The hand is pale and small for a man’s. And it’s dirty of course. A snake of dried blood stains the forefinger; dust and fragments of brick cling in the dark hairs at the back.
“Is he alive?” I whisper.
The hand is all I can see, sticking out towards me through the wreckage.
Bernie Chapman, the head of the rescue team, puts his own finger over his lips. He’s just rigged up the drip. A plastic pouch hangs from a jutting fragment of broken chair at eye-level. It’s connected by tube and needle to the short length of exposed forearm beyond the hand.
Bernie sighs as he examines his makeshift work. He’s already put in an eighteen-hour shift. It’s like that, he’ll tell you, no point in coming back tomorrow after a good night’s sleep. Here, there is no tomorrow.
“His name’s Frank. It’s not as bad as it looks,” he says. “When the room fell in, we reckon the door lintel propped itself up over the top of him. As soon as we can lift the floors above away, we’ll be able to get to him.”
“How long’s that going to take?”
Bernie looks at me helplessly, which tells me it’ll be a long time, which tells me it might be too long, which tells me that all of what he’s saying is for show.
“He’s complaining of pains in his lower abdomen,” Bernie explains, behind a cupped hand.
“I see.”
“We just daren’t start pulling stuff away willy-nilly…” He breaks off. He knows he doesn’t have to justify himself to me. “Look, Kate, just sit with him, OK? You know the routine.”
Sure, I know the routine.
I step over a fallen table and a telephone with half its case smashed away. How many times have I done this in the last year? Too many – too many disasters; too many fires. I’ve seen more than is good for me.
I take three deep breaths like an athlete about to perform. I even have the performance butterflies. But the air sucked into my lungs is less than pure; it’s like breathing the burnt powder from an extinguisher. I try to clear my head and shape my voice into something calm and gentle and caring and, at the same time, determined.
I’m part of the team. The team has to make you believe it’s going to succeed. Bernie says, whether you think you will or you won’t, you’re probably going to be right.
Two months ago, I spent fourteen hours with a teenage girl in a buckled carriage outside Euston station. I convinced her she was going to be fine, but, in the end, they had to cut a leg off to get her out. She told me she wanted to be a dancer. Afterwards, she killed herself with sleeping pills.
But I guess you either put that behind you or you quit. You can’t bring those ghosts to the next job.
“Hi, I’m Kate.” I’m leaning down as close to the hand as I can, trusting my voice will carry through the wall of debris to wherever Frank’s head is positioned.
I get a gentle moan in reply.
“Can you hear me? It’s Frank, isn’t it?”
“Yuh.”
As soon as I get this answer, I nod to Bernie to let him know he can leave. This building was seven floors and I expect Bernie’s got any number of little pockets like this to attend – lonely silent holes where the chaos of an explosion leaves a little space and a little hope.
“I’ll send soup when we’ve got some,” he mouths as he backs away through what once was a set of swing doors. Now it is an opening only four feet square.
“So, how are you holding up, Frank?” I ask.
“Some pain,” says the muffled voice from beyond.
“Can I hold your hand?
The question doesn’t draw an answer at first. Then, I hear, “Yeah, OK, if you want.”
“Sometimes it helps,” I say.
I lace my own fine-boned fingers into his hand. If he gripped, I can see that they would almost disappear, but his hand is discoloured and weak, where mine is tan and freshly manicured. I spend too much on beauty-parlour fingernails, but it’s addiction from when my financial circumstance was different and I can’t shift it now.
After a few seconds, his hand tries to respond to my grasp, nothing too firm, but enough to show willing. I notice a couple of telltale liver spots on his skin that I hadn’t seen before and my estimate of his age ticks on another ten years – forty-five, fifty maybe.
“I don’t even know who you are,” he says. His voice a little stronger; it’s often that way, once they have the sensation of touch.
“I’m Kate,” I say. “I’ll describe myself, shall I?” I don’t tell him it’s a way of passing the time, but of course it is.
He doesn’t respond. He doesn’t even grunt or moan.
“I’m twenty-four years old, five-foot seven, slim-ish, I wouldn’t say pretty.” I stop to check that I’m getting through.
