by Sarah Moss
The most immediate difficulty appears to have been the lack of water. I found this surprising in England in November – surely cold was more urgent than thirst? No shortage of fire, I suppose. And it wasn’t water people wanted but tea. Without mains water, they dipped kettles in rain butts and boiled them over smouldering ruins. (Where did the tea come from? Wasn’t the water full of ash and debris? Don’t ask awkward questions.) Several men were seen shaving, using fragments of mirrors propped over cracked bowls of rain-water. (Did they carry razors in their pockets, did people take bags of toiletries to the bomb shelters? Well, you would, wouldn’t you?) There were no shops, and so no food for those without houses; people whose kitchens had survived found themselves running impromptu feeding stations. Supplies ran low, and one woman remembers her father telling her to open the tin of salmon saved in the pantry since before the war. But we’re keeping that for an emergency, she objected. Yes, he said, this is the emergency. A man was told off by a police officer for making porridge over a burning incendiary bomb. A boy found a piece of tram track on his bed, blown through the wall.
There were heads. There were bodies. People made piles.
It was hard for anyone who had not spent the night in the city to enter it. The roads were gone, and the terrain now impossible for bicycles as well as buses and cars. Many people tried to turn up for work in the usual way, walking and carrying bicycles over the rubble, some because it seemed like the right thing to do and others because Friday was payday and they needed their wages, then usually handed out in cash in brown envelopes. The banks were closed and even businesses whose premises were physically intact were rarely able to lay hands on record books and accounts. Some workers wanted to get their money and get the hell out of town and there were ugly scenes when this was not possible.
People left. They piled their remaining belongings onto handcarts and prams and walked out of the city into the Warwickshire countryside with no destination and no means of support. They were hungry and thirsty and dirty and in some cases their children had given up crying. They went on walking as darkness fell. Refugees. You know what they look like. Unlike the ones you’re seeing in the news or perhaps even walking along a nearby motorway, these people found refuge. Many, turning up in the villages from which residents had watched the city burn the previous night, were offered beds in strangers’ houses. Some communities set up ‘rest stations’ in schools and church halls, sharing rationed food and loaning bedding, inviting strangers to take baths in their bathrooms. There were residential nurseries during the war, set up for the children of parents working irregular shifts or deployed abroad, and the Coventry nursery evacuated its infant inmates to the Canadian Military Hospital at Marston Green, a village now consumed by the city but then still far enough out to seem safe. That first night, each wounded soldier lay with two babies in his bed.
That first night, there were fewer people sleeping in Coventry than there had been for centuries.
A city ruined.
a matter of mitigation
I had not driven much since it happened, and every time I started the car I remembered speeding to the field. Even now, the big roundabout and the slip-road on which that day I overtook three cars before joining the dual carriageway far too fast, remind me of our loss like the ghosts of hanged men at crossroads. I negotiated it slowly this time, ceremonially, as if I were driving a bride to church (get lost, Dad, if I ever feel the need for state sanction of my sex life I doubt I’ll need you to take me to the registry office). Rose, perhaps, Rose in a white dress. Emma might enjoy that. There was no reason, really, not to bring Miriam home on the train, but we didn’t. It was like having a new-born again, a new-born with a news habit and red silk pyjamas. She seemed too fragile, too precious, to expose to the proximity of strangers, to the smells and noises of the railway. And I would not have been surprised to find that after two weeks’ confinement, the mile’s walk home from the station tired her, and it now seemed important that Miriam should not get tired. And that she should not risk being jostled among Christmas shoppers, or catching a cold. You must work towards making your lives as ordinary as possible, Dr Chalcott said. She is not an invalid. We used to climb mountains, Emma said. Climbing mountains is one of few things enjoyed by all four of us. We used to like small islands and remote paths. Carry her pen, he said, and keep climbing, there are probably fewer allergens at seven hundred metres than at school. Though maybe stay where you have phone coverage, at least for the next few months. I could not imagine taking her even across the fields again, or along the canal, where we are often ten or fifteen minutes’ walk from the nearest road. I thought perhaps we might go sit quietly on a bench in the park adjacent to our local hospital, which still has a twenty-four-hour Accident and Emergency unit. Not for long, Emma says, not unless our MP turns out to have some mysterious hold over the Minister for Health.
