by Chris Cleave
“I’m sorry,” said Mary. “If that counts for anything.”
“You’re sorry . . .”
“I waited for what I thought was a decent time. I wouldn’t have written if I thought that you and he were hitting it off.”
Hilda still looked straight ahead. “Who wrote first? You, or him?”
Mary rested her forehead on the wheel. “I don’t blame you for being angry.”
“ ‘Angry’ isn’t the word. You’ve done this since we were children.”
“I know. I’m sorry, Hilda.”
In the useless headlights the men got one body back on its stretcher. They lifted it unevenly and the corpse rolled off again.
“At every party you left with the nicest man. And whatever second-choice boy I kissed was closing his eyes and thinking of you.”
“Well it won’t happen again, I promise.”
“Oh, so Alistair is the last one you’ll take from me?”
“I didn’t want it to happen.”
“When did you know?”
“When I took his bag to the station.”
“So you did kiss him.”
“No.”
“Did you hold hands?”
“No. I was with Tom, remember? You don’t know what it was like.”
“Why? Do you suppose I’ve never been in love? I feel these things, Mary. Hopeless as I am, I feel them. But you are always there—aren’t you?—to rescue me from love.”
Mary closed her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
Hilda said nothing. A swing tune played at the edge of Mary’s awareness, somewhere in the white noise: a phantom melody. Nobody slept.
When the corpses were loaded again, Mary drove to the morgue. Now it took an age to get everything off the roof, since the men had made doubly sure with the strapping. Their cold hands struggled with the knots. With an effort Mary kept her head from drifting down to the wheel again.
“It’s getting harder,” said Hilda.
“What is?”
“To believe that this is endurable.”
Mary supposed she either meant their friendship, or the bombing. Tens of thousands were dead now, and everyone left was sickened. This was something about war that they did not warn one of: that death was an illness of the living, a cumulative poison.
When Clive and Huw had got the empty stretchers on the roof at last, Mary drove back to the church. They were all too weary to go down into the shelter. They listened to Tom’s wind-up gramophone, which Mary kept in the ambulance now. Clive passed a bottle around. They worked at getting drunk enough to be able to do the job, without being so drunk that they couldn’t. Through the windshield, in the orange glow of fires, the rubble stretched to the limit of sight.
“It’s all right for you,” said Hilda. “But I don’t have anyone.”
“You will. You’ll see.”
“Listen to yourself,” said Hilda.
The sadness calcified.
The ARP controller tapped on the ambulance window with a fresh address. Mary parked the gramophone’s needle and drove. Hilda rested her head against the passenger window and watched the ack-ack gliding up.
The incident was in Farringdon, past their usual patch, and when they got there the scene was already busy with ambulances and fire crews. An office building had come down on top of the shelter beneath it, and the wreckage was ablaze. The crews had worked an access route down into the shelter, and Clive and Huw joined them to bring out the wounded. The firemen played hoses on the steaming rubble around the access tunnel, and the stretcher parties were coming out drenched.
Hilda took her medical bag and went down without a word. After a minute Mary couldn’t bear it and went down after her. The tunnel began under a bowed steel lintel and tended steeply down a stairway that had been filled by rubble when the building collapsed. It had been excavated sufficiently to permit passage if one doubled over. Freezing water poured from the roof of the tunnel.
The dim light from the flames outside surrendered to a darkness broken by battery lamps every few yards. Mary’s knees scraped on the sharp rubble and her tin hat slammed against a beam, so hard that she was stunned for a moment. Shouts were coming up from the darkness. She forced herself to continue.
The tunnel opened out into what Mary took to be a large water tank, in which for some reason the men of the rescue crews were wading thigh-deep by the bewildering light of torches.
“Where’s the shelter?” she asked a rescuer.
“This is it.”
She must have looked blank, because he said: “It’s water from the fire hoses. Flooding.”
