The Dynamite Room

by Jason Hewitt

  The house smelled unfamiliar. Her feet creaked over the floorboards and the oak paneling was cool to her touch. All the doors from the hallway were closed; she opened them one by one, finding the rooms dark and musty, the fixtures and furnishings indistinct. All the windows were filled with blackout frames.

  She stood at the foot of the stairs and called out again.

  “Hello?”

  Holding on to the banisters as she went, she followed her voice up the staircase. At the top she looked both ways before nervously making her way down the corridor. The bathroom light didn’t work; even the tiny window in there had its blackout frame in place. There were no towels hanging over the rail. No toothbrushes or toothpaste in the blue spotted mug.

  She stepped back into the corridor and stopped outside the next door, her sweaty hand on the cool, brass knob.

  “Hello?” she said quietly. She turned the knob and nudged the door open. The room was dark and hot. At first everything seemed to be in its place. The neatly made four-poster. The old oak dressing table. The slightly tarnished mirror. The little side table and tasseled lamp. But no bedside book. No half-drunk glass of water. She took a step back and found herself staring at the bulky oak wardrobe. Her breath quickened as she reached out for both handles, and then, after a silent count of one, two, three, she flung open the double doors. It was empty. Her mother’s clothes were gone.

  She sat there on the four-poster bed, her feet dangling, until her eyes slowly adjusted to the dark and shapes began to emerge from the wall: pictures hanging from the picture rail, her mother’s treadle sewing machine, the corn dolly hanging on its hook. She began to feel cool again as the sun fingered its way around the side of the house, no longer pressing at the shutters. She tried to think, forcing her eyes shut in the hope that when she opened them again, the room would be full of light and everything as it should be. Twice she got up and shut the heavy wardrobe doors, hearing the careful click setting everything back into place, but when she opened them again the wardrobe remained empty.

  Eventually she wandered downstairs. The front door was still open, the sun still streaming through now that it was lower in the sky, but the kitchen remained dark.

  She sat up on the work surface—something her mother would never have allowed—and leaned over to fill a glass from the tap. The water drooled out, cloudy at first and then finally clear, and she drank it and then filled the glass again, drinking it more slowly this time.

  Her mother had gone to the cinema at Felixstowe with Bea, or Joyce, or somebody else. There wouldn’t be a bus back till late, and that was why she’d already prepared the house for the blackout. Her mother was like that—organized. That was why they’d wanted her in the Women’s Voluntary Service, and on the parish council and the school’s board of governors and heaven knows what else. And she’d moved out of their bedroom and into the spare one. That was it. It might have got damp in her parents’ room, because, after all, her mother had always said that the house was damp, she said she could smell it, while her father contested it as he contested almost everything, arguing that it was her imagination. It’s barely thirty years old, Annie. How on earth can it be damp?

  Lydia sat for a moment, letting the heel of her sandal bang rhythmically against the cupboard. But that didn’t explain the empty station, or the empty village either, or the empty road and fields. Other than the man in the black Hillman Minx, the only sign of life she had seen had been on the train: soldiers with their kit bags, air force officers eating sandwiches or playing cards or sleeping with their heads gently knocking against the window as the train rattled on its way. Two or three women had been sitting in other carriages. She’d seen them on the platform getting on when she’d changed at Reading—a plump lady with a suitcase and a couple of WVSs in their funny green uniforms and hats. She had hoped that one of them would sit by her, but they hadn’t. Something about them had made her think of her mother.

  Have you a ticket?

  Her mother had it, she had told the ticket collector. She’s just powdering her nose.

  Right, he said, although he didn’t seem sure. Most lassies your age are going the other way, you know.

  She nodded.

  Everyone but the army is going the other way.

  He asked her how old she was, nibbling at his mustache as he did and leaning against the compartment door as if he was getting himself ready for a long wait.

  She told him, almost twelve.

  He frowned as if even that were questionable, scratching his head under his cap, and then stood there watching her, waiting. Finally he asked her if she was all right in there—your ma?