I joined the motorway and turned on the radio, not wanting my own thoughts. I had not attended to the news since (I still do not have a word for it; ‘my daughter’s cardiac arrest’ dynamites any sentence and several surrounding paragraphs), but of course it was Woman’s Hour, a discussion of menopause in the workplace which I didn’t think would have been any less puzzling if I hadn’t been negotiating traffic at the same time. Not that I would know much about the menopause or the workplace. I am, after all, the second generation not to enter what would conventionally be regarded as a workplace. A historical quirk, ‘the office’, a creature of industrialisation, along with ‘working hours’ and ‘leisure time’. I preferred C.R. Ashbee’s Cotswold Utopianism, in which people co-operate to do what needs doing until it’s done, whereupon they go off to swim or make music or write letters or make love until something else needs doing. Although doctors, of course, would never stop, but then doctors never do stop anyway. There is always more suffering. I checked the road ahead and switched to Radio 3.
Miriam was quiet, as if she, too, couldn’t quite believe they were letting us take her home. She walked out with nothing in her hands, Emma following her clasping the duvet we’d brought from Miriam’s own bed a week ago, I laden with bags of books and knitting wool and clothes, more than I remembered ever bringing. I stifled an urge to run like a bank robber as we reached the car park, where a traffic warden was already hovering beside the pick-up bay. Just in time, mate, he said, you’re right on the fifteen minutes. I opened my mouth and closed it again. But we’re special. But my daughter nearly died. Can there be no mercy, right outside the children’s hospital? I dare say, said Emma, but she’s been on the HDU for the last two weeks and sometimes it takes more than fifteen minutes to discharge a patient and get back to the car. Well then, he said, you should park somewhere else, shouldn’t you, love? I could see her rising on the balls of her feet, could see the Do You Know Who I Am forming in her head, could see Mim gazing into the distance because she knew her mother was about to make a scene. Come on, I said. Mim, do you want to sit in the front? Mum won’t mind going in the back today.
I opened the boot, positioning myself between Emma and the traffic warden. The epipen, I thought, in the little bag, let’s keep it on the back seat, save two minutes running round the car. I would have kept it in my hands if I could, its point poised over Miriam’s jeans, except that if I could, I would have taken her off to climb Ben Nevis the next morning, to prove to her and anyone else that she was exactly the person she had been a month earlier, undiminished. What if we lose it, I’d asked Erica, what if we forget to take it with us? I don’t think you will, she said, people don’t, not after the kind of shock you’ve had. I know it sounds odd, but the research suggests that having several pens makes patients less likely to have one when they need it.
I’ll drive, said Emma. I need to feel in control of something. So, I thought, do I, but our marriage is built on me not being the kind of arsehole who can’t sit in the passenger seat while his wife drives so I passed her the keys, and managed to last almost as far as the motorway before leaning forward
to ask Miriam if she was all right. I sat behind her, watching her shoulders move as she breathed. You do understand, Dr Chalcott had said, that this is for the rest of your life, Miriam. You do understand that we are all trusting you to keep yourself safe, that whether you are dancing at a club or swimming in the ocean you must have your pen always on hand now. You do understand that because we don’t know what caused your anaphylaxis, we don’t know how you can avoid it.
Don’t think about it. I would have liked to have been driving. I sat forward. What would you like to do this weekend, Miriam? Grandpa’s going to come over this evening and I’m making that stir-fry you like from the Chinese cookbook, start getting some fresh vegetables into your diet again, but you can choose anything you like tomorrow. Help me cook? I don’t mind, she said. Whatever you want to make. And I don’t really feel like going anywhere at the moment.
