When the Sky Fell Apart

by Caroline Lea

  ‘So,’ she said, pointing to the sky. ‘Do you think we can expect more of this, then?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mrs… Please forgive me, I don’t know your name.’

  ‘Edith Bisson.’

  ‘Mrs Bisson, I really couldn’t say. I can’t see any particular advantage to the Germans in wiping out the lot of us. But, then, why bomb a defenceless island in the first place? It’s crossed my mind that I should have evacuated while the opportunity was there.’

  ‘You should have, Doctor. English by birth, aren’t you? So you’ve no loyalties here. And the rest of your lot went last week. You didn’t think to go with them?’

  ‘No, not really. I haven’t much to return to back in England. Only Father and…’ He busied himself checking Clement. ‘I felt, well—it didn’t…sit right with me, the thought of leaving.’ He kept his eyes down.

  What are you hiding? Edith wondered.

  But she nodded along as Carter continued. ‘We’ve no idea what medical care will be necessary if they do invade. Leaving would have seemed, well—I almost said traitorous, but perhaps that’s a foolish term to use.’

  ‘I heed you, Doctor. You wouldn’t catch me leaving, either. But then I’m rooted to this soil—years of my blood in it. I just couldn’t understand it, folk upping and leaving like that, thousands of them. Rats from a sinking ship.’

  ‘Well, there will be no more of that—the chap who fetched me said that there’s more smoke over St Helier. Rumour has it they’ve bombed the harbour.’

  Edith felt a fluttering of fear. ‘Bombed the harbour? By Crie! They mean business then?’

  He gave a thin, humourless smile; he really did have a kind face, and a sort of sadness in those eyes.

  ‘It would seem so,’ he said. ‘We’re entirely isolated now.’

  ‘We’ve been cut off for two weeks already, Doctor, what with England leaving us to our own devices. Demilitarisation? A fine name to pretty up leaving your dependants to be blown up and invaded, don’t you think? We’re supposed to be under Crown protection. The English took every single one of their soldiers. The Germans could come and butcher the lot of us, for all they care.’

  Carter blinked. His eyes were red-rimmed from the smoke or exhaustion. It hit her, for the first time: the weight of responsibility on this man’s shoulders—English doctor in a land far from home, during a foreign invasion. Why would any soul make that choice? What must his family think?

  He sighed. ‘Yes, well. On some days, I’m ashamed to call myself English.’

  ‘Now, Doctor. The shame isn’t with you. It’s those politicians sitting in London, smoking their cigars and drinking while other people—good, honest people—die for them. Seems they could drop bombs on us until we’re nothing but a crater in the sea and the English wouldn’t shift a muscle to help us.’

  ‘If it’s any consolation, Mrs Bisson, I can’t see that happening. There’s little doubt the Germans will invade now. But there oughtn’t to be any more killing. What would be the gain for them, murdering innocent people?’

  Edith felt a jolt of irritation: why didn’t he understand the danger they were in? Where was his fear? His rage?

  ‘What about what they’ve done in France then, eh?’ she demanded. ‘Burned farms to the ground, killed whole families, raped women… What makes you think it’ll be any different here?’

  ‘It has to be.’

  ‘And why is that?’

  He was quiet a while. Just the creaking of the cart, the soft wheeze of poor Clement’s ruined lungs. The seagulls screeing in the open sky above them and the sea breathing behind them, inhaling and exhaling, mumble-mouthed over the stones. Some things remain the same, even when the sky over your head is ablaze.

  He sighed. ‘Because…because I have to hope it will be different.’

  No answer at all. Once again, Edith was struck by the thought that Dr Carter was hiding something, or perhaps hiding from something.

  The cart creaked over their silence. She turned to look at the sea. Flat stretch of water, blank and blue as the sky above. Pretty as a picture, except with black and grey craters where the bombs had fallen: as though some thuggish child had scrawled all over the picture out of spite alone.

  And Dr Carter thought this time would be different? He was naïve, too young to remember the Great War, the way it ripped apart people and land and time. Still, no gain in making him fret over what couldn’t be changed. Another few minutes and she would get off and leave him to travel the mile to the hospital. She hoped Clement would last the journey.

