by Sarah Waters
But then there was a more substantial thud, and then another; and the road ahead, suddenly, was lit by a fierce white light. The plane was dropping incendiaries, and one had burst.
‘Great,’ said Mickey. ‘What’ll we do?’
Automatically Kay had slowed, and her foot was hovering over the brake. They were meant to keep going, whatever they passed. If you got involved in some new incident, it could prove fatal. But she found it hard, every time, simply to drive away from danger.
She made a decision, and stopped the van, as close as she dared get to the spluttering cylinder. ‘I’m not going to leave this street to catch fire,’ she said, opening her door and jumping out. ‘I don’t care what Binkie’ll have to say about it.’
She looked around, saw a heap of sandbags before the window of a house, and, shielding her face and hands from the incendiary’s mad magnesium frothing, she dragged one over and let it sink. The white light disappeared. But then another bomb, farther down the street, started up. She took a second sandbag to that. The incendiaries that were only smouldering she kicked; they went out in a shower of viscous sparks. Mickey came and helped her, and after a minute a man and a girl emerged from a house and joined in, too: they all went capering up and down the street like crazy footballers…But some of the incendiaries had fallen on to roofs and into gardens, where they couldn’t get at them; one had lodged in a wooden To Let sign, which was already beginning to burn.
‘Where the hell’s your warden?’ Kay asked the man.
‘You tell me,’ he said, panting. ‘This street’s on the border of two posts. They sit there arguing about who’s supposed to patrol it. Do you think we need firemen?’
‘A couple of stirrup-pumps would do it, if we only had ladders or ropes.’
‘Shall I run to a telephone?’
Kay looked around in frustration. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I think you ought to.’
He went off. Kay turned to the girl. ‘You should get back under cover.’
The girl was dressed in a man’s teddy-bear coat, and a pixie-hood. She shook her head, grinning. ‘I like it out here. It’s more lively.’
‘Well, it may be too bloody lively in a minute. There, what did I tell you?’
There had come a bang, a sort of whump, from one of the houses farther down the street, followed by the tinkling of falling glass. Kay and Mickey ran towards it, and the girl ran after them. They found a ground-floor window with its shutters blown open and its curtains sagging on a broken rod; the curtains were black with soot or smoke, and a black cloud, with scraps of plaster in it, was billowing out, but with no sign of flame.
‘Watch out,’ said Kay, as she and Mickey got on to the window-sill and looked in. ‘It might be a timed one.’
‘I dunno,’ answered Mickey. She shone in her torch. The room was a kitchen: quite wrecked, with chairs and crockery flung about and the wallpaper scorched, and the kitchen table thrown against the wall and upended. Just beyond the table they could see the figure of a man sprawled in the chaos. He was wearing pyjamas and a dressing-gown, and was clutching his thigh. ‘Oh! Oh!’ they heard him say. ‘Oh, to fuck!’
Mickey gripped Kay’s arm. She was peering through the dust. ‘Kay,’ she said huskily. ‘I think his leg’s gone. I think it’s blown clean off! We’ll need a strap, for the bleeding.’
‘What’s that?’ called the man, beginning to cough. ‘Who’s there? Help!’
Kay turned and ran to the ambulance. ‘Don’t look,’ she said to the girl, who was hovering about outside. The drone of aeroplanes had faded, but the little fires that had been started up and down the street were taking proper hold now, the flames of them yellow, orange, red, rather than white. They would bring more planes, with real explosives, but she could do nothing at all about them. She got out a box of dressings and hurried back to the house. She found Mickey in the room with the wounded man. She had pushed back some of the mess and was ripping open the man’s pyjamas.
‘Help me up,’ he was saying.
‘Don’t try and talk.’
‘It’s just, my leg—’
‘I know. It’s all right. We need to put a tourniquet on you.’
‘A what?’
‘To keep you from bleeding.’
‘Bleeding? Am I bleeding?’
‘You must be, mate,’ said Mickey grimly.
