by J. S. Monroe
“Need a suit,” I said finally, still facing away from them. I couldn’t keep a straight face for much longer. “For a funeral.”
The assistants glanced up at their elderly superior. A tall man, he stepped forward, cleared his throat. “We, um, we tend to cater for the larger end of the market, sir.”
“I know,” I said, turning round with an enormous scarlet suit in one hand and grinning. “I’ll take this one.”
At that moment the entire shop window disintegrated. The blast knocked me to the floor and sent shards of glass winking through the compressed air. A fraction of a second later there was a deafening crack, followed by a rushing sound, then silence. How long it lasted I could never remember. Gradually the air shook itself down, regaining its shape. I became aware of a pain in my left leg and a hideous cacophony in the street outside: tinkling glass mixed with screams, Annalese’s screams.
Recently, in moments of crisis, I had found myself thinking of Annalese’s face, with its carefree curves and muddy freckles. It was something I never thought I would do. My past life maybe, but not one person and so vivid, too. Now, as I lay on the shop floor, staring at the manager’s deflated frame next to me, I saw Annalese’s smile beneath her favourite velvet hat, lifted in style from Covent Garden.
I was rolled semi-conscious into an ambulance, staring across to where the shoe shop had once stood. A heavy stillness hung in the street like fog, muffling moans, absorbing the cries of the dying. Then a piece of glass fell from a high up window, echoing down a stairwell. I became aware of a burglar alarm ringing somewhere in the distance, its hammer twitching needlessly. A grey nylon anorak had been placed on something in the dust, a child perhaps.
3
I turned on to Mudlark Way, the footpath by the old gas works, and saw the wharf up ahead. I was exhausted. I should have been dead. The manager had taken the full impact of the blast, shielding me from flying glass and a chunk of concrete bollard. My left leg was badly bruised, bandaged at the knee, but otherwise I seemed to be intact. The hospital had released me in the early afternoon, armed with crutches. To keep away the pain they had filled me with pethidine. I had since consumed a couple of cans of Special Brew, just to make sure. A bad idea. As I picked my way clumsily through the ropes and twisted iron, one of my crutches jammed between two jetty planks. I freed it with effort but lost the rubber nozzle at the end. I stumbled on. Annalese had built a garden of sorts near the towpath: plants tumbled bravely out of ancient funnels and rusting paint pots, and a broken anchor, wrapped in plastic ivy, was propped up against a small bench.
Then I saw the flowers, a stockpile of colour, heaped up on the quayside and on the barge roof. There were messages on bits of paper, flapping in the cabin door and trapped under stones. I stood swaying, trying to focus on the scene, and took another swig of beer. A couple of women were sitting on the edge of the quay, backs turned. They looked around as I approached. One of them got up. It was Katrina from the market. Her eyes were black and hollow, smudged by tears. She hugged me and started to sob. I tried to hold her, but the crutches made it difficult. Instead I looked out across the water. A tug was towing rubbish towards Dartford.
“She loved you, Dutchie, she really loved you,” Katrina said, sniffing. “It wasn’t true what they said.”
What who said? I couldn’t think about her words and concentrate on standing at the same time. I felt myself deflating in her arms. Her cheeks were wet and salty. My own eyes were moist, tears beginning to refract my already blurred vision. Until now, Annalese’s death had only happened to me; I was able to dispute my own evidence, question whether there had been a bomb at all. On the train home, walking back from the station, people had given me strange looks but they had known nothing of her death. I hung on to their indifference, trusted their ignorance. Now I realised that other people – she had so many friends – were mourning too, complicating things, making it harder to doubt what had happened. Katrina disentangled herself to read some of the messages, leaving me leaning precariously in the wind. The other woman, Mia, was still sitting on the quayside.
“We thought it was Christmas Day,” I began, apologetically. Why was I apologising? The river and sky were merging into a greyness, absorbing my words almost before I had spoken them. I felt unable to say anymore and stepped on to the side of the boat, levering myself awkwardly into the cockpit and dropping a crutch. I put a hand on the hatch to steady myself. The women exchanged looks.
