The bloke in the next bed stirred. He’d come in two days before and hadn’t said a word yet. He’s just lain on his bed, staring into space, eyes as dead as pebbles. He was saying, ‘It was the tooth that killed him. The gunshot wound was the start of it, but it was the tooth that killed him.’
I glanced over. He was looking straight at me. His eyes had become moist, human again. Tears were rolling down his cheeks.
‘I was a trained medic. I’d worked in three hospitals. I should have known better. A jagged piece of filthy, decayed tooth must have gone into the lung tissue and just festered. That’s what killed him. It wasn’t the gunshot wound, it was the miserable piece of rotten tooth that killed him.’
He lay back on his pillow and stared ahead again, but the tears continued to flow. ‘He was my best mate. He’d caught a high-velocity in the jaw. He was lying on his back, choking – not with blood or vomit, he swallowed his tongue. I yanked his tongue forward and pulled every bit of mess out of his mouth I could find. I was sure I’d got everything out of his passageway. I was sure I’d completely cleared the cavity of all the bits of teeth. He made it back to the UK all right, but he was having increasing problems with his breathing. Pneumonia or pleurisy, I don’t know. They were pumping him full of penicillin, trying to get him better from the infection.
‘I used to visit him in hospital as often as I could. It gave Jean a break. She had her hands full as it was with the kids. This particular day, he seemed fine one minute, a bit pale, but fine. The next minute he was no longer seeing what I was seeing, hearing what I was hearing. His eyes had glazed over, his ears somehow stopped up with the effort of trying to get his breath. I called the nurse.
‘He twisted his head fiercely from side to side, his mouth working away as if he was chewing a piece of leather. Suddenly he would lie still, and his mouth would gape open for a while at the point of some momentous inner struggle. Then the head would start again. Strange sounds, not of this earth, emerged from his mouth and spoke of deep, agonizing distress. He strove to turn and lever his body off the bed, driven by some deep instinctive urge, as if he could pull through if only he could get himself into an upright position.
‘He lifted and twisted his head one last time, more slowly now, and he looked at me, fear and questioning in his eyes. Questioning in his eyes. Then, slowly, slowly, he sank down with a rasping sigh, the life visibly draining away from him. I stared at him in complete and total helplessness, such impotence to alter the course of events as I’d never before experienced. A few last twitches and then his body was still, as if some great sinking battleship had finally come to rest on the bed of the ocean.
‘The doctor came and went. I sat there for an age, staring at his silent form, hoping for an eyelid to rise, for a flicker of movement in the chest, staring for so long that my eyes began to play tricks on me and I imagined I saw a tremor of movement in his solar plexus. Eventually, I slowly got up, stiff from staring, and walked away. I was feeling heavy. I knew I had to tell Jean.
‘She was laying the table for tea when I came in. She had a plate of buttered sliced bread in her hand. Her two kids were shouting excitedly, running around, tugging each other’s sleeves. Her eyes met mine and she knew straight away. The welcoming smile faded and in an instant turned to dawning horror. She didn’t rant, she didn’t rave. She didn’t burst into tears, she didn’t shake with rage. There were no silent mouthings of incredulity nor any desperate fist-clenched challenge to the heavens to explain why. She neither fainted nor slumped in a chair, nor gripped the edge of the table. She was rigid, transfixed by a charge of emotion that overpowered her ability to think, feel or speak clearly, that seemed for an instant to have chased the very soul out of her body. She simply, slowly and deliberately, closed her eyes, was silent for the eternity of a moment, then whispered with a voice that was not her own, “Please go.” With the two kids now silently staring at me, uncomprehending but sensing that something momentous was taking place, I turned, opened the door and quickly left. I hadn’t spoken a word, not a single word.’
‘Maybe the shock of the high-velocity bullet that hit him made him suddenly catch his breath and inhale the piece of tooth into his lungs,’ I suggested, trying to offer some comfort.
‘How could you tell them what it was really like down there?’ he continued, apparently without hearing what I’d said. ‘They all wanted to buy you drinks in the pub and ask you how it was, but how could you tell them what it was really like? To most people, the war was just an interesting diversion, something that happened each night for ten minutes on the Nine O’Clock News. Some people thought the Falklands was an island just off the coast of Scotland.’ He leaned back over in my direction and fixed me with his eyes. ‘I didn’t want to leave when it was all over. That’s where the lads had fought and died. That’s where you’d been through it together. How could anyone else possible understand? No one could possibly know what you had been through.’
‘That’s true, mate, that’s true.’
‘They told me I’m suffering from POST.’
‘POST, PTSD, ABR! Bullshit! It’s all bullshit!’ I exclaimed angrily. ‘It’s just names, boxes. They think if they can put a name on it, put it into a box, then everything’s explained, that’s all’s well with the world. You’ve gone psychosomatic. There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s just shell shock. That’s all you’ve got. Good old-fashioned shell shock.’
I looked at him. He could see from my eyes that I’d been there too. We were mates together, mates who had never met. A veil of gloom and fear seemed to lift off his face.
‘You know something? They can’t really cure you in here,’ I went on. ‘All they’re after is your mind. You’re just a case study, one for the archives, a bit of research for the thesis they’re writing. They’ve got a tape recorder hidden on the desk. There’s a little red light when it’s on. You’ll see it. They record everything you say so they can have a good laugh with their pals afterwards.
‘If you think you’re Napoleon now, nothing’s going to stop you waking up when you’re ninety-three and still thinking you’re Napoleon. There’s only one way you can be cured, and that’s from within yourself. It’s got to come from inside. You’ve got to get a grip on yourself. No one can do that for you.’
As the evening wore on I finally dozed off to sleep, the man’s words spooling through my mind on an endlessly repeating loop tape. ‘How could you tell them what it was really like?’
‘How could I begin to tell you what it was really like?’ It was the next day and I was struggling to get through to the psychiatrist. ‘I could describe to you the terror, the disorientation, the sheer loneliness of being caught in a blizzard late at night driving across the mountains, when the road disappears, when everything is eerily hushed, when you don’t know what is ditch and what is road or even which side of the road you’re on, when the snow is so heavy the windscreen wipers begin to slow down under the accumulating weight, and the flakes stick to the screen even though the heater is trained full onto it, when you can’t stop because to stop would be even more dangerous than to carry on, when you feel like a man slowly sinking in quicksand as you are sucked into the centre of the snowstorm, when your mind tells you there are other people in the world but your heart tells you are the only one there.