They Do the Same Things Different There (43 page)

He squeezed her hand. “It’ll be okay.”

“I know,” said Helen. “I don’t know what’s waiting for me afterwards. But I’m sure there must be something. I believe God is kind. Because he has to be, don’t you think? He wouldn’t give us this. That before we die, just for one day, everyone gets to be young and happy again.”

“You think that’s proof of God?”

“Don’t you?” she said.

In all their years of marriage, they’d never really discussed God or anything like that. She’d never wanted to go to church, she’d never seemed the preachy sort. He couldn’t help wondering about all the other things that they had never got around to talking about, in all their forty-three years. There were still new things left to say.

“Yes,” Mr. Marshall said. “I suppose I do.”

They sat in silence for a couple of minutes.

“Are you frightened, baby?” she then said.

He wasn’t sure of what, frightened of his own death, or frightened she was about to leave him? “I’ll be okay,” he told her.

He knew how it was going to happen, of course. That at some point Helen would just start getting even younger still. She’d shrink again, but not this time with old age and disease, she’d become a little girl, then an infant, then a baby, all her memories falling away. And then she’d be gone. It would only take a few seconds, and they said it was painless and rather sweet. Peaceful.

Mr. Marshall hoped it didn’t happen whilst they were stuck on a dual carriageway outside Brighton.

It began to rain.

“Let’s go home,” said Helen.

“No,” he said. “No. I want to give you a perfect day.”

“I like home,” Helen said. “I’ve always liked our home. Let’s go home. Baby. Let’s go.”

They turned around. The roads leaving Brighton were free and empty and they were back before they knew it.

Mr. Marshall said, “We can still go out for dinner, there’s a new Thai restaurant that’s opened around the corner.” Helen said, “Let’s stay in. I’ll cook.”

Helen looked in the fridge. She looked in the freezer. She tutted. “Baby, this is all junk,” she said. “How are you supposed to take care of yourself with this stuff?”

“I’m sorry.”

“We’ll go to the supermarket,” she said.

He objected. He wasn’t going to take her to the supermarket. He had wanted to take her to the seaside, and to a West End musical, to special things. She said, “If I get to choose where we go, I choose the supermarket. Come on, it’ll be fun! We’ll make it fun!”

It was fun. Helen placed Mr. Marshall in charge of the trolley, and she’d order him up and down the aisles whilst she picked things from the shelves, and he told her he wasn’t in the bleeding army, and she laughed and began to call him Corporal Marshall, and he called her his Sergeant Major. She was shocked at how expensive everything had got. “How long have I been away?” she said. “What, was I in a bloody coma?” They both found that very funny, and Mr. Marshall laughed so hard he began to wheeze and Helen had to clap him on the back.

She cooked them spaghetti bolognaise. Nothing too grand, but she’d always done something clever with the sauce, it tasted better than any spaghetti he’d ever had eating out. “I want to look after
you
,” he’d protested. “You’ve looked after me for long enough,” she said, “now it’s my turn!” She said she didn’t want any help, but he could stay in the kitchen and talk to her if he liked. He didn’t find anything to talk about, but he stayed anyway, and kept her company.

They ate the pasta. It was really good. “Who likes Thai anyway?” said Helen.

Mr. Marshall said, “I’ve been dreaming of this. That you’d be all right again. That things would be back to how they used to be.”

Helen said, “Oh, baby.” She took his hand. “Oh, baby, but I’m not all right. Am I? I’m really very very ill indeed.”

Mr. Marshall swallowed. “Yes,” he said.

She reached over the plates and kissed him then. Her lips seemed so soft and big, and he knew his were just these awful cracked things, but she didn’t seem to care. He hadn’t kissed in such a long time, he thought he might have forgotten how, but it all came back to him like Cliff Richard.

“Let’s go to bed,” she whispered.

“Oh, Helen,” he said. “Oh. I don’t think I can. I can’t. I can’t. I’m sorry. I can’t.”

“Do I look all right?” she asked him.

“You’re beautiful,” he said. And she was, she was.

