Quaseem

Looking around their bright cluttered kitchen the morning after we arrived in the U.K., and listening to the noisy clamour of their brood of children I was struck by how much their lives have changed and how much they, themselves, have stayed the same since those far off days at the FOB when I first got to know them. Molly hasn't really changed much at all, she looks older of course, but that's to be expected, it was almost ten years ago after all, and she was then about the same age as Bashira is now. She is still as beautiful, as funny and as feisty now as she was then; how well I remember her when she first arrived, a beautiful little soldier with a will of iron and a big heart, a combination that spelled trouble and a pair of huge green eyes which followed the Captain's every move. I remember thinking that he should be very careful; she presented an extremely potent mix of a young girl who was not only very beautiful but very endearing and full of what I perceived to be hero worship. She was also the bravest girl I've ever come across, in fact I think she was the bravest young soldier of either gender, and it was during one of her exploits that I looked at his face and realised that, far from him handling the potential danger that she presented, he was as emotionally connected to her as she was to him.

Her connection to him became distressingly obvious on that far off day when he got shot and she was distraught; that connection is as evident today as it was then and it is plain that they love each other and their children deeply. I know that they were apart for quite a while after they got home because Molly came back to Afghanistan to see me, and more especially Bashira, and didn't mention him at all, then when she went home again she e-mailed regularly, again never mentioning him. It wasn't until they served in Turkey together that something happened and they got together. The next thing I heard was that they'd had two children and were married, I'm not sure which came first, she never said and I didn't ask. They have since had a third child, a little girl who is demonstrably as strong willed as her mother, although not quite as pretty as their eldest daughter who is enchantingly like her mother. Their little boy is a carbon copy of his father and is a serious and shy little boy; very endearing and I can see that Bashira is very taken with him.

The look that passed between them when Molly told us that they are expecting another child, made me, for a few minutes, really envy the Captain, or Charles, as I have to remind myself to call him; Captain is not even his rank any more, he is a Lieutenant Colonel, but old habits die very hard with me. My wife Alima and I decided to have only the one child, my daughter Camella, in order to give her the best we could with our limited resources, but I so wish now that we'd had a large brood like these two. Of course there is a chance that they might not have survived the Taliban either, but that is something I will never know. Looking around me I can see that material resources for a large family are not a problem for them, this is a very lovely, and I imagine very expensive, house.

I have very much enjoyed being a surrogate father to Bashira, she is a delightful girl and I will always be grateful for Molly's interference, as the captain called it at the time, in her life, but as I looked at her face when Molly told us about her pregnancy, I realised that Bashira has fallen between two worlds. At present as a modest Muslim girl, she has had no interaction with young men who might be potential husbands, she has no family to arrange any such meetings and I have no contacts with suitable young men. Yes, the arranged marriage her father was forcing her into when she was just eleven was completely wrong, but I cannot see how she is going to have a normal life with a husband and children of her own. I can see from her demeanour that she is extremely nervous around Charles because she is just not used to men.

I will make arrangements to be independent of Molly and Charles as quickly as I am able, I want to make a move to London to secure accommodation and start looking at getting exceptional leave to remain at the same time as getting work to support myself. I know that I am welcome here, they have made that very plain, but they have three small children, two of them very small indeed and Charles' teenage son from his first marriage and a puppy, as well as Bashira, Molly is insisting that she stays for the present, and Molly is pregnant, not to mention having a large house to look after without any help, so I feel that she has enough on her plate at the moment without me.

Molly

Feeling like shit when you have people staying is the bloody pits, I wanted everything to be perfect when Bashira, and Quaseem of course, were getting to be part of our family. I owe her that much, but instead of things being perfect I feel like I'm gonna puke my guts up any second, especially when Charlie keeps waving that sodding coffee about. It's not like he doesn't know that I can't be anywhere near the smell of coffee when I'm up the spout and on top of that he's really asking for a slap this morning, walking around with a huge smirk on his gob as though he's done some something bleeding clever when he knows that I'm not exactly over the moon about it. It's not that I don't want it exactly, in a way it's actually all down to me, or me getting rat-arsed at his party and thinking it was a good idea, it's just that the timing is crap and I can't help being worried that the same thing will happen to this one that happened last time.

In a lot of ways it reminds me of when I got pregnant with Chloe, I kind of knew what was going on, but I kept trying to kid myself that it wasn't true, that I wasn't pregnant, it was only when I started chucking up that I couldn't pretend any more, and this has been the same. In the end I had to tell Bashira because otherwise she was bound to wonder what the fuck was wrong with me and her and Quaseem were all smiles and congratulations, so I had to pretend I was as over the moon about it as Charlie is.

.

On top of everything else, it's pissing down this morning so the kids are cooped up and are running wild round the house and bickering and getting up to all sorts and I ain't got the energy to sort them out. They're still excited about having people stopping which means Millie is showing off and being a right little mare, winding Marcus up so that he slapped her and I had to tick him off which made him grizzle so that he keeps wanting to cling to me and climb up on me which is all I bloody need. Then Sam started winding Millie up and she had a tantrum, so if Charlie could just stop being so fucking pleased with himself for five minutes, he could maybe see what's going on and sort it. I don't wanna have to ask.