She gave a final tug on the seam of the pyjamas and swung the beam of her torch on to the man’s bare thigh. The flesh ended a little way above the knee. The stump, however, was pink, smooth, almost shiny…‘Hang on,’ said Kay, putting her hand on Mickey’s shoulder. The man let out his breath. He began to laugh, and then to cough again.
‘Fuck me,’ he said. ‘If you find a leg on the end of that you’ll be a fucking magician. I lost that in the last war.’
The leg he was missing was a cork one. On top of that, the blast that had knocked him down had come not from a bomb, but only from a faulty gas-cooker. He’d been bending down to put a match to the ring beneath a kettle, and the whole thing had gone up. His artificial leg had been ripped from him and sent flying with everything else: they looked around and found it, hanging by one of its buckles from the picture-rail.
Mickey handed it to him in disgust. ‘As if there aren’t enough bangs going off just now, without you having to make more.’
‘I was only after a cup of tea,’ he said, still coughing. ‘A man’s entitled to his cup of tea, isn’t he?’
When they got him upright, they saw how badly shaken he was. He had burns on his face and on his hands, and part of his hair, and his brows and lashes, had been singed away. They thought they might as well take him to hospital as leave him here; they carried him out into the street and put him into the ambulance.
All around the square, fires were still burning, but the girl who’d helped extinguish the incendiaries had started banging on the doors of houses; one or two people appeared with pails of water, and pumps, and buckets of sand. The man with the artificial leg called to someone he knew, to ask him to board up the window of his flat.
‘Looks like we’re well out of here,’ he said to Kay and Mickey, watching the figures running about. ‘I hope they don’t turn their pumps on my house, though. I’d rather a fire than a flood, any day.—What’s this?’ he went on, as Kay pushed the door closed. ‘You’re not going to lock me up in this van with her, are you?’ He meant Mickey.
‘I think you’ll be all right,’ said Kay.
‘That’s what you say. You didn’t see the way she went for my pyjamas…’
‘Proper caution he was,’ Mickey said, when they’d dropped the man at the hospital.
‘Laugh?’ said Kay.
‘Honestly, though, a cork leg! If the others should find out—’
Kay tittered. ‘“Kay! Kay!”’ she said throatily. ‘“I think it’s blown clean off!”’
Mickey lit them cigarettes. ‘Get lost.’
‘Don’t mind it, dear. Anyone would have thought the same.’
‘Maybe. Still, didn’t that girl have lovely brown eyes?’
‘Did she?’
‘You never notice the dark ones.’
The guns, for the moment, had fallen silent. The plane that had dropped the incendiaries had been chased off. It was like the lifting of a weight. Kay and Mickey chatted and laughed, all the way back to Dolphin Square. But they were met in the garage by Partridge, who gave them a warning look. ‘You’re in trouble, girls.’
Binkie appeared. She had a sheaf of chits in her hand.
‘Langrish and Carmichael, where the hell have you been? You were seen heading back almost an hour ago. I was just about to call Control and report you missing.’
Kay explained about the incendiaries and the wounded man.
‘That’s too bad,’ said Binkie. ‘You’re to come straight back between jobs. You’ve been in this business too long not to know that, Langrish.’
‘You’d like me to leave a street to burn and bring more bombs? We’d have
lots of jobs, then.’
‘You know the procedure. I’m warning you. You’ll do this sort of thing once too often.’
She was called back to her office by the ring of the telephone, and returned, in another moment, to send Kay and Mickey out again. The bombers had moved away from Pimlico, but there was trouble in Camberwell and Walworth. A couple of the section’s ambulances had been struck and put out of service: Kay and Mickey, and four other drivers from Dolphin Square, went over the river to take their place. The jobs were rather grisly ones. In Camberwell a house had fallen and its occupants been struck by beams: Kay had to help a doctor fix splints to a child’s crushed legs, and the child screamed and screamed whenever they touched her. In another street, a little later, two men were hit by flying shrapnel: they were so cut about, they looked as though some sort of maniac had gone at them with knives.