So they went to bed, and stayed dressed, and lay side-by-side, and held hands. They didn’t say much, and sometimes Mr. Marshall would start, and wonder whether she’d vanished already, and he’d take a look, even though he could still feel her fingers stroking his palm.

No, God wasn’t kind. One extra day wasn’t kind at all. Why not a week, that might have meant something, he could have taken Helen away, to Paris, or Venice, or New York. Why not a year? Then they could have tried for a child, again, maybe. Why not twenty years, so they could see the child grow up? Why not forever?

He was crying again. He blurted out, “I don’t think I can go on without you.”

“Look at me,” she said softly.

“No.”

“Look at me.”

He looked at her.

She said, “All day long we’ve been together. And you’re still old. So that means you’ll live through tomorrow. You can get through tomorrow without me. And if you can live tomorrow, you can live the day after that. One day after the other. You’ll be all right.”

“I’ll be all right,” he whispered, and she kissed him on the nose.

He felt so sleepy. This latest bout of tears had quite worn him out. And Helen was stroking at his hair.

“Of course you’re tired,” she said. “All you’ve been through. My poor love, I’ve quite put you through hell these last couple of years. I’m so sorry. You go to sleep. Just for a little while. You take a nap, I’ll hold you.”

He wanted to say no, but his eyelids were drooping, and when he opened his mouth to answer a yawn popped out. “Promise you won’t leave without saying goodbye,” he said.

He slept through the night, and it was only the sunlight flooding in through the windows that woke him. He looked for Helen, he called around the house for her, but he knew she was gone.

He found her little red dress on the floor downstairs.

He also found a note.

You’re so tired, I didn’t want to disturb you.

Thank you. You have been the best thing in my life. You have been my life.

Take care of yourself, for me.

xxx

Mr. Marshall wasn’t sure that he would ever forgive Helen for leaving him behind. But eventually he did.

He ate the healthy food she’d left him in the fridge, and when it ran out, he went to the supermarket and bought some more. He started to lose weight. He looked trim.

He tried out the Thai restaurant one night. There was a special deal on Thursdays. He had the lad nah with chicken, it was quite nice. There was a woman there, eating alone, and he said hello.

He went back to the Thai restaurant a couple of months later, and this time he didn’t worry about a Thursday discount. The woman was there again! He supposed she was a regular, but it was only her second visit as well. They laughed at the coincidence. She asked whether he’d like to join her, and he said he would.

Her name was Claire. She was a widow. Her husband had died seven years ago. “I don’t think I said the right things to Helen that last day together,” he told her. “Oh, darling,” Claire said, “no one ever does.”

It felt odd to have a new girlfriend, though she wasn’t really a girlfriend, was she? Well, maybe she was. They’d meet a couple of times a week, and they’d kiss goodnight, on the cheek, and then one time they went for the mouths. She invited him in, and he accepted, and when she took him to the bedroom he got scared again. But this time he could, he
could.

He felt guilty. He liked to think that Helen would have got on with Claire. But would she have, honestly? Claire said to him one night, “What was it you wanted to say to Helen? Let it out. Tell me instead.”

Mr. Marshall said, “I love you too.”

It was a whole new year, the first year in which Mr. Marshall hadn’t got a wife called Helen anymore. Claire asked him to move in with her. He already spent so much time at her house anyway, wouldn’t it be simpler?

He went back to his home, began to sift through all his old stuff. So much to throw away. Still, so much to keep too.

He took a deep breath, he at last boxed up all of Helen’s clothes and took them to the charity shop. He hesitated about the red dress, but it was just a dress, it wasn’t Helen—and he could never give it to Claire, Claire was seventy-four years old and fat, she’d never fit into it. And he would never have wanted Claire to have it anyway.

He cried for Helen that day, and though he didn’t know it, it was for the last time.

And in a dresser he found an old photograph album. He hadn’t even known Helen had kept one. He leafed through it, from the beginning, from their wedding day. He used to be so handsome, and Helen was so pretty. And as he turned the pages he watched himself get older, but Helen, Helen didn’t age at all, Helen stayed young and healthy forever and so so full of life. In every picture they stood together, and he looked so proud of her. And she looked so proud of him.