  Near her fence, Edith called for the cart to stop. She turned to Carter.

  ‘I must be off now,’ she said. ‘I live on that hill.’

  ‘Of course. Well, very pleased to have met you.’

  ‘Likewise.’ She paused, put her head to one side. How far could she trust him? ‘You were saying before—about the harbour being out. Not being able to leave. Were you looking to go yourself, after all? There’s none would blame you. You’ve no ties here.’

  A momentary flash of a haunted shadow in his eyes, and then he smiled and his professional briskness was back.

  ‘I’m staying,’ he said. ‘It’s only that I’ve some patients who would do well from receiving more specialist care on the mainland. But, of course, that’s out of the question now…’

  ‘I might know a way, Doctor, if you can be at La Rocque pier tomorrow morning. I’ve heard tell there’s one last boat leaving. Mostly women and children, a few fellows set on fighting. Only a small collier, you understand. But it might do for those strong enough to stand a slow trip across the channel.’

  He stared at her, hard, eyes narrowed. For a moment, her stomach dropped. Perhaps she had him all wrong?

  But then he said, ‘Very helpful, thank you, Mrs Bisson. I shall see you there tomorrow.’

  He smiled, his longish nose pinking under the sun, like a tourist’s.

  Edith climbed off the trailer. When she looked back, Dr Carter was straight back to checking on Clement and counting out his pulse.

  She had decided to walk the last part home along the sand. She’d spotted some devil’s claw there that would come in handy for Clement—ever so good for burns, it was.

  The tide was up. That deep blue and the surface like glass. The Germans could have pelted a hundred bombs into it, a thousand, and it wouldn’t change a jot.

  The mirror would shatter and then reform. Implacable. Eternal.

  Behind her, the beach was smoking, the air thick and grey with the settling ash. Edith turned away. Some wounds are so shocking that looking on them too long stings the eyes and brings bile to the throat.

  MAURICE had been at home bathing Marthe in front of the stove when the bombs struck the beach.

  She’d had a miserable night and had woken sweaty and soiled. Her skin was ever so delicate, and he knew he would need to bathe her at once to stop the rashes and sores.

  He carried her into the kitchen and stripped her down to her drawers. As usual, she didn’t say anything. She stared at him as though she would like to thank him, but couldn’t find the words.

  Maurice kissed her lips, gently wiped away the white film and spittle that crusted her chin. Pulled down her drawers. Picked her up and cradled her in his arms, rocking her for a moment back and forth.

  She would be thirty-one next month.

  He had known her for all of those years, or as many of them as he could remember. The earliest moment he could recollect, when he was just a scrap of a boy, barely standing on his own two feet, was of little Marthe tottering over and pushing half of her biscuit into his mouth and then knocking him backwards in an embrace.

  They married the day after she turned eighteen.

  He had loved her as long as he had loved anything. Thinking of it made his eyes itch.

  Marthe’s head lolled against his arm. He shifted her a little. Dr Carter had warned him against letting her neck sag; she could suffocate under the weight of her own head, he’d expl
ained, if her chin was folded into her chest.

  Maurice caught a glimpse of himself in the looking glass above the mantle and started at the wild man he saw there: matted hair (he rarely had the time or inclination to comb it these days), sun-browned, wind-whipped skin and eyes carved with lines from squinting at the glare from sun and the sea. And something else, something new: deep brackets of pain around tightened lips.

  He’d seen the same look on the face of another fisherman once. The man had tangled his hand in the snarled mess of his fishing net and, fingers swelling and blackening under the rope that tightened with every twist, had taken out his fishing knife and sawn off his own fingers.

  Gently, Maurice lowered Marthe into the metal tub, all the while watching her face for any movement that might tell him that the water scalded or froze her. But she moved not a muscle—only stared at a point just beyond his shoulder. Perhaps the plates? He had meant to wash them that morning, but then her bath had been more pressing, what with the blasted rash. When they were first married, before the disease had fully gripped her, she had been ever so house-proud. Not a cup or a fork out of turn. His heart sickened to think of the scolding she should be giving him for those crocks.

