Strangers (11 page)

‘Why haven’t you drawn me?’ she demanded and he answered, ‘Well, that would have been rather
obvious
of me, wouldn’t it?’

He’s nice, Annie thought.

She felt the intriguing mixture of excitement and anticipation that she recalled years afterwards as the dominant flavour of those days. Everything that happened was an adventure, every corner turned presented an enticing new vista.

‘What’s your name?’ the boy asked her. ‘I’ve seen you at the college, haven’t I?’

‘Anne. Annie,’ she corrected herself. Since leaving school she had discarded sixth-form gawky Anne in favour of Annie, free-wheeling art student with her Sassoon bob and cut-out Courrèges boots.

‘I’m Martin.’

And so they had met, and the strands had been picked out and pulled together in the first tentative knot. Martin had taken a crumpled handbill from his pocket. It was the term’s programme from the college film society.

‘Look.
Zéro de Conduite
. Have you seen it?’ And then when Annie shook her head, ‘You really should. Would you like to come with me?’

For all their protestations of freedom they had still been very conventional, all that time ago. He had invited her to see a film and she had accepted, and he had taken her for supper afterwards at the Sorrento.

But there was no fragment to illustrate what had happened next. She simply couldn’t remember. All she could see was herself, trudging through the rain in the streets beyond Battersea Park, with Martin’s address burning in her pocket. He must have taken her out once or twice and then moved on to someone else. Was that it?

Perhaps. And perhaps she had been smitten by the anguish that was as much part of those days as the enchantment. She had determined that she wouldn’t let him go, and had boldly gone to the registry to find his address. But she could see her nineteen-year-old self so clearly, in her white plastic mac dotted with shilling-sized black spots, splashing through the puddles wearing her tragic sadness like a black cloak. Just as Jeanne Moreau did, or Catherine Deneuve, or whichever French actress was providing her model for that week. She was going to confront him, beg him to listen to her because she was lost without him. There was a bottle of wine in her carrier bag, and when the time came they were going to drink it together, all barriers down at last.

There, that little piece fitted there
.

She had reached his door and rung the bell, her face already composed in its beautiful, sad, brave lines. Martin opened the door, brandishing a kitchen ladle. He beamed at her, and her heart lifted like a kite.

‘Oh, Annie, it’s you. Great. Just the person we need. Come in here.’

She followed him into the kitchen and stared around. It wasn’t what she had planned, not at all.

The room was packed with people, mostly ravenous-looking boys. In the middle of the table, amidst a litter of potato peelings and bottles of beer and cider, there was a slab of roast pork, half carved, with blood still oozing from a round pinky-brown patch in the centre.

‘We were going to have a house feast,’ Martin explained. ‘But the meat looks wrong. What d’you think?’

‘I think it needs about four more hours in the oven,’ Annie retorted. It was hard to maintain her Jeanne Moreau expression confronted with a piece of raw pork and a dozen hungry faces.

Martin shrugged cheerfully. ‘Oh well. Let’s stick it back in the oven and go to the pub.’

They went to the pub, and came back again much later. At some stage they ate the pork, or what was left of it. Somebody else drank Annie’s wine, and later still threw it up again. Annie didn’t care about anything except that she was with Martin. He took her upstairs to his room and put his arms round her, and they looked into each other’s eyes as if at a miracle.

‘Why did you come down here, this evening?’ he asked her and she answered, with daring simplicity, ‘Because I can’t live without you.’

‘You don’t have to,’ Martin said.

It was the truth.

After that, for a long time, all the pieces of confetti that she put into the proper sequence belonged to them both. Slowly, by the same stages that many of their friends were passing through at the same time, Martin and Annie became a couple. They explored each other, awkwardly at first, on the mattress in Martin’s room, then with daring, and then with skill that turned quite quickly into tenderness. In the same way, but even more slowly, their life in the world found its pattern, echoing the private one. The discovery of one another’s likes and pleasures was consolidated by sharing them. They launched themselves into the endless, fascinated talks that convinced them they were identical spirits. They went everywhere and did everything together, exchanging the romantic isolation of adolescence for the luxury of mutual dependence. They became, to all their friends, Martin-and-Annie.