And, one day, the Towers came back.

Later there were those keen to tell the world how they had witnessed the miracle first hand. How they’d been right on the spot when the five hundred thousand-ton structures of concrete and glass had so impossibly popped back into existence. How they felt blessed they’d been there to see it, how they’d felt
chosen
, how it had brought to their eyes tears of patriotic fervour. But they were lying. Some of them didn’t even know they were, they wanted so much to take their part in history. But no one had seen the Towers appear. They came back at the exact moment when everybody in the vicinity just happened to be looking in the wrong direction at the same time.

In the instant of their arrival the Towers blotted out the sunlight, and the sudden shadows that they cast caused passers-by to shiver.

The police cordoned off the area. The yellow tape around the buildings’ perimeter said “Crime Scene”—although there wasn’t a crime, not really, or there
was
, but the crime that had been committed there had happened such a long time ago and on such a scale that “crime” seemed too paltry a word to describe it. But “Crime Scene” was the best they could come up with, the police just didn’t have an appropriate yellow tape.

And into the buildings were sent doctors, firemen, the police. They soon reported that the structural integrity of the Towers was sound. The ninety-third floor was intact, as if it had never been cleaved through with aeroplane fuselage. And it was clean; the window panes were polished and fair sparkled in the New York sun, the toilets smelled of pine bleach, the carpets seemed newly shampooed.

There was no one to be found. Not a trace of a single body. Not a trace, moreover, that anybody had ever worked there. The desks were empty, the memo boards were blank. The windows were fastened shut tight, as if indeed they’d never been opened at all, as if indeed no persons had ever felt the urge to climb through them and jump to their deaths. Even the soft swivel chairs were pristine and plump, there was not the merest indentation from any bottom to be found.

As good as new.

The media weren’t sure at first how to play the story. The default stance was one of panic: this was the signal for another attack; another Godless foe had designs upon America. But no one could quite see how bringing the Towers
back
could be construed as a terrorist act. And so, broadly, it was reported as a Good Thing. One expert pundit said that he could explain the phenomenon. That sometimes events take place that are so important that they shatter the world stage and change the course of history. That the destruction of the Towers was one such event. That the impact it had made was so great, its legacy so incalculable, the Towers would be a part of everyone’s lives forever; so, therefore, the very
absence
of the Towers was at once weird and contradictory, how could something that so defined the mood of the twenty-first century
simply not be there
? History itself had brought the Towers back into existence. History could not let them go.

It wasn’t a very scientific theory, and no one necessarily understood it. But it quite caught the public’s imagination. For a good few hours, at least. For as long as the Towers stood intact.

Because, at a little before half past ten the next morning, the Towers vanished once more.

The same expert claimed on breakfast television that this in no way contradicted his earlier theory. Rather, it was an extension of it; that the Towers’ fall had been so momentous an event of history that what they were now seeing was its echo. Why hadn’t such things happened before? Well, maybe no event before had been important enough. Maybe this was the most significant historical event there had ever been. This was a reminder. God was reminding them not to take the tragedy for granted. God was reminding them never to forget.

But the news was less interested in the whys. It would rather focus upon the human drama. Because the Towers had not been empty at the time they had vanished. They had taken eleven souls with them: seven firemen, and four police officers. No trace of them could be found. They were described as fresh victims of the 9/11 attacks, as new American heroes. Journalists were dispatched to interview the bereaved: the wives, the lovers, the children. One wife declared, with tears in her eyes, but they were angry tears of determination, there was no
weakness
to those tears, that she was proud her Brad had struck a blow in the war on terror. That she would love him forever, and that she knew Brad was looking down on her from Heaven. That their son was still too young to understand, but she’d
make
him understand, one day, just how lucky he had been to have had a father who had died so nobly and so selflessly to ensure that he could live in a better and purer world. The newspapers loved it. They wrote up long features on Brad, and on all his companions. Fallen heroes, all; all of them sacrifices in the crusade for democracy, liberty, and truth.

