Now she asked, ‘What happened? Was it the dream again?’
‘Yeah. Was I making a noise?’
‘I thought someone was killing you. You were yelling at the top of your voice. It woke Tim.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s all right. I meant to ask — did you hear any news about when Tony’s coming over to do selection?’
‘He’ll be here in June, I think. Why?’
‘Just wondered.’
I knew what she was thinking: that Tony had been my salvation in Iraq, and might again act as a stabilizing influence when he arrived in England. He might help me get the whole Gulf experience squared away. Possibly she was right — but how could anyone know?
‘Arm hurting?’ she asked.
‘No, it’s comfortable.’
‘Headache?’
‘A bit.’
‘Take some Paracetamol, then.’
‘OK.’
She punched a couple of tablets out of a pack on the bedside table and handed them to me, together with a glass of water. I propped myself on one elbow to get them down.
‘Thanks. I’ll be fine now.’
‘Sleep well, then.’
She ran a hand over my hair, got up, went back to the door and closed it softly. Soon the kid stopped crying, the landing light went out, and I heard the door of our bedroom click shut.
Our bedroom. I should have been sleeping there, in our big double bed. The fact that I was on my own summed everything up. The recurring nightmare was my excuse for sleeping alone; I’d said I’d move out to the spare room because I didn’t want to keep waking Kath with my bad dreams. But beneath the surface, something far deeper had gone wrong.
My sheets were clammy. Like most guys in the Regiment I sleep naked — so I got up, rubbed myself down with a towel, opened the window wider and let the cool night air flow in round my body, drying it off. I listened as the wind rustled through the oak tree at the back of the house. An owl hooted, close and loud. Lucky bird — that it should have so little to worry about. A mouse or two a night was all it needed to be happy, and it had no idea of war, no idea of captivity, no idea of death.
After a while I went back to bed, and lay staring upwards with the sheets pulled under my chin. I knew full well that my troubles stemmed from what had happened in the desert and in that shit-heap of a hospital in Iraq.
I thought of Tony; good, tough guy that he was. Tony, who had shared my captivity, and done so much to get me through it, with his indomitable spirit and unfailing sense of humour. His proper name was Antonio Lopez, but ever since he could remember he had been known by the easy abbreviation. As a SEAL (a member of the American Sea, Air and Land special forces unit), he had been through far worse ordeals than I had, especially when that operation had gone tits-up in Panama. He had come out of the Gulf very much in one piece, and now he was about to take the selection course, in the hope of joining the Regiment for a two-year tour. Was I so much inferior to him, that I couldn’t stand the strain?
I kept thinking back to what it had been like before, between me and Kath. If anyone had asked, I could have answered truthfully in one word: ‘Brilliant!’ We’d met four years earlier, and we’d been delighted to discover that our twenty-fifth birthdays were both coming up within a week of each other. Now, lying in the dark, I remembered the day we found the house. We’d seen a photo in an estate agent’s window, and arranged to borrow the key. The price was right on the limit of what we could afford, but thanks to the generosity of my in-laws we had enough cash for the deposit. The agent warned us that the place was way off the beaten track. ‘It’s another world out there,’ he said. ‘Not to worry,’ I told him, ‘that’s what we’re after.’
He handed us the keys and we drove out, only fifteen minutes from town. When we saw the house, we looked at each other and grinned. It was old, 150 years at least, and it stood in a perfect position at the end of a lane, in a hollow surrounded by fields. A spinney of oaks ran away up a little valley at the back, with a trickle of water coming down between the trees. Even in winter, with the branches bare, it looked a dream. What would it be like in high summer?
Keeper’s Cottage was its name, and that’s what it had been: the home of a gamekeeper. Before long we came to call it KC. Over the years the brickwork had mellowed to a soft red — typical Herefordshire — and the previous owners had worked hard to restore and improve the house, so that we were able to move straight in. Outside, the garden had gone to seed, but Kath, who had green fingers, got stuck into that as soon as spring came. Under her direction I did the heavy digging, but it was she who planned and planted everything. She was thrilled to find that several of the trees in the spinney were rowans, or mountain ash — her favourites — which put on a tremendous show of brightred berries in the autumn. The place and its associations reminded me of my childhood home in the north, where as a boy I was forever ferreting rabbits and walking the hedgerows.
In KC we were as happy as anybody could have been. It was the first time that either of us had lived in a house without a number — in our eyes a big plus, as it made us feel we had the edge over our friends living in towns. The house and rooms were exactly the right size for us, neither too big nor too small. The place was so private that in summer we could sunbathe stark naked on the lawn. Kath got a vegetable patch going, and grew some cracking beans, peas, potatoes and lettuces, and herbs galore. We ate so many fresh salads that our ears started turning green. In winter we were snug as squirrels, because I got permission from the neighbouring farmer to collect firewood from the spinney, and in the living room we kept a Norwegian log-burner on the go day and night. The stove had a back-boiler for boosting the hot water; if I opened up the draught, I could get the tank boiling.
The footpaths and woodland tracks were ideal for running, and I could do my phys — physical training — at home just as well as round the camp. Soon I had two circuits worked out — one of six miles, one of eight. Kath talked of getting a horse… if we could persuade the farmer to rent us a paddock, and after the baby had arrived.
Tim was born, on time, in the County Hospital in Hereford. I watched him come into the world, holding Kath’s hand and trying to share her pain. He weighed 8 lbs 2 oz, and once he was cleaned up we could see he was going to have hair even fairer and eyes even bluer than his mother’s. Kath’s parents were so chuffed with their first grandchild that they came straight over from Belfast to see him; they stayed in the cottage, and Meg helped with the baby for a few days, until Kath got her strength back. Den, a retired doctor, didn’t do much except offer medical tips — and I don’t think he did much at home either, except watch television.
So we carried on, happy with each other. In the summer of 1990 I went to Africa with the squadron, on team training. We were away two months, but I got back to find everything just the same, and Kath and I carried on where we’d left off. It was only when Saddam invaded Kuwait, and D Squadron was deployed to the Gulf, that things began to go belly-up.
Leaving was tough. Before we flew out from Brize Norton at the start of January ‘91, Kath and I had some emotional moments trying to plan a future for her and Tim, in case I didn’t come back. The house would be hers, of course, and she would be free to sell it if she wanted. But I told her it would be my wish that she should marry again, and that the kid should be educated as well as she could afford, at some fee-paying school if no good state school was available. Such thoughts brought with them many tears, but we did our best to look the future in the face.