  She stumbled for a moment, wondering what to say, and then blurted that her mother was feeling sick, that was all—sick. She doesn’t like trains.

  No? Well, nor do I much on a ruddy ’ot day like this, he said. I’ll be back later for the ticket, mind. I’ve another four carriages to do before Ipswich, so you make sure she has it ready.

  She nodded and forced a smile, but the man never did come back and the train clattered on.

  She hauled her things up the stairs, along the landing, and into her darkened room. She dropped her gas mask on the floor at her feet, heaved her suitcase up onto the bed, and lit the oil lamp. The flame’s light flickered across the walls, teasing shadows up to the ceiling and smearing them across the floor. She pulled the evacuee tag off the case’s handle and, screwing it into a ball, netted it into the wicker waste bin beneath her dressing table, then clicked open the catches and lifted the lid. She took Mr. Tabernacle out and sat him plumply on the bed. At eleven years old she had thought herself too old for bears, but her mother had suggested that she might want a friendly face with her, even if it was just one-eyed Mr. Tabernacle wearing her father’s school tie.

  She emptied the rest of the suitcase on the bed and then felt too hungry and tired to put any of it away. What was the point? If her mother had been planning to leave the house, she was sure that she would have written to her. But then her mother still thought she was in Wales, safe and sound.

  She slumped on the bed with the bear on her knee and reached over to pull out the six letters from the gas mask box along with a storybook she’d made, the pages threaded together with string. Now it was all crumpled, her writing half-washed away where one of the Welsh boys had thrown it into the brook. She tried one more time to smooth out the creases where it had dried all out of shape, but the story was ruined. She put it back into the box, then laid out the letters, folded tight, in a semicircle on the bed between her and Mr. Tabernacle.

  “You choose,” she told the bear. Then, taking his arm, she made him pick one.

  She unfolded the letter.

  She knew them off by heart, her mother lamenting at how quiet the house was now that she and Alfie and Lydia’s father were all away. The petrol pump in the village was out of bounds, she wrote—needed by the infantry apparently—so she was feeling desperately cut off and she never had been good on a bicycle, as Lydia well knew. The Germans had given them a bit of a bashing the day before, one of the Jerries emptying a load on the harbor at Lowestoft and another hitting the airfield at Martlesham. Joyce had apparently felt the rumbles in the pub, and her mother wrote that half the tins in the kitchen larder had fallen out. It had put the frighteners up them all.

  They’re calling it “terror attacks” on the radio. It does make me laugh, the funny terms they come up with. I expect they’ll have another shot at us tonight (they seem to be coming over every day). I hate going down to the shelter with no one to talk to. I keep thinking that your father has overloaded that tin roof with all his veg. The slightest blast in the village and I swear the whole lot will come down on top of me. Can you imagine Archie Chittock and the rest of the boys trying to haul me out from under all that muck and your father’s carrots and cabbages?

  There was no news of Alfie or of Lydia’s father. She wrote instead of WVS meetings and her disastrous fruitcakes, as if nothing else mattered, and
of Mr. Morton.

  I told him you wouldn’t be back until all this nonsense blows over. I said you were having a ball in Wales. You are, aren’t you, Darling? Do write and tell me that Mrs. Duggan is looking after you, and Button too.

  And so Lydia had written one of the special postcards they’d given all the children. Everyone is being lovely, she said. What did another lie matter?

  She slowly folded the letter again and put it back in the box with the rest. Then she picked up Mr. Tabernacle, gathered the blanket from the bed, and took up the oil lamp. She stepped out onto the landing and walked along to the junction outside the spare room. The door at the far end of the corridor was closed, the rim of darkness around its frame sealing everything in. At some stage, if no one came back, she thought, she would have to go in.

  She stood for a moment, looking at it, then turned back as far as the narrow flight of stairs that led up to the attic. The steps were steep, and near the top she had to set Mr. Tabernacle and the oil lamp down, her blanket wrapped around her shoulders, so that she could heave the hatch open. After a struggle it tipped back on its hinge and clattered down, throwing up dust. She hauled herself and everything with her up through the hole and then dropped the hatch shut and pulled the bolt across, pushing it into its socket good and tight.