Expressions of sympathy poured in from all over the world. They spoke of deep regrets, of common bonds, of alliances never to be broken. They were accepted with cool politeness. As a whole, the American people saw them for what they were. These other nations, they were just jealous
they
hadn’t had a miracle. They were trying to muscle in on the act.

Nine days after they had vanished, late in the afternoon, the Towers came back again. It was rush hour, and quite a few people were looking in the right direction at the right time. But the Towers appeared at the exact split second when everybody blinked.

The police cordoned off the area once again with their yellow tape. And the military stood by for a full hour and a half to see whether or not the Towers would simply wink back out of existence. At last a major said that he was prepared to inspect the buildings, but that he would do so alone, he refused to risk any of his soldiers’ lives in there. He would go in with a walkie-talkie, he’d be in constant communication, he’d be able to give the world a second by second commentary of his impressions and insights. Before he made his entrance, he found time to acknowledge his bravery exclusively to Channel Eight News. He said that he was “taking one for Uncle Sam,” and spoke directly to his wife: “I love you, Moira, and I love the kids, and if I die today, this is how you should remember me forever, as a hero, as a patriot.” America watched collectively, hearts in mouths, as the major embarked on his mission—it went out live on all stations; families held hands and prayed, mothers cuddled up close to children, men drank bottled beers and wept openly together in downtown bars. The major was soon able to tell the viewers that there was no one to be found, neither the original victims of the attack nor those so haplessly taken in the aftermath. The major spent a good two hours inside the Towers, establishing just how immaculate those carpets could be. Two hours, that was longer than an average movie, and yet the live broadcast stuck with him for the whole thing. He was ordered out; he claimed there was still so much more he could investigate; he was ordered out again, very strictly; he emerged, somewhat reluctantly, to the cheering of crowds. “It’s nothing, I would have taken one for Uncle Sam,” he said, “it’s all I wanted, to take one for Uncle Sam.” And then went home to Moira, and to the kids, and to a new contract as a
TV
anchorman.

The expert said that night that he hadn’t meant an echo, not as such, but
ripples
: if you imagined History as one big pond, and the Twin Towers as one big rock—two big rocks, technically, but let’s for the sake of an argument call them one—if you were to drop your one big rock right into the centre of your pond, then there’d be a ripple effect; this is the situation they had here, rock, pond, and America was blessed, it was seeing the ripples, getting ripples on all sides, God was buffeting them with ripples. He’d go into further detail, he said, but it was better examined in his new book, which would be available next week. The interviewer complimented him on the speed at which he must have written it. “We must all do our bit for our country in these dark and difficult days.” Would the Towers now be safe? “It’s in the book,” said the expert. But when pressed, “I think by taking away the Towers God gave us a reminder of a tragedy past, and by restoring them, a beacon of hope for the future. Those Towers right now are the safest places in America.”

The next morning, again a little before half ten, the Towers vanished. This time they took fourteen firemen, six police officers, and a tramp who hadn’t been deterred by yellow tape. The expert was not available for comment. Luckily for him, the press left him alone—they had families of new fallen heroes to interview.

One night the NYPD received a call from a woman. She said the crisis wasn’t over. She knew the Towers would come back, and take more lives; she knew that she was responsible. The NYPD had been plagued with hoax calls ever since the first reappearance. The woman sounded a bit drunk, and very distressed, and no one on duty was inclined to take her seriously—but they were obliged to bring her in. What she said when they did convinced them all.

