When the Sky Fell Apart

by Caroline Lea

  Thoughts whirring, Carter started to examine the German, palpating his abdomen to find the area where the bowel lining had pushed through the muscle wall. The first thing he noticed was that the abdomen was softer than he might anticipate for someone with an inflamed or infected diverticula.

  He asked a series of questions. Have you vomited? Have you experienced diarrhoea or constipation? When did the pain start? Indicate the level of pain you are currently experiencing, if ten is unbearable and zero is no pain at all.

  The Commandant’s answers were puzzling: yes, he had vomited, had been constipated for some days now; the pain had started just that morning and he would currently class it as nine on the pain scale—a point at which, Carter knew, patients were usually incapable of speech or coherent thought.

  Then there was his temperature: normal, when everything suggested that he should be pyrexic. The German was not sweating excessively, and he did not have that fixed and staring look which patients often exhibit when their pain is so extreme that they can’t function.

  Carter busied himself looking into the mouth, ears and eyes, allowing himself time for thought. The Commandant’s blue eyes were watchful, lucid. In spite of the occasional groans of pain that he gave, Carter noted that he continued to observe his every move. Sometimes, he even looked vaguely smug. Or amused? The slight shadow of a smile on his lips, when his mouth should have been a rictus of pain.

  Carter felt a prickling fear across his scalp. This is a performance, he thought.

  Just then the soldier returned with his medical bag. The Commandant sat up a little straighter.

  ‘So, Doctor? What medicine will heal me?’

  Carter blinked. The Commandant expected the sulfa tablets, but quite apart from the fact that Carter no longer had the tablets, the man’s condition did not demand them. Yet, if he was challenged, the Commandant was liable to fly into a rage and have Carter punished for insubordination.

  The image of a dark, damp train carriage flickered across Carter’s mind—the crush of bodies swaying with the forward momentum of the train, passively waiting and absorbing every movement as they clattered towards Ravensbrük.

  So he decided on a compromise. ‘I will give you a painkiller, Commandant, to provide relief while your body battles the infection.’

  ‘Painkillers, these will cure me? Make better my stomach, yes?’

  ‘No. But you will be more comfortable. I believe you will recover in any case, without the need of further medication.’

  Eyes bright, the Commandant chuckled. He seemed to have forgotten about feigning pain. His hands dropped back to his sides, and his breathing became regular, his expression triumphant.

  ‘So I do not need medicines?’

  ‘Goodness, no! It would be a waste—I would like to ensure that the sulfa tablets are reserved for…emergencies.’

  The Commandant straightened up and clapped his hand on Carter’s shoulder. ‘I think I am feel better already.’ He turned to the soldier and said, ‘Is he not a wonderful doctor?’

  Carter had a queasy moment of comprehension: in playing along with his pretence but refusing to give the Commandant his sulfa tablets, he had confirmed his responsibility for their disappearance. He should have either challenged the man outright when he found no evidence of illness, or he should have made a pretence of wanting to give him the tablets but finding them gone. By doing neither, he had revealed himself as guilty.

  ‘If you need me,’ he finally muttered, ‘I’ll be in my office.’

  Usually, Carter would have been prevented from leaving until he was dismissed, but the Commandant simply watched him leave. As Carter was going out the door, the German called, ‘You must go to your house and wait there, yes. I have no need of you, Doctor.’

  ‘Of course. As you wish.’

  Carter tried to press his trembling mouth into a smile, wondering how on earth he was going to escape the island.

  SHE knew Gregor would have heard every word of their plans to escape, so after Maurice and the girl had gone, Edith opened the larder door and said, ‘Go on then, arrest me!’

  His expression was so aghast, and the idea was so ridiculous that they both giggled. Then his smile faded.

  He sat at the table. ‘I hurt for Claudine,’ he said. ‘This Hans, he is a bad man and my heart pains for her but…this is a dangerous thing. Escape. Many people try. For some, it is easy. But so many people? And children?’ His eyes were wide, beseeching. ‘I do not want them to catch you, Edith. They will not harm children if they catch, but they will kill you—’ His voice cracked.

