Home Fires (26 page)

The insurgents are everywhere, hiding beneath the most unlikely carapace: the elderly man with the stooped shoulders and the baggy, wrinkled face or the young woman in the bright pink sarong with the high cheekbones and elegant neck. Max cannot trust anyone. Even the landscape, with its rugged beauty, once the preserve of adventurous back-packers and NGO volunteers, conceals deadly secrets.

It can be the most insignificant thing that gives a bomb away: the thin sliver of glinting yellow from the cooking oil container packed full of farming fertiliser, or the snaking length of electrical wire waiting to be pressed underneath a soldier’s boot or the tread of a vehicle wheel. You have to be alert, even when the heat saps your energy and your concentration. You have to remind yourself of the danger, just to keep your heart rate up, to keep the adrenalin flowing.

The Vallon Man stops. The search-team halts, momentarily. Max waits, his pulse rate quickening, his muscles tensed in readiness. The ten men around him do the same, their nerves stretched tight as trip-wires.

But it is a false alarm and, after a few minutes, they move on and resume the familiar shuffling movement forwards: one foot in front of the other, eyes scanning each peak and dip of the ragged ground.

After what feels like hours but is probably only a matter of minutes, they come to the edge of a dried-up river, the banks falling steeply on either side of the gulley. Johnno scrambles down first, clumps of soil breaking off in his hands as he manoeuvres himself gingerly towards the bottom of the natural trench. Again, he sweeps the metal detector over the surface, the movement of his hands rhythmic and steady. Johnno signals to let them know the way is clear.

Max steps forward. The tip of his boot makes contact with a piece of rock, about the size of a child’s clenched fist. As he shifts his weight on to his foot, the rock splinters into quarters. A blast rips through his body.

He is thrown back several metres, his body thumping to the ground, his neck twisted slackly. His helmet rolls to one side, the strap sliced through. It happens so quickly.

Cracked mud. Redness. Voices all around him, shouted orders and screams for help, each one registering at a different decibel, each one with its own jarring note of discord, a miasmic babble of noise.

‘Come on, Max, come on, you fucker, don’t you dare leave us now, don’t you fucking dare.’

Someone is kneeling beside him, sleeves rolled up, pushing down on his ribcage. Their bare hands pump up and down, blood spitting on to skin.

His eyelids flicker shut.

His heart beats frantically, trying to keep up, but soon there is too much blood and his heart seems to be drowning in fluid, like a rock sucked into the quicksand, and although they are trying, all of them, trying so, so hard to keep him alive, it is too much effort to take another breath. There is too much blood.

His heart stutters. Then it stops.

Was that how it happened? she wonders. Or was it another way?

Maybe he woke up that morning with an intimation of what lay ahead, a bad feeling, a sense of what fate had in store for him.

Maybe, in the moments just before the bomb exploded, he had been laughing, sharing a joke with his mates and not paying enough attention to where his feet were falling.

Maybe the blow was instant and there was no time to feel pain or hurt or sadness or panic or any of it – any of it at all. Maybe there was no time to think.

Maybe he was calm.

Or panicked.

Or resolute.

Was he convinced he was going to make it through?

Maybe he thought of her just before he died. Because isn’t your life meant to flash before your eyes? Isn’t death meant to bring you back to the moment of your birth?

Or maybe, instead of his mother, he thought of Andrew.

Or of Elsa.

Or even of Angelique.

But then again, maybe he didn’t.

Maybe he didn’t.

And maybe none of it happened quite the way she imagines, she thinks, shifting the car into gear, trying to remember the quickest way to the supermarket. Because how could it?

Because how could she possibly know?

Andrew

Andrew wakes at
6
.
38
in the morning, exactly seven minutes before his alarm is due to go off. He is always roused at exactly this moment, his mind jolted into consciousness by some automatic reflex. He once experimented by falling asleep without setting the alarm clock and found that he overslept. Andrew was tickled by the idea that his subconscious mind reacts to the idea of regulation rather than the practical exercise of it. He is, generally speaking, a creature of habit.