She explained that she had once worked at the Towers. And how the day that they fell she ought to have been inside, she ought to have fallen with them. But on September the tenth she’d been out to a bar, she’d met a man, she’d had a few drinks, and one thing had led to another—she’d taken him back to her apartment, they’d fucked all night, and in the hangover and satiated exhaustion that followed she’d slept through her alarm clock the next morning. By the time she’d thought to ring her office and pretend that she was sick, her office didn’t exist anymore. At first she’d taken this as a sign from God. He’d
spared
her, He had other plans for her; rather than die in fear and fire she was supposed to be with this man she’d picked up. But that soon turned out to be wrong. The man was a liar, and used drugs, and was married—and, worse still, was bad in bed; he wasn’t someone on whom she could pin any salvation at all. And ever since it had haunted her, how close she had come to dying, how she had been
meant
to be there with all her colleagues, with the office managers, with the girls on reception and the boys in the post room. She’d tried to live her life, she got a new job, she found a boyfriend who wasn’t married and got high only at weekends—but it always seemed so wrong to her, that all about her was a lie. She had been destined to be a victim of America’s greatest tragedy, she’d been destined to be special.

When the Towers had come back, she’d known they’d come back for her. They were calling her. And they’d appear, and then disappear, appear and disappear again, over and over, until they got what they wanted—until they took her—until they gobbled her down and swallowed her whole. As was meant to be. And only then would it all stop. 9/11. It was about her, it had always been about her, and her alone, that’s all it had ever been for.

She wasn’t the only one to come forward.

A man in New Jersey petitioned for the right to die in the Twin Towers. His story touched the nation. He told how his wife had died in the attack, and they’d never even said goodbye. So many farewell phone calls sent out that morning, but never one to him—he didn’t know whether she’d died quickly, or in pain, all he knew was she hadn’t come home again. He’d have to live through it—so said his friends, his doctors, the therapist—he’d live through it, one day things would get better. But they hadn’t got better. No day was ever better. Because they were days without
her
in them. He’d flirted with suicide—but he’d never taken quite the right number of pills, never cut quite deeply enough. He’d always supposed Heaven was a big place, it must be
huge
, just to house the sudden influx of new American heroes—what if he were sent to the wrong bit of it, the bit reserved for pill poppers or wrist slicers, what then, how would he ever find her then? Now he knew he could find her. He wanted to be at her work desk. He wanted to be on her swivel chair. He wanted to know that when he vanished, he’d vanish right to where she’d be waiting for him, this woman who’d make him forever happy, they’d be reunited at last in an open-plan office of their very own. He wanted to die the way she had died. He wanted to die
right
. . . And he was pretty sure his sister-in-law would take care of the kids.

And there was the elderly couple that lived in Arkansas, no one dreamed of sending suicide bombers to Arkansas—it wasn’t fair, they too wanted the honour of dying for America. And there was the man who’d tattooed “9/11” on his left arm, and on his right a picture of an airplane in flames—across his chest it said “never forget,” and he never would, he wouldn’t. And there was the old man who believed in God so much. And there was the young girl who just wanted to believe. And there were the lost. And there were the lonely. And there were the ones who were so happy and so safe and were living the American dream, and the guilt that it had come too easy and they’d never been called upon to make a sacrifice for it gave them nightmares. And those who’d tried to enlist for the army, for the right to serve and fight, but their country had turned them down, they weren’t good enough to fight, they were too old, or too diabetic, or too gay. All of them, all of them, they claimed that when they saw the Towers on their
TV
screens, unbowed, undefeated, and so majestic now, and so
clean
—they’d felt pulled toward the Towers, they knew it was their God-given right to become part of them. “I want to be a hero,” said an unparticular someone. “And I don’t know any other way of doing it.”

And, one day, the Towers came back.

Cameras had been set up to record the possibility, but all of them glitched at the very same moment. And the police cordoned off the area, and this time they had new tape already prepared, it was
red
, and it said “Crime Scene!!!” with three exclamation marks, and the exclamation marks were an even brighter red! The whole thing was really very red indeed!!! And once the authorities had done their checks to make sure it was safe, they didn’t want anyone to slip on those shampooed carpets, they didn’t want anyone to
sue
, they let in all those who’d queued up for days, ready to take their places in the Twin Towers. All of the chairs filled quickly. Soon there was standing room only in the lobby and in the corridors and in the restrooms. Everyone admired how the windows sparkled, and the pleasing scent of bleach. “We’re going to Heaven!” said one delighted six-year-old child, to a mummy and daddy who were laughing along with him, “we’re all going to Heaven, and we’ll be there in the morning!”