Compulsion

The sound of his voice rang in her head as she slowly pulled the suit on.

“Why do you have to do this? Why you? You could do anything else, but you choose to do this.”

She’d looked at the man she’d married only three years previously, and despite the familiar brown eyes, the face she could picture with her eyes closed, and the hair she’d run her hands through so many times, she didn’t recognise him anymore.

“You’ve always known this is what I was going to do. I was training for this when we first met.” She’d never bothered much with men before she’d met him, as she was so involved in her work that she didn’t have time for anything else. But her friends had insisted she had to go with them to the pub that night and wouldn’t take no for an answer however many times she’d said it.

She’d been sipping her drink quietly, watching her more outgoing friends chat and flirt with the ever-rotating collection of men that surrounded them, when he walked over and said hi. She’d stared at him for a long moment and looked over her shoulder to check that he was actually talking to her before she said anything. That first conversation had been so easy, and he’d asked for her phone number at the end of the night.

One date had turned into two, then into three, soon they were inseparable. When he’d pulled a ring out of his pocket and asked her to marry him twelve months later, she’d said yes without any hesitation. They hadn’t wanted a fuss, so they had slipped away quietly four weeks later and got married, just the two of them and the celebrant.

The first year had felt idyllic, and she hadn’t noticed the cracks that were starting to form. She would go away for work for long periods, but whenever she was home, she thought things were perfect. They lived in a small house with a tiny garden that he tended with a passion that made her grin and roll her eyes when she saw him mowing the grass for the third time that week and crawling around on his hands and knees inspecting the ground for the tiniest weed and removing them meticulously.

The second year they were married, she began to notice the cracks. When he knew she was about to go away for work, he became sullen and withdrawn, questioning why she had to go. She would always cajole him and comfort him and reassure him that it wouldn’t be forever and that one day, her job would be based in one place, and she wouldn’t have to go away anymore. He would finally be mollified with her pleading and allow her to comfort him and make it up to him.

By the time they’d been married for three years, the cracks had become chasms. He was always sullen and withdrawn, even if she’d only just arrived back, he was never happy, he was always talking about her going away again and how he didn’t see why she had to do it. No matter how many times she explained why she did it, explaining why she needed to be the one to do this, the one to make a difference, he’d wave his hand dismissively, cutting off all her reasoning with a sneer. Telling her she was selfish, that she only did this job because she wanted to be a hero or a martyr. She’d explained what had happened to her family and how she did this so no one else would end up in the position she was in, alone with no family in the world. At first, he used to be sympathetic, and he would comfort her as the tears rolled down her cheeks, tell her it would all be okay. But now he just froze if she mentioned them, telling her that she needed to move on, that he was her family now, so she could stop doing her job and stay at home with him. Finally, he started to mention all of his friends that had wives who had jobs in the local town and cooked, cleaned and kept house. He would leave newspapers out on the table, open to job advertisements, clearly wanting her to look at them and apply for something else.

The fight they’d had just before she’d gone away this time had been the worst one they’d ever had. They’d both said things she didn’t know if they could ever recover from. The last words he’d said to her rang in her ears as she carefully pulled her helmet on over her head.

“If you can’t stop doing it. We can’t be married anymore.”

She’d tried to talk to him, to reason with him. But he’d walked away from her, refusing to listen to anything else she had to say.

She breathed deeply, starting to go into the meditative state that she entered each time she did her job. No one ever rushed her, they knew she was an expert at what she did but needed to be in the right mindset to go in and do it.

On the second breath in, she remembered the little girl she had been that day, the day that had changed the course of her whole life. She could picture with total clarity the outfit she had been wearing. The white trainers with pink sparkles on them. The denim skirt that she had been so excited to pick out in the shops with her mum and the t-shirt with a dancing unicorn over the front that had been her favourite. She remembered she had shouted out to her mum that she was going to get the post. She remembered the sound of her mum’s voice as she called back one of the last things she would ever hear her say. She always wished it had been something about how much her mum loved her, but the reality was, her mum had reminded her not to walk over the wet grass and not get mud on her shoes.

She had been so excited when she opened the post box and saw the parcel. She was only nine, so she didn’t notice that it had no stamps, and it wasn’t properly addressed, just wrapped in brown paper and tied with string with her dad’s name scrawled across it. She read his name out loud, “Judge Peterson”, it always made her giggle to give him his full title. She knew he was someone important and that he was currently involved in a very important trial, which revolved around some very bad men. But to her, he was just her dad, the man who wiped away her tears when she was upset, cleaned up her grazed knee when she fell off her bike and told her every day that she was the most important girl in his life.

She ran back up to the house and waved the parcel in the air, shouting for her dad to let him know that he had some post. She ran into his study and dropped it on the desk in front of him, he’d looked up from his paperwork and smiled at her and thanked her. Her mum had walked into the office to chat to him as he’d undone the string on the parcel. She’d interrupted and asked if she could have a can of soda out of the fridge as a treat. Her mum had smiled and said yes, as it was the weekend and she’d been good all week. She’d skipped off happily to the kitchen to select her soda. She could still remember exactly how many and what type of soda’s were in the fridge, as she’d been looking at them when she felt the pressure wave that had knocked her off her feet, then the boom that had been so loud her ears had been ringing for days afterwards.

She’d scrambled to her feet and looked around the kitchen, trying to work out what had happened, seeing every plate they owned was now shattered, and the window was no longer there, instead there were only shards of glass hanging in the frame.

She’d yelled out for her parents, but she couldn’t hear her own voice, and all the sound around her was gone. She’d looked down and noticed her t-shirt was stained red, which she’d later found out was due to her blood, as she’d been cut by flying glass.

She sprinted down the hall to her dad’s office, taking in the destruction as she went, and when she got there, she had seen things that no nine year old should ever see.

She hadn’t been allowed to attend the trial of the men who sent the parcel bomb to their house, but once she’d been old enough, she had read everything she could about them and had vowed to herself that she wouldn’t let another little girl lose their family the way she had.

She’d gone to university and studied engineering, then joined the army straight afterwards, always with one goal in mind.

She took another deep breath, clearing her mind of the memory of her family and walked slowly forwards, encumbered by the padded suit that was there to keep her safe.

She slowly knelt down in front of the device and carefully lifted the cover off it, checking for booby traps as she went.

She’d explained so many times to her husband that she had to be in the bomb squad, that every device she safely neutralised was one that wouldn’t rip a family apart like her’s had been. But he couldn’t cope anymore with the stress and the worry that she might not come home. She did understand and had been incredibly sad, but she couldn’t stop doing this, it was a compulsion that she wasn’t ready to give up.

“What can you see, Captain?” The voice crackled over her headset.

“It’s a basic design. It won’t take me long to neutralise.” She grinned to herself as she inspected the wires, cataloguing in her head, which were dummy wires and which she needed to be wary of.

“Don’t take any risks.”

“I never do.”