Strangers (22 page)

And he went on, talking blandly about his treatment.

But Annie knew that he wasn’t thinking what he was saying any more than she was listening. He had taken her hand as she held it out. He turned it over in his, looking at each of her fingers and at the shape of her nails. He touched his fingertips to the marks that the needles and tubes had left in her wrist. She felt the light touch as if it had been his mouth against her throat. She knew that he was looking at her, but she couldn’t raise her head to meet his eyes.

‘It’s very clever, they make the muscles work against one another, you know …’ Annie felt afraid to move in case he came closer, or let her hand drop.

Stupid
, she thought dimly,
don’t you know what you want?

There were half-healed cuts on Steve’s hands too. She could remember the length and shape of his fingers so clearly. Was the tactile memory so much stronger than the visual, then?

‘It’s very important. Otherwise they just fade away from lack of use …’

Annie made herself look up. She met his eyes and saw the question in them, but she couldn’t even have begun to frame an answer. Behind them the two women had left their seats. The younger one with the magazine was holding the door open for the knitter. They went out together, and the door swung to with its gust of medicinal tasting air.

‘They’ve gone,’ Annie said.

The two old men sat with their backs turned, intent on the racing. It occurred to Annie that she was alone with Steve for the first time since the bombing and the blackness. The first time that they had been effectively out of sight and out of earshot of the nurses or the other patients.

Together the two of them seemed infinitely isolated, even within the tiny, cut-off world of the two hospital wards. For a moment Annie could have believed that reality extended no further than the stuffy air enclosed in the day room. She looked down again at their linked hands.

‘It’s very strange,’ she whispered.

‘What’s strange, Annie?’

‘This.’

Her hand moved in his, no more than a faint tensing of the muscles. Steve was wishing that she could have brought herself to say,
You and me
, or
Us, here
. He remembered her telling him about Matthew. I chose the easy option. The safe option. That’s what she had said. He looked at her, trying to take the measure of her courage. But Annie had infinite courage. He knew that.

‘I want to ask you such a lot of things,’ Annie said. The words tumbled out in a rush. ‘All sorts of things. Ends, to tie up everything you told me when we were buried. I think about them instead of going to sleep. Cowardly, because I’m afraid of the nightmares.’

‘Ask me,’ Steve said.

Annie smiled. ‘I wanted to ask you if you felt angry,’ she said. ‘About what they did to us. Whoever they are.’

He had been looking at her eyes. The blue was intensified by the dark shadows around them.

‘Angry?’ Steve thought for a moment. ‘No. Sad, for the other people. Not angry for myself. How could I be?’ That movement of her hand in his again. ‘It happened and we were there. That’s all. It’s hard to direct anger into a vacuum. I think what I feel most, now, is happy. I caught that from you, the other day. Do you feel angry, Annie?’

‘No. Not for myself. Sad for the others, like you. I feel angry for the boys’ sake, for Benjy, because he needs me. And for Martin. It was worse for him.’ Annie looked back at Steve. ‘I can’t imagine what I would have felt, or whether I would have been able to bear it. Waiting to know if Martin was alive. Waiting afterwards to find out if they could keep him alive.’

Her blue stare was level now, holding his.

‘I think you would have borne it with great courage,’ Steve said after a long moment. ‘I know how brave you are.’

‘You helped me to be brave down there.’

There was a pendulum swinging between them. It swooped from its high point, down and then up again, stirring the close air with its arcs. The bombing and their hours in the dark had set it swinging, Steve thought. Time would slow it down, and in the end it would stand still. Then they would know. He couldn’t ask her for anything while the pendulum still swung.

They sat facing each other, their hands still linked.

‘Did you think we were going to die?’ Annie asked him.

‘I was afraid, at the end, that they might not come in time.’

‘Yes. I can’t remember the end. Only you talking. You were telling me about your Nan, and when you were a little boy. You all got mixed up together, you and Thomas and Benjy. I could see you running away from me, the three of you, and I was afraid that I would never catch up with you again.’

‘And now you have,’ Steve said softly.

‘Now I have,’ she echoed.

