Three Hours : A Novel (2020)

by Lupton, Rosamund

  She doesn’t notice Frank coming over until he’s crouching down next to them. He has a laptop with him; she’d never had him down as a law-breaker.

  ‘There might be something on the news that’ll tell us what’s happening,’ he says. ‘Maybe about help coming.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ she says to him.

  Tap-tap go Frank’s fingers, confident once he’s at a keyboard, a different person. He must have 4G on his laptop because there’s no Wi-Fi in here, part of Mr Marr’s drive to get them all to read books in the library.

  He brings up BBC News 24 with the sound muted, as if the gunman in the corridor might forget about them if they make no noise. Hannah can see from the screen that all the news is about their school. Even the bit at the bottom, running like a tickertape, which normally has other news, is just about them.

  … shots in the school grounds … 47 secondary school children and 7 members of staff known to be still in the school … 140 junior school children and their teachers are unaccounted for … unconfirmed reports of an explosion at 8.20 this morning … police not giving more information …

  ‘Junior school’s okay though, right?’ Ed says.

  ‘They’re a mile away from the road,’ Frank says. ‘And surrounded by woods. So the gunmen probably don’t even know they’re there.’

  Frank seems newly bold to Hannah, crouching close to her and Mr Marr.

  ‘Anything about a rescue?’ David asks. ‘An ambulance?’

  ‘No,’ Frank says. Hannah thinks he sees her disappointment. ‘But I was being stupid before. I mean, the police aren’t going to say on telly, are they? They’ll keep it secret.’

  ‘What about the man in our corridor?’ Ed asks.

  ‘Not yet. But it’ll be the same thing; they won’t say.’

  An aerial picture of their school comes up on the screen.

  ‘Must have a drone with a camera,’ Ed says. ‘A local journalist maybe. Or someone’s sent it to them.’

  It’s weird to see school from above, blurry with snow, and to know that they’re there, right now, inside a news photo. The photo of the school has arrows and captions. At the bottom of the photo is NEW SCHOOL, by far the largest of all the buildings, with ROAD next to it; lucky people in New School, they had an escape route. Further up the photo, half a mile away from the road and an escape route, through the woods, is where they are: OLD SCHOOL. A little away from OLD SCHOOL they’ve marked THEATRE. Even further up the map, deep into the woods, POTTERY ROOM. And at the top of the photo, almost in the sea, a mile from the road, is JUNIOR SCHOOL. A dotted red line shows the private drive that links up all the buildings.

  Hannah hopes that if Frank’s right about the gunmen not knowing where Junior School is that they’re not watching TV, but it’s general information, it’s on the school prospectus even. Hopefully they haven’t done their research. Hopefully they just grabbed a gun on the spur of the moment. And on the spur of the moment will just fuck off again.

  There’s a number to ring ‘if you have any information’ tickertaping along the bottom of the screen. Hannah supposes it’s to keep the story going, little titbits added to keep it fresh and spicy. Because Frank is right, the police won’t be telling them anything.

  She’s holding her phone tightly, even though it’s out of charge, like it still connects her to Dad and Rafi, and she knows that’s ridiculous but doesn’t loosen her grip.

  Frank is searching through news sites; all of them are about their school, not like the usual news, all slick and organized, but hurriedly put together. On one site, there’s a male reporter she recognizes talking straight to the camera, as if directly to her.

  ‘Could this be a terror attack?’ he asks. ‘We’re going now to our terrorism expert, David Delaney.’

  She looks up at the skylight. Snow is falling down on top of them, smothering the daylight.

  * * *

  In the theatre, Daphne and Sally-Anne get a WhatsApp message from Neil Forbright, the deputy head, who is alone in the headmaster’s office in Old School.

  We can’t get to you. You must lock the doors

  ‘What do you think?’ Sally-Anne asks.

  Daphne thinks their young deputy head is astonishingly brave.

  ‘We must do as he says.’