By quarter-past two—almost the end of their shift at the station—Kay and Mickey had been out five times. They drew into Dolphin Square, more or less exhausted. Kay switched off the engine as she turned in from the street, and let the vehicle coast down the slope into the garage under its own speed. When she tugged on the brake, she and Mickey put back their heads and closed their eyes.
‘What can you see?’ she asked.
‘Bandages,’ answered Mickey. ‘You?’
‘The road, still moving.’
Their van was now filthier than ever: they spent another quarter of an hour filling bucket after bucket with freezing water, rinsing it out and washing it down. Then they had to clean themselves off. There was an unheated room, its door marked Decontamination: Female, where they were expected to do that. The room had a sort of trough in it, and more cold water. The combination of dust and blood was terribly hard to remove from clothes and skin. Mickey’s fingers, at least, were bare. Kay wore a ring of plain gold on her smallest finger, which she never liked to take off; she had to ease it up to her knuckle to get the dirt from underneath.
When they’d done the best they could with their hands, they took off their hats. Where the straps had gripped, across their brows and under their chins, there was clean pink flesh, but the skin between was reddish-black from brick-dust and smoke, only showing lighter where they’d wiped sweat away, or in channels where water had run from their eyes. Their lashes had grit in them: they paid attention to that, because sometimes the grit contained little pieces of glass. They took it in turns to examine each other in the light: ‘Look up…Look down…Lovely!’
Kay went through to the common-room. Most of the drivers were already home. Hughes was having his hand bandaged by O’Neil, the new girl.
‘Not so tight, ducks.’
‘Sorry, Hughes.’
‘What’s up?’ asked Kay, sitting down beside them.
‘This?’ said Hughes. ‘Oh, nothing. O’Neil’s just practising.’
Kay yawned. It was always a mistake to sit before the All Clear had sounded: she felt suddenly tired to death. ‘What kind of a shift have you two had?’ she asked, in an effort to stay awake.
Hughes shrugged, his gaze on the winding bandage. ‘Not too bad. Ruptured stomach, and a lost eye.’
‘And you, O’Neil?’
‘Four broken bones in Warwick Square.’
Kay frowned. ‘That’s a music-hall song, surely?’
‘Howard and Larkin,’ O’Neil went on, ‘got a man who fell down a flight of steps, on Bloomfield Terrace. It wasn’t even blast; he was whizzed, that’s all.’
‘Whizzed!’ said Kay, liking the word, beginning to laugh. The laugh became another yawn. ‘Well, good luck to him. Anyone who can put their hands, these days, on enough booze to get whizzed by deserves a medal.’
Out in the kitchen, Mickey was making tea. Kay listened to the clink of china for a moment, then hauled herself up and went to help. They added fresh leaves to the filthy-looking black mixture that was kept, almost permanently, in the bottom of the pot; but then had to wait for the water to boil on a shrunken flame, because the gas pressure was low. The All Clear sounded just as they were pouring out, and the last of the drivers appeared. Binkie went from room to room, counting heads.
The mood of the place began to grow jolly. It was a sort of exhilaration, at having survived, got through, taken on another raid and beaten it. Everyone was streaked with blood and dust, impossibly weary from wading through rubble, from stooping and lifting, from driving through the dark; but they turned the ghastly things they’d seen and done into jokes. Kay took in the mugs, and was greeted with cheers. Partridge picked up a teaspoon and used it to fire paper pellets around the room. O’Neil had finished bandaging Hughes’s hand and started on his head. She put his spectacles back on him, on top of the crêpe.
When the telephone rang, no one grew quiet and tried to listen: they supposed it was Control, calling with confirmation of the All Clear. But then Binkie came in again. She raised her hands, and had to shout to make herself heard.
‘There’s a single ambulance needed,’ she said, ‘up at the north end of Sutherland Street. Who’s been back longest?’
‘Drat,’ said O’Neil, taking a safety-pin from her mouth. ‘That’s Cole and me. Cole?’
Cole yawned and got to her feet. There were more cheers.
‘Good for you, girls,’ said Kay, settling back.
‘Yes, cheerio, girls!’ said Hughes, pushing up the bandage from one of his eyes. ‘Splint one for me!’