After a moment’s hesitation, he asks, “What would you say then…” I hear him cough. “…If you wouldn’t say pretty?”
“Not unattractive,” I tell him. “I’d say not unattractive.”
“Blonde or brunette?”
“Sort of mousy actually.”
“Short or long?”
“Short.”
“Eyes?”
“Blue.”
“Ah,” he sighs contentedly as if picturing me in his mind, and I know he is forming a rather idyllic image. Ten pounds off the middle, a straighter nose, nicer teeth, a body in better proportion. They say blind men see only beauty. Maybe that’s so.
“I could do with a glass of something,” he says. His voice descends into a dry croak. With effort, he adds, “I don’t suppose it’s possible.”
“Not really.”
“You might push a straw through.” He laughs dustily.
“If I could I would,” I tell him.
“It was a hell of a bang, you know?”
“What was?”
“The bomb… I assume it was a bomb.”
“They’re not sure.”
“It makes no difference.” He hesitates. “Lying here, it makes no difference.”
I’m not sure what to say. You never want to say the wrong thing. I suppose that’s natural. It’s an underlying deference we all have for patients and victims. And most of the time, it’s a mistake. It makes them fear the worst.
In what I had thought was silence, I now hear the soft cricks and cracks of rubble settling on rubble. Somewhere water is dripping. The longer you wait in these cathedrals of wreckage, the more you hear.
“What religion are you?” he asks, as if he suddenly needs to know.
“Does it matter to you?”
“No, not really, I suppose,” he says. And then he adds, “It didn’t matter to the bomb either.”
The grip of his hand fades. He’s letting go.
At these points, we’re told to go on talking, treat the patient as if he or she has slipped into a coma and needs something upon which to focus. Sometimes those who revive from near death talk about hanging onto the world by the thread of a voice or a smiling face at the bedside. Frank can’t see my face – not that it’s smiling anyway – so I offer to describe a walk in my favourite park. His ‘yes’ is faint and tired.
I begin to talk as lightly, as happily, as I can. I go on for five minutes, describing grass, trees, the rose garden, the preposterous statue in the fountain where a teenager once scratched my initials – ‘RJJ 4 KSP’. I was Katherine Samantha Pickwick, he was Robert James Jones, but I don’t go further into that story.
Gradually, I feel Frank’s hand tightening again, until by the time I’m telling him about the russet colours of autumn in the park, his full on grip has been restored.
“Are you there?” I ask him, knowing he is.
“Yeah.”
“How are you feeling?”
“So-so.” He coughs again. His chest seems to have filled up, because he hacks for several seconds, before he says. “Keep talking. You talk sort of posh.”
“Do I?”
“Yeah.”
“In what way?”
“Like you’ve had lessons.”
“‘The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain,’” I recite with suitable exaggeration. I’m not usually grateful for my elocution, but given that it’s probably Republican Semtex that’s put Frank where he is, I’m feeling relieved that something papers over my roots right now.
Frank’s not fooled though. After a moment’s thought, he says, “Second generation, maybe. It’s still Irish in the r’s and l’s.”
“It’s had tens of thousands invested in it,” I tell him, slightly insulted.
“You should ask for your money back,” he says. “Not that they didn’t do a good job. It’s just why would you want to lose the accent.”
“It wasn’t my money. I went to private school. It’s a side-effect in the package. Rich aspiring parents, you see. Though they weren’t too happy when I lost the hometown brogue either.” I stumble over the last few words and end up feeling strangely uncomfortable. I don’t particularly want to tell him about my family.
But Frank puts his finger on it straight away. “You don’t get on?” he says as if it’s glaringly obvious even through the barrier of rubble.
“Not anymore. I don’t see them. My father and I… well, actually, my stepfather…” My words run out. And it is not just that the subject is inappropriate here; I always lose my way when I try to talk about family. My real father was a Protestant – that’s all they ever told me – and I never forgave him his absence. I guess I never forgave my stepfather either.
“Shame.” That’s what Frank says. Nothing more than that.
I suddenly realise I’m holding this guy’s hand and he’s buried under God knows what and he’s asking me questions about my family and passing judgement. Despite the dust – or maybe, because of it – Frank’s voice has an unnatural gravitas. He could hypnotise without looking in your eyes, not that he can look in anybody’s eyes right now. As if bewitched, I find myself about to say, “I guess I’m just a bad daughter.”