  She closes the security doors across the entrance to the glass corridor, then locks and bolts them. Everyone who was critical of Neil Forbright will have to see his courage now, even that wretched father of his, who Daphne could cheerfully throttle. But Daphne has seen Neil’s courage for the last year, because teaching with depression is impossibly hard and he managed it on and off for months. Not bravery like this though; because Neil hasn’t only locked himself out of safety – only! – but is shouldering the burden of that decision so she doesn’t need to. But it’s her fingers that locked the door, slid the bolt across, and her hands feel treacherous.

  Neil often comes round to theirs for pasta and a chat; other staff trapped in Old School are friends too. And the teenagers. Dear God. She’s known many of them since they were young children in junior school. And now she’s locked the doors against them and left them with a gunman.

  Neil didn’t say if anyone was hurt and he would have told them. Surely he would? She hurriedly WhatsApps him.

  ‘I’ll wait here by the doors,’ Sally-Anne says. ‘In case something changes. In case they can get to us.’

  ‘Good plan,’ Daphne replies, because she wants to believe something will change, but fears that if it does the likelihood is that it will be for the worse.

  But worrying’s no use to anyone in Old School, Daphne, no use at all. You just have to get on with it; put your best foot forward for the children in the theatre until this terrible thing is over; shove to the back of your mind this terrible anxiety about the people in Old School and the missing children and everyone in Junior School and this new love for your husband that keeps inappropriately pressing itself forward. Right then, a phrase she has never used before, suspicious of people who used it, right then, she must keep everyone calm; keep them busy. They came to school this morning thinking they were going to be doing a dress rehearsal of Macbeth so that is what they are going to do.

  She claps her hands, forces her voice to be loud and strong.

  ‘Tell your parents that you’re safe in the theatre, if you haven’t already, and that you’re turning your phones off – then all mobiles off, please.’

  Phones aren’t allowed in the library but the students in Jacintha’s English classroom will have their mobiles with them. She thinks that, like her kids in the theatre, they’ll be phoning their parents first, poor loves, of course they will, not yet siblings or friends, but they most probably will. If bad news happens, she doesn’t want her kids in the theatre to get it.

  They all protest about turning off their phones. She raises her voice above the hubbub of theirs, but keeps it calm.

  ‘We are going to rehearse Macbeth – Joanna, that was absolutely the right thing to suggest earlier – and I don’t want phones pinging.’

  Amazingly, the kids seem to buy this bit of normality, her usual rule, and turn their mobiles off, though she doubts it will last for long.

  ‘Finish off your costumes and keep your faces as they are. Zac, Luisa and Benny, lighting and set, please. Once you’re ready, refresh your lines.’

  No WhatsApp reply from Neil. She opens her copy of Macbeth, playing her part in this charade, and reads the opening; the same opening Shakespeare’s King’s Men would have read four hundred years ago.

  Macbeth

  Act 1, Scene 1

  A desolate place.

  Thunder and lightning. Enter three WITCHES

  The kids had brainstormed ideas for ‘A desolate place’, sitting in a safe, warm rehearsal room. Tim wanted a shopping mall and Daphne liked the idea, Princesshay Shopping Centre being her idea of Dante’s fourth circle of hell, but Luisa said, ‘Desolate actually means bleak, abandoned and forsaken, not Zara and Lush.’ Josh came
up with a windswept moor, but that was ‘a bit Heathcliff ’n’ Cathy’, and then Rafi Bukhari suggested Aleppo.

  ‘But does Syria have any link with Macbeth, really?’ Luisa, ever the realist, asked.

  ‘You don’t have to be literal in your staging,’ Daphne said.

  ‘Aleppo’s mentioned in the play,’ Rafi said. ‘In Act One, the First Witch says, “Her husband’s to Aleppo gone”.’

  Daphne had never noticed that the poor sailor cursed by the witches was on his way to Aleppo and she was struck by the similarity to Rafi and his brother’s journey, also cursed and tempest tossed, in the opposite direction.

  And now Benny is projecting a photo of a bombed street in Aleppo on to the back wall of the stage. It looks like an urban moonscape: collapsed chalk-white buildings, black shadow spaces where rooms and people should be, whitened cables and wires trailing down into the street that is piled high with chunks of houses. The streets in this photo are deserted but the original has a father holding his baby, her legs and small feet covered in white dust, but they’d edited them out; too much for children in the audience, for parents too, but the pair still hover there for Daphne.

