Crazy Paving

by Louise Doughty

  Joanna shook her head. ‘We aren’t frightened of injury in the way that men are. That’s why we cope better with accidents and things like this. We bleed every month after all. And when we have babies we get torn apart. Men go to war I suppose, but what happens to us isn’t unusual. It’s part of who we are.’

  Joanna’s glance switched to further away, over Joan’s shoulder. Joan turned round. A tall, white-haired man was approaching them. Joanna leapt to her feet as he came over. ‘She’s going to be fine. Fine . . .’ There were tears in his eyes. ‘Nothing broken. They’re doing X-rays.’

  Joanna sat back down, her hand to her cheek. ‘Oh God, oh God.’

  ‘They said they probably won’t even keep her in overnight, they’re just doing some other checks.’

  ‘Did they let you see her?’

  ‘No but we can in a bit, I thought I’d come and tell you straightaway. Oh Joanna!’ Bob sat on a spare chair, clenched his fists and waved them in the air. ‘We can take her home!’

  Joanna indicated Joan. ‘Bob, this is Joan. Works with Helly. Joan, this is my husband, Helly’s grandad.’

  Bob grabbed Joan’s hand and shook it up and down. The motion rattled the flimsy table and Joan’s tea slopped over the side of her cup and into the saucer. ‘She was there at the station,’ said Joanna.

  Bob’s face became more serious. ‘I’m sorry. How are you?’

  ‘Oh I’m fine,’ said Joan. ‘Helly?’

  ‘Hardly injured, very lucky they said, considering how close she was. Some people further away got it much worse.’ Bob was shaking his head. ‘It was some poor bloke who saved her. Some bloke was standing between her and the bomb and took the full blast. She was a bit of mess though, splattered, and stunned of course. They took her clothes off and put her in a gown.’

  Joanna was smiling and crying again. ‘Oh God . . .’

  ‘They said they’d get her some clothes from lost property so we could take her home. I’ll go over to her mum’s tomorrow and pick up her stuff,’ said Bob.

  ‘All of it,’ said Joanna firmly.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Bob. ‘All of it.’

  Gillian Leather sat with her hands folded neatly in her lap, like a good student waiting to hear her examination results. The young policeman stood awkwardly in front of her. Two nurses in plastic aprons rushed past. Opposite, there was another row of seats. A man sat in one of them with his head leaning back against the yellow hospital wall and his eyes closed. Staff continued back and forth, the soles of their shoes squeaking. The corridor echoed.

  The young policeman bent down slightly and then straightened up, as if he was trying to decide whether or not to kneel in front of her. He was very tall and thin. His trousers flapped around his stick-like legs. Eventually, he reached out a bony, pale hand and laid it gently on her shoulder. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Let me contact somebody for you.’ She was impressed by the simplicity of his request. She looked up at him. His face was surprisingly round. The mouth in the round face moved and said, ‘You might find this easier if someone is with you, I mean, even if they just wait for you outside. I’m afraid it is going to be very unpleasant.’

  She shook her head, annoyed. She had seen a Caesarean section performed on a horse. Did they think she was a woman who was frightened of the red inside of things? First of all, they had shown her the contents of Richard’s pockets, his season ticket and credit cards, and requested confirmation that they were his. Then they had asked her if she would come down to the mortuary, for the official identification. Their sympathetic tones had made her angry. Did they think she would refuse? If they had tried to stop her, she would have screamed the place down.

  ‘Can you tell me . . .’ she began. Her voice sounded odd, a slightly higher register than usual. She cleared her throat. ‘Can you tell me, you weren’t there I realise, but somebody might – can you tell me, is there anyone who will know? I know you said he was unconscious by the time the ambulancemen got to him but had he been unconscious all along or do you think he knew?’ In her mind, she was already picturing what she would see of Richard on the mortuary slab: blood, flesh, bone. Half the face was gone, they had said; the face, not his. But even that didn’t mean that he had lost consciousness straightaway. She had to know.

