by Jason Hewitt
She sat there now, listening. It must have been an hour or two, maybe more, since she had heard the noises downstairs. She stood and pushed the ottoman back as quietly as she could, squatting down to listen again before she pulled back the bolt and slowly lifted the hatch just enough to peep through. The attic stairs were shadowy, the hallway a somber gray. She hauled the hatch open and laid it gently on the floor. With her toes fumbling in the darkness for each step, she eased her way down, pressing herself against the wall at the bottom of the attic staircase before she found the courage to look around the corner.
Along the landing, a single slip of moonlight fell across the carpet from her mother’s room. She used it as a guide, allowing it to take her footsteps to the top of the stairs, where she peered down over the banisters and waited. After a minute she sidled her way down, one careful step at a time until she was at the bottom, her feet curling on the cold floor.
She crept sideways down the hall, her hand feeling along the walls, edging up to the corners and door frames. At the end, the kitchen waited dark and empty. The sitting-room door was open, and she took a few small steps in, her hands held to her mouth to smother the sound of her breath. The room seemed somehow darker than the others, just the heavy silhouettes of furniture: the lumpy backs of leather chairs, the blackout sheets pinned, the bony legs of a side table with the Bakelite telephone crouching on it, and her mother’s piano and stool, both ghostly beneath old sheets.
She took another step in and, as her eyes readjusted, the darkness shrinking back a little, she saw the silvery glass of water on the floor at the far end of the room and then a figure huddled beside it in the shadows beneath the window. She must have made a sound, because the figure moved slightly, and something clicked. It was a man, holding a pistol, the barrel pointed towards her. The sudden sense that she was the subject of his gaze lit the room up around her as though he were shining a torch. She wanted to move, to run, but her feet were rooted to the floor, and panic had snatched away all her breath.
She could barely see his uniform in the dark, but it reminded her of the Essex Regiment when they’d come up this part of the coast the previous year. When he finally spoke his voice was quiet but firm, and she glimpsed his teeth. For a moment she thought he was grinning—then she realized they were gritted in pain.
“Why are you here?” he said.
She tried to answer, but couldn’t find any words. Her throat was clamped tight.
“I said—why are you here?”
She couldn’t even swallow. Her fingers found the button of her cardigan and twisted it on its threads.
“I live here,” she finally ventured.
His eyes remained fixed on her.
“Where is your family then?”
“Out,” she told him, the lie slipping from her before she could catch it.
He watched her from beneath his scowl. “Out?”
She nodded. “They’ll be back soon though. Any minute…”
The man laughed.
Without taking his eyes off her or lowering his gun, he rose to his feet and she stumbled backwards.
“Where are they then?” he said.
He held her in his stare. The pistol wavered in his hand and she saw then that it was wet, bloody perhaps, and that there was blood on his shoulder and down his arm too, a smear of it across his face. He took a step closer, and she clamped herself rigid; rubbing at his forehead, he took a couple of steps back—and then, as if changing his mind, came towards her again, straightening his firing arm now and pointing the pistol with some certainty. She waited for the shot, for the hot impact, but his arm dropped again and, with a sudden bellow, almost simultaneous with her own shriek, he kicked at the glass of water and it exploded into shards against the wall.
He leaned his hand against the window frame, catching his breath and watching her from beneath his scowl. His breath came like snarls through his gritted teeth and his gun hung loose in his hands; then he straightened up and pointed it at her.
“Go back to bed,” he said. “Go on! Now! And don’t leave your room. Do you hear me?”
She backed towards the door, still saying nothing.
He jabbed the gun at her. “Do you understand?”
She nodded. Then, scrambling out through the doorway, she ran down the hall, up the stairs, and into her room, slamming the door behind her and pushing everything from her bed to the floor. She jumped in and pulled the covers to her nose. She lay there, holding herself as still as possible and listening as hard as she could, but all she could hear in the darkness was the sound of her breath blasting against the bedsheets and the throbbing of her heart.
He gathered up as many bits of glass as he could find in the dark and emptied them into a teacup on the dresser, rubbing the dusty shards from his hand. The pain in his shoulder was excruciating, burning right through to the bone and sending piercing stabs down his arm and across his chest. The blood was soaking through the dressing and his shirt. He covered his eyes with his hand and listened. He had to focus. Stay calm. He couldn’t let the girl being here trip him—not now.
He moved to the window and tried to look through the slit in the blackout cloth that he had cut with his knife. It was almost impossible to see anything through the rip and the dusty glass and shutters, but he’d see a torchlight if someone was coming, and that was enough. He leaned back against the wall and allowed himself to breathe, tipping his head and glancing at the ceiling. He checked his pockets. Everything was still there: identity card, letters, the photograph, the dog tags, the ten pounds in English notes, the Browning back in its holster, the spare magazine. He had to keep checking these things; had to know everything was in its place.
He looked up at the ceiling again. The child. The bloody child! His hands were clammy and tacky with blood, and his heart hammered. He could feel the grit and sweat in his hair, the taste of salt still on his lips. Stay calm, he told himself again. He couldn’t afford a mistake.
