Chameleon's Shadow

Two

WILLIS DREW UP A CHAIR beside Acland’s bed and placed his notes on his knee. If he’d had any doubt that his presence in the room was unwelcome, it was confirmed by the young man’s stony indifference as he stared at the wall in front of him. ‘I’ve got some good news and some bad news for you, Charles. The good news is that your parents have decided to go home and the bad news is that Tony Galbraith almost certainly gave you an exaggerated picture of what is achievable through reconstructive surgery.’

At least he had Acland’s attention. The lieutenant’s good eye flickered briefly in his direction.

‘The surgeons will do what they can, but in the end you’ll have to decide for yourself how much scarring you’re prepared to live with. It’s about learning to live with a different face. However good your medical team, however well you manage your own expectations, there will always be a gap between what you hope for and what is possible.’

Acland gave a grunt of what sounded like amusement. ‘It must be worse than I thought if a shrink has to break the news.’

Willis avoided remarking on the improvement in his speech. ‘It’s not pretty,’ he agreed frankly. ‘The shrapnel burned the flesh down to the bone and took your eyelid and most of your eye. Realistically, you should expect some permanent scarring and problems with the nerve and muscle functions on that side of your face.’

‘Message received and understood. Will try to be realistic, sir.’

Willis smiled. ‘Robert will do just fine, Charles. I’m not in the army. I’m a civilian psychiatrist who specializes in dealing with trauma.’

‘To the head?’

‘Not necessarily. Most injured men experience difficulty making the transition from active service to inactive patient. I gather you’d rather be out of bed than in it, for example.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with my legs.’

‘Maybe not, but you were damn lucky to make it successfully in and out of bed yesterday. Forget the condition you arrived in . . . and the drugs you’re on . . . and the fact that you had a major operation a week ago . . . your brain hasn’t had time to adjust to mono-vision. By rights you should have gone arse over tit the minute you took your first step.’

‘Well, I didn’t.’

‘No. You seem to have the constitution of an ox and the balance of a tightrope walker.’ He eyed the young lieutenant curiously. ‘How did you manage to catch your mother’s wrist so easily? You should have missed by a mile.’

Acland produced a ball of tissue from under his sheet and tossed it from one hand to the other. ‘I’ve been practising.’

‘Why don’t you want anyone to know?’

A shrug. ‘It’s like a zoo in here . . . with me as the latest exhibit. People keep prodding me to see how I’m going to react. Most of the time I don’t feel like performing.’

‘Is that why you shut your door last night?’

‘Partly.’

‘Why else?’

‘To show that I could. I knew someone would barge in eventually to prove they were doing their job properly.’

‘The senior nurse found you intimidating.’

‘Good.’ He spoke with satisfaction.

Willis made a note. ‘Don’t you like her?’

‘Am I supposed to?’

Strange answer, Willis thought, giving one of his dry smiles. ‘You’re outside my usual remit, Charles. As a rule it takes weeks for patients to become as stroppy as you seem to be. They start by being grateful and compliant and only become irritated when progress isn’t as quick as they’d like.’ He paused. ‘Are you in pain?’

‘If I am I can ask for something.’

The psychiatrist consulted his papers again. ‘Except you never do. According to what I have here, you didn’t use the PCA and you refuse analgesics. Are you really pain-free . . . or is it a macho thing?’ He paused for an answer. ‘You ought to have a continuous dull ache around the site of your surgery, and acute stabs of pain every time you cough or move. Is that not happening?’

‘I can live with it.’

‘You don’t need to. Your recovery won’t happen any faster because you suffer. It might even hinder it.’ He studied the young man’s impassive face. ‘Is your amnesia still worrying you? Are you blaming the opiates for it?’

‘How can I remember anything if I turn myself into a zombie?’

‘And you think pain’s any different? It’s just as deadening to the concentration as morphine.’ He watched Acland toss the tissue ball again to prove him wrong. ‘Well, maybe not in your case,’ he said with dry humour. ‘What have you remembered so far?’

