Strangers (13 page)

‘Annie.’

The word was no more than a croak, but it left him gasping. The hand in his felt limp and cold as ice. He lay for a moment, trying to gather his strength, and then called her name again.

‘Annie.’

The silence was hideous now. There was something different. Steve slid his hand from hers and found her wrist, thin and bare. His fingers moved up her arm, meeting the rough edge of her coat sleeve, and a woollen cuff underneath it.

Something different. What was it?

His fingers moved again, scraping the gritty cloth.

Cloth
.

His head hurt so that each thought took a separate, punishing effort. Before, surely, there had been only her hand? His shoulder still ached from stretching out to reach it. Yet now he could feel her arm, all the way up to the elbow, slightly crooked. In the silence Steve could hear his heart’s terrified drumming. He opened his mouth to try to pull more oxygen out of the thickened air.

He was capable of only one thought, and it gripped him for long, shivering seconds. He was holding her arm, but it was no longer part of her. Something had severed it. Fear and nausea swelled inside him and he crouched within a shell of pain, longing for unconsciousness again. But his head defied him and the thought clarified, until it was certainty, and he knew that he must confront it.

He took his lower lip between his teeth and bit into it, to stop himself screaming when the discovery came. Then he slid his hand down once more to clasp the fingers in his. Slowly, he pulled their linked hands towards him.

The arm moved, not easily because the coat sleeve snagged on the roughness beneath it. But it moved, and he drew it closer until his fingers could crawl up again to the elbow and beyond, inch by inch, his lip held beneath his teeth to help him to bear the discovery of sticky flesh and bone.

But there was only the reassuring weave of the cloth, and then the rounded hump of the shoulder.

Suddenly, as though his consciousness could only dole out one at a time, another thought came to him. Her pulse. He could feel for her pulse. His fingers slid back again and fumbled under the woollen cuff. He turned her hand so that it lay wrist upwards and touched his forefinger to the vulnerable skin. Nothing, and nothing, and then he found the place. A little beat quivered, tick, tick.

Steve breathed out, a long sigh that stirred the stench of brick dust again. She was still alive. This was Annie’s arm, her hand still touching his. He held on to it like a lifeline.

Think again, then. What had happened? He must work it out, establish a thread of hope for Annie again …

He tried to remember the noise and then the avalanche that had followed it. They hadn’t fallen, but everything else had fallen around them. Steve had the sudden conviction that the limits of their black world had redefined themselves. As the weight fell something had shifted.

He had heard Annie scream his name, and then what? Had one of them rolled sideways, involuntarily, to escape the avalanche? If that had happened, something had moved to release one of them from the weight that had pinned them down. Steve tried to move now, willing his leg to follow the jerky spasm of his other muscles. The pain intensified, shooting across his stomach, but he found that he could lift his hips and drag himself to the right by an inch or two. His left leg slithered uselessly with him. He could reach out and touch Annie’s side now. His fingers explored the folds of her coat and then moved upwards, vertically. He found a button, and then another alongside it, and he knew that he was right. The discovery comforted him like a shot of painkiller.

Annie had rolled towards him as the falling began. She had been lying on her back before, with her hair pinning her down. Now she was on her side, much closer to him, still with her arm stretched out towards him. She had rolled with all her remaining strength, and she must have torn her hair free.

She had been trapped by the heavy, fireproofed door. That’s what she had said. He remembered – how long ago? – trying to push it open for her. It had been lying at an angle on top of her, pinioning her right side. Now he reached upwards as far as his arm could stretch, but he couldn’t feel even the edge of it. So whatever it was that had fallen had tipped the door further and freed her. But the door had been a shield as well as a pinion. What was protecting them now? Steve looked into the unyielding darkness. If it fell again, he thought wearily, it would extinguish them too.

For the first time Steve thought that he could reach out gratefully for that extinction.

And then, like a feeble blue flame, came the determination:
No
.

His fingers moved to Annie’s wrist again and felt the little slow ticking of her pulse.

