‘It’s so quiet,’ she said, blaming the quietness of the woods for Rafi being able to hear her sixty-a-day old-geezer wheeze.
A cold touch on her face and she saw snowflakes, most getting caught in the trees, and it seemed for a moment that it was just her and Rafi alone in the dark tree-limbed world.
Then Rafi abruptly turned away from her. ‘Have to go,’ he said, hurrying away with his long-stride walk, a slight limp in his right leg. She wanted to tug him back to her, call after him, but made herself still and quiet. Every time Rafi left her she thought he’d seen what everyone else saw: a weird plain plump girl with too-pale skin and too-red hair and now with an old-geezer wheeze and totally undeserving of him.
‘Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent,’ Dad had told her last week; ‘Sensible lady, Eleanor Roosevelt.’ She thought Dad trawled wise female sayings to make up for her lack of mother, though he really didn’t need to and Eleanor didn’t help as she watched Rafi disappear round the bend in the path.
She remembers the woods closing in, the trees treacherous, as if moving stealthily towards her once she was alone; remembers the loss of Rafi in the hand he’d been holding, colder than the rest of her. She’d shoved her hands into the pockets of her puffa jacket but couldn’t get her fingers warm. She’d looked up at the snowflakes, doing skittish dancing above the trees, most too weightless to fall, and saw a glint, vividly bright in the dull winter sky.
She should have remembered the glint before; should have told Mr Marr. But after the glint there was so much else.
‘I think someone may have been watching us,’ she says to Melanie.
‘Watching you …?’ Melanie says like she’s a lip-glossy parrot – You were right about her, Dad – but this is on TV and the police may watch and it might be important.
‘There’s a high ropes course in the woods for Outdoor Ed; really high,’ she says. ‘We don’t use it in the winter. But someone was up there because I saw something glinting, like binoculars.’
Birdwatchers had gone up there last summer term and the PE teacher had spotted them because of their glinting binoculars and ‘read the twitchers the riot act’. But how likely was it to have been a birdwatcher on a freezing November morning?
‘How much longer till there’s an ambulance?’
‘I’m sure help will be with you as soon as possible. Can you remember anything else?’
Is Dad watching this? The thought of him watching her makes tears start; her face tightens. Frank’s phone is on 12% charge and she’s afraid it’ll run out before she gets a turn. She smiles at the screen in case Dad can see her.
‘So you thought someone might be watching you,’ Melanie says. ‘What happened then?’
It’s warm in the library, the Victorian cast-iron radiators blasting out heat as usual, but the memory makes her shiver. Frank must notice because he asks in a whisper if she’s okay.
‘Hannah …?’ Melanie says.
Courage, mon brave.
Her trainers were leaking. The cold wet of the bracken seeped into her socks. Her fingers stung with cold. Her wheezing was getting worse. She stopped and put her fingers to her lips, trying to use her breath to warm them. She turned, just in case Rafi was coming back towards her, hoping.
A brutally loud noise, an assault of sound startling birds out of the trees, as if their branches had been shaken, sending them wheeling up into the sky. And then gone. The air still, the woods quiet, the birds back in the trees. Nothing to prove it had ever happened. She’d thought it hadn’t been that loud. She was upset about Rafi and pathetic about the woods and had jumped at a loud noise. It was probably someone fooling around with fireworks or a farmer with a pigeon-scarer thing; something like that.
Taking her fingers away from her mouth, the cold air sharp against her damp skin, she’d looked again for Rafi and seen a thin pall of smoke moving between the snowflakes and the trees.
‘I heard a loud noise,’ she says to Melanie. ‘And then I saw some smoke, but I didn’t think it was anything bad. Just a pigeon scarer or something and a bonfire.’
‘Really …?’ Melanie asks, like she would have thought Clearly a bomb! and not think of normal things to explain it, like a bonfire and pigeon scarer. But being fair to lip-glossy Melanie, it’s not her fault that Hannah didn’t tell anyone.
