The Voyeur

The Soldier’s Wife The soldier was a stallion galloping across a grassy, spring field. Nothing could hold him back. He galloped hard and fast. His mane waved like a flag in the air. In the distance lay a great snow-peaked mountain range. His name was Corporal Jonathon Hawkins. He was a powerful, black stallion. His wife was a boat. A sailboat sailing, aimlessly, across a summer-still lake. There were no mountains on her horizon, just endless gentle winds wafting and the words of her father who loved her very much. Her father whispered in her hair in her university days. What was she doing there? She did not know, but it was like an endless summer-still lake. There was no child Olivia then. There was her friend, Rie, who wrote books and lived not far from the soldier’s wife. Rie understood things – perhaps because she had lived much and had gone orange picking in small country towns. Perhaps Rie also understood things because she listened to the news and understood that the world was not round at all but lumpy and full of loopholes and other holes and improvised explosive devices called IEDs, not to be confused with IUDs. Olivia (many years after she was born to Corporal Jonathon Hawkins and his wife) would have lots of conversations with Aunty Rie (after the so-called war that was not really a war at all). Olivia would do the grocery shopping on the days that her mother could not sail through because she had become what is known as listless. Others had technical names for what Olivia’s mother had become, others like the soldier’s wife’s friend, Antonia, the nurse. Antonia would explain to Olivia that her mother needed to recover, that’s all. Re-cover what, thought Olivia. The couch? But the couch was still good. It was not worn out and she remembered tumbling off it in play with her father the Corporal (which is what her father told her to call him, yes sir, daddy sir, is what she would say). He would lift her into the air where she could see for miles and fly over great mountain ranges. Then he would plummet her to the earth. Then he would zoom her up again before she could smell the carpet. Her legs like the long bony legs of a stork dangling behind her and she, flying free. The soldier did not overtly display any of the great qualities of the stallion. He simply was one. No one could saddle him or ride him in that field in which he galloped free. But the sergeant sure did ride him later (as all sergeants are want to do). But Rie’s view of the world held true. There were lots of loopholes, and worm holes, and potholes, and great vast craters. If you fell into a crater you could fall all the way through to China and pop up like a prairie dog sniffing foreign air. Maybe you would even be upside down. The soldier’s job was to make sure that there were no holes at the end of his shift, lifting gently the IEDs that Rie knew existed, but of which the soldier’s wife knew nothing. Antonia, the nurse knew about such matters and was good at doing jigsaw puzzles. Putting them together that is. But she, like many of her colleagues, did not know how a jigsaw puzzle that was already complete (which is what the soldier’s wife seemed to be) could be put together. She seemed complete, but everyone knew she was in pieces. So Antonia, like many of her colleagues, used words like recovery and mental health, although, the word ‘mental’ seemed like such an arbitrary and elusive notion, like gentle lapping waves on the shore of a beautiful lake. The nurse looked out over the lake and in the distance, the far, far, distance, she could barely make out a snow-capped mountain range. On the lake, white sail boats skimmed across the surface.