Fireweed (14 page)

The talk had stopped as I rushed in. ‘There's been a bomb!' I said, jerkily, short of breath. ‘The houses on the north of the square have all fallen down!'

The man looked at his book. ‘Thank you for reporting it, son,' he said. ‘But there's been no bomb there. Off with you now, we've got work to do.'

My head spun. ‘Come and look, quickly, and you'll see,' I said.

Wearily he said, ‘Look, son, there's been no bomb there. Those houses were shaken to bits last month; they were barely still standing. All that's happened is that the blast's shaken a bit more of them down. Nothing to worry about. Now if you don't mind …'

‘But …' I said, ‘but you've got to come. Someone's got to dig her out!'

‘All right, son, calm down,' he said. ‘There wasn't anyone in them. They weren't safe.'

It was like the worst nightmare of my life. ‘There was!' I cried. ‘We were there, and I just went out for some milk for Dickie, and when I got back they were under it all …'

‘Whose sector is it?' said the man in charge. His voice had lost that weary note. He spoke sharply.

‘Jack's,' someone said.

‘Where is he?'

‘Just coming now,' they said, pushing a newcomer to the front.

‘Those houses north of the square have folded, and this kid says there were people in one of them. Were there?'

‘No,' said Jack. ‘Not a soul. I cleared them all out the day after the bomb made them shaky.'

‘Oh, God!' I cried. ‘Come and dig her out!'

‘Shut up, you!' he said to me, fiercely. ‘Keep a hold on yourself. Now, exactly where did you say you were living?'

‘In the basement of number twenty.'

‘Why didn't you report to the warden, in the proper manner?'

‘I didn't know we had to,' I said, and that was true enough.

‘Jack, could this kid have kipped down there, without your noticing him?'

‘It's possible … I suppose …' Jack looked very uneasy. ‘I
did
think I saw smoke there, one day. Couldn't find where it was coming from. Only other thing I noticed was a funny sort of handcart that appeared at: the back of the houses the other day. I didn't think it warranted a report.'

‘You'll hear from me later!' said the chief, picking up his phone.

They weren't going to believe me. I turned tail, and ran out of the hut, ran back towards the house. The black horror of it made me shake all over, but I got back to the house. I clambered up the mound of ruin to the top, and crying to myself, began to scrabble in it with my bare hands. Foul pinkish dust rose in a cloud around me, to join that already hanging in the air. My nails broke off, painfully, below the quicks. I still thrust my bleeding fingers frantically down into the mess, pulling at fragments of brick and tile, succeeding only in making a hole as big as a kitchen bucket.

‘Hey, kid!' yelled someone from below me, on the street. The warden from the post had set up a red lamp on a tripod down there, and now was climbing up towards me, with a blue cover on his helmet marked
Incident Officer
.

Still on my hands and knees I scraped the ruin. He came right up, and stood over me. ‘Where are your parents?' he said.

‘We were on our own,' I said, sobbing a bit, in spite of myself.

‘Right,' he said, calmly, as though that deserved no comment at all. ‘Now listen hard. You've got to calm down, and stop going off the deep end like that, because WE NEED YOUR HELP. Got it?'

I was sober at once, as though he had doused me down with cold water. I stood up, and looked at him.

‘That's better,' he said. ‘Now. How many people are there in there?'

‘Two,' I said. ‘A girl and a very small boy.'

‘Where were they?'

I looked helplessly round the featureless desert which we stood on. A lorry pulled up at the lamp below. It was full of men in navy siren-suits, and tin hats painted with R on the front, tools, timber props, and ropes. Behind it came an ambulance. The leader of the rescue squad climbed up to join us.

‘There were two rooms and a passage,' I said. ‘They were in the front room, and they would have been near the fire, so they would have been over to the right, somewhere there.'

‘Are you sure they would have been near the fire?' asked the warden.

‘Dickie was ill. He needed warmth. That's the best guess I can make.'

‘Good. Well, you're quite sensible when you try. Keep it up.'

‘Did you have a lighted fire?' asked the squad leader.