He pushes the flat black button on top of the clock-radio to mute the beeps before they sound and then slides out of bed as carefully as he can so as not to wake Caroline, although he knows her sleep has been twitchy and disturbed of late. There is an uncomfortable pressure on his bladder and he walks over to the lavatory to relieve himself, noticing as he does so that the bathroom needs to be regrouted. Patches of black mould are dotted along the white tiles. The bath is ringed with a pale brown water line and the whole room smells damp and mildewy.

They had only put this bathroom in a few years ago but already it needs an overhaul. Andrew groans at the thought of it. There was a time when he would have done it himself, rolled up his sleeves and got out his toolbox and fixed whatever needed to be done. He used to like DIY even though the results, admittedly, were somewhat mixed. But there was something about the simple practicality of a manual task that appealed to him: he did not have to think while he was painting a wall or drilling a hole or scraping flat a patch of Polyfilla, he simply had to follow the rules. And then there was always the sense of satisfaction, however slight, that you got when a task had been completed, when a problem had been rectified, when things were straight and ordered once more. Was it absurd to say that it made him feel more like a man? Possibly.

But increasingly he found he was too busy for DIY. He began to realise that his tinkering with screwdrivers had only ever been an indulgence, a hobby he could pursue because he possessed the luxury of time and because he also knew that professionals could be called in whenever something went seriously wrong. With Elsa living under the same roof, he found that he had less and less free time at his disposal. He was working long hours at the office – a tricky new corporate client needed mollifying on a regular basis – and Caroline was still not herself, so Andrew found he had to pick up the slack more and more. It had been agreed before his mother moved in that Andrew would take on the bulk of the care but he had not realised then quite how much he would need to do. Elsa was in rapid and apparently irreversible decline – where once he could have relied on Caroline to keep an eye on her during the day, now he was forced to rush to and from the office to help the carer lift and change his mother’s incontinence nappy.

The main carer was a cheery-faced Kenyan woman called Sanapei – ‘but you can call me Snappy,’ she had said on her first day with a giant smile. Andrew had managed to arrange with a local care agency for her to come four times a day to change and wash his mother. It was a laborious task that required two people and although normally he could have relied on Caroline to help Sanapei, he thought it was safer to arrange someone else to be there. But the other carer, a quietly spoken Ukrainian woman he’d found in the Classifieds section of the
Malvern Gazette
, could only come twice a day – once in the morning and once in the afternoon – so Andrew had to rush back from work to cover the other two slots with Snappy, at lunchtime and in the early evening.

Even in the short time that Elsa had been with them, the change had been dramatic. She could barely talk at all now and her mental acuity was slipping away from her. Andrew was no longer sure what went in and what didn’t. The other day, he had walked into the room to see an expression of intense anxiety on her face and he had to remind her who he was, reaching out to give her a reassuring touch on the shoulder.

It was, Andrew found, difficult to readjust. His mother had always been the one in control. Growing up, Elsa had been easier to admire than to love. He remembers with perfect clarity the party she threw for his fifth birthday. He had invited three friends, all of whom lived nearby, and Elsa had bought a cake from the Fitzbillies bun shop. She lit five candles and brought it into the kitchen where the four boys were seated round the table in paper crowns. They sang Happy Birthday, with his father providing the only baritone voice, and then Andrew blew out the candles in one go, which gave him an immense feeling of pride. He looked up to his father for confirmation that he had done well and Oliver broke off from patting tobacco into the bowl of his pipe to smile at him and raise his eyebrows to show he was impressed. Andrew’s cheeks burned with happiness.

