Crazy Paving (33 page)

‘Oh God,’ the woman said. She picked up a paper napkin, took off her glasses and wiped at her eyes. ‘Oh God, you wouldn’t believe the day I’ve had. My mother brains
a burglar and there’s blood all over the linoleum, then she pegs out with a coronary, then I scream blue murder at two police officers until they put the siren on and bring us up here quicker
than Concorde. Now we can’t find Helly and nobody will tell us anything. It’s been one hell of a day.’

‘Helly?’ Joan said. ‘Helly Rawlins?’

The woman nodded. She gazed at Joan and then said, slowly. ‘I know who you are. You’re Joan. You’re the only nice person in that awful office she works at. She told
us.’

Joan tried to smile – and tried not to think about the blood-stained clothing she had seen in Accident and Emergency.

‘Oh God,’ said Joanna. ‘I’m such a berk. You must have been there. Did you see her. Are you okay?’

‘I’m fine, fine . . .’ Joan said. ‘I don’t know anything about her I’m afraid.’

‘Oh.’

For a moment, conversation died as they both thought about the reality of what was happening and, briefly, words became impossible. They looked at each other.

Funny, Joan thought, she looks so odd, but actually I have the feeling I am quite like her in some ways.

Odd, Joanna thought, she’s a funny old bird, but she seems nice enough.

‘Do you know what?’ Joan said suddenly. ‘Do you know what I really feel?’

Joanna put her glasses back on and looked at her.

‘Jealous. Yes, that’s it. I feel jealous of those people in there, even though they’re lying there in their hospital beds, maybe terribly injured. I wish I’d been
injured. They’ve discharged me already and I should have gone home. I could have got a taxi. Instead I’m sitting here where my husband won’t be able to find me, wishing it was me
getting all that attention in there. I always thought if anything like this happened to me I would be quite useful – you know, go back forty years to when I was a Girl Guide and stem
somebody’s bleeding. Somebody else did that for Annette, this other secretary that I was with, that is. One of the station staff got to her before I did. I can already hear myself talking to
people about it, exaggerating how close I was, the things I saw. Truth is, I stayed by them until the ambulance came and kept my head down. I didn’t see anything much.’ She looked at
Joanna. ‘Now it’s all over, for me, and I wish I had. Is that terrible?’

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 father’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.