Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered
that he could think about it he realized that the clogged air was settling. Each breath came easier, and although the dust still choked him there was oxygen filling his lungs. He even had the impression that a draught of clean, cold air touched his face.
He lay on his side facing Annie. He could feel her close to him, and he had the sudden sense that they were like lovers in the dark. Gently he disentangled his fingers from hers and felt for her pulse. The little beat was still there. He laid her hand down and then reached out to touch her face.
With his fingertips he followed the contours of it, trying to see her through his hands. Her hair was tangled over her cheek and he stroked it back. Her forehead was cold, but he knew that she was alive. When he touched her upper lip and traced the line of it through a crusted patch at the corner, her mouth opened and he felt the faint exhalation of breath on the palm of his hand.
His fingers moved again, over her chin and then to cup the point of her jaw. Except for the dried blood at the corner of her mouth her face was untouched.
He rested for a moment. Steve was thinking, his confused mind still only admitting one thought at a time, What happened?
He tried to recall the exact quality of the noise. It had been a long, diminishing roar. Not an explosion, but a collapse. It must be that more of the store had fallen in overhead. Perhaps the rescue work had undermined it. Perhaps the rescuers themselves were pinioned, somewhere in the weight above …
Steve headed off the thought. They would come in the end, but how much longer could it be? He thought of the watch again and knew that it was gone for good. They had both moved, and he had lost his bearings.
Annie’s cheek had grown a little warmer under his hand. He began his slow exploration again. Her hair was matted with dust, but that was all. He combed his fingers through the ragged length of it, but he could find no trace of blood. Very slowly, as gently as he could, he lifted her heavy head and slid his right arm under it. Her skull felt hard and round. There were no soft places, nothing sticky. Steve felt the first flicker of real hope. No head injuries. He settled her head once more so that it was pillowed on his arm. Then, with his free hand, he stroked her hair.
As if to reward him Annie stirred a little, and then murmured something. Thillren? He strained to hear, and then to make sense of it. Children, was that it?
‘Annie?’
He whispered her name at first, then repeated it, louder and more insistent. There was no response, and she didn’t move again.
Doggedly Steve slid his hand down from her head to her throat, and then over the crumpled stuff of her coat.
At the level of her breastbone his fingers stopped moving. There was a stiffness at first, a difference in the texture of the cloth. He reached further, and then met the stickiness he had dreaded. Blood, here, a patch that had soaked right through her clothes. It was warm on the side she was lying on, and he couldn’t stretch far enough beyond her waist to discover how far the blood had seeped. He trailed his fingers downwards to touch the rubble underneath her and there was blood there too, mixed with the grit and dust. He lifted his hand and put it to his own mouth. There was the taste of blood in the dirt, and when he put his hand down to feel it again the patch seemed bigger.
In despair, Steve let his head drop back. A shower of powdery dust fell on his face and he thought of the earth scattered on a coffin lid. Annie was bleeding, and she would bleed to death in his arms.
He opened his mouth and shouted upwards into the black firmament. ‘Why don’t you come, you bastards? Why don’t you come for us?’
The shout was no more than a croak, and he felt the dry ache of thirst in his throat.
There was no point in shouting. ‘Annie,’ he murmured. He turned his head again so that they lay face to face, their foreheads almost touching.
‘I’m here,’ he told her.
Suddenly he felt weak, languid and almost comfortable in his exhaustion. The thick air was like a blanket. It if wasn’t for the thirst, he thought, he could fall asleep. Like a lover, with Annie in his arms. If he just inclined his head a little he could kiss her cheek …
Annie. Not Cass, or Vicky. A stranger, but he knew her face now.
Steve forced his eyes open again.
Not fall asleep. Not.
He made himself think, remember, anything, just to keep his consciousness flickering on.
Overhead the lights made a harsh ellipse in the dark cave of the store. There were more of them now, and the work in the light was faster, and fiercer. The collapse had come, injuring two men, but the danger was past. Even the injured were forgotten, now that they had been taken away to safety. The rescuers worked on, grimly, digging from the point where the scaffolding shelter had been. The tarpaulins had been rigged up once more, providing a rough screen against the wind and sleet, and from inside them the police guarding the store front could hear the multiplying bite of picks and the juddering whine of the drills.
It was ten past five. Forty-two minutes since the frontage had collapsed. Already, seemingly incredibly, the ground floor had been exposed all over again. They were working downwards, once more, into the basement.
Annie lay with her head in her mother’s lap. It was a warm day, and she had been playing in the garden. She knew that, because she could still smell the scent of crushed grass where the rug had been spread out, and the musty geranium leaf smell from the window boxes. Then she had hurt herself, somehow. Perhaps she had fallen on the path and cut her knees, or perhaps she had bumped her head on the kitchen door as it swung outwards in the breeze.
She had run in tears to find her mother, and her mother had bathed her cuts and dried her face. Then they had gone together into the cool sitting room. There were photographs on the piano and on the low table by the fireplace, Mummy and Daddy when they were young, Annie herself and her brother on seaside holidays. It was very tidy, very quiet. Annie was lying on the sofa. She was wearing sandals with a rising sun pattern punched in the toes and white ankle socks, a green cotton dress and hair ribbons. Once or twice her mother stroked her hair back from her cheek.
Annie smiled contentedly. As she lay there she had a huge, luminous sense of something that was puzzling, because it felt so strange and important, but yet was also utterly comforting and warm and safe. For a brief moment she held the whole of childhood, the summer afternoons and birthdays and holidays and winter bedtimes, all distilled in the recollection of one single day. She turned her head a little, feeling the touch of her mother’s fingers, afraid that the vision would evade her. She wanted to hold it, but she knew that it would burst like a bubble as soon as she touched it.
It stayed with her for a moment longer, and then she felt her smile of joy fading. So complete, so perfect a vision of childhood could never visit a child. A child’s view of its own life was a mass of fragments, frustrations and fleeting pleasures and unexplained loose ends.
She was cold, not pleasantly cool any more. She wasn’t a child, and the precious, glowing vision had vanished. From a distance, Annie saw herself sit up and swing her legs down off the sofa. She ran to the door, with the hair ribbons fluttering like white butterflies. Her mother sat with her hands in her lap, watching her go, and her face was sad.
It wasn’t her mother, then, but Annie herself and she was watching the open door and the sunlight making long squares on the parquet floor of the hall. Pain was stabbing into her side, and there were tears behind her eyes that hurt in a different way. She heard children’s voices in the garden. Somehow she got up and went to the window. It wasn’t the little girl with the hair ribbons playing out there. It was Thomas and Benjamin, Benjamin in his pedal car and Tom clambering up into the branches of the pear tree. They were calling her and she couldn’t run, or even answer them.
‘Children,’ Annie managed to say.
Someone was listening to her, she knew that. It was comforting not to be alone in the dark, with the pain. He was very close to her, and she heard him say, ‘I’m here.’
Annie