A Stolen Season Read online

  About A Stolen Season

  Adam’s life has been ruined by war . . .

  A veteran of the Iraq conflict who has suffered such extensive bodily trauma that he can only really survive by means of mechanical skeleton.

  Marianna’s has been ruined by men . . .

  A woman who has had to flee the country after her husband lied to the wrong people.

  John Philip’s by too much money . . .

  Until he receives a surprise inheritance in the evening of his own life.

  Rodney Hall, two-times winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, presents the story of three people experiencing a period of life they never thought possible, and, perhaps, should never have been granted at all . . .

  PRAISE FOR RODNEY HALL

  ‘Reminiscent of both Joyce and García Márquez.’

  Washington Post

  ‘Magnificent. So good that you wish you had written it yourself.’

  Salman Rushdie

  ‘A wondrous blend of the fabulous and the surreal.’

  The Australian

  ‘Brilliant’

  David Mitchell

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About A Stolen Season

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1: Adam & Bridget

  Chapter 2: Marianna

  Chapter 3: Adam & Bridget

  Chapter 4: John Philip

  Chapter 5: Adam & Bridget

  Chapter 6: Marianna

  Chapter 7: Adam & Bridget

  Notes & Acknowledgements

  About Rodney Hall

  Also by Rodney Hall

  Copyright page

  To the memory of my mentors

  John Manifold and Robert Graves

  two great and admirable men

  both of whom would probably have disapproved

  of this book.

  Once we are bound to our brothers by a common goal that is outside us, then we can breathe. Experience teaches us that to love is not to gaze at one another but to gaze together in the same direction.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars

  1

  ADAM & BRIDGET

  A mudbrick tower stands in ancient Samarra, a city known to Alexander the Great. Wrapped around this tower a staircase hugs the wall—concealed behind its own separate mud shell—spiralling up from the courtyard to the sky. Such is the closeness of heaven for those with permission to go there. Right nearby, in the middle of the American military compound, a surprise explosion leaves two men dead and one, an Australian, critically injured.

  The Mesopotamian dust settles, a flat street rising through it, as the city collects wits enough to struggle from moment to brutal moment of a war of occupation. The wounded man, Adam Griffiths, clings to life. His instinct is tenacious. Having left death too late, he cannot let go even when he decides to. He wakes in a hospital tent to find there’s a lone desperate army surgeon already at work on his body. He’d like the poor fellow to worry less. And being young, buoyed by good humour and helpfully ignorant of how dreadful his burns are, he survives the treatment.

  ‘Nineteen,’ he croaks in reply to the doctor’s question. ‘Nineteen not. Ar. Out.’

  Next of kin?

  Ever the joker, he rolls his eyes heroically and gasps, ‘Married.’

  Without warning the canvas hospital unfolds, its dark wing peels back on livid sunlight and dissolves around him, whisked away, complete with operating tables, blood-stained bandages and embedded cries of pain. The last overworked attendant on death is sucked into the black hole of a heartbeat.

  Good luck.

  Here we go again. He’s flat on his back in another surgical ward, this one comfortable as concrete and equipped with glittering steel weapons. It doesn’t get more scientifically up-to-date than here. Further investigations would appear to be underway. A team assembles. Artists with steady eyes are probing newly budded growths more or less the shape of elbow and knee while tweaking re-routed nerves. Their cowled silhouettes hunch in a cone of light. Dazzled necromancers, they dare to model what remains of his face in the likeness of guesswork based on photographs provided by the battalion—stitch by threaded stitch. Delayed by two comas the whole job seems to be taking a lifetime. And, sure enough, here they come again, indomitably hopeful. Men with needles and blades.

  ‘Did. We get,’ he coughs up three separate syllables before attempting four more. ‘What we came for?’

  ‘You betcha.’

