by Steven Sater
Move him? Why? Because he’d taken a fall? Had cut himself, had punctured his rib in a flurry of mortar and brick? Because he’d been coughing and pale, his same old miserable illness, ever since? Ridiculous! Alice leapt unsteadily to her feet: “Who? Alfred? No!”
But as she lurched forward, to lodge an objection, that militant Nurse pressed on, with dark conviction: “Summon the Orderlies. Send that child to the end of the line.”
In a fury, in a frenzy, Alice started toward the quarantine drapery. But the goodly Doctor had preceded her. And already had his goodly nose down Alfred’s throat: “Tonsillar Pseudomembrane—a viscous yellowish coating over the throat, you see?—consisting of coagulated Fibrim—”
“What does that mean?” Alice demanded.
“Mean? What it says it means. With complications due to Corynebacterium Diphtheriae—meaning, the pathogen transporting Diptheria—and Mycobacterium Tuberculosis—”
“Which means,” the Nurse spewed, with a pitchfork glance at Alice, “catch that cough, he’ll be your death.”
“Alfred?! Never. No. Please don’t move him. He’s my friend. He’s always been. My dearest friend.”
Winding a flick of unruly fringe behind an imperious ear, Nurse Cross took her cue from Stalin then: “Today he is your dearest friend; tomorrow, a statistic.”
“Don’t listen to them, Alfred,” cried Alice—toward his quarantine. “I’ll read to you.”
“Alice Spencer, get it through your head. Thirty-seven nights straight of bombs—and this is just the overture.”
With a heinous snap of her heathen fingers, that Nurse barked: “Ward D!”
“Ward D”?! The words alone, so cold. Alice knew what they meant: that dire ward where the wounded went. What they called the “good-as-dead.” Children whom you never saw again . . . But Alfred was not, and never would he be one of those. Not for Ward D.
No no no no. “He’ll be safe down here. With me. He’ll get better near me,” Alice declared.
“Back! To! Your! Bed!”
And with that, that Nurse—no, not just her—no, the entire eighty years of Red Cross Nurses, dressing all the wounds of all the world—seized hold of Alice and brazenly hauled her across the insomniac platform, till the girl tripped, near-toppled, but finally broke free. And arighted herself. Herself, once more!
And with that, and a splat, upon the floor beside her cot, down down down our Alice went.
* * *
• • •
Down down down. Yes—just like in her treasured book. Where her lovely Storybook Alice fell down down down the hole to Wonderland. Or so Alice thought, steadying her forearms on that gloating floor, resting her head against that callous cot.
But in the storybook, Alice remembered, her lovely Story Alice fell, and fell so slowly, she had time to ask: Would her fall never end? She, she tumbled past such child things— cupboards, maps, and empty jars of marmalade. And she played such sweet-sad word games (“Do cats eat bats? . . . Do bats eat cats?”) as she fell fell fell right past. Asking herself, wonderingly, that sweet Story Alice: Did it matter with a question, how she asked it, if either way she asked she couldn’t answer?
She, that ever-lovely Story Alice, with her daisy chains and sweet White Rabbit, how could she know what it was, what it had been, to wake up from the sleep of life and find yourself within some dream of death? To find your door blown off, embedded halfway up the stairs; your bedroom crumbling about you, the rubble blasting down. Could she have stood, stood fast somehow, teetering, trembling, but not falling? Could she have stood and seen—yes, seen—her sister’s scream? As lovely lovely Cathy fell, bleeding, screaming, fallfallfalling, sprawled and crying, down that staircase, flailing in a gulf of crumbling banister and raging black-fire ceiling beams.