  She has never fully engaged with the photographer’s point of view before but looking at the photo now she realizes that the picture was taken looking down a street, and right off into the distance to other streets, and in the photo there is not one building that remains a building, not a room left intact; that the horror of this picture is that there is nowhere left to run.

  Her mobile vibrates with a WhatsApp message from Neil. She reads it, appalled.

  * * *

  An eight-year-old boy is hiding in a shed; he has a stitch in his side from running, faster than he’s ever run before, and he’s still out of breath. The wooden door isn’t closed properly, because he’s scared of the dark. The cold creeps in through the gap. His red woolly gloves are wet with snow and freezing cold so he takes them off. There are canoes stacked up on the walls on special hooks and at the very back there’s a wooden rowing boat like Ratty’s in The Wind in the Willows. He can leave the door open just a tiny bit and if the man comes in he will hide in the rowing boat.

  But the man has a gun.

  He has to shut the door but it’s going to be all right because he’s got his mobile phone and its screen will glow in the dark, like the rabbit night light he had when he was little. He opens his mobile and puts it on the ground with the screen shining up at him.

  He shuts the door, trying not to make any noise; then he grips the bolt, bumpy with rust, and pushes it across.

  On his screen there’s a picture message of a frog and another one of a bowl, like a cereal bowl, full of sweets, and a message but he doesn’t read it because he’s seen that his battery level is 15%. He left his farm game running otherwise the animals run out of food and get hungry. He looks again hoping it will say 50% or even 25% but it’s still 15%.

  If the man with the gun comes he’ll need his phone to get help. He closes the game, saying sorry to the chickens and pigs for not feeding them, and turns off his phone.

  The smell of the shed is stronger in the dark: something rotting and damp wood; dank, dark smells that make him feel sick. He hears blood rushing in his ears, his limbs are shaking, he feels tears wet and warm on his cheek, like weeing yourself. Stupid arms, stupid legs, stupid tears. Eight’s too old to cry. He must be brave. Brave as a Barbary lion. Brave as a Bengal tiger. Brave as Sir Lancelot.

  3.

  9.25 a.m.

  In the library, Hannah smells cigarette smoke. No one in the library is smoking. It must be coming through a gap in the door; the top part because most of the doorway is covered by the mound of books. He’s just outside. Is he taking fast drags or slow ones? What will he do when he finishes?

  Mr Marr is trying to talk but she can’t make sense of what he’s saying. She bends her face closer to his as if his words lose their shape and meaning as they travel the distance between them. But it’s worse now because she can hear how hard this is for him, the rasping of his breath as he struggles to speak. Perhaps he sees that he’s upsetting her because he stops and his eyes meet hers as if it’s him who’s worried about her, rather than the other way round.

  Frank hands her his laptop which is on a news channel. A presenter is talking about them. It’s the presenter Dad says wears too much lip gloss and that the news isn’t a cocktail party and she shouldn’t talk about people being killed while showing off so much. He means showing off so much cleavage though he wouldn’t say that to Hannah in case he embarrassed her but she knows exactly what he means. Dad’s normally pretty laid-back about that kind of thing, but he really doesn’t like lip gloss and low-cut tops on newsreaders. Distracting, he says. She thinks that people probably like to be distracted when the awful things are on.

  Frank gives Hannah his headphones. ‘You’re live now, Face-Timing,’ he says.

  ‘You’re sure you don’t want to?’ she asks and Frank nods.

  She puts on the headphones and looks at the screen.

  Bloody hell, she’s on telly. Instead of the map of the school there’s a picture of her in a box; the presenter with the cleavage and lip gloss is talking about her –

  ‘We have a pupil at Cliff Heights School …’

  She and Dad are going to find this hilarious tonight, when they watch it on TV. Of all the presenters in all the world … Dad’ll say to her.

  ‘I’m Melanie,’ the presenter says. ‘What’s your name?’

  Even though the gunman in the corridor knows they’re in here, she keeps her voice quiet.

  ‘Hannah Jacobs.’

