Rosie Thomas - Strangers

The minutes ticked by and he thought about Annie and the boys. Whenever the question What would we do, without her? reared up he tried to make himself face it, but there was nothing he could see beyond it. It was impossible to envisage. He couldn’t think beyond the diminished figures of the firemen that he had seen, working away up the road. He thought about them instead, willing them to uncover her, as if the intensity of his longing would spur them on.

The door at the end of the corridor opened and a woman came out. Someone else from the silent line went in in her place, and the rest of them went on helplessly waiting. A fat woman in a checked overall came past and asked if anyone wanted a cup of tea from the canteen. Martin shook his head numbly.

At last, after what seemed like hours, it was his turn. The office was cramped, lined with steel filing cabinets. A police sergeant sat behind the desk with a young WPC beside him. They nodded reassuringly at Martin, and the sergeant asked him to sit down.

As Martin answered their questions, the girl filled in a sheet of paper. He gave Annie’s name and age, her general description. They asked him why he thought she had been in the shop and he answered, unable to convey his fearful conviction, simply that it seemed likely.

‘I’ve got a photograph of her here,’ he said.

Martin took out his wallet. In a pocket at the back there was a snapshot of Annie playing in the garden with the boys. She was laughing, and Benjy was standing between her knees, twisting the hem of her skirt. He pushed the photograph across the desk to the sergeant and then demanded, ‘Do you know anything? Can’t you tell me anything at all?’

The policewoman turned her pen over and over in her fingers while her colleague spoke.

‘As you must know, everything is being done that can be done to explore the shop for possible survivors, and the operation will continue until it is quite certain that no one is left inside. One survivor has been located in the last hour, using thermal imaging equipment, and they should reach him very soon.’

The wild, hopeful flicker was extinguished almost as soon as it had shone out.

‘Him?’

‘Yes. It’s a man, apparently not badly hurt.’

So it was possible, then, for someone to survive under that landslide of rubble. The hope it gave him helped Martin to confront the next question.

‘And the two … bodies that have already been recovered?’

‘Both have been positively identified. They were store employees.’

He wanted to put his hands up to cover his face, letting it sag with relief, but he sat still, ashamed to feel so grateful for the news of someone else’s death.

‘I would go home, sir, and wait there. We’ll contact you immediately if there is any news of your wife.’

The interview was over. Martin got up reluctantly and then stood holding on to the chair back.

‘Or you could wait here,’ the WPC said. It was the first time she had spoken and she glanced nervously at her companion. He nodded, and looked past Martin at the door.

‘Thank you,’ Martin said. He had never intended to go home while Annie might need him here.

‘When your wife does come home, sir,’ the sergeant called after him, ‘would you be kind enough to let us know at once?’

Martin nodded and went out into the stale, chilly air of the corridor again. Instead of sitting down he found his way by the scent of fried food down the stairs to the canteen in the basement. There was a public telephone under a blue plastic hood beside the swing doors. He dialled the familiar number and counted the rings. One … two … Audrey answered before the second one was complete. She sounded breathless, as if she had run to do it.

‘It’s Martin. Have you heard from her?’

In the background he could hear Tom’s voice calling out, ‘ Is it Mummy? ’ Martin closed his eyes and hunched his shoulders, as if he were waiting for someone to hit him.

‘No,’ Audrey said.

Martin looked at his watch. It was ten to one. Wouldn’t Annie have telephoned, by now, to make sure that everything was all right? He knew there was no particular reason why she should, but the knowledge that she hadn’t reinforced his conviction. She was in the store. Every minute that passed made it more certain.

‘I’m at the police station,’ he said. ‘They can’t tell me much. None of the … ones they have found is Annie. They don’t know any more than that. I’m going to stay here and wait.’

‘Yes,’ Audrey answered, ‘you’d best stay there. We’ll be all right here …’ The dialling tone cut her short. Martin had already hung up and gone. He ran up the stairs again, and walked out of the police station into the street. In front of the store the yellow latticework of a crane stood idle. He walked towards it, into the wind, shivering. He passed the enclave of television cameras and waiting pressmen and thought, with unreasoning savagery, that they were like vultures hovering before the kill. He walked on around the outer edge of the barriers until he came to the point where the policeman had blocked his way. He looked up, over the heads of the crowd. It seemed impossible that the crumpled front of the store could remain standing. As he watched it seemed to sway, curling inwards with a shower of falling fragments that drew clouds of whitish dust down with them.

Martin shivered, and he realized that the wind was strengthening. It swept across the street, lifting a torn paper wrapper into the air before pasting it to the wet roadway again. Even above the noise of the wind, Martin thought he could hear the creak of broken girders as the concrete weight shifted and then settled itself for another moment or two, before the next gust came.

A police van inched along the inside of the cordon. Behind it the police were moving the watchers back, all the way back up the road. More steel barriers were lifted out of the van and pushed into place. Looking backwards, as he was ushered out of range with everyone else, Martin saw a group of men in protective helmets moving under the threatening frontage. The crane swung slowly round. He understood that they were going to try to push the wall outwards so that it collapsed into the street.

They would have to do it quickly, before it fell of its own accord the other way.

Annie was thinking about the wedding picture. Not her own and Martin’s this time. Theirs was as bright as a paintbox with the splashed colours of the girls’ dresses and the vivid blue sky behind the church. She was thinking about her parents’, in a big, old-fashioned leather frame, standing on a table to the left of the fireplace in their sitting room. Theirs was black and white with a faint brownish cast that was deepening with age. It was wartime, and her mother was wearing a two-piece costume with square shoulders and a little hat perched on one side of her head. Her hair was in a roll to frame her face. Her father was beaming in his army uniform. His face had hardly changed, except for thinning hair and lines dug beside his mouth and around his eyes. Her mother was barely recognizable. She had had full cheeks then, and her smile was lavishly painted with dark, shiny lipstick.