Free War Baby by Colin Falconer Page A

downdraught of the rotors stung her face and eyes.
    I can’t do this anymore, I can’t face another boy with no legs.
    ‘Mickey, c’mon!’
    A doctor and two nurses ran towards one of the Hueys with a gurney. She started running with them. Please God, get me through another night.
     
    * * *
     
    The canonesse looked out of the window to the courtyard below. The big Australian towered over the orphanage children, as happy and exuberant as a large dog, shouting and laughing with them as they kicked a plastic football around the quadrangle. He was like a big child himself, and like a child he could cause a lot of damage without intention.
    She turned away. Soeur Odile sat with her head bowed.
    ‘You intend to marry him?’ the canonesse asked her.
    ‘Yes, Mother.’
    ‘When?’
    Soeur Odile did not answer.
    ‘I hope you have thought this through.’
    ‘I trust him, Mother.’
    ‘He has been one of our greatest benefactors. But charity and responsibility are not always found in the same person.’
    ‘I have made up my mind.’
    ‘Yes, I was afraid of that.’
    She sat down at her desk. A rosary clicked softly between her fingers. She wondered if Ryan really understood young Odile at all. The girl was sincere, and she too had a good heart, and she was beautiful, certainly. But she was not bright, and she was naïve, she had no knowledge of the world outside of her cloistered upbringing here and in Dalat. Perhaps Ryan had mistaken vacuity for mystery. She really was no match for such a man.
    ‘When you leave us, you can never return. You understand this?’
    ‘I understand.’
    ‘Do you really understand what you are doing, Odile? Do you really know this man?’
    ‘I love him.’
    Love! The young fell in love so easily, and placed such store by it, yet they knew least about it. The canonesse had come late to her vocation and knew just how painful an emotion it could be. Ryan’s voice around the courtyard below, over the shouts of the children.
    ‘Would you like to pray with me, Odile?’
    ‘Yes, Mother.’
    And so they knelt together under the wooden crucifix on the wall, but all the while she knew Odile was longing to flee to the door, like a schoolgirl detained to finish her homework. Only the canonesse truly prayed that some good would come from this liaison, but she had known the world too long to believed that such stories ever ended well.
     
    * * *
     
    Webb spent two weeks up-country, living out of the Press Centre at Danang. When he got back to Saigon the Hashish Hilton had undergone a radical change. Nixon had gone. Crosby told him that Cochrane’s Vietnamese girlfriend had been sitting in the room alone one night when the monkey began masturbating on the bookshelf behind her. At the inevitable conclusion of Nixon’s performance the girl had felt something wet and warm on the back of her neck. She had screamed, grabbed the animal by the tail and tossed it out of the window.
    He came, she got sore, he was conquered, as Crosby put it.
    Crosby had moved into Ryan’s top-floor room. Ryan’s paraphernalia had all gone: the ashtray made from a shell casing; the NVA pith helmet with the red star; the Leica with the grenade fragment lodged in the lens; the meat safe where he kept his stock of marijuana. Crosby was sprawled on a hard divan chair, a can of Koors in one hand and a large joint in the other. He was stoned as well as drunk, red-eyed and remorselessly solemn.
    He looked up as Webb walked in. ‘The wanderer returns,’ he said.
    ‘Where’s Sean?’ Webb asked, experiencing a cold chill of alarm. ‘He’s okay?’
    ‘Yeah, he’s fine,’ Crosby said. ‘Moved out. Got himself a live-in girlfriend.’
    ‘Sean?’
    ‘Yep. I know it’s hard to believe, but they do say fact is stranger than fiction. We’ve had some changes here while you’ve been gone. Cochrane got his ass transferred back to Washington DC. Hell, he was only here because he wanted it on his CV. Prescott moved on