Beneath The Skin Episode 10

They passed Alys sitting on a low stool in the doorway, smoking, the white cat curled up on her lap. She looked at them without interest, until the black thumb was produced for inspection. Then her eyes lit up.

She dropped the cigarette and jumped to her feet, brushing off the cat. It skulked away into the shadows to groom its fur. Alys moved towards Walt, a little too close, cupping his injured hand in hers, her touch insubstantial.

He smelled smoke on her scalp. His damaged hand lay in hers, upturned, like a dead thing. She was gentle but it was an odd gentleness.

He tried to ignore the pain, which was threatening to burst out through the mangled tip of his thumb.

It was nauseating, but he would never admit it, would grit his teeth against exposing it, because he’d experienced so much worse, witnessed so much worse. To admit to any kind of hurt was a betrayal.

She was probing the base of his thumb with her fingers, nipping his bones and ligaments like a dog that wouldn’t stop biting until its teeth met.

He pulled his hand away. He thought she looked vaguely amused.

Whatever that expression was, it didn’t seem appropriate, and the young lad, down by his elbow, saw it too and his eyes shuttered.

“Could be a fracture of your distal phalange,” she said. “It happens. But more likely to be severe trauma to the pulp surface. Did you know the distal pad of the human thumb is divided into a proximal and a distal compartment?

“The proximal is more deformable than the distal and allows the thumb pad to mould around an object. Lucky, really.” “What the hell are you talking about?” “Well, there’s a bit of ‘give’ in your thumb. They’re hard to break. You’ll probably lose the nail though.”

“How come you know so much about thumbs?”

“I’ve stuffed plenty.” She grinned. “Not any human ones. Yet.”

“I still think you need a plaster,” William said.

Fighting Ghosts

The last night on patrol is always the longest night. If you’re going to give in to your fears it will be then, in the dark hours, between sundown and the welcome roar of the Hercules that’s going to take you home.

Your psyche is jumping with tales of those who bought it on their last day. That’s got Sod’s Law written all over it: to dodge bullets for six months and then stumble into an IED tripwire on the final night of your tour.

Nobody mentions it, but the thought is there, buzzing around you like a fly. Prayers are imagined a little louder, charms fingered for luck. Walt’s amulet is a Saint Christopher medal that belonged to his granny.

Your whole system is tuned to the slightest movement, the faintest sound. Shadows trick you; the air is sticky with tension. Your training kicks in and you realise there’s a certain balance in dodging bullets, a law of averages.

You can fire back. You are a leveller. It’s the IEDs that scare you witless. You’re fighting ghosts.

That’s how it was for Tom – a roadside blast on his final night; the night before he was due to go home to Sara and the kids; due to stride off the plane and engulf them in bear hugs.

The army medics radioed it in as “significant damage”. Walt could see that Tom wasn’t going to stride anywhere in a hurry. Two mortars had detonated, making a mess of Tom and little Deano, a young squaddie of eighteen, first tour.

Both of them were conscious as they loaded them into the Chinook.

The lad was screaming for his mother and Walt would never forget how Tom reached out to him with his one remaining hand.

Come on, bonnie lad. You’ll be home before you know it.

By the time Walt and the rest of the unit had made it back to base in the armoured vehicles, Tom was dead, had slipped away into the dark night high above the desert. The young lad had survived, minus his legs. Walt was still trying to decide who was the lucky one.

Overfamiliar

The pharmacy was a family-run independent a 15-minute walk from Alys’s house. Walt was unsuited to walking with a child and it was a long 15 minutes. His gait was all wrong for a start; it was impossible to match it to William’s.

He’d been proud of his military stride, the way it covered the terrain, the way it got him noticed on Civvie Street. Old soldiers bought him pints and clapped him on the back; girls gave him the eye.

But nothing was scarier than feeling the kid’s hand worm its way into his at the junctions. There was a warmth to it, a comfort he’d thought he could live without. At the second set of traffic lights he started to get paranoid.

Were people looking at him? Speculating? An adult male with a kid that wasn’t his. Did they know?

William tugged on his hand – “the man’s at green, we can go now” – like a little guide dog.

The boy kept up a steady stream of chatter, as if his words had been stoppered up for ages and Walt was the only one who could listen. The lad was a magpie: a collector of other people’s thoughts, snippets of conversation and throwaway comments.

He picked them all up and added them to the scrapbook in his head.

By the time they’d reached the pharmacy on Raeburn Place, Walt knew that the pharmacist was called Galen, that he kept a house in France and tiny scissors in his wallet with which he neatened his beard in the staff toilet.

Mouse had apparently worked for him for seven years and was worried that he was becoming overfamiliar.

“What’s overfamiliar mean, anyway?” William asked as they reached the shop.

Walt realised that he was still holding the kid’s hand and dropped it quickly. It had gone all warm and sweaty the way kids’ hands do.

His own thumb was pulsing, getting worse the way a toothache does at the thought of the dentist.

“Sounds like he’s an old lech.”

More on Monday.

You’re tuned to the slightest movement, the faintest sound. Shadows trick you; the air is sticky with tension

Beneath The Skin, by Sandra Ireland, is published by Polygon, £8.99. Her latest book, Sight Unseen, is out now.