Run! Alice had. She’d run straight to her sister. Catherine! Had grabbed her hand—still pulsing hand—hold on! Till that strong-arm man, that fireman, had heaved her off, had dragged her screaming into night. No air, no sky left in the sky. Cathy carried out, her arms charred, her chest all sunken and awry. Some rescue worker thrusting her into an ambulance, one in a line of waiting ambulances—each with its war-widow, volunteer driver—as Alice wailed Noooooooo, and Mum gone crawling after. Screaming, crying—as if from some earthquake life. Grabbing for Alice: “Darling, quick!” But Alice . . . could not. Could not. She’d just . . . stood, silent, mouth wide open. As if some tree (which lacked the intelligence of trees) had begun growing, spreading from its rough trunk into branches straining from her—no talk, just brittle barren leaves. Not a word she had to offer. Not to Catherine, not to Mum; not to them she lovedshelovedsheloved. Not while down through her tongue, those dark roots dug. Small wonder, she could not budge. Could not see them, really. Only darkly, through some inner, annihilating mirror: Mummy crying, “Alice, please! This minute!” But she could not. God my God, so sorry, Mum. (Papa, had he still been with them, he would have understood. She knew.) She just . . . she had to run. From them. To hurtle herself through this Nowhereland. Past the children covered in blood, the dogs lying helpless or stiff, the mothers, bandaged, wailing, covered in dust. Had to run from all that—on, past that broken bank of blurred neighbor faces, all their features erased from them.
She had to rush. Had to run. Even as policemen cordoned off lawns and piles of loose brick and shattered streetlamps, all the burnt ruined emblems of her street, her home. She had to run, to see . . . where Alfred was. To know he was . . . still there.
How could her lovely Storybook Alice ever know what that was? To bid good night, good night, to everything once you, once yours? To run on, as the moon lugged out, like some blank-faced rat just crawling from the rubbish heap? To run and run, through rubble-streets? Past the steeple of their ravaged church, the steeple which always had spoken for the church, scorched and burned—the nave and altar reduced to a heap of dumb nothing—embers of nothing. Shriveled, charred prayerbooks alight in the flames, bits of print scattering into the night like black butterflies . . . How could that Story Alice know what that was, to run on, regardless, past still-live bombs just covered with sand and earth?
And what of the library? Those wood-paneled chambers, more full of thought and mystery even than their church . . . Their beloved library, where she’d huddled so often with Alfred. All of those mullioned rose windows. All those immaculate aisles, where they’d knelt, where she’d let her heart run shelf over shelf, over Anne of Green Gables and Captains Courageous, where she’d gingerly thumbed through already-thumbed pages, wondering just who had passed there before her. All that, all those, gone up in smoke. A holocaust of words.
And everywhere else, everywhere that she looked—nothing but dust, ash, and litter. As if everything truly human—everything of the mind, of the spirit—had been stripped from the world. Leaving only one ruined, material shell. Only death. Only fear, as they said, in a handful of dust.
How could that pinafored Storybook Alice know what it meant to find, in that empire of dust, that the neighborhood shelter had also been hit—to fear her friend was trapped within and then to dig and dig for him? Her Alfred! To dig through the black-pit rubble with her own bare hands while hearing those terrible moans from within, and the only light she had was from the shells exploding overhead? As all those wounded ghosts ran, screaming through the fiery brimstone streets—like the graves had cast out all their dead.
Alfred—where was Alfred?
Then, someone calling—neighbors shrieking—they had found his father. Mr. Hallam. No! Buried in debris. But he was such a good man! Always so good to her. And here he lay, no breath. No heartbeat. No life left.
What could she do? What else could she have done, if not to run to find her friend? No matter what they screamed at her, she knew she had to keep on—keep running. Through the naked desolation that was London. Running who-knew-where. Where where was Alfred? . . .
So alone she s
tood, as if she’d somehow stepped outside her mind, and had no map, no guide to help her be here with herself. Though, in truth, her Story Alice had been there too. There, in Alice’s hand. Within the book.
Still with her. Her storybook Hero, calling to her: “Run, and I’ll run with you. You’ll find him—come, you have to. You can’t imagine life without him.”
No, she couldn’t.
“We’ll find him. Come. We must.”
But how? Where?
“Come, now, Alice.”
CHAPTER V:
—
A PORTRAIT OF URBAN CONTENTMENT
HOW long had it actually been since Alice had finally straightened her knees, since she’d climbed from that timedulled floor onto her cot again? She couldn’t say. Long enough, that was all.
Sometimes, it felt like she was one of those (fabled) prisoners in Plato’s Cave. Chained to her cot, like her fellow inmates—and all she knew were those shadowy walls and the secondhand sounds from above.
