More Than You Can Say by Paul Torday Page A

didn’t miss much. The whole series was a disgrace from start to finish.’
    I supposed my parents wanted to keep the conversation light; I supposed they wanted to help me forget what I had been through. But I didn’t want to forget.
    The three of them – my beloved family – couldn’t have been nicer to me, or more careful of my comforts, or more concerned. They made sure that I was not too tired, not too hungry, not too full, not too hot, not too cold. They gave me the best cuts of the leg of lamb we ate for dinner; my father kept topping up my glass of wine, telling me that this was Château so-and-so, and the best vintage, nineteen something or other. I smiled, and nodded my thanks, and ate the lamb, and sipped the wine.
    To me, the lamb tasted like cloth. The wine tasted of mud. The temperature in the room seemed at one moment to beoppressively hot and stifling, so that I could scarcely bear it; at another, I was freezing and wished I could be nearer the fire that blazed at one end of the room. We ate by candlelight, and in the gloom I thought my father’s face had become red and pompous; my mother’s dull and stupid; my sister’s narrow and scheming. I couldn’t breathe properly. I couldn’t think of anything to say when someone spoke to me. The conversation, lively enough at first, began to falter.
    ‘Won’t you tell us a little bit about what you have been doing, Dicky?’ asked my mother. ‘We haven’t seen you for so long and we haven’t the least idea of what your life has been like. It’s been so hard for us, not knowing where you were or how your days have been.’
    No, you haven’t the least idea of what my life’s been like, I thought. Aloud I said, ‘This lamb is delicious.’
    ‘He can’t talk about it. Disclosure policy,’ said my father. ‘I was in the army. I know what it’s like, coming home after a long tour.’
    No you don’t, I thought. You served for three years in Germany and the most exciting thing you did was drive your Golf into a tree near Bielefeld. You were invalided out and you never heard a shot fired in anger.
    ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I can’t talk about it.’
    My silence had nothing to do with the disclosure policy. We had all signed it when we left the army. We weren’t meant to talk about what we had done but most of us didn’t want to, anyway. I certainly couldn’t talk about the last few months. I couldn’t talk because someone had imprisoned me behind a wall of glass. I could see people around me, I could see their mouths opening and shutting, but the words never reached my brain. And I couldn’t answer questions. I couldhardly bring myself to say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ or ‘Two lumps of sugar, please’ or ‘Thank you.’
    Nobody who hadn’t been there could understand what it had been like: the adrenalin rush, the fear, the occasional random, sudden moments of horror; the excitement. I was alive then. Now I felt as if I were in a trance, or as if I were half-dead.
    When I came back to Britain after finishing my brief tour in Helmand I decided to apply for Premature Voluntary Release. The next move for me would have been to spend two years behind a desk. But I had never been interested in promotion or passing exams. I felt that I wasn’t capable of sitting behind a desk. I longed to be back in the action; and I dreaded going back to it at the same time. The truth was that I’d done enough; I’d seen enough; I wasn’t sure I could take much more. So I put in my papers.
    Before I left I was sent to see the Regimental Medical Officer at headquarters. He had a file on his desk and he interviewed me for five minutes without showing much interest. Then he said:
    ‘People who have experienced the sort of things I see in your file sometimes suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Do you know what that is?’
    ‘I’ve heard of it, obviously,’ I said.
    ‘We do have some limited facilities for treatment of particularly severe cases. It’s