Elsa took a long shiny knife out of the cutlery drawer to cut the cake. It was the biggest chocolate cake Andrew had ever seen and his stomach had rumbled in anticipation of eating it. There was a thick layer of icing that dripped down over the sides and Andrew, overcome by greed and excitement, reached out to pick off a small piece of it with the tip of his index finger. Elsa did not notice Andrew’s finger as she started to cut. He felt a sharp stab of pain in his hand. He cried out with a yowl. There was blood on the yellow tablecloth, mixed in with a muddy stain of chocolate. The other boys were shrieking with shock. Elsa, at first unaware of what all the fuss was about, quickly realised what had happened. And what Andrew remembered most vividly about that day was not the pain of the cut but rather what his mother had said next.

‘Oh Andrew, stop being such a baby,’ she said, putting down the knife and turning away. ‘It’s only a scratch.’ She did not comfort him or put her arms around him. It was left to Oliver to scoop him up and take him to the bathroom, where he ran Andrew’s finger under the tap and put a plaster on it. ‘All right, old chap?’ Oliver said, and his breath smelled of tobacco. Andrew nodded his head and the movement caused a single tear to spill out on to his cheek. Oliver, embarrassed, took his hand roughly. ‘Come on then.’

The cake, when he ate it, did not taste as good as he had imagined it would.

Years later, Andrew had asked his father about this, about whether he thought it unusual that Elsa appeared so detached from her own child. By that time, Andrew was married himself and Oliver, always gentle, had mellowed to the point that he could quite easily be moved to tears by a heart-wrenching story on the evening television news. He hadn’t been surprised by Andrew’s question. In fact, it was almost as though he had been expecting it.

They were sitting in the living room of the house in Grantchester, where Andrew and Caroline had come to stay for the weekend. They were reading the papers while Sunday lunch was being prepared in the kitchen down the hallway and occasionally there would be the reassuring sound of jostled cutlery or an oven door being opened and shut. The buttery smell of roasting potatoes thickened the air around them. Caroline had gone upstairs to change, even though Andrew kept telling her she didn’t need to.

‘I think I should open a few bottles of that red,’ said Oliver, folding up his section of newspaper and putting it on to the nest of tables to his side.

And Andrew asked him, the question coming out of the blue. He hadn’t even been aware he was thinking of it but then it popped out of his mouth.

‘Do you think Mummy ever really loved me?’ he asked. ‘As a child, I mean.’

Oliver looked at him over his reading glasses, his chin tucked into his neck. He considered the question for a few seconds and then, taking off his glasses, he said: ‘Of course she did, Andrew.’ His voice was straightforward, not unkind, but not especially comforting either. Oliver sighed, rubbing the back of his neck. ‘Elsa has always found it difficult to show her love. I suspect she thinks it would be a weakness to do so.’

There was a pause.

‘Listen, she loves you a great deal, Andrew, as you well know, but there are things about her . . . her upbringing that make it hard for her to admit it. She’d hate me talking about her like this,’ Oliver shook his head, ‘but it’s probably a lot to do with her own parents. She had been very close to her mother but then, when her father came back from the war.’ He stopped. When he spoke again, his voice was tight. ‘He was an absolute brute.’ Andrew glanced at him. His father’s face had grown mottled and red. ‘It was bloody lucky, all things considered, that I didn’t serve.’ When Oliver had volunteered to fight in the Second World War, so Andrew recalled, the doctors had discovered a heart murmur at his medical check-up. He spent the rest of the war doing something rather secretive and unexplained in intelligence. ‘I think it would have undone her,’ Oliver continued, fixing his gaze at a midpoint on the wall. He seemed to be struggling with something, uncomfortable at what he was about to say. ‘There are things we never told you, Andrew, things you shouldn’t ever have to hear about your own grandfather. Elsa couldn’t even speak about him. Couldn’t mention him by name.’ Oliver stood up and smoothed down his chinos, scattering the crumbs from a messily eaten handful of Twiglets on to the Afghan rug. ‘Now I really must get on with that wine or I’ll be for it.’ He walked past Andrew’s chair towards the drinks cabinet, pausing briefly to pat his son on the shoulder.