For a while in Martin’s last year they lived together, sharing a chaotically disorganized house with three other students. There were lots of little, disjointed pictures of that time, of faces around the kitchen table and skinny legs sprawling in broken-backed armchairs. Where had all those people gone? Perhaps, Annie thought sadly, they had become Martin. Become him because all the memories of that time were crystallized in him, part of the cement that held them together. In those days, at the age of twenty, Annie had proudly acted out the role of housewife. Here was the image of herself heading for the local launderette with two bulging blue plastic carrier bags. She had cooked meals too, and folded Martin’s shirts for him.

Did I ever, she wondered, see my mother in myself? Was I never afraid that it would be the same for me, too?

No, not that. We thought we were different, so busy making new rules. We thought we had turned the world upside down because Martin used to clank about the house with a mop-up bucket. Because he used to take his turn at cooking dinners that were never ready until midnight, and left every saucepan in the house dirty.

They had been happy … There was a lot of laughter printed on those confetti fragments. Lying numbly in her tiny space with Steve’s hand her only warmth, Annie wished that she could breathe life into them again.

At the end of that time Martin had gone to work in Milan. Here, Annie saw herself with him at the airport, her face crushed against the leather shoulder of his coat as he hugged her. For two years they had separated, because they had grown out of play-acting married life.

Annie remembered the flat that she had taken. It was close to here, above the creaking weight that pinned her like a butterfly to a board. She followed the turns of the streets that would take her there, and up the stairs into her rooms. She saw the colour of the walls – had she really painted them aubergine? – and the fringed Biba lampshades. The flicker under the skin of her face might have been a smile.

At the end of two years Martin had come home from Italy. They had found each other’s company all over again, as comfortably fitting as a winter coat left on a peg all through the summer, and then gratefully put on with the coming of cold weather. Within a year they were engaged. Their parents met and approved, exchanging drinks in their similar houses, pleased that their children had found the way at last. And a year after that, with Matthew’s still face watching from inside her head, Annie was married.

‘I thought that we would be gentle to each other,’ Annie said. ‘And we have been.’

‘You’re very lucky,’ Steve answered her softly.

That made her turn her head to him, as far as it would go.

‘Why do I feel ashamed, then?’

Steve thought, I hardly glimpsed you, walking in front of me towards that door. How long have we been lying here? Talking. I know you now. Better than I knew my own wife. Better than I’ll ever know anyone again, if there is anything beyond this day.

‘You haven’t anything to be ashamed of, Annie.’

‘I made a choice, an easy choice. And now it’s too late to take the other path. I feel that … everything has faded. For Martin, too, do you think? And now it’s too late.’ Annie was too tired to cry any more, but she felt the fine muscles pull at her eyes, the little mechanisms of her body still unbelievably functioning. ‘It’s too late to turn and run and draw it back again, and make the colours shine all over again.’

‘If you and I weren’t lying here, if this thing had never happened, would you have changed anything then?’

Annie said, very quietly, ‘No. I would have gone home with my tree baubles and the toys for my kids, and I would have hidden them and put the boys to bed and Martin and I would have eaten dinner together, just as we did every night …’

Did
. More pieces of confetti, fresh and unfaded now, mosaic of a life, a family life. She longed for it, aching where her hurt body was numb.

‘You haven’t anything to be ashamed of, Annie,’ he repeated. ‘You have loved your family, mothered your children. Ordinary, admirable things. You should take hold of those.’

‘Take hold of them,’ Annie echoed. And then, abruptly, ‘Everyone is ashamed.’

Steve felt her closeness, closer in the touch of her cold fingers than he had ever held anyone.

‘I am ashamed too,’ he said. ‘Of a thousand things. Business subterfuges. Social evasions. Lots of lies, so many I couldn’t begin to count. I lied to my Nan, to Cass, Vicky, everyone I’ve known and should have cared about.’