Martin ran faster, his legs pumping up and down.

The cloud of dust swirled outwards, the colour of its underbelly in the lights fading as it drifted away.

The spectators at the cordons had thinned out as darkness fell and the cold intensified, but Martin could see people turning, running back to see as the echoes of the crash died away.

He ran without thinking and reached the line of people, standing with their faces upturned and staring at the blue and orange smoke reflections where the façade had been … He looked each way and then pushed through them. He scrambled through the barriers and ran again, down the length of the store front. The space was full of other people running and the sound of their boots crunching on brick and glass. Two men with a stretcher passed in front of him and Martin saw a group of others bent around a fireman lying on the ground. As the stretcher was unfolded and they lifted him up his heavy helmet fell and rolled unnoticed in the debris. Martin looked past it into the centre of the store and saw a smoking mountain of stone and planks and scaffolding. A blue tarpaulin was draped like a cloak around its base.

Martin stumbled forward with his hands outstretched.

Annie was under there. He would launch himself at it and dig until he reached her. There were uniforms all around him, police in helmets, and firemen with their brave silver buttons. He went forward with the surge of them, through the gaping hole where the busy doors had stood, and into the thick dust and the blizzard of fragments that the wind blew off the broken walls.

They were already working at the wreckage, with shovels and picks and their bare hands, to clear a space. He pushed further forward, and the broad blue back in front of him turned and heaved a chunk of stone into his hands. Martin never felt the weight. He swung round and passed it on to the next link in the chain and then reached out for the next. His lips drew back from his teeth in concentrated effort and he felt the tension of the day’s idleness evaporating.

He was helping her now, working with his strength to reach her.

Hold out, brace for the weight, swing with it, let go and reach again.

I won’t let her go. I won’t let it take her
. The words beat in his head, synchronizing into a desperate chorus with every heave and stretch of his body. Instead of the rubble at his feet and the legs of the men struggling in front of him, he saw Annie.

He saw her at home, waiting for him to come in at the end of the day, and the way that her face softened with pleasure at the sight of him. He saw her frowning, with her head tilted a little to one side as she sat reading with Thomas, and then laughing, with Benjy as a fat, tow-headed baby slung on one hip.

He thought of the warmth of her beside him in their bed, the softness and familiarity of her curled against him. The warmth seemed to spread around him, insulating him for an instant from the desperate rescuers.

He could feel Annie’s generosity and strength, and the reality of her love for the three of them, like a living thing fighting beside him. If she was dead, and all her warmth and life had bled away, how could he bear it? And if she wasn’t dead, but buried, injured, what must she be suffering? Her pain stabbed into him, becoming his own, and he doubled over it. Like an automaton he took the next chunk of masonry that was thrust backwards at him.

If it could be me down there, instead of you, Annie. I love you. Did you know that? I wish I’d told you. I wish I’d let you know how much.

He knew that he could have worked for ever and he found himself trembling with impatience, sweat glueing his hair to his face as he waited for the next load. But there were more uniforms pushing past him now. He dimly heard the blare of sirens. Martin let his arms drop to his sides and he ducked sideways, into a corner of shadow. The lights carved out a pallid room inside the skeleton store and the rescuers milled within the room. Martin tried to slip out beyond the walls of it. He went down on his hands and knees and tried to pull at a piece of plank that stuck up at an angle. The illusion of superhuman strength had deserted him and he wrestled feebly with his piece of wood. The sweat dried icily on his face.

Then he felt a hand on his shoulder.

‘Who are you?’

It was a policeman, of course, in a greatcoat and peaked cap.

‘My wife is under there,’ Martin said. He looked at the policeman and saw the official expression fading for a moment, and sympathy peering out at him. He was very young, Martin thought irrelevantly, the old cliché. Not more than twenty, surely? A year or so older than Annie and he had been, back at the very beginning.

‘Will you come this way, sir?’

Martin nodded, helpless now, although his torn hands still twitched involuntarily, reaching out for more stones. He followed the policeman to the steps of the parked trailer. Inside it he saw telephones on a bench, a little group of men waiting. It was very warm and stuffy after the cold outside.