I nodded, and he made a gloomy grimace that stabbed me with fear.

‘Go and get your hands seen to,' said the warden. ‘The stretcher party will do that for you. And stick around, we may need you.' As I went I heard him say, ‘Not too good?'

‘Tricky,' said the rescue man. ‘But I've seen worse.'

The girls driving the ambulance had a doctor with them. He cleaned up my fingers and put bandages round them.

‘You're a bit shaken,' he told me. ‘We'll send you off for a rest.'

‘I have to stay here,' I said. ‘They said they might need me.' He made me sit on a bunk in the ambulance, and put a blanket round me. As soon as he turned his back I got out of there, for I couldn't bear not to see what was going on.

They had long metal rods, and they were probing with them, driving them in every few inches over the mound. Then they stopped that, and said that a tunnel wouldn't be safe.

‘We'll have to get it off the top,' the leader said. At once they brought baskets, shovels and picks. They began to shovel rubble into baskets, and making a chain across the mound, they handed the loaded baskets from one to another, down the mound, and tipped the stuff into the street.

I felt very shaky. Still wrapped in my blanket I sat on the step that led to the driver's cab of the lorry, and just watched. An icy wind was blowing under a grey sky. The whole world was grey, dirty. Dirt blowing in the wind. I felt as though my mouth was full of ashes, and a great weight was pressing on my eyes.

They worked hard. They didn't talk, they just grunted to one another. Now and then they changed places, not to take a rest, but just to do a different job. They had moved a hell of a lot of debris in an hour. The dump pile in the street was growing massive, and I thought they must be getting somewhere, when suddenly they set up cries of alarm, and began to slither and scramble down. The whole mass of the fallen house was shifting, moving, the shape changing like a sleeper moving under a blanket, and a great avalanche of rubble slid and roared down onto the place they had cleared.

They gathered in a tight little circle in the street, conferring. Just then a W.V.S. van drove up, and brisk ladies began to ply them with soup and tea and cheese sandwiches. The men stood around, eating, eyeing the job as they stood. Their chiefs still talked together. Someone offered me a bowl of soup, and I nearly screamed at her.

‘I can't eat while she's under there!'

Then I heard one of the rescue squad say, ‘Here, let me try.' He took my soup, and came and squatted on the ground in front of me. ‘You eat up, son. It's cold, and this is going to be a long job, and we need you, still in a state to help, later on, when we get somewhere.' I took the soup. I looked at him. He had a weatherbeaten face, wrinkled at the corners, and he was very dirty. His hands, cupped round his own mug of tea, were wide, and the hairs on the backs of them were whitened with pale dust.

‘Are you going to get to her?' I asked him.

He looked back at me with very blue eyes. ‘Yes. We always get there, in the end.'

‘Will she be all right?' I screwed up my eyes in agony, vainly trying to block out the crushed and broken images in my mind. He was answering;

‘Could be. Last week we dug out an old lady, what had been under for three days; three
days
, mind you. We had a nice canvas bag, all ready for her. When we gets to her, she sits up, smartly, like a Judy in a show, up she comes, swearing the place blue, because we hadn't reached her sooner!'

Someone called to him. They were starting work again. This time they worked differently. They brought wooden props, and lengths of tarpaulin, and made supports to hold back the wall of rubble. They cleared a much wider space, and so it was much slower. It was three hours before they got back down again to the tangle of timbers where the floor, the basement ceiling had been. All that time I sat there. It went through my mind that if I had let her go back to her parents when she read about the ship going down, she would be warm and safe somewhere now. But I didn't really feel anything. I was numb to the core. Numb with cold, numb with fear.

They brought me several cups of tea during that time; I drank them, but I didn't really want to thaw out. Then they were sawing, the rasping noise zig-zagging through the square – then they were carrying away beams and rafters so tangled that they looked like crumpled straws. Then at last a voice called, ‘Is that kid still there?'

I clambered up to them. They were standing on a web of broken timber. They had made a hole through it, and below was another layer of dust and rubble.

