‘It’s Lisa,’ I say. ‘And this is Joe.’

‘Well, it’s nice to meet you,’ she says. ‘My name’s Isobel. Isobel Carter.’

14

Soldier Number 1

Rowan Isle House, August 2004

Sarge hasn’t been the same since that day with the vicar. I try to ask him what’s the matter but he just shakes his head and marches off into the woods, night after night, and doesn’t come back until morning. I don’t know what he’s doing out there because he’s not bringing home any rabbits or pheasants, and sometimes he even goes there without his gun. He’s off his food too which is very unlike him. Ever since I was a tiny kid he’s drilled it into me how an army marches on its stomach and about the evils of wasting food. Now, he just pushes whatever I put in front of him round the plate. It’s like he’s given up but I have no idea why.

The voices are back too or at least it seems that way. Last night I found him kneeling in the hallway with his hands clasped over his ears. He was making the most horrible squealing noise, like the chickens when we wring their necks. I stood in the kitchen doorway watching him, wondering if I should say something, though I know full well that you don’t get in his way while he’s like that. Once when I was about five I heard him screaming his head off in the garden one night and I ran out to see what was going on. I remember I came up behind him and shouted ‘Daddy’, and it must have been the shock because he would never harm a hair on my head, but he swung round and hit me, knocking me clean off my feet. The next day he had no memory of it, or at least I think he hadn’t as he never said a word about it and I knew not to bring it up. But last night it was different. He sounded like he was in agony and he was crying out, ‘Leave me, leave me. You’ve tortured me enough.’ It was hell to see him like that but I knew as I closed the kitchen door and tiptoed down to my room that it was best to leave it alone. The voices always go away when the morning comes anyway.

At breakfast this morning he seemed more in control. He walked into the kitchen with a basket of eggs and set them down on the table. While I was cooking them he asked me a bit more about what the vicar had said to me and I told him that he just wanted me to go and join in a church service. When I said this Sarge clenched his fists so hard his knuckles went white. He said that I was to keep focused, that the vicar and his kind are the enemy – ‘You see, religion is like a worm that gets inside your head and feeds off you.’ He jabbed his fingers at his temples and then his voice got louder and louder. He said religion saps your consciousness until you become nothing more than a zombie. And that’s how they want you. They want you ‘malleable and submissive’ so they can mould you into ‘an android with no free will, no independent thought’. His mouth was frothing as he spoke. It was like he couldn’t get the words out fast enough. I nodded my head while I dished up the eggs, tried to reassure him that I wasn’t going to go to any church. Then he grabbed my wrist and said, ‘I might not have been able to give you much, but I saved you from that lot. You do know that, don’t you?’