Authors: Mila Gray
Flames lick at the sky and an orange haze mushrooms
over the compound. Suddenly the alarm cuts through the
ringing in my ears, a siren blare that sounds as if it’s
coming from some place deep inside me. And then I hear
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the sound of boots stampeding, people yelling over me. I
hear my name, but it sounds as if someone is calling to
me from down a long, dark tunnel.
I’m dragged to my feet and someone tries to pull me
away from the gate post, but I wrench myself free and
start running – a limping half-jog, the pain in my side
slowing me down.
‘Riley,’ I yell again, spinning in a circle. Swallowed by
the dust and dirt that have blanketed out the floodlights
and the stars, it feels as though I’m standing in a choking
hot cave. ‘Riley!’ I shout until my throat is hoarse.
But he doesn’t answer.
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Jessa
Riley. No. No.
A sharp hook snags behind my rib cage, ripping
upwards, tearing a path through my heart, puncturing
my lungs, rasping up my throat. The room spins even
more violently. Faces lunge past me − my mother, Kit’s
father.
Kit! What about Kit?
With both hands on the floor, I steady myself and take
a deep breath in. My lungs are on fire. ‘Kit. What about
Kit?’ I manage to gasp.
‘He’s OK. A slight injury, but OK.’
He’s OK. An intense burst of relief douses the pain
momentarily, like water being thrown on a fire. I can
breathe again. But it lasts for only a moment before the
blackness rushes back in, threatening to suffocate me, and
the pain returns – a razor-sharp blade slicing again and
again between my ribs. Riley. How can he be dead?
Somehow I’m in the living room, sitting on the sofa,
with no knowledge of how I got there. My mother is sit-
ting beside me. She’s not speaking. She’s staring straight
ahead at the wall, at the photograph of Riley in his uni-
form on graduation day. I shake my head, looking at Kit’s
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father Ben standing in the middle of the room. This can’t
be happening. This isn’t real. Riley can’t be dead. They
must have made a mistake.
‘I don’t believe you,’ I say, hearing the note of defiance
in my voice. I pull out my phone. ‘I’m going to call him.’
Kit’s father kneels down in front of me. His hands –
calloused and warm – close over mine. ‘Jessa,’ he says
softly, ‘it’s not a mistake. We’ve had confirmation.’
I jump to my feet. I have no idea where I’m going. I
only know one thing; that I need to get away. I need air.
I need to find someone who’ll tell me this is all a joke. I
need to outrun this.
I make it to the door and slam straight into my dad. He
catches me by the shoulders. I try to push past him. I
shove with all my might, but he doesn’t budge. I look up
at him angrily and suddenly stop shoving as it dawns on
me that he doesn’t know – he doesn’t yet know that his
son is dead, that Riley is gone. And I feel a sharp stab of
envy. I envy him the fact that he still exists in the before,
in the place where Riley is still alive. And I hate him for it,
while also pitying him for the blow that’s about to fall
which he has no clue is coming.
He’s looking at me confused and blurry eyed, still wear-
ing his pyjamas. I note the grey hair peeking out the top of
his shirt and the fact that he hasn’t shaved yet. I see for the
first time the thick, raised veins snaking over his hands. I
take in all of these details with furious concentration, as if
my brain has decided that if it focuses on the minutiae it
won’t have to contemplate the bigger picture. My dad
looks over my shoulder and his face drains of blood as he
sees Kit’s dad and my mom in the living room.
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‘What is it?’ he asks, his fingers digging into my arms
hard.
‘Riley’s dead,’ I tell him in a voice so calm that it rattles
me. Why am I so calm? How can I sound so matter-of-fact
when inside it feels as if a storm is raging? How can I
announce something so momentous as though I’m talk-
ing about the weather?
My father’s face turns ashen. He releases me and walks
unsteadily towards my mother. I watch him pull her into
his arms. I see her knuckles bleach white as she grips him
around the waist, her mouth pulled down into a silent
scream of agony. My dad turns towards Kit’s dad and a
half-formed thought careers through my mind:
He needs
to leave. Kit’s dad can’t be here. They hate each other.
But then
I see that they’re talking. My father is asking questions;
Kit’s father is answering calmly, quietly.
It sounds as if they’re underwater, but I make out the
words
suicide bomber
then
car bomb
then
body home for
burial
before I cover my ears and collapse once more to
the floor, the screams inside my head growing so loud
that eventually they drown out everything.
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Kit
If I concentrate with all my might on the little things − on
straightening my cuffs, on polishing my boots until I can
see my face in them, on picking every piece of lint off the
sleeves of my uniform − I’ve found it helps keep the dark
thoughts and the images at bay. I can still sense them
there, lurking in the darkness like a pack of hyenas scrap-
ping for my attention, but at least they’re not right there
in my face.
I had thought it might be better once I was back on US
soil, that putting a distance between myself and what
happened would make it somehow easier to deal with,
but it hasn’t. Sleep is the worst – one non-stop nightmare
in which I’m paralysed, watching the man in the coat
approach Riley who’s standing sentry at the gate, trying
to scream at Riley to run but not able to make a sound.
But even during the day, if I let my concentration slip for
even a millisecond then the memories rush in like a tidal
wave dragging me under. And each time it’s getting
harder and harder to fight my way back to the surface.