But he cuts me off before I begin. “No,” he says, “it’s never that simple.”
I look down and I’m still holding his hand. Somehow that seems surprising.
“Kate,” he whispers, “don’t say anymore.”
Whatever weight had been in that voice, now there is only sympathy, as if I – sitting on the right side of the rubble, with no blood on my hands, with no pains in my abdomen, without seven floors of rubble on top of me – am more in need of sympathy. And what a turn in the tables that seems. Sometimes I’ve heard confessions in this situation, not exactly of the religious kind, but things I’m sure had never been breathed to a soul before.
In the space we’ve created, I can sense him waiting. I have to say something, so I say the first thing I think of. “I tried to get away from the family, and I ruined my life trying.”
When the sentence is out there, I get this weird feeling, as if I’ve dropped a china cup and I’m waiting for it to hit the ground.
Down, down, it goes. He doesn’t answer.
Finally, I hear him sigh. “How old are you, Kate?” he says.
“I told you twenty-four.”
His fingers wiggle against the back of my hand, drawing my attention. “This,” he says, “is a ruined life.”
I want to tell him, “Don’t worry, we’re going to get you out of here,” but all I can think of is that teenage dancer in a railway carriage. We talked about Nijinsky, Fonteyn and Bussell.
Frank doesn’t know there’s seven floors of building waiting to fall on him and that moving it will take days and that he only has… well… a fraction of that. Even so, he knows enough – I sense it. He’ll see through any conciliatory lie of mine.
For a while – I don’t know how long – I talk inanely about the weather and the government. We get onto Manchester United and Arsenal. Frank’s a rugby fan. I don’t understand that game, so I listen to him talk disjointedly about Australians and New Zealanders I’ve never heard of. After that, we’re into the arts and I have my degree to fall back on. Sometimes in this job, you hit a rhythm and each new subject seems to trip out of the last one. If you’re lucky this lasts right the way through until they come to dig your new acquaintance out.
Of course, on this occasion, they were never going to come that quickly. But to his credit, Frank never asks me about the time, and I’m grateful for that.
Three or four hours in, the subjects are starting to wear ever thinner. “Tell me how you came to be in the building,” I suggest as convincingly as I can, but I’m afraid I come over like an actor delivering a ham line.
“Why would I want to do that?” he asks. He sounds disappointed. I have just talked non-stop about the joys of Safari parks, and he’s been listening with only the occasional grunt for encouragement.
I know he’s getting sleepy. He’s getting tired. For the last hour, I’ve been increasingly worried that he’ll lose consciousness.
“Why don’t you tell me how you came to be here?” he says.
“It’s rather a long story.”
“Isn’t that the point? I’ve got nowhere to be for hours.”
I notice that his voice is suddenly stronger. I suppose that’s a good sign and I try to be receptive to it.
“Let’s swap,” he suggests. “I’ll tell you. You tell me.”
“That’s fair,” I agree, thinking the next ten minutes or so are covered. It makes him talk, and I need that. I need the break and I need to make sure he’s still with me.
He says, “Came in to take a buddy of mine out to lunch. He was tied up in a meeting. They said sit here. I sat. There was a big bang. Here I am. End of story.”
So much for my break.
“You didn’t have to reduce it to edited highlights,” I tell him.
He chuckles, pleased with himself. “Your story will be more interesting… and longer,” he says.
“Why are you so sure?”
“Doesn’t hurt when you talk, does it?”
“I suppose that’s true,” I admit. “But actually, I came here in the back of a truck. That doesn’t make for a long narrative.”
“No, tell me why you do the job,” he says. “Why are you here, holding this hand?” His fingers wriggle in mine once more, but the wriggle is almost playful this time.
“It’s not the pay, that’s for sure,” I say, stifling a laugh.
“And the work place has such appalling décor,” he adds.
I let the laugh out, as if he and I are now party to a playground conspiracy. It’s intimate – that’s what it is – and it seems to give him a new burst of energy.
He says, “Would it have anything to do with that family of yours? With that Robert James Jones?”
