by Luan Goldie
Mary hears tears on the other end of the line and pictures the heavy make-up, which she has not seen her daughter without in years, run down her face.
‘Yes, I am fine. But I need to wait here till I find Tristan and Malachi.’
The toddler begins to wail and Mary presses her index finger into the other ear and misses what is said. ‘Huh?’
‘I asked where they are. The boys?’ Julia says.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, where were they when it happened?’
The question irritates Mary because, of course, she does not know the answer to it. ‘I need to get off the phone. There are a lot of people waiting.’
‘No, Mum. Where are you? I need to come and get you.’
‘No. It’s fine. I need to go.’ Julia protests but Mary puts the phone down.
The toddler’s cries quell as the mother replaces its dummy. A fax machine crackles and whines. And at the desk across from Mary a woman talks casually into the phone, as if having a chat with a friend.
‘Yeah, new sofas,’ she says. ‘New bunk beds too, can you believe it? I can’t believe it. No way. It didn’t happen. No way. How come planes still crash? With all that technology?’
‘Excuse me, miss.’ There’s a gentle hand on her shoulder from one of the volunteers. ‘Sorry, but could I ask you to move on so the next person can use the phone?’
As she returns, the number of those in the hall suddenly seems so large, so vast. She tries to calculate how many flats made up Nightingale Point, how many families were likely to have been affected, but she can’t even remember how many floors it has, what it looks like, where it is.
The crowd is a good thing – it means more lives saved. She stands on her tiptoes to look over their heads, across sunhats, burnt bald patches and hair dank from sweat or sprinklers. Malachi towers above most people and Tristan can usually be heard over a crowd. They must be in here somewhere.
‘Mary?’ Harris takes her hand. ‘Come, they are beginning to register everyone.’
He pulls her to the other side of the hall, where lines have begun to form. Above each desk is a handwritten sign with the name of each block. The lines for Seacole Point and Barton Point are long and winding, at least sixty people in each, but the line in front of Nightingale Point is shorter. She scans each one quickly. A dreadlocked man shouts to anyone who will listen about what he saw, a woman in a blue bathrobe shakes her head and a tearful pensioner clacks rosary beads.
On the desk someone has folded a sheet of card in half lengthways to make it stand up. REGISTER HERE, it says, as if it were a conference or staff training day that people would try and skip out of.
Mary presses her hands on the desk. ‘I need to register Malachi Roberts and Tristan Roberts. Both from flat thirty-three. It’s on the ninth floor.’
A woman in a bright orange top writes down the information while an overly animated young police officer types on the computer.
‘Any more information, please? Ages? Appearance? Ethnicity?’ The woman does not stop her pen to look up.
‘Why?’
The officer chips in, ‘Any information we can collect here will help with identifying.’ He pauses, as if he realises for the first time the horror people on the other side are faced with. ‘Fact is, if the authorities need to identify lost people, people who are confused, maybe knocked unconscious, descriptions help.’ He looks at Mary’s uniform. ‘I’m sure you understand.’
‘Malachi is twenty-one. Tall. Over six feet. He is … he is …’ How can she describe him? There are so many words. Beautiful. Clever. Sullen. Miserable. Missing.
‘And your nationality?’ The woman finally looks up from her papers, squints at Mary but decides against a guess.
‘No. These are not my children. They are black.’
‘Oh, right,’ she says.
‘Do you share a property in Nightingale Point with these men?’ the officer asks.
‘No.’
‘I’m sorry, miss,’ the woman glances behind Mary, ‘but we have over six hundred people to account for and right now we’re only registering the missing members of people’s families and shared properties.’
‘They are my family.’
The woman bites her bottom lip.
‘Write it down,’ Mary shouts. She grabs the pen and slams it in front of the woman. ‘Tristan Roberts and Malachi Roberts. Flat thirty-three. Write it down.’
‘Please, miss. Calm down or I can’t help you.’