They’re sharp-edged, 3D – images that burst with gory,
technicolour detail. Sounds too – the blast still echoes in
my head five days on, the back of my throat is still raw
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from yelling Riley’s name, and the acrid smell of smoke
still lingers on my skin despite the number of times I’ve
tried to scrub it off. My muscles won’t quit trembling
either, and my hands shake even now as I try to do up the
buttons on my shirt.
I glance at the bottle of painkillers on the side and
think about taking one, or maybe even two or three to kill
the pain. But I’m not sure even a whole bottle would be
enough to numb this, and besides, I’m not even sure I
want to numb it. The constant burning ache in my side
just beneath my ribs where some shrapnel from the bomb
blast struck me gives me something to focus on other
than the voice in my head that’s striving to be heard over
the ringing in my ears – the voice that hasn’t let up for a
single second since it happened; the voice telling me
it
should have been you.
I pull open the dresser drawer to look for my cufflinks
and the room tips sideways with a lurch. Jessa’s clothes
fill the drawer, neatly folded as if just put there. My chest
constricts at the sight. I stare at the pile of underwear –
delicate lace, pastel colours – fighting the urge to sink my
hands into it, lift it to my face and inhale deeply. I draw a
sharp breath and manage to get a hit of her perfume, the
first thing other than smoke I’ve managed to smell in five
days. It sends my head spinning. Shit. I ram the drawer
shut making the whole dresser shake, then, resting my
palms on the top to stop my arms from trembling, I
squeeze my eyes shut.
Instantly I’m overcome by a fast-flowing stream of
images: Riley turning towards me, the flash of compre-
hension on his face in the split second before the blast, the
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white sheet lightning that swallowed him whole, the
whooshing roar of the flame that knocked me backwards.
The smoking darkness, the void-like sense of something
being fundamentally wrong with the world that rippled
through me straight afterwards as though someone had
switched off gravity.
It should have been me.
My phone buzzes and my heart explodes like a bomb
in my chest. I spin around, disorientated.
Breathe, breathe,
I
order myself as the room starts to spin. The slightest noise
keeps setting me off, throwing me right back to the
moment the bomb went off. The phone is still buzzing.
Dizzily, I cross to the bedside table, where it sits vibrating,
and grab for it.
It’s Jessa. I stare at her name, my heart now trying to
hammer its way clean out of my chest. Fuck. I jab at the
cancel button. And then for good measure I turn the
damn thing off. In a fit of desperation I try to find some-
where I can hide it.
I don’t hear my dad knock, and when he comes into
the room I’m still pacing anxiously back and forth, look-
ing for somewhere to hide my phone. I’m aware I
probably look like someone trying to hide a bloody
murder weapon.
‘Have you spoken to her yet?’ my dad asks, nodding at
the phone in my hand.
I turn my back and pulling out the top drawer of the
bedside table drop my phone into it before slamming it
shut.
‘You need to speak to her. She needs you.’
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He drops his hand on my shoulder and I stiffen auto-
matically.
‘Kit. You need to talk to someone. You need to take
them up on that offer of counselling.’
I brush off his hand and walk to the bed, getting down
on my knees to roll up the camping mat I’ve been sleep-
ing on for the last three nights. I’ve seen the counsellor
once already – it was mandatory. They told me I might
start to display signs of post-traumatic stress disorder and
that I was to notify them if I did. Jesus, I thought at the
time, I’m never going to turn into Jessa’s dad. But now
here I am, going crazy just like him, the slightest noise
setting me off, acting like a jerk. The realization would
make me laugh if the truth of it wasn’t so fucked up.
‘Kit.’
I start and look up. The sadness in my dad’s eyes
makes me wish I hadn’t. I look away, focusing on the
camping mat that’s half rolled in my hands. I can’t deal
with this.
‘It’s not your fault,’ my dad says.
I stop what I’m doing and get to my feet. ‘Yes. Yes, it
is,’ I say. It’s the first time I’ve spoken to him, to anyone,
since I got back yesterday. He’s the first person who’s
guessed what’s going on in my head. My dad walks to
me and puts his hand out as though to rest it on my
shoulder, but I back away. ‘It’s my fucking fault. It was
meant to be me! I was on duty. I asked him to swap with
me. You don’t get it. It should have been me. I’m the one
that should be dead!’
I stare at him, breathing heavily. My dad holds my
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gaze, his expression calm. He nods. I want him to under-
stand. I need him to understand and to start yelling at
me. I need him to tell me he blames me too.
‘Kit, there’s nothing you could have done,’ he says
quietly. ‘God works in mysterious ways.’
I stare at him, my eyes bugging, my breathing uneven,
my head starting to spin. ‘God? You’re talking to me
about God?’ I yell. ‘Fuck God! There is no fucking God.’
Pain passes across my dad’s face. I can’t bear to see it.
I can’t fucking handle it a moment longer. I cross to the
dresser and grab the bottle of painkillers, pouring out
three and downing them with one dry swallow. I’m too
much of a fucking coward to face this sober.
‘I need to go,’ I mutter to my dad, picking up my jacket
from the back of the chair.
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Jessa
Why does everyone wear black at these things? Riley
would have hated it. He would have wanted a cele-
bration and lots of colour. He would have wanted pizza