by Rosie Thomas
‘I won’t ever forget,’ she murmured, almost to herself. Then she made her attention direct itself outwards, beyond her own selfish concerns.
‘How is it at home?’ she asked. She felt the house, too, so clearly.
‘Oh,’ Martin shrugged with a touch of weariness, ‘we’re managing. Aren’t we, Tom?’
He told her that his mother was helping wherever she could, and Audrey was coming in every day. But Annie knew that the responsibility for the boys’ daily life, always hers in the past, would weigh heavily on Martin. He had less patience, and in two days’ time he would have to go back to work after the Christmas break.
‘McDonald’s every day?’ she asked Tom, and he grinned at her.
‘Just about.’
Benjy was lying quietly with his head against her good shoulder, his thumb in his mouth. Annie was still thinking about the house. It was so much part of her, she realized, that it was like an extension of her body. She could see the tiles in the kitchen, two or three of them cracked, the patches on the walls, the ironing basket overflowing next to the washing machine.
‘Can we get someone in? A temporary mother’s help?’
‘Very expensive,’ Martin said stubbornly. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll muddle through.’
Annie felt the ties of responsibility beginning to pull at her. She felt both guilty and relieved that she couldn’t respond to them yet. The hospital felt, momentarily, like a haven of peace and she remembered the brilliance of light that had illuminated it. It was a sanctuary from the demands that had followed her since the boys were babies. She loved them, all of them, but she couldn’t respond to their needs. Not yet.
‘What about my Mum?’ she asked. ‘How is she?’
‘Um. About the same. She wants to come in and see you. Are you up to it?’
Annie picked at a thread in the bed sheet.
‘Tell her to come. Whenever she can.’
They talked, the four of them, for a few more minutes. The boys told her about Christmas, shouting one another down as they listed their presents.
‘How marvellous,’ Annie said. ‘I wish I’d been there.’
Family. Gathered around her, needing her to pick up the threads again. It was hard to be all things, she thought, even some of the time.
Her head and back ached overwhelmingly now.
Martin stood up at last. Reluctantly she let the boys scramble away from the warmth of her hug.
‘Come back soon. Tomorrow?’
Martin kissed her, and she put her hand up to touch his cheek. ‘Thank you for being here.’
‘Where else could I be?’ he whispered.
They held hands for a long minute. Then, remembering something, Martin reached for a bag he had put down at the foot of the bed.
‘I brought you these. Essentials of life.’
Annie peered into the plastic carrier. There was a jar of Marmite and another of anchovy paste, both of which she loved. There was a big box of Bendick’s Bittermints. They always gave one another the dark, bitter mints as a consolation or a gesture of reconciliation. There was the latest copy of her gardening magazine, and the plant encyclopaedia that Annie often sat poring over on winter evenings. Every winter she drew up lists of the plants she would stock her garden with; every spring she failed to put her elaborate plans into force.
The little things were an expression of how well they knew one another, of how their lives had woven a pattern together.
What else? Annie wondered. The question pricked her, disturbing.
‘I love you,’ she said deliberately.
‘I know. Me too.’ He was gathering up the boys’ anoraks, helping Benjy into his. ‘Come on, you kids.’
‘See you tomorrow. See you tomorrow,’ they called to her. Annie waved to them. Martin took Benjy’s hand and with Tom scuffling beside them they went out in the tide of departing visitors.
Annie lay stiffly against her pillows.
She was wondering why she hadn’t mentioned Steve. She should have told Martin that they had met and talked.
But then, answering herself, she thought, No. That was separate. The thing had happened to them together, and it didn’t touch on her family. It was important that it didn’t because of the fear, and also because of the other things that she had felt with Steve today.
When it was over, when the dreams had stopped and she was well again, he would be a stranger again too.
Five
Annie stood at the window of the day room. Three floors below her was a narrow side street lined with parked cars. On the corner was a sandwich bar, and she could see office workers from the surrounding buildings going in and out. They looked a very long way off, as if she were watching them in a film about another place.
The dislocation of time increased her sense of separation from the outside world. She knew that it was lunchtime for all the people passing to and fro in the street, but in the hospital wards their meal had been served and cleared away an hour and a half ago. The tea trolley with its rows of clinking white cups and saucers and big enamel teapot had just circulated. Annie didn’t want tea, but she had taken a cup anyway and carried it into the day room. The nurses encouraged her to walk around now. She moved very slowly, slightly hunched, but every painful step gave her pleasure too. A chain of them linked her to the happiness that she had felt on the day when they brought her down from the intensive care ward, and she knew that she would survive.
Annie put her cup down on the window-sill and looked around the room. There were plastic-covered armchairs and a pair of sofas, low metal-framed tables piled with magazines, and the cream-painted walls were haphazardly hung with institutional posters and prints. The curtains and the carpet and the air itself smelt of cigarette smoke. At the opposite end of the room from Annie’s window two old men were smoking determinedly and staring at the screen of the big television. Annie guessed that they were waiting for the day’s racing coverage to begin. A woman in a flowered housecoat was reading a magazine, and another in the chair beside her was knitting ferociously, a long knotted pink coil.
