Out of Mind (6 page)

“Why did she go outside? Why didn’t she walk through the building to her room?”

Mike shrugged. “I have no idea. Should I?”

“What did she talk about that night?” I asked.

Mike shrugged again, but unlike Alan, he never took his eyes off mine. It was almost as though he were trying to outstare
me, as though I’d give in and go away if he looked at me hard enough. On film it would look menacing. He wasn’t doing himself
any favors.

“Same stuff we all talk about, all the time. About how easy it is to get killed. How she sometimes felt like getting out of
the profession, leaving it behind.”

“She talked about leaving her job?” I echoed him. “I thought you said you exchanged a few words.”

“We had a few conversations over the three days.”

“Did she say where she was going if she left her job?”

“She wasn’t speaking in those terms”—Mike had become icily exact—“perhaps I’ve overstated it. She simply said that there were
times when she didn’t want to see another war. She’d seen several of her colleagues killed.”

“On the day of Melanie’s disappearance, you practiced a hostage-taking situation,” I said. “She was hooded, pushed to the
ground, then taken to what she was told was an execution ground. She was expected to talk herself out of trouble. It must
have been a frightening experience.”

“Melanie was a good talker, from what I hear. She knew how to talk her way into things, and she knew how to talk herself out
of them. She’d been in bad situations before. She’d have had a fighting chance. Not like some of them.”

“But you think she’d had enough of her job.” I tried to pin him down, but he just looked at me as though he were seeing me
in the crosshairs of his rifle sights. So I left the question hanging and moved on.

“Melanie’s belongings were still in her room,” I said, “which suggested to the police that she didn’t go by choice.”

“Or that she did go by choice and left her stuff behind.” Mike shrugged. “People do strange things.”

“Do you believe Melanie Jacobs is dead or alive?”

“How should I know?”

“I’m asking what you think.”

He considered. He passed both palms slowly over his face and drew in a great breath.

“I think she’s alive,” he said at last. He made it sound like an article of faith. I let the silence lengthen.

“You knew Melanie,” I said. “She’s been gone for six months, and none of her family or friends has heard anything from her.
Does that sound like Melanie to you?”

“I hardly know the woman.”

I could feel that he was willing me not to say what I said next.

“But you had met before,” I said.

He didn’t reply at once, and what started out as hesitation grew into a gulf of silence. His eyes pleaded with me.

“Wasn’t that so?” I prompted him.

“No . . . yes . . . We may have met, I don’t remember.”

I had the photograph in my pocket, but to pull it out hey presto would be the kind of sensationalist journalism that one tries
one’s best not to stoop to. Besides, what did it prove? It was just a play of light on film, Melanie’s face hidden. It would
be too easy for Mike to say simply that it wasn’t Melanie at all, that the caption was wrong. He might even be right there.
Until I’d tracked down the photographer, I couldn’t be one hundred percent sure myself that it was Melanie. But the expression
on his face told me there was something there.

“Where did you meet?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“When?”

“Three years ago.”

“How?”

“I’m not at liberty to discuss special operations.”

We stared at each other.

“What was the nature of your relationship with Melanie?”

“Relationship? We were in the middle of a bloody war.”

Suddenly, in the distance, there was a slurred, argumentative voice raised, complaining. It was Justin. He was fed up with
being made fun of, fed up with this hellhole.

Mike, enraged by my questioning, stood up and yelled in the general direction of the voice, “Go home, then, if you’re such
a baby. Go on, get the fuck out of here. I’ve had enough of your whining.”

A single shot was fired into the night.

“Fuck,” Mike muttered, as anxious as he was angry. “Where’s the stupid bugger gone?”

He was peering into the night when there was another shot and the sound of a voice, ranting.

“Justin!” he shouted. “Justin!”

About thirty yards from us, a figure emerged into the light thrown by the car headlights. He was walking backward, gun raised
above his head, shouting. A child ran up to him, fascinated by the spectacle, and Justin waved him away with the gun. An adult
grabbed the child and picked him up, swinging him away from Justin. The boy was crying, his voice rising into the night air
and mingling with Justin’s.

“Stop, you idiot!” Mike shouted out, moving forward so that his voice reached Justin. But Justin wasn’t listening. And I realized,
in that moment, what it was that had Mike so panicked. It wasn’t the gun. Not only the gun, at least. It was that Justin was
wandering drunkenly and witlessly into the minefield.

