Strangers. Rosie Thomas

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СКАЧАТЬ tried to move again, and knew that he couldn’t pull his crushed leg with him.

      ‘My mother’s ill,’ Annie said abruptly. ‘She’s got cancer, they’ve just told her. It must be just the same.’

      Steve could follow her thoughts, unconfined, flickering to and fro. The extra dimension of understanding was eerie but he took it gratefully. ‘No,’ he contradicted her. ‘Not the same sense of loss. No waste. Your mother has seen you grow up, marry. Seen her grandchildren. Illness isn’t the same as … violence.’

      He wouldn’t say violent death, but he sensed Annie’s telepathic hearing as clear as his own.

      ‘Perhaps … perhaps everyone’s death is violent, when it comes.’

      They were silent then, but they were unified by fear and they could hear one another’s thoughts, whispered in childlike voices quite unlike their own.

      ‘If they come for us in time,’ Annie said, ‘and there is any life left for us that isn’t just lying here, I won’t let any more of the days go. I’ll count each one. I’ll make it live. I’ve shrugged so many days off without a single memory. Dull days. Resigned days. Just one of them would be so precious now. Do you understand, Steve?’

      ‘Oh yes,’ he answered. ‘I understand. Annie, when we’re free we can do whatever we like.’

      Steve tried to think about how it would be, and nothing would come except confused images of Vicky, and of unimportant restaurants where he had sat over lunches, and of preview theatres where he waited in the dark for clients to watch their fifteen-or thirty-second loop of commercial over and over again. ‘Run it through a couple more times, David, will you?’ His own voice. ‘Did you learn all that at LMH?’ The self he had been. Work and play, alternating, undifferentiated, spooling backwards. And now the tape snapped, and the film he had only been half-watching might never start up again.

      Steve opened his eyes on the real darkness. He seemed to have been groping backwards for hours, failing to find an image that he could hold on to amongst so many that flickered and vanished.

      ‘Annie?’ he called out, seized with sudden panic. ‘Are you still there?’

      ‘Yes.’

      She sounded drowsy, too far away from him.

      ‘Annie?’

      He could hear the effort, but she responded at last. ‘Yes. I’m still here.’

      ‘Talk to me again. About your mother. Anything, just go on talking.’

      ‘I …’ she sighed, a faint expiry of breath and he knew that he was only imagining the brush of it on his cheek. ‘I can’t talk any more. You talk, Steve. I like to hear your voice.’

      When was the last time? That was what he wanted to catch hold of before it was too late, the last time he had felt the rawness of wanting something very much. The last time he had wanted something in the way that he wanted to live now, because he wouldn’t be defeated by a maniac’s bomb. Was that the key to it? Because he wouldn’t be defeated …

      Steve felt his head thickening, the thoughts and memories beginning to short-circuit. He forced his eyes open wide, willing himself to hold on to consciousness, and he began to talk.

      ‘A long time ago. So long I’d forgotten how important it was. I wanted to get away, that was it. My Nan’s flat, Bow High Street, three floors up. From the moment I went to live there, I wanted to get away.’

      It had taken long enough, but he’d made it in the end. When the day came he went into the little room that led off Nan’s kitchen and stuffed jerseys and shirts into his blue duffel bag. Nan was sitting in the kitchen watching the television. He could see her bulk past the half-open door, and the tablecloth half-folded back over the Formica-topped table, and the brown teapot and milk bottle, and her cup and saucer waiting to be refilled with thick brown tea.

      ‘Off again, are you?’ she shouted over the din of the television.

      There had been trial getaways before this. Plenty of Saturday-night stopovers in overcrowded flats when those who were left behind after the part petered out had just fallen asleep wherever they fell down. There had even been a week, not long ago, when he had stayed with a girl up near Victoria Park. That had been too good to last, of course. She’d seen through his assumed adult suavity all too quickly.

      ‘Sixteen? Is that how bloody old you are? Sixteen? Go on, get back to your mother before they come and lock me up for corrupting infants.’

      Nan had welcomed him back, and the sharpness of her tongue didn’t disguise her relief. ‘Where the hell d’you think you’ve been? Not a word from you for a week. Didn’t you know I’d be worried stiff? You’ll end up like your Dad, Stevie, after all I’ve done.’

      He put his arms around her. She was fat, but she was also frail and she could only move stiffly across the poky kitchen.

      ‘I will not end up like my Dad. You know that.’

      Nan had shifted her dental plate with the tip of her tongue and said acidly, ‘Perhaps not. But there’s plenty of other ways of going to the bad. I daresay you’ll manage to find one that suits you.’

      There had been calm after that for several months.

      Now, as he closed the empty drawers in his bedroom one by one, he tried calling out, ‘Nan? Nan, I’m going to live up West …’

      She couldn’t hear him, of course. The television obliterated everything. So he had finished his methodical packing, even taking down his childhood posters of West Ham United and Buddy Holly and folding them up. Then he went into the kitchen and put his assortment of bags down on the cracked lino floor. He crossed to the vast television set and turned the volume knob, and silence descended.

      ‘Eh? I was watching that, Stevie. Don’t play about, there’s a good boy.’

      ‘Nan, I want to talk to you. I’m going to live up West. I’ve got a room and everything. I’ll be all right.’

      He had been so callous in those days. Nan had just sat and stared at him, with her big pale fingers twisting in her lap.

      ‘Eh? Live up there? What for? You live here, love. Ever since you were that high.’

      She held her palm out, a couple of feet off the lino, and Steve thought, Yes, I do remember. And ever since I’ve wanted to get out. ‘I can’t live here for ever, Nan. I want to get on. I’ll come and see you weekends, I promise.’

      Her face went sullen then. ‘After all I’ve done,’ she murmured.

      She had done everything, of course. Mothered him and fended for him, and bought his food and clothes for ten years. He couldn’t pay her back for her devotion, he knew that with chilly sixteen-year-old detachment.

      ‘I’ll come and see you often,’ he repeated. ‘And as soon as I’ve made it I’ll buy you a better place, up near me or here, whichever you like.’

      ‘Make it?’ she snapped at him. ‘How are you going to do that? What about school? You could go to college. Mr Grover told me himself.’

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