Pat Barker - Noonday

Kenny would have to sleep soon, his eyes were rolling back in his head, but my God he fought it. Finished his orange juice, asked for more…This time, Paul tipped a little whisky into the glass and, although Kenny wrinkled his nose at the funny taste, he drank it all down and shortly afterwards curled up on the mattress and went to sleep.

Paul began to clear the soldiers away, then stopped, selected two and looked at them, lying side by side on the palm of his hand. Somehow, last time he’d seen them, he hadn’t quite realized what it meant. My God, he thought. We’ve become toys. He wanted to share the moment, the shock of it, but there was nobody who’d understand.

He slipped the little figures into his pocket, lay down beside Kenny and went to sleep.

In the middle of the night, Kenny woke up and shook Paul’s arm. “You hear that?”

Paul struggled to wake up; he must’ve gone very deep, he could hardly force his eyes open. They lay listening to the thuds until one blast louder than the rest made Kenny cry out. He was too big to ask for reassurance, too young not to need it. Paul touched his arm. “Don’t worry, it’s all right.”

“Is it true, you don’t hear the one that hits you?”

“Yes.” Said very firmly indeed, though he’d certainly heard the shell that had hit him; he’d heard it shrieking all the way down. Still did.

Kenny was sitting up, wide-eyed, quivering like a whippet at the start of a race. “Can we go now?”

“Soon as it’s light.”

“What time is it?”

“Three thirty. Come on, go back to sleep.”

“I can’t sleep.”

Nor could Paul.

“You know, we mightn’t be able to get there. There won’t be any buses or taxis. And I’m not driving through that.”

“We can walk.”

No point arguing. And anyway he didn’t know. No more than Kenny could he guess what they would have to face. “Well, I’m going back to sleep,” he said. “And if you’ve got any sense at all you’ll do the same.”

He turned on his side and lay in darkness, waiting for the change in Kenny’s breathing. Only when he was sure Kenny was asleep did he let his own eyes close.

—

THE ALL CLEAR went at four thirty. Kenny woke instantly, alert and wary, more like an animal than a child. Paul fetched the last of the orange juice for Kenny and two cups of black tea, one for each of them. “Here, drink this. No, I know it doesn’t taste very nice but you need something hot.”

Paul stepped across the mattress and opened the front door; his eyes, gritty with tiredness, flinched from the sudden light. Yet another monotonously blue sky, but over there above the docks, the red glow lingered, mixed in with plumes of billowing black smoke. Even at this distance he could smell burning.

Kenny joined him on the step. “Look,” Paul started to say, wanting to warn him again that it mightn’t be possible to get anywhere near his house, but the words dribbled into vacancy before the boy’s fixed, hard stare. He was going, no question; no hope of deflecting him either.

“Come on,” Paul said. “Let’s get your case.”

—

A CABBIE AGREED to take them part of the way. When a warden waved at them to turn back, Paul and Kenny got out and walked for a while before Paul begged a lift in an ambulance from Derek James, one of the drivers Elinor worked with.

Oily black smoke drifted across the wet roads. Many of the warehouses were still on fire, dwarfing the exhausted crews who still, hour after hour, directed white poles of water into the heart of the blaze. Other buildings had been reduced to charred and smoldering ruins in which, at any moment, you felt a fire could break out again. So many streets lay in ruins he couldn’t understand how Kenny was finding his way, and yet he rarely hesitated. Bodies lay by the side of the roads, lifeless, sodden heaps of rags. No child should be seeing this, but then, some of the bodies were children.

Once, he tried to persuade Kenny to turn back, but the boy just shook his head. “No, no, it’s just along here.” He grabbed Paul’s sleeve and started dragging him along. He had such a strange, haunted look on his face that Paul was frightened for him, though at least the intensity of his drive to get home seemed to prevent his taking in the horrors on either side. They were walking along the river now, or as close to it as they could get. On the opposite bank, a wall of flame half a mile long leapt into the lowering sky. In mid-stream, burning barges, loose from their moorings, drifted hither and thither with the shifting of the tide.

Ahead of them a cluster of little terraces, still apparently more or less intact, ran up to the dock gates, like a row of piglets suckling a sow’s teats. As they got closer, they saw that most of the houses were badly damaged and a few had collapsed altogether, leaving gaps through which further destruction showed. “Kenny…”

“No, it’s not far. Just along there.”

As they turned into the first street Paul heard Kenny’s intake of breath. It seemed, at first sight, as though all the houses had been hit. Kenny began to run, weaving his way around piles of rubble until at last he stopped in front of one of the houses. The windows had been blown in, a mattress hung out of an upstairs room, most of the roof had gone. Paul tried to push the front door open. It was a struggle — the door was jammed shut by debris from a fallen ceiling — but he managed it at last.

Kenny pushed past him and was clambering across the mess of bricks and plaster in the passage.

“Don’t,” Paul called out. “It’s not—”

Safe, he had been going to say, but the word meant nothing here. He followed Kenny into the devastated sitting room, through the almost-untouched kitchen and out into the yard at the back. Fleeting glimpses along the way of where and how Kenny had lived.

“Mam?” Kenny was calling. “Mam?”

A body was lying outside the coalhouse door, a woman’s body, facedown, and for a moment Paul thought: Oh God it’s her, but Kenny paid it no attention. Farther along, by the yard door, a man’s head rested on the concrete, severed neatly at the neck, one eye closed. Kenny pushed it to one side with his foot and opened the door into the alley. A big jump down and he was on the cobbles, staring up and down a row of washing lines, from some of which, incredibly, shirts and pillowcases still hung. Dazed-looking people were wandering up and down, lost, waiting for somebody to get hold of them and tell them where to go. A few, braver or harder than the rest, were rescuing their possessions from ruined houses, carrying tables and chairs into the alley and setting them down, with sheets and blankets and pots and pans, small heaps of possessions fiercely guarded. Somebody had stuck a Union Jack on a pile of rubble, but most of these people were too exhausted and shocked for gestures of that kind.

Kenny looked around him. “It’s all gone.”

Paul opened his mouth, but had no idea what to say. He was about to suggest that Kenny should come back inside the house, when, at the far end of the street, they saw a woman walking towards them with a baby in her arms. Kenny ran towards her shouting, “Mam! Mam!” She stopped, but then came on more quickly. Her clothes were black and torn, her face blackened too. She might even be burnt, Paul thought. At any rate she’d lost her eyebrows. She looked dully at Kenny. “Oh, it’s you.”

A dark-haired, cadaverous man with yellow skin and deep furrows in his cheeks followed along behind, holding a tiny red-haired girl by the hand. “What you doing here?”

Kenny ignored this and went on tugging at the woman’s sleeve, but she shook him off. It’s the shock, Paul thought, she’ll be all right in a minute, and indeed, a few seconds later, she pressed the boy’s head against her side and ran her fingers distractedly through his hair. But then, immediately, she looked accusingly at Paul. “What you brought him back for? I can’t have him — you can see for yourself there’s nothing left.”