The Trojan boy Page 5

  As the moon dipped behind the window-frame Avedissian felt sleep creep up on him. The stars twinkled in the clear night sky over the dark shapes of the Welsh mountains and all was peaceful, save for the alarm that had just gone off.

  'Boy Scouts!' muttered Avedissian as he got into his clothes in the darkness. The advantage of not having been asleep when the alarm had sounded and the fact that there was still some moonlight in the room made the exercise a smooth one. He clattered downstairs and joined the throng of people assembling in the hall. Jarvis was already there. He acknowledged Avedissian with a nod.

  Several of the course members were standing stiffly to attention, eyes staring straight ahead as if fixed on some invisible Star of Bethlehem. Avedissian adopted a more leisurely stance and Jarvis hid a smile.

  'Good morning,’ said the captain and checked his watch as the last of the stragglers came through the door, including one of the girls carrying her right boot. 'I couldn't get the knot out,’ she said sheepishly. It got a laugh.

  'You'll find sweaters and anoraks by the door,’ said the captain. 'We're going for a walk.’

  At first the walk was brisk but not unpleasant. Avedissian found himself enjoying it and was pleased to note that his circulation had improved to match the cold night air. Another two miles and the Captain said, 'Right, we'll run for a bit.'

  Pleasure gave way to pain as Avedissian's lungs demanded more and more air and the fact that Jarvis beside him appeared to be breathing quite normally did not give him a psychological boost.

  'Keep up!' yelled the sergeant as the party started to string out with Avedissian competing successfully for last place. The shouts of the NCOs and Jarvis egging him on spurred Avedissian to greater effort and he increased his pace to gain a little on the pack. He was almost back in touch when they were ordered to return to walking pace. Jarvis asked Avedissian how he was feeling but Avedissian was unable to reply. Oxygen was too precious to waste on mere words.

  The outward leg of the 'walk' ended with a climb. The party followed a mountain track to reach the summit of a Brecon peak of sixteen hundred feet. By the time he reached the top Avedissian was feeling ill. He detached himself from the group and fell down on his hands and knees behind a rock to be sick. He stayed on his hands and knees till his stomach was empty and his breathing had returned to normal.

  The sun came up. Avedissian had always found the dawn an intensely personal experience and, like most people, had not watched the sun come up that often in his life, so that he could recall clearly the occasions in his past when he had. He was glad that no one spoke for there was no need for anyone to say how beautiful it was. He stood alone on an outcrop of rock and let the red light bathe him in mellow sadness.

  It was six-thirty when they got back to Llangern House to a hot shower and then breakfast. This was followed by a morning of lectures on navigation and map reading. Avedissian could not help but wonder about his fellow students. They all seemed to be familiar with the basics but varied a great deal in ability above that level. Were they civilians? Service personnel? What was more important, were they all there for the same reason? The fact that the members of the course split up in the afternoon to do different things seemed to suggest that they were not.

  Avedissian and Jarvis were part of an eight-strong contingent, all male, who spent the afternoon in the gymnasium. There they were hounded by two NCOs in something called circuit training, in which they were required to complete a series of exercises in succession and then start all over again. After three circuits Avedissian had to void his lunch. His attempt to linger too long in the lavatory was headed off by one of the NCOs who had seen it all before. Avedissian was permitted to rest… after two more circuits.

  The official day finished at seven and Avedissian was in bed by eight. He had not felt so tired since his basic training with the Parachute Regiment. Come to think of it, that had been in Wales too, he recalled.

  A new day began at five a.m. and followed much the same pattern as the one before. Early morning exercise was followed by breakfast and lectures. Lunch was followed by afternoon exercise. This time the afternoon exercise for Avedissian and four others, including Jarvis, was in unarmed combat. Jarvis did not need it, as the instructors quickly recognised, but Avedissian did. He spent so much time in the air that he considered joining the Air Force. At least they would teach him to land properly.

  'A bit rusty are we, Mr Avedissian?' inquired one of the NCOs, sending Avedissian into yet another ungainly heap. 'Never had much time for the Paras myself.'

  Tumble crash.

  'Bit overrated I always thought

  Tumble crash.

  'Crowd of nancy boys, some people reckon…'

  Tumble crash.

  Avedissian was growing tired of his love affair with the mat and the NCO was beginning to get on his nerves. He was just too confident and arrogant, although with good reason he had to admit, but perhaps it could be used against him? He staggered to his feet and pretended to be more disorientated than he really was as the man came into him yet again. At the last moment he side-stepped and brought his foot up into the NCO's solar plexus. The man went down and Avedissian was on him, forearm in his throat, fist raised above his face.

  That's more like it, sir,' said the man with a smile. 'Coming back, is it?'

  Jarvis applauded and said, 'About time too. I thought you were auditioning for a part as a bowling ball.'

  On Thursday it was announced that the course would be guaranteed an uninterrupted night's sleep before moving on to 'phase two' of their training. On the strength of that promise Avedissian stayed up past his eight o'clock bedtime and joined Jarvis downstairs in the reading room.

