“Is it always like this…?”
He snapped his head sideways to see a dark silhouette seated in a chair by his bedside that spoke with the voice of Eileen Donelson. He’d been so captured by the nightmare that he’d not even noticed her unexpected presence.
“Sometimes worse,” Thorne admitted slowly, his voice thick and hoarse “…though not often.” He no longer possessed any strength to fuel anger or fear… all he felt was exhaustion.
“When I was a wee bairn, I used to wake up to my father screaming in the next room as he dreamed about what the IRA did to him… he never really got over it…” Eileen said softly after a pause. “My mother and I spent sixteen bloody years listening to that… and enduring the abuse and the violence that went with it… in the end, I joined the navy so I wouldn’t have to deal with it any more. Ma left him later the same year… I guess it was that much more difficult, with no one else in the house.”
“I’m sorry… for what I said… I thought…” His voice trailed off — he had no idea what he might say that would make any difference. “I don’t know what I thought…” he added finally with a sigh of resignation.
“It doesn’t matter now,” she replied softly, sniffling a little as he realised that she must also have been crying. “I’ve known where I stood with you for quite a while, and that’s fine: I just can’t stand to see you going through this…”
“I didn’t know what else to do!” That admission alone was painful. “If I’d told them what was going on inside my head, they’d have never left me in charge of Hindsight at all, let alone come back here with all of you. I had to go… there was nothing left for me there.”
There was a long silence as neither could add to that remark, and Thorne eventually found the pause unbearable. Reaching out with his right hand to his small, bedside table, he activated the iPod that lay there along with the tiny pair of speakers attached to it. The music of an Australian rock band called Cold Chisel began playing, the selected song painfully appropriate to Thorne as he realised which one it was… a song from their Circus Animals album of 1981 called Forever Now. Beginning midway through the song as it did, the lyrics seemed all too poignant under the circumstances.
“I remember them,” Eileen said warmly, thinking back. “You used to play them all the time when we first met.”
“I’d just left Australia to live in another country,” he grinned faintly at the memory. “I badly needed to remember where I’d come from… remember what I’d left behind.” He paused momentarily, then added: “I’ve been playing them a lot lately…”
“We all need to keep remembering… we have to!” Eileen voiced her own strong feelings of displacement and unease then; Thorne was only one of many at Hindsight who were having difficulty assimilating the culture of an unrecognisable past. Thorne suddenly burst into tears once more, burying his face in his hands.
“I can’t remember what she looked like!” He moaned in anguish, the sound tearing at Eileen’s heart. “I wake up sometimes missing the feel of her body against mine, or of her hair against my face… I remember how that felt, but all I can remember now when I think of her is how she looked in the casket… a ghost of what she really was…!”
Eileen rose from her chair in an instant and moved to sit beside him on the bed. Cradling Thorne in her arms, she pulled him to her until his face rested against her shoulder. He clung to her tightly, just needing to feel someone else’s presence… anyone at all at that moment.
“You can’t wind back the clock, love,” she whispered into his ear, crying again too as he sobbed against her chest. “I know how cruel that sounds when you think of what we’re doing here, but that doesn’t change anything. With a very few exceptions — Alec and Richard, and maybe one or two others — these people in our unit are the only friends we’ve got. They’re likely to be the only ‘family’ we’ll ever have now who’ll ever understand what we’re going through, or what we’ve left behind.” She ran her hand gently through his hair and kissed the top of his head. “I wish I could give you back your memories, but I can’t… no one can.”
“I just don’t understand it,” he breathed between sobs. “I loved her so much, yet even in the dreams, all I can see is that ‘death mask’… never her real face. I don’t know what to do…!”
“You wake up each morning and get on with what you have to do until the day comes when it doesn’t hurt any more,” She said softly with the dark, sorrowful air of someone with more experience than they’d care to admit. “The first thing you’ve got to do is let some of it go, or you’ll never get rid the pain, and you’ll end up like my father…”
“How…?”
“You let your friends help you if they can, and don’t shut them out just because they can’t.” She paused for a moment. “You were right this evening when you said I hadn’t lost anyone… I haven’t… not the way you have, anyway.” She smiled faintly. “I’ve had some casual relationships along the way, but it’s not easy when you’re following the military lifestyle, and the only one I ever really cared about out of all of them was you…” She almost chuckled at that. “It’s not easy finding someone you have something in common with when your hobbies are military hardware and technical engineering, you know…”
“Maybe I should’ve tried harder,” Thorne shuddered, thinking of the past and for once coming up with more pleasant memories. “We sure as hell had a lot of things we liked doing together… more than Anna and I, I think sometimes…”
“Oh rubbish…!” Eileen disagreed gently, lifting his head in her hands so they were looking straight at each other in the faint glow from the iPod’s tiny screen. “You two were as perfect for each other as any couple I’ve ever seen! She was a fine woman, and you both deserved to be together.”
“Then what do I do?” It was a strange thing that although it had been so difficult to talk about originally, it was almost easy to do so, now that the problem was out in the open and he was confiding in an old friend.
“Maybe you just need to live each moment as it comes for a while,” she offered, caressing his cheek lightly and sending an uncertain shiver along his spine. “Work the past out of your system.” She smiled softly then, and Thorne thought he knew what she was talking about.
“I — I don’t think I can feel anything like that… for anyone… I don’t know…”
“No one’s telling you to be in love with anyone else… not yet, anyway. I’m not saying that’s how I feel anymore either: that was something I got out of my system a long time ago. No one’s going to replace Anna in your heart, but that doesn’t mean two old friends can’t get together once in a while for old times’ sake. It might not be love, but sometimes friends need each other, too.”
She kissed him then, full on the lips, and conflicted as he was he didn’t pull away. He’d awake early the next morning to find Eileen asleep and pressed against him in the confines of that single bed. Tears would fall once more, just for a moment, this time more as a reaction to the long-missed sensation of companionship than of anything else, but as they lay there with their bodies entwined, it would also be the first in five successive mornings Max Thorne hadn’t woken because of either hangover or nightmare.