by Steven Sater
“Enough!” cried Alice suddenly, her voice breaking with the cry. “No one has ever loved like me. I’ve . . . lost everything. And now, I’ve lost him, too.”
“Aha!” the Mock Turtle retorted with a told-you-so groan: “You see, we are a we.”
“But . . .” Alice searched for words. “I don’t know how to let him go.”
“Don’t,” the Mock Mock Turtle preached. “If you never move forward, you never have to leave your friend behind. Simply give into your grief, live and breathe your grief, like—”
Breeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep. That Dread Cross Whistle. A frenzy of torchlights, and a rampage of shoulderless shadows, swept across the platform, bedazzling the rafters. And, ever-mysterious, there she was again—Tabatha. Recoiling from the passing gleams and toobrightstares. (Like a thing so long familiar with the dark she couldn’t do for long without it.)
“Tabatha Dedwin,” growled the global Red Cross.
The most disingenuous meoww: “Ma’am?”
“Where have you been?”
“Nowhere. Ma’am,” retorted Tab.
“I said.”
But, that rum-tum Tabbie couldn’t have cared less who said or what they’d said. “Me, I’m the girl who went up, then came down without eyes,” she purred. “Not a light on, up there—you could die of the truth out tonight.”
“Yes, indeed,” Mamie sniped, “that’s rather why we all stayed down here. And left you to chase after that half-wit.”
Dodgy puckered his pursey lips. Freed now, it seemed, to gossip to his heart’s content.
“Harold Pudding. Exactly.”
“Puddinnnng? Harold Pudding?” Dr. Butridge came on mumbling—as if some long mustache were muffling his mouth, except he had no mustache.
Ignoring the man, the Red Cross Nurse abraded the renegade Tabbie: “And . . . Pudding?”
“Couldn’t find him. Anywhere.”
“Well, what did you expect?” the Red Cross Nurse countered. “That he’d be lounging on the neighboring curb, cross-legged?”
“I looked down every street,” reported Tabatha. “Rows of flats stripped of their backs, like so many broken dollhouses. Row after row of four naked walls, just staring at each other. Their roofs blown open, revealing stairways to nowhere. All those furnished rooms, emptied. Littered with busted beds and cupboards. A plate of unpeeled potatoes, left on some plaid tableclothed table . . .”
Another lone echo mourned, seeming to arise from somewhere within Alice: “Ay me!”
“I called his name,” Tabbie pressed on. “Nothing. No one. Some crusty, drunken bloke by the alley stood bragging, how many shops, how many houses just down. Like it was worth keeping score. The gloomy pride of the just bombed, you know.”
“Ayy mee! . . .” Alice felt as much as heard.
“I asked every shadow I met—all the anxious worried women in their doorways, all the grime-smeared lodging-house keepers, all the men too old and unsettled to stay in the shelter—had they seen my soldier? Some rouged-up streetwalker squawked back, ‘Yours, dear? Gone and left you on your lonesome? I’ll take care of that, then.’”
“Ayyy meee . . .”
“Then, who can blame the lady her willies?” Tabatha went on flatly. “So many soldiers wandering about, like stars gone out. And what can you ask from a man just back from combat? It’s like he’s returned from the Land of the Dead. All he can really say is: ‘You cannot imagine.’”
“And the rouged lady?” Dodgy deigned to ask.
“Oh, her,” Tabbie replied. “She shrugged. And waved her torch and showed us heaps of broken glass. All the latest style in litter! Oh, and those scattered body parts in rubbish sacks—”
“Tabatha Dedwin,” the Nurse blared.
“What? How else do you sack up the dead? How else recover the limbs—and pitch the bodies blown to bits?”
As no answer was forthcoming to that, Tabatha resumed her former track: “I wanted to thank that Cadaverous Lady: ‘If you knew what your torch, or a hurricane lamp, what a lit window meant—to those of us out on the streets.’ But she’d gone by then. Leaving no lack of void. As though all those Messerschmitts had finally managed to shoot down the moon. To blot every watery star from the deadman’s sky. Nothing but the nothing left.”
“No Harold?” Alice couldn’t not ask.