  ‘I’m sure,’ the young policeman said, too hastily for honesty, ‘I’m sure it was instant.’ Gillian looked into his round, pale features and searched them for signs of truth, awareness, knowledge. He did not know. Perhaps no one knew.

  It was two weeks before William was able to visit Annette. He too had been injured in the second bomb but had been much further away. He had sustained a collapsed lung but his chest had been drained successfully and the lung re-expanded. It might have been worse, they told him. There were also lacerations to his torso, two in his right upper leg and one to his face; all caused by shrapnel, all relatively shallow, none life threatening. He would be permanently scarred.

  Joan had been to see him and told him that Annette was about to be allowed home. He had arisen the next morning and insisted to the nurse that he was well enough to walk around the hospital. He knew it was his last chance.

  At the side of her bed, he wept.

  He was wearing pyjamas and a towelling robe. Annette looked at him and thought that it was the first and last time she would ever see him in night clothes. Helly and Joan had already visited, early because they were on their way to the shops. They had chattered – Helly was going to be on television. Now Annette felt tired. She stared at the top of William’s head where he was bending over her bed, weeping softly, his shattered chest giving small, shallow heaves. Eventually, he lifted his head.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ she replied.

  He passed a hand across his reddened cheeks and glanced anxiously from side to side to see if anyone around them had noticed him. Annette lifted her left hand and indicated the box of tissues on the stand by her bedside. He took one. By the time he spoke again he had recovered but his words were fumbling. ‘I wish I could . . . it’s just . . . it’s so unfair . . . what’s happened. Terrible . . .’

  ‘You were injured too.’

  ‘Not like this.’ He glanced up and down her still body, his eyes resting only briefly on the sling. Then he looked down at his lap. His voice was no more than a whisper. ‘It was so short, Annette. It meant so little in comparison with this, this awful thing that was waiting round the corner for us. It was so tiny and I hate the thought that it was a passing, unimportant thing. I wanted it to be monumental. It was. But it’s been eclipsed.’

  Annette winced. She was having a problem with stiffness in her back from lying in the same position all the time. She was ready to start walking about more. She looked at him. He loved me, she thought. And I loved him. I could count the number of times we made love on the fingers of both hands. If I had both hands. She drew breath. It had been astonishing, the past two weeks, to discover just how much of the English language comprised of phrases which involved fingers or arms or hands.

  He looked up at her and met her gaze. His face was still crumpled. He shook his head slowly and rested the length of his forearm against her uninjured arm. She gave a small smile in reply. His eyes were moving over her face, as if he was trying to record every last detail of her features. ‘I would give almost anything to be able to look after you.’

  ‘I know,’ she said and her voice was kind. ‘I know.’

  In the days immediately following the bombing, it had been William’s turn to lie in bed while a woman sat beside him. The woman was Alison, his wife. She had not wept.

  For those first few days, they had been drawn together by the magnitude of what had happened. All that mattered was that he was alive and would continue to live. Then, as the immediate danger passed and the novelty wore off, so their ordinary lives were pieced back together in phrases and gestures. The first day that William was allowed to sit up, Alison brought Paul in to see him. Paul sat on his fathe
r’s bed and held his knee with both hands and said, ‘I’m being very good Daddy and I’m going to make you a card and a cake.’ William and Alison had smiled at their son and loved him for all the things he did not know.

  It was the day after he had visited Annette that William suddenly found himself blurting out something he had thought that he would never say. Alison had come in for her daily visit. Outside, it was springlike. She was wearing a short-sleeved, lemon-coloured jersey and pearl earrings that twinkled. The doctors were pleased with his progress and had just told them he could be allowed home within a fortnight.

  ‘There’s something else,’ William said quickly as the doctor left them alone. ‘Something I want to say before I come home. About before the bombing. It’s over now, but before it all happened I was . . .’ he could not bring himself to use the words unfaithful or affair. ‘I was seeing someone. Someone else.’

  She looked at him. Her mouth twitched in a half-smile but her eyes were bright, brimming with pain. She looked down and appeared to see a piece of dirt or fluff on the body of her lemon jumper. She picked it up between two fingers, then rubbed the fingers together so that it would drop from her grasp.