“I’m alright, just need a kip,” I said, and sank slowly to the floor.
*
Hungover but happy I lay staring at the low ceiling, reassured by the barge’s familiar smell of kerosene, its imperceptible lilt. My dreams had been of Cornwall, of heady times with Annalese, swimming naked below the cliffs at Treen. The clock by the bed said half past eleven. Propping myself on one elbow, I picked up a packet of Rizlas and looked around for some puff. Instinctively I put my hand to my breast pocket. Why was I still wearing a shirt? I took a sharp, involuntary breath. Slowly, I closed my eyes and sunk back into the pillow. My leg began to burn.
Katrina and Mia had left a note telling me to come round and chat in the morning if I wanted. I didn’t feel like talking to anyone. Their presence earlier had been unambiguous: Annalese was dead. Silence kept her alive. I got up slowly and tried to light a cigarette on the stove, kicking its base when it didn’t ignite. I sat down at the narrow table. The boat rocked slightly as I manoeuvred my leg on to a chair. It wasn’t just my leg that hurt. I had a churning feeling in my stomach, like permanent butterflies. Each time I thought of Annalese they swarmed.
It was approaching midnight rather than midday. A tanker was making its way quietly out to sea having unburdened its huge rolls of newsprint at Deptford. The wake lapped noisily against the concrete wharf along the towpath. It had lapped this morning, as we celebrated Christmas. I thought back to the afternoon, to the mortuary. I had to go there after leaving hospital to identify the body. According to one of the doctors, Annalese’s mum was too distraught.
“Take your lime,” the man had said, tucking a clipboard under his arm. Barely twenty years old, he had looked like a medical student, fresh-faced, too at ease around death. A packet of Marlboro was clearly visible in the breast pocket of his white coat, “Please, there’s no rush,” he continued. Of course there wasn’t. She was hardly going to get up and run away. She had no legs, arsehole. I very nearly hit him. Instead, I pressed my lips together until they hurt and focused on a small oval stain on the white, breeze-blocked wall. Blood? The man stood awkwardly for a moment, too concerned, then walked away.
The room was cold and whitewashed. The man’s shoes squeaked noisily on the plastic tiled floor. I didn’t look up but I sensed him pausing before leaving, looking at me again. I kept staring ahead at the opaque plastic curtain. I hadn’t been allowed to see my mum’s body. For years a part of me had been able to say she had never died. It was only as the evidence mounted, slowly and incontrovertibly (the quietness in the kitchen, my dad beginning to talk about girlfriends), that the indifference wore off and I began to believe she was dead. The two of them would have got on. For a moment I imagined her lying next to Annalese, chatting, as if nothing was wrong. Second time around and I was doing better. I actually felt something, sadness, guilt, terror, I wasn’t sure, but it was an improvement.
I stepped forward, pushing the rings back along the cheap metal rail. Annalese looked like she was wearing a mask. Her skin was yellower than usual, almost waxed, and her hairline seemed more pronounced, stitched even. Then I saw her facial wounds. Strange that I hadn’t noticed them first. Large black blotches beneath the cheek skin, grated cuts criss-crossing her forehead and nose. Her left ear had gone. Instead, there was a grey dent. Below her waist, supports pressed up against the sheet like tent poles. I squinted, searching for the whole. This was the first woman I had loved. Had she known that? Did I ever tell her? I leant forward and kissed her gently on the lips. They were as hard as marble.
/> *
I reached for a scarf on the windowsill and inhaled. It always amazed me how the barge became untidy within hours, even minutes of her leaving, buried beneath cans and ash. This time, however, she had been gone barely twelve hours and the boat remained exactly as she had left it. I was determined to keep it that way. The kitten asleep on the bed, bottled unguents lined up like soldiers in the bathroom, the sign by the window – “plants like water”, written in her italic hand – the velvet hat hung up by the hatch. (I had found the barnacled hook at low tide and spent a whole day cleaning it up for her birthday.) Nothing had changed. If I walked down the river tomorrow, passed Lovell’s Wharf, The Cutty Sark and on through to the market into Greenwich, she would be at her stall selling jewellery, pieces like the beads above the mirror.
