Arjuna took his clothes off and folded them neatly. Before he was recruited by the Agency, he had worked in the Sri Lanka Army. His father had also taught him to be neat. Cleanliness is next to Godliness. A Christian homily that had pervaded their Buddhist home.
He pulled out his small toiletries bag from under the sink. Namalie kept it there for him when he returned the first weekend of every month to see her and the boys. Everything was there, including the expired painkillers. He hadn’t needed them for years, but he liked to carry them just in case. Just in case of what, he didn’t know. The nerve endings were dead; they would never feel pain again.
He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. Four years ago, when he had returned to Namalie’s home to recover, she had removed all of the mirrors in her small apartment. Only faint shadows remained on the cupboard doors and walls where they had once been.
The boys never complained and the mirrors never returned, even years later. Now, one new, small mirror had been placed in the bathroom.
He closed his eyes and remembered. He opened his eyes, looked at his face, and remembered. He closed his eyes and tried to forget.
Four years ago, Gajan had led them deep into the jungle. He had found the weapons seller that Redmond wanted, that Ellie had been sent to Sri Lanka for, who had traded in Semtex which had killed American sailors and American tourists. The whole team were hungry for success: Ellie, Sharkey, Bradfield and him. Missions went sideways all the time. Sharkey and Bradfield’s families were told they died bravely. Arjuna had survived, his body wracked with fear and ravaged by fire.
He twisted his body in the mirror.
Only here did he look at himself.
The slash across his chest had formed a keloid scar, a shiny, thick ridge like a ceremonial sash.
He turned, fascinated by the way his skin rippled across his body like the waves of the ocean, cresting and falling. It had its own topography of damage. The pigment had never returned, and his skin was mottled pink in places, white in others.
He traced the path from his left shoulder, where the lighter had been held, to the right side of his hip. From the place where the fire had started to devour his body, to where it had stopped when a US Black Hawk circled overhead and bullets ripped into the earth around him, killing almost everyone.
When Ellie had dragged him down and rolled him over and over again in the merciful earth that was red and wet with the blood of the others.