Strangers (14 page)

His fingers moved again, over her chin and then to cup the point of her jaw. Except for the dried blood at the corner of her mouth her face was untouched.

He rested for a moment. Steve was thinking, his confused mind still only admitting one thought at a time,
What happened?

He tried to recall the exact quality of the noise. It had been a long, diminishing roar. Not an explosion, but a collapse. It must be that more of the store had fallen in overhead. Perhaps the rescue work had undermined it. Perhaps the rescuers themselves were pinioned, somewhere in the weight above …

Steve headed off the thought. They would come in the end, but how much longer could it be? He thought of the watch again and knew that it was gone for good. They had both moved, and he had lost his bearings.

Annie’s cheek had grown a little warmer under his hand. He began his slow exploration again. Her hair was matted with dust, but that was all. He combed his fingers through the ragged length of it, but he could find no trace of blood. Very slowly, as gently as he could, he lifted her heavy head and slid his right arm under it. Her skull felt hard and round. There were no soft places, nothing sticky. Steve felt the first flicker of real hope. No head injuries. He settled her head once more so that it was pillowed on his arm. Then, with his free hand, he stroked her hair.

As if to reward him Annie stirred a little, and then murmured something. Thillren? He strained to hear, and then to make sense of it.
Children
, was that it?

‘Annie?’

He whispered her name at first, then repeated it, louder and more insistent. There was no response, and she didn’t move again.

Doggedly Steve slid his hand down from her head to her throat, and then over the crumpled stuff of her coat.

At the level of her breastbone his fingers stopped moving. There was a stiffness at first, a difference in the texture of the cloth. He reached further, and then met the stickiness he had dreaded. Blood, here, a patch that had soaked right through her clothes. It was warm on the side she was lying on, and he couldn’t stretch far enough beyond her waist to discover how far the blood had seeped. He trailed his fingers downwards to touch the rubble underneath her and there was blood there too, mixed with the grit and dust. He lifted his hand and put it to his own mouth. There was the taste of blood in the dirt, and when he put his hand down to feel it again the patch seemed bigger.

In despair, Steve let his head drop back. A shower of powdery dust fell on his face and he thought of the earth scattered on a coffin lid. Annie was bleeding, and she would bleed to death in his arms.

He opened his mouth and shouted upwards into the black firmament. ‘Why don’t you come, you bastards? Why don’t you come for us?’

The shout was no more than a croak, and he felt the dry ache of thirst in his throat.

There was no point in shouting. ‘Annie,’ he murmured. He turned his head again so that they lay face to face, their foreheads almost touching.

‘I’m here,’ he told her.

Suddenly he felt weak, languid and almost comfortable in his exhaustion. The thick air was like a blanket. It if wasn’t for the thirst, he thought, he could fall asleep. Like a lover, with Annie in his arms. If he just inclined his head a little he could kiss her cheek …

Annie. Not Cass, or Vicky. A stranger, but he knew her face now.

Steve forced his eyes open again.

Not fall asleep. Not.

He made himself think, remember, anything, just to keep his consciousness flickering on.

Overhead the lights made a harsh ellipse in the dark cave of the store. There were more of them now, and the work in the light was faster, and fiercer. The collapse had come, injuring two men, but the danger was past. Even the injured were forgotten, now that they had been taken away to safety. The rescuers worked on, grimly, digging from the point where the scaffolding shelter had been. The tarpaulins had been rigged up once more, providing a rough screen against the wind and sleet, and from inside them the police guarding the store front could hear the multiplying bite of picks and the juddering whine of the drills.

It was ten past five. Forty-two minutes since the frontage had collapsed. Already, seemingly incredibly, the ground floor had been exposed all over again. They were working downwards, once more, into the basement.

Annie lay with her head in her mother’s lap. It was a warm day, and she had been playing in the garden. She knew that, because she could still smell the scent of crushed grass where the rug had been spread out, and the musty geranium leaf smell from the window boxes. Then she had hurt herself, somehow. Perhaps she had fallen on the path and cut her knees, or perhaps she had bumped her head on the kitchen door as it swung outwards in the breeze.

