Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘Annie,’ he begged her. ‘Hold on for just a little while longer. They’re right overhead. It means they must have found where we are. They’ve used heat-seeking cameras, and they can come straight to us. I’d forgotten that’s what they’d do.’ Steve shook his head, weakly surprised by his own stupidity. ‘We must make them hear us,’ he said. ‘I’ll count again. Shout, Annie.’

  Again, the thin sound rising and evaporating into the limitless dark.

  ‘It isn’t any use,’ she whispered, but Steve’s fingers dug into her hand like a claw.

  ‘Again,’ he commanded, and then, ‘Again.’

  One of the firemen held up his hand. He lifted his head to listen and the others froze into stillness. The silence seeped from the torn hole that held them and spread outwards. The next time it came they all heard it. It was a cry, very faint, but a human cry. They stood still for another moment, then heard it once more.

  ‘Someone’s alive down there.’

  The word was carried backwards like a torch. It reached the senior officers waiting inside the tarpaulin screen, and the medical team waiting with the ambulances.

  The commander stepped quickly forward and looked down at the filthy faces ringing the hole. ‘As fast as you can,’ he said quietly, and they stooped to work again.

  Martin was chilled to the bone and his face was stiff with being turned into the wind, watching the unchanging scene in the distance. Abruptly he turned his back on it, but the sight of it was still clear in his mind’s eye. He knew that he would never forget the distorted shape of the store against the cold sky. He began to walk northwards, his feet painfully numb in his thin indoor shoes. The nearest tube station was closed, he had seen that when he passed it on the way back from his interview with the police. He would have to walk on to the next one. There would be a telephone there.

  He felt a little warmer as he walked, but his feet stung as the circulation started up again. He began to walk faster and faster, imagining how he would pick up the receiver and dial the number. Perhaps Annie would answer it. Perhaps she had come home long ago. He was almost running now, wondering how he could have stood stupidly for so long without telephoning. Perhaps she was waiting for him to call, sitting with the boys and Audrey, comfortable in the warm room.

  The blue and red tube station sign drew him on and he ran the last hundred yards, panting and slithering on the greasy pavement. In the ticket hall there were two payphones in malodorous wooden cubicles. He snatched up the receiver in the nearest booth and listened between his gasps for breath to the thick silence of a dead line. In the same instant a fat man wedged himself into the next booth and began leisurely dialling. Martin planted himself in the middle of the man’s field of vision and held up his coin, but the man turned his back and settled himself to talk.

  Martin stood counting the seconds off, thinking what he would say to her. Annie? You’re safe? Thank God …

  The fat man hung up abruptly and eased himself out of the cubicle. Martin cradled the warm receiver and dialled.

  ‘Hello?’

  It was Audrey’s voice. The pips cut into it and Martin pushed in the coin, but he already knew. Annie hadn’t come home.

  ‘No,’ Audrey said. ‘There’s been nothing. But she could still be shopping …’

  Martin looked out of the square mouth of the tube station entrance. It was getting dark. He could hear music somewhere, a jazzed-up carol. He thought it must be buskers playing at the foot of the escalators. Annie wasn’t still shopping. He knew where she was.

  He said, ‘They’ve brought two people out alive so far. Both men. I asked one of the policemen on the cordons. I don’t know anything else. But they’re still working there, dozens of them. They’re still expecting to bring people out.’ Martin looked at the scribbled graffiti over the cubicle walls, names and telephone numbers, phone Susie … Kim & Viv woz ’ere. Millions of people, filling the sprawl of London, moving to and fro. Why should it be Annie, there, today?

  ‘I don’t know anything else,’ he said again, helplessly. ‘I’ll stay here until they stop looking.’

  Audrey’s voice was quiet. He knew that she didn’t want the boys to hear what she was saying.

  ‘I haven’t had the TV on, Martin, in case they saw … something. But I heard on the kitchen radio. They think there are still three buried.’

  ‘Alive?’

  ‘They said it was a possibility. I think it was only the reporter, you know, guessing. There’s been eight killed.’