Charles

Molly's really not best pleased with me and I'm not sure what's the best way to be at the moment. If I behaved as if I was as unsure about this baby as she is, she would, probably quite rightly, be bloody upset with me, she'd be accusing me of not wanting it, but because I'm showing that I'm pleased, she's annoyed, and is accusing me of being pleased with myself, which is not true, well not completely true anyway. I know she feels shitty and that the kids got to her this morning, Millie was being a bloody nightmare, but she's also swept up in some need to make it up to Bashira for her crap life, as though any of it is her fault for fuck's sake. Molly is not responsible for Bashira's arsehole of a father, or her brother, or for her mother who took a hike when the opportunity came along. I keep telling her but she doesn't listen.

I agree with her that the timing of all of this could hardly be worse, but only because I think she should be taking things a bit easy and looking after herself, if this morning was anything to go by this applies especially for the next couple of months, she looked decidedly ropey, but I know that no matter what I say she is going to run herself ragged trying to create the so-called perfect home for Bashira.

Quaseem will not be staying with us for very long. We went to Stonehenge in the rain this afternoon, so that Bashira and Quaseem could see the ancient site and the kids could run off some of their energy. I made Sam come with us to pay him back for being a real smart-arse this morning and winding Millie up so that she threw a tantrum, which didn't help Molly at all. He really should know better at his age. Having a completely empty house for a couple of hours will hopefully mean that she can have a bit of a rest, but knowing her she'll probably hoover the sodding floors or something, sometimes she can be bloody obstinate. Quaseem tells me that he is intending to start proceedings as soon as he can to get the full legal right to stay here and see about sorting out his life, but Bashira will be staying with us for the foreseeable future. I know I don't know her very well, well neither of us do in reality, but I can see my wife trying to turn her into one of our kids, making her our responsibility and in a lot of ways that worries me.

Now that Molly has told Bashira and Quaseem, I'm going to have to tell Sam that we're going to have another baby. I was hoping to put it off for a while, only because I'm a bit of a coward when it comes to tricky conversations, but it'd be far worse if he found out by accident the way Molly found out about him and Rebecca, trouble is I don't know how to bring the subject up or what to say. One thing I must do is remember to make him promise not to tell the others, Molly will want to do that when she thinks the time's right and I know she'll think that it's too early right now, in case everything goes to shit again. Anyway Sam is almost bound to see this baby as an embarrassment and I don't think his version will be the way we'd like them to think about their little brother or sister, his version of how Molly got her Military Cross still sticks in my head.

Molly and Charles.

"I'm sorry, I know I was being a right old Ronald Rich"

"A what?"

"A bitch"

"No you weren't, alright, yes you were but I forgive you, come and give me a kiss"

Molly was in the kitchen when the others got back, and Charles was completely right, she'd tidied up, taken Patch for a short walk and was peeling potatoes for the children's tea.

"Did you have a rest? No of course you didn't, you muppet"

"Well, there was a lot to do and I thought it was easier to get it done when you was all out of the way, sorry"

"Go and sit down and talk to Bashira, I'll sort the kids and we'll have a Chinese or maybe try that Thai place"

"I do love you"

"I should bloody think so"

"Have you told Sam yet?"

"Can't you do it?"

"Nope"

Charles stood behind her and put his arms round her waist, and started nibbling her ear then lifted her heavy hair free from the back of her neck and started kissing along her hair line.

"Oi stop it"

"Why?"

"That's what got us in this mess in the first place"

"Molly, it's not a mess" He turned her round to kiss her gently and put his hand on her flat stomach "It's a little Marcus or Chloe….."

"Or a Millie""

"Nah, she's a one-off and it wasn't my, what do you call it, my charm and magnetism or me kissing your neck that got him ….. or her" He laughed "You attacked me ….., twice"

"I'm still not telling Sam"

Charles

He eventually told Sam when the teenager had gone to bed in the room he was sharing with Marcus, which meant that their conversation had to be held in whispers. Sam had known, in theory at least, that his father and Molly had sex, even though he much preferred not to think about the fact that his father, who as far as he was concerned was middle aged, still experienced the pleasurable sensations that he enjoyed when he thought about girls or paid the levy to look at certain black-market magazines that circulated at school. It had taken a few seconds to react to the toe-curling embarrassment of knowing that he was going to be forced to face the consequences of his father's carelessness every day. Sam assumed that it had to have been an accident, it was unthinkable that he could have wanted another child at his age and even though Molly was much younger she already had three children so she couldn't possibly have wanted another noisy little pain in the bum like Millie.

It wasn't that Sam didn't enjoy being part of a large extended family; he did, although at times he looked back with some regret at his former solitary status where everything had revolved around him, but up till now it had never been enough to make him even contemplate moving in with Penny and Bill in Bath. He loved his grandparents, well most of the time anyway, but Penny still treated him as though he was eight and would never in a million years allow him to be a teenager and have the freedoms that Molly allowed him. His dad then further pissed him off by going on to warn him of the perils of telling the others, even Chloe, which suggested that his dad thought he was a blabbermouth kid who couldn't keep his mouth shut. He wondered for the first time whether he would be allowed to go and live with his mum in Dubai, and what it would be like if he did.

OGOGOG

Authors notes: Welcome back to my parallel universe; aka The Barn near Amesbury, I hope you enjoyed it.

In Chapter two, Bashira gets settled in at Uni, Sam starts making waves and Charles considers where his future career should lie.