  She sees that on TV they’re blurring her out below her face, so that you can’t see the blood, or maybe it’s the bra, maybe that’s just too much cleavage for TV, although definitely not the cocktail-party kind. She finds this a little funny. She imagines someone getting out a pot of Vaseline or lip salve and smearing it over the lens. But in here nobody takes any notice of her just wearing a bra, when yesterday it would have been shocking and unthinkable.

  ‘Our headmaster has been shot,’ she says. Totally shocking, totally unthinkable. ‘He’s bleeding and he’s very pale and cold. We need to know when an ambulance will get to him. He’s in the library by the door.’ Surely they’re giving it an armed escort or something, surely they’ll get help to Mr Marr.

  ‘Okay. My producer is finding out now.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Are you okay, Hannah?’ Melanie asks.

  The smell of the cigarette is making her nauseous. She imagines Dad’s arm around her, his terrible French accent, Courage, mon brave.

  ‘Yes. It’s not me who’s hurt, it’s Mr Marr who’s hurt.’

  ‘Can you tell me what’s happening?’

  Maybe the gunman is watching this on his phone as he has his cigarette. The arsehole smoking gunman knew to charge up his phone fully this morning, probably brought a juice-pack with him. If he’s watching this on his phone she’s not going to show him she’s afraid and she’s definitely not going to give him any information. She looks at Melanie in her lovely safe TV studio.

  ‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea,’ she says. ‘Do you know when an ambulance will get here?’

  ‘I’ll let you know as soon as I do. We’ve heard it all began with an explosion …?’

  Like the explosion was the beginning of a story: ‘What’s the story in Balamory?’, ‘Postman Pat and his black-and-white cat.’ She’s being sarky about Melanie – Your fault, Dad, you prejudiced me against her.

  ‘A teacher’s told us that they were warned about a possible explosion in the woods at 8.20, the reason for the amber alert,’ Melanie says. Hannah imagines the producer’s voice in Melanie’s discreet little earbud giving her info.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The school is right in the middle of the woods?’ Melanie asks.

  So not a CBeebies TV story but old-style Grimms’ Fairy Tale woods: a huntsman taking Snow White into t
he deep dark woods to kill her, to return with her lungs and liver; a girl in a red cape being stalked by a wolf through the trees.

  But the explosion in the woods an hour ago wasn’t the start of the story; a prologue maybe, an introduction; not the beginning. Because it began – whatever ‘it’ is and it’s not a story, not to any of them inside it – it began when someone shot their headmaster in the corridor of their school. That’s when life as they’d known it before ended and something else began and reset time. Because she thinks the something else is measured in lifespans and how long Mr Marr has left to live, maybe how long all of them have left, started at that moment.

  ‘Did you hear the explosion?’ Melanie asks, because for her the starting point is neutrally impersonal. But the police might need to know more about the explosion, it might be important.

  ‘Yes. We were in the woods …’ she says.

  She sees Mr Marr looking at her, keeping his eyes on hers, and she finds it comforting; she thinks he knows that.

  She remembers running through the woods with Rafi, holding hands tightly, cold, numb fingers together, so she could feel his bones, like two in-love young skeletons; which is morbidly weird but frankly she is a weird person and at a party four months ago told Rafi one of her weird (but not morbid) thoughts and wanted to grab the words back again because she had this huge crush on him. But he understood. Understood her. And it had been like their minds were touching.

  The in-love bit isn’t true, not for Rafi anyway, because he is charismatic and has an extraordinary story and so that kind of thing happens to him on pretty much a daily basis; but it was unique for her – she touched a boy’s mind and he touched hers. She hasn’t ever told him she loves him.

  Fuck’s sake, back to the woods, Hannah. Quarter past eight, but wintry dark, making you want to press a switch and turn on the lights. Rafi’s hand was pulling her along, helping her go faster, so she wouldn’t be late for English and he wouldn’t miss the start of the dress rehearsal. She’d left her puffer behind yesterday in the common room but she didn’t want to slow down. Rafi must have heard her wheezing because he stopped running. She sounded like an old man, not a gentlemanly one but a gross one who smokes sixty a day, huffing around in a tartan dressing gown.