The survivors seemed all to have been brought out—the people down here were rescuers—and Mary saw them going down into the black water, plunging in and staying under for long moments before surfacing with gasps.
Hilda came over to her. “They’re only looking for bodies, I’m afraid. Let’s go back up.”
Mary took a step forward and a heavy weight came down on the back of her legs, pushing her down. She knelt, chest-deep. Hilda took her arm to help her up. Mary tried to stand but found that she couldn’t. In the cold water her breath came in gasps.
Hilda held her under both arms. “Oh do get up, won’t you? We’re all exhausted, you know.”
Mary felt down her legs with her hands. A heavy beam—it felt like metal—was pressing into the angle of her knees. Her kneecaps were pinioned to the uneven rubble of the floor. She strained against the metal. It wouldn’t move at all. There was no effect except to grind her knees into the rubble, which hurt. She reached down and felt along the beam, left and right, but it stretched away farther than the span of her arms.
A rescuer splashed up and shone his torch on Mary. “All right here?”
“I’m very sorry,” she said. “I seem to be stuck.”
She smiled, which was all one could do when embarrassed.
The rescuer had Hilda hold the torch while he knelt beside Mary and tugged along the length of the beam. “It’s good and stuck, isn’t it? Are you in pain?”
“Only when I try to move. Which is silly, isn’t it?”
“Well you just stay calm, darling, while we get this sorted out.”
“Thank you very much,” said Mary. Until the man told her to stay calm, it hadn’t occurred to her that there might be reasons not to.
Hilda held her hands. More rescuers came and began to duck under, bringing up a brick here and a piece of bar there, but whatever was trapping her was too heavy to shift. Mary gathered that the beam was set in concrete at both ends, and the concrete lodged under obstructions. She took in the men’s nervous voices and the efforts they made not to alarm her.
They became more methodical, searching underwater obstructions with their fingertips, trying to understand how to dislodge the beam. The sound of pouring water was loud in the sudden calm. Hilda undid her hair clips and fixed Mary’s hair back to stop it going in her mouth.
“Be a dear and do my lipstick next,” said Mary, her teeth chattering.
Hilda said, “You’re doing very well.”
The water was rising in the basement—now Mary understood this—at about an inch a minute. While she had been kneeling the water, which had been up to her sternum, had risen to the base of her throat. It poured down from the ceiling, faster now that the rubble above was saturated. Some of the rescuers left and Mary stared after them, wild-eyed, until someone told her they had gone to rig pumps.
“What can we do?” Mary said.
Hilda looked at her strangely. “This.”
Now Mary began to struggle. She heaved against the beam as hard as she could, not minding the pain as the metal cut into her calves. She thrashed and bucked, and when the rescuers held her arms to keep her still, she began to fight against them. Water gushed from the ceiling in torrents.
When the
level reached her mouth, Mary tilted her head back to keep her face clear of it. The water rose to her earlobes.
Hilda squeezed her hands until she was calm again. In the wavering light of the torches, Mary saw the look in Hilda’s eyes. Now she understood that the most awful thing was going to happen to her. Grief came. Its level rose. The water was over her eardrums now, muting the splashing of the rescuers as they made their last, frantic attempts.
Mary felt unbearable misery that Kenneth Cox was gone. His voice was still alive—this was the terrible thing. The boy never would be told to hush and now he yelled away, somewhere in the impossible music that was flooding her. Grief poured down from fire hoses.
“It’s all just a dream,” said Hilda. “Shh, just a dream.”
“SHHUSSSSSHH!” shouted Kenneth. “It! Is! Just! A! Dream!”
It was agony that he was gone, agony that pretty Beryl Waldorf had died mute and unconsoled, agony that Betty Oates still smiled, even now, when Mary shut her eyes. She arched her body back and forth. She wrenched against the beam that pinned her, and it was more than she could bear, it was really far too much, and it was so clear now that one had not believed in death at all—neither how quickly it came up one on, nor how fathomless its sadness was—until this moment when it was suddenly here.