  She smacked her hand on the table. ‘No more talk of killing. Or catching, for that matter. If you’re going to tell me anything, then talk to me about how to escape.’

  He took her hand in his. ‘I can help. I try. But if you go…’

  She pulled her hands away. ‘You mercenary bastard! You’re fretting about how to save your own skin, not mine! Worried about where you’ll hide? Where you’ll get your food.’

  ‘No! It is not this. I worry little for me, yes. But I think more for you—’

  ‘You lying sod!’ She was not usually one for huffing, but she stood up to go, ready to stamp out and slam the door.

  He seized her hand again, pulled her back to the table. His skin was rough, his grip strong. ‘You must not go!’

  Before she could move away, he wrapped his arms around her waist and held her.

  ‘You stay.’

  She went to slap him off, but then she brought her hands to rest, first in his hair, then on the back of his neck. His skin was smooth. She ran her fingers over the fine shadow of light fuzz that ran down his neck and disappeared into his shirt. She had imagined that holding him would be like embracing a sack of bones. But she could feel the corded muscles under his skin and, as she closed her eyes, she could sense the thrumming of his heart. Or was it her own?

  They stayed like that, for a long time. He was very warm. Then she leant down and pressed her lips against his rough cheek and untangled his arms from around her waist. She felt the sudden rush of cold. A tug of longing as she pulled her hand from his, but she paid it no mind; instead she went to gather some bladderwrack from the shoreline. Wonderful for arthritis.

  His face, from behind the window, was small and white and sad. But she couldn’t think on that now. She had to see Sarah.

  They’d not spoken in so long—Edith felt a clutching of nerves as she tapped on the door. Claudine’s maman opened it warily. She was plumper than Edith expected, but her eyes were lifeless. No more the young girl she’d once known. Time rises up to meet everyone.

  Sarah raised her chin and narrowed her eyes. Edith smiled, though she half expected the woman to screech her off the step and slam the door.

  But she simply folded her arms across her chest and said, ‘What are you after, then?’ She didn’t ask Edith in, which was just as well, because Edith didn’t know if she could trust herself not to claw Hans’s eyes out.

  Edith had a little speech prepared. She explained how she needed Claudine’s help. She was ready to argue until she was blue in the face, but Sarah was nodding before she’d finished speaking and there was a glint of life in those eyes. She even smiled and said, ‘Thank you,’ and promised to send the children’s rations over, along with any extras—meaning what Hans gave her.

  Then Hans appeared. Pig-faced, just as Claudine had said.

  ‘Where is Claudine?’ His voice was cold.

  Sarah flinched at his tone, but she said, ‘Claudine and Francis are staying with Edith. She looked after them when they were young and she misses them. They’re having a…holiday with her. Isn’t that so?’

  Edith looked Hans right in the eye. ‘That’s the way of it. Good to have children about. And she’s lovely, Claudine. Such a good girl.’

  ‘Yes, she is,’ Hans said, and turned away.

  But not before Edith had seen a flicker of something. A bleak rage, a craving. It was enough. She couldn’t let the girl com
e back to the house—her mother couldn’t protect her. And she mustn’t stay on the island. She would be better off in England, where Edith could care for her. A place where the Germans had no sway.

  As Edith turned to go, Sarah clasped her in a quick embrace. She whispered, ‘Thank you,’ again. It chilled Edith, that hasty clutch of her arms, that searing fear in her voice.

  How much does she know? But some things are too terrible to dwell upon, so Edith didn’t let herself ponder it for long. The knowledge of something doesn’t change the fact of it.

  She walked back along the shoreline, gathering bladderwrack and counting the new buildings the Germans had slapped on to the seafront, blocks of grey amid the greenery. As if patches of the landscape had given up and turned into tombstones.

  When she returned to the house with a sackful of seaweed, she couldn’t find Gregor anywhere. Not in the larder, the garden, the shed. Remembering how she’d left him, full of sudden fear that he’d run away, she raced through the house, calling his name. She finally found him, curled up on her own bed, facing the wall.