  He knew that, too. He had pushed his way as close as he could get to the control trailer and asked. The officer had been sympathetic, like the ones at the station, but uninformative. Eight bodies had been recovered and identified. None of them was Annie. But he wouldn’t say whether the rescuers were still expecting to find anyone else, however hard Martin had pressed him. The radio reporter, whoever he was, had done rather better, he thought dully.

  ‘I’ll go back and wait then,’ he said. ‘Can you stay, Audrey?’

  ‘Of course I can.’

  Martin noticed that she didn’t try to say that Annie would be back soon.

  He hung up and pushed through the stream of people pressing into the station with their loaded carrier bags. Most of them looked over their shoulders as they plunged into the lighted space. He felt how their buzz of shocked fascination overcame their irritation at being diverted to a different station, and it made him angry. He went out into the icy street and began to walk back. The shape of the store, sideways on against the sky, looked mockingly almost as it always had done.

  Martin was pulling his coat around him and wishing that he had wellington boots on his feet when the noise came. It was a vicious gust of wind first, making him duck his head into his collar. He heard the full blast of it funnelling past him down the long street. But then the wind dropped a little, and the noise should have subsided with it.

  Instead it was augmented by a different sound, unplaceable at first, but it made the hairs prick at the nape of his neck. It was a low rumble like thunder, but much closer to earth than thunder. After the first crash it became the distant roar of surf breaking and, drowning in the sound of it, Martin heard people shouting. In a terrifying split-second he thought, Another bomb. He was waiting for the blast to hurl him sideways but it never came and he stood, frozen, staring into the sleet-thickened darkness. Surely it was there, before the noise, that the blue and white lights had been reflected under the store front? He couldn’t see them now. A pall of thick, coiling dust hid everything.

  Martin began to run.

  There had been no warning.

  The police commander had been standing with a group of bomb squad officers close to the trailer. He felt the gust of wind and looked up in alarm. As he watched, the broken edge of the façade trembled and swayed inwards. He opened his mouth to shout a command and heard the sharp rain of falling chunks of brick.

  ‘Back,’ he yelled. ‘Get back.’

  There was a scrambling rush of men, scattering away over the pavement to the shelter of the vehicles. He glimpsed a fireman rooted to the spot, and from the tilt of his helmet knew that he was staring upwards.

  And then there was a deafening roar as the height of the façade crumpled inwards, seeming to hang unsupported in mid-air for an instant, and then fell into the wrecked centre of the store. The dust billowed outwards, thick with the acrid smell of pulverized brick. Choking, with his hands up to cover his nose and mouth, the commander stared into the clouds of it.

  The blue tarpaulins had been torn down. The shelter of planks and scaffolding was buried, and half in and half out of what had once been one of the festive display windows a fireman was lying face-down, his legs twisted beneath him.

  In the darkness the noise was another explosion, the first terror renewing itself. It took hold of them, eating them up as it swelled louder so that their bodies shook with the vibration and their lungs filled with the smell of it.

  ‘Steve.’

  He hea
rd Annie scream his name, just once, and then the scream was extinguished and the roaring went on. The sensation was like falling again, but it was more terrible because there was nowhere to fall to. Instead, everything else was falling. Steve turned his head until his neck wrenched, hunching his shoulder as if that could shelter him. There was a pounding rain of red-hot rocks all around him and he knew that he would drown in this solid sea of noise and grinding stone.

  There was no pain then, except the agony of terror. On and on.

  Still the noise, but muffled now. An angry, diminished roar.

  The solid rain was still falling, but it was finer now. It had washed away all the air.

  The air.

  Steve choked as the filth swept into his lungs. Gasps for breath convulsed his body and he writhed until the pain in his leg swept back again. He would have screamed but there was no breath. There was no breath to cough, no air to breathe.

  The blackness grew heavier, pressing its pain all around him.

  Steve closed his eyes and then there was nothing, oblivion as sweet and comfortable as a child’s sleep.