‘Nothing much. I had a flashback where I was being driven along a road that I didn’t recognize . . . but now I’m thinking it was a dream.’

‘I doubt it. Snippets of memory always feel like dreams at first. You’ll know they’re real when you can put them in context.’ He leaned forward encouragingly. ‘Being able to recall your command will take the uncertainty out of it. I imagine doubt about your leadership is what’s troubling you the most, isn’t it?’

Acland stared rigidly back at him. He had no intention of discussing his fears with anyone, let alone a psychiatrist.

Willis took off his glasses to give himself an excuse to look away. ‘There’s nothing alarming about your amnesia, Charles,’ he murmured, using a corner of Acland’s sheet to polish the lenses. ‘The brain bruises like any other part of the body when it takes a knock. It just needs time to heal.’

‘That’s OK, then.’

‘You’d be in a lot more trouble if the metal had come at you from a different angle or you hadn’t been wearing your helmet when you were thrown from the vehicle. A pierced or shattered skull is a different kettle of fish entirely. The brain doesn’t recover easily from that kind of damage.’

‘So I was lucky?’

‘Certainly . . . if the only choice was between serious brain damage and concussion. Real good fortune would have been that the shrapnel missed you altogether.’ He replaced his spectacles. ‘I gather you don’t like being told you’re lucky.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘You lost your temper yesterday morning when one of the auxiliaries urged you to cheer up because you’re better off than some of the others in here.’

‘That’s not what she said.’

‘What did she say?’

‘Invited me to keep my pecker up . . . so I invited her to take her fucking hands off me.’ He squeezed his fist round the tissues. ‘She told me I should be so lucky, then stomped out of the room. I haven’t seen her since.’

Willis was nonplussed. ‘Are you saying she touched you inappropriately?’

‘No, Doc,’ Acland answered sarcastically, ‘I’m saying she stood on one leg in the corner and danced a fandango. Look, it’s no big deal. I don’t enjoy being treated like a piece of meat . . . but I’m probably the only man in here who feels that way.’

‘Do you want to report her?’

‘No chance. She’s already given her side of the story. Who’s going to believe mine?’

Who indeed? As far as Willis knew there had been no similar complaints against Tracey Fielding. The interesting factor was how similar Acland’s and Tracey’s accounts were – it took only a small twist to put a sexual slant on the incident – and he wondered if Acland had deliberately read more into ‘keep your pecker up’ than had been intended. If so, it worried the psychiatrist, although he didn’t pursue it.

Instead, he asked Acland if he had any objection to seeing his parents before they left. ‘They’re downstairs and they’d like to say goodbye.’

‘Do you have a mirror? I might be more sympathetic if I know what my mother’s been bawling about.’

Willis shook his head. ‘There’s nothing to see except bandages, Charles.’

The lieutenant pointed to the right-hand side of his face. ‘Not on this side.’

‘Yes, well, that’s not pretty either, and I don’t want you taking the wrong messages from it. You’ve got a black eye, your skin colour ranges from yellow to indigo and your face is still swollen . . . but the damage isn’t permanent and you’ll recognize yourself with no trouble in a few days.’

‘I wouldn’t bet on it,’ said Acland with more truth than irony. ‘Mum keeps referring to a photo in her wallet to remind herself what I used to look like . . . and Dad says my appearance was so altered when I arrived here – he claimed my head had swollen to twice its normal size – that he didn’t believe the soldier on the trolley was his son.’

‘That’s not unusual, Charles. Often the impact of injury is greater on the family than it is on the individual. The patient knows what he has to do – survive and get better – but it requires a huge amount of ego-focused energy to achieve it. If he allows his family to drain that energy away, it becomes much harder. Parents and spouses rarely understand that. They subscribe to the myth that love cures everything and feel rejected if their love isn’t wanted.’

Acland stared at his hands. ‘I hope you told my folks that. It sounds like a much better reason for attacking my mother than the real one.’

‘Which was?’

‘Too many bloody questions.’

‘I was told she tried to comb your hair.’

‘That too.’

‘What were the questions about?’