When we got home, she stood at the front door, waiting for me to unlock it. Inside, she slipped off her shoes, dropped her cardigan over them on the floor and went straight up the stairs to her bedroom. Two floors up, we heard the door shut. Leave her, Emma said, she’s had no privacy for weeks. What if she stops breathing, I wanted to say, when she’s alone in her room— I know, I said, I’ll bring the rest of the bags.
It was coming up to lunchtime. The sky was grey. I stuffed the contents of Miriam’s laundry bag into the washing machine and set it going. I turned on the oven to heat up a quiche Lorraine, Miriam’s favourite. I took lettuce and cucumber from the fridge. Emma, having spent the previous night on the ward, was taking a shower, had already muttered something about looking in at work on the way to pick up Rose, just to have a chance of getting home for dinner tomorrow. The dialogue we never exchanged hung in the air like a bad smell: Even now, you can’t make it home to have dinner with your daughters?
Not while I earn all the money, no, not while the continuing existence of dinner depends entirely on my career.
They don’t pay you extra for missing dinner, you know. There’s no-one tabulating all the times you don’t see the girls and rewarding you for each one.
You have no idea what it’s like. You’ve never had a real job and you’ve never even lived with anyone who had a real job until you met me. Your idea of what’s normal is completely fantastical.
My idea of what’s normal is based on the priority of love over work. That was one of your reasons for marrying me, remember? Most people, you know, most people put family first, and if you’re not going to do it, I will.
The next line was never going to lead towards happily ever after. Civilisation, after all, survives on repression: probably all marriages, all families, require the silencing of words that, once spoken, could not be unsaid. Someone before you was better in bed. I thought you would change. You do exactly the thing for which you always criticise your parents. Hush. More reason than ever, now, to stay together, because how could we subject Miriam and Rose to divorce as well as death? No, I thought, immersing my hands with the lettuce in cold water, no, our cards are played now. From now on, life is a matter of mitigation. With luck, and good medicine.
or maybe like
Rose ran across the playground, shedding a glove and two pieces of paper. She doesn’t run into my arms, not at school with her friends watching, and she came to a halt a wary metre away.
‘Mimi’s home,’ I said. ‘She’s home right now, waiting for you.’
Rose looked away. ‘I got a numbers star. For doing my sevens.’
‘That’s excellent,’ I said. ‘Well done. Sevens are tricky.’
She stood on one leg and rubbed the other, muddy shoe on her tights. ‘They’re easy for me.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘I’ll just get your glove, shall I?’
She stalked off, leaving me to follow her across the tarmac and through the gate, pressing the button at the pedestrian crossing and beginning to cross before I caught up with her.
‘Mimi’s back,’ I said again.
The last leaves were coming down. Autumn seemed to have lasted a long time.
‘Joey’s got a new cat. Not a kitten, a rescue cat. Why can’t we ever have a cat?’
‘Because the house is too small.’ And because it might get run over or sick and we don’t need any more hostages to fortune, and I do not miss the shit-shovelling aspects of caring for babies and toddlers.
‘That’s silly. Cats hardly take up any room.’
‘Rose, lots of things take up hardly any room but lots of your life. Babies. Money. Spatial volume isn’t a good indicator of cost or benefit.’
‘Yes, but you said the house was too small for a cat. Anyway, they’re not loud.’
‘Not that kind of volume. So today I drove to the hospital and brought Miriam back. And I iced that chocolate cake I made yesterday.’
Rose climbed onto the low wall outside the flats and began to balance along it. ‘I don’t like chocolate cake. It looks like poo. Why can’t we have a cat?’
Miriam wasn’t there when I unlocked the front door. My father and Emma came out of the kitchen, and I held back ‘where’s Mimi?’ and said, ‘Rose got a numbers star!’
‘Brilliant,’ said Dad. ‘Clever Rose. Miriam’s been down, Adam.’