  He didn’t want them to come back again, the pain and the smell and the air that lay like a mask over his face. But they came anyway, dragging him back into consciousness. Each breath tore his chest and yet wouldn’t fill his lungs.

  He lay in the silence, moaning. The silence. The noise was over now. The thing, whatever it was, had come and gone and left him alone again. Then something else pecked at his unwelcome consciousness. He groped after it in the fog of agony and remembered, not alone. He made his mind work outwards, to the limits of his body. His shoulder and arm were still part of him, his arm outstretched. His fingers were still there, and he was still holding the girl’s hand.

  ‘Annie.’

  The word was no more than a croak, but it left him gasping. The hand in his felt limp and cold as ice. He lay for a moment, trying to gather his strength, and then called her name again.

  ‘Annie.’

  The silence was hideous now. There was something different. Steve slid his hand from hers and found her wrist, thin and bare. His fingers moved up her arm, meeting the rough edge of her coat sleeve, and a woollen cuff underneath it.

  Something different. What was it?

  His fingers moved again, scraping the gritty cloth.

  Cloth.

  His head hurt so that each thought took a separate, punishing effort. Before, surely, there had been only her hand? His shoulder still ached from stretching out to reach it. Yet now he could feel her arm, all the way up to the elbow, slightly crooked. In the silence Steve could hear his heart’s terrified drumming. He opened his mouth to try to pull more oxygen out of the thickened air.

  He was capable of only one thought, and it gripped him for long, shivering seconds. He was holding her arm, but it was no longer part of her. Something had severed it. Fear and nausea swelled inside him and he crouched within a shell of pain, longing for unconsciousness again. But his head defied him and the thought clarified, until it was certainty, and he knew that he must confront it.

  He took his lower lip between his teeth and bit into it, to stop himself screaming when the discovery came. Then he slid his hand down once more to clasp the fingers in his. Slowly, he pulled their linked hands towards him.

  The arm moved, not easily because the coat sleeve snagged on the roughness beneath it. But it moved, and he drew it closer until his fingers could crawl up again to the elbow and beyond, inch by inch, his lip held beneath his teeth to help him to bear the discovery of sticky flesh and bone.

  But there was only the reassuring weave of the cloth, and then the rounded hump of the shoulder.

  Suddenly, as though his consciousness could only dole out one at a time, another thought came to him. Her pulse. He could feel for her pulse. His fingers slid back again and fumbled under the woollen cuff. He turned her hand so that it lay wrist upwards and touched his forefinger to the vulnerable skin. Nothing, and nothing, and then he found the place. A little beat quivered, tick, tick.

  Steve breathed out, a long sigh that stirred the stench of brick dust again. She was still alive. This was Annie’s arm, her hand still touching his. He held on to it like a lifeline.

  Think again, then. What had happened? He must work it out, establish a thread of hope for Annie again …

  He tried to remember the noise and then the avalanche that had followed it. They hadn’t fallen, but everything else had fallen around them. Steve had the sudden conviction that the limits of their black world had redefined themselves. As the weight fell something had shifted.

  He had heard Annie scream his name, and then what? Had one of them rolled sideways, involuntarily, to escape the avalanche? If that had happened, something had moved to release one of them from the weight that had pinned them down. Steve tried to move now, willing his leg to follow the jerky spasm of his other muscles. The pain intensified, shooting across his stomach, but he found that he could lift his hips and drag himself to the right by an inch or two. His left leg slithered uselessly with him. He could reach out and touch Annie’s side now. His fingers explored the folds of her coat and then moved upwards, vertically. He found a button, and then another alongside it, and he knew that he was right. The discovery comforted him like a shot of painkiller.

  Annie had rolled towards him as the falling began. She had been lying on her back before, with her hair pinning her down. Now she was on her side, much closer to him, still with her arm stretched out towards him. She had rolled with all her remaining strength, and she must have torn her hair free.

