Crooked Heart

by Lissa Evans

  He stared at the sodden garden through the kitchen window, and wondered why the word ‘home’ seemed to linger in his head, in large, neat capitals. ‘THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME’, to be precise, picked out in maroon beads on a yellow pincushion; for a minute or more he couldn’t fathom where he’d seen such a thing, though he could clearly remember pulling off the beads and dropping them one by one behind a sideboard. Then, like a coin into a gas-meter, the memory dropped into place: it had been in the flat above the scrap-metal yard, where he’d first lived with Vee. With Vera. With Mrs Sedge. He still didn’t have a comfortable term for her; she wasn’t a comfortable person.

  For the first time, he wondered what she’d thought when he hadn’t come home from school. Perhaps he should have left her a note; after all, she’d given him her egg ration, once.

  He stood and watched the rain. The grey afternoon grew gradually darker, and when he could no longer see the back fence, he roused himself and hunted fruitlessly for candles and matches. Later, when the guns started, he left.

  The baby in the shelter carried on grizzling for so long that the noise ceased to sound human and became just another part of the raid, intermingling with sneezes and bombs and the rasping snore of a drunk. Despite her warning, the woman next to Noel gave him a second potato, followed by a Bovril sandwich, after which he dozed briefly, opened his eyes and saw Ray McIver.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked the woman.

  ‘Nothing.’ His whole body was trembling; he stood up to see better.

  ‘If you want the WC, it’s in the corner. Just follow your nose.’

  He nodded, absently, his feet taking him in the other direction, towards the little desk where the shelter warden sat knitting. Ray McIver was standing beside her, unbuttoning his greatcoat; he had brought the night air into the shelter with him – Noel could smell cordite, could feel a cold current ruffle past.

  ‘We could prob’ly take another ten or fifteen if the kiddies sit on their mums’ laps,’ said the shelter warden. ‘What’s the problem with Bell Street, then?’

  ‘Fractured water main – they’re up to their knees. Got a match?’

  McIver bent to light his cigarette.

  ‘Busy night out there?’ asked the knitter.

  ‘Seen worse. Nothing in our sector so far, it’s all down by the river tonight. Did you hear about Eddy Burden?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He was going past an alley in the middle of a raid and he saw a tart in a white dress leaning against the wall.’

  ‘Tipsy?’

  ‘That’s what he thought. He got a bit nearer and saw it was a landmine, with the parachute all wrapped around.’

  ‘No! ’

  ‘It’s true. Plenty of strange things going on out there in the dark.’ He leaned against the wall, in no apparent hurry to leave, smoke trickling from his mouth. He looked untroubled, his eyes sharp and his body loose. No one who mattered was ever going to hold him to account, thought Noel; London was too full of public danger for McIver’s small, private cruelties to be chased. The only people who’d ever care were the ones he’d stolen from and the ones he’d steal from next.

  Noel took a step nearer and McIver glanced over at him.

  ‘I know you, don’t I?’ he asked, mildly.

  Noel nodded. There was no plan in his head, but he knew that he was getting ready to do something. His heart whirred like a clockwork toy.

  ‘So when are we getting all these extra people?’ asked the shelter warden.

  McIver ignored her. ‘You had a collection box,’ he said. ‘You and that skinny piece.’

  Noel nodded again. He could feel McIver’s gaze, like a finger pressing against his forehead.

  ‘Yes, I remember,’ said McIver. He flicked the ash off his fag and seemed to relax again. ‘They’ll be round any minute,’ he said to the knitter.

  Noel took another, deliberate, step forward.

  ‘You still here?’ asked McIver, casually.

  ‘Yes,’ said Noel. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see heads shifting; the nearest row had started to realize that something was happening. He turned and saw an old man, a gangling girl, a woman with a baby.

  ‘Anything the matter, love?’ asked the woman.

  ‘That warden over there is a thief,’ said Noel. Her eyes widened in shock; the row of heads swung round to look at McIver. ‘That warden,’ said Noel, more loudly, addressing the whole shelter, ‘is called Ray McIver and he’s a thief. He stole money and jewellery from an old lady’s room when she was bombed out and he’s done it before and if—’

  McIver was trying to say something, his face all rage and disbelief, but Noel’s voice was speeding up and climbing to a shout; people were standing to see what was going on, people were gaping.