And, as for the world below? Only the circus surrounding her. Witness the sideshow: that myopic, and mean-spirited, Miss Mamie Van Eysen. Also aged fifteen (but going on a flirty fifty). She, who barely deigned to inhabit the common air. She, seated, thankfully, two woolen cot-thrones to the left, but so omnipresently there.
How, Alice wondered, how had that golden-haired girl, the transparent belle, no doubt, of every debutante ball (where the dance floor undoubtedly brightened beneath her, wherever her petticoats roamed)—how had that same Mademoiselle Van Eysen found her way here, to this random and plebian platform? And how how how did she find herself now, lolloping out of that moth-holed bit of burlap; rising in tattered majesty, barefoot and stocking-free? Without even (choke! gasp! scream!) a governess?! As she intrepidly set aside her chipped, chipping teacups (the sole treasures she’d brought with her) to wade through the slatternly fish-and-chips wrappers toward Alfred’s quarantine? For what? All the while, fanning her delicate self with her debutante fan? How could the Nurse allow that?
How indeed. Alice knew by now (by this, the ninth night of this Underground-now) exactly how that privileged Mamie would answer—with a sigh of fatigue, so grand it could only be known by that languid, leisure class . . .
“You want to go, then go,” counseled some rough-magic voice, high above.
Tabatha? With a turn of her head, Alice pried into the gloom. Only the barest hint of that enigmatic grin. (As if the one-behind-the-grin felt that was enough of her and so she let no more of her appear.)
“Go,” said the grin.
“Oh, but,” Alice stammerstalled, “he already has a guest.”
“Careful,” admonished the grin. “When you act too stupid, you turn into stupid.”
Alice frowned. “But I’m not . . .”
“Acting?”
“Look at her,” the frowning Alice persisted, with a discreet nod toward Mamie. “With all that weariness tutored into her from the moment of her silver-spoon birth.”
“The question is,” countered Tabatha, “how will those tattered airs serve in this war-leveled world? In this strange new world, where a Princess Starlight lies cradled next to those Unthinkables—the Poor.”
“Meaning, me?” deduced the frown. “A girl like me?”
“Alice, take in the world. We weren’t all born with a Mum and a home and a warm cottage pie after school. Nor is this war merely what it is to you.” With that, that brightness disappeared, like the gleam of a wick going out. (Or like vision, itself, falling darkly away.)
“Yes, of course,” Alice silently mouthed, and in silence felt. Till gradually her eyes settled once more on the Underworld war zone she now knew as home. She breathed, all right, take that in:
All those toddlers. Tied to the rails and hovering over those blank, night-mirroring tracks, the youngest and frailest children hung, suspended in hammocks (like so many baby Moseses in bulrush baskets). What a picture they made: like some portrait of Urban Contentment, really, or some advertisement in Sleep’s tourist office. For, those children did not appear stricken but, rather, at peace—as if lifted in the rough grasp of that burlap into an otherworldly calm. An ignorant bliss: this being the only world they had known, it was good enough for them to forget themselves in. This bare platform night-world, which they’d been so rudely shuffled into. What, what would become of them, when they emerged, Alice asked—how would they do, when they woke, in the dark arms of sleep, to the war-ravaged daylight again?
Alice shook and shook her head. As if to loose every last riddle out of it. Really, what a surfeit of thoughts, what a surplus of feelings she near-always had! The question was, what was the purpose in having them?
Rousing herself, drawing her still-scabby knees to her chest, she glanced toward that quarantine curtain. Drawn open a bit. Yes! But there skulked that Splintered Princess, Mamie. Slanting her pretty, freckled self in, fanning him? Cooing to him? Making him laugh? (As though merely by speaking to someone she conferred such superiority upon them that all others only could envy them.)
“Nothin’ to be done for it,” some throaty voice concluded, just over her shoulder. Presuming, it felt, on just what Alice felt. Who? Who else but that loll-about, ever-near mouth in its nodding, smokeblue cloud. The unstoppered Angus. Regaling, with one of his tales, someone beside him but not listening to him. Someone too muffled by their own thoughts to be bothered with his.
Someone. Someone else, who mumbled merely: “I’m beginning to come around to the opinion. Yes.” Who? Who but that daft and (indubitably) dapper whippersnapper, Dodgy.
