Paradime Read Free Page A

get to the entrance of our building on 10th Street and suddenly feel sick, like I’m going to puke right there on the sidewalk. I haven’t eaten, so there’s nothing to puke, but the feeling persists. I go inside, along the narrow hallway, and up the stairs, hoping I don’t run into anybody. I don’t like this place, and although it made sense for me to move in, which I did about a year ago, I half suspect that one of the attractions of shipping out to Afghanistan was to get away from here – not away from Kate, away from this damp and cluttered little apartment of hers. I don’t have nightmares about Iraq, go figure, but I do have nightmares about this place, about still having to trudge up these stairs when I’m forty, or about being trapped here, say, with a baby.
    Which is something we’ve discussed.
    With my key out, I get to our door and open it. Kate looks up from the table, a smile on her face. It quickly fades. She’s out of the chair in an instant, but in the next I’m in the bathroom, retching into the toilet bowl. Not long after this, we’re both at the table, poring over the letter, dissecting it, parsing the language – one minute convinced it’s nothing more than a stalling tactic, the next that Gideon don’t just intend to withhold my last pay cheque but might actually be threatening me with some form of legal action as well.
    After a while I stand up and walk over to the refrigerator. I take out a bottle of water and knock a third of it back in one go. Screwing the cap on again, I look at Kate. She’s small and slim, with bright blue eyes and shoulder-length red hair. At times, in her black-rimmed glasses and plain black T-shirt, she can seem fairly intense, but she’s also thoughtful and circumspect, good qualities, I’m sure, for a lawyer – at least the kind she wants to be. Speaking of which, there’s a conversation we haven’t had since I got back, an interrogation she hasn’t conducted, and I have to say I admire her restraint in not initiating it. What really happened over there? That’s all she’d have to say to get the ball rolling. And I’d tell her. I wouldn’t lie. But she hasn’t asked. When I spoke to her on the phone a couple of days before I shipped back, I tried to explain how these staff cuts were the result of a massive lawsuit Gideon was involved in and that, because of an early release clause in my contract, there was nothing I could do about it. Besides – I was at pains to add – maybe my timing hadn’t been so great. The war was winding down, after all, and troops were coming home.
    This was greeted with the kind of silence that told me she knew I was full of shit.
    Since there were more important things to focus on when I got back, such as what to do next, there didn’t seem to be much point in conducting a post-mortem, in trying to pick apart a decision that couldn’t be reversed, so it became the official line, and nothing more was said about it.
    But with this letter now and its veiled threat of litigation, I won’t have any choice but to talk about it. There’s pride in the mix too. Kate never liked the idea of me going to Afghanistan, never approved of Gideon Logistics, and I sort of ended up defending them, being all hard-nosed and pragmatic about it. I don’t usually have a problem admitting that I’m wrong, but when it’s this spectacularly wrong? You need a little lead time.
    It’s been three weeks, though. How much longer do I need?
    Kate holds up the letter, and shakes her head. ‘I just . . . I don’t understand this, Danny.’
    I put the water back in the fridge. I close the door and lean against it. ‘That’s because there’s something I haven’t told you.’
    She stares at me, her eyes widening.
    If the fridge behind me didn’t have such a loud hum, she’d probably be able to hear my heart beating from the other side of the table.
    ‘There was an incident at the base,’ I say, ‘something pretty horrible, something that