  He didn’t move when she came in. She sat on the edge of the bed. She could feel the heat from his body.

  ‘Please do not leave me,’ he said.

  She lay down behind him and put her hand upon his back. The warmth rested between them, something newly born and barely breathing.

  Neither of them dared move for fear of smothering something so fragile and precious. Light seeped from the room. They slept, the burning space of a finger width between their bodies.

  When Edith woke, it was dark and he was shouting, voice taut with fear. She flung her arms around him.

  ‘Hush now.’

  He turned to her. She kissed his cheeks. They were rough and wet and tasted of salt.

  With Frank, it had always been eyes shut and count to twenty and roll over and go to sleep. This was different. The unpeeling of clothes. The unspooling of thought. Kisses tugged from the roots. Eyes open. Breath hot and gasping. The weight of him. The way she stretched herself to meet him. The way she pulled him closer, closer and then, even when closer wasn’t possible, she wrapped herself around him, pulling him closer still, until she didn’t know where her body ended and his began.

  There were no lines in the darkness. No words or thoughts of young or old or Jèrriais or German.

  In the grey light of the morning, Edith felt a panic where she thought there might be shame. Or worse, disgust. He smiled and stretched out his arm and pulled her towards him.

  But by the time the sun was fully up in the sky, Edith knew she had to be out collecting more herbs and bartering for meat because they were still leaving.

  It was a wrench even to be thinking of abandoning it all. Her little house. The sea. The size of the sky. That salt smell that bled into her very skin and was as familiar as the breath in her lungs.

  Gregor.

  But it was a different place, Jersey, since they had taken over. They had built grey walls and shelters. They had slapped concrete on to the beautiful old castles. They had chopped down whole areas of woodland. The land was butchered. Scarred.

  They had changed the people, too.

  Of course, Edith had noted the difference as soon as they started evacuating, even before the Germans arrived. Folk raiding their friends’ houses the moment they’d left: making off with their good china, their kitchen table, even the pictures off the walls. The rugs that had been there for three generations of babes to lie on—all of it gone in an afternoon.

  The Gallichans weren’t even evacuating, just went to the harbour to watch. They came back within the hour to find their neighbours ‘borrowing’ their rugs and saucepans—the sheets from their beds, for heaven’s sake. No room for sentimentality when the sky is on fire.

  After the empty houses had all been stripped bare and folks had taken whatever they could carry, the rooms didn’t stay unfilled for long. They were overrun by the soldiers as soon as they arrived. Four or five of the Germans, crammed in together in the tiniest of houses, living like animals in muck.

  Suddenly, Edith couldn’t think of leaving her little house. Couldn’t imagine letting soldiers come to squat in it and inviting the vermin in, and pissing in her good kitchen sink. The very thought of it made her shudder.

  She tried to explain that to Maurice, but he said, ‘What will it matter? You won’t be living here to see it.’

  ‘But where would we go in England?’ Edith asked. ‘Who would know me?’

  ‘Why the worry? You’re useful and you’ve a friendly sort of face.’

  She snorted. ‘Good of you to say so.’

  ‘Now, don’t be like that. I simply meant that you’ll have no trouble talking to people.’

  ‘At my age, though. I’ve birthed two generations of some families here.’

  ‘You should have time for at least one more batch of babes then,’ Maurice grinned—there was wickedness in his eyes since he’d seen a chance of escaping. A humour fashioned from hope. ‘Somewhere new, before you’re gone.’

  ‘Charmed, Maurice, I’m sure. You can jest. You’re still young.’

  ‘Ah, come now, Edith. I mean no harm. It’s only…I have to go. I knew it all along, but I didn’t think I could put Marthe through it, knowing she might not survive the journey. But the girl made me think on how it is here for all of us—the pain of it. Like living in a furnace. It’s changed everybody. War’s blackened our hearts. And if Marthe is set to…to die…then I won’t have it happen here, under this. I’m not saying you must come along for me, or for Marthe, but leaving you—well, it would be like leaving family.’