Yesterday, and the day before, Annie and Steve had met in here.
They hadn’t said anything yesterday, when they stood up to walk back to their wards, about meeting for the third time. They had looked at one another instead, and they had smiled, understanding each other perfectly, at the thought of making a date in such a place.
But before she had left her ward today Annie had looked in the mirror. She had looked at the hollows in her pale face, and she had even thought of lipstick. Then she had imagined how the colour would make a too-vivid gash in the whiteness. She had simply brushed her hair out so that it waved loosely and hid her cheeks, deciding that she must find a pair of scissors to trim the jagged ends.
She was standing with her hand on the window-sill, looking out into the street again, when Steve hobbled in. He saw her against the light, and the brightness of it shining through her cloud of hair gave it a reddish glow.
She turned towards him at once.
‘Did you get your five bob on, Steve, like I told you?’
It was one of the old men in front of the television, calling out to him.
Steve stopped, thinking, She was waiting for me.
‘Merrythought,’ the old man prompted. ‘Two-fifteen, Kempton.’
Steve shook his head. ‘No, Frank, I’m afraid I didn’t.’
The newsvendor clicked his tongue. ‘You’ll be sorry, son. It’s a cert.’ He swivelled back to face the screen.
Annie and Steve looked at each other and felt the laughter rising again. They had laughed yesterday too, like school-children, at almost nothing.
Trying to keep a straight face Annie asked, ‘How’s the leg today?’
‘Itching. Right down inside the plaster.’
The woman with the knitting peered up at him, then held out one of her steel needles. ‘Here. Poke this down inside and have a good scratch with it.’
Steve looked gravely at th
e implement.
‘I’d have to take my pyjamas down to get at the top of the plaster.’
The woman beamed at him. ‘Feel free, my duck.’
Her friend smothered her laughter behind her magazine.
‘The itching is probably safer,’ Steve murmured. He reached Annie’s side and turned a chair with its back to the room. They sat down in their corner, facing each other.
‘This place,’ he sighed.
‘You could afford to get yourself transferred to a smart private clinic,’ Annie reminded him sharply. ‘Peace and privacy. Menu food and real art on the walls.’
She wondered if Steve knew that she was voicing her fear that he might really go. He was sitting with his hands curled loosely over the arms of his chair, his crutches laid neatly at his feet.
‘No, I couldn’t,’ he said. ‘I want to stay here, because this is where you are.’
Annie felt the tightness of joy and panic knotted together under her ribs. It took her breath away, and the blood beat in her throat. She felt the closeness of his hand on the chair arm, and her own lying in her lap. She would have reached out, but panic suddenly overwhelmed her happiness. She lifted her arms and slotted her hands into the opposite sleeves of her robe, hugging them against her chest, shutting him out.
Steve saw the gesture and read its implication. She knew, and regretted it at once. She saw his handsome, haggard face and the grey showing in his dark hair. Steve was more than a man sitting in a hospital day room. He had been her friend and her comforter, her family and her lifeline all through the hours that still came back, renewing their terror, almost every time she slept. The memory and the fear were still potent, and Steve belonged with them, inextricably.
But he meant much more than that, because he was the man he was. Nothing to do with the bombing.
Annie was certain that it would be wrong to add fear of what Steve might demand from her to the pantheon of all the rest.
He was, and would be, her friend.
She slid her hands out of her sleeves again. She couldn’t reach out to him now, and she made an awkward little gesture instead.
‘I am here,’ she said simply. ‘Don’t go to a clinic.’
Over Steve’s shoulder she saw the woman with the knitting look up, curious. And with the intuitive quickness that seemed to link them now whether they wished it or not, Steve intercepted and understood Annie’s glance.
‘When did they unstrap your arm?’ he asked casually, nodding at it.
She took the opening gratefully. The progress of their injuries and illnesses was the common currency of ward conversation. Annie and the other women exchanged their latest details first thing in the morning and last thing at night, after the doctors’ rounds, and in between times when the nurses brought round the drugs trolley and the dressings packs.
‘This morning,’ she told him. ‘When the physio came round. It’s still strapped at the shoulder, but at least I can use the hand and elbow.’ Annie held out her arm, turning it stiffly. The woman looked down at her knitting again, uninterested. She had heard the details already.
‘That’s good news,’ Steve said. ‘They took me down to the physiotherapy room this morning. They had me pulling weights to and fro for hours, to get my arms and shoulders working.’
And he went on, talking blandly about his treatment.
But Annie knew that he wasn’t thinking what he was saying any more than she was listening. He had taken her hand as she held it out. He turned it over in his, looking at each of her fingers and at the shape of her nails. He touched his fingertips to the marks that the needles and tubes had left in her wrist. She felt the light touch as if it had been his mouth against her throat. She knew that he was looking at her, but she couldn’t raise her head to meet his eyes.
‘It’s very clever, they make the muscles work against one another, you know …’ Annie felt afraid to move in case he came closer, or let her hand drop.
Stupid, she thought dimly, don’t you know what you want?
There were half-healed cuts on Steve’s hands too. She could remember the length and shape of his fingers so clearly. Was the tactile memory so much stronger than the visual, then?
