Pat Barker - Noonday

“No, I’ve died and gone to heaven.”

“Don’t worry, mate. Soon have you out.”

It was what they said over and over again to people who were injured or trapped, only now they were saying it to him. He’d become a victim, no longer one of the team.

“You OK? Only we thought—”

“Fine!” he shouted back. Easier to say that than try to explain what he didn’t understand anyway. More questions; ignoring them, he turned back to her. Her lips moved, but the voice was, once again, not hers. Even in this hot, stuffy darkness, he was drenched in a cold sweat, his own this time. It was a relief when she fell silent.

It took nearly an hour of heaving and shoveling to clear the stairs. They were almost through when a rescue squad arrived and tried to take over. A row broke out as to why the wardens were in the building at all. Paul heard a squeaky, querulous voice laying down the law, or trying to, then Charlie: “You can go fuck yourself, mate, we’re not budging.”

All this time, Paul had been listening to a constant trickle of plaster dust, the minute creaks and rustles and sudden heart-stopping lurches as the stricken building shifted its center of gravity. Another bottle of water was passed through. He gave some to her, relieved when she seemed to be swallowing, before taking several huge swigs himself. Grit everywhere: between his teeth, in his nostrils, in his eyes. He seemed to be breathing dust. A voice from the past: a doctor he’d consulted a few years ago in Harley Street, after one particularly bad winter. “You have to take better care of your chest. Have you thought of spending the winter abroad?” He was laughing, still laughing when Charlie’s head appeared, level with the floor. “Glad you think it’s funny, mate.”

Paul could cheerfully have kissed him. Charlie inched forward, pressing down hard with his hands before trusting his weight to another foot of sagging floor. When, finally, he reached Paul, he clapped him on the shoulder, then looked down incredulously at the prone woman. “By heck, the size of her.” He was whispering, but the sound registered on her face.

“Do you think we can get her down?” Paul asked.

“Bloody got to, mate. Can’t leave her here.”

“Get some of the others?”

Charlie shook his head. “Floor won’t take it.” He crawled round to Bertha’s other side and wiggled his hands underneath her till his fingers were clasping Paul’s in a desperate, painful grip. “Right. Count of three.”

As soon as they tried to move her, she started to moan but also, embarrassingly, to apologize. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she kept saying. “I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault, love,” Charlie said. “Blame Hitler.”

Finally, they managed to drag her farther away from the wall. Paul got behind her, put his hands under her armpits and heaved her into a semi-upright position, aware, but in a totally detached way, that at one point they formed a perfect, if grotesque, pietà. Then they half dragged, half carried her across the floor, and lowered her through what remained of the doorway into Brian’s waiting arms. Still, in between screams and moans, she kept apologizing for her weight. “I’m sorry, I’m so heavy,” she said. “I can’t help it, I hardly eat a thing.” “Sure you don’t, love,” Brian said. He’d make a joke of it later, but he was tender with her now.

At last, the top of her head disappeared into the darkness and they were able to stand up. Charlie indicated to Paul that he should go down the stairs first.

“No, you go.”

Left alone, he took a last look round the room at the detritus of poverty and squalor that had once been a home, then turned and followed Charlie down the stairs.

Then things began to move quickly. Bertha was heaved onto a stretcher and carried downstairs, not easily — it took four men, and even then they grunted and strained. Mercifully, she’d stopped apologizing and lay with her eyes closed, unconscious or dead. Behind them, Charlie was still arguing with the man with the squeaky voice. In the end he simply turned his back and walked away. “Bloody little Hitler.”

Outside, fire hoses snaked across the street and pools of black water reflected the sullen, red glare in the sky. Paul followed the stretcher across to the ambulance. He recognized Neville’s bull-necked shape as he jumped down from the cab and came round to open the door. They exchanged a few words; terse, impersonal. At the last moment, Paul turned back. “Where you taking her?”

“Guy’s.”

Paul raised a hand in acknowledgment, splashing through a puddle of stinking water on his way to rejoin the team.

—

THE ALL CLEAR went just after five o’clock. Back at the depot, they stared into thick white cups of dark orange tea and found little to say. Paul tried to look back over the events of the night, but everything before Bertha and after Bertha was a blur. Of course everything would be carefully timed and tabulated in the incident log, but it certainly wasn’t tabulated in his brain.

After a few minutes, Charlie stirred and stretched his legs. “You know what the Chinese say, don’t you?”

“No,” Paul said, obligingly. “What do the Chinese say?”

“If you save somebody’s life it belongs to you. I mean, like you become responsible for that person. Mind, I think it might just be if you stop them killing themselves, I’m not sure. But it’s not a very nice thought, is it, when you think of some of the people we’ve saved? I mean, that poor old bugger pissing in a bag, imagine having him around for the rest of your life.”

“He was all right,” Brian said. “Happy as Larry. No, the one that’d worry me is that woman tonight. God, the size of her. And she’d pissed herself.”

“I’ve met her before,” Paul said. “She’s a medium.”

“Is she?” Charlie said. “Me mam was a great one for the spuggies. Couldn’t see anything in it meself.” He looked up. “Ah, here they are. We thought you’d got lost.”

Walter came towards them, rubbing his hands, his cheeks purplish with cold. “By heck, it’s nippy out there.”

Paul finished his tea. He didn’t fancy going round to the van for pasties with the others. The ambulance drivers went to the same van and he didn’t much fancy bumping into Elinor’s friends. Outside, he stood on the pavement taking in deep gulps of air. Alive. It wasn’t so much a thought as a pulse that throbbed in every vein in his body. His heart was beating so hard he could see the quiver in his fingertips. A voice hailed him: Sandra. Had she been waiting for him? The thought that perhaps she had, produced more throbbing, but farther down.

“Bad night?” she asked.

“So-so. How about you?”

She shrugged. “All right.”

People were watching them. He saw Charlie and Brian exchange a sly grin, then look away, but he didn’t care. His previous — very minor — infidelities had been conducted with iron discretion, but not this one. Part of the feeling of being outside time was that nothing seemed to matter very much. Nothing he said or did now would have consequences. If he’d stopped to think about it, even for a second, he’d have known at once it wasn’t true, but he felt it to be true.

So they linked arms and walked the few hundred yards to his studio. Neither of them said very much. He was amazed by the new day, intensely aware of all those for whom it had never dawned: the dead, lined up on mortuary slabs or lying, still unrecovered, under mountains of rubble. He felt their bewilderment, the pain of truncated lives. So what right did he have to despise Mrs. Mason, her ignorance, her superstition, when in his own experience he knew how porous was the membrane that divides the living from the dead?