  The attic had been many things: a submarine, or an airship flying out across the Channel, or a courtroom, or the offices of a spying agency, or a dragon’s lair, or just the very best and most secret of hiding places. It was rather poky, being in the only part of the roof that was high enough to stand in, but it had a single square window that she could see out of if she stood on one of the crates. She looked out now. The sun was finally sinking beneath the horizon. Clouds rolled in from the coast, their underbellies orange and pink.

  She stepped down off the crate. There wasn’t much room. An old ottoman stood in the corner, containing some of her mother’s coats from when she’d been courting and there must have been more money. A few cardboard boxes were stacked full of disused china plates, cracked saucers, and chipped teacups. And everything—even the things supposedly sealed up safe—was furred with dust.

  She checked the bolt across the hatch and, emptying the coats to make her own nest of sorts in the corner, heaved the ottoman across the hatch as well—just to be doubly safe.

  She tried to make herself comfortable but the coats smelled of wet fur, and she wondered how long they’d been abandoned there, slowly rotting. It was getting dark. She would keep the oil lamp going as long as she could; that way at least she might stop the night from completely swallowing her.

  She squeezed her eyes shut. Alfie was in his cricket whites out on the lawn, bouncing the ball on the underside of his elbow and catching it as it flipped into the air. She could see him quite clearly—his blond hair, blue eyes, the golden tan to his face. She concentrated on making him real, on remembering something good. They were playing cricket—Alfie, Eddie, and her—and she was infield as usual, which meant she spent the whole time chasing the ball and never got to bat.

  Alfie tossed the ball to Eddie and took position—Bowl!—and Eddie bowled, his ginger hair flapping. The ball arced through the air, and as it came down Alfie leaned forward on one leg and hit the ball with a whack. It whistled off to the left and struck a tree on the edge of the garden where by some magic it was stopped short, caught within the fork of two branches.

  Out! yelled Eddie.

  That’s not out! said Alfie.

  Tis!

  It’s not!

  It is! Out!

  I’m not!

  You are!

  Alfie looked up at the ball wedged in the tree. Oh, bugger it! he said, swearing with his usual gusto. Look at that! In the damn ruddy tree!

  She remembered watching from the terrace as the two boys stood around, hands scrunched in pockets, staring up at the branches and trying to work out how to get the ball down—an image of Alfie in her head pushing his hair out of his eyes, Eddie next to him, always the less impressive with his pale skin and gangly limbs, and yet, as her mother said, such a dear. Alfie was training to be a carpenter and always had dusty arms and splinters in his hands, and looked rather fine, Lydia thought, in his overalls. People are always going to need carpenters, he said, ’specially in a war. Eddie had his eye on the air force, but of course that never worked out because, with his epilepsy, Eddie wasn’t going anywhere. He would end up spending his days sitting in a field in a damp pillbox stocked with iron rations and toilet paper, with nothing for company but a battered rifle and the chums his grandfather grew potatoes with, while Alfie gallivanted around Europe having all the fun.

  Alfie kicked his shoes off and clung to Eddie as Eddie hoisted him up on his shoulders. From there, in his socks, Alfie climbed up into the tree. He pulled the cricket ball out of the branches and dropped it into Eddie’s hand.

  She could see Alfie now, standing in the branches, the sun washing through him in his cricket whites. She would always remember it: a tall, lean figure with a shock of blond hair standing among the illuminated leaves, almost illuminated himself in the sunlight, like something heavenly. But only ever for a moment, because he was soon scrambling down and onto Eddie’s shoulders, Eddie setting off with him, running across the lawn, both of them laughing and yelling until they fell sprawled across the grass in a terrible tangle of limbs and set to wrestling like they always did, rolling around on top of each other and trying to pin each other down, grunting and laughing and shouting, Submit, submit!