  Jarvis put down his book and asked how Avedissian was feeling after five days. Avedissian had to admit that, after the hell of the first two days, things had been improving and he was forced to concede that he felt a lot better than he had done for a long time. 'But you must be bored?' he said.

  'Not at all,' replied Jarvis. 'The run-up to an operation is never boring. What is it they say about anticipation being more exciting than realisation?'

  ‘Then you've been on a mission before?'

  'One.'

  'Can you tell me?'

  'No.'

  'Silly question,' conceded Avedissian and Jarvis smiled. 'What can you tell me?' Avedissian asked.

  'Just about everything else, I should think. My mother and father split up when I was fourteen and I went to live with an aunt in Cumbria where I suppose I had a pretty uneventful adolescence. I don't think my aunt was ever that fond of me, or I of her if the truth be told, but she did look after me through my school years, and for that I am grateful. Money was tight when I left school so I applied for, and got, a University place under military sponsorship. The Royal Marines paid me a salary while I was a student on condition that I served with them after graduation. It suited both of us.'

  'Your aunt must be proud of you.'

  'She's dead.'

  'Parents?'

  ‘They're dead too.'

  'Wife?' tried Avedissian.

  'I'm engaged to a girl I met at university. Annie, she's a biologist, doing a PhD at Edinburgh.'

  'You can't see much of each other?'

  'It hasn't been too bad. I'm normally stationed at HMS Condor in Arbroath. It's not that far from Edinburgh.'

  'Except when you're on holiday in Wales.'

  'Quite,' replied Jarvis with a smile.

  The major gave a brief introductory talk to the second phase of the course in the library on Friday morning. The key word that kept cropping up, to Avedissian's dismay, was 'survival'. They would be trained to exact a living from the most unforgiving of terrains, he said. Not that many of them would be likely to need such skills, but it was felt by their sponsors that such training would do them good in an all-round sense.

  'Does that mean that we are all here for different reasons?' asked Avedissian.

  'Why do you ask?'

  '
Because personally I have no idea what I will be doing when I leave here. Is that the same for everyone?'

  The major said, 'It is certainly true that the members of the staff here, myself included, have no notion why any of you are here. If there is any course member who would like to say anything?…' The major looked round the room.

  One man said, 'I know why I'm here. I've been appointed assistant and general minder to Admiral Sir John Sharpe at NATO Headquarters in Brussels. There's no great secret about it.'

  Another, one of the women, said, 'I'm an army nurse. I hope to go on the combined services expedition to Borneo.'

  Two RAF instructors admitted to being there on a refresher course.

  'I think that answers your question,' said the major.

  It did, but it didn’t help.

  Avedissian was convinced that the Welsh mountains had taken a dislike to him, or so it seemed in moments of damp paranoia when he thought that it might never stop raining again. People who lived in houses and ate real food had quickly become a distant sub-species who never in their wildest dreams considered the kind of existence that he and the others were experiencing. A life where hunger and discomfort were the norm, clothes were never properly dry, and feet were never warm. The sole object of each day was to get through it.

  Avedissian frequently lost track of time as they roamed the peaks and valleys of the Brecons, like aimless sheep scratching a meagre living from the hillside. Relationships within the group were appraised in terms of new qualities, ability to light fires quickly, success in wood gathering, prowess in rabbit snaring. Avedissian had the personal advantage of having Jarvis at his elbow and took full advantage of this to learn quickly. He had grown to like the Cumbrian for Jarvis always understated his ability and that was the mark of a true professional.

  As Avedissian lay in his dug-out trench with its bracken roof canopy he was enjoying the fact that it had actually stopped raining. The ground still smelled wet but the sky was clear and he could see the stars in an unclouded heaven. His cheek noted that the wind had dropped to a gentle breeze. He took off his boots and rubbed his feet. Sheer luxury… and tonight it wasn't even that cold.

  It was a night for contemplation, a night for astronomers to work and philosophers to consider. Avedissian was neither but he did consider the course of his life and where it had led him, for one thing the time at Llangern had done was to relax him mentally. He felt able to see things more clearly.

  In society's eyes he had failed at two professions and it seemed unlikely that he would be given a chance at a third. His army career had ended in an Irish farmyard when some snot-nosed kid had made himself more important to him than the ambush that he and his platoon had been planning for weeks. Avedissian knew that he should have died that day, but the Irishman had let him live and in the space of a few short seconds had changed his whole way of thinking. He had subsequently resigned his commission and gone to medical school.

  Avedissian had enjoyed medical school. The fact that he had been three years older than most of his fellow students had been a help rather than a hindrance in that, with more experience of life, he had been better able to avoid the traditional distractions that face students on their first time away from home. He had worked hard and done well.

  His hard work and dedication to the profession he loved had rewarded him with a consultancy at an early age, and with his marriage to Linda contentment had appeared to have been within his grasp. But then came the day when Michael Fielding had been admitted to St Jude's. It had not been a difficult case to diagnose for the brain tumour had been very clear and the fact that it had been sited in an inoperable position had also been beyond doubt. A sad but straightforward case. Avedissian remembered how he had taken the parents into a ward side-room to tell them.

