42. Sarah
42. Sarah
The words spill out of him in a rush. Cupping his cheek, I wipe away his tears but I don’t even think he realizes he is crying.
He tells me about the policeman who wasn’t a policeman – the sniper who killed Squadron. And the explosion that killed Tom.
I remember both those nights. Shifts where every time the trauma doors opened I was gripped with a terrifying fear that the body lying on the trolley would be Danny – or Carl.
Gently, I try to interrupt, to tell him once again that none of this was his fault, but he immediately closes me down.
‘Maybe I wasn’t technically responsible, but if I’d stuck closer to Squadron, seen what the shooter was about to do, or been the one to go ahead instead of letting Tom …’
He spits out the sentences like machine-gun fire, toxic bullets of pent-up hurt and rage and guilt.
‘And then there was Caroline,’ he says, and his shoulders stiffen. ‘She was pregnant.’
Something inside me goes cold. The tattooed poppy with the tiny bud next to it.
‘I’ve never told anyone that before,’ he says as fresh tears slowly begin to fall down his bristly cheeks.
I say nothing. I just hold his hand. Feel the grip of his strong fingers.
People who are dying relax when you hold their hand. My first matron told me that. I have felt it so many times, sitting next to a patient’s bed, their hand in mine, while I stroke their palm. As if by magic, their breathing steadies, and their body relaxes.
But Carl’s body does not relax. It remains rigidly alert.
I think of poor Caroline. There wouldn’t have been time for anyone to hold her hand – not Jobbo, or Carl, or Cherub. Lovely Caroline who only ever wanted to help people, who adored her fiancé and her friends and the dogs she looked after.
‘She told me, that morning,’ Carl says, pulling his hand away from mine and pressing the heels of his fists into his eyes, angrily wiping away the tears. ‘What was I thinking?’ he goes on. ‘I never should have let her go back to work. I should have told someone. It would have been easy. There are strict rules in the military, banning mothers-to-be from serving in a war zone. They’d have sent her straight home.’
He is right. I was shocked at how many women were sent home from Afghanistan after finding out they were pregnant. Around a hundred. One soldier actually gave birth while I was working out there.
The delivery was such a joy, all of us clamouring to help, to be part of a new life coming into this world instead of watching yet another body being carried out. When a team of paediatricians were sent out from the UK to escort her and the baby home, a couple of days later, I felt bereft.
No more staring at that beautiful baby boy, at his perfect golden crown of hair, his tiny feet and his fat pink fists as he happily punched them in the air.
Jobbo would never know the joy of staring at his and Caroline’s newborn, cradling the baby in his arms, as that exhausted but elated soldier had done. Crying and laughing at the same time at the miracle that lay in front of her.
Poor Jobbo. I talked to him at the wedding reception earlier. He was sweet, as always, with the same kind eyes, but he looked defeated. There was none of the old joy and bounce about him that I remember.
He chatted about his job, told me that he ‘couldn’t complain’, although we both knew that he could. That the awfulness of what life had hacked away from him gave him the right to complain for the rest of time. Later, I saw him standing at the bar alone, drinking whiskey.
I imagine him asleep in his hotel room now, with only the ghosts that haunt him for company. I think of how much worse it would be for him to know, to understand that he has lost even more than he thought.
But even if he knew, he would never blame Carl.
Sweet Carl, who has carried the burden of Caroline’s secret for all this time. Who has somehow twisted her and all his other friends’ deaths into being his fault.
‘Carl, listen to me.’ I turn my body so that my face is in front of his. ‘None of this is your fault. Caroline, like Fridge and Squadron and Tom, knew what she was doing. They all knew the risks they ran, understood that the ultimate price of being out there might be their deaths. We all knew that –’
I break off, holding his gaze with mine. Desperate to reach him.
‘And Carl, they were all so proud of what they did. Not one of them would have changed anything. Yes, we all have to live with their loss, and that’s heartbreaking, but death is the price you pay for war. A war that wasn’t your fault, any more than their deaths were.’
He stares back at me, his eyes pools of dark despair.
‘But what about Assami? I have a letter to prove that’s on me. The others may, have been casualties of war. But the interpreters, they were only casualties because we let them be. We turned our backs on them.’
His voice stutters with anger. He’s struggling to get the words out.
‘Assami understood he was at risk for helping us. He knew the Taliban would hunt him down to make an example out of him. But he always thought that we’d be there to protect him.’
I think of Assami, and I see his dark eyes – so black he looked as if he had eye liner on – his thick dark moustache and long, frazzled grey beard. He used to drape his arm around Carl protectively and whisper conspiratorially into his ear. Every time he laughed, he threw his head back and clapped Carl on the back.
They adored each other.
‘I wasn’t there for him, even though he wrote to me begging for my help. None of us were. We betrayed him. And all the other interpreters. Assami knew by then they would come for him, that it was just a matter of time. Imagine how that feels – knowing you are being hunted down by the most brutal, bloody, unforgiving fighters in the world.’
‘I can’t,’ I reply honestly. ‘But I do know that if there was anything, anything at all, that you could have done, then you would have done it. It was the government that didn’t do enough to protect them, not the soldiers. Everyone understands how angry you all are that more wasn’t done to help them. To bring them and their families over here.’
He looks at me. ‘His family, Sarah. His wife and three children. I don’t even know what became of them. I would have done anything –’
‘I know you would,’ I cut him off. ‘Carl, these decisions are made by people we’ll never know, for reasons we’ll never understand.’ I kiss him. ‘But what I do know is that the people who make those decisions don’t have an ounce of your bravery, or loyalty, or goodness. And certainly not your guilt, although they’re the ones who should be feeling it.’
He looks pitifully relieved, and my heart fills with love for this decent, honourable man who’s been made to feel that he has failed by a system that has failed him.
‘I was worried if you knew …’
But he doesn’t finish the sentence, because I reach forward and kiss him. For a moment he resists, but then he kisses me back. He traces my scars with the tip of his thumb.
‘Caroline said this thing to me once about letting down my shield, letting people in. I made a joke of it at the time, but now I know what she meant. She meant this.’
I pull him into me and hold him.
He clings to me and I cling back, holding on tightly to this broken man who has turned his back into a form of self-expression because he doesn’t know any other way to explain how he feels about the people he’s loved and lost.
Who carries an impossible burden of guilt he does not deserve to carry.
Who has been kicked so many times by fate he simply lies in wait for the next blow.
Who thinks because he has never been loved before that he doesn’t deserve to be loved now.
He has demolished the elaborate wall he built up around himself, he has trusted me, and I understand now why that has been so hard for him.
I run my fingers through his hair and kiss the top of his head.
I close my eyes and when I do, I see his eyes, the vulnerability in them when he turned to me after showing me the poppy tattoos.
I will never betray that trust. I love him, and I will show him how much he does deserve to be loved.