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your honour. People that have been through what I’ve been through are liable to behave like loons for a while, if not for the whole rest of their lives; I suppose it’s the knowledge you have about death, the fact that it’s still waiting, tapping its staff with impatience. And you know too that what he’ll do to you won’t be pretty. Oh, it won’t be pretty at all.
    ‘What won’t be pretty?’ asked the Yorkie, a new slyness creeping into his voice. I hadn’t realised that I’d been speaking aloud. I’d thought that the thoughts were spinning around my head, crashing into one another like bumper cars, but apparently I’d been speaking after all, like an old drunk that’s got so used to the company of the voices in his whacked-out Ice-Dragon head that they just mumble along without caring.
    ‘If you’re worried about your injuries,’ he continued, ‘then don’t. You’ll still be a pretty-boy. In comparison to us two, you got out of there with hardly a scratch on you at all,’ he said. Then he whispered something which made my blood run cold: ‘People are saying that you got yourself some kinda guardian angel, son. Someone that pulled you out that building when all hope was lost. Everyone else in that building was fucked, and I mean fucked; but you?’
    ‘Got lucky,’ I whimpered.
    There was a long silence. Uncomfortable; we listened to the injustice in the other bed; the unfairness of that man’s life being chosen instead of mine.
    ‘Don’t feel guilty for getting out of there alive,’ said the Yorkie. ‘That’s the last thing you wanna do. I been lying here a good few days listening to you talk to yourself and him groaning, and all I thought was that he lost his body but you lost your head. I felt guilty… It ain’t a nice feeling… What’s your name?’
    ‘Lance Corporal Bull,’ I replied, shifting uncomfortably in the sheets. ‘Kingsmen...’
    ‘Ah, the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment,’ he said, ‘so you’re from the red rose county then, eh?’
    ‘I am, mate,’ I said.
    ‘White rose through and through, myself. I’m in… I was Corporal in the Second Yorkshires…’
    I suddenly felt thoroughly sick of all of the formalities. Here we were, blasted to fuck in some godforsaken country that most of our relatives back home couldn’t even locate on a map, and all we could talk about was our proud regiments. The same proud regiments that had got us blasted to fuck in the first place. And it wasn’t just the fact that he ranked higher than me that rankled; something about the fact that his injuries were far worse than me rankled too. Hell, he’d probably be up for at least one blag rag for getting so badly injured.
    ‘Look,’ I interrupted, ‘call me Gaz. Gaz Bull.’
    ‘Good name that; sounds kinda like a footballer’s name,’ said the Yorkie, sounding more convivial than he had before. ‘What’s your dad’s name? Terry?’
    I’d heard it all before; dad called Terry-Bull, mum called Un a -Bull… Most of my friends just called me Bully; always had, always would. I knew that this stranger would end up calling me by the same name; Bully by name, bully by nature. Maybe it was in my genes to be this way. Maybe, no matter how hard I tried, there was no other way that I’d have turned out.
    ‘What do they call you?’ I asked. Gradually, my eyesight was starting to return. I could make out the Yorkie’s thick dark hair and his unshaven chops. I could see his jutting forehead, like the overhang of a cliff, and reckoned that he would have been adept at the head-butt. Hell, he probably made the head-butt his special-move.
    ‘Dean,’ he said, creasing up his heavy forehead with concentration, as though it was a struggle to remember his own name. ‘Dean Howitt. Or Do-Nowt to me pals.’
    I chuckled to myself; in his soft country accent, Dean Howitt did sound a bit like ‘do-nowt.’ I wondered if he was similarly cursed by his name. Had his name caused him to be a lazy