Harris takes Mary’s arm and guides her from the line. ‘You need to stop. You can see it’s chaos. It will take ages for the police to fully evacuate the area and have everyone come through here. But they will. That door, Mary.’ He looks over to the entrance of the hall, at the slow stream of people who are not Malachi or Tristan. ‘People keep coming through it, every minute. The boys will come too.’
‘How can she tell me they are not my family? Who is she to tell me?’ Mary feels helpless, regretful and furious. How could someone suggest that she had no right to look for them? The boys were family in a way that no one else could understand. She had loved them and watched over them their whole lives and now some stranger dared tell her she could not even search for them, their relationship belittled, as if she were asking after a neighbour or distant friend.
‘They are my boys, Harris. They have no one else. No one.’
‘I know.’
‘Where are they?’ She doesn’t want to shout, to be that woman crying and screaming, but at this moment she can’t control it. ‘Where could they be? They can’t be hurt, Harris. It’s not fair if they are hurt.’
‘You must stay positive.’ He puts his hands on her shoulders. ‘You said Tristan was on his way out. Malachi probably joined him.’
Harris had never met Tristan and Malachi, but he had a habit of speaking like he knew them, as if their personalities were shared with every other young person he had ever taught.
Mary nods. She wants to believe that they were both out at the time of the accident, that Harris is right. But then Harris does not know how Tristan can lose whole weekends indoors to a computer game and that hot days are the worst for Malachi, as the city smog clogs his airwaves and has him constantly reaching for his inhaler. Like this morning, when she last saw him. He said he was staying in, yes, that’s definitely what he told her.
‘I can’t take this,’ she says. ‘This waiting and not knowing.’
‘We have no choice, Mary. This is where they will come.’
The air is stagnant and close, and Mary pulls her uniform from her chest to fan herself. It releases the stench of smoke.
‘I need some air.’ She walks towards the double doors that lead into the main part of the centre. The smell of chlorine reminds her of the endless humid hours she spent all those years ago teaching her children to swim. She tried to teach Tristan too, when he was eight. He was keen but unfocused, and would waste time thrashing about, laughing till the water streamed from his nose and his eyes went red. He had never been in a pool before. But then the boys’ lives were like that, huge chunks of childhood unchecked because of their mum’s depression. They were only just finding their feet. It can’t all be taken away now. It wouldn’t be fair.
The flicker of a television catches her eye from a windowless room; a sign on the outside door reads: Staff Only. She shuts it behind herself and climbs over boxes with their contents spilt across the stained carpet tiles: deflated footballs, bundles of paper timetables, plastic-wrapped tennis rackets. There is a large table in the middle of the room, bare apart from a few squashed pieces of chocolate cake on a silver tray, a note underneath: It’s my 21st. Enjoy. Bean x
Mary sits on one of the burst fabric seats closest to the television. The screen is filled with an image of Nightingale Point. Over the picture, a calm and formal newsreader recites the details, a bunch of numbers that mean nothing and yet everything. Fifty-six flats, up to 600 feared missing, death count on the ground currently three. She thi
nks of the last Major Incident Training she had at the hospital, how they were told to expect up to three times as many injured as dead. The boys could be hurt.
An old woman comes on the screen, her skin ashen. ‘I just popped out.’ She looks behind her to where the flaming building is cut from shot and drops her head. There’s an awkward silence as the camera waits for more. Then footage of the green, of crowds and ambulances. Mary holds a hand to her mouth at the sight of the flames and sound of sirens.
The same information is repeated again and again. Homes destroyed. Many missing. Three confirmed dead. A distorted phone call from an airline official with a heavy Greek accent. An accident, a terrible accident. Five on-board. Cargo flight. Five crew assumed dead. No passengers. Eyewitnesses describe something that fell from the plane, heavy and dark, onto the field in front of the estate. The faces in the background are many and unfamiliar. Nine confirmed dead.
From outside the staffroom Mary hears a raised voice. Someone shouts for their daughter. She grabs the remote control and turns it up; she can cope with the trauma on the screen but does not want to play audience to someone else’s tragedy in real life.