She groaned in the darkness, and then she felt the sharp scratch as Hilda punctured her arm, through the fabric of her jacket and blouse, with the needle of a morphine syrette. Hilda was looking down at her calmly. “Shhh now. Just . . . a . . . dream.”
After a minute Mary’s breathing came under control and the chill of the black water was gone. A glow spread through her belly and up her spine. It was unfamiliar and yet perfectly native and good. She felt Hilda’s hands on her face, holding her up. “There now.”
Mary was still aware of what was about to happen to her, but only in the same way that one was aware of the crossword. It was something difficult that one might pick up, or might not. The relief of the morphine was upon her and she understood that the drug was a simple and merciful thing, no less appropriate than a bandage for a cut.
“Better?” said Hilda.
Mary supposed there was an answer. The water was almost up to her lips. How pretty Hilda was, how luminous and constant in the fickle light of the torches. Mary watched her friend, this debutante who had learned the habit of going out among bombs with no more protection than a tin hat and an armband to bring home the bodies of strangers.
It seemed to Mary that Hilda had asked a perfectly simple question. Certainly she should respond. The water, when the first trickle entered her mouth, tasted rather strange. How cold it was, and how sharp with soot and brick dust and yellow clay. How odd that London wanted to trickle into her. She smiled, but the water poured in and she supposed that she ought to close her mouth and breathe through her nose while she could.
How lovely was each breath. How peculiar that one had never noticed.
She felt certain that Hilda had asked her a question.
Morphine was the discovery—and it seemed obvious now—that every breath was perfect. The knowledge had been there all along, unnoticed and perfectly straightforward. How strange that one had never seen it. Was it an incapacity, a specific blindness of the mind? Or was it a mannered oversight? It would hardly be polite to go around noticing that every breath was lovely. She giggled, and water flooded in until she closed her mouth again.
The agony of her children’s deaths still sounded in an undiminished cacophony—yes, she was perfectly aware of it—but the anguish was no longer particular to her. It simply was: one could hear it clearly, and listen to it calmly, picking out its individual timbres and notes, distinguishing its great themes and minor phrases. She grieved for every quiet sigh Beryl Waldorf had made. Her heart broke for each timid inflection in Thomas Essom’s voice. She heard every harmonic in the screech of the chalk on the blackboard when she had written Tom’s surname after her own. Of course: nobody ever really died. Life lingered. Every breath would persist forever, written in the clay of the city. And given that this was so perfectly obvious, it suddenly seemed imponderable that the enemy would make the effort to pack high explosive into a metal casing, fight it through the defending fire, and drop it from twenty thousand feet over a city of immortals.
Hilda was watching with her eyebrows raised in a question, and Mary realized that this had been the case for some time, and possibly forever. “Better?” said Hilda again, or perhaps it was still the first time she had asked: the word dissolved into the groundwater of the city, the word without end.
She strained to place her mouth into air. “Yes, thank you. Much.”
Hilda seemed ready to cry.
Mary said, “I am sorry I wasn’t kinder to you.”
“Oh, don’t be sorry, it’s . . .” Hilda looked up at blackness. “It’s . . .”
Mary watched the incomplete phrase float up into the night and come to rest there, glittering in bright points at the farthest extremity of the sky. This was how the stars had been made, after all: each the end of an unfinished thought, each an answer that one had known all along. She realized, of course, that this was not the sky and the stars—only the torches of the rescuers and the black roof of the basement—but she also understood that it was the same thing.
And now she realized—as the black water rose above her nose and eyes, as the light of the stars became blurred through the water—that this breath inside her was her last. She smiled, exhaled, and sank.
Hilda squeezed her hands. The two of them had always known each other, of course. They were one person—she, and Hilda, and Alistair, and Tom. They had gone too far into the unendurable dark and now they glittered there, too far apart to be a comfort to one another anymore, but not so scattered that a godlike eye could never make of them a constellation.
