Paullina Simons - Inexpressible Island

Always better to be safe, says the fragile girl whose life has been threatened and snuffed out up and down the centuries, now sitting in the rubble caused by high explosives, the rubble to which she has traveled out of her soul’s own free will.

“You don’t have a house in London,” Julian asks, “a family?”

“I had both,” Mia replies. “The house got bombed, the family left. Of course I could go to a proper rest center up on Old City Road, but they’re overcrowded, and I don’t want to stand in the street all day with my blanket, queueing for a space. Finch and I did that back in September. Bollocks to that, we said after a day.” Mia takes out a cigarette, offering one to Julian. At first he refuses, and then accepts. Why not? They light up. Her lighter says sad girls smoke a lot.

“You don’t seem sad,” Julian says, inhaling the smoke, coughing, inhaling again.

Mia concurs. “I’m not sad. But the girl who died, she was sad. It was hers.”

“Why was she sad?”

“Because she died.”

He likes the camaraderie of smoking with his beloved over bombed-out ruins in a war. In the war. It’s not the worst thing they’ve shared, by far. “None of you has a home?”

“Robbie has a home,” Mia replies. “In Sussex. Liz has a home in Birmingham. But those places are getting hit pretty hard. Phil Cozens has a home, but he doesn’t sleep there, because he’s paid to be on call at Bank. It’s not too bad at Bank, really. You’ll see. They’ve spruced up many of the Underground shelters. Bank is like a fine hotel. There’s even a refreshment center.” She smiles wistfully, glancing down the street for the refreshment truck that’s long left.

“Do you work?” Julian asks. “Or is this your day job, too?”

Mia has a different day job. She works at the Lebus Furniture Factory on Tottenham Court Road. She sleeps until ten or eleven in the morning and then goes in. Her boss doesn’t mind; he knows why she is up all night.

“Do you work?” she asks, looking inside Wild’s cloak at Julian’s well-made suit, now dusty.

“I did. I had a restaurant on Great Eastern Road. It’s gone now. Along with my flat right above it.”

“Restaurant? I’m so hungry,” she says. “What kind of food did you make, Cornish pasties? Shepherd’s pies?”

“Beef noodle soup. Squid with garlic. Shrimp rolls.”

“Tell me about it. Don’t spare any details.”

When Finch spots them sitting on the broken pile next to each other, he looks upset, even at a distance, even in the early light. But Julian takes the cue for how to behave from Mia. She doesn’t move away from him. So he doesn’t move away from her. Julian is not the keeper of her relationship with Finch. If he’s overstepping his bounds, she’ll let him know. But Julian doesn’t think he is overstepping. Something about the way she kissed him back when they pretended to be Cecily and Algernon. As if she had been longing to be truly kissed.

While they wait for Finch to finish up, Mia tells Julian bedtime stories, and he nearly falls unconscious to the sound of her achingly familiar soft breathy voice. She’s known most of the Ten Bells gang since primary school. She, Shona, and Finch grew up together on Folgate Street in the back of Spitalfields Market, and in September were made homeless together. For the first few weeks, they roamed the streets like beggars, and then found the passageway at Bank.

Shona, the medi truck driver, is a tough cookie, while Liz Hope is the opposite. “She is a soft cookie. Like a sponge cake.” Liz began a promising, bookish career at the British Museum, but now that the Museum has shuttered indefinitely for the war, she’s out of a job and out of sorts. Sometimes she volunteers for the church truck, serving refreshments to the dislocated, but mostly feels she’s not doing enough. “She can’t help it,” Mia says. “People are not going to change just because of a little bombing. The truth is, Liz is terrified of the bombs. Going out into the darkness during the attacks is not an option for her.”

Liz seems like the sanest of the bunch. “Why can’t you be more like Liz,” Julian says.

“You mean chaste and shy?” Mia is grimy yet shiny. She smiles. Every time Mia smiles, Finch manages to see it from wherever he is. Maybe because she lights up like a firework.

“I mean safe and underground,” Julian says. “But chaste and shy, too, if you want, sure.”

“You want me to hide from life in the dungeons?”

“Not from life,” he says. “From death.”

“There’s nowhere to hide,” she says. “A month ago, a bomb fell near the entrance at Bank. It killed twenty people and left a crater in the road so large it had to be spanned by a makeshift bridge. The Bank of England was untouched, though.”

“Maybe we should hide inside the Bank of England.” Julian says we but he means you .

Liz likes being part of the squad, Mia says, but because of her agonizing shyness has a hard time speaking up in a group setting. And a group setting is how they live these days. There is no private setting.

“So how do you and Finch make it work?” Julian asks, looking at his hands instead of at her. “In a group setting,” he adds carefully.

There is a longish pause. “Biding our time is how,” she replies. She returns to talking about Liz, glossing over his silence with a brisk “What option do we have?” as if she can read his thoughts.

Who’s got the time to stay put, to linger?

Not you.

Last week, Robbie started taking Liz to work with him on Fleet Street. She now proofs his articles for the Evening Standard . She’s never had a boyfriend but has had a paralyzing crush on Wild for years, and after his accident last summer, if anything, loves him even more because he is less perfect and therefore more accessible to her and therefore more perfect.

Wild’s real name is Fred Wilder. “Isn’t that funny? Wild is Freddie . He’s been trying to rebel against his plumber name since birth.” As if the moniker weren’t punishment enough, his parents had named his younger brother Louis. “So one brother’s a plumber, the other a French king. I mean, that’s Wild’s life in a nutshell.”

“Where’s Louis?”

Mia shakes her head, glancing around for Wild, as if he might be nearby and can hear. “We don’t talk about Louis.”

“Ah,” Julian says. “Okay.” Beat. “So, tell me about you.”

“What about me?”

“You’ve told me about Liz, about Shona, about Wild. What’s your story?”

“I told you.”

“I mean, other than the war.”

“Is there anything other than the war?” she says. “I almost don’t remember.” Before the war, she strived for the West End stage, but that’s been put on hold, like everything. “Two bombings and my beloved Palace Theatre on Cambridge Circus has been boarded up!” she says with indignation. “As if people don’t need entertainment during war. They need it even more, if you ask me.”

Julian agrees.

“Do you know that theatre?”

“I do,” he says. “Once upon a time, a man loved his wife so much, he built her the most magnificent theatre in all of London, so she could go to the grand opera any time she wanted.”

“Yes!” Mia exclaims, staring at him in amazement. “How do you know that? No one but me knows that.”

“And me.”

Warmed and softened, Mia tells him about her work at Lebus, the furniture factory, becoming especially animated when she describes what they’ve started building for the war. “We take the hollowed-out frames of double-decker buses and paint them red. No engines, no transmissions, just the frames.”