After a couple of minutes he pulled his kit from the corner. His pack was sopping wet, but when he unfastened the buckles and opened the drawstring the contents were still dry, carefully wrapped in their oilskin bags. He emptied a box of cartridges out from one of them and took out a handful. Taking the spare magazine from its carrier hanging on his belt, he fed the bullets in and exchanged the magazine for the one already loaded into the butt of the pistol. Four bullets used already; he would have to be more careful.
He pushed his pack back into the corner, stepped lightly to the foot of the stairs, and listened. The girl would not be asleep. She’d have buried herself in the bed or would be crouching behind the door, listening to him listening to her, and neither would make a sound. He could sense her, just as she no doubt had sensed him: the pulse of another heartbeat, the soft breeze of another’s breath.
He edged his way around the house, counting off the rooms as he passed through them: hallway, dining room, kitchen, study, sitting room, back to the hall. He pulled a small torch from one of his pockets that gave off a light so fine and sharp that it could make the smallest incision in the dark, and with it he checked in cupboards, cabinets, and corners, behind the three leather chairs, cautious all the time that something might jump out. He had learned over the last few months that if you find one child in an abandoned house, there were usually more, hiding away somewhere. He saw the flash of torches, frightened white faces, heard a rattle of gunfire, shouts, and screams, then sudden desolate silence. He tried to blink the images away. You shouldn’t think back. Ohlendorf was right. Don’t ever think back.
As he moved about the house, he could feel his shoulder seizing up, as if inch by inch, minute by minute, the pain was closing him down. He opened drawers, rummaging around, putting his whole hand in and feeling awkwardly along the top for things stuck there or secret catches; listening all the time for her, for any movement. In the study he flicked through the leather-bound books along the bookcase, his torch held between his teeth while he thumbed hurriedly thr
ough the pages or opened the books by their spines and shook them out. He pulled up the sitting-room rug, upturned ornaments, and poked around the soil of dead pot plants with his blade, foraging about in the corners of this other family’s life. He tried the cupboards of the Welsh dresser, feeling for false backs, looking for even just a slip of paper—a document, a letter, a photograph, anything useful—pushed so far into a crack that only the tip of a corner might be visible.
In the sitting room, he stood at the side table and picked up the telephone receiver and listened to the buzzing crackle; then he quietly replaced it, pulling out the cord from the back and curling it into a loop, and with a sharp yank he severed the line. He switched the torch off and pocketed it, then paused again, scanning the darkness. He was already beginning to feel acquainted with the house. He had a sense of the space settling around him. Greyfriars. It was not at all what he had expected.
He went back to the window where he had cut a slit in the blackout material and perched on the ledge. He had already hauled the sash window open, and, stooping a little, he pushed the knife through the slit and levered up one of the wooden slats of the shutter with the blade. He looked through the narrow gap and almost instantly felt the hot smog of the night slipping in, the slight drift of air from the coast blowing across his hands.
Beneath the blanket of clouds, everything was gray. The mound of the air-raid shelter. The meshed structures of the chicken coop and rabbit run. The stone angel statue in the middle of a vegetable patch where the ghostly circles of vegetables looked as if they were made of ash and the slightest puff of wind would blow them into dust.
Over the treetops the sky flared silver, then died again. He felt the tremble. An explosion out at sea. He wondered if the girl had noticed.
He scanned the trees, waiting for movement, a sense of something watching.
Their forms remained still and thick and heavy against the night: great English sycamores, oaks, and firs. And beyond them the marshes, the mudflats, the beaches, the coiling wires, and concrete blocks, pillboxes, and buried mines.
He left the window, going light-footed into the hall and up the stairs, moving from room to room and along the corridor, past family photographs on the wall.
When he was a boy growing up this had all been played out as a game. He and the other boys running around among half-built, abandoned buildings, shooting at each other with their stick guns and scrambling over the brick piles and timbers. They imagined that a new war was raging, greater and wider than the World War had ever been; that the abandoned building sites were not abandoned for lack of money but were bombed-out streets, that they were clambering up and down broken stairs, that the half-built walls had been blown away, allowing them to sit on bedroom floors, swinging their legs out into infinity. I claim this half house in the name of the Republic! And if a boy they didn’t know strayed onto their street—perhaps a Communist—they would capture him and beat him and shoot him until he was dead.
Those were just games though. Taunts wouldn’t kill a boy. The guns weren’t real. You could point at another child’s head and say “bang” and nothing much would happen, except maybe a fake slumping to the ground, followed by a giggle or, better still, a groan. Now there was a real pistol in his hand. He was standing over a bed with a child asleep in it. He held the gun to her temple, feeling the softness of the skin there through the metal, as though the weapon were an extension of his hand. There was no choice with this one; there had been no choice before.
Friday
Early the next morning he went from room to room taking down the blackout frames and hauling up the sash windows in the hope of admitting the thinnest lines of sunlight from between the shutter slats. Even with the windows open the rooms remained hot and airless. He felt along every floorboard, shining the torchlight between the gaps and testing each board with the blade of his knife to see if it was loose. The wound in his shoulder was still painful, searing like a burn, and every time he lifted his arm it felt as if he were being cut anew.