Emma helped Rose take off her coat. ‘Shoes off, darling. She’s just taken an apple back up to her room. Did Dad tell you Mim’s back?’
‘I did my sevens in less than a minute and I got all of them right.’
Emma tried to put her arm around Rose. ‘That’s great. Sevens are hard, too.’
Rose shrugged her off and started to stamp up the stairs. ‘Only for really stupid people. Only for people who don’t even go to school because they’re lying in a bed all day watching television.’
We listened to her crashing up the stairs, slamming the bathroom door. Emma bit her lip.
Dad put his hand on her shoulder. ‘It’s just change,’ he said. ‘It’s just stuff we don’t control.’
I saw Emma hold herself still, not push him away. ‘I know. I’m going to go up there. Tidy up a bit. I can’t face them fighting. Not today. I thought Rose would be pleased.’
I went into the kitchen and put the kettle on. Rose, despite an avowed preference for school lunches over my cooking, is always hungry when she gets home, usually hungry enough to accept cheese, crackers and fruit.
Dad followed me. ‘Would it be better if I cleared off? Gave the four of you some space to rearrange yourselves? I don’t have to stay for dinner.’
I opened a packet of oatcakes and tipped them onto a plate. ‘I don’t know, Dad. We’ve never done this before.’ I remembered that he had left his house, taken three trains, was paying for a hotel. I remembered that the city is not one where anyone goes for fun, and that he especially dislikes crowds and dirt and noise and never leaves Cornwall by choice. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean that. Please stay.’
‘Only if it’s what you need. What Miriam and Rose need.’
I rinsed the teapot. ‘They need attention. And the more of us can give it to them, the better. Anyway, I think Emma’s working tomorrow morning.’
He took an oatcake and frowned at it. ‘When’s Miriam back in school?’
I shook my head. ‘Once they have a proper care plan. It might take a while.’
We were going to have to trust them to look after her. To save her life. It was, after all, they and not we who had done the right things last time; I had not brought myself to see Mr Stanton, to tell him that we were grateful and would now for ever owe him everything because he had saved our child and we had not. Emma had sent a card, because there is no reciprocation for a life, no wine or flowers or pot of gold to pay the price. So now we depend sometimes on the kindness of strangers, I thought, we trust the world. That is how it is.
He nodded and turned over his oatcake. ‘You used to have saffron buns after school, do you remember? Ian made them every week with the bread.’
‘They eat enough refined carbs at school,’ I said. ‘If the school lunches were bet
ter, I’d be more relaxed about snacks.’
Yes, I am controlling, and look, my children have perfect teeth and healthy weights and no, they don’t get as much exercise or as much freedom as I did and so we do have to be more careful about what they eat and yes, these facts doubtless represent a decline in quality of life since the good old days of the 1980s. I looked at him: go on then.
He shook his head and smiled at me. ‘I wasn’t criticising you, Adam. Well, not much. I wish you could be more relaxed, that’s all.’
What the actual fuck, I thought, is there to be relaxed about?
I heard Emma on the stairs. I saw her glance at me, scent tension. She came and touched my shoulder, leant her head briefly against me.
I patted her. ‘I made tea.’
‘In a minute. Come and look. Quietly.’
I crept behind her up the stairs, stairs I learnt to tread silently when Rose was a restless baby. Emma beckoned, motioned me forward to the door of Miriam’s room, where the girls stood at the window tight in each other’s arms, Rose’s face crushed against Miriam’s chest where Miriam’s heartbeat would echo in her ear, Rose’s arms around Miriam’s waist and Miriam’s around Rose’s shoulders. Their hair mingled, the same light brown, the wrist-bones under their sleeves the same shape. They were silent, relearning their shared blood, the codes in their marrow and their veins. We made them, I thought. We do not possess them but our bodies formed them. I clasped Emma’s hand, stepped away from the doorway and pressed her against me. Her flesh too would one day fall away, her bones be committed to earth or fire, but for now we were there. Here.