Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered
his spine until the sounds started up again.
‘They’re right overhead, Annie. Do you know what that means?’ Still she didn’t answer and he shouted at her, ‘Don’t you know?’
‘Tell me,’ she said. He heard her exhaustion, and knew that she was near to giving up, now, after so long.
‘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