31. Sarah
31. Sarah
I pick up the plate of untouched food that sits on the table beside Danny’s armchair. A bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich – his favourite, or at least it used to be his favourite, I don’t know any more.
I don’t know anything that goes on inside his head. The flashbacks, the paranoia, the anxiety. The uncontrollable rage that makes me too scared to be in the house alone with him now.
Upstairs I hear Annie running a bath. The ever-present radio is burbling away in the background, keeping her company.
‘He had a bad night,’ was all she said when I called in this morning.
A bad night means anything from nightmares to chronic headaches, dizziness or chest pains.
Poor Annie looked shattered.
‘Why don’t you have a bath?’ I told her. ‘I can sit with him for a bit. My shift doesn’t start until lunchtime.’
‘Danny? Danny?’ I urge. ‘Can I get you anything else?’
When he doesn’t respond, I take the plate into the kitchen, scrape the uneaten food into the bin and load the plate into the dishwasher. I look around the kitchen for any jobs I can do to help Annie out. But everything is spotless, as usual, so I dig my laptop out of my bag and settle down at the kitchen table to scan the news.
There’s a story about a suicide bomb in Kabul. I automatically click on the link, drawn in by the photograph of a soldier standing in front of the remains of a burnt-out vehicle.
I scan the headline: SIXTEEN DEAD IN KABUL SUICIDE BOMBING.
Then I start to read the story beneath, about Taliban fighters threatening a bloody wave of suicide attacks and raids against international troops.
And that’s when I hear him behind me. Deep, heavy, ragged breaths that turn my heart to stone. I reach forward to close the laptop.
Gently , I remind myself, no sudden movements .
But I can tell from his laboured breathing that it is already too late. I know he saw it – the photograph of the soldier standing amid the detritus. The aftermath of a bomb.
I know, too, from the endless medical journals I’ve read on PTSD and its triggers that Danny’s heart will be racing. That when I turn to look at him there will be a film of fine sweat on his forehead. His mind will be in the grip of a flashback so vivid he might as well be the one standing in front of that burnt-out vehicle.
I can’t even call up to Annie, because the sound of me yelling may reinforce the threatening and dangerous place his mind has already taken him to.
How could I have been so careless? So stupid.
I think of the ‘crisis plan’ his doctors discussed with us. The list of instructions they gave us that Annie painstakingly wrote out in capital letters and stuck on the fridge door. I must have glanced at it a hundred times.
Try to stay calm.
Gently tell him that he is having a flashback.
Avoid making any sudden movements.
Encourage him to breathe slowly and deeply.
Encourage him to describe his surroundings.
The spiderweb threads of hope I glance at every time I open the fridge. As if, by memorizing these instructions, I will be able to help him. Pull him back to the present and take away his pain.
Slowly, I turn around. Danny is pacing up and down in front of the kitchen table.
‘Sweetheart,’ I say gently. ‘It’s okay. You’re having one of your flashbacks. Let’s take some deep breaths together.’
He doesn’t hear me. He has disappeared into the dark recesses of his mind, and no amount of gentle encouragement from me is going to persuade him he’s not in the Afghan hell where he thinks he is.
But I have to at least try. ‘Danny, it’s okay,’ I say again. ‘You’re having one of your flashbacks,’ I repeat. ‘Let’s take some deep breaths together. Can you do that for me, sweetheart?’
Even as I say the words I can almost hear the demons in his head mocking me. Deep breaths , they scoff. Is that all you’ve got to come at us with?
Danny’s head swivels towards me. His eyes are burning with rage. I shudder to think what horrors those demons are tormenting him with.
‘Sweetheart,’ I say, slowly getting up from my chair. Danny doesn’t move, and I inch slowly, so slowly, towards him. ‘That’s it,’ I say. ‘Nice and steady.’
Carefully, I hold a trembling hand out towards him. But when my fingers touch his, he leaps back as if I have given him an electric shock.
His face is so angry. Danny’s face. A face as familiar to me as my own, but that is not the face before me now. His grey eyes, once so gentle, burn with a fiery hatred. His chapped lips are curled back, his teeth bared.
For the first time I see that his overlapping front tooth is chipped. How did that happen? When? It seems inconceivable to me that I haven’t noticed this before. How could I not know? This man whose face, whose every freckle, every contour, I know by heart.
The slight crook in his nose from the impact against another player during the schools’ rugby final we all travelled on the coach to Cardiff to watch.
The pitted chicken pox marks above his lips and on his chin.
The sunken shrapnel scars on his cheeks.
Fleetingly, I think of Carl’s face on the night before I left Afghanistan, the night I couldn’t find Danny, when I already knew there was something wrong with him. I remember how Carl had looked at me with such exquisite tenderness.
Danny is making a strange growling noise now. He swallows, and then swallows again, as if he has something stuck in his throat. His eyes flick over my face. He looks panicked, frightened.
‘Danny,’ I try again.
But this just makes him worse. Whatever it is, whatever dark, horrible memory he is locked in, I realize there is nothing I can do but let it run its course.
I feel a deathly calm descend on me.
Agitatedly, Danny rubs his hand down his face and I think of Carl again, his hand on my face just the other day, brushing away my tears as we stood together in the porch of the community centre.
I try to remember the feeling of being safe that comes over me whenever I’m with Carl, and I start to cry. Tears of longing for Carl, but for Danny too. For the man Danny used to be.
I search his eyes, his face, his lips, but I don’t recognize anything about the man who stands before me. I tell myself that’s for the best, because this is not the real Danny.
The man raising his fist above my head is not Danny. Not really. Whatever happens next, it’s not his fault. I’ve got no one to blame but myself. I should never have opened my laptop. I know what his triggers are, and none are more incendiary than visions of the war he fought in.
Danny’s breaths are even shorter now. What is it that he sees? I wonder. What has made him clench his fist above me? It hovers there, as if in slow motion.
My heart is pounding. I don’t want this. I don’t want any of this any more. I want a life. I want to live.
Fight or flight , I tell myself. Fight or flight . I turn to run.
But I don’t even make it past the table before he catches me.
The pain blasts inwards from the point of impact on the side of my head, and I feel myself fall, hard, on to the kitchen floor.
There’s a strange noise in my head, a sort of high-pitched whining, and the pain is coming from all directions now.
Blinking furiously to try and keep everything in focus, I see something glinting in front of me. It’s a small, jagged piece of china, a shard from Annie’s broken mixing bowl. I try to reach for it but my arm won’t move.
So I lie there, staring at my useless hand lying splayed in front of me, listening to the ringing in my ears.
My eyes search for the shiny fragment of the bowl, but I can’t see it any more.
I can’t see anything.