The Age Of Odin

Twenty

Eventually I did fall asleep, and I dreamed I was back in the Astra.

I was back in the Astra, trapped upside down, and Abortion had burrowed his way out and was somewhere in the field outside, but he'd been gone a long time. Minutes, though it felt like hours. It didn't take that long to phone the emergency services, did it? What was he doing, giving them his life story?

"Abortion?"

Nothing. No answer.

"Abortion? Mate?"

Still no answer.

I tried it louder, almost a scream.

"Abortion!"

Don't flap, Gid, I told myself. Bugger's strayed out of earshot, that's all. Trying to get to high ground to get a signal. Yeah, that's it.

But it wasn't impossible that he'd wandered off. Abortion's brain had holes in it, which his train of thought often fell into and seldom chuffed itself quickly out of. Dazed and confused from the crash, he could easily have forgotten about me and trundled off back up to the road, maybe planning on heading back to the petrol station. By the time he got there, if he ever did, he might not even recall how he came to be out on a night like this in the first place. Meaning I was well and truly snookered.

I wriggled, struggled, but couldn't free myself. The cold was seeping into my muscles, my bones. I was constricted. Paralysed. Dying.

I woke up then, in Jotunheim, with my bedroll all twisted round me like a sweet wrapper. I got untangled, huddled tightly up and rubbed myself for warmth, and soon was dozing once more.

The claustrophobic car dream, I suspected, was destined to become a recurring nightmare.

Another one to add to the collection.

My tours in former Yugoslavia, then Iraq, then Afghanistan, had left me with a whole host of images that I could push to the rear of my mind and ignore while I was awake, but not in my sleep, when my brain was its own boss and did whatever it felt like.

The aftermath of a Sunni suicide bombing on a bus carrying Shiite militiamen in Basra.

An Afghan woman in the field hospital at Bastion, her face melted off by white phosphorus.

The charred corpses of British soldiers in a Snatch Land Rover whose armour hadn't protected them from an RPG attack near Kandahar.

Naked bodies piled high in the cellar of a house in Srebrenica, all males, the youngest of them a boy of no more than fifteen — Bosnian Muslim refugees slaughtered by a particularly vicious Serbian para-military death squad known as the Scorpions.

A British infantry platoon limping home to forward command, lugging several of their comrades behind them on improvised drag litters after a "friendly fire" incident when the joystick jockey operating a Predator drone a couple of hundred miles across the border in Uzbekistan opened up on them with Hellfire missiles, misreading his camera image and mistaking them for armed locals.

They came to me at night, these scenes and others. I lived them over and over, never able to escape them. Mental wounds, the kind that never heal. Bringers of night sweats and small-hours vigils that lasted until dawn.

The price we paid for being soldiers. The price of surviving warfare.