Before Mr Marr was shot, she’d said sorry to him for not realizing and telling him because if she had maybe everything would be different. He told her other people had heard it too and not realized. One teacher had complained about some kind of rumpus in the woods; ‘Rumpus, like Where the Wild Things Are,’ Mr Marr had said, trying to make her smile, because he’s kind and knew she felt bad about not telling him and that she was afraid. It wasn’t just that he reassured her, it was that he took time with her; even with everything else going on, he took time to do that.
Then he’d put his arm around her to hurry her away from the front door and said, ‘Love is the most powerful thing there is, the only thing that really matters.’
And now he’s lying shot in the head and the foot. He’s still watching, keeping his eyes on hers, but as if it’s getting harder for him. Frank is at the back of the library again and she doesn’t blame him for leaving the area by the door.
‘You said we earlier?’ Melanie says. ‘We were in the woods? So someone else was with you?’
The producer must be talking into Melanie’s little earbud again. She imagines all the people behind the scenes finding things out; maybe looking things up about her, looking at her Facebook page and Twitter and Instagram. You’ve got to make it all private, Dad was always on at her. Any nutter can look you up.
‘Your boyfriend is Rafi Bukhari?’
Should have listened to you, Dad.
‘He’s a Muslim from Syria?’
‘Tell the ambulance to hurry.’
She smiles at the screen again in case Dad is watching then she ends the FaceTime call with Melanie and takes off the headphones.
On Frank’s laptop, Melanie’s mouth is opening and closing as she speaks, tiny on the laptop screen and far away and not connected to her and the others trapped in school, because that’s the truth. When she was talking to Melanie, even though she didn’t much like her, it stopped her from feeling like they were totally alone.
Mr Marr has closed his eyes and she doesn’t think he’s still conscious.
She’s been imagining an ambulance with paramedics hurrying to the rescue, blue lights winking, siren calling – I’m here I’m here I’m here – but they can’t get to Mr Marr because of the gunman in the corridor and another one in the woods, and she thinks she knew that, secretly, all along but just wanted to believe help was coming for him. An armed escort had felt unlikely even as she’d thought it to herself. And even if that is what’s going to happen, they’re miles from any city so how long will it take? She’s frightened it will take too long.
‘We’re almost out of 4G data,’ Frank says, coming back towards her holding his anorak. ‘Not enough for FaceTime or the internet. Just emails now.’
He’s so cold. He must be lying in snow. Why’s he lying in snow? A game with Reception children? He must have just fallen asleep. His muscles are frozen, unable to flex, so his whole body jerks with the shivering. He opens his eyes. Hannah is bending over him. Not a game. His mind an island thick with fog. He tries to move. Can’t move. Try harder. Still nothing; as if the command and control centre in his brain has been disconnected. Why’s he thinking of a command and control centre?
It’s the soldier in you. Not too late to join me and the boys in the Paras.
I’m forty-five years old and a pacifist, Rob, he tells his older brother. And you’ve been dead for fifteen years.
But for a moment his brother reaches across from his single bed in their new foster home to Matthew’s and takes his hand and the dense fog thins a little.
He’s in the library. Something terrible has happened. And he just fell asleep and left them.
What’s happened?
Hannah moves and in his line of vision he sees that she’s covered in blood. Please God let it be his and not hers. Must be his surely because she looks afraid but not in pain. She’s just wearing a bra and she must be so cold, much colder than him. He’s got someone’s clothes covering him, he can glimpse the edge of a coat, and he must give it to her but he still can’t move.
He sees Frank wrapping an anorak around Hannah and is grateful to him.
What the hell’s happened?
A flashback to this morning; a dealer flicking memories in front of him, no control of them. Putting the bins out in the dark. Crushing down the stiff black bin bags. The car iced up. Hands cold on the ice scraper. The print of a fox in the deep frost. The coldest day for five years. Snow forecast. Everything normal apart from the cold.
Lighting a fire in his office, the wood catching. Warmth taking the chill off the large Victorian room. Nothing to alert him.