  She waved a hand at him, wiping away the prickling sensation in her eyes.

  ‘Stop it now. What do you think you’re doing to me? You’re a cunning one, Maurice Pipon.’

  ‘I mean every word. You’re the closest to family we have. It would break my heart to leave you here, Edith.’

  There was a wrenching in her chest, a burning ache in her throat. She scowled at her knitting until she could talk again.

  Then she said, ‘I haven’t made my mind up between staying and leaving yet. But what about the land? Won’t it hurt you? Leaving the place that birthed you?’

  Maurice shrugged. ‘No beating heart in sand and soil, is there, Edith?’

  Those words drove her to thinking. She took to walking out, in all weathers and times of day. Rambling over the beaches and along the cliff paths and across the fields. Anywhere they wouldn’t have laid bombs in the soil.

  Sometimes she carried Francis with her, if he was sleepy. He pointed at the sea, the trees. They watched seagulls together, screeing across the free and open sky. And, in the end, if she walked next to the sea for long enough, the wombing of the waves lulled him, and he nodded off.

  She trudged for miles: only her thoughts and that little child’s heavy body in her arms. Then came the sudden realisation like a detonation in her head. She never expected the remembering to steal up on her like that and snatch the breath from her mouth.

  That babe of hers. Born warm, but quickly cooling and cold. Close-eyed and screwed-up bud picked too soon.

  Edith had stowed that scrap of her flesh in the ground without a name or a stone to mark the place, but she knew it as well as she knew where her own eye was, her mouth, her heart. But for all the times she’d thought of it—that cold little body, with the tiny hands and feet and the lips quite blue—she hadn’t thought what it would be to abandon it. To travel across the water to another country, perhaps never come back. Who would be there to lay flowers in the spring? Who would know to put a holly wreath down, come Christmas? That piece of her body would lie in the ground. Frozen, forgotten. Once she was dead, there would be no one to know it had ever been at all.

  So she poured herself into the thought of staying. When Gregor saw her unpacking her suitcase, he seized her and kissed her from top to toe.

  Laughing, they were always laughing. The sound gusted out of her mouth and into his and then
back again. The warmth of sharing that laughter. The warmth of being known, being understood. It was strange to find home in another body from another country.

  Strange, too, how life could change through a few moments. Weeks ago, she barely knew who he was. Now she couldn’t imagine taking a breath without him.

  It was bad timing; that was all. Claudine came running to find her on the beach when it happened. Edith had been picking through one of the deeper rock pools, looking for anemones and dead men’s fingers when she heard the girl shrieking from the beach. Something in her voice made Edith drop her net and run.

  Claudine kept up her screaming. When Edith was close enough, she could hear her shouting, ‘He’s found him! Maurice! He’s found him.’ And Edith knew, from the dread in Claudine’s eyes, what she meant.

  They raced up the beach while the girl puffed out what had happened: Maurice had brought Marthe around. She was sleepy, so he’d taken her to Edith’s room—and found Gregor crouched in the corner, gun in his hand.

  ‘Bloody foolish men. What was Gregor doing with his gun?’

  ‘I think he thought it was a patrol. Now they’re both shouting. Maurice said he’d kill him.’

  When Edith ran into the room, she half expected to find both of them bleeding or one of them with a bullet in him. But they were facing each other, gun and knife in hand.

  Edith said to Claudine. ‘Go and fetch some wood from the shed, will you, my love?’ When the girl didn’t move, Edith snapped, ‘Go now. No need for you to see this.’

  Claudine scampered from the room but Edith saw her crouch behind the door to listen.

  ‘Don’t come any closer, Edith,’ Maurice growled. ‘I found him here. Waiting for you with a gun, he was.’

  ‘Put the knife down, Maurice.’ She stepped between them, trembling hands raised.

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Edith. Move over. Now.’

  ‘Gregor, put the gun down. Drop it.’

  Gregor grunted, let his hand fall to his side. He didn’t drop the gun, of course—but then Maurice was still pointing that knife at him.