  After more experimenting and another skin graft—the latest stage in a comeback that seems to be happening to somebody else—he battles through . . . with the help of some top-quality bottled blood. A witness to his own drama, inert in the embrace of drugs, he overhears the knife-wielders exchange encouragements. This time their confidence seems justified. His resurrection assumes enough momentum to rumble into motion, wonky as a juggernaut. Is he the passenger or the vehicle? This is not clear. Way beyond his control the bumpy ride betrays poor planning, wooden wheels and lots of wear. At least he knows the wagging heads belong to rostered staff who peer down from swaying galleries. From windows and portals they stare, masquerading as doubtful stretcher-bearers, rooky nurses, obsessive specialists, psychiatrists, rooky nurses and yet more doubtful stretcher-bearers. Not to disappoint them he concentrates on holding the bits and pieces together.

  At best it feels like he’s only camped out in his injuries anyway.

  Next thing, the world flips inside out. He is the helpless witness to this event. His spirit hovers free. He fully feels he has been skinned alive and tacked back together. Pain on such a scale will take decades to settle. When they are ready to put him on view (he hears the news, yet doesn’t hear) the army’s entrepreneurs are called in to make the event an event. He is to be a paragon and an example. What luck. A military celebrity in a civilian age. One of a kind. An endangered species.

  They load him aboard a commercial aircraft and fly him halfway round the world for ceremonial release into the wild. Ogling reporters descend, eager to secure his ordeal as public property. The only way out is up. Declared fit for discharge he finds himself winched like some treasured relic to take his place in a museum of the grotesque. Spectators lean so close a man can’t breathe in the enveloping depth of their amazement. Crowded out by the humorous intimacy of noses—pitted with pixelated pores and thrust his way—he would laugh if he could. But instead of lungs he has these red hot pincers. He’ll have to put off seeing the bright side till later.

  With an authorized discharge clipped to his pocket he crouches inside a borrowed rib cage of the wrong size, where he fights against the nightmare sensation of having swallowed himself. Most functioning parts seem to survive (at least for now) within his sack of skin. And on this basis the persuaders come to the decision that he has a future. He agrees. But he isn’t prepared to live up to the status of war hero.

  ‘No,’ he struggles to set the record straight, ‘I’m just a guy. Who got wounded.’

  Even so, and this only dawns slowly, the best thing is that he is not quite alone. He has a wife.

  Adam’s first glimpse of Bridget coincides with her first sight of him. The door to the airbridge opens just long enough for a shock of recognition on both sides. His wheelchair glides through an arc of light bent to the curve of slab-glass walls, but he has already seen her face contorted with horror as she hides her feelings against her shoulder. Meanwhile the pilot and first officer insist on thanking him for flying with them. Courtesies must be observed and they shake hands with his remaining fingers. This gives Bridget just enough time to collect h
er courage so, when the chair spins his vision in reverse through the same dazzling reflections, she composes herself and steps his way.

  Here she is. And here he is.

  Startled by her loose unbloodmatted hair, her equal teeth, intact acrylic nails, her blemish-free cleavage and her not-screaming mouth, he can see she has lived a life disconnected from his. Or perhaps—and he feels a sudden sadness for her—not lived at all. Knowing this is his fault. He remembers tasting the tartness of her skin after tennis and burying his nose in the damp patches under breasts still fragrant from the shower.

  Seeing him so mutilated she hesitates, suppressing her urge to shrink before she kisses him. But why was she never told? Who kept it from her? Who has been standing in the way all this time? Has she been manipulated? Even if he couldn’t be moved she should surely have been notified? Or at least sent a photograph? His scaly forehead crackles against her lips. Too late to be stopped, she whispers a welcome.

  These tender horror-struck words of comfort yank him out of his optimism, slam up against the monstrosity he has become. As if he had never thought of it. As if he didn’t know already. He ought to be grateful for that kiss, but his chest is too swollen and his dressings too tight. Old habits die hard. He comes to the rescue: choking on an attempt to make light of her shock, ‘I got. Caught out. Ar.’ The past clogs his throat. ‘In a.’ Desperate cries echo in the vault of his skull. ‘In a trap.’