  ‘—and if you get back after a raid and you’ve had something stolen it’s most likely him who did it, it’s most likely Ray McIver, and he’s an air-raid warden at Post D in Solomon Road and he’s arottenstinkingdirtyTHIEF.’ Like a full stop, the door smacked open and a stream of people entered the shelter, wet shoes puddling on the floor, blankets steaming, and Noel ducked down and wormed between the elbows, following the draught outwards.

  The guns were pounding and the sky was latticed with searchlights. He felt reborn, rinsed clean. He started walking, not knowing or caring in the slightest where he was headed, navigating from one white-painted lamp-post to the next, certain that tonight he was invulnerable, shielded by rectitude. ‘You can’t get me!’ he shouted, when an engine whined overhead.

  He felt utterly magnificent.

  When a flare dropped, and he found himself in lurid daylight, he kept walking, his shadow marching triumphantly ahead of him.

  17

  It was the ears; Vee would have known them anywhere. She’d been fumbling along the road, cursing every sandbag, when the world was suddenly flooded with ghastly light and she found herself gazing at a film show taking place on the gable end of a house ahead of her: two shadows crisply silhouetted on the brick screen, one small, with a domed head, and one larger, with a bouncing gait and ears that seemed familiar.

  She spun round and saw two yellow figures advancing along a yellow street – the illusion reversed, so that it was the more distant of the two who was actually taller, a full-grown man in warden’s uniform, while the maker of the other shadow was only small, a small boy—

  ‘Noel!!!’

  She ran towards him. She saw Noel’s mouth drop open, she saw the warden check his stride, she saw the man’s face – furious, thwarted – as he turned away, and then a line of tracer bullets rose gracefully above the rooftops and the flare was shattered with the noise of dropped crockery. The darkness was instant.

  ‘Noel. Noel!’

  ‘I’m here.’

  He was just in front of her, and she reached out and grabbed him by an arm and a shoulder and then by a cheek and an ear, and pulled his face towards her coat.

  ‘Ow,’ said Noel, a button digging into his lip. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘What do you think I’m doing? Looking for you, you silly beggar, outside in the middle of a raid and that man following you.’

  ‘What man?’

  ‘McIver.’

  ‘Where?’

  Her eyes had adjusted now, and she could see his pale face, struggling to look round. Beyond him, the empty road spooled into the night.

  ‘He’s gone now,’ she said.

  Noel pulled free. ‘I was all right. I’d done it. I told everyone in the whole shelter that he was a dirty, rotten thief – I got my revenge.’

  ‘And he bloody nearly got his! He was following you in the dark, you little fool. What were you thinking? No, never mind—’ He was starting on one of his explanations, and she wasn’t in the mood for polysyllables. ‘Thank God I found you. I’d been doing some praying so maybe it works sometimes. Now, which way should we go?’

  Noel shrugged, sulkily, the glory of five minutes ago already muddied.

>   ‘I don’t know where we are,’ he muttered. ‘I left my torch in the shelter.’

  ‘And I broke mine. Fine pair, aren’t we?’

  For a moment both were silent; from somewhere to their left, quite far away, came the long, shrill whistle of a falling bomb, and the phlegmy rumble of its impact.

  ‘Come on,’ said Vee, taking Noel’s arm and giving it a little tug. They started to walk, following the pale line of the kerb.

  Seconds passed. From exactly the same direction as before came exactly the same sequence of sounds. But louder, this time; nearer.

  They broke into a trot; Vee pressed a hand to her chest, the scald of heartburn beneath her fingers.

  The third bomb in the stick came down not with a whistle but with a wicked swish; it was still streets away, but the explosion shook the road. Window glass showered the pavements.

  ‘Run!’ shouted Vee.

  The engine of the bomber was audible now, stammering above them and Noel could hear himself sobbing, could hear Vee calling on God, but he knew the whole thing was luck, all luck; it was like a boulder tumbling down a mountain, bouncing between impacts, randomly crushing or sparing. He heard the fourth bomb falling – a colossal splintering scream, like the sky being split in half – and the street lifted as if it were a sheet of plywood, and slammed down again.