“A van marked ‘Dead Only’ passed. But no Harold, no Pudding among them.”
But, he had to come back. At least for his sketchbook. He couldn’t become just some swelling of the ground, some rock, rolled round as the earth rolled round . . .
“I’ll be seeing you, in all the old familiar places,” the sardonic Dodgy crooned.
Harold, he could never be like one who fought and died. More like, one who died but still was fighting . . .
Accustomed as she was to swallowing sentences whole, Nurse Cross seemed unable to handle the lump in her throat. Alice could almost hear the woman thinking: And all for what? For what—the exhaustion, the late nights, all the ceaseless caring about every detail? For what? For them, her charges, who were always so resentful, or frankly indifferent? Only for them, too, to wind up dead on the streets? “Ah well,” the Nurse said, “he’s not the first.”
Doctor B suppressed his spittle, as if to attest to his powerlessness. If, in the end, the patient will not listen, if he will not follow his prescription, what is a doctor to do? Meanwhile, the Doc put on his best nod. “At least we’ve spared Ward D another lad.”
Silently the Red Cross Nurse set her face in her hand, and with that, a terrible lamenting arose on the air. A sorrow, larger than London, that bewept itself: “Ay meeeeeee!” As if some grand Bereavement Group of Mock Turtles were having it out, right there on the platform: grieving the good grief, gnashing their absent teeth about how lost they were, beyond recall, and, worse still, how normal that, too, had become.
Having none of it, insistent, siren after siren sounded. This time, in rapid-fire succession. And still, the roaring of engines drew nearer. Like evil heralds, announcing the coming scarring of heaven; that nightblue heaventree of stars decimated, shattering into a darkness so hideous no darkness could comprehend it. Once again from the battered world above came the shrieks of the dying, crying without wisdom, unregarded, from the streets. And there, from below words, some menacing sense of an ultimate, idiot silence, a wordless sense of hopelessness, began to settle in—to steep itself in everything. Like a sigh from all the small things of the earth, the books and the identity papers, the garters and school ribbons, all the greatcoat buttons, guarded by loved ones in cupboard drawers, somewhere . . .
And yet. There, just there, in the very material of her mind, in the depth of her ear, below those anguished chords from the impious Nazi war on heaven, Alice could make out some slow buzzing hymn. (Like in Chopin: some return to D-flat major—after all that throbbing darkchord drama!) She could feel, she could sense, some windy grandeur soon to come sweeping round.
Surely, she thought, Churchill must be on radio now, rousing them all through this darkest of hours. Soon, sometime soon again, the “All Clear” would sound, commanding with invincible sound. And from every corner of this still-sceptered isle would come Butchers and Bakers and Candlestick Makers, would come Clerks and Clerics, Typists and Tailors (and in from the suburbs, Wheelwrights and Tolltakers). All of them, striding victorious over bomb craters, until they came clattering, down down the Tube-station stairs. To queue, as one does, for the late train—home again.
One night soon, Alice knew, she would walk up those long stairs with Alfred. Not tonight, to be sure. But once this awful war ended, they would stroll again through Westminster, along the Embankment; the lamps of all London would lift their frail lanterns again—glimmering, half-blued, from the opposite bank. The Thames running softly on, as some passing tram captured their face in its brightening glance. They would linger, they wo
uld, beside those rain-worn Victorian sphinxes, in the shadow of that Ancient Egyptian Obelisk. And there, they would know that they too had stood, that they too had survived. That they too now were part of that monolith, which had stood through so many eras of dark hateful fire and yet still pointed in peace toward the still evening sky.
CHAPTER XIX:
—
THE DEVIL’S FERRIS WHEEL
“THE Devil’s Ferris Wheel, that’s what they call it, Alice.” So Alfred had informed her, as they peered out from under his blackout curtain onto the London night robed in fire.
Just a little more than a month ago, was it? Only a month? His eyes so alive with that firelight, his cheeks flushed, his breathing tight, uneven, as he beckoned her nearer. “All the colors, Alice! The orange, the magenta, the purple-pink-green flames, see—like souls in bliss, riding that wheel into the brimstone pit.”