  She had been trapped by the heavy, fireproofed door. That’s what she had said. He remembered – how long ago? – trying to push it open for her. It had been lying at an angle on top of her, pinioning her right side. Now he reached upwards as far as his arm could stretch, but he couldn’t feel even the edge of it. So whatever it was that had fallen had tipped the door further and freed her. But the door had been a shield as well as a pinion. What was protecting them now? Steve looked into the unyielding darkness. If it fell again, he thought wearily, it would extinguish them too.

  For the first time Steve thought that he could reach out gratefully for that extinction.

  And then, like a feeble blue flame, came the determination: No.

  His fingers moved to Annie’s wrist again and felt the little slow ticking of her pulse.

  Martin ran faster, his legs pumping up and down.

  The cloud of dust swirled outwards, the colour of its underbelly in the lights fading as it drifted away.

  The spectators at the cordons had thinned out as darkness fell and the cold intensified, but Martin could see people turning, running back to see as the echoes of the crash died away.

  He ran without thinking and reached the line of people, standing with their faces upturned and staring at the blue and orange smoke reflections where the façade had been … He looked each way and then pushed through them. He scrambled through the barriers and ran again, down the length of the store front. The space was full of other people running and the sound of their boots crunching on brick and glass. Two men with a stretcher passed in front of him and Martin saw a group of others bent around a fireman lying on the ground. As the stretcher was unfolded and they lifted him up his heavy helmet fell and rolled unnoticed in the debris. Martin looked past it into the centre of the store and saw a smoking mountain of stone and planks and scaffolding. A blue tarpaulin was draped like a cloak around its base.

  Martin stumbled forward with his hands outstretched.

  Annie was under there. He would launch himself at it and dig until he reached her. There were uniforms all around him, police in helmets, and firemen with their brave silver buttons. He went forward with the surge of them, through the gaping hole where the busy doors had stood, and into the thick dust and the blizzard of fragments that the wind blew off the broken walls.

  They were already working at the wreckage, with shovels and picks and their bare hands, to
clear a space. He pushed further forward, and the broad blue back in front of him turned and heaved a chunk of stone into his hands. Martin never felt the weight. He swung round and passed it on to the next link in the chain and then reached out for the next. His lips drew back from his teeth in concentrated effort and he felt the tension of the day’s idleness evaporating.

  He was helping her now, working with his strength to reach her.

  Hold out, brace for the weight, swing with it, let go and reach again.

  I won’t let her go. I won’t let it take her. The words beat in his head, synchronizing into a desperate chorus with every heave and stretch of his body. Instead of the rubble at his feet and the legs of the men struggling in front of him, he saw Annie.

  He saw her at home, waiting for him to come in at the end of the day, and the way that her face softened with pleasure at the sight of him. He saw her frowning, with her head tilted a little to one side as she sat reading with Thomas, and then laughing, with Benjy as a fat, tow-headed baby slung on one hip.

  He thought of the warmth of her beside him in their bed, the softness and familiarity of her curled against him. The warmth seemed to spread around him, insulating him for an instant from the desperate rescuers.

  He could feel Annie’s generosity and strength, and the reality of her love for the three of them, like a living thing fighting beside him. If she was dead, and all her warmth and life had bled away, how could he bear it? And if she wasn’t dead, but buried, injured, what must she be suffering? Her pain stabbed into him, becoming his own, and he doubled over it. Like an automaton he took the next chunk of masonry that was thrust backwards at him.

  If it could be me down there, instead of you, Annie. I love you. Did you know that? I wish I’d told you. I wish I’d let you know how much.

  He knew that he could have worked for ever and he found himself trembling with impatience, sweat glueing his hair to his face as he waited for the next load. But there were more uniforms pushing past him now. He dimly heard the blare of sirens. Martin let his arms drop to his sides and he ducked sideways, into a corner of shadow. The lights carved out a pallid room inside the skeleton store and the rescuers milled within the room. Martin tried to slip out beyond the walls of it. He went down on his hands and knees and tried to pull at a piece of plank that stuck up at an angle. The illusion of superhuman strength had deserted him and he wrestled feebly with his piece of wood. The sweat dried icily on his face.