  Michael had been their only son and their obvious distress had made it all the more difficult. Somewhere outside a contractor's steam hammer had been busy on the foundations of a new wing for the hospital and on that morning it had seemed like an obscenity. The callous indifference of its thump had punctuated what Avedissian had had to say in all the wrong places.

  'He is going to die isn't he?' the woman had asked with brim-full eyes.

  'Yes, I'm afraid so.'

  'How long?' Her voice had dropped to a whisper as if she were afraid of the words.

  ‘Two months at most.'

  'Will he suffer much pain?'

  Avedissian had been unprepared for the question and he had dithered long enough for the woman to see the true answer to her question. He had tried to assure the parents that pain-killing medication would be given.

  'But will it work?' the woman had asked.

  In his heart Avedissian had known that, from the type and position of the tumour, standard pain medication would not have been much use but he had been reluctant to say so to the couple. Once again the woman had read the truth in his eyes and had said, 'I really don't want my son to suffer.'

  Avedissian had remained silent.

  The woman had taken her husband's hand in her lap and said with plain meaning, 'Anything you can do…would be appreciated.'

  Michael Fielding had died peacefully in his sleep two days later. His parents were at his bedside at the end and Avedissian had been on hand to comfort them. It seemed to all present that God's will had been done, but Sister Veronica Ashwood had disagreed. In her book, and her book was the Bible, God's will had certainly not been done. Murder had been done and she had noticed the dose that Avedissian had administered.

  The trial had been a strange affair of medical fact and religious cant. Never had Avedissian been more convinced of Marshall McLuhan's assertion that moral indignation was a strategy for endowing the idiot with dignity. Any questioning of the rightness of letting a child suffer prolonged agony before certain death had been countered by a barrage of mysteries and miracles and the ways of the Lord being strange. The outcome had been inevitable but Avedissian had known that all along. The Lilliputians won the day and, having smitten Avedissian the Arrogant, they had gone on to set about the child's parents.

  Two people who had loved their child so much that they had been unable to see him suffer unnecessary agony had been pilloried in the newspapers. Teams of ferrets on expense accounts had been let loose to dig up tales of miraculous recoveries after medical opinion had pronounced matters hopeless. They had been mainly instances of remission from carcinoma, a well-known feature of certain cancers, but this had not been mentioned. Did these callous parents now regret their action? was what the Daily Rag had wanted to know. Perhaps they had been led astray by an evil doctor?

  To their eternal credit the couple had not gone for the easy way out. They had refused to blame Avedissian and had maintained a dignified silence throughout. They had been put through hell, but what had that mattered when compared to the Daily Rag's circulation figures and the right of the Rag's reader to feel superior over sandwiches in his tea-break?

  A calm night gave way to a misty summer morning, with the air so still that Avedissian was conscious of the sound of his own breathing as he prepared to move off with the group. The sun rose to burn off the mist by eleven o'clock and baked the barren Welsh landscape as they made their way up the unshaded side of a valley to pause for breath at the top.

  As they lay in the rough bracken Avedissian became aware of a distant beating sound. He recognised it as the sound of a helicopter's rotor-blade and searched the sky with his hand to his forehead against the glare. He spotted the yellow rescue craft down at the other end of the valley and watched it traverse from side to side in a search pattern.

  'Lost climbers?' suggested someone.

  ‘They would have to be really lost to end up in this valley,’ observed Jarvis.

  Avedissian took his point for there was no reason for climbers to be anywhere near this spot. There was nothing worth climbing in the area. It was just an endless, rolling wasteland.

  As they all watched it the helicopter released three flares, two gre
en and a red. The captain got to his feet and said, They're looking for us.' He said something to the sergeant who responded by rummaging in his pack and bringing out a Verey pistol. A single red flare was loosed into the sky and the helicopter stopped its meandering, leaned heavily over to starboard and came towards them.

  It descended to twenty feet above them but did not land for fear of ditches and boulders. Instead a crewman was lowered on a line and the captain approached him in a crouching run. A brief conversation was conducted through cupped hands and ended with the captain coming towards Avedissian. They want you back at Llangern,' he said.

  Avedissian pointed to Jarvis and asked above the noise, 'Him too?'

  'Just you,’ replied the captain.

  There was very little time for goodbyes. Avedissian shook hands with Paul Jarvis and Jarvis said that he was sure that they would be meeting again soon. The whirring blades insisted that Avedissian run towards the crewman and accept the sling that was offered to him. The crewman checked that it was properly positioned then signalled to the winchman above them.

  Avedissian and the crewman revolved slowly like a dance-hall globe as they left the ground. Avedissian tried to look down but his clothing had bunched up, obscuring his view, and it was not until he was inside the winch bay that he could turn round and look back to the ground. He raised his arm in farewell and saw the gesture returned from the ground as they gained height and altered course.

  As the helicopter skimmed over the hills and valleys Avedissian warmed to the idea that his time in the wilderness was apparently over. Thoughts of a hot bath and a good meal took precedence over why he was wanted back at Llangern. He relaxed and watched the countryside roll past the open bay then, as he put his hand to his face, he felt the rough beard that he had acquired and smiled as a distant voice from his past said, ‘Disgusting.’