Well, she couldn’t disagree, looking out on that kaleidoscopic night. Only color wheeling after color; each one lavishing itself, long and wide, like another blood-ribbon in flight. As bullets sprouted erasures, and as bombs tore open the sky—scattering shrapnel and shells, rattling the roofs, and pounding every disfigured street in Bromley.
(What, she asked, what was going on in the mind of the sky? Was it bewildered by the delirious fire? Or awed by the dazzling display—the latest style in Nazi fireworks? Or neither? Somehow it seemed so . . . unperturbed.)
“We must close the curtain, Alfred.”
“We will,” he said, no affect to his words. His gaze still fixed on that darkpane of light. “Father says, they’ve bombed the zoo again.”
“Oh no!” Alice blurted out. “They have?”
Faintly on the window, his grim reflection nodded. “One of the zebras was sprung. And a host of monkeys. Our squirrel monkeys!”
“But they’ll find them. Or the monkeys will run home again. They’ll be hungry,” she assured him.
“Me, I envy them. Honestly. Despite how frightened. Despite the sky on fire. Better, one last fanciful dance . . .”
“Yes.” No. No.
“Better that. When you look what’s happened to the fishes!” he expostulated, his agitation rising. “All our carp and perch and eels—”
“Our soles and eels—like in our book!” But she saw how gloomily her lightness fell upon him—disheartening him. “I mean, yes. Mum told me.”
“All lost,” he moaned.
“No, some were moved, to room with our Flamingos.”
“But the Python, Alice. He’s been boxed up, sent away.”
“For a while, maybe. But they can’t keep a Python down.”
“And our Tortoise—our Mock Tortoise! They’ve sent him off, too.”
“He still has his shell, I promise.”
She watched her friend recede once more, into his fervor. “Sorry, Alfred, let’s do close the curtain.”
He watched her draw across the drapes—in long, runged folds, one layer after another—fixing his blank inner gaze upon her.
She felt him watching. Something so resigned in him, as if some inner clock, each moment, measured what it cost him—to be part of that from which he could well be departing.
Without warning, words came tumbling from him, mute, secret words: “If they should have to send me somewhere, Alice—”
“Send you?”
“If.”
“But they’ve done with the evacuations from London. You, you won’t be sent.”
“But should I have to go. To leave you—”
“You won’t. Ever. Don’t be horrid.”
“But my doctor—”
“Stuff and nonsense.”
But his look was like a plea still. And she softened. “Come,” she said, quoting their book: “it sounds ‘uncommon nonsense.’”
But his eyes paced restless, over the shoulders of those shadowy draperies.
“Alfred?”
With a patient sigh, his gaze settled once more on hers. Letting all he had not said remain so. All that which she’d just interrupted. “Do remember this, Alice. This night of fireworks. The sky so full of our proud plumed Pythons, our starry-eyed Peacocks, our runaway Flamingos . . .”
“They must miss us. Our Flamingos.”
He half smiled. “In any event, do think back on this and remember.”
She had. She would.
In fact, no matter where she turned, it felt like she was, forever, looking toward that window—from his lighted room. On the darkpane before her shone the reflections of the world still lit behind her. Every single object in that room. Still, still there before her—between her now and everything she viewed. There again she could hear it, they all could: above the darksome air of the Tube, that sinister sawing. (Like some German church music, played night after night. Forever, the same bass line and chord progression, but nary a trace of melodic variation.) Soon, so soon, she knew, the rude whistling would resume, then the deathscreams from those Jericho Trumpets, the propeller sirens of the dive-bombers. Soon soon, those shrieking incendiaries, sending sparkles like eyesight, cascading the night; ruckling the pavements like crazed baby rattles; the maternal groaning of the gutted earth to follow.
“It’s a buzz-bomb—hear that?” Angus half-deduced, half-conjectured, as if tamping down his cowlick weren’t enough to distract him. “Br-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-ruum—hear that? That pulse-jet pulsing fifty times per second!”
“Under your bed, Wilkins! Not a word!” came the Red Cross Commandment.
A sudden blast from that sky of hell shook the walls. Violent bits of broken tile and concrete, scattering over the shaken crowd, the stairs, and the platform.
