to buy whenever we caught the bus to Barry Island to spend the day at the seaside together.
Sitting at the kitchen table, I watch as she sieves flour into a bowl and then throws in a lump of butter. She rubs the flour and the butter between her fingers.
‘How was work today, love?’ Annie asks.
I think of the twenty-year-old lad rushed in after a motorbike accident. Shrieking alarms telling us he had gone into cardiac arrest. The panicked dash to his bedside, the rush to attach sticky pads to his skin. Defibrillator paddles slamming on to his chest, shocking his heart back to life.
The smile of pure relief on his mum’s face when I told her he was going to be all right. I wish, more than anything, that I could make Annie smile like that. That I could do something, anything, to help Danny.
‘Busy,’ I answer. ‘Did I tell you Vihann’s wife is expecting again?’
‘Is she? Ahh, that’s lovely news.’
Annie adds sugar and sultanas to her mix as she chats. She has been making Welsh cakes for so long, she doesn’t need to weigh any of the ingredients, just spills what she instinctively knows to be the right amount into her ancient cane-coloured mixing bowl.
The bowl is chipped at the edge but Annie won’t hear of replacing it. It used to belong to her mum, Granny Gwen, who worked as a cook in a nearby stately home and taught Annie to make Welsh cakes.
‘They’re such a nice couple. Will that be their third?’ she asks.
‘It will.’
We sit in happy silence as she cracks an egg into the bowl and then, a few minutes later, lifts the doughy mixture on to the floured kitchen surface before energetically rolling it out.
I’ve always loved watching Annie bake, but never more so than now. There is something comforting in the soothing repetition of her actions, of knowing exactly which ingredient will be added next.
The sense of control, and the welcome distraction from anything else, both of our minds completely absorbed in the here and now. Neither of us glancing up at the kitchen clock, wondering where Danny is, when he might come home, what his mood will be like when he does.
He and I used to eat Annie’s Welsh cakes fresh from the pan, still warm, after school. No one in the house will eat this batch. I’ll discreetly put them in a tin later and take them in to work.
They are nearly done now. Annie is stamping her crinkled cutter into the dough and, one by one, lifting the little doughy discs on to the griddle. The second the last one goes on, she looks up at the clock. Her expression – relaxed while she remained absorbed in her task – returns to a worried frown.
‘Tea?’ I ask.
She nods gratefully, and I get up to put the kettle on.
Poor Annie. The skin on her once-rounded red cheeks is paper thin, like the rest of her. She hasn’t eaten properly since Danny got back. Not since that first Remembrance Sunday.
He had been home a week and the service in the local church was being held in his honour. Annie had invited everyone to a special lunch at theirs afterwards, to celebrate his safe homecoming.
I was afraid it might be too much for him.
‘He’s just tired,’ Annie said, when I tried to talk to her about it.
I explained how worried I was about him. How anxious he had been in Afghanistan.
‘He’ll be fine,’ she insisted. ‘He’s been through a lot. He just needs to readjust. To know he’s safe.’
On the Sunday, Annie got up early to prepare the lunch. She peeled the vegetables and set the table with her best tablecloth and her best china. Just before we set off for church, she put the roast in the oven.
But no one sat down for lunch that day.
The vicar, who had known Danny all his life, talked movingly about a time for love and a time for hate, a time for war and a time for peace. He smiled at Danny as he said that those who had returned deserved peace, and he called on us all to pray that they would get it.
Then a little boy, his bright orange hair specially combed for the occasion, picked up his trumpet and walked to the front of the church. He raised the trumpet, took a deep breath, and began to play the ‘Last Post’.
Danny’s hand, clasped in mine, began to tremble. He turned to look at me, and I saw it in his eyes.
I’d seen eyes just like his in the camp hospital. The eyes of men so frightened, they had retreated into a place where no one could reach them. A place from which they couldn’t be rescued.
I thought of Danny back in camp, the ‘Last Post’ playing at the eerie sunset vigils, staring at the Union flag draped across coffins being carried on to the RAF C-17s. I remembered the times when he had been the one doing the carrying.
Shouldering the coffins of Fridge and Squadron.
And then Caroline’s.
Jobbo buckling as he tried to hold up her coffin. Carl shooting out an arm to steady him, while Cherub and Danny struggled to hold the coffin level behind them.
‘It’s okay,’ I whispered as the trumpet’s sound poured through the church, squeezing his hand. ‘You’ve seen terrible things that you’re not going to forget overnight. But everything’s going to be okay. You’re home now.’
But the truth is that Danny, the old Danny, never really did come home.
Does that make it better? That I yearn for a life away from him. A life with Carl.
Or worse?