‘Nothing of any importance.’

*

Acland watched the little pantomime of his father shepherding his mother protectively into the room to say goodbye and wondered if his lack of guilt was because he’d finally brought her to her knees. He paid lip service to her need to have every unpleasantness swept under the carpet by saying he was sorry and allowing her to kiss him on the cheek, but they both knew it was a charade. There was a little more warmth in the handshake he gave his father, but only because he knew the kind of recriminations the man was going to face for his son’s misdemeanour.

*

Over time, as some of his memories began to return, Acland asked Robert Willis why the process was so unpredictable. ‘In what way?’ ‘I remember some things but not others.’ ‘What sort of things?’ ‘People . . . briefings . . . a couple of recces that we made . . . the heat . . . the landscape.’ ‘Do you remember your two lance corporals?’ Acland nodded. ‘There’s a cleaner here who smiles the way Barry smiled. I get flashbacks every time I see him.’ ‘Doug, too?’ ‘Yes. They were good blokes.’ ‘Do you have any memories from the day of the attack?’ ‘No. I don’t even remember receiving the orders.’ ‘But you know what they were. I showed you the report. Intelligence had a tip-off that the convoy might be targeted, so your CO sent his best crew to scout ahead. He said he had complete confidence in you and your men.’

‘What else could he say?’ asked Acland cynically. ‘If he’d slagged us off, morale would hit rock bottom. Soldiers would question what the hell they were doing there when even their CO doesn’t stick up for them. It’s bad enough that the British public thinks we’re fighting a rotten war.’

He spent his time watching the twenty-four-hour news channels on the television in his room. Occasionally, Willis took him to task for it, arguing that a concentrated diet of shock-value news gave a distorted view of the world. War was the currency of broadcasters, not of the man in the street. Acland ignored the advice, denying that he felt a personal involvement with the British soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, or that he found each new death depressing.

‘Your CO spoke very highly of you,’ Willis reminded him now, ‘described all three of you as men of the highest calibre. Aren’t you being decorated for it?’

‘Only mentioned in dispatches. If we’d been the best we wouldn’t have been taken out so easily.’

Willis eyed him thoughtfully for a moment, then flipped through the papers on his knee. He withdrew a sheet. ‘This is a paragraph from the investigators’ report. “Lieutenant Acland’s Scimitar was attacked by two improvised explosive devices which were buried in freshly dug culverts at the side of the road and detonated simultaneously as the vehicle passed. The culverts were tunnelled by sophisticated moling equipment and the explosives detonated by remote signal.”’ He ran his finger down a few lines. ‘It details evidence taken from the scene and from a video made by the insurgents, and it goes on: “This suggests an expertise in the construction, camouflage, placing and detonation of IEDs that has hitherto only been seen in Northern Ireland. Future training must include this development to avoid further loss of life. It is no longer enough to alert men to the possibility of a single roadside bomb in a burnt-out car or rubbish bin.”’

He looked up. ‘What they’re saying is that there was nothing you could have done. You and your men were the first victims of a new form of attack, and your only mistake was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.’ He read continued cynicism in Acland’s expression. ‘What makes you think it was your fault?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Did any of your squad express dissatisfaction with your command?’

‘Not that I recall . . . but maybe I’ve chosen to forget it.’

Willis gave one of his dry smiles. ‘You’re confusing different types of amnesia, Charles. Yours – which goes by the general term of retrograde amnesia – is usually the result of head injury or disease, and is not governed by choice. Emotional amnesia – which may involve an element of choice – follows a traumatic psychological experience. In some cases this is so devastating to an individual’s ability to function that he blocks all memory of the incident in order to cope.’ He paused. ‘Nothing that I’ve seen suggests your amnesia has an emotional basis . . . but perhaps there’s something you haven’t told me?’

‘Like what?’

‘Did anything happen before you left for Iraq?’

Acland stared at him for a moment. ‘Nothing important.’

It was his favourite answer, thought Willis. ‘Perhaps not,’ he murmured, ‘but I suspect most people would say that being ditched by their fiance´e on the day of their departure was –’ he sought for a word – ‘upsetting.’

