Pat Barker - Noonday

The old woman’s cries seemed to be getting louder again — either the rescue squad was getting closer or her own sense that help was at hand had renewed her strength. Perhaps, after all, she’d be the first one out. Suddenly, they all went quiet again. Men with sweat-streaked faces stopped and stared at each other, white eyes startling in their grimy faces. A child’s head had appeared through a hole in the rubble. Nobody moved. For a long time, it seemed, nobody moved. Then the rescue-squad leader fell to his knees and, placing his hands on either side of the head, gently persuaded it to rotate, so that first one shoulder then the other and then, in a great rush, the whole body fell out of the hole. Still, no cry. People looked at each other, unable to accept the truth, but the body was small and floppy and it made no sound.

Dana, one hand across her mouth, ran to fetch a stretcher. Elinor followed to help. Only when they returned, did they see the dead child lying on the pavement. They knelt on either side of her and, not looking at each other, prepared to lift her onto the stretcher. Nobody spoke. From inside the ruined building, a voice cried out: “Livvy? My baby. Oh, my baby.”

Neville looked down at the little body. “My daughter’s that age.” It sounded almost casual: the sort of remark you might make outside the school gates. Then, bending swiftly down, he gathered her into his arms and carried her to the ambulance.

The mother was brought out half an hour later, thickly coated in dust, bleeding from a deep cut to her head, but otherwise surprisingly uninjured. “My baby,” she kept saying. “Where’s my baby?” “Won’t be long now, love,” one of the rescue workers said. Elinor wrapped a blanket round her shoulders, thinking she and Dana should take her to hospital rather than let her travel in the back of Neville’s ambulance with her dead child. But Elinor didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know what she would have wanted if this unimaginable pain had come to her. Neville took the decision for her. “You take the mother,” he said. “I’ll stay here.” He gripped the woman’s arm and helped her up the steps. “Come on, let’s get you to hospital.”

“But my daughter?”

“Don’t you worry, love. They’ll soon have her out.”

Wrapped in a red blanket, too shocked to argue, she sat down on the bench. Dana climbed in beside her and put an arm round her shoulders.

At the last moment she started to struggle, trying to throw off the blanket and jump down into the road. “I want Livvy.”

Dana restrained her. “I know, I know.”

—

THE ALL CLEAR sounded as it started to get light. The dawn wind, tainted by the smell of high explosive, brought with it the assurance they were still alive. The rescue workers breathed deeply once or twice, then got back to work.

Elinor and Dana, returning from the hospital, stood shivering against the garden railings, taking in, for the first time, the full extent of the devastation. In this thin light it looked worse than anything they’d imagined in the dark, and yet both knew that in a few days, a week at most, they might walk along this terrace and hardly notice the gap.

A warden came up and stood beside them, watching the rescue workers still passing chains of buckets down the line. He was sucking something, a boiled sweet, perhaps, or else just his gums. “It’s all very well saying Londoners can take it,” he said. “But can they? How much more of this can anybody take?”

It was the forbidden question; neither of them answered it.

The old woman was brought out an hour later, garrulous with shock, but unhurt. Her daughter, injured but alive, was pulled out a few minutes later.

“Where’s my granddaughter?” the old woman kept asking. She was still clutching her jewelry box, bright, acid-drop sunshine showing up the age spots on the backs of her hands. Dana tried to wrap a blanket round her thin shoulders, but she wasn’t having any of that. “Where’s my granddaughter?”

“She’ll be all right,” somebody said. “They’ve taken her to hospital.”

Dorothea obviously didn’t believe it. She stood looking from face to face. “I hope she didn’t suffer.”

Elinor said, “I think it would have been very quick.”

The old woman looked at her and nodded. Then she turned to her daughter, held out her hand and together the two of them climbed into the ambulance. Elinor got into the driver’s seat, checking with Dana that the two women were securely fastened in before bumping along the brick-strewn road in the direction of University College Hospital. There, she and Dana helped the two women into the entrance and handed them over to the porters, before walking out again into gritty sunshine and a song of birds.

Elinor stumbled as they walked back to the ambulance. As she reached up to open the door, Dana pushed her gently to one side. “My turn,” she said. “And I’ll drop you off.”

Standing on the pavement outside her new home, Elinor thought only about having a bath and falling into bed. Her skull seemed to have been rinsed in icy, bone-numbing water. She was incapable of thinking, or feeling, anything.

At some point he must have slept. He woke to find a cup of tea going cold on the table beside him and his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth. For a moment, it was a normal day. He lay, gazing placidly at what little he could see of the ceiling, but then memories of the night before began to surface. Out of a vortex of darkness emerged the broken body of a small child lying on the pavement. He’d picked her up, yes, and carried her to the ambulance. Her mouth had fallen open to reveal the two adult teeth at the front, not quite through yet, still shorter than the baby teeth on either side. He remembered Anne at that stage: the “wobbly tooth” she’d insisted he feel half a dozen times a day, long before it was actually wobbly at all.

And then there was the gap, the all-important gap, the visit from the tooth fairy, Anne smiling, baring her teeth to show her friends. She’d been late losing her baby teeth. And for a long time afterwards, he’d noticed her running her tongue along the edge of the grown-up tooth, which was uneven, not smooth as adult teeth are after years of biting and grinding. That little girl, last night — Livvy, was it? Her two precious grown-up teeth would never be worn smooth.

He lay in bed in the darkened room and thought of Anne, whom he hadn’t seen now for over a year. She sent him letters, of course, in the neat, joined-up writing she was so proud of, and drawings that were becoming more accurate and less imaginative all the time, but none of that made up for the lack of her physical presence. She used to get into bed with him in the mornings and her freshly baked smell made him ashamed of the sourness of his early-morning breath. “I’m smooth because I’m new,” she said. “And you’re wrinkly because you’re old, but it doesn’t matter, I still love you.” All this in an American accent, which never failed to take him by surprise. Somehow, he’d always assumed she’d speak in the same way as her parents, but she didn’t: she sounded exactly like the children she played with in kindergarten. He was smiling to himself, as he thought about the strangeness of it: his little American daughter.

Until last night, it hadn’t occurred to him that he might die and never see her again. Now, suddenly, all that ungrounded confidence disappeared, swirled away like dirty water down a plughole, leaving only a gleaming white emptiness that was the certainty of his own death.

Get up. He was doing no good lying here. And it was late, oh my God, it was late.

Downstairs, in the kitchen, he made himself a pot of tea, swishing the first gulp of hot liquid round his mouth before spitting it out. No use, he could still feel grit between his teeth. The sun strengthened, casting his shadow behind him across the tiles. God, he was tired, he was never not tired, he couldn’t remember what it was like not to be tired, and yet when he closed his eyes all he saw was the child lying on the dirty pavement. Some kind of pattern on her nightdress, he couldn’t quite remember: pink bows, was it, or teddy bears? Rags twisted into her hair. Anne hated rags — but then next day you had ringlets, like Shirley Temple, and that was still the way little girls wanted to look. Only for Livvy there’d been no next day.