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By Root 1064 0

and wasn't afraid to let it show. She had ash blonde hair with a few streaks of white in it. A round, jolly face, laugh lines, bright eyes. I liked her the moment I saw her. She reminded me of my mother, but in a good way. My mother as I preferred to remember her, the warm cuddly creature of my childhood, not the bitter-to-the-point-of-dementedness divorcee she became after my dad walked out on her to go and play housey with a receptionist at one of the hotels where he worked as a lift service engineer. The girl was all of nineteen, just five years older than his son was at the time.

I couldn't stop laughing when the old woman told me her name, though.

Frigga.

I mean - Frigga!

How could I be expected not to laugh?

She took it well. Wasn't the first time, clearly. She just smiled at me, fondly, like you would a child who'd just fathomed how hilarious the word "bottom" is.

"You'll get over it," she said.

And surprise surprise, she was right. I sniggered the next couple of occasions I used it, and then that was that.

I slept a lot. At odd hours, for odd lengths of time. I ate whenever someone brought me food. I relieved myself in the chamberpot provided, which would invariably be emptied and rinsed out when I next needed it. I let Frigga put poultices and bandages on my various injured parts and I drank the medicine she gave me, even though it tasted like boiled sweatsocks, because it took away the pain better than any pharmaceutical I'd ever known and because I could almost feel it and the poultices fixing things inside me, knitting bones, calming contusions, patching torn flesh back into place. I tried to piece it all together, where I was, how I'd got here, and gradually random thoughts surfaced, memories returned in snippets, and it was maybe my fourth day of recuperation when I finally got everything straight. Of course this wasn't a hospital. The snow storm, the car crash, the forest, the wolves, the women on snowmobiles... Asgard Hall.

And Abortion. Poor old Abortion.

Made me quite sad, remembering him and what he'd done, saving me from that wolf at the cost of his own life. I blubbed. Proper crying, tears and all. He was a useless tit but still, he'd been a mate, and I didn't have many of those. Arguably, I didn't have any now.

That time when he spent half an hour chatting up this German girl in a nightclub just off the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, and came back to us boasting about how he'd pulled, and he couldn't understand why we were all pissing ourselves laughing until eventually someone explained that his ladyfriend wasn't as much of a she as she looked like, and he went back to check, and then spent the whole taxi journey back to barracks muttering about a shim, a fucking shim, you all knew and you never told me...

That time in Belize when he went into a seedy bodega in Cayo West to score some dope off a man there, and we'd told him beforehand that the phrase "hijo di puta" was considered the height of politeness, the Spanish equivalent of "my dear sir" in English, and he came running out five minutes later with two massive great moustachioed Mestizos chasing after him with machetes...

That time on base when he crashed out drunk and we got a black marker pen and wrote "Sergeant Major Phillips" on his forehead, "is a" on his right cheek, and "cunt" on his left cheek, and he spent half the next morning frantically trying to scrub it off before parade at noon...

God, we were mean to him.

Abortion.

Carl.

Mate.

Six

Fifth day, I had a visitor. I woke up from a snooze to find this bloke had pulled up a chair beside my bed and was sitting there, hands laced together on his lap, studying me.

He was old, like Frigga, but wore his age less well. It seemed to hang heavily on him, the weight of years, bending his neck, stooping his shoulders. The lines on his face turned the flesh into little separate pouches. He had long white hair and a bushy white beard, like Santa Claus, but a Santa with manic depressive tendencies.

I could only see his right eye. The left, if it was there, was hidden beneath the