Jane Higgins - The Bridge

I said, ‘Can I see the enrollment application?’

He closed the folder. ‘Why?’

‘I have this memory of a woman who brought me here when I first started; not my mother, but she must have known my mother, and maybe my father. I don’t know who she was, or anything about her except that her name was Frieda. I thought it might say, on the application, who she was. If I could find her, I might find out about my parents.’

‘Do you remember your mother’s name?’

‘Eleanor.’

‘And your father?’

I ducked my head.

‘Do you know your father’s name, Nik?’

Shook my head. I could feel him looking at me, thinking how pathetic is it to not even know your own father’s name? And maybe that means your mother didn’t know it either.

‘Nikolai, perhaps?’ he said.

The way he said it made me look up. He was watching me like he was thinking hard. This wasn’t the official version of Dr Williams anymore.

‘Sir?’

He tapped the folder on his desk, still thinking. ‘I can’t let you see school files, I’m afraid.’ He turned away towards the file room, but he stopped in the doorway and looked back at me.

‘Kelleran,’ he said. ‘Her name was Frieda Kelleran.’

When he came back from putting my file away, he was back to being his formal, teacherly self. He picked up the phone, called Security, said, ‘I wish you well. I really do. I’m sorry I can’t help,’ and directed me out of the infirmary when the security guy showed.

I walked back to my dorm, thinking. I had now run out of obvious reasons for ISIS to cross me off their list. If Dr Williams knew any less obvious reasons, he wasn’t telling me. But he had pointed me in a new direction. Frieda Kelleran. Who was she and how hard could it be to find her?

When Tornmoor threw me out, I knew what I would do.

In the dark, a blast blew the bones of the building apart.

The flash rammed light into closed eyes, punched glass from windows, broke beams and doorways like fingers.

The stomp of a giant boot shook skin from bone and eyes from sockets.

For a heartbeat, silence.

Then screaming.

Someone was yelling, ‘GET OUT! GET OUT! GET OUT!’ We fell out of bed and staggered about. Fires lit up broken windows and splintered glass; the voice kept shouting, ‘GET OUT! GET OUT!’ We grabbed jeans and sweatshirts and boots and stumbled towards the fire escape. ‘GET OUT! GET OUT!’

I was yelling too. I dropped from the last steps of the fire escape shouting Lou’s name. People pushed past me, charging down the walkway between the dorm and the outside walls. No sign of Lou. We raced onto the lawn. Figures were weaving like drunks across the grass. The library was ablaze, flames roaring through its windows, but the dorm wing was still standing; people were struggling out of it, streams of people through the doors and down the fire escapes.

I left the chaos on the library lawn and went through the trees and across the driveway to the staff quarters. What I saw there stopped me dead.

The upper storey of the staff wing was gone. Huge chunks of masonry had crashed onto the lawns and lay half-buried, casting shadows in the firelight.

People weren’t milling about here. They were standing and staring.

And waiting. For sirens to come tearing up the driveway, for the paramedics and the police and the army. We waited for them to come.

But no one came.

No one came.

After I don’t know how long, I started to walk through the crowd gathered outside the staff wing. I was looking for Lou and Bella and Dash and Fyffe, but I reached the edge of the crowd without finding any of them. Then, because no one had come to say ‘do this, do that, go here, go there’ and no one was going to come from the staff quarters to say anything ever again, I picked my way through the rubble towards the infirmary garden where I’d been just a few hours before. Its walls lay smashed under pieces of fallen building.

I went through the garden and stood outside what was left of the infirmary. I was breathing hard but trying not to because the air was thick with burning and it made me gag. In the firelight, I could see shapes tangled in the demolished walls. People. Three people. I clambered over the wreckage towards them. They were bloody, their clothes burned black into their skin. The burning smell was them.

Dr Lewis. Sprawled on his back, his left arm half blown off, bones sticking out of it, and his face bloody all over.

Dr Stapleton. Frowning. As if this was one more thing he disapproved of.

And Dr Williams.

They were dead.

I knelt beside Dr Williams and shook his shoulder, lightly, just in case. His head lolled towards me, one eye wide and staring. The other side of his face was burnt through to charred bone and his whole left side was a mess of blood and burnt cloth. I thought, stupidly, this is how they look, people who die in war. They look like this.

I knelt there and knelt there and couldn’t get up.

I don’t know how long for.

Somewhere, far off, hammer blows beat the earth. Someone was talking in my ear. Telling me to stand up and get out, pulling me away.

Mace.

He hauled me to my feet and pushed me out into the smoking, noisy dark. He made me sit down, wiped the blood off my hands, and put his jacket round my shoulders.

Nearby, Jono was trying to stop Fyffe and Sol racing off to look for Lou. ‘He’ll find us. Don’t worry.’ He fished a flattened packet of cigarettes out of a pocket and handed them round, but I was shaking too much. Mace lit one for me. Sol sat down beside me, his face pale in the firelight. He looked at me with huge eyes and said, ‘Will they get us?’

Fyffe took his hands in hers. ‘Sol. They won’t get us. I’m here, and Nik’s here and Jono and Macey. And Lou will be here soon. We’re going to be all right. Aren’t we, Nik?’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Sure, we are.’ I put Mace’s jacket round Sol’s shoulders. Calming a terrified eight-year-old has its advantages: by the time Dash found us I’d almost stopped shaking.

‘It looks like a coordinated attack across the city,’ she said. ‘But it’s taken out communications, so we’re guessing at this stage.’ ISIS, she meant. She said ‘we’ like it was second nature to her already. ‘Nik, they want to see you.’ She put a hand on my arm. A whole hand – not smashed up or burned black with bones sticking through. ‘Nik?’ She brushed the hair out of my eyes. ‘God, you’re freezing. The ISIS agents want you. Come with me.’

I started to hand Sol over to Fyffe and stand up, but Mace said, ‘Wait.’ He stubbed his cigarette out on the grass. ‘They say why?’

‘No,’ said Dash. ‘Of course not.’

Mace lit another cigarette and watched me through the smoke. ‘Did you wonder, maybe, why they didn’t want him the first time?’

‘Sure,’ said Dash. ‘But—’

‘Anybody lost tonight from your new recruits?’

Dash looked at Jono. ‘No. We were lucky.’ She glanced up towards the smoking ruin that was the staff wing. Inside, I thought, if you go inside… they’re all still there. The unlucky ones.

‘They don’t want him to make up numbers, then, do they,’ said Mace.

Jono said, ‘Say what you mean, Macey.’

‘It’s for Nik to say, not me. But I wouldn’t be taking him to ISIS just now if I were you. Try this. Go and tell them he’s lost, or gone or dead. See what they say.’

They all looked at me. I started to say, ‘What are you talking about?’ to Mace, but another explosion hammered the city down near the river and we all jumped. Sol leaned on my arm, breathing in little gasps.

Dash said, ‘They must need extra recruits. That must be what it is.’ She hurried away. The rest of us sat in that firelit dark under the smoke and the stars, with the clamor rolling on around us. I put an arm around Sol and he went to sleep on my shoulder. I needed to ask Mace what he meant, but I didn’t want Jono listening in. At last Fyffe took him off to look for Lou, leaving Sol asleep with me.