  ‘You’d realised anyway, hadn’t you?’ he said.

  She nodded.

  William closed his eyes. He had thought that telling Alison would be terrible because she didn’t know. Now he saw that telling her was terrible because she did.

  The following day, he had another visitor. The visitor was Gregory Church, general manager of the property division of the Capital Transport Authority. It was the first time an official superior had visited William since the bombing and the man was clearly embarrassed. Still, I suppose he had a lot of people to get round, William thought. He sat up in bed and tried to look relaxed, manly. Lying down put him at too much of a disadvantage.

  ‘About your little visitation, the day all this . . .’ Mr Church waved his hand loosely about the ward and William understood that he was referring to the police search of his home the afternoon of the bombing. Church had brought a box of expensive toffees which sat open on William’s bed. The two men had both taken one and removed the plastic wrappings which made loud crinkly noises. William popped his in his mouth and tossed the wrapping back into the box.

  ‘I want to explain, between you and me of course, that that was not authorised by myself or anyone else in an executive position at the Authority. Richard . . .’ at the word Richard, both men looked down briefly. ‘Well, let’s just say he was a little over-eager in some aspects of his work. It had come to our notice some time before the unfortunate . . . before he was . . . and in due course we would have taken action.’

  Bit embarrassing, thought William, being in the position of having substantially accused a bomb hero of bribery and corruption. And the only way out of it is to blame another bomb hero who happens to be dead. Which is even more embarrassing. Poor old Mr Church. William’s financial position was uncertain. There was compensation to be had. He might never work again, for all Church knew. No wonder the man had brought toffees.

  William took another toffee, paused, then offered the box to Church who smiled, shook his head, changed his mind and took one anyway. I wonder if you will speak at Richard’s memorial service, William thought. I wonder if you will stand up in a church or crematorium and talk about what a pleasure and an honour it was to work with a man of the ability and warmth of Richard Jeremy Leather. And I wonder if you knew that the man was duplicitous, sadistic and very possibly psychotic. And I wonder if you even care.

  ‘Now don’t forget you’re miked up,’ the technician said as he fiddled with the lapel of Helly’s waistcoat. The microphone was attached to a small black clip. Helly peered down at it, pulling a face. It was like having a cockroach perched on her chest. ‘At the end of the show,’ the technician continued, ‘don’t leap up off your seat. Just stay put and we’ll come and dismantle you.’ He moved on to the person sitting next to her, a counsellor with expertise in dealing with the long-term effects of traumatic injury. ‘Don’t forget you’re miked up,’ the technician began again.

  ‘Alright, alright,’ said Helly, ‘we get the point.’

  The counsellor was called Cherry. She and Helly had got talking in the hospitality room. ‘What are you here as?’ Cherry had asked.

  ‘Bomb victim,’ Helly had replied. ‘How about you?’

  They were both on the front row. All the front row contributors were miked. The rest of the studio audience sat on banked seats behind them. Along the row were ranged two other survivors of the Victoria bomb, one who was facially disfigured. There was also a Unionist politician, a Catholic priest and a florid, middle-aged man from an organisation called Victims For Action Against Terrorism. They had been given a rough running order. Helly would be the third or fourth to speak.

  Opposite the banked seating were cameras, lights and more technicians, under a huge draughty roof not unlike an air-craft hangar. A producer stood with a clipboard and stopwatch. ‘Where’s Kilroy?’ Helly asked, leaning over towards Cherry.

  ‘There,’ said Cherry, pointing.

  Kilroy stood amongst the technicians, watching his guests settle in and fiddling with his ear. Joanna had made Helly promise to take a good look – she had always had a thing about Kilroy, she had said. Helly regarded him with distaste. His suit was sharp enough to chop the Sunday veg, in her opinion. His light grey hair was in lurid contrast to his hot orange tan, which looked as though it could be peeled off like the mask of the Invisible Man. He glanced their way. Helly leant over to Cherry again and murmured, ‘What a ponce.’

  ‘Ssh! Don’t forget you’re miked up!’

