The Girl with the Fragile Mind. Claire Seeber

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      FRIDAY 14TH JULY KENTON

      Somehow the bus protected her. Forever after she would be grateful; she would look on London’s famous red double decker as some kind of lucky charm; some kind of talisman to her.

      Instinctively, Kenton had hit the floor when the explosion ripped through the north side of the square. She had lain motionless on the pavement with her hands over her head for a minute or two, until the noise settled, the rumble stopped, and there was quiet across the square. A strange pocket of silence in the city, broken only by the incongruous sound of birdsong.

      And then a new noise began. Now it was the alarms that filled the air: the cars, the shops and flats; the electrics triggered by the huge explosion. There was thick dust swirling in the air, making Kenton cough as she thought absently of 9/11 and the survivors staggering about covered in white like ash-covered ghosts.

      She tasted it in her mouth and spat a few times, trying to find some moisture. She stood slowly, trembling, and began to walk towards the mutilated bus that had inclined fatally to the right, towards the crying and the wailing – towards the devastation, glass crunching underfoot. Her inclination might be to run back, but she knew it was her duty to go forward. She stopped for a moment, and breathed deeply and then pulled her phone from her pocket to ring for help. Afterwards, she couldn’t remember the conversation, or whom she spoke to, but soon after, the air was filled with police sirens.

      Nothing could prepare her for what she was about to witness. In her mind’s eye, she imagined her late mother, smiling with encouragement from her usual place at the kitchen sink. ‘You can do it, Lorraine,’ she heard her mother say, snapping off her yellow Marigolds. ‘That’s my girl.’

      The smell of burning filled the air as Kenton stepped over something, walking towards the bank in the far right corner. She looked again: it was a hand. She retched into the gutter; the pavement nearest the bank was red with blood. She held her phone tighter. She looked for the first ambulance. She saw another mutilated body. She kept breathing. She didn’t retch this time.

      A blonde woman was lying on her back, face bloodied and blackened, one foot extended gracefully; glassy eyes open. Dead. Most definitely dead. Another woman lay at a right angle to her; this one was alive, whimpering in terror and pain. Kenton knelt beside her gratefully.

      ‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

      ‘Maeve,’ the woman whispered. Her face was entirely drained of colour. ‘Maeve O’Connor.’

      ‘You’re going to be all right, Maeve.’ Kenton had no idea if the woman would be all right but it seemed the thing to say. ‘Where does it hurt?’

      Desperately Kenton looked again for an ambulance. Where the hell were they? She held the woman’s hand, and she tied her belt round the woman’s bleeding leg. Then she spoke to a young man; a builder from the neighbouring site. He seemed delirious, worried he’d lost his hard hat; his face was speckled with shrapnel cuts. Other people were coming now; moving amongst the dead and injured. Kenton looked up. The front and side of the Hoffman Bank were gone; it looked naked, like a half-dressed man. The building site beside it had lost its front hoarding; gentle flames licked the side of it. The dust flew in the air.

      When the ambulances finally arrived, and the police cars and fire engines, and there were no injured left to talk or tend to, Kenton sat on the kerb in the debris until she was moved off, like any other member of the public, and after a while, she wept.