“Alfred?!” Alice cried. Reproving herself for the cry. While, admittedly, wanting so badly an answer.
Not a shrug came back from that emptied quarantine, nor those unlistening tracks. Nothing from the shadows over the rails, where the frailest children still hung, in a hush suspended.
And so? So, she held to herself. Thinking of all those children above, in their supposedly cozy homes, huddled under bed frames, beneath rattled windows, so terrified, even in Mum’s arms. While beyond their flimsy bedroom walls, the rising ruins of London glimmered around them; searchlights, lighting the first lights of evening—like some low-hovering galaxy of powdery stars.
Still, all children cry out, don’t they? From their beds at night and through the daytime—when separated from their Papas, as she had been, that time in Kensington Gardens. Every statue, every sculpture she’d run past, even that abandoned bandstand, acting as if it had never known her . . .
“Chip chip chip!” someone pipped. Mamie? Yes. Looking utterly distracted from her wit, crimping and uncrimping her lip over the cup’s trembling rim.
“Shall we have a spot of cream, then,” a composed Angus tossed in, “in honor of those missin’?”
And of course they all cry—from their toppled tricycles, from those rude swings lifting, heaving, chucking them . . .
“If you can even call it cream,” Dodgy drawled from under his unseemly bunk, “and calling makes a thing.”
Setting her hypersensitive hankie aside, Mamie lifted her ramshackle cup: “In honor of our dear, departed cream.”
An instant after, a second savage blast rocked the station. Brattling the cots, hovering like a goblin damned over the vibrating tracks.
“I want my Mummy, I want my Mummy!” cried Nigel, wrapping his arms ever tighter around him—as once his Teddy might’ve done—only making his pocket pen bleed all over again.
With a deftly lifted brow, Dodgy dripped: “Appalling.”
Mamie simpered, smiling darkly: “London Bridge is falling.” They all cry, still. They do. Even when grown. At the beastly injustice. At the interruption. At the sense that this, their story, will not work out as it might have.
“Bloomin’ listen,�
�� Angus countered, rising, “we’re not squealin’ for peace. We’re lettin’ it come, we’re resistin’ ’em.” Then brandishing his pipe as if it were his broadsword, “They’ll see we’re not British for nothin’.”
“Wilkins!—Spencer!—For the sake of God—under your beds!”
Denying that cry, Alice remained upright. Mindful that to move, even a bit, could be to topple from her resistance, from those silver cliffs of her remembrance.
All she really had to do, she knew, was duck to her knees, to lie prone on the platform, to submit to some greater destiny of. To accept that this crisis was—and that soon she too would be gone . . . But no, she would not. She had cried long enough. Had longed, for too long, for an answer outside herself.
No, Alice thought, she would not be caught, at some stultifying rim of where she actually lived, with all things future and past threatening to collapse. Into what? Some “fate” she could blame? Some supernal shuffle of the inhuman deck? Some domino-drop of her redbrick block, toppling to white-powder death? No no, though much had been taken away, still more of her—and more of him—remained. That which they were, they were.
Why would she, why should she, give herself up to the ruthless, ceaseless bombardment, when there—hear?—in her own golden ear, a trumpet sounded. The Trumpet of a Prophecy. TatatataTaaa! A blowing hymn. There—an ecstatic clatter sweeping over the platform. There, as the whole of the coward world crouched, a pack of proud playing cards, subjects of the immortal Queen of Hearts, came marching, life-sized, along the track. Why couldn’t those Tube-squatters see it? All those pusillanimous souls, like so many discarded cards, lying flat on the ground. Really, thought Alice, we all should be rising and regally bowing. To that festooned, faux-royal deck. To that Knave of Clubs, that Knave of Hearts, clanging fantastical kerosene lamps. Dashing lads, dashing about. Announcing: “The Trial! The Trial!”
And . . . there. With a bat of her blearying lashes, Alice once more looked about. And saw, or seemed to see darkly, someone there, down the track. Just beyond those life-sized, paintbrush-wielding playing cards. Someone, just there. Like a phantom form in the night, beneath some unlit lamp. Some frail gleam of someone before her. Yes. Trembling, pale as an apparition, in his fluttering hospital gown, stood . . .