The shouts from beyond the wall are joined by an authoritative voice as it calls for calm. There’s a thump, the sound of a struggle. Then a voice she knows.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Chapter Twenty-Two ,Malachi
He pictures flat thirty-three on the ninth floor. The place him and Tristan, aged fourteen and nine, redecorated with their nan a few days after their mum’s funeral. Each room was coated in white paint in an effort to erase the devil Nan saw in every corner. Malachi was so proud that he was tall enough to paint over the blackened patch of ceiling above the toaster, the result of him attempting to make himself and Tristan dinner. It was satisfying to erase the past by simply covering it up and bringing new things in. The old bed sheets were ripped down from the windows and replaced with bright white nets from the market, the black mould removed from around the bath with bleach, and the cupboards and fridge were filled.
They dragged bag after bag into the lift and out to the rubbish stores, until everything from the old days was gone. Everything except for Mum’s pink and purple scarf, which was kept tied around a once leaky pipe under the sink. Neither Malachi nor Tristan ever acknowledged the scarf, yellow with age and London limescale, but they knew it was there, like a heartbeat. Maybe it offered comfort that she was still with them in some way. Its image kept appearing as Malachi followed the crowd off the field and towards the local leisure centre hall, as directed by the police.
He wonders now how long he can put off calling Nan. He doesn’t know what to say to her anyway.
The tightness in his chest has not yet subsided; this kind of attack usually means he will be confined to bed for the next few days. Malachi always suspected Tristan enjoyed those days. He would park himself up on the end of the bed and subject his captive audience to endless trivia about warring rap stars and local girls.
The air is muggy as he stands in the line for Nightingale Point, but there is a small flow of air from the fire exit doors, propped open with a chair on each side. Huddles of people stand out there, in the sunshine of the staff car park; they smoke cigarettes and look up at the thin haze that fills the sky.
Everywhere people are talking, behind him, in front of him. Someone shouts from the front of the line, an official voice, one that does not wobble or question.
‘This is the line for residents of Nightingale Point only. Please help us help you.’
Everyone talks over the voice. Why can’t they stop? Just be quiet. Malachi’s head hurts with all the noise. But he is almost at the front. Then the line stalls as a woman in a yellow headscarf faints. People rush over to help, to hold her child and fan her face with leaflets for the Salvation Army. The child screams by her side and calls at her to wake up till she comes to.
The woman behind the desk aggressively takes the lid off her bottle of water and tips it to her lips to find it empty. She mouths ‘fuck’ under her breath, her empathy for the situation exhausted.
The paper on the desk is glaringly white, scrawled with names. Some of the writing has been scored out. Why? Are these the people who have been listed as missing but then found? Found alive? Have they walked into the local hospital? He jumps as the fire exit doors slam shut.
‘Open them back up,’ a voice from the line calls.
‘They can’t,’ says a volunteer behind Malachi. ‘The smell is drifting in.’
The strip lighting is too bright in the hall. The long, thin windows above the basketball hoops allow in too much natural light. The space feels too tight, too airless. Malachi tries to breathe slower but it doesn’t help. How can he stand this? He needs to get out, to get away. He leaves the line and runs from the hall, stopping by a bank of vending machines, where he slides down to the floor, facing away from the lit-up bottles of Lucozade and bars of chocolate. He wills the hum of the glowing box to drown out the searing sounds around him, the footsteps and cries and talk of so many.
‘Only six phones calling out.’
‘That poor girl, poor girl.’
‘They’re saying it was an accident but they never tell us the truth.’
He breathes slowly.
‘The terrorists are getting more and more ruthless.’
‘Call your dad. Call him now.’
Who would Malachi call? Mary will be busy, on shift at the hospital. He had asked her earlier this week why she was working so much and taking on the busy afternoon shifts she usually complains about. She said she was not sleeping well, up with nightmares and worries, then struggling to wake early enough to get in.