‘Just a minute,’ said Binkie. ‘O’Neil, Cole’—she lowered her voice—‘I’m afraid it’s a mortuary run. No survivors at all. One body for certain, and they think two more. A mother and children. The parts are to be carried to storage. Think you can take it?’
The room fell silent. ‘Christ,’ said Hughes, letting the bandage fall back down, and drawing up his collar.
O’Neil looked sick. She was only seventeen. ‘Well—’ she said.
There was a moment’s stillness. Then, ‘I’ll do it,’ said Kay. She got to her feet. ‘I’ll partner Cole instead. Cole, you won’t mind?’
‘I won’t mind at all.’
‘Look here,’ said O’Neil. She had grown white before, but was now blushing. ‘It’s all right. I don’t want you nannying me, Langrish.’
‘No one’s doing that,’ said Kay. ‘But you’ll see enough awful things in this job, that’s all, without being made to see them when you don’t have to. Mickey, you’ll be OK with O’Neil, if another call comes through?’
‘Sure,’ said Mickey. She nodded to O’Neil. ‘Kay’s right, O’Neil. Forget it.’
‘Yes, think yourself lucky,’ said Hughes. ‘Do the same when it’s my turn, Langrish!’
O’Neil was still blushing. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘thanks, Langrish.’
Kay followed Cole out to the garage. Cole started up her van, and moved off slowly. ‘No point in rushing, I suppose…Do you want a smoke? There are some in there.’
She gestured to a pocket in the dashboard. Kay fished about inside it and brought out a flat gun-metal case marked, in nail-varnish, E. M. Cole, Hands Off! She lit two cigarettes and handed one over.
‘Thanks,’ said Cole, taking a puff. ‘God, that’s better. That was nice, by the way, what you did for O’Neil.’
Kay rubbed her eyes. ‘O’Neil’s just a kid.’
‘Still.—Hell, this engine pinks like crazy! I think the ignition’s buggered.’
They rode the rest of the way in silence, concentrating on the route. The site they wanted was back up towards Hugh Street. ‘Is this really the place?’ asked Kay, as Cole put the brake on; for the house looked fine. The damage, they found when they got out, was all in the back garden—a direct hit on a shelter. People who must recently have emerged from shelters of their own were gathered at the garden wall, trying to see. Policemen had set up a tarpaulin. A man led Kay and Cole around it, to show them what had been recovered: a woman’s body, clothed and slippered but minus its head; and the naked, sexless torso of an oldish child, still tied round with its dressing-gown cord
. These lay under a blanket. Wrapped in an oilcloth sheet beside them were various body-parts: little arms, little legs; a jaw; and a chubby jointed limb that might have been a knee or an elbow.
‘We thought at first: a woman, a daughter, and a son,’ said the policeman quietly. ‘But there are, frankly—’ He wiped his mouth. ‘Well, there are more limbs than we can account for. We think now that there must have been three children, perhaps four. We’re talking to the neighbours…Do you think you can manage?’
Kay nodded. She turned, and went back to the van. It was better to be moving, doing something, after sights like that. She and Cole got stretchers: they lifted on the woman’s body and the torso and fixed labels to them with string. The limbs they wanted to keep in their oilcloth sheet, but the policeman said he couldn’t spare it. So they brought a crate, and lined it with newspaper, and put the arms and legs in that. The worst thing to handle was the jaw, with its little milk-teeth. Cole picked it up, then almost threw it into the box—overcome, in the end, not with sadness, but simply with the horror of the thing.
‘All right?’ asked Kay, touching her shoulder.
‘Yes. I’m all right.’
‘Walk about over there. I’ll see to this.’
‘I said I’m all right, didn’t I?’
They took the crate to the ambulance, labelled it up, and put it on board. Kay made sure to tie a strap around it. Once she’d carried a load like this from a mortuary to Billingsgate, where unidentified body-parts were stored. She hadn’t fastened down the crate, and when she’d opened the ambulance doors at the market a man’s head had rolled out and landed at her feet.
