Sarah Waters - The Night Watch

She made a decision, and stopped the van, as close as she dared get to the spluttering rocket. 'I'm not going to leave this street to catch fire,' she said, opening her door and jumping out. 'I don't care what Binkie'll have to say about it.'

She looked around, saw a heap of sand-bags before the window of a house, and, shielding her face and hands from the rocket's mad magnesium frothing, she dragged one over and let it sink. The white light disappeared. But then another rocket, further down the street, started up. She took a second sand-bag to that. The incendiaries which were only smouldering she kicked; they went out in a shower of viscous sparks. Mickey came and helped her, and after a minute a man and a girl emerged from a house and joined in, too: they all went capering up and down the street like crazy footballers… But some of the rockets had fallen on to roofs and into gardens, where they couldn't get at them; one had lodged in a wooden 'To Let' sign, which was already beginning to burn.

'Where the hell's your warden?' Kay asked the man.

'You tell me,' he said, panting. 'This street's on the border of two Posts. They sit there arguing about who's supposed to patrol it. Do you think we need firemen?'

'A couple of stirrup-pumps would do it, if we only had ladders or ropes.'

'Shall I run to a telephone?'

Kay looked around in frustration. 'Yes,' she said. 'Yes, I think you ought to.'

He went off. Kay turned to the girl. 'You should get back under cover.'

The girl was dressed in a man's teddy-bear coat, and a pixie-hood. She shook her head, grinning. 'I like it out here. It's more lively.'

'Well, it may be too bloody lively in a minute.-There, what did I tell you?'

There had come a bang, a sort of whump , from one of the houses further down the street, followed by the tinkling of falling glass. Kay and Mickey ran towards it, and the girl ran after them. They found a ground-floor window with its shutters blown open and its curtains sagging on a broken rod; the curtains were black with soot or smoke, and a black cloud, with scraps of plaster in it, was billowing out, but with no sign of flame.

'Watch out,' said Kay, as she and Mickey got onto the window-sill and looked in. 'It might be a timed one.'

'I dunno,' answered Mickey. She shone in her torch. The room was a kitchen: quite wrecked, with chairs and crockery flung about and the wallpaper scorched, and the kitchen table thrown against the wall and upended. Just beyond the table they could see the figure of a man sprawled in the chaos. He was wearing pyjamas and a dressing-gown, and was clutching his thigh. 'Oh! Oh!' they heard him say. 'Oh, to fuck!'

Mickey gripped Kay's arm. She was peering through the dust. 'Kay,' she said huskily. 'I think his leg's gone. I think it's blown clean off! We'll need a strap, for the bleeding.'

'What's that?' called the man, beginning to cough. 'Who's there? Help!'

Kay turned and ran to the ambulance. 'Don't look,' she said to the girl, who was hovering about outside. The drone of aeroplanes had faded, but the little fires that had been started up and down the street were taking proper hold now, the flames of them yellow, orange, red, rather than white. They would bring more planes, with real explosives, but she could do nothing at all about them. She got out a box of dressings and hurried back to the house. She found Mickey in the room with the wounded man. She had pushed back some of the mess and was ripping open the man's pyjamas.

'Help me up,' he was saying.

'Don't try and talk.'

'It's just, my leg-'

'I know. It's all right. We need to put a tourniquet on you.'

'A what?'

'To keep you from bleeding.'

'Bleeding? Am I bleeding?'

'You must be, mate,' said Mickey grimly.

She gave a final tug on the seam of the pyjamas and swung the beam of her torch on to the man's bare thigh. The flesh ended a little way above the knee. The stump, however, was pink, smooth, almost shiny… 'Hang on,' said Kay, putting her hand on Mickey's shoulder. The man let out his breath. He began to laugh, and then to cough again.

'Fuck me,' he said. 'If you find a leg on the end of that you'll be a fucking magician. I lost that in the last war-'

The leg he was missing was a cork one. On top of that, the blast that had knocked him down had come not from a bomb, but only from a faulty gas-cooker. He'd been bending down to put a match to the ring beneath a kettle, and the whole thing had gone up. His artificial leg had been ripped from him and sent flying with everything else: they looked around and found it, hanging by one of its buckles from the picture-rail.

Mickey handed it to him in disgust. 'As if there aren't enough bangs going off just now, without you having to make more.'

'I was only after a cup of tea,' he said, still coughing. 'A man's entitled to his cup of tea, isn't he?'

When they got him upright, they saw how badly shaken he was. He had burns on his face and on his hands, and part of his hair, and his brows and lashes, had been singed away. They thought they might as well take him to hospital as leave him here; they carried him out into the street and put him into the ambulance.

All around the square, fires were still burning, but the girl who'd helped extinguish the rockets had started banging on the doors of houses; one or two people appeared now with pails of water, and pumps, and buckets of sand. The man with the artificial leg called to someone he knew, to ask him to board up the window of his flat.

'Looks like we're well out of here,' he said to Kay and Mickey, watching the figures running about. 'I hope they don't turn their pumps on my house, though. I'd rather a fire than a flood, any day.-What's this?' he went on, as Kay pushed closed the door. 'You're not going to lock me up in this van with her, are you?' He meant Mickey.

'I think you'll be all right,' said Kay.

'That's what you say. You didn't see the way she went for my pyjamas…'

'Proper caution he was,' Mickey said, when they'd dropped the man at the hospital.

'Laugh?' said Kay.

'Honestly, though-a cork leg! If the others should find out-'

Kay tittered. '“Kay! Kay!”' she said throatily. '“I think it's blown clean off!”'

Mickey lit them cigarettes. 'Get lost.'

'Don't mind it, dear. Anyone would have thought the same.'

'Maybe… Still, didn't that girl have lovely brown eyes?'

'Did she?'

'You never notice the dark ones.'

The guns, for the moment, had fallen silent. The plane that had dropped the incendiaries had been chased off. It was like the lifting of a weight. Kay and Mickey chatted and laughed, all the way back to Dolphin Square… But they were met in the garage by Partridge, who gave them a warning look. 'You're in trouble, girls.'

Binkie appeared. She had a sheaf of chits in her hand.

'Langrish and Carmichael, where the hell have you been? You were seen heading back almost an hour ago. I was just about to call Control and report you missing.'

Kay explained about the incendiaries and the wounded man.

'That's too bad,' said Binkie. 'You're to come straight back between jobs. You've been in this business too long not to know that, Langrish.'

'You'd like me to leave a street to burn and bring more bombs? We'd have lots of jobs, then.'

'You know the procedure. I'm warning you. You'll do this sort of thing once too often.'

She was called back to her office by the ring of the telephone; and returned, in another moment, to send Kay and Mickey out again. The bombers had moved away from Pimlico, but there was trouble in Camberwell and Walworth. A couple of the section's ambulances had been struck and put out of service: Kay and Mickey, and four other drivers from Dolphin Square, went over the river to take their place. The jobs were rather grisly ones. In Camberwell a house had fallen and its occupants been struck by beams: Kay had to help a doctor fix splints to a child's crushed legs, and the child screamed and screamed whenever they touched her. In another street, a little later, two men were hit by flying shrapnel: they were so cut about, they looked as though some sort of maniac had gone at them with knives…