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around, momentarily embarrassed that I had actually spoken the words aloud. I ran a hand through my hair. I know. Did she think I did not know? Did she continually need to tell me it wasn’t the answer? Did she not understand that if there was an answer, if there was a relief from this crushing fear, this darkness, I would have taken it? Would gladly have taken it, whatever it might have been.
    A sob of desperation welled up inside me. ‘Oh God,’ I murmured. A shower of images scattered across my mind. Scorching, brilliant sparks that settled and burnt the thin membrane of forgetting I had woven to protect myself. A scream. A shout. A body, split like a ripe fig at the side of the road. The sweet-sour stench of death. Hot dust in the back of my throat. The crackle of gunfire.
    My mind wobbled, trembled, shivered on the edge of the abyss. I had worked so hard to forget those years in Afghanistan. I had manhandled a thousand rocks into the hole: my craft, friends, marriage, child, love and anger, the rubble of life, and now I turned to find it still open, yawning darkly, waiting to swallow me.

Chapter 6
    The base we reported to was a sprawling site to the north-west of Vilnius. We were handed uniforms: green suits with a red band on the shoulder, boots as stiff as wood, so inflexible we could not move our feet. We laughed, tramping around the barrack room, clumsy as elephants, our heads newly shaved. Clowning, excited still.
    Later we were divided into different companies and told we would be going abroad. Kolya and I found ourselves in the same company.
    â€˜Look at the belts they gave us,’ Kolya said, slapping his down across the bunk.
    â€˜What about them?’
    â€˜Look how badly made they are. It’s clear, isn’t it?’
    A small group gathered around the bunk, examining their belts.
    â€˜What do you mean?’ someone asked.
    â€˜You know how it goes?’ Kolya said. ‘They give the good belts to those going to Germany or somewhere nice, and to those going out east…’
    The group fell momentarily silent. We stared at the belts as though they held the key to our futures. There was no doubt the belts we had been given were of an inferior quality, even by the standards Kolya and I were used to in the children’s home.
    â€˜You don’t know shit,’ someone said.
    There were mutterings of agreement and the crowd dispersed quietly. The clowning stopped, though, and when we did physical exercise the next morning we threw ourselves through the assault course with violent determination, toughening ourselves up, welcoming the cuts and bruises and aching muscles.
    Kolya was right about the belts. At the end of our first month of training we were put on to a plane at Vilnius airport. We were not told our destination, but the long flight took us south-east, across the vast plains of Russia to central Asia. When dawn broke it illuminated, thousands of metres below us, barren scrubland, stretching to the horizon. As the sun climbed higher and its rosy flush spilt across the earth, the foothills of a distant mountain range bubbled up darkly from the plain. A city was spread out below us, dissected by a sinuously curving river, still shrouded in the grey light of early dawn. Only the upper tips of the acres of high-rise apartment blocks were caught by the sun, reaching like bloodied fingers for the underbelly of the plane. We landed in Tashkent in the early hours of morning.
    At the airport a row of KamaZ trucks were waiting for us, their tarpaulins flapping and billowing in a strong breeze. We jumped up into the trucks, tired and bleary eyed, and gazed out in amazement as we bumped through the huge city; streets lined with poplars, monumental tower blocks the like of which I had never seen in my life. Fountains glittered in the morning sunlight; the squares seemed wider than the small town I had been raised in.
    The trucks took us to a large base outside the city, which,