I consider the question carefully. I think of the laugh we just had. I guess I’m not sure what intimacy means, or what it implies. It’s all very well describing my appearance, talking about parks and fountains. This goes further. He warned me not to tell him about my family, but now he’s asking the question. And for some reason, I don’t stop to wonder why he’s changed.
“With both of them, as it happens,” I answer.
“Ah, this is far more interesting,” he says.
“What makes you think that?”
“I’m guessing.”
“What are you guessing?”
“All sorts of things. Girl leaves home with the first man she meets to get away her family. She finds the cure was worse than the illness.”
“Do you write your own soap operas?”
“No, I just watch them.”
“You seem to have a fair grip on my life,” I say.
He says, “It’s not your life I’m describing. It’s mine.”
It takes one, two, maybe as many as three seconds for me to process the words. I feel him squeeze my hand. “You didn’t tell me this,” I say.
“Ah, but it’s not my turn. You’re telling the story.”
“How can you…?”
“No,” he repeats firmly. “You’re telling the story. Later, maybe I’ll tell you mine.”
There’s a knowing edge to his voice now, as though he knows he’s in control. Which might seem strange considering the rubble and the pains in his abdomen, but these considerations wash over me. In fact, I don’t consider them.
“He hit me,” I say, before I have the chance to filter it out.
“Who? Your stepfather?”
“Robert James Jones.”
“I see.”
“No, you don’t see. How could you see?” I feel very annoyed. I can’t look at Frank’s face. I’d like to be really staring at him now. But I have to back down.
“Bobby was perfect. He was supposed to be perfect,” I say in my resigned tone of voice. “When I finally had my big argument at home, he said, ‘OK, come on and move in. I love you.’ He gave me a big brass front-door key for his flat. It felt like a wedding ring. I guess that was the problem, his problem.”
“So what happened?” Frank says, suddenly sympathetic.
“I told you he hit me.”
“It’s never that simple,” he says again.
“Four and a half years of hell trying to prove I was right. I got smaller and smaller. Then I was just an irritant under his skin. At first, I wondered what it was I’d done, you know, but of course I’d done nothing except be there. It all started spiralling out of control… like a broken kite. I got out with a Marks and Spencer’s carrier bag full of underwear and a black eye.”
“And you didn’t want to go back to your family, right?”
“No,” I say. That small stark word is supposed to shut the subject off, but it doesn’t. He grips my hand. The word gathers its own momentum, sucking in thoughts as it spins inside me, until I blurt out a kind of truth: “They never loved me.”
He says, “Families fight because of love, Kate, not for lack of it.”
“Perhaps.”
“No, that’s the way it is,” he assures me. He squeezes me tighter. “We make one mistake in our lives: we expect those who love us to know how to take care of us. But, of course, they are the most blind. When we look up what do we see? Family, world, God. Which of these loves us? Which understands us? Promise me one thing, Kate.”
“What’s that?”
“Will you go back and make up with the ones who love you, however much they can’t understand?”
I want to say something to fill in the blank, to answer his question, but I can’t find anything. For a moment, I wonder if this is some philosophy he’s quoting, but I don’t know the source. And he seems to speak with such personal pain.
“I was in love once,” he tells me. “You wanted my story?”
“Yes,” I say automatically.
“She was an Irish Catholic. I was a soldier.”
“You were in the army?”
“Sure, does that surprise you?”
“No, I mean, I guess it shouldn’t.”
He hums the intro to a song. After a few bars, he sings, “‘When the wars of our nation did beckon, a man barely twenty did answer the call.’ You know how that song goes on?”
“No.”
He drums his first and second finger against the back of my hand, pattering out the rhythm for a couple bars before singing: “‘Proud of the trust that he placed in our nation. He’s gone.’ It’s a very bitter song.”
“I can see that,” I say.
“The army warned us about Catholic girls. Many a young soldier thought he was on a promise, and found himself facing a gunman in a back alley. That was love and trust, that was – to be a soldier with a Catholic girlfriend.”
“So what happened?”
“Oh, I avoided the bullet. Avoided everything until I came into this building. Do you think this might be a belated judgement?” He tries to laugh, but only half succeeds.
“I meant, what happened with the girlfriend?”