I started to run toward him, shouting, adding my voice to Mike’s. In the dark it was hard to get my footing, and I stumbled
but regained my balance. Still Justin was not listening. Drunkenly, he thought we were shouting to argue with him, not that
we were trying to stop him. I was only yards from Justin now, and he was waving his gun around. Next to me, a villager suddenly
stopped and grabbed my arm, bringing me to an abrupt halt, too. He pointed at the ground. I could not see what he was alerting
me to, but I understood that I was about to step inside the skull-and-crossbones marker that defined the minefield. I stopped
short of the minefield and yelled at Justin again. At last, illuminated in headlamps, he seemed to hear us.

Confusion crossed his face, then panic. He took another step backward. He did not see that he was moving toward the small
bridge over the gully. I would learn later that no one had dared to walk there for years. Then, as he puts his left foot behind
him, there was a tremendous blast that hit us, causing us to stagger backward, deafening us temporarily, spraying debris that
reached to our faces, forcing us to close our eyes.

Already my memory of that nighttime drive exists only in snatches. We drive through the night across the potholes, toward
Phnom Penh. I’m in the passenger seat, my eye swollen closed, the whole of that side of my face bandaged, blood leaking through
the dressing. I’m dimly aware that our driver is casting worried looks at me. Dave is in the backseat, huddled in the corner.
Justin lies across the backseat of the car, what remains of his left leg bandaged by Mike, who stopped Justin’s bleeding with
a tourniquet, who gave Justin a shot of diamorphine for the screaming pain, and who now holds Justin’s head on his lap.

“Jesus, Kes, what have I done? I didn’t mean this, not this.” I hear Mike mutter under his breath, not once but a hundred
times, pleading with Jesus and with Justin’s father, the two entangled, judge and jury who will condemn him for what he has
allowed to happen. In my muddy brain, I hallucinate that it is Melanie blown apart in the backseat there with Mike and that
we are at the War School, driving through the bomb-strewn woods.

Hong Kong

W
HEN I awoke, it was not fear that immediately enveloped me but confusion. I could feel the cool, clean sheets of a hospital
bed on my skin. I raised my hand to my face and felt bandage. I turned my head and peered as well as I could with one sleepy
eye at the view from the window. Dense junglelike vegetation, a precipitous cliff, distant blue sea. The door opened, and
a middle-aged man entered wearing a white coat and a smile somewhat less bright.

“Miss Ballantyne, I am Dr. Kerry.”

I stared at him. Dr. Kerry had an Irish accent, and to say I was disoriented would be an understatement.

“You’ve been medevaced to Hong Kong,” he said with another of these half-smiles, “and I’m glad to be able to tell you that
we were worried, but you’ll be fine. Or at least, I’m assuming you can remember who you are. . . .”

I nodded at him. My name, date of birth, my children, their birthdays. Name of husband? I shook my head and he smiled and
shrugged.

He handed me a mirror and peeled off a dressing to show me a rude red weal that stretched from the edge of my eye almost to
my ear. The wound had been stitched neatly closed. It seemed a ridiculously small injury to have caused so much blood and
pain. I had been hit by a flying shard of metal. Land mines can be packed with objects intended to cause maximum damage to
bystanders. Many land mine victims spend the rest of their lives with tiny pellets of metal peppered across their faces and
their eyes. I was lucky. One small piece of metal, likely a nail, struck my face just at the outer edge of my eye. Half an
inch less lucky and it would have gouged my eye out. As it was, the wound was healing, the bruising would recede, scarring
would be covered by my hair if I grew it a little longer.

“When can I go home?”

“Forty-eight hours. With a history of head injury like yours, we don’t want to put you straight on a long-haul flight.”

I couldn’t argue. Forty-eight hours was nothing, of course. I understood that in the greater scheme of things, but I wanted
to be gone that very minute. I felt fine. A little woozy, perhaps, but basically fine. I was alive, after all. So I felt as
though I’d been told my plane would sit on the tarmac for the next forty-eight hours, with me on board.

“You can help to cheer up the boy who lost his leg.”

I stared at Dr. Kerry. Somehow, ridiculously, it came as a shock to hear that Justin was still without his leg. The scene,
Justin staggering backward, shouting drunkenly, came back to me, then the blast. The awful car ride, Mike in desperation in
the backseat, cradling Justin. I remembered Mike arguing with doctors, fighting to clamber aboard the small aircraft on the
Phnom Penh airfield, being gently pulled away, airport officials explaining the plane was full . . .