An Eton schoolboy formerly, Dodgy had been posh as posh could be—from his patent leather slippers to the primrose boutonniere in his neat crop jacket. Or so Alice imagined. But, here he was, below earth now, seemingly allergic to this, that, and everything; like a creature who could thrive only in artificial light; his pallid arms shivering—as he ducked the common dust. The next moment, with a Vaudevillian flourish, he’d drape himself like some grande dame, in a fraying shelter blanket, donning some “borrowed” earring, and fretting his complexion in a suspect hand mirror. This ever-bickering, cross-dressing lad, drawn near, no doubt, like some hungry calf, longing for that whiff of class that Mamie still possessed. His Roman nose held lofty in the close and musty night air.
Past that notable profile, Alice let her gaze wander toward Alfred, only to recoil at the touch of a rough, uncustomary hand, at the sight and the smell of all those vagabond smoke rings. “All bloomin’ Leeds,” blathered the dust-strewn Angus, proud owner of that rude-rough hand, “it was one wrecked shell . . .”
“I’m, uh,” Alice tried, “a little busy . . .”
“Feel it with me,” roocoocooed a rogue, throaty ring. “The black-eyed remains of the church—my dead Mum’s church—where my best mate got married. The pub from their brilliant reception no longer there. Blue o’clock in the morning it was, and the whole infernal sky, pink as pink could be.”
“I’m sure,” Alice offered firmly, attempting to wriggle her shoulder free (after all, she was rather accustomed to having it).
“All the windows pink,” Angus blithely continued, “the pavements pink, even the breeze. Brisk and cold as a wolf tit, it was.”
“Tit, indeed,” observed Dodgy. With a connoisseurish eye, browsing Alice’s breast: “Well, a cad like Angus wouldn’t bother, would he, if that blousy wasn’t such a snuggly fit.”
“Stuff and nonsense!” Alice retorted. Really. Never before had her growing chest been such a nuisance as this. Surely, there were bigger things to dwell on than her blouse. To Angus she turned imploringly: “Unhand my shoulder, please.”
But Angus held tight. His clenched hand straining out of that seeming dust-heap of his outfit. Waxing irascibly on: “Those Nazi swine, flyin’ low, black crosses on their wings. Droppin’ their damned incendiaries, dottin’, dribblin’ their poisonous spunk down th
e night; those magnesium flares climbin’ back up the sky. And all I could think was: See? Now, you satisfied? Knobheads! Throw yourself a bleedin’ war and not let me play a part in it? We all could be gettin’ a night’s sleep, if you’d only let me fly . . .”
Almost, just almost, Alice could let herself entertain empathy for the stunted hopes of this still-aspiring lad. Were it not that . . . his own rogue eye kept roving her chest, as if he were staking a claim on her just-budding life . . .
“Hehehehe,” came some fresh lowlife laugh, from behind, someone else crowding in. Who? Who but that sad-sorry, shape-shifting tyke, Nigel, who’d been drawn like a moth to Angus’s cot (from his own, further on). A young man of thirteen, or so he claimed, though seeming about nine—in any event, such a child. So snooty one minute; the next, so broken-and-scattered. And always so oddly in denial, forever fidgeting with his battered schoolboy hat and his dusty, pockets-ripped navy-blue jacket, with the ink-bleeding pen clipped to the faded breast pocket. Still dismissing all this Blitz as phooey, just some Phony War. Although the poor thing had already lost his mother, his father, all his brothers to it—and somehow missed his teddy most of all.
So sad, really, Alice thought, hearing that boy heheh-ing on, mocking his surroundings to console himself, for the loss of everything he’d known as himself.
“My Mummy’s coming for me today,” declared Nigel to everyone and no one in particular. Plugging his mouth shut with his ink-stained thumbs.
What, what would he do, when his Mum did not come?
Thankfully, a (rather nonplussed) pause ensued, and Alice managed to slip free from Angus’s grasp. Unencumbered, she retreated—head, neck, and shoulders, thank you—to a more discreet space on her cot. There she settled, sighed, drew in a breath. She gnawed a bit on her stiff nether lip, determined to get back to something, to somewhere the world still made sense. “The necessity of living,” as Papa had said, “in some upper air.”