‘My wife,’ he explained to them. ‘I want to help to get her out.’

‘Do you know for sure that she is down there?’

Martin shook her head, but then he babbled, ‘Yes. Yes, I’m sure she is. There’s nowhere else she could be, not after all this time …’ The words petered out as they looked at him.

‘The façade is unsafe still,’ the senior man said gently. ‘I can’t allow anyone except rescue personnel anywhere near it. The most helpful thing you can do for your wife is to leave her recovery to those trained for the job.
If
she’s there, of course.’

‘I want to help,’ Martin repeated.

‘I know. But what will happen if I let you go in there and a chunk of rubble falls on you?’

The policeman pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers. Martin could see that they wanted to be considerate, but they were also irritated by his persistence.

‘If you would like to go down the road to the local station,’ the other one suggested, ‘you can have a cup of tea in the warm. I’ll send a WPC to keep you company, and we can contact you as soon as we know anything at all.’ He tapped one of the telephones with his fingertip.

‘I’d rather be here, as close as possible,’ Martin insisted.

‘I’m afraid, then, it will be a case of asking you to wait at the cordon. The inner one, at the point closest to here.’ The commander gestured backwards over his shoulder. ‘Would you like a constable to come with you?’

Martin thought of the young faces he had seen today, blotched with cold under their helmets.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Thank you. I’ll be all right on my own.’

They nodded, waiting for him to go and leave them to their work.

‘It said … it said on the radio that there are still three people in there. Is that true?’

The officer hesitated for a moment and then he said, ‘Yes. Before the collapse at least one of them was alive. We heard a shout. There’s still hope, of a sort.’

Martin stood up, painfully, like an old man.

Annie, was it you, screaming down there?

They escorted him back to the cordon. Martin walked to the place closest to the control trailer and stood once more to watch as he had watched since midday.

There was a disturbance behind him but he didn’t hear it. It took a tap on his shoulder to make him half turn his head, never taking his eyes off the store.

‘Hello. Mike Bartholomew from the BBC.’ It was a man with a microphone, a camera crew trailing behind him. ‘I saw you come out of the control trailer back there. Is there anything you can tell us?’

Martin whirled round and struck out, almost knocking the mike out of the man’s hand.

Annie, was it you, screaming down there?

‘No,’ he shouted. ‘I can’t bloody tell you anything.’

And he turned his back on them, staring helplessly at the circle of lights around the store front, tears blurring his eyes.

Steve lifted his shoulders, gathering what was left of his strength, and then dragged himself another inch to the right. He had to rest afterwards, lying with his lip still drawn between his teeth until the claw of pain released a little. Then he tensed his muscles again for another effort.

If he could get close enough to her, he thought, he might be able to do something to help her. Annie lay very still and silent, and the beat of her pulse seemed frighteningly weak.

To move across the last few inches separating them took everything Steve had. His head flopped down and his ears filled with the sound of his own gasps for breath.

At last he had done it. He was still holding on to her hand, and he clung to it while he fixed all his will on the next breath, and then the next. He had kept the worst fear at bay while he struggled to reach her – the fear that the airflow, wherever it had come from, had been blocked off by the fall. But now that he could think about it he realized that the clogged air was settling. Each breath came easier, and although the dust still choked him there was oxygen filling his lungs. He even had the impression that a draught of clean, cold air touched his face.

He lay on his side facing Annie. He could feel her close to him, and he had the sudden sense that they were like lovers in the dark. Gently he disentangled his fingers from hers and felt for her pulse. The little beat was still there. He laid her hand down and then reached out to touch her face.

With his fingertips he followed the contours of it, trying to see her through his hands. Her hair was tangled over her cheek and he stroked it back. Her forehead was cold, but he knew that she was alive. When he touched her upper lip and traced the line of it through a crusted patch at the corner, her mouth opened and he felt the faint exhalation of breath on the palm of his hand.