In one of the bedrooms he found a wardrobe of men’s clothing. There were shoeboxes in the bottom with brogues and boots but little else, and nothing in the pockets of the trousers, jackets, or coats but a penny coin, a few seeds, and some fluff and sand. He pulled one of the jackets out and held it up against him. It was well stitched and of a fine thread, and when he lifted the arm to his cheek he could smell the warm fug of its wool, as if the heat of the man who had last worn it were still trapped there.
A model boat stood on the windowsill, and he picked it up carefully in both hands, the torch clasped between his teeth. It was skillfully made with canvas sails and cotton thread for ropes, now slightly grubby. Every detail was delicately crafted: the varnished rim around the deck, the fine wire rails, the intricate etching around the wheel. He would commit it to memory like every other detail in the house, every knickknack, trinket, treasure, and vase. Nothing would go unnoticed. Nothing would be left to chance.
He lifted one of the wooden rungs of the shutters and looked down across the garden at the birdbath, hollyhocks, and buddleia below, the trees casting early morning shadows across the lawn. He couldn’t let the girl go. Why hadn’t he shot her when she was just a dimly lit face, a figure and no more than that, standing there in the sitting-room doorway?
In the master bedroom, pictures of flowers dabbed in watercolors hung from the picture rail: clutches of foxgloves, lilies, and bluebells, tiny thunderflies like pinpricks caught behind the glass. He ran his hand over the bedspread, searched under the pillows and mattress, but there was nothing. The wardrobe in the bedroom was empty too, as were the drawers of the dressing table, bar a few bits of makeup and a jewelry box pushed to the back. He took it out and opened the lid with a click. The gears coughed rustily inside, and three figurines stood frozen mid-dance on the circular mechanism. The device chimed once, then was silent, and he shut the lid and returned it to its drawer.
He picked up a wedding photograph from the dressing table: a bride and groom beneath the crumbling arches of a church door. The man looked mildly surprised, as if the camera had flashed before he’d had a chance to compose himself, while his bride smiled demurely, head cocked to one side like a bird. He studied them closely: the bride with her curls and coils of hair pinned elegantly; the groom’s own hair slick and shining, his face sharp and youthful, with prominent cheekbones. He put the photograph down and looked in the mirror at his own face, the contours of his own skin. Sometimes he barely recognized himself.
In the bathroom, he took off his jacket and shirt and removed the dressing from around his shoulder. The blood was now clogged and black around the wound, which seeped a clear sticky liquid; every time he moved his shoulder the pain forced air through his clenched teeth. He gently bathed the wound in cold water, wincing as he went. The hole was deep, and he was worried that the knife had not been as clean as it had looked and that infection might be setting in. He could feel the throb of it, the pain of its pulsing, tiny spasms like fissures splintering down his arm and through his chest. He dabbed it dry with the corner of a towel and applied a fresh dressing from his kit bag, wrapping it around and tying it tight; then he tested his fingers, bending and straightening them.
She woke with a start. He was sitting in the chair beside her, his pistol in his hand. One finger tapped rhythmically on the arm of the chair, and a collection of wooden splinters were piled like a tiny bonfire on the other arm. Outside, the morning was silent. Behind him, a sharp rectangle of sunlight burned its outline around the blackout fabric at the window. He looked right through her.
She clamped her eyes shut, but when she opened them again he was still there.
“Get up.”
He hauled the bedclothes off her and she sat up blearily.
“Come on!” he shouted. “Up, up!” He bent down for her suitcase and threw it on the bed beside her. “You can’t stay here.” He pocketed the gun and flung open the case; then he gathered the clothes up off the floo
r and threw them onto the bed.
“You have to leave.”
Barely thinking, she scrabbled things into her arms and scrunched them into the case.
“Do not tell anyone that you have been here,” he said. “Or that I am here or that you have seen me.” He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her so close to him she smelled his dirty breath. “If you tell anyone about me I will hunt you down and kill you. Do you understand?”
She nodded and he released his grip, then gathered more clothes up, squashed them into the case, shut it, and threw it to the floor.
“Go on,” he said. “Go!”
She stood looking at him, suddenly unsure.
He picked up the case again and grabbed at her wrist.
“Come on. Get out! Go!”
He hauled her out of the room and down the stairs, her feet barely touching them and the case dragging and scraping down the wall. At the bottom he pulled the front door open, and she expected him to push her out but he stopped short. She tried desperately to yank herself free, but he held her tight as he looked down the drive and across the road and fields. And then he muttered something—a curse, a word she didn’t recognize—and suddenly pulled her back in and slammed the door shut.
“No!” she shouted. “Let me—”
But one hand was already clamped against her mouth and, with the other holding her around her stomach, he hauled her off her feet so that she hadn’t the air or time to scream before she was being pulled—half-carried, half-dragged—down the hallway, her feet scuffing and kicking at the floor, and him puffing and struggling as if in some pain. He shoved her into the kitchen and kicked out a chair from beneath the table. Throwing her down on it, he took his gun out and pointed it at her. Then, withdrawing it again, he paced up and down. His breath was ragged. Finally he turned to her.