  That had been the end of May, less than two months ago; it was the day before Alfie had left, sent out on a draft to France by his own choice, and two days before she was packed off herself to Wales. Within a week they were all scattered, a whole family blown across Europe—Alfie, her, and their father too, who’d been sent off with the navy. Only their mother had been left behind. Now even she was gone.

  She pulled the blanket tighter around herself.

  In the morning she would walk to the railway station and somehow get herself back to Wales and Mrs. Duggan. She’d shut her eyes and her ears to everything there and not let it eat at her. She’d leave a note for her mother and tell her to come and rescue her. Perhaps that was where her mother had gone. Perhaps they had passed each other on different trains, meeting for that split second as their carriages swept by each other on the tracks. Perhaps her mother was on her way to the little Welsh village now to look for Lydia when Lydia was here instead, in the dark and too scared to sleep, scared of the man in the Hillman Minx coming back for her, scared he might have followed her and knew where she was living, scared of the gas.

  In their drills they had been taken to green gas vans parked by the school and told to put their masks on and step into the van, which had been filled with foul-smelling smoke. That way, they’d been told, they’d know if the masks were working.

  But what if the gas isn’t like smoke? someone said.

  Of course it’s not like smoke! said the woman from the WVS, and she laughed.

  But no one said what it would be like. What if it was like tiny seeds in the air, or the sparkling particles she’d seen in the hallway as she sat on the kitchen worktop? What if it looked like the dust in the attic, or like nothing at all, just bad colorless air, unwittingly breathed in and out?

  She sat upright and fumbled under the coats for the box. She took the mask out, then took a deep breath and pulled it over her head.

  She tried to breathe normally. She took long, deep breaths and heard the rasping back and forth of all the air and tiny particles being drawn in through the filter, into her mouth and down her throat, deep, deep into her stomach, where the poison would lie twinkling in her lungs.

  She tugged the mask off again and laid it on her chest, trying to catch her breath, and shut her teary eyes. She couldn’t wear it; she wouldn’t. She didn’t want to die here, but if everyone else was dead and gone, what did it matter? She sat for a moment, then she slowly opened her mouth, opening her throat as wid
e as she could, and took in as much air as she could manage, breathing in every mote of dust and every poison particle.

  She woke with a lurch, and it was a moment before she realized that she was no longer in Wales, sharing a bed with Button. She had heard the wailing of a beast in her dreams, had seen the eyes from her own stories watching her in the dark. The room felt clammy, and she could just about make out Mr. Tabernacle and the sheen of his single black eye.

  There was a soft creak of wood downstairs, and she listened. Footsteps. She got onto her knees and pressed her ear to the floorboards, listening for her mother, waiting for her voice. She tried to trace the movement, holding her breath as one stair creaked, and then another, before it went quiet again. Then more footsteps, going in and out of each room, but too cautious perhaps, too careful. She pressed her ear harder to the floor. She heard the throb of blood in her ear, like the soft pulse of the house, and then the squeaking tap in the bathroom slowly being turned, something scrambling up through the pipes, and then a sudden retch of water and a voice, a profanity, almost like a bark, that didn’t sound like her mother at all.

  She sidled nervously across the floor and hunched beneath the window. For a while there was nothing but an uneasy quiet. Then the footsteps came again, quietly coming right up to the steps of the attic this time, and suddenly, from inches away, a rattling. The hatch in the floor bucked and jolted, and she almost shrieked but the bolt held firm, and, under the weight of the ottoman, there was no way in. She clamped her hand across her mouth, the other pressing at her heart. Don’t breathe. Don’t cry out. Don’t make a sound. After a moment the attic steps creaked and whatever was there moved away until it was gone, and for a long time she could hear nothing but the slight quivering of her breath.

  She was used to sleepless nights. They all were. She was used to lying in bed, hearing the sound of bombers droning overhead, followed sometimes by the snarl of pursuing fighters. Even in Wales there had been disturbed nights as a lone plane tore up the sky, and for a moment you could imagine a single package of death whistling down through the clouds to you, From Mr. Hitler, with Love. The silence was worse. The silence made room for other things to creep in, from her dreams and from the stories she wrote, her imagination turning real.