She had run in tears to find her mother, and her mother had bathed her cuts and dried her face. Then they had gone together into the cool sitting room. There were photographs on the piano and on the low table by the fireplace, Mummy and Daddy when they were young, Annie herself and her brother on seaside holidays. It was very tidy, very quiet. Annie was lying on the sofa. She was wearing sandals with a rising sun pattern punched in the toes and white ankle socks, a green cotton dress and hair ribbons. Once or twice her mother stroked her hair back from her cheek.

Annie smiled contentedly. As she lay there she had a huge, luminous sense of something that was puzzling, because it felt so strange and important, but yet was also utterly comforting and warm and safe. For a brief moment she held the whole of childhood, the summer afternoons and birthdays and holidays and winter bedtimes, all distilled in the recollection of one single day. She turned her head a little, feeling the touch of her mother’s fingers, afraid that the vision would evade her. She wanted to hold it, but she knew that it would burst like a bubble as soon as she touched it.

It stayed with her for a moment longer, and then she felt her smile of joy fading. So complete, so perfect a vision of childhood could never visit a child. A child’s view of its own life was a mass of fragments, frustrations and fleeting pleasures and unexplained loose ends.

She was cold, not pleasantly cool any more. She wasn’t a child, and the precious, glowing vision had vanished. From a distance, Annie saw herself sit up and swing her legs down off the sofa. She ran to the door, with the hair ribbons fluttering like white butterflies. Her mother sat with her hands in her lap, watching her go, and her face was sad.

It wasn’t her mother, then, but Annie herself and she was watching the open door and the sunlight making long squares on the parquet floor of the hall. Pain was stabbing into her side, and there were tears behind her eyes that hurt in a different way. She heard children’s voices in the garden. Somehow she got up and went to the window. It wasn’t the little girl with the hair ribbons playing out there. It was Thomas and Benjamin, Benjamin in his pedal car and Tom clambering up into the branches of the pear tree. They were calling her and she couldn’t run, or even answer them.

‘Children,’ Annie managed to say.

Someone was listening to her, she knew that. It was comforting not to be alone in the dark, with the pain. He was very close to her, and she heard him say, ‘I’m here.’

Annie wanted to ask him, ‘Come outside and see the children,’ but she couldn’t. She watched them herself, instead, knowing that he was close enough to see whatever she saw.

They were absorbed in their play. Benjy came hurtling down the path, his face a concentrated frown. Tom hung out of the tree, his legs dangling as he pretended to fall, just to frighten her. She waved to them, but they didn’t wave back. Watching, she knew that she should have felt the same calm sweetness as when she had recaptured her own childhood. But it was cold in this garden. The trees were bare of leaves and it had been trying to snow. There was a white powdering of it on top of the walls, and the wind was like a knifeblade. The boys were on their own, out there.

Annie knew why she felt so cold and sad. She was afraid of leaving them. She felt her weakness, and the sure sense that she was failing them. Her love for them took in every minute of their lives, interwoven with her own for eight years, unshakable. It couldn’t end, could it, cut off in the darkness?

Annie left the garden window and walked through the house, touching the memories accumulated in the rooms. In the playroom they crouched beside the model train layout, their heads almost touching. In her bedroom Annie saw the wicker crib that he had put Tom into when she brought him home as a baby. He lay under the white covers, a tiny, warm bundle. Their faces turned up to her from the kitchen table, Benjy’s mouth rimmed with jam. The sounds of their voices drifted up the stairs, and she heard running footsteps overhead.

There was nothing of herself left in the house. She wanted to be there, but something terrible had happened to stop her going back. She felt her sons’ love, and their need, and the brutally snapped edges of the circle that had held them together. The dream she had had of her own childhood had contained another circle, unbroken. She had wanted so much to duplicate that circle and to set others moving outwards, ripples on a pool.

The loss hurt unbearably. Annie moaned, and at once the arm holding her tightened.

‘Tom,’ she said, ‘Benjy.’

‘Annie,’ the man’s voice said, very gently, like a lover’s in the most secret darkness. ‘Hold on. They’re coming for us. I can hear them.’