His laughter stops altogether. “She wanted me to take her to England. Her father was an alcoholic. She lived in a big house, but she had no kind of home.”
“And did you?”
He hums again, but there’s no song. “Ah, a pretty, pretty lass,” he says. His voice drifts. I compress my hand around his all the harder.
“Frank, what happened? Did you take her to England?”
“If she had come,” he says, “she could never have gone back. It’s strange what love can and can’t do, what it can and can’t overcome.”
“Did you feel…?” I stop, because I have no idea how he would feel. I ask, “What happened?” I try to frame the question as if it’s a show of support.
He says, “She married… a Catholic. Her family approved. She had a child eight months later, a little girl.”
“Your daughter?” I say.
“They moved to England to avoid the scandal of the… timing.”
“I understand your bitterness,” I say without thinking.
“Bitter? No, not I,” he says. “You misunderstand me. That’s rather the point, isn’t it?”
“Did you… I mean, do you…ever see her?”
“Only once.” He hesitates as if it is both difficult and time consuming to draw the memory from its archive. “She lived in a road with street lamps like exotic Victorian flowers,” he says, “and great iron gates in front of the houses. I stood on the other side of the street gazing up the drive. After a while, she came out in a pushchair. I remember the detail so clearly, right down to her pushchair… Silver Cross, top of the line model. Only the best. She looked across at me. Her mother looked across at me too. But she kept on pushing. I stood there, and waited while my daughter faded slowly into the distance.”
I capture it in my mind. It’s not so hard. I once lived in privilege, on a street with ornamental street lamps and iron-gated houses.
“I loved her, you see,” he continues. “I think I understood what she needed.”
“Money isn’t everything,” I tell him.
He says, “You still don’t understand. I’m not talking about providing money. That’s the least of it. I’m pushing fifty. I’m not leaving anything behind, Kate.”
“What was her name?” I ask him, as if the thought has just popped into my head. It’s casual, but as soon as I’ve said it, it doesn’t feel casual.
He murmurs, “No, Kate, don’t say anymore.”
But the murmur can’t disguise what I think I hear. I think I hear… what?… fear, retreat. Is that what’s in his voice?
“What was her name?” I repeat.
He doesn’t speak, but his silence catches me like a sucker punch. Sometimes silence can only mean the worst and, when you hear it, you try to imagine what the worst might be.
Do I expect him to say Katherine Pickwick? Do I expect to find a lost father in this rubble? One pale hand with liver spots. I was raised a Catholic, force fitted into the box, like a podgy schoolgirl who didn’t quite fit in her uniform. In the family’s view, the fact that they came to England made it all the more necessary to remain Irish; the fact that I was only a stepdaughter made the force behind the fit all the more desperate.
“Tell me the year then?” I press. “If you won’t give me a name, give me a year.”
“Kate, no.”
“Tell me the year.”
I suddenly realise all pressure has gone out of his hand and something sour rises into my mouth. Several internal organs batter away at the insides of my ribs.
This is crazy. I’m out of control. It’s all imagination.
So why won’t he answer?
“Frank?”
Nothing comes back.
I shout his name. I shout it again.
I hear, “Kate, what’s happening?” But it’s not Frank, it’s Bernie Chapman, ducking through the ruined entrance.
“He’s… I mean… he’s stopped talking. He’s…”
“Calm down, “ Bernie says. He kneels beside me, moves me gently to one side and takes Frank’s hand.
“He was just talking and then he stopped. I tried to call his name. He was telling me…well… you know… And then he wasn’t…”
I go on rambling. I can’t stop myself. I’m staring over Bernie’s shoulder, expecting him to break into some well-practised resuscitation routine.
He doesn’t.
Instead he eases his hand away from Frank’s, allowing it to sink limply to rest.
“Aren’t you going to…?”
“He’s dead, Kate.”
“But I was just talking to him.”
“He’s cold as hell. Couldn’t you feel it? He must have been dead the best part of an hour… more probably. Why didn’t you call me?”
My lips move, but nothing comes out. They go on quivering and I keep on saying nothing, until I sink into Bernie’s arms and cry against his dirt splattered shirt like that very little girl in the Silver Cross pushchair.