The night lasted a moment, then forever.
In the dark, silhouetted against the stars of the rescuers’ torches, she watched Hilda’s face come down through the water toward her. Hilda’s black hair floated in strands against the light. Now she will have to have her hair reset, thought Mary. Why is she sinking down with me?
And then Hilda’s lips pressed against hers, and Hilda’s fingers pinched her nostrils closed, and Mary felt Hilda’s breath, sharp with tobacco and unutterably perfect, flooding into her. The breath hung suspended inside her, glowing and lovely. Mary held the breath until the life was gone from it, then sent it up to the surface. Against the torchlight she watched the silver bubbles rise. After a moment, Hilda’s mouth came down and breathed into her again.
Again and again Hilda breathed, and Mary learned the habit of breathing only when Hilda’s lips pressed against hers. How long it went on, and how silently. When finally the water level fell, and words came back into the world, and she heard Hilda saying she must breathe on her own now, Mary had become so dependent on Hilda’s lips that at first she did not dare to breathe without them. She clung to Hilda, and pressed her face to hers, and it took a long time of Hilda gently pushing her away before she understood that her mouth was above water again.
The level fell. The rescuers had managed to run the intake pipes from the fire engines down into the basement, and soon it was pumped dry. They brought a hydraulic jack and lifted the beam that had pinned her. They laid her on a stretcher, wrapped her in blankets and took her to the surface. Hilda took a grease pen and painted a letter M on her forehead.
People were saying how much blood she had lost. Through the slow warp of the morphine Mary tried to listen, although it was becoming harder to make out words. It seemed that the beam, pinning her left leg, had cut into something that bled. Everyone moved faster now, and she watched them all rush around. How funny they were. It was because they did not understand that the air was all one needed. Now this perfect breath; now this one; now this. Hilda tightened a tourniquet around her thigh. How silly she was. They wrapped her in
more blankets, and then Clive and Huw lifted her stretcher onto the rack on the roof of the Hillman. Somebody drove, impossibly fast. The Hillman screeched and slewed. Mary thought, I hope they have remembered to strap the world on to me.
Here was the indigo sky, noisy with stars. Mary stared up at them, all the unslaked billions. How gamely they faded. Without fuss, and faster now, the stars were losing their brightness. And as the stars dimmed, by soft degrees and quietly, the stars and the night became one. It was softer than one imagined, at the end. The final thing was the sound—lovely, in its way—of the last, lost bombers of the enemy droning home through the air that had been there all along. The air, then, quietening now—which would be there after they were gone. The ageless air, barely perturbed by their slipstream.
April, 1941
A SIROCCO BLEW DUST in from Africa. The sun, even at noon, cast red light over the island. The wind blew for six days, so dry that exposed skin cracked like fired earth, so hard that the emaciated children could not walk against it and instead careened from alley to alcove in the ruins. The windblown grit scourged their legs until they bled.
The sea was ripped and dyed by the dust. Under the darkened sky the waves, breaking on the southwest coast, bloomed crimson at the foaming crests and purple in the troughs. The islanders hauled their fishing boats up the beaches through the last remaining channels between the mines and the barbed-wire entanglements. In the red light they furled their sails, folded their ragged nets and weighed them down with rocks.
In Fort Bingemma, the wind dragged the sky across the unglazed rifle port of Alistair’s room. He shuttered his mind against the howl. He removed the dressing from his right hand where the airman had bitten it. It came away without pain, drawing with it soft strands of yellowish glutinous matter. It didn’t smell right—but then, Alistair told himself, nothing did. After a year of the siege everything on the island was foul, including the water to wash it in.
The whole edge of his hand was gone now, the fort’s surgeon having excised a little more each time. The infection didn’t want to be cut out. His little finger no longer moved, while the ring finger twitched a slow rhythm of which Alistair was not the conductor. In the deepest part of the wound a tendon shone dully. It was a mercy the light was no better.