  Kilroy was fiddling with his ear and frowning at them.

  ‘Oops!’ said Helly.

  ‘That was just the start of it!’ Helly screeched with glee. She was sitting on the sofa in Rosewood Cottage. She was holding a can of beer and wiggling her legs to and fro. ‘They cut what I did at the end, well not exactly cut it, you can tell some sort of commotion is going on.’

  Bob was on his knees in front of the television, trying to rewind the video. Joanna sat on the sofa next to Helly. She was also holding a can of beer. ‘Another dream gone,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘He’ll never marry me now.’

  ‘Ah shut up, I brought you a signed photo.’ There had been an elegant fan of black and white signed photographs on the table in the hospitality room. Helly had helped herself to one, which Bob had framed. It now hung in Rosewood Cottage’s lavatory. ‘And they sent a car for me,’ Helly added to Joan and Annette, who sat in armchairs opposite. ‘And it brought me back home again. The driver called me miss.’

  ‘You’ve never been a miss in your life,’ muttered Joanna. ‘Annette, another cup of tea?’

  Annette shook her head. She would have loved a beer but she had only been out of hospital for two days and was still on strong painkillers.

  ‘Almost there,’ said Bob, still bent down with his nose to the video recorder.

  ‘Oh hurry up,’ said Joanna. ‘We’ve had enough of the sight of your arse.’

  He sat back. As the music to the programme started, Helly and Joanna began to sing along. ‘Da! Daaa!’

  Bob rolled his eyebrows and gave Joan and Annette a comradely glance. ‘Can you imagine what it’s like living with them two? They were doing that over breakfast this morning. I’m ready to go after the bloke with a hammer.’

  ‘Good morning!’ said Kilroy from the television, with a beaming smile. Then his expression switched to tragic. ‘Bombs are exploding all over London again. Nobody knows whether they are safe. In the wake of the latest outrage, I’ll be talking to survivors and the bereaved, and to some people who think they know the solution. This is not a political programme . . .’

  ‘You can say that again,’ muttered Helly, caressing her beer.

  ‘Ssh!’ said Joan.

  ‘On this programme, we’ll be talking to people who have direct experience of what it’s like to be a vi
ctim of terrorism.’

  Helly had taken exception to the word victim, and when her turn came to speak she told Kilroy so in no uncertain terms. During the rest of the programme, the screen switched to catch her facial expressions even when she wasn’t talking. There were a lot of expressions to catch. She had dressed up for the occasion, in a velvet waistcoat and one of Bob’s floral ties, knotted neatly. Her hair was piled on top of her head and she was wearing bright pink lipstick. The camera loved her.

  Towards the end she became engaged in a heated debate with the florid middle-aged man from Victims For Action Against Terrorism, who became more and more florid as the debate proceeded. ‘For your information young lady, I lost my daughter in the London Bridge bombing in March. I don’t intend to sit idly by and watch these murdering bastards – sorry about my language but that’s what they are – I’m not going to sit by and just let them walk all over us. I want to see some of them behind bars or better still, strung up.’ There was a smattering of applause from the rest of the audience.

  ‘This bit! This is it!’ cried Helly from the sofa. ‘You watch. It’s nearly the end.’ Kilroy was looking over to Helly for her response. ‘Well for your information, matey,’ she was saying, ‘I was on London Bridge when that bomb went off too, so I’ve had my fair share. I’m sorry about your daughter but you’re an angry old bigot and you’d be an angry old bigot whether you’d lost your daughter or not and if you think stringing up a few Irish people is going to help you’re bleeding mental. It won’t stop someone else’s daughter getting blown up.’

  The florid man was apopleptic with rage. ‘How dare you! How – how—’

  Kilroy had sprinted across the studio to a white-haired woman sitting half-way up the seating who had her hand raised to comment. He thrust his handheld microphone into her face.

  ‘I would just like to say,’ she began in quavery tones but Helly and the florid man were still arguing. At that point, Kilroy turned to a camera and said, ‘Well, ladies and gentlemen, it’s been a very passionate debate but I’m afraid that’s all we have time—’