Annie held out her other hand and he took it, folding both of hers between his own. Annie had the sense that she had been afraid of choices, and also that there was no choice now. The hours underground had changed all the neat, straight lines of her life, and the perspectives would never be the same again.

‘If we hadn’t been afraid that we would die,’ Annie said, ‘we wouldn’t have told each other all the things we did.’

‘Do you regret them?’

She looked up at him then. For a moment she saw a stranger’s face, a face as she would have seen it if she had glanced round in the doorway of the store. If nothing had happened then she would have gone on down the stairs.

But then. There had been the wind, and the thunderous noise, and the pain that held her in its fists. They had escaped from that. Relief renewed itself inside her and she felt the weightless brilliance of happiness again. It made her smile and she read the answering smile in Steve’s eyes.

He knew her thoughts. He was as close to her as her family; he was a part of herself. Not a stranger.

‘No,’ she told him. ‘I don’t regret anything.’

His hands moved over hers, warming them. Annie wanted him to reach forward and put his arms around her. He had held her in the dark, and she wanted to feel his touch again. She saw their joined hands, and the blue woollen weave of her dressing gown over her knees. She was clearly conscious of the whole of her body, patched and stitched as it was, and the slow movement of blood inside it. She felt her scars, and the new skin rawly pink at the margins. She was regenerating herself. She was suddenly almost drunk with the giddy pleasure of it, and the glow of it spread through her fingers to Steve’s.

‘Annie,’ he whispered.

They looked at each other still, motionless, silenced by the sudden need that drew them closer.

Another hermetic world, Annie thought wildly. The hospital enclosed them, just as the tangled girders and broken walls and floors had done.
Did that make it all right, then?

Her skin prickled. Steve’s face was very close to hers. She looked in his eyes and saw the dark grey irises, flecked with gold.

Annie’s awareness of her body’s workings made her feel naked. The colour flooded into her cheeks and she looked down to hide the heat of it. Steve moved too and their heads bent. For a moment their foreheads touched.

At the opposite end of the room one of the old men levered himself out of his chair. There had been a muted, distantly hysterical racing commentator’s voice in the day room background, but a control button clicked on the television now and there was silence.

Steve raised his head. The circuit broke and Annie thought,
No, don’t do that
.

But at the same time she felt relief wash through her, cooling her skin.

‘Did your horse come in, Frank?’ Steve called. He squeezed Annie’s hands in his and then let them go. She folded them in her lap, empty.

‘Nah,’ Frank grumbled. ‘The bugger ran like a one-legged ostrich.’

He shuffled across the room towards them, peering at the clock on the window wall.

‘Five to visiting time. They’ll all be pouring in here with their talk, talk. I wish meself that they’d leave me in peace with the racing. Still,’ he winked across at Annie, ‘I wouldn’t miss the sight of Steve’s visitors. You should see ’em.’ His hands outlined explicitly in the air before he stumped off towards his ward.

Annie and Steve were laughing. Their laughter was another link, almost a safety valve.

‘He has me cast,’ Steve explained, ‘as a kind of hybrid between Warren Beatty and Frank Harris. Nothing could be further from the truth, I promise.’

‘Who’s coming to see you today?’

‘Vicky.’

‘Hm.’

Acknowledgement flickered between them, humorous, unexpressed. As if they were partners, Annie thought. It was easy to laugh with Steve. The warmth of it was comfortable.

‘And you?’

‘Martin’s mother, bringing Tom and Benjy.’

Steve reached awkwardly for his crutches. Annie could move more freely so she bent down and retrieved them, holding them upright while he fitted his elbows into the padded cups and then let the metal legs take his weight.

‘Thank you.’ He half turned, then looked back at her. ‘Doesn’t this strike you as absurd? Crutches. Bandages. All the rest of it? A pair of battered bodies …’

‘It will pass,’ Annie interrupted him.

‘Soon, I hope.’

Annie let his challenge lie. Infirmity was a protective shield, and with her old caution she shrank from confronting what lay beyond it.