Then I heard the explosion again, the implosion of silence.
I grabbed a crutch and cleared the table with a clumsy sweep. A gas lamp toppled and fell, enriching the smell of kerosene. It was the formaldehyde at the mortuary that had shocked me the most – so antiseptic and final. I hauled the table over, knocking a plant into the wicker bin. Her beads slunk from the mirror to the floor. Already her presence was ebbing. I moved awkwardly to the sink and spat down the plughole. Then, as an afterthought, I pulled the drying rack off the wall, plates smashing to the floor. Lamorna had long since departed.
Annalese felt very close as I cleared up. Her silence now was familiar, reassuring. She had never commented on my anger, not directly anyway. “When you’re done, we’ll be in the caff. And don’t forget to water the plants,” she had said once, when I was trashing the place. I had just gone for an audition at a community theatre in Lewisham – her idea – and beaten up the director. (He was fresh out of drama school and we had spent the first hour being trees. “Where are your leaves, Dutchie? Anyone would think it’s autumn.”)
Sometimes she would stay in the boat if Leafe wasn’t around. She didn’t like violence, but I knew it fascinated her. The day I mellowed she would have left me. I smiled as I picked up the beads. Then it hit me again, like a poisoned chaser. Had she died instantly? (The doctors said yes, but they would, wouldn’t they?) Or had the glass wheedled its way slowly into her flesh like fiery maggots?
*
From the moment I woke I wondered what Annalese’s killers looked like. There was no early morning respite, no break from the grief. It was better this way, I thought, a more coherent start to the day. Something easy and uncomplicated had nudged my grief to one side and I could do nothing about it. I needed a face, an image to replace her own. I wanted to tell her killers what sort of person she was, show them her jewellery, let them know of her innocence. (I was the guilty one.) Then I would kill them. I was certain of that. Annalese wouldn’t like it, but she was dead now.
For the next two days I barely left the boat, venturing out into Charlton only to nick newspapers from the public library. When people knocked on the barge’s frosted up windows I hid behind the cupboard or lay on the floor out of sight, watching them leave flowers, write clumsy notes with numb fingers. Events like death were too big for my own world, I accepted that now. They spilled over into another, one which I could only observe from a distance.
Detached, I digested every detail of the bombing campaign, from the first, febrile headlines in The Evening Standard, to longer pieces in the Sunday papers. The lump in the street hadn’t been a child, it was Annalese. A bit of her, anyway. It was the third blast that week. “The Bomb That Sliced New Age Traveller in Half”, as The News of the World delicately put it, had killed eight people. The week before had been worse. Who was behind the violence remained a mystery. Terrorist organisations queued up to deny their involvement and people believed them. MI5 announced that everything possible was being done to find the faceless terrorists and were believed less. Day after day the bombs continued to detonate, quarry blasts in the middle of crowded cities.
Everyone had their theories. The Daily Star blamed Class War, which made me laugh. They wouldn’t know a block of semtex if someone stuck it down their trousers. Personally, I hadn’t given the bombings much thought. On principle, of course, I welcomed the chaos. The resumption of violence was a business opportunity – my Christmas bonus. It didn’t take a genius to work out that when eight hundred people tried to get out of a train in a hurry, there was a fair chance that a few briefcases would be left behind. It was the same with office evacuations (computers, bottles, more briefcases).
But that was before Annalese died.
I picked up another newspaper, a local one, and there she was, staring back up at me, anemones in her hair. The picture had been taken around the time I met her in Cornwall. The butterflies beat against my stomach wall. I tried to reason with myself. She meant little to me; if she had been special, her death would have been unbearable. As it was, the loss was sad, nothing more. People come and go. She had come into my life a year earlier and now she had gone, like the others. I’d get over it. We hardly knew each other. I tried to be detached, to tap the void like I used to, but I tore out the picture and stuck it above the bed. Then I started reading again, drawn to what I thought was a small misprint. It didn’t strike me as odd at first, but gradually, as I devoured more and more papers, an idea took root in my fertile mind. I checked and double-checked the accounts of the Oxford Street bombing, cross-referencing the death tallies. There was a flaw, I was sure of it, a discrepancy in the reporting. It wasn’t much, but I needed to tell someone.
