Sarah Waters - The Night Watch

'Why,' Mickey asked Kay, 'did you give that girl your ring?'

Kay changed smoothly up the gears. She said, 'I don't know. I felt sorry for her. It's only a ring, after all. What's a ring, in time like these?'

She tried to speak lightly; but the fact was, she was already rather regretting having given the ring up. Her hand, where it gripped the steering-wheel, felt naked and queer, unlucky.

'Maybe I'll go back to the hospital tomorrow,' she said, 'see how she's getting on.'

'Well, I hope she's still there,' said Mickey meaningfully.

Kay wouldn't look at her. She said, 'She wanted to chance it. It was up to her, not us.'

'She didn't know what she was saying.'

'She knew, all right… The lousy swine who made a muck of fixing her up is the one I'd like to get my hands on. Him, and the boyfriend.' She came to a junction. 'Which road do we want?'

'Not this one,' said Mickey, peering at the street, 'I think it's closed. Go on to the next.'

It was their heaviest night for weeks, because of the moon. After dropping Viv at the hospital they'd returned to Dolphin Square and at once been sent out again. A stretch of railway line in their district had been hit; three men who'd been patching it up from the last raid had been killed, and six more injured. They took four of those casualties in one trip, then were sent to a terrace that had got its front blown off, where a family had been buried. Two women and a girl were dug out alive; a girl and a boy were discovered dead. Kay and Mickey had taken the corpses.

Now they'd been sent out again: they were heading for a street slightly to the east of Sloane Square. Kay turned a corner, and felt the tyres of the van begin to grind. The road had grit and earth and broken glass on it. She slowed to a crawl, then stopped and put down her window as a warden came over.

She saw the leisurely way he was walking. 'Too late?' she said.

The man nodded. He took them over and showed them the bodies.

'Jesus,' said Mickey.

There were two of them: a man and a woman, killed on their way back from a party. Their house, the warden said, was only fifty yards further on. The street was crescent-shaped, broken up by a slip of garden, and it was the garden that had taken the worst of the bomb. A plane tree thirty feet high had been blasted more or less into splinters; houses had lost windows and front doors and slates from their roofs, but were otherwise unmarked. The man and woman, however, had been tossed up into the air. The man had landed on the flags of a narrow area in front of the basement window of a house. The woman had fallen on to the railings on the pavement above-been caught, chest-first, on the blunt tips of the iron spikes. She was still slumped there. The warden had found a length of curtain, that was all, and covered her over. Now he drew the curtain back, for Kay and Mickey to get a better view of the body. Kay looked only once, then turned away.

The woman's coat and hat had gone, and her hair was loose about her face; the evening-gloves were smooth and unmarked, still, on her dangling arms. Her silk dress, silvered by the moonlight, was pooled about her on the pavement as though she were curtseying; but the flesh of her bare back bulged where the iron pressed at it from within.

'The last set of railings in the street,' said the warden, as he took Kay and Mickey down the area steps. 'What luck was that, eh? Left here, I think, because they were rusty… I'll be quite honest with you, I didn't want to try and move her. I could see she was dead, though. Killed at the first blow, I hope. Her husband, believe it or not, was sitting up twenty minutes ago, having a conversation with me. That's why I put in the call to you lot. But look at the state of him.'

He moved aside a piece of rubbish and they saw the man's body: he was sitting with his legs drawn up and his back to the area wall. Like the woman, he was dressed in evening gear-the neck-tie in a neat bow, still, around his collar, but the collar itself, and most of his shirt-front, stained ghastly red. Dust had settled, like a cap, on the brilliantine in his hair, but where the light of the torch played over the side of his head Kay could see his torn-up scalp, and more blood, thick and glistening as jam.

'Nice bit of muck,' said the warden, tutting, 'for the people of the house to come out to, eh, when they show their heads?' He looked Kay and Mickey over. 'Not much of a job for women, this. Got anything to wrap 'em in?'

'Only blankets.'

'Fine mess,' he said in his grumbling way, as they went back up the steps, 'they'll make of blankets…' He kicked his way along the street, and found a length of something. 'Look here, what's this? The lady's cloak, blown off her back. We could- Oh, by jiminy!'

He and Kay ducked, instinctively. But the blast was a mile or two away, somewhere to the north: not so much a bang as a muffled sort of whump . It was followed by a series of crashes, from somewhere closer to hand: falling timbers, slithering slates, the almost musical sound of shattering glass. A couple of dogs began barking.

'What was it?' called Mickey. She had gone to the ambulance and was bringing out stretchers. 'Something going up?'

'Sounds like it,' said Kay.

'A gas-main?'

'Factory, I'll bet,' said the warden, rubbing his chin.

They looked at the sky. There were searchlights playing, thinned-out by the moonlight, but making it difficult to see; but when the beams went down, the warden pointed: 'Look.' There had come, on the underside of clouds, the first reflection of some great fire. Where smoke rose up in whorls and tangles it was lit a dark, unhealthy pink.

'A grand view that'll give to Jerry, too,' said the warden.

'Where do you think it is?' Mickey asked him. 'King's Cross?'

'Could be,' he answered doubtfully. 'Could be further south than that, though. I'd say it was Bloomsbury.'

'Bloomsbury?' said Kay.

'Know the area?'

'Yes.' She narrowed her eyes-scanning the sky-line, suddenly afraid. She was looking for landmarks-spires, chimneys, something she knew. But she could see nothing-and anyway, she forgot for the moment which way she was facing, north-east or north-west, the curve of the street made things confusing… Then the searchlights went up again, and the sky became a mess of shadow and colour. She turned away, went back to the woman's body. 'Come on,' she said to Mickey.

She must have sounded odd. Mickey looked at her. 'What's the matter?'

'I don't know. Got the creeps, that's all. Christ, this is awful! Give me a hand, can you? It's no good just lifting her, there are barbs; she must be caught on them.'

By rocking the woman's body back and forth they managed to free it; but the grinding of the iron against her ribs, and the lurching about of the point of the spike beneath the skin of her back, were ghastly to feel and hear. She came away wetly. They didn't turn her over, didn't try to close her eyes, but laid her quickly on a stretcher and wrapped her around with the torn curtain that had covered her before. Her hair was fair, tangled as if from sleep-like Helen's hair, Kay thought, when Helen woke, or when she rose from a bed after making love.

'Christ,' she said again, wiping her mouth with the back of her cuff. 'This is bloody!' She moved a little way off and lit a cigarette.

But while she stood smoking it, she became anxious. She looked at the sky. The play of colour was as wild as before, the glow sometimes more intense, sometimes dimmer, as the flames producing it must have been bucking and leaping about in the breeze beneath. Again she was afraid, without quite knowing why. She threw her cigarette away after two or three puffs; the warden saw and said, 'Hey!' He picked it up and started smoking it himself.

Kay caught up the second stretcher from beside the body of the woman, and carried it down the area steps. She took a roll of bandage with her, and used it to bind up the dead man's head. Mickey came to help her-holding the head rather gingerly while Kay passed the dressing around it. Then they laid the stretcher flat, and tried to lift the body on to it. There was not much space, and the ground was cluttered, with soil thrown up from the garden, with branches and broken slates. They started to kick the rubbish aside; they began to breathe more harshly as they did it, to mutter and curse. Even so, when Kay's name was said in the street above-said urgently, but not called, or shrieked-she heard it. She heard it, and knew. She straightened up, grew still for a second; then simply stepped over the body of the man and went quickly back up the steps.