As more time passes Malachi knows he will have to phone his nan, but he can’t face telling her he’s lost Tristan, that the last time he spoke to his little brother he was hanging with some hoods, probably buying or smoking weed.
Again he sees the image of his mum’s scarf, but he pushes it from his mind and concentrates only on the rise and fall of his own chest. He is startled by a shout from the hall, loud and aggressive, a male’s voice whose words can’t be made out. The doors fly open and a man in a yellow T-shirt is bundled out, a police officer on each side.
‘My daughter,’ he says loudly. ‘I need to find my girl.’ His big black boots trip by Malachi’s feet.
‘You need to slow down, sir.’ The police officer puts his palms up in an attempt to pacify the man. ‘If you slow down, we can try to help you find her.’
‘My daughter, my little girl, my little girl. I need you to find her. Flat forty-one. The eleventh floor.’
His back is to Malachi. But it’s him, it’s Jay, Pamela’s dad. His eyes jump about fearfully at the faces that surround him, as if about to be set upon. The colour is drained from his skin, far from the angry red of the last time Malachi saw him on that excruciating morning outside of the flat.
Malachi had opened his front door, expecting to see Pamela; it was part of their routine, the ten minutes they would steal each weekday before she went to school. He loved the way she would smile at him when he opened the door, the knowledge that even though the minutes were short, they would be spent together. But that morning she didn’t smile, her eyes were puffy and she twisted her fingers nervously.
‘I’m sorry, Mal.’
Jay came up behind her, chucking two black bin liners by her feet. ‘There it is,’ he said.
‘What’s going on?’ Malachi asked. He knew it was bad.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ Jay was close enough that Malachi could smell the cigarettes on his breath. ‘Why couldn’t you find a girl your own age?’
‘Dad, please.’
‘You’re a grown man and she’s still in school. Don’t you see a problem with that?’
Malachi felt it then, looking at Pamela standing there, crying in her school uniform, her hair tied in a neat ponytail. He felt like he was some kind of pervert.
‘But obviously you’re serious about her
. Pam tells me you want her to move in?’
Malachi’s heart raced.
‘Dad, stop it, please.’
‘Well, here she is.’ He kicked at the bin liner and turned to his daughter. ‘He doesn’t look that keen now, does he?’
‘Why are you doing this?’ she cried.
‘Because it’s what you said you wanted.’
Malachi tried for her attention. ‘Pam, we haven’t even spoken about this.’
‘So you’re saying you don’t want her then?’ Jay laughed. ‘Ain’t that a surprise.’
Malachi rubbed his face. What was he meant to do now? The timing was wrong. He wasn’t ready.
‘Pam, can you come in and talk?’
‘Talk? Is that what you’ve been doing with my sixteen-year-old all these months?’
‘Dad, please stop it.’ She grabbed his hand to pull him away but he threw her off.
‘You wanted her, so have her. You support her, pay for the roof over her head, her food, her sports. You do it. Bet you don’t even have a job, do you?’
Pamela stood opposite, like some unwanted pet. ‘He’s going to send me back to Portishead. I hate it there, you know I do.’
It was too much pressure, he couldn’t think straight, not with her in front of him crying and Jay looking on, waiting to be proven right.
‘Let’s see if he really is different from the rest of them,’ Jay said, then went back into the stairwell, leaving them alone.
‘I’d love for you to move in.’ Malachi sighed. He knew this would be the end of things. ‘But I told you how crazy this year is going to be for me with studying and I need to find some work to top up my money, Pam, and I haven’t—’ He broke off as she started to cry again. He wanted to take her hand but didn’t. ‘I need to speak to Tristan about—’
‘It’s fine, Mal, it’s fine.’ She sniffed and grabbed at one of the bags. ‘I get it. Seriously.’
‘I need some time. I need to think about how I could do it properly, how I could support you.’
‘Support? Is that how you see me? As another thing on your to-do list?’