“Justin really wasn’t himself,” Dr. Kerry was saying. “He’d drunk an astonishing quantity of vodka, and on top of that it
seems the poor lad may have had a little bit of a psychotic episode.”

“How can you be a ‘little bit’ psychotic?”

“He was taking antimalarial drugs, and they can bring on temporary psychosis in a small number of cases. He’s lucky to be
alive, but he doesn’t feel lucky. And although he’s stopped taking the antimalarial drugs, they’re still in his system, so
he doesn’t feel himself at all.”

“What about his parents?” I clutched at straws. I was sorry for Justin, but I was pretty sorry for myself, too.

“I understand his mother died several years ago, and the father has telephoned to say he’ll meet his son at the airport on
his return.”

After Dr. Kerry had gone I practiced getting out of bed a few times, and in between I practiced lying down a few times. I
could not work out why I was so exhausted. Then I tottered pathetically along the corridors until I found Justin, in a private
room. He lay on the bed, his face turned toward the window. He was hooked up to an intravenous drip. His left leg, what remained
of it, was in some type of cast. When I went into the room, he turned his face and looked at me, but he didn’t say anything,
and after a moment he turned his face to the window again. I went and stood by the bed.

“How are you feeling?”

He didn’t reply, so I sat in the chair next to his bed and read the newspaper to myself. A doctor came in, introducing himself
as Dr. Lam, and I got up to leave, but he waved me back into a chair and pulled a face at me.

“You don’t have to go,” he said. “She doesn’t have to go, Justin, does she? I just want to give you a rundown on how you’re
doing. Usually when I do this, there is some family or a friend here. She can remember the bits you forget, so you don’t have
to bother me to say it all over again tomorrow. What do you think, can the young lady stay?”

There was a moment’s silence and then a low, cold voice from the bed:

“She’s old enough to be my mother.”

I stood up to go, but as I pulled the door open, Justin spoke again, this time in the childishly courteous voice I remembered
from before the accident:

“I’m sorry. She can stay.”

“Biologically,” I told him, settling back into my chair, “I am barely old enough to be your mother. For practical purposes,
I’m at most an elder sister.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Aunty,” the doctor said, and Justin gave a small grunt of appreciation. Now that he had Justin’s
attention, the doctor continued. “Okay, now let me tell you what’s going on here. Justin, I want you to look at me, and see
where I am pointing. Okay. Your leg was blown off here, midcalf. Look, here. Originally, there was more leg, but the wound
was very untidy, the bone was shredded above the ankle. Land mines are designed to tear people up, so I had to neaten the
wound for you. Look, Justin, look where I’m pointing, don’t keep looking away. At the moment you have a rigid cast on your
leg, it helps control the swelling. Of course, it won’t always be bandaged like this. Soon we’ll change the dressings, but
we have to control the swelling for some time, so we will use elastic bandages, perhaps, or a compression sleeve. I had to
cut off more of the bone also because it must be shorter than the skin, because the skin has to be stretched over the stump
and sewn together, as if I’m wrapping a parcel, you understand?”

I glanced at Justin’s face, but there was such raw shock there that I looked away. Instead I watched Dr. Lam. It was clear
he had done this before and that he had perfected this blunt, upbeat style to bring his patients face-to-face with their new
reality.

“The good news is that you still have your knee joint, and that will make things much easier when you have your new leg and
you start to have physiotherapy. Soon we will give you a cast designed to take a simple training prosthesis called a pylon,
so that you can soon learn to stand and walk. They will make your new leg for you in England. There’s no point in fitting
it until the healing is done, because the leg will change shape a little bit, the muscle will wither, the swelling will subside.
You can go home as soon as your wound is healed a little more, and when you are comfortable in a wheelchair. Most important
over the next few weeks is hygiene for the wound, and making sure the dressings are clean, because what we do not want is
infection. Any questions? . . . No? Okay, you are wondering what is there in your drip? These are antibiotics also to guard
against infection. We are also giving you painkillers. And these will continue for some time. Right now, if we didn’t give
you painkillers, your leg would hurt all over. You might even feel pain from the part of the leg that is not there. It is
called phantom pain. We have to find ways to control this.”