They moved slowly away towards the opposite doors. Annie imagined the outside world, reaching its long fingers into theirs to draw them apart. The image disturbed her but she still stopped in the doorway.

‘Tomorrow?’ she asked.

Steve nodded gravely. ‘Naturally.’

But then his face split into a smile, a smile that brought the fierce colour into her face again because it was as intimate as if they already lay in one another’s arms. Annie drew her blue robe around her and pushed through the door into the women’s ward.

Martin’s mother and the two little boys came down the length of it towards her.

‘Mummy!’

Somebody’s mother
, Annie remembered. Steve had said that about his wife wanting a baby. Just somebody’s mother. The recollection made her angry and she was grateful for it. He was arrogant, and he possessed all the male characteristics that she had turned her back on long ago, when she married Martin. Annie bent down to hug her children, drawing them close to her.

When she stood up again her mother-in-law kissed her and then stood back to look at her, exclaiming, ‘Annie! Darling, you look so much better. You’ve got pink cheeks again.’

‘I am better, Barbara,’ Annie said deliberately. ‘I’m working really hard at it. I want to get home just as soon as I can.’

‘I wish you would come home. Dad won’t let us do
anything
,’ Thomas complained. ‘Life’s very hard, right now.’

‘Poor boy.’ Annie put her arm round him. ‘Poor Dad, too. When does term start again?’

Thomas stared at her. ‘Monday. You
know
that.’

‘Of course I do. I’m sorry.’ She had forgotten. The slip of her memory made her aware again of the two worlds, one trying to draw her back and the other enclosing her here.

School terms. The neat pattern of days, the boys needing to be driven to and fro, her own routines of cooking and shopping and attending to them, and the quiet evenings when she sat with Martin opposite her at the table, exchanging the small snippets of news. And here, the high white beds in their curtained boxes, the terrifying fingers of her dreams, the peaks and troughs of pain. And Steve. Annie put her hand up to the corner of her mouth. The cut there had almost healed. Her body renewing itself. She felt the life in it.

‘Mum, are you listening?’

‘Yes, love, of course I am.’

They settled themselves around her bed. Benjy had brought her a series of drawings, and he wanted her to guess what every crayoned shape represented. Thomas wanted her to read a new book with him. She listened carefully to what they had to say, trying to share her attention between them with scrupulous fairness, suggesting and reassuring.

Barbara wanted to talk, too. She was an indefatigable talker, a friendly, outgoing, ordinary woman to whom Annie had never been particularly close. The bond with her own mother was too strong.

Annie struggled to spare some attention and make the right responses to Barbara’s recitals of how Martin was coping, what the neighbours in her street had said and thought, how the boys were behaving for her, the emergency domestic arrangements. She wished that her own mother were well, and that she were here instead of Barbara.

She remembered how she had imagined that she was a girl again, in the dark with Steve. Lying with her head in her mother’s lap, in their cool living room. Annie’s mother had come to see her twice since they had brought her out of the intensive care unit. They had been short visits, no more than ten minutes, and all through them she had held on to her husband’s arm with thin white fingers. She had been cheerful, painfully bright, for Annie’s sake.

Listening to Barbara’s stream of talk, Annie felt the vibration of anxiety for her mother, love and fear mixed together. With the anxiety came a sudden, sharp resentment of the demands that the other world made. The dues of love, she thought bitterly. Payable to parents, husbands, children.

Her selfishness startled and shocked her.

In pointless expiation she praised Barbara fulsomely for everything that she was doing. She bent her head over the books and drawings, trying to give of herself as generously as she could.

The visit only lasted an hour, but Annie was glad when it was over. Her head ached fiercely, and the long scar in her stomach burned. She knew that her goodbyes sounded hasty and irritable, and when the boys had gone she ached with guilt and longing for them.

She pushed the tray of supper aside as soon as they brought it to her, and lay dozing against her pillows until Martin came on his way home from work.

He stretched his long legs out in front of him as he sat in the hospital armchair. ‘You look tired,’ he said.

‘I am a bit. But I felt wonderful this afternoon. A tower of strength.’

‘That’s good. How was your day?’