  Vee’s neck seemed to expand and contract like a telescope; she lost her grip on Noel and fell to her knees. In an instant the world was swallowed by utter blackness, the air suddenly as thick as soup, peppery on the back of the throat so that she coughed, and coughed again, and swiped at her eyes with fingers that were instantly gritty, so that she knew that at least she wasn’t blind, only blindfolded, and the thought was a drop of relief in a great basin of terror. The guns were hammering away, but distantly, as if swathed in blankets.

  She climbed to her feet and flailed in the darkness and her fingertips brushed Noel’s face. This time he flung himself at her, arms locked around her waist, and she clasped his head and waited, trying to see something, anything, that might give her some clue as to what they should do. They might be standing on the edge of a crater, for all she knew, there could be a corpse lying a yard away. Or a pile of them.

  ‘Don’t fret,’ she found herself saying, mechanically. ‘There, there.’

  The growl of a motor car came from somewhere nearby, and then a series of shouts. For a second or two a beam of light poked a foggy red hole through the darkness. ‘Help!’ she called, and then closed her mouth again, her tongue crusted with grit. Red grit, she thought; brick dust. This fog had been a house.

  The glimpse of light somehow made the blindness even worse, and she started to inch forward, desperate to find an end to it. Noel moved crab-wise, still hanging on to her. There was more shouting, nearer now, and the crunch of a handbrake. Another torch-beam, swiping diagonally, briefly outlined a huge dark shape just ahead of her and she reached out and felt a metal surface, warm beneath her fingers – the bonnet of a parked van.

  ‘Anyone there?’ The dust seemed to soak up her words; it was like speaking into a cushion. Close by, she heard a sharp click.

  There was no other warning, She turned her head and something wide and hard smacked her face and flung her into nowhere.

  18

  She was trying to find her purse, pawing through greasy heaps of clothes in a room full of rubbish.

  Her cheek hurt.

  She saw blood on a blanket.

  She saw a man with hairy nostrils holding an oversized tea strainer above her face. ‘Nice big breasts,’ he said – she thought he said – ‘and you’ll soon be asleep.’

  She saw an old woman thrashing her skinny arms and screaming for Mary.

  Her cheek still hurt, a steady pulse of pain.

  She saw tea in a thick green mug, a paper straw angled temptingly towards her mouth. She tried to sip and tea cascaded down her front.

  There was a crash and she opened her eyes to find the world sharp and bright. An enamel bowl had been slammed on to the table beside her, and a nurse was pouring hot water into it from a jug.

  ‘Can you manage to wash yourself, do you think, Mrs Overs?’ asked the nurse.

  ‘I’m not Mrs Overs,’ said Vee, and the words came out as a string of vowels; her mouth wouldn’t close properly and her cheek felt the size of a cottage-loaf. She raised a hand to her face and felt a wad of cloth and a bandage that encircled her head.

  ‘You mustn’t touch your dressing. If you want to ask anything you can write it down.’

  The nurse extracted a tiny notebook from her pocket, together with a red pencil.

  ‘I’ll be back,’ she said, ‘after your wash.’ She pulled a screen around the bed, and left Vee with a view of faded sunflowers.

  She dabbed at herself with the flannel and memories came back in pieces. A letter handed to a bitch of a girl in a knitted hat. An empty wardrobe.

  ‘Mrs Elias, it’s morning,’ called the nurse, from a couple of yards away.

  ‘Morninaaaah.’ The word stretched into a yawn. ‘I had such a nice sleep.’

  ‘I think a lot of people had such a nice sleep. There wasn’t a raid last night.’

  ‘No raid?’

  ‘Not in London anyhow.’

  ‘No raid! Did you hear that, Mrs Thomas?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There was no raid in London last night.’

  ‘No what?’

  ‘Raid.’

  ‘No bread?’

  ‘No. No RAID.’

  ‘Oh. May I have porridge then?’

  ‘Morning, Mrs Connell. Did you have a nice sleep?’