  He kissed her forehead. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered. ‘Not enough hours in the day, my love.’

  They had taken in a girl to help, when the disease became too much. The doctor said Marthe would need someone to tend to her while Maurice was out on the boat. They could have done with another girl now, he knew it. But he didn’t trust anyone since the first girl turned out a damned thief and a liar—pinching Marthe’s food and leaving her all alone during the day.

  He had only found her out because he had come back early once. The wind was up and the sea would have swallowed his boat whole, so he left his nets and went home. The house had been silent: Marthe and the girl were nowhere to be found.

  Gone for a walk, probably.

  He’d planned to give the girl a ticking-off for dragging poor Marthe out on such a wild day. Without her woollen blanket, either—it lay in its usual spot by the door. Then he heard a noise, a whimper, such as a dog might make, coming from their bedroom.

  When he went to look, there was a stench like a midden. The room was thick with it. And there she was, covered in her own mess, face in the bedspread and nearly smothered. Couldn’t move a muscle to save herself, could she? Turned out the girl had been leaving her alone all day, without food or water. Stewing in her own filth. And then only cleaning her up when she came back from whatever jaunt she’d been out on, so Maurice was none the wiser.

  He could have done her an injury, that girl, when she finally turned up. Pockets full of sweets and bobbins and ribbons she had bought with the money he paid her. His fingers had itched, but he hadn’t belted her, not with Marthe watching. Told the butcher’s wife about her, though—Madame Hacquoil. The girl hadn’t worked since: the whole island and every soul on it knew her for the good-for-nothing thief she was.

  Gossip seeped in with the sea water, insinuated itself like the salt and spread the rot from the inside. But some moulds have their uses.

  Maurice soaked a rag in the water and sponged the wisps of fine, blonde hair back from Marthe’s forehead. He had loved that hair when they first courted—the way it fell forward across her face when she was talking so she had to tuck it behind her ear. It made him recall that sweet child she once was.

  He used to love the way her hair fell around his face when they made love, too. A curtain, shutting out the world. There was just her. All eyes and lips—her soft breath on his face. The smell of her: grass and sea and sweet sweat. That hair of hers, all around them, like something to take deep into your lungs and drown with.

  It was still as beautiful, her hair, still long and thick—the illness hadn’t touched it. He used his fingers to comb it back from her face and worked the soap in gently, so as not to hurt her. Then he washed, ever so carefully, her neck, shoulders, back. He counted each bone in her spine. Her chest, so flat now, like a child’s. The fuzz between her legs. He took extra care to rinse off all of the waste from her thighs and behind her knees, knowing she would flare up even redder if any trace remained.

  Afterwards he wrapped her in a towel and held her on his lap in front of the kitchen stove to rub the warmth back into her bird bones. He thought how he would have done this with the children they should have had. The children she should have been nursing and rocking and kissing right now. The children who should have been hanging off her skirts as she stood at that stove and stirred the broth…

  He stopped himself. Such thoughts did no one any good. He had driven himself mad over it all too many times to count.

  He sang instead. ‘Bobby Shaftoe’ was Marthe’s favourite—sometimes she snoozed as he sang.

  He was on the second verse—bright and fair—when he heard the explosions. Felt them, really. A deep echo that moved through the walls and floor and up into his body. Into Marthe’s delicate bones. A pause and then another boom as before, only louder.

  Maurice stopped singing. Marthe’s eyes snapped open.

  Another boom.

  He knew what it had to be. Everyone had been expecting it for weeks now, ever since the troops had left and they had announced on the wireless that the islanders would be left to fend for themselves.

  Demilitarised.

  A fancy word for abandonment.

  He kissed Marthe’s forehead, telling her he was sorry, so sorry, my love, as he laid her down on her blanket in front of the stove. She cried out, but he couldn’t mind her, not just then.

  He ran to the window. He could see the smoke billowing up as close as if it were from next door’s bonfire.

  Stomach jolting, blood singing, Maurice started to run.

