What Would I Do?

I was looking for something this morning and I got lost in the archives. I have so many old files. A lot of them are called things like ‘Thoughts’. Or, ‘Ideas’. Or, ‘Book Ideas’. Or, ‘New Novel’. I open some of them and find seven lines. I opened one just now and it had seventy thousand words in it. I have no memory of writing those words. They are from ten years ago. I think I was trying to make a book.

They won’t make a book now, those words. It’s all too long ago. But I stared at them and thought, well, perhaps there are seventy Substack essays. (Not quite, but you never know.)

I’m going to give you one passage, because I wanted to write a postcard today and I wasn’t quite sure I had a story to tell you and then I found this and I thought it was sort of perfect.

From 2014:

I went to the charity where I volunteer. There was a mixed group there on this day, some of whom had their injuries on obvious show – prosthetic limbs, glass eyes – and some of whom bear their scars on the inside.

A gentleman whom I have known for almost two years had come back to visit. He had been blown up in Afghan, but showed not a trace of it. Amazingly, his body was not wounded, at least not externally. The blast went upward, lifting a military transport in front of him straight into the air so that it acted as a shield, absorbing the fatal explosion, stopping him from being directly hit with shrapnel or hot metal.

At first, he thought he was perfectly all right. It was only when he found he could not concentrate in a briefing soon after that he realised something was wrong, and was bundled off to the medical services. The blast had caught him, indirectly. He had internal injuries, mostly to his brain. His semi-circular canals were screwed, so that for a long time afterwards he would suddenly topple over. There were also nuanced psychological side-effects, which showed themselves bit by bit, often when he was least expecting them.

Back in the days when we worked together, he would not speak much of this incident. He could mention being blown up in general, vague terms, but he never gave any details.

On that April day, in the wild yellow sun, he suddenly told me his story.

‘It was there,’ he said, pointing to my feet. ‘The bomb was there, where you are standing now.’

We paused for a moment, to take in that momentous fact. We were standing about three feet apart.

Sometimes, when I hear the most visceral of these veterans’ stories, the impact is so great that I can feel something in my body moving, a physical shift, as if the very atoms of my corporeal self are reconfiguring themselves. I felt that sensation then, in the bright Scottish day.

We smiled at each other, our minds in sympathy. I am good now at listening to horrifying things. I learnt that, from spending time with these men and women. I do not exclaim or move my eyebrows up and down, or put on an expression of extravagant pity. I let the information come into me, and open myself to it, and accept it. If they can tell their stories, I can hear them. There is no need for dumb show.

I left, and drove to the west, to a village along the valley, where I wanted to do some errands. The car was warm in the sun, and, outside, the ancient glacial valley unfolded itself, and the silver birches stood sentinel, and the high mountains still had snow on their blue peaks. It was so clean and glittering that it looked like the Tyrol, or some foreign place.

I let the extraordinary story I had just heard settle in me.

Then I did some very ordinary things. I ran my errands. I bumped into a nice woman I know slightly. I grew hungry, and bought a sausage in a bap from a smiling girl in a small cafe. I was not thinking any big existential thoughts; I was just living my day.

As I drove home, marvelling again at the view, thinking of that remarkable blown-up man, another man who also knew about facing death came on the radio. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and had not very long left to him. The interviewer asked him some intelligent questions. Do you live each day as if it were your last? What do you do with the really annoying things, like taxes and laundry? Do those small, necessary irritants drive you mad?

The dying man spoke thoughtfully back. He said he had to find a balance. It was no good, he said, living at full throttle in the face of death. There did have to be normality too, even when it was annoying. He said he had wondered, when he sat down to do his taxes, whether ‘this was the best use of my time.’ He said that last in a most dry, British voice. You have to find the balance, he said.

A woman then called in. Her cancer had migrated from her ovaries to her lungs, and she had been given a year. ‘I still have my hair done,’ she said. ‘I still do my nails.’

The sun was shining very brightly now.

I thought of those remarkable words, from those remarkable people. The atoms in my body shifted again.

I thought: if I had a year, what would I do?