War Torn полностью

Agnieszka waited for Jenny to phone back. The minutes ticked past. Was Jenny still talking to Adi? Was she phoning other people? Had she fallen asleep?Her anxiety was like a massive machine waiting to run her over. Her nerves throbbed as she listened to the silence, listened for a car stopping outside. Then the doorbell. Then the Families Officer. Standing on the doorstep with news that would crush her like a great juggernaut.Jamie dead. Jamie not there any more. Jamie’s body in a big, dark bag and then a wooden box, buried in the cold ground. Jamie icy and unfeeling, Jamie without love or warmth or life inside him. Jamie unable to put his arms around her or hold Luke. Had all his absences been a way of preparing her for this final, awful absence? She wanted to howl with pain, howl like a wolf.Still no phone, no car. The silence assumed huge proportions of its own as she waited for it to end. It seemed to get bigger as it went on and on, like a sound getting louder. Except it was silence. She was almost grateful when Luke started to whine. She went in to him. His cot was on wheels. She rocked it over a bump in the rug she had made by stuffing towels under it and he went back to sleep. The unbearable silence resumed.If only there was someone. But there was only Jamie and he was out there. Last night there had been a TV programme about the Arctic and how it was melting. Instead of being shocked by this, Agnieszka had been horrified by its kilometres of white emptiness. The wasteland had reminded her of her own life. A polar bear floating on a small iceberg through freezing seas, far from other polar bears or any life at all, had made her weep with sad recognition.Then she had an idea.She reached for the phone.After a few rings, a sleepy voice answered.‘Yes?’‘Hello . . .’ She spoke quietly.The voice was surprised. It was uncertain. And it was wide awake.‘Hello?’‘Who is this?’But she could tell he knew who it was. He was just scared to hope he was right.‘It me.’‘Aggie?’‘Yes.’‘Aggie!’Surprise. Pleasure. Then a realization that this was around 2 a.m.‘Aggie, are you all right?’‘Help me, Darrel. You always fix everything. So now I ask for help.’‘Aggie, I’ll fix anything I can. What’s happened?’‘Oh, God, something so awful I can’t stand it.’‘Tell me.’‘I sorry to ring in night.’‘Well, I wasn’t busy. I was only sleeping.’‘I don’t know what to do . . .’‘Tell me, Aggie.’It was a relief to tell him. The call to Jenny had been awkward, full of guilt and confession. And she had sensed Jenny’s disapproval. Now she was talking to someone who really cared about her, who could share her concern and understand it.‘Listen, when my husband go to Afghanistan he take a secret little telephone . . .’She finished the story, her throat catching on the words Jamie is dead.‘Darrel? You still there?’‘Yes, Aggie. I’m thinking. The problem is that you need to find out whether the message could be true. Without telling anyone where it came from.’‘Darrel, that exactly right. Exactly. You understand.’This was different from the hysteria of her call to Jenny. This was a more quiet desperation.‘OK, is there some sort of place you army wives go for help? Supposing something happened to Luke and you had to contact your husband urgently . . .?’‘I go to Families Officer.’‘You’ve got a choice, Ags. Either you sweat it out and wait. Because if he’s really dead they’ll come and tell you soon enough. Or you go to this Families Officer and say you got a text, you don’t know who from or where from, it was anonymous. You say you immediately erased it from your phone but it’s been worrying you ever since.’Darrel was right. Either she waited or she contacted the Families Officer with every detail of the story except the one she didn’t want him to hear.‘But, for what it’s worth . . . well, I don’t think your husband’s dead. It sounds to me like some of his mates have found his mobile and they’re trying to teach him a lesson.’‘No one teach such nasty lesson.’‘There are enough nasty people around. I don’t think he’s dead.’She felt as though someone had put their arms around her in a warm embrace. Darrel, who fixed things, was fixing this.‘Ags, can you contact this person, this Families Officer, in the middle of the night?’‘Um . . . maybe there’s a number. But maybe I don’t contact. Maybe I wait until morning.’‘Can you stand it?’‘Yes. In morning I go to office.’‘That’s my suggestion.’‘Oh, Darrel, talk to me a little while.’She didn’t want to put the phone down and hear the silence again.‘No, you talk to me, Aggie. Go on. Tell me what you’ve been doing since we last met. Any more drawing?’She snuggled down under the duvet and talked. It felt intimate. Her voice became soft. He even made her laugh. There were whole minutes at a time when she was able to forget the big, black abyss that had opened up in her life tonight. They talked for two hours and at the end of their talk she was so tired that she slept.

Chapter Thirty-eight