  What was it that hit him . . . back there in Iraq? No matter how often he tells himself he knows, he doesn’t. A missile? Fired by whom? And how . . . in the secure zone? Instead of answers his perverse memory presents him with an ancient mudbrick tower, complete with sheathed stairway (starkly fixed in mind, for no apparent reason other than that it still stands). He struggles against breaking down. The airport arrivals lounge is full of people too busy to notice. Passengers with wheelie bags have places to go and no time to stop and stare.

  A waiting ambulance whisks him off. The medical orderlies in attendance rock to the motion of the vehicle. As a way of not staring at him they are all eyes for Bridget. Yes, it’s Bridget in the flesh. And she crouches at his side struggling to discount the gulf between this and how she expected him to be. After a succession of giddy zoomings the vehicle is lifted by a long hill. Familiar streets unfold—he glimpses them through the corner of one window—resolving the maze. Earth stops. He musters the courage to smile.

  Paramedics hoist him into the open. With irresistible strength they deliver him home, tearing the last stretched membrane of the anaesthetic in the process. He can see his house for himself: a house unbearably the same as the day he left—one of four terraces squashed together on a little stony outcrop above the neat suburb—even to the steps leading up through an improvised rockery to a quaint little verandah tacked on to the tiled porch. Steps which will now present an insurmountable barrier. He assesses the problem.

  Oh, he has legs, a miserable apology for what they used to be. The stretcher-bearers, professionals trained in carrying techniques, treat this as a mere hiccup. Skyward he floats to be smoothly set down indoors. He croaks cheerfully, ‘How’s this for style. Ar. Bridget? They upgraded me to. First.’

  To his surprise the little living room is full of strangers. His arrival has been turned into a managed event. The official greeting is drowned by applause. He cranks up the energy to smile. Nice people meaning well. But exhaustion insists. He sinks. He’s deep among memories that clarify themselves as a seething maggot-heap of bewilderment.

  The event is over by the time he comes to. The crowds have left. Skilled helpers once again handle the breakable egg of his fragility. Glad to have been delivered safely, he fights off the image of himself as mutilated goods to be handled with sterile gloves. He does his bit. He balances the bone dome of his head, which he keeps steady in defiance of the escape plans thundering around inside. What choice is there but to grin and bear it?

  ‘I took a. Bit of a. Beating,’ he apologizes.

  Now emptied of people the room, as he can see, has been made ready for an invalid. Still, it’s more or less familiar. Safely set down among pillows, the vertigo begins to unwind . . . and with gratitude he lets go . . . yes, mercifully he’s on a bed that was never here before, his carcase rolling back to the desert just in time for the sound-barrier to go off like a cosmic whipcrack, jet fighters streaking low over a line of bare sandy hills. Tanks rise up from hidden gulches shedding cascades of dust, hurtling shells explode against precious blue-tiled domes and the shock wave of a man-made earthquake shudders underfoot.

  All quiet among the reorganized banalities.

  Adam blinks to restore his eyes. Thoughts emerging through the fog of painkillers cohere too late to be any use. The joke is that he was up against a full-scale war and came through okay. This room is still here and still mine. Even to a bed with side levers, thanks to whoever paid for it. The paramedics, back on duty, are muttering confidentially because it’s Bridget they must talk to.

  Worst case scenario, I can let go and die.

  Some top-of-the-line equipment has been supplied to help with mobility. Already the technician wastes no time. He demonstrates how this is assembled. His manner of squatting on sprung thighs shows pride in his work. What emerges from the flat-pack is a freestanding carbon-fibre exo-skeleton, ‘Known as a CSAAD, Custom Support and Articulation Assistance Device—nothing but the latest and best in experimental bionics.’ Ambulance paramedics hang round in their glow-striped uniforms to listen in while Bridget is briefed. The tech invites her to see the bright side, ‘He’ll be helping science by trying it out.’