For the first time in five years I headed home.
4
It was Christmas Day, the real one, and a crisp frost sharpened the edges of the deep Hampshire hedgerows. All colour had been sucked from the hills, leaving them empty and white, and the vaulting sky was a brilliant, darkened blue. As the narrow road dropped down a hill, twisting sharply, I cut the ignition (the car had been thoughtfully abandoned on someone’s driveway in Charlton), wound down the windows and free-wheeled. I hadn’t passed any other vehicles since coming off the motorway and the freezing air rushed silently past. I drew up in the middle of the road and listened. The whole world, it seemed, had been stilled by the cold.
My dad lived in one of the small villages outside Portsmouth which was popular with retired naval officers. It had a cricket pitch and a pond, which was iced over, and a pub which I had been banned from years ago. I slowed down as I passed it to look at the name above the door, but it was partially obscured by some ivy. The only blot on the rural idyll was the concrete shell of a derelict petrol garage, up ahead, opposite the post office. It looked like a bombed out temple, the vast awning cracked and peeled.
The turning into my dad’s road was up on the left. I slowed and took a deep breath. It annoyed me that I felt nervous. A car hooted behind me. I wound down my window and gave it the finger. Then I pulled out after it, accelerating into the turning fast enough to make the tyres whine and give the other driver a shock. My dad’s road was lined with barren cherry trees which pushed up the paving stones. The houses were set back in their own land. Most of them were modem, mock Tudor buildings. At the far end, up a steep hill, they became older, hidden out of sight down longer driveways.
I drove up the road, looking at the coloured lights in the windows, the Christmas trees in manicured front gardens. Heavy oak doors were cloaked in ivy. Then, up ahead, I saw something strange. It was my dad’s Volvo, I was certain, but it seemed to be reversing, driving forwards, reversing then driving forwards again, all within the space of a few yards. The old git had finally lost it. I approached cautiously, winding down the passenger seat window as I drew level with his car.
“Alright?” I asked.
My dad pulled up hard on the handbrake and looked at me briefly, his eyes widening.
“Christ Almighty!” he shouted. “The last of the Mohicans.”
Releasing the handbrake, he let the car roll down the hill two yards, and then drove forward, drawing level with me again.
“You owe me money,” he said aggr
essively.
“What you doing?” I asked. There were more creases at the side of his eyes. I glanced down at the black cable lying across the road like a flattened worm.
“Do you have any idea how much it cost me?” he continued loudly, and then paused, wiping one of the dials on the dashboard with the back of his hand. We were silent for a couple of moments, acknowledging each other’s presence, letting the formal bluster die down.
“You can afford it,” I said quietly. “What’s going on?” I nodded again at the cable.
“Bloody council. They’re planning to close off the end of this road. Not being used enough.”
“It isn’t.”
“That’s not the bloody point. If they close it, we’ll have to drive half way round Hampshire to get to the shops.”
“The golf course.”
“That too.”
“You could walk.”
“What?”
He had slipped back two yards, out of earshot. He drove forward again, conning the cable with another car. When the council came back to check the traffic frequency, they would write in their reports that the entire M25 had been diverted down his road. I left him to it, drove on ahead, parking my car in front of the house. It was the only genuinely old one in the whole road. Nelson, no less, had spent a night in it, as my dad insisted on telling everyone. But it had never felt like home. It was where I had stayed in between terms. I watched dad walk across the gravel towards me, picking out a weed from the stones and throwing it on to the lawn. The house might have to be sold if Lloyd’s didn’t cough up. Crying shame, that.
“Thought you were the man from the water board,” he said, wheezing passed me into the kitchen. His sandy hair was still all there, but his face was too rubied, even for a sailor. The dents above his eyes were deep, giving him an air of being permanently surprised. His eyebrows had once curved normally, but the longer hairs now failed to turn the corner, forming little wings or handles like the tuft on a peewit’s head.