Strangers. Rosie Thomas

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      In its place she saw the garden behind their house, as vividly as if she was standing in the back doorway. Only a week ago. Martin was stooping with his back to her, his head half-turned, reaching for the hammer he had dropped on the crazy-paving path. She saw his hand, the torn cuff of the old jacket he wore for gardening, and heard the music coming from the kitchen radio.

      They were working in the garden together. Martin had at last found time to repair the larchlap fencing that separated them from their neighbour’s voracious Alsatian. The boys had gone to a birthday party and they were alone, a rare two-hour interval of peace.

      Annie was standing at the edge of the flower bed. The dead brown stalks of the summer’s anemones poked up beside her, acid with the smell of tomcats, and the earth itself was black and frost-hard. Her arms ached because she was holding up a bowed length of fencing, waiting for Martin to nail it in place. Neither of them spoke. Annie was cold, and Martin was irritable because he was an awkward handyman and the setbacks in the task had brought him close to losing his temper. He picked up the hammer and jabbed it at the nail, and the nail bent sideways. Martin swore and flung the hammer down again.

      Annie was thinking back to the days when they had first bought the crumbling Victorian house, long before Tom was born. They had worked endless weekends, painting and hammering, because they couldn’t afford to employ builders or decorators. They would quarrel unrestrainedly then, launching themselves into blazing arguments over the coving that had been mitred wrong, the glaringly mistaken shade of paint, the tiled edge that rippled like waves on a lagoon. And then they would stop, and laugh about it, and they would go upstairs and make love in the bedroom where the last occupants’ purple and orange wallpaper hung down in ragged strips over their heads. Nine, ten years ago.

      A similar memory must have touched Martin too. He had kicked the hammer aside and straightened up to look at her.

      Annie saw his face now, every line of it. She could have reached up and touched it in the darkness. He looked almost the same as he had when they first met, except for the deeper creases beside his mouth, and his frown.

      He had put his arms round her, inside her coat, and kissed her.

      ‘Let’s ask Audrey to come in tonight, so that we can go and eat at Costa’s.’

      They always went to Costa’s. Annie couldn’t remember the last time they had been anywhere else. They shared a plate of hummous, and then they had dolmades and a bottle of retsina. The last time, after their work in the garden a week ago, they had come in late and Martin had taken the babysitter home. Annie had gone on up to bed and she had fallen asleep at once, before he lay down beside her. In the morning Benjy had woken at six, and for the sake of another hour’s peace she had carried him in and put him between them. He had smiled in triumph, with his thumb in his mouth.

      Martin had reached out across Benjy to rest his hand regretfully in the hollow of Annie’s waist. They had looked at each other, acknowledging. That was how it was. They were tired, and then there were the children.

      Something touched Annie now, colder than the cold that pierced her bones. She was shivering again.

      ‘We always go to Costa’s,’ she repeated. ‘I don’t know why. Martin likes it.’

      ‘I know,’ Steve answered her. ‘I know all about that, too.’

      ‘Why?’ Annie heard herself ask. ‘Are you married?’

      The street had been cleared. Out of the first desperate scramble to reach the injured the police had created a kind of order. They had unrolled orange plastic tapes to make a cordon around the store, and inside the circle the rescue workers were at work. The orange fluorescent jackets worn by the police seemed to spill their colour into the grey air, and the firemen’s yellow helmets bobbed up and down as they unloaded their complicated equipment, pulleys and lifting tackle and strange, cumbersome cameras. They moved quickly, with practised efficiency.

      Outside the orange line the rescue vehicles were drawn up. The high grey and scarlet walls of the fire engines made a solid wall, and beyond them an ambulance waited, drawn up beside the big white emergency first aid trailer. Another ambulance moved away with the last of the injured from the pavement outside the store. Sixty yards to the south two police constables opened the white tapes of the outer cordon to let it through.

      The crowd, swollen with arriving sightseers, had been moved back beyond the fluttering white tapes. One of the uniformed constables at the cordon still carried a loudhailer, to warn back anyone who tried to come closer.

      In the centre of a huddle of police cars drawn up between the inner and outer cordons stood an anonymous pale blue van with a domed roof. It was the major incident vehicle from Scotland Yard, and inside it the duty inspector from the local station was handing the direction of the operation over to the commander who had arrived with it. The bomb squad’s equally anonymous control van stood close beside it.

      A few yards away, at a special point in the white cordon, the press had already formed a restless knot. The first television news crew had set up, and their reporter was moving along the crowd at the tapes in search of an eye-witness to interview. But he turned away again as a senior police officer and a police press officer emerged from the control van.

      ‘We don’t have any idea, as yet,’ the policeman told them. ‘The store had only been open for a few minutes, as you know, so the chances are that there were fewer shoppers inside than there would have been later in the morning. We have a list of store personnel and it is being checked now against the survivors we have already reached.’

      A dozen more questions were fired at him.

      ‘No. We do not yet have an accurate figure for the number of casualties, nor will we for some time. The rescue operation has already begun, and it will continue until it is clear that no survivors remain.’

      The cold, wet air was alive with the static crackle of police radios.

      ‘No,’ the officer said. ‘We don’t have any idea yet as to how many people may be buried.’

      He turned away with a brusque nod, back towards the control van. At the cordon the press officer read out to the journalists the telephone number of the central casualty bureau set up at Scotland Yard.

      Steve knew how it would be. He had been imagining it, using the picture in his mind’s eye to convince himself that they would be rescued. He needed to convince the girl, too, make her believe in the precision of the rescue operation. Her hand was so cold, and he could feel her trembling even in her fingertips.

      ‘I was married, for a while. Not any more.’

      ‘Why?’

      She wanted him to talk, too. She was reaching out in the same way, wanting to hold on to the sound of his voice. Steve tasted the dust in his throat.

      Why? Cass had been waiting for him, that evening. She hadn’t had a booking, and so she had been at home all day. It was very late when he came in, but it was often late. The irony was that that night he really had been working.

      ‘Had a good time?’ she had asked, without looking up. There was a bottle on the low glass table beside her, almost empty. So she had been drinking. And, as there always was wherever Cass went, there was a litter of other stuff as well. Two or three glossy magazines, a scarlet phial of nail-varnish with a plastic crest to the lid like a stiletto blade, her Sony Walkman with its leads trailing on the floor, a scatter of СКАЧАТЬ