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She’d just have to grin and bear it. A job with the London ambulance service was waiting for her after Easter, she would move in with Nate and they could start to plan their future together. It’s all good, she told herself, firmly. Stop being such a misery.
But grinning and bearing it did not come easy.
The clinic sessions at the barracks were as dull and dispiriting as she’d feared. Time dragged more slowly than ever as she examined a succession of soldiers’ smelly feet with their blisters, veruccas, and minor sprains or, for light relief perhaps, a touch of man flu, earache or tonsillitis. The highlight of her first week was being called out late one night to the Military Police cells for a soldier covered in blood and so drunk he could barely speak. He had a six centimetre gash from one ear to the back of his neck, obviously from falling backwards onto something hard.
The last time she’d seen this much blood was after a Taliban RPG had landed in the compound, knocking her out and sending shrapnel flying everywhere. She’d come round to a scene of carnage, lots of head wounds and blood everywhere because the soldiers had been at rest and not wearing helmets or body armour. Ignoring her own dizziness, she’d scrambled to her feet and set to work. When she and Vorny had finished checking everyone over they discovered that, by some miracle, most of the injuries were shallow cuts which needed only simple stitching. Only a couple of lads were more seriously hurt and needed evacuation, and they later heard back that both of them had survived and weren’t likely to suffer any long term after-effects. ‘Saved their bloody lives, those two lassies of yours,’ the surgeon told her CO later.
She checked the drunken squaddie over, swabbed him down, shaved an unnecessarily wide strip of hair on either side of the wound, stitched him up and told them to wake him every half hour to check for concussion, with a bucket of cold water if necessary. That’ll teach him, she thought to herself.
One day she diagnosed a case of ‘housemaid’s knee’. The spotty lad gazed at her in confusion: ‘I ain’t been doin’ no housework.’
‘It’s an inflammation of the tissues in front of the kneecap. You just need to take it easy for a couple of weeks and it’ll sort itself out.’
‘Can’t tell me sergeant I’ve got housemaid’s knee,’ he muttered. ‘Never bloody live it down.’
She would normally have found this funny, but for some reason his pathetic embarrassment irritated the hell out of her. She took a deep breath, wrote ‘Prepatellar Bursitis’ on a note and passed it to him. ‘Will that do?’
He tried to pronounce the Latin and gave up.
‘Thank you, ma’am,’ he said, with a brazen smile. ‘Fancy a drink sometime?’
‘Get lost, you cheeky bastard,’ she said, showing him the door.
‘I just can’t cope with the pettiness of it all,’ she shouted to her mother as they struggled along the shingle beach in the face of a bitter cold wind whistling off the North Sea. She’d been given a few mid-week days off and, to be honest, was pleased to have her parents to herself. ‘Their stupid little complaints. I feel like slapping them, telling them to man up.’
Her mother had suggested the walk after she’d come downstairs at three in the morning to find Jess watching the shopping channel with a large glass of her father’s whisky on the table in front of her.
‘What’s up, love?’ she’d asked, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. Jess noticed for the first time that her mother’s hair, the gingery side of auburn like her own, was turning grey.
‘Can’t sleep. It’s just too quiet here,’ she replied, trying to make light of it. ‘What are you doing up, anyway?’
‘Saw the light on when I went for a pee.’
Jess had been looking forward to a few days by the seaside, where she could take long walks in the sea air and hopefully knock herself out with physical tiredness, but it hadn’t worked like that. For the second night running she had lain awake for hours before giving up and going downstairs to raid her father’s drinks cabinet.
‘You shouldn’t drink so much of that stuff,’ Susan had said, looking pointedly at the glass.
‘Don’t worry,’ Jess said. ‘I’ll buy Dad another bottle. Go back to bed. I’ll be fine.’
Later that morning, out on the beach, she found herself almost enjoying the distraction of physical discomfort as the wind slashed at their faces.
‘Tell me about this drinking,’ her mother had started.
‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ Jess said. Admitting the nightmares to her mother would only make her more anxious – better to gloss over it. ‘Just fed up with work. It’s so boring. I can’t wait to get out.’
‘You haven’t got long to go now, have you?’
‘Four weeks, that’s all. I can deal with it. Thanks for being so understanding, Mum.’
But that evening she lost it again. Her father had insisted on doing a barbecue in spite of the fact that it was still only February, and bitterly cold. The wind had dropped, he said, and besides the barbecue was under cover of the patio awning. He would be perfectly dry, and once everything was cooked they could eat inside. Except that it began to bucket with rain, and while Jess tried to persuade him to abandon the idea, Susan had been placatory.
‘He does it all the time, don’t worry,’ she said. ‘He enjoys it, and the food tastes so much better on the barbecue. You’ll never dissuade him, so you might as well give up trying.’
‘But it’s pouring, Mum. He’ll get soaked, and so will the food.’ She felt her chest tightening, the tell-tale heat tingling at the back of her neck, and tried to take deep breaths, but it came out anyway. ‘He could perfectly well come inside to cook, and we could have a lovely meal but he’s just determined to spoil our evening with his pig-headed insistence. It’s so fucking stupid,’ she shouted.
‘Watch your language, young woman,’ Mike called through the patio door.
She exploded then, shouting, ‘I can’t bear to watch. I’m going out.’
She’d stomped off to the only pub in the village, hoping there would be no-one who recognised her or engaged her in conversation. Fortunately the place was deserted, so she sat by the fire and read a dog-eared red-top newspaper, sickened by the photos of semi-naked women on what seemed like every other page, while downing three double whiskies in quick succession. She paid the pub premium for a bottle to replace her father’s Johnnie Walker and hid it inside her coat as she headed home.
Her parents were watching a nature documentary on television.
‘We left you a plateful – it’s on the side,’ her mother said mildly, without a hint of reproach. How could they be so forgiving? It almost made her angry all over again.
‘Not hungry,’ she muttered. ‘Going to bed.’
‘Sleep well, sweetheart,’ they chorused, to her departing back.
In the morning nothing was mentioned until she was alone in the car with her mother on the way to the train station.
‘Forgive me, darling, but do you think you might need some help?’ her mother said, pulling out onto the main road.
‘What do you mean, help?’
‘Adjusting to life back home. I know it’s hard.’
‘Leave it, Mum. I’m fine.’
‘Except you’re barely sleeping, drinking way more than you ever used to and losing your temper at the drop of a hat. We’re worried about you, love.’
They arrived at the station just in time and she kissed her mother on the cheek. ‘See you soon,’ she said, ‘and don’t you go worrying