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bastard that couldn’t be bothered to do much of anything? Probably not, I concluded, on account of the fact that like me, he was stuck in this military hospital. People don’t just get their legs blown off for no reason. He must have been doing something to cause it. Perhaps his name was one of those ironic names.
    ‘Sorry about your leg, Dean,’ I said, trying to take all emotion out of my voice; trying to sound sympathetic as most people would have done in this kind of situation. Or perhaps ‘most people’ wouldn’t have even mentioned the leg at all. He fixed me with his bloodshot blue eyes for a heavy moment and then gave me a reassuring smile. Evidently surviving an incident like we had allows you to say just what the hell you want and people just oblige.
    ‘So am I,’ he said, making this grimace as though to show how hard he was. ‘But to tell you the truth, I was sick of being out here, and this means I can go back and do-nowt for the rest of my days. Sit down the pub and not have to worry ‘bout work. It’ll take some getting used to, but I’ll do it… They used to call injuries like this one a blighty one back in the old days. Me dad told me about it.’
    ‘How did you get out?’ I asked.
    ‘Me an’ Bolton there was hanging back, you know, in case of anything unexpected coming up from the rear. Tell you the truth, I was glad about it when our sarge told us… There was something about that building…’
    I knew exactly what he meant. Wondered whether he’d seen the strange purple light that day too.
    ‘Once that first blast went off, it went awful quiet,’ said Do-Nowt. ‘Then, after a few seconds, we could hear all the shouts and screams from the men we’d been with for the best part of our lives, and they sounded like babies or something. It were horrible. Horrible. He couldn’t hack it, could Bolton. He just went charging in there, mad-like. I tried to stop him; I could kinda sense there’d be another one. I could feel it in the dust, like. And I suppose that was how he got done so bad when the second one went off like that, worse than the first… And by that time, I’d got too close an’ all.’
    ‘Shit,’ I commented. It was about the only response I could formulate.
    ‘Shit is right,’ said Do-Nowt. And for a while, we were quiet. Remembering.
    The silence soon became too painful for me though. I had to change the subject again.
    ‘Does it itch, the leg?’ I said, remembering some story I’d heard or seen once about missing ‘ghost’ limbs; it must have been one of those awful horror flicks that Twinnie used to rent down at M and S Video Supplies. Fuck: why was I remembering Twinnie at a time like this?
    Do-Nowt sighed, as though having lost a leg for – what was it; five? six? days – suddenly made him the word-leading authority on the subject. ‘You know sometimes and you’re drunk and trying to watch porn and you feel all light headed and think about having a wank and then you look down and your poor old dick is just lying there, numb. That’s what it feels like; like I’ve sat on it too long or something and that if I just give it some care and attention, everything’ll be okay.’
    ‘You’ve not…’ Even I couldn’t bring myself to ask the next question.
    ‘No!’ snapped Do-Nowt, almost too quickly. ‘And if you’d have seen some of the nurses, you’d know how I know that!’
    Ah! It had started already. Here we were, lucky to be alive, and already we were making up brag-stories in our scratchers. Give it a couple of hours, and I would have convinced this guy that while he was asleep, I had this amazing threesome with two buxom nurses… Even now, we have to talk-up our masculinity. Legless, he had even more reason to talk about his third-leg, I supposed.
    Suddenly, we heard sounds of movement from what must have been a neighbouring building. Only when we heard the sound of the creaking door and the scrunch of footsteps upon gravel did we realise how