Annie could hear his breathing, shallow gasps as he sucked in the stagnant air. ‘I’m ashamed because I’ve never loved anyone. Never, in all my life. If there isn’t anything after today … I will have lived for nearly forty years without making anyone happy. And you say that you are ashamed.’

The bitterness in his voice cut her as sharply as any of the physical pain.

‘No,’ she said, so loudly that he wondered whether somehow she had managed to bring her face closer to his. ‘I know you. I know that isn’t the truth.’

Out in the street the wind was bringing snow again, tiny flakes of it driven horizontally into the faces of the small groups of watchers. The wind tore at the orange tapes so that they strained and flapped and the policemen guarding them turned their backs into it and moved uneasily to and fro. Martin stood motionless, watching the store front. Along with everyone else, he had been moved so far back that the effort of staring into the distance made his eyes ache, and they watered with the cold blast of wind.

The crane had moved round once, very slowly, and was now stationary again. The fireman had brought their ladders forward in its place, fragile-looking metal probes reaching up against the buckled frontage. Martin could see the yellow helmets swaying at the ladder tips. Everything seemed to move so slowly. What were they doing?
Please hurry up
. The words beat in his head with the throb of blood. Why so long?

Through the tears that the wind scoured out of his eyes Martin saw a chunk of brick fall from the raw edge of the façade. It plummeted downwards in a shower of smaller fragments and he heard the sharp indrawn breaths of the people pressing around him. Amongst the wreckage the rescue workers scattered and, involuntarily, they turned their faces up to look at the sagging wall and the patch of sky seeming to press down on top of it. Then, when the dust had blown away, they bent to their work again. Painstakingly the chunks of concrete and splintered beams and broken shop fittings were still being lifted away. Part of what had been the ground floor was exposed now, its carpets whitened with thick dust. The tiny flakes of snow settled and vanished, and settled again unnoticed.

In the big control trailer that had joined the line of police vehicles, the police commander was watching the time. It was just after three o’clock, and the light was already fading. The power supply to the store had failed with the explosion, but generators had been brought in and the emergency lights had been hauled into place, ready to be switched on. The work would go on for many hours yet.

3.10 p.m. The commander moved abruptly to the trailer door and looked out at what the bomb had done. He knew with a degree of certainty now where the bomb had been planted, what type it was, how much explosive it had detonated and who had been responsible for it. He didn’t know whether there was a chance of reaching any survivors in time. They had been buried more than five hours.

‘Three,’ he said aloud, without turning away from the door.

The thermal imaging cameras had located three heat sources, human bodies. They were in the basement of the store, lying four storeys directly below the point where the bomb had exploded. Two of them were very close together and the third some yards away. They could have been in the basement at the time of the explosion, or they could have fallen into it as the store collapsed inwards on itself. The policeman put his finger to his moustache, the only sign of anxiety that he ever revealed. It should only be a matter of minutes, an hour at the most, to reach them now.

But the broken façade hung over them, unsupported. It had taken precious time to discover that it couldn’t be knocked outwards to fall harmlessly into the street. There was no time to erect scaffolding and bring it down piece by piece. The only hope was to work faster, to uncover the remaining three bodies before it fell, or the wind brought it down.

For the hundredth time since early morning the commander offered up thanks that the bomb had gone off almost as the store opened. Instead of hundreds of casualties in a store packed with Christmas shoppers, the total so far was eight deaths. In the last hour two people had been brought alive from the wreckage near the main doors. One of them was a store commissionaire and the other a teenage boy, both seriously injured. There were thirty or so further casualties, some of them passers-by who had only been cut by flying glass. And there were three more people, perhaps alive, to be recovered before the teams of rescuers could be pulled back and the frontage knocked down into the tangled mass already lying beneath it.

Unless, the commander thought, the wind does it first.

He went down the trailer steps, settling the protective helmet on his head, and felt the full force of the wind in his face. He walked quickly, with his head bent, past the ruined windows again. The bobbing yellow helmets and the orange fluorescent jackets of the police seemed to be the only spots of colour in a world that had been drained of it.