  By the time he reached the beach, it was a scene from the end of the world. Just the empty stretch of sand and the black, smoking craters, spewing smoke skywards. No aeroplanes in the sky; the sea was flat and blank. But in the air, the stink of burning vraic and something else he couldn’t place. Something that made his mouth water. They’d already started the rationing—everyone’s meat, butter and sugar had been restricted from the moment they knew England was cutting them off.

  Back up the hill, smoke was spiralling from his chimney.

  Marthe.

  But he walked on towards the beach. He needed to see it for himself.

  There wasn’t another soul in sight. No fires either, now. Only huge, smoking holes, like blackened open mouths in the sand.

  Warily, he inched over to the closest one. It was a vast crater with stones and vraic scattered all around. He peered in, guts roiling. Deep enough to be filling up with water. It was like a laceration, as though Jerry had clutched an enormous knife, reached across the ocean and dragged a blade across the face of the beach, gleefully stabbing and gouging.

  Maurice felt suddenly chilled. His knees went and he sat down, cradled his head in his hands and tried not to think about who might have been on the beach when that bomb hit. Fishermen packing up their nets. Couples walking, hand in hand. Children playing…

  He retched a little, insides churning with each fresh image, each fresh puff of smoke. He squeezed his eyes shut, pressed his fists against his eyelids. Everything was darkness until, when he pressed harder, silent stars or fireworks or explosions.

  When Maurice opened his eyes, the bloody bomb holes were still there. Pockmarks on the face he had loved as long as he had drawn breath.

  Damn Jerry. Damn the damned Bosche.

  He hurled a stone into that hole that shouldn’t have been there. It made a decent splash as it hit the water. He threw in another, then another. Then he kicked some of the sand in.

  Suddenly he was scrabbling on hands and knees and pushing great armfuls of sand into the hole, as fast as he could, panting with the effort of it. His head was swimming but he carried on anyway. Armfuls and fistfuls and whatever he could push in. It made no difference at first, but after a while the water disappea
red. He kept going. Each armful of sand burying the Bosche.

  When he’d finished pushing all the sand back in, he sat back and tried to look at the shallow hole. Just as if he’d been walking along the beach and then happened upon it. Could have been made by children, pretending to dig their way to China. Black ash buried by the sand. Nothing to make you think of bombs or death. Just the beach, rumple-faced after a day of play, the same as ever.

  Now for the others.

  He had just started the second hole when he heard a voice behind him.

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’

  Maurice nearly jumped from his skin. Behind him stood a girl. God knows how long she’d been watching him. She was holding a shell in her hand. An ormer.

  He felt his cheeks heat with embarrassment. ‘What does it look like?’ he said, gruffly. ‘I’m filling in the holes.’

  He pushed another armful of sand in.

  ‘Can I help?’

  He stopped and stared. She could only have been eight, nine at a push. She was narrow-chested, with tangled hair and a gaping hole in the leg of what looked like boys’ trousers. She was half smiling, but her eyes were watchful.

  ‘I’m Claudine. I’m ten.’

  He smiled. ‘I’m Maurice. I’m thirty-one.’

  ‘Very pleased to meet you, Maurice.’

  Then, without waiting for his say-so, she started hurling sand into the hole. She went about it like a burrowing animal, crouching over and flinging her arms so the sand went flying—some into the hole, but a good amount into his eyes and mouth too.

  After a minute, she stopped, panting.

  ‘Bombs made these holes, you know.’

  Maurice gave a wry smile. ‘I thought as much.’

  ‘We’re most likely to die, once the Germans arrive.’

  He stopped digging and stared at the strange girl, with her scrawny legs and her clear voice: the matter-of-fact way she said die. Were all children like this? He struggled to find something reassuring to say.

  ‘I’m sure no one will die.’

  She pointed to the bomb craters all around. ‘They’re bombing us,’ she said. ‘And I’m not a fool. People always think children are fools. But I hear things. I’ve learnt about wars at school. People die and are killed. And everyone knows the Germans are evil. I heard the grown-ups say so. After they poured water all over the man who was on fire—the butcher.’