An image spikes through his semi-consciousness: little hands are playing with clay, snow falling around them. But the young children aren’t in coats. They are inside the pottery room. It’s snowing outside the windows and one of the children looks up at it. Huge glass windows with no shutters: no protection. In the woods. Far from help.
Questions not memories barge their way into his mind, sharp-edged and brutal.
Are the children in the pottery room safe?
Did junior school get out?
Who is safe? Who is missing?
What in Christ’s name has he allowed to happen?
4.
8.15 a.m.
An hour and sixteen minutes ago
From the top of the high ropes course he watched the school. He was the deus ex machina, apò mēkhanês theós, άπó μηχανῆς θεóς; the god from the machine that nobody expects.
Earlier, he’d watched parents taking their children into Junior School, the gate in the fence left open for busy drop-off time. The school started early, 8.10 drop-off, 8.15 registration. And then the ant parents had left again in their ant cars, going along the drive to the road a mile away.
And then it was quiet.
It started to snow, just a few flakes, and he knew before the ants because the flakes weren’t yet reaching the ground. But he was prepared. His hands were in gloves and he didn’t feel cold. The man next to him cursed, but he ignored him.
In an hour, give or take a minute here or there, the headmaster would be shot and that would be a starting gun – he liked the economy, the violence, the aptness of that – and everyone would realize, if they hadn’t already feared it, if they were a bit slow on the uptake, that their lives and stories weren’t their own; and all the different stories he’d set in motion would play out at the same time, the simultaneity generated by him.
And he was trying so damn hard to be serious, but he was playing a game, a fucking game; he was a croupier, using hours and minutes as counters, and none of the ant people knew that they were on a roulette wheel, a wheel of fortune, wheel of fate, rota fortunae, Bhavacakra, with him about to turn it.
Movement in the woods below. He trained his binoculars and saw the back view of two teenagers running, holding hands. In another part of the woods, a class of young children and a teacher were hurrying along a path towards the pottery room. But he didn’t leave his place; not yet. Everything was set up, everything planned.
Before the starting gun, there would be a little alert. Perhaps the teenage couple would see, perhaps not. Didn’t matter. It was just a warning, a tap at the door; a joke.
* * *
A class of seven-year-olds, coats buttoned and zipped up against the freezing weather, raced through the woods, some breaking into a skip, jostling and laughing, with Camille Giraud, their sixty-year-old teacher, leading the charge along the path. She’d been ferrying them in a school minibus from Junior School to the art block in New School, the distance judged too far for little legs, when she’d asked them if they’d like to make clay acorns and now the minibus was parked at the side of the drive and the same legs that were too little to walk far were running and skipping, because clay was magic and part of the enchantment was the pottery room in the middle of the woods.
One of the skipping girls said she was frightened of the pottery room because it was like a witch’s house! And then a boy grabbed hold of the story, embellished it, and the kiln was the witch’s oven! Roasting children inside to eat! And they were all enjoying the quiver of fear because Camille was with them and it was just the pottery room and a kiln which had baked their clay-coil snails; fun to be a little afraid. And then it started snowing, a few flakes but enough to banish the witch and her oven, the children screeching the word ‘SNOW!!’ as though it was a visiting deity.
Camille had an odd sensation, a chill that wasn’t the snow; a feeling of being watched. Perhaps Lily, who’d been fearful of the witch’s house, had felt something too, which had prompted the image; something not quite right in the woods. But Camille knew her artistic nature could make her overly sensitive, so she ignored the sensation and listened instead to the children planning a snowball fight, a snowman and an optimistic igloo for break time.
* * *
Rafi Bukhari’s hand was holding on to Hannah’s as they ran through the woods, helping her to run faster and because he loved touching her; her beautiful red hair and pale skin and her kindness; Angels are bright still. His best friend, Benny, would say, Wow, man, you’re so fucking deep, and he’d say back, Hey, bro’, you’re so fucking shallow.