Anger flared briefly in the younger man’s face. ‘Who told you that?’

‘Your parents. They couldn’t understand why you never mentioned Jen or why she hadn’t phoned or sent a card . . . so your mother called her. Jen told her she couldn’t go through with it and felt it was fairer to let you know before you left. Is that what happened?’

‘Pretty much.’ Acland produced a tissue ball and tossed it idly from hand to hand. ‘It must have pissed my mother off something chronic to hear it was Jen who ditched me.’

‘Why?’

‘She spent months trying to make it happen the other way round.’

‘You were supposed to ditch Jen? Didn’t your mother like her?’

‘Of course not. She hates competition.’

Willis could believe that. He’d admired Mrs Acland’s fine-boned looks but he hadn’t liked her. He’d seen no more sincerity in her showy displays of grief than her son had done. ‘Were you upset by Jen’s letter?’

‘I never read it.’

‘She told your mother she sent it by registered post to your base.’

‘I didn’t bother to open it . . . just chucked it in the bin.’

Willis tapped the end of his pen against the notes on his lap. ‘You must have known what was in it. You had Jen’s name deleted from your records as someone to be informed in the event of your death.’

‘When?’

‘Presumably on your arrival in Iraq.’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Do you remember feeling any grief? Do you feel grief now?’

‘No.’

Willis was sceptical. ‘Most of us do when relationships end, Charles. Novelists don’t write about broken hearts for no reason. Sometimes the pain can go on for months.’

‘I don’t feel anything for her at all.’

Willis tried a different tack. ‘What did you think of your CO? Would you describe him as a good bloke?’

‘Sure. He lost his rag from time to time but he never held grudges.’

‘What about the job you were doing? You talked about loss of morale earlier. Was morale low while you were out there?’

‘Not where I was . . . but we didn’t have much contact with the locals. It was the guys on the ground in Basra who took the brunt of the resentment, and they all said that was hard to deal with.’

‘Were you afraid at any point?’

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

‘Every time a car came towards us with a solitary driver. We held our breath until he passed in case he was a suicide bomber.’

‘So you remember some feelings – you liked the people you worked with, you empathized with low morale, and you were afraid – but you’ve suppressed your feelings for your fiance´e. What do you think that means?’

Acland gave an ironic shrug. ‘That I had to forget her to function properly?’

‘Except you haven’t forgotten her, you just don’t like her any more.’ Willis watched him pump his hands together, monotonously squeezing air from between his palms. ‘What emotion do you think you’d have felt if you had read her letter?’

‘I didn’t read it.’

He was lying, Willis thought. ‘Would you have been hurt?’

The lieutenant shook his head. ‘I’d have been angry.’

‘Then you must have been angry whether you read it or not, since you obviously knew it was a “Dear John” letter.’ He took off his glasses and rubbed them on his cuff. ‘Why does anger worry you?’

‘Who says it does?’

‘You implied your amnesia had an emotional basis, and you’ve been struggling with anger since you arrived here. It’s a strong emotion. I’m wondering if you think it caused you to fail your command in some way.’

‘How?’

‘Lack of concentration.’ Willis replaced his glasses and studied the young man. ‘I think you’re blaming the deaths of your men on the fact that your mind was on Jen . . . and you’ve convinced yourself that’s why you’ve forgotten the attack. You believe you were guilty of negligence.’

Acland didn’t answer.

‘I don’t pretend to understand every working of the brain, Charles – it’s a complex organ that contains around one hundred billion neurones – but I doubt the two events are related. You might have been distracted during the first week of your deployment but not after two months. I imagine you placed Jen in a box to concentrate on suicide bombers – it’s what most of us would do in the same situation – and anger never came into it. It’s hardly plausible that you’d box up the bombers to concentrate on her, is it . . . not if you held your breath every time a car went by?’

‘No.’ The young lieutenant’s hands relaxed suddenly. ‘But it’s odd. She was a damn good fuck. I’d expect to feel something.’