  ‘I didn’t I’m afraid, nurse, I’m so used to the bombs now that it was much too quiet for me. I’m a bit funny that way.’ There was a tinkle of self-deprecating laughter.

  More pieces slotted into Vee’s memory. A dropped torch. Shadows on a wall.

  ‘Oh Christ !’ The words came out as a blunt bellow, the sound of a cow giving birth. She pushed aside the bedclothes and tried to stand and found that she seemed to be on a merry-go-round, the floor rising and falling and the sunflowers revolving queasily. She dropped back on the bed, just as the nurse reappeared.

  ‘What’s wrong, Mrs Overs?’

  ‘Where’s Noel? Where is he?’ The words were unintelligible, even to herself; she reached for the pencil and notebook.

  I HAVE TO GO WHERE ARE MY CLOTHES?

  ‘You can’t possibly leave the hospital until Mr Feggerty says you can, and that won’t be for another few days, I’m sure.’

  I HAVE TO FIND SOMEONE. A BOY

  Vee underlined the last word, and then jabbed at the letters with her pencil, looking up at the nurse, trying to will her into understanding the urgency of her request.

  ‘Do you mean your nephew? The little boy with the ears?’

  Vee nodded.

  ‘He’s come in to visit for the last two evenings. I expect he’ll be back tonight. We don’t usually let children in on their own, but he was very well behaved.’

  She whisked away again and Vee lay back, limp with relief. The pencil clattered to the ground and she could no more have reached for it than flown a Spitfire.

  It was the breakfast orderly who retrieved the pencil, and who answered a few basic questions before leaving Vee with a bowl of milk pudding. The spoonfuls slithered around an unfamiliar gap in her teeth.

  She was in Ward 22 of Hampstead General Hospital, she’d broken her cheekbone and suffered a concussion and today was a Tuesday, which meant that she’d lost half a week.

  ‘And the Eyeties are bombing Greece,’ added the orderly, collecting her tray; Vee had almost forgotten that there was a wider war. She felt for the dressing again and then cautiously explored the rest of her face; there was nothing missing, no holes, just a scabbed graze across her forehead.

  After that, her thoughts seemed to come to a halt, and she jerked awake again to find the bed surrounded by doctors, her right cheek exposed to their view in a w
ay that felt indecent.

  ‘Depressed closed fracture of the right maxilla and contusion to right temporal region secondary to direct trauma,’ announced a boy with spots and a moustache like a finely plucked eyebrow. ‘Can you remember what happened to you, Mrs Overs?’

  SOMETHING HIT ME

  wrote Vee.

  A BOMB

  ‘Not a bomb, no. Keep watching my finger.’ He traced a rapid cross in the air above her. ‘And can you recite the alphabet for me? All right,’ he added hastily, as she slushed and sprayed her way as far as G. ‘That’s enough. It’s only the swelling that’s preventing you from speaking clearly; it should improve over the next couple of days. Dressing back on now and stitches out on Friday, Sister.’ And they were off, trundling a trolley full of notes towards the next bed while nurses fluttered behind like gulls following a tractor.

  She was asleep when Noel arrived, and she opened her eyes to see him staring down at her from about six inches away, his expression tense.

  ‘Are you awake?’ he asked. ‘I mean, properly awake?’

  She nodded. He was wearing a man’s coat with rolled-up sleeves, and she reached out and felt the material. Wool.

  ‘A woman at the tube station gave it to me. The nurse said you had concussion, which is when the brain gets shaken up in the skull. It causes clouded consciousness and memory loss. You kept opening your eyes yesterday but you weren’t really seeing anything. What’s six times nine?’

  She mimed writing.

  ‘Six times nine,’ he repeated, handing her the notebook and pencil.

  36 WHERE ARE YOU STAYING? WHAT ARE YOU EATING?

  ‘That’s not right, it’s fifty-four. What’s the capital of Sicily?’ His voice was shrill, bullying; he was scared, she realized. She wrote:

  AM NOT GOOD AT ARITHMETIC OR GEOGRAPHY. ASK ME HOW TO KNIT A SOCK.

  ‘Oh.’ He let out a long breath. ‘I see what you mean. There’s no point in giving me the sock answer, though. I wouldn’t know if you were right.’