  No kidding! Adam rises to the occasion. He thinks he says: Why else would I get myself all shot up? (Though maybe not.) Or he could accept the fact as fact. Also that other men died. They died and got flung on the dungheap where a pulsing blanket of flies covered them. The well-known hymn of hunger. Yet here I am with enough working parts left to stay alive. Meanwhile this technician obviously has the entire instruction catalogue by heart. Some dude. Such a casual fanatic. But he’s never going to be satisfied without double-checking to be sure his every last word has been understood. Even the paramedics shuffle a bit while the equipment is erected to stand by itself, ready to be inhabited. The jointed limbs are introduced, specifications of the saddle, chest brace and control panel.

  ‘Is his sight okay?’ the technician asks. ‘Does he have enough fingers left to activate the power pack? That’s the main thing. Once he’s strapped in there’s no problem, the frame is virtually self-driven.’ Ever the perfectionist, he gloats, ‘And the electrode we’ve implanted in your husband’s head is already calibrated to the reader.’

  Adam can hear for himself and he tries to check his temples for some sign of the implant, but his fingers won’t reach that far. The arm itself remains inert.

  The technician squats again to correct the setting of an artificial foot. ‘How smart is this guy, ay?’ he crows, as if the equipment can hear and appreciate his praise. ‘You instruct it what to do—just by wanting to do it for yourself.’

  ‘That’s so cool,’ one of the paramedics offers helpfully.

  ‘It’s. Ar. A contraption.’ Adam hears a remote growl that is, at last, his own voice intervening.

  So, the Contraption has a name. He finds himself lifted into it and supported while the straps are clipped, surprised by how firmly it holds him. The tech undoes everything again. ‘Your turn to try buckling up, mate. How do you feel?’

  Adam fumbles and fails. The task requires concentration. First he must locate his fingers. Then guide them. He hunts for words. ‘Give me a. Moment to get. The hang of this shit.’ Being shown once more. He tests a few basic movements. ‘Beauty.’

  ‘Good. Next you operate the power pack.’

  Even a simple switch is not simple. His damaged hands refuse to coordinate. Helpers close in, ready for an emergency. But there it is. Done.

&n
bsp; ‘Good man. You’re going to make it. The army’s picked you out. You’re the first to have one of these. You must have done something special.’

  ‘Ar. No.’

  ‘Well, it’s top-of-the-range for you. Nothing but the best. Motorized wheelchairs is what they usually supply. This thing’s the cream de la cream. It’s a life-changer. And waterproof, too! Safe in the shower. Anyhow, let’s leave it at that for the while. You got the idea: the straps know to seek their own sockets. You switch on and steer with your brain. Initiate any movement—the limbs respond. Simple as that. Pretty much like real walking.’

  ‘Got it. Ar. How do I. Jump?’

  ‘I’ll look up the manual. See you this afternoon when I come back to check on your progress.’

  ‘Hey, but. Didn’t anyone. Need my,’ Adam asks, intending to tap his head but unable to lift his arm, ‘permission for this. Implant thing?’

  ‘I reckon you must have given it, mate.’

  Already there is no way to explain his condition. So he tries beginning with the beginning. He shapes each word, syllable by syllable, forcing the truth out of his ruined mouth. ‘We did things. We should. Ar. Never have done,’ he croaks. And Bridget shows she’s listening. He puts aside his cheerfulness to confront the brutal truth. His conscience busy hatching horrors smuggled home as contraband. He thinks it through. The consequences of obeying orders. He will put forward his plea on the grounds of youth—young men generally squander life—as if there’s some sort of court case going on. But the effort proves too big for the idea.

  What he doesn’t know is that she packed her bags as soon as the army notified her they were sending him home. Prepared for anything. The bags stand ready and unseen in the room upstairs.

  He is asleep.

  How can she help it? Bridget feels imprisoned. She goes over and over the same worn-out protest. Ceaseless questions and self-accusations. All with no answers. She could have got out. And she should have got out. Why did she continue to live alone here in this same house? Why did she never divorce him? He had dumped her, setting off to fight John Howard’s war, which at least left her free to make a move of her own. She never expected to be with him again.