1. The Invalid
Brown, like a leather belt.
Brown, like the top of his army boots, the dingy carpet of the room that Captain John Watson has been assigned to live in here in London. A transitional place for returning soldiers to give them time to adjust before finding occupation and accommodations of their own.
The room is littered with the marks of the dozens of other occupants before him who stared at the same boring walls, lay on the same hard bed. A room designed to be practical more than welcoming. Not the kind of place for a person to stay long. Not a place to spend any sort of time in. But this is where he has spent the majority of his days since his return, preferring to be alone with his thoughts rather than spending his time out there in the place that his therapist calls 'the real world'.
Nothing here feels real. It's all muted, sheltered. It's like returning a five year old to a playpen. Things that once seemed so important are revealed to be simply toys, a doll with a painted on face. That's what the real world seems like to John after life and death in Afghanistan.
Down the hall is a lounge with a television and a ping pong table. There is a notice board where vacancies for flats are posted as well as job listings. A place to socialize, to interact with others. A place to help one get on with one's life. But how can he make a life in this playpen of a world? What good are his skills in this land of shops and cinema? John left his life behind him in Afghanistan. Sitting on the edge of the bed staring down at the brown carpet he wonders if there is anything left of the man that he once was.
He feels a sharp pain in his leg as he rises to his feet. He staggers across the room reaching for his cane. It should be his shoulder that hurts, not his leg. There is nothing wrong with his leg. He's seen the X-rays and there's nothing there, but his leg refuses to believe him. The pain shoots up the nerves making him wince, so he takes a seat at the battered brown desk and pokes at his left shoulder in the place where the bullet hit him, the place where it tore into his flesh leaving him without pain only a vague pressure and a nasty scar. The skin is pinched around the site. He should stretch it. That's what they told him. Exercise it and it will be back to normal.
Normal. What a joke. Nothing about this is normal. Normal is sitting in the base hospital looking at files and yelling over the phone about shipments that were delayed for the third time. Normal is rushing out to do triage on soldiers ambushed on their way back from a remote outpost.
He touches the wound remembering the warmth of his blood rushing down his side. How he had thrust his hand into the pressure point reducing the flow, but was still able to feel the cold overcoming him, knowing that if he passed out and released the pressure that he would most likely bleed to death before anyone could get around to help him. It was a close thing. They pulled the bullet out of him, saving his life at the price of only a few nerves. He had lost some feeling to part of his chest and part of his arm. He felt no pain there, but now his hand shook whenever he tried to pick up a scalpel, and his leg screamed at him when he tried to move forward.
John sat in the chair at the tatty desk and glanced at his computer. In Afghanistan, no amount of begging or requisitioning had been able to get him one. When he returned, he only had to walk into a shop and pass over a good part of his pension check, and it was his. Now, he didn't know what to do with it. He didn't know what to do with anything here.
He had known what to do when he had heard the call that Barrows had been injured by a mine. He had taken the truck out immediately finding him almost dead of blood loss. They had thought it too dangerous to move him far, and John had operated on him there in a trench with a makeshift tent overhead to keep out the dust. It was an impossible operation. The iliac vein was hit and the blood had been incredibly difficult to stop, but he had stitched him up, and saved his leg in an operation that would have had his instructors at Barts cheering. But it had all been wasted.
They had loaded him into the truck and headed back only to blunder into an offensive that kept them holed up for days in the back of an abandoned house as Barrows slowly slipped away. John could imagine how he must have felt, to have been given hope only to lose it again. The pain flared up, and he frowned slapping his leg in the hopes that the pain that they said was only in his head would go away, but it didn't. He was broken. Useless as a soldier. Useless as a doctor. Simply useless.
He pulled the eviction letter out of the desk drawer and read it. Less than a week and he would have to go.
"Well John, better do something about it," he said to the empty room before rising to his feet and trudging out into the busy world of modern London, expecting nothing, but resolved to find something anyhow.