‘Look,' they said. ‘These blackened bricks are from the chimney. So if the chimney's here, how far over do we try, to get to the middle of the room?'

I closed my eyes. I tried to remember the size of the room. ‘It's a big room,' I said. ‘But there was a table in it, so the free space wasn't in the middle.'

‘If she was in the middle of the free space when it happened, about how far over from the chimney?' he asked. I noticed vaguely that he spoke gently to me.

‘About here,' I said, shuddering at the thought. ‘Just where I'm standing.'

‘Right. You go and stand over there, by those props. Get going, squad.'

I stood back, poised against the tarpaulin dam, and watched them. Swirls of dust raised from the rubble wound round them like fog. They brought shovels and spades, and more baskets.

Down in the street I saw the stretcher party, white-helmeted, standing ready. My heart beat so that the pressure of it hurt me. Then it took almost no time at all. They swung their heavy spades into the rubble, and stood on the flanges, leaning their weight on them, before lifting a spadeful away; and then someone cried, ‘Steady on! I've found a hand here,' and they all stopped. They stood back. Three of them, on hands and knees, leant down, and scooped the dust away tenderly, with bare hands.

And slowly, handful by handful, a shape appeared. She had been buried standing up, and they were uncovering her face.

A face of stone. Plaster, crushed to powder, covered her hair and skin. Her hair was stiff, grey. A grainy texture, like weathered marble, covered her cheeks; her lashes were loaded with dust, thickened by it, as though they had been fretted from the coarse substance of stone. They uncovered her shoulders, part of her body. Her attitude was stiff; statuesque, she stood rigid, with one hand extended in front of her. She had been turned to stone. She looked like one of those angels of death which stand on tombstones, slowly crumbling with weather and time. I watched a stream of tiny particles of dust flow down her cheek from the laden strands of her hair.

It began to rain then. The rescue men were working their way around her, trying to release her legs. The rain fell. The foul smell of wet plaster rose from the mess. The rain splashed her upturned cheeks like tears, cleaned her face, like cold tears, showing the smooth pale flesh beneath the dirt.

And suddenly there came back to me – as she had said words came back to her, much later – forgotten words, once meaningless, that went through my mind like naked flame:

But she is there. That limp form, whose arm hangs down all wrong, being lifted clear now, laid down on a stretcher, covered, carried away.

I flung back my head, and howled, like a dog, at the sky.

The ambulance doctor struck me in the face, first on one cheek, then on the other, not angrily, coolly and carefully, just as he had dressed my hands. I shut up. They pushed me forwards. There was a big hole now, a hollow space under the shattered flooring, and a rescue man was crawling around down there.

‘We don't know where to look for the other one,' he said. ‘You got a guess?'

‘She was holding him,' I said dazedly.

‘Not when it happened.'

‘Well, if she had put him down, it would have been in one of the chairs, very near the fire, I should think. Over that way a bit.'

He disappeared into the hole, and came back with a scrap of green fabric, held it up to me over his upturned face.

‘This from the chair?' he asked. I nodded. Back he went.

On a sudden impulse I stepped forwards, and slithered down into the hole with him. It seemed a long way down. There was a gap between the sagging rafters and the floor, just enough to crawl through. ‘The other chair would have been this way,' I said, crawling towards it myself.

He came with me. The chair back was propping up cracked rafters. He shone his torch at it, and we could just see a bump, covered with plaster, in the seat of the chair. Together we pulled at it, and the blanket came off in our hands, and there underneath it was Dickie, asleep, quite clean, and unharmed, Edging forwards I put my arms round him, and pulled him out, going backwards on hands and knees till we reached the hole again, and could stand up. I looked upwards through a ring of foreshortened men, standing on the rim of the hole, their tin hats circling a patch of sky through which the rain still fell. From all directions hands reached down to help us up. They rolled Dickie in a blanket, and took him off to the ambulance. They picked up their picks and shovels, and moving slowly, tiredly, they gathered round their lorry in the street and began to climb in. The ambulance moved off, the warden took down his lamp, and waved to the squad in the lorry.