‘It’s very important. Otherwise they just fade away from lack of use …’
Annie made herself look up. She met his eyes and saw the question in them, but she couldn’t even have begun to frame an answer. Behind them the two women had left their seats. The younger one with the magazine was holding the door open for the knitter. They went out together, and the door swung to with its gust of medicinal tasting air.
‘They’ve gone,’ Annie said.
The two old men sat with their backs turned, intent on the racing. It occurred to Annie that she was alone with Steve for the first time since the bombing and the blackness. The first time that they had been effectively out of sight and out of earshot of the nurses or the other patients.
Together the two of them seemed infinitely isolated, even within the tiny, cut-off world of the two hospital wards. For a moment Annie could have believed that reality extended no further than the stuffy air enclosed in the day room. She looked down again at their linked hands.
‘It’s very strange,’ she whispered.
‘What’s strange, Annie?’
‘This.’
Her hand moved in his, no more than a faint tensing of the muscles. Steve was wishing that she could have brought herself to say, You and me, or Us, here. He remembered her telling him about Matthew. I chose the easy option. The safe option. That’s what she had said. He looked at her, trying to take the measure of her courage. But Annie had infinite courage. He knew that.
‘I want to ask you such a lot of things,’ Annie said. The words tumbled out in a rush. ‘All sorts of things. Ends, to tie up everything you told me when we were buried. I think about them instead of going to sleep. Cowardly, because I’m afraid of the nightmares.’
‘Ask me,’ Steve said.
Annie smiled. ‘I wanted to ask you if you felt angry,’ she said. ‘About what they did to us. Whoever they are.’
He had been looking at her eyes. The blue was intensified by the dark shadows around them.
‘Angry?’ Steve thought for a moment. ‘No. Sad, for the other people. Not angry for myself. How could I be?’ That movement of her hand in his again. ‘It happened and we were there. That’s all. It’s hard to direct anger into a vacuum. I think what I feel most, now, is happy. I caught that from you, the other day. Do you feel angry, Annie?’
‘No. Not for myself. Sad for the others, like you. I feel angry for the boys’ sake, for Benjy, because he needs me. And for Martin. It was worse for him.’ Annie looked back at Steve. ‘I can’t imagine what I would have felt, or whether I would have been able to bear it. Waiting to know if Martin was alive. Waiting afterwards to find out if they could keep him alive.’
Her blue stare was level now, holding his.
‘I think you would have borne it with great courage,’ Steve said after a long moment. ‘I know how brave you are.’
‘You helped me to be brave down there.’
There was a pendulum swinging between them. It swooped from its high point, down and then up again, stirring the close air with its arcs. The bombing and their hours in the dark had set it swinging, Steve thought. Time would slow it down, and in the end it would stand still. Then they would know. He couldn’t ask her for anything while the pendulum still swung.
They sat facing each other, their hands still linked.
‘Did you think we were going to die?’ Annie asked him.
‘I was afraid, at the end, that they might not come in time.’
‘Yes. I can’t remember the end. Only you talking. You were telling me about your Nan, and when you were a little boy. You all got mixed up together, you and Thomas and Benjy. I could see you running away from me, the three of you, and I was afraid that I would never catch up with you again.’
‘And now you have,’ Steve said softly
.
‘Now I have,’ she echoed.
Annie held out her other hand and he took it, folding both of hers between his own. Annie had the sense that she had been afraid of choices, and also that there was no choice now. The hours underground had changed all the neat, straight lines of her life, and the perspectives would never be the same again.
‘If we hadn’t been afraid that we would die,’ Annie said, ‘we wouldn’t have told each other all the things we did.’
‘Do you regret them?’
She looked up at him then. For a moment she saw a stranger’s face, a face as she would have seen it if she had glanced round in the doorway of the store. If nothing had happened then she would have gone on down the stairs.
But then. There had been the wind, and the thunderous noise, and the pain that held her in its fists. They had escaped from that. Relief renewed itself inside her and she felt the weightless brilliance of happiness again. It made her smile and she read the answering smile in Steve’s eyes.
He knew her thoughts. He was as close to her as her family; he was a part of herself. Not a stranger.
‘No,’ she told him. ‘I don’t regret anything.’
His hands moved over hers, warming them. Annie wanted him to reach forward and put his arms around her. He had held her in the dark, and she wanted to feel his touch again. She saw their joined hands, and the blue woollen weave of her dressing gown over her knees. She was clearly conscious of the whole of her body, patched and stitched as it was, and the slow movement of blood inside it. She felt her scars, and the new skin rawly pink at the margins. She was regenerating herself. She was suddenly almost drunk with the giddy pleasure of it, and the glow of it spread through her fingers to Steve’s.
‘Annie,’ he whispered.
They looked at each other still, motionless, silenced by the sudden need that drew them closer.
Another hermetic world, Annie thought wildly. The hospital enclosed them, just as the tangled girders and broken walls and floors had done. Did that make it all right, then?
Her skin prickled. Steve’s face was very close to hers. She looked in his eyes and saw the dark grey irises, flecked with gold.