Annie didn’t know what he meant. She had been in the garden, watching her children play.

Steve had been listening. The ring of spades and drills was louder now, and he felt himself shrink from the sharp metal biting over his head. But he was frightened by how quickly Annie seemed to be slipping away from him.

‘Go on thinking about your children,’ he said. ‘You’ll be with them soon. I wish I had children. I’ve never felt that before, but I do now.’
Now it’s too late
.

The scraping overhead was much closer, but he felt himself at a distance from it, further with every minute. Another irony. Steve found himself smiling, but couldn’t remember why. He put his hand out to touch Annie’s cheek, strengthening their contact.

‘If I had children,’ he rambled, ‘I’d make it different. Not like for me. It would be so different. I’d make sure of that. Perhaps that was why I didn’t want any with Cass. I never thought of that.’

Annie turned her head a little, perhaps to hear better, perhaps reaching for the touch of his fingers again. He cupped her cheek in his hand.

‘Shall I tell you? I’ve told you everything else. There isn’t much, anyway.’

He began to talk and Annie listened, dimly confusing the little boy he was describing with her own sons, so that Steve and Tom and Benjy ran together down the paths ahead of her and their voices were carried back to her on the wind.

He had been to that flat before, of course. He knew it, on the day that his mother took him there with his suitcase, almost as well as his own home. Three floors, up the hollowed stone steps that had mysterious twinkly fragments embedded in them. Into the living room, where his Nan was waiting for them. Beyond was the kitchen, with the cracked lino floor. There was a grey enamel stove on legs in there, with a little ruff of grease around each of its feet, and the sight of the hairs caught in the grease made him feel sick in the back of his throat.

‘Here we are then, Mum,’ his mother had said, in the too-cheerful voice that always told him she was about to do something he wouldn’t like.

His Nan had simply jerked her chin and muttered, ‘I can see that.’

He had stayed with Nan before. He didn’t like sleeping in the little room beyond the kitchen because there was no window in it, and it was dark in the mornings when he woke up even when the sun was shining down on the High Street.

His mother had taken his case through into the room. He had seen her putting his things into it; too many, surely, for just one or two nights?

Nan had put the kettle on and made a pot of tea and his mother had drunk hers standing up by the kitchen window, smoking and looking out of the window. She wouldn’t look at him, and that made him afraid.

Then, when she had finished her tea she had come across the room to him and hugged him. She said, ‘Steve, are you listening to me? I’ve got to go away for a bit. Will you stay here and be a good boy for your Nan, and then I’ll come soon and take you home again?’

He had nodded, miserably, knowing that it was pointless to argue. And so his mother had gone and left him with his Nan, and he had gone into his bedroom and taken his toy cars out of his suitcase. He made a line of them on the kitchen lino, taking care not to look at the grease around the feet of the stove.

His mother had come back from time to time, less and less frequently. At first she had brought money, and Nan liked that.

‘Perhaps next week,’ she always said, when Steve asked her when she was going to take him back home. Then she began coming without money, and that made Nan angry.

In the end she didn’t come at all.

In the dark Steve lay holding Annie and trying to remember what it had been like, then.

It was hard, because it had been so featureless. There had been a long, long time when everything stayed exactly the same except that he grew bigger. He would recall the places clearly enough. Outside the flat there was the high, grey-brick school surrounded by a fenced yard. After school he had played between the lines of prefabs at the end of the street, and on the bombsites where the willowherb sprouted cheerfully. It had been the same for him, more or less, as for his friends. And if he had felt anything much, he had forgotten it.

Once, when Nan was angry with him for some reason, he had shouted at her, ‘I’m going away from here. I’m going to find my Dad, and tell him.’

All Nan had said was, ‘That’ll take a better detective than you are, my lad.’

At about the same time, he had learned that his mother had gone to live in Canada, with a friend.

Perhaps a year later, after months of silence, she had sent Nan some money in an envelope. There had been a letter with it, and in the letter his mother had said that part of the money was for a Christmas treat for Steve. Nan was to take him up to the West End, to Selfridges – she had stressed that, Selfridges, underlined – to see Father Christmas.