Pat Barker - Noonday

As he walked, he thought not about Kenny — he still felt there was no real reason for anxiety — but about that cordoned-off street, the way a perfectly ordinary road acquired, merely because access to it had been denied, an air of mystery. He remembered looking through a periscope into no-man’s-land: the inhabitation of rats and eels, and of the corpses, submerged in flooded craters, whose slow, invisible decomposition sent strings of bubbles spiraling to the surface. But, no, that wasn’t it. It wasn’t the obvious horrors that made the hairs on the nape of your neck stand up. It might be a country lane: not bombed, not devastated, pretty, even; but a lane you couldn’t walk down, because it was enemy territory. And that lane, merely by being forbidden, acquired depth, mystery and terror. It seemed shocking to him that now there were streets and squares in London that aroused the same prickling of unease. He’d never before felt that he wanted to paint London, or any other built-up area, and yet those roped-off, silent squares and streets had started to haunt him. Perhaps because blacked-out and bombed London felt less and less like a city?

Agate Street wasn’t difficult to find. A corkscrew of black smoke twined into the sky above it, almost like a question mark reversed. This was the school in the photograph. Even before he turned the corner, he knew that.

Despite the coil of smoke, the fire service must have declared the building safe, because teams of rescue-squad workers, wearing overalls and tin hats, were clambering over a scree of rubble, slipping and slithering as they tried to get a footing. The school seemed to have imploded; there was a crater at the center where the roof had crashed through onto the floors below. Whoever had been in the basement when the upper floors collapsed was dead now. Nobody could have survived tons of brick landing on them like that.

The scene in front of Paul was oddly static. Heat and dust everywhere, but no sense of urgency. The rescue workers with their covering of white dust might have been carvings on an antique frieze: a funeral procession, though, not a wedding feast. There was no sound. Four ambulances were parked by the side of the road, the drivers leaning against their vehicles, smoking, occasionally wiping sweat from foreheads or lips. They looked as if they’d been there for hours.

Still wearing his warden’s coat and tin hat, Paul ducked under the tape and strode confidently towards the ambulances. A tin hat could take you almost anywhere. Close to, it was obvious the drivers had been there all night. Red-eyed, exhausted, stubble sprouting from their chins, lips parched from the long hours of chain-smoking, none of them looking as if they expected to be going anywhere in the next few hours. As he approached, the door of one of the vehicles opened and a figure he recognized jumped down on to the road. Derek James.

“My God,” Paul said. “They’re keeping you busy.”

“Twelve bloody hours I’ve been stuck here.”

“What’s happening?”

“You can see what’s happening — bugger-all.” He fished a packet of Woodbines from his pocket and offered it. “What you doing here anyway?”

“You know that lad I was with when you gave us a lift — Sunday?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, it turned out his house had been bombed and they were sent here.” He could tell from James’s face that something was wrong. “That was Sunday. They were just waiting for the buses to take them away.”

“Bloody long wait.”

Paul stared at him.

“They didn’t come. Apparently, there was some mix-up over the address, Canning Town, Camden Town, God knows. And then, when they finally did show up, a raid started so they decided to postpone the evacuation. They were still here last night.”

“But that’s three days.”

James shrugged. “Another bloody cock-up. They’ve had years to get this right. Years. ”

Paul pictured Kenny and his family at the end of the crowded corridor, how at the last moment the little red-haired girl had turned and held out her arms. “How many?”

“They’re saying seventy-three.”

Paul twisted sharply to one side. “I was there, it was bloody well jam-packed.”

James said, slowly: “To begin with you could hear them crying out…You know? And every now and then they’d call for silence and everybody stopped and listened, and then the last time…” He shook his head. “Mind, we did get two babies out. Tough little buggers, babies.”

“Nobody else?”

“Not that I saw.”

The rescue squads had started gathering in small groups around their leaders, the men who’d been climbing across the rubble sliding down and walking across to join them.

James nodded. “I think they’re calling it.”

“What, pulling out?”

“What else can they do? It’s going to take weeks to clear that lot. Hundreds of bodies, this heat?”

He was right, of course. Every night these rescue squads were needed to dig out people who could still be saved. How could you possibly justify using them to retrieve dead bodies? No, the only thing to do with this was cement it over. Walk away. Paul patted James’s shoulder and walked across to the railings. Now he was closer to the building, he noticed a smell that was not the stench of high explosive. The rescue workers wore masks against the plaster dust, but others, this side of the railings, were pinching their noses and covering their mouths with their hands. No, James was right, that was all you could do, declare it a mass grave. But my God…All those people. Kenny, the little girl, the baby. Kenny.

Resting his forehead against the railings, Paul realized he was looking at the small area of playground that was clear of rubble. Somebody, perhaps a teacher but more likely a child, had chalked out squares for a game of hopscotch. He saw, for a moment, with the clarity of hallucination, a stick of yellow chalk gripped in a small, pudgy hand.

Blinking the image away, he looked instead at the wrecked building and above it to the sky, where the corkscrew of black smoke was beginning to change shape. Again, he saw Kenny raise his hand and wave; again the little girl stretched out her arms, while flakes of soot, whirled around on the slight breeze, fell onto his upturned face like snow.

C rappit heid. Dear God, fancy being reduced to that after all these years. Fishmonger just now give her a funny look — you’d think it was in his own best interest to be civil, wouldn’t you, but oh, no. Just stood there in his straw hat and his white coat, fag end stuck to his bottom lip, bloody great turd of ash ready to drop— and he was leaning over the fish. “Cod’s head?” he asked. She felt like saying: You want the business or not? Didn’t, of course, just raked about in her purse for the coppers and handed them across. As she walked away, she felt his gaze stitched to her back, though when she turned round she saw he’d already moved on to the next customer, wasn’t watching her at all.

She was sat on a bench in Russell Square on this September afternoon because she didn’t know what the fuck else to do. In prison the only fresh air you got was an hour in the exercise yard every day, and even then all you did was trudge round and round, nothing much to look at except the wobbling backside of the woman in front. Still, on the inside, there were people all round you, you could hear them and see them even if you didn’t talk to them, and then she come out and there was nobody. Oh, she could’ve gone back up north, set herself up again in a small way, people’s front rooms, that type of thing — she didn’t want to go attracting attention to herself. She knew she was going to have to be very, very careful.