The rhythm of his feet hitting the path as he ran, then Hannah’s a moment later, thudding out an iambic pentameter; his friends would say, You really are fucking weird, bro’, and they’d be right but Hannah was equally weird and they were united in their shared weirdness, a normality of two.
His mum and dad were fluent in English but never used words like fucking, bro’, chrissake, hench, peng, wanker; they’d be shocked, but his older brother, Karam, would have learnt it all immediately.
His thoughts were full of Hannah and the luxury of worrying about being late for your school dress rehearsal. He’d brought his dad’s copy of Macbeth from Syria but had never seen it performed. And now he had a part! He wished he could tell his dad. He heard Hannah wheezing and pulled her to a stop. A white snowflake landed on a fiery gold strand of her hair and for a moment he saw the beauty of it.
‘Have to go,’ he said, then he turned from her and ran towards Junior School, because his younger brother was terrified of snow – not stopping for even a moment to explain to Hannah, and later he’d wonder if it was because he thought she understood or because responsibility for his brother trumped everything and this was a kind of selfishness and smallness in him because he wasn’t able to incorporate Hannah too.
‘Snow is a PTSD trigger for Basi,’ Dr Reynolds had said, but for him and Basi trigger meant a gun, a real trigger on a real gun; men holding guns, their dogs barking and snarling; just the word trigger making memories jump alive again. So he and Basi had their own word – hole. Because the present was the floor you trod on, all fine and oblivious, and then – BAM! a hole – and you fell down into the past.
He saw the tarmac drive which wound through the woods ending in Junior School, but the path would be quicker.
He jogged, not slowly but not flat out; Basi had become quicker to recover in the last few months and he felt guilty for wondering how long he’d need to spend with Basi, if he’d still make it back in time for his cue.
The percussive roar of an explosion, ripping the air around him, cutting inside his memory as if it was flesh and could bleed, and he was falling into the past.
His dad was running, carrying toddler Basi in his arms, his mum and older brother ahead of him, yelling at him to run faster but he couldn’t hear them, just saw their mouths, because the sound waves had torn his eardrums. He fell as another building was hit.
He was under the rubble, calling for Baba and Mama, but his mouth was dried with dust
and he couldn’t make any sound. It was four hours until he was pulled out by his parents, his right leg broken, but lucky; Baba’s hands bloody from digging for him, two of Mama’s fingers broken by her search through the rubble.
He was struggling to breathe under the rubble but at the same time he was pressed against an English oak tree, its trunk soft with moss. He thought of the face of a stranger who’d been kind because that’s how he could clamber back to the present. Today it was the judge, his beard flecked with salt, talking to him all through the first night on the boat, and Rafi came fully back to the English woods with snow falling.
He walked towards the flames being extinguished by the snow, charcoal smoke smudging the sky; then the wind blew the smoke into his face, stinging his eyes, smarting at the back of his throat. Pulling his hoody over his mouth and nose, he went closer. A twisted, blackened piece of metal, the size of a lunch box. A small bomb, nothing like the ones in Aleppo, but a bomb. The tree close to it had pieces of shrapnel sticking into its trunk. The lower branches were charred and, as he watched, fragments of blackened bark fell with the snow to the ground. He couldn’t see anyone else in the woods.
Fuck’s sake, it’s just your PTSD! You’re still in the middle of it, numb-nuts! His rational mind had to be aggressive and swear to get his attention because he had the six-pack version of PTSD with what Dr Reynolds called hypervigilance and delusions, a kinder way of saying psychosis. But delusions didn’t sting your throat, phantom smoke didn’t smart into your eyes.
He ran flat out towards Basi, his lungs hurting as they pulled in the freezing air.
The woods thinned and he saw the Junior School building and playground in front of it; the pirate ship playset with swings and a slide, and a huge old tree with parts of its roots exposed. Basi had shown him the houses they’d made for their Lego minifigures in the roots; tiny twig roofs.
Three Hours : A Novel (2020) Page 4