Jonathan Lee - High Dive

‘No way.’

‘Well, I’ve just got a feeling, that’s all. Who knows. The hospital stuff seems to have made them closer, and apparently she’s just split up with someone. A guy who sounds suspiciously like Mr Barry from English.’

‘Barry Balloon Eater?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Brutal. I don’t know how Bazza does it. But you’d feel all right about it, would you? If your dad and her got together?’

‘I actually really like her.’

‘You do? You never seemed to.’

‘No, she’s good. She sort of always says what she thinks.’

‘So do I,’ Susie said. ‘I mean, that’s what people say about me, anyway.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Did you see her? Mrs T?’

‘No. You?’

‘Few seconds,’ Susie said. ‘Threw an egg.’

‘As in stink bomb?’

‘As in free range.’

‘Three points?’

‘Got the bodyguard.’

‘Ah, two points.’

‘One max.’

‘No splat?’

‘Hard-boiled.’

‘Ah.’

‘I wasn’t sure how long to keep them in for,’ Susie said. She nodded at a couple of the other protesters, packing up to leave. ‘We could have one of our beach walks, Frey-Hey?’

‘Now? It’s pretty dark.’

‘Only if you want to. It was just an idea.’

Freya twisted on the ball of one foot, a soldier type of thing. An idea. ‘OK then. Yessir. Let’s go.’

She began a slow march in the direction of the sea, wishing she had her warm jacket to hand. It was the kind of stupid walk Moose used to do to amuse her when she was small, ill, afraid, totally snot-soaked or bogged down in fever. He did it while her mother fetched a cool damp facecloth.

She paused to give Susie time to slip her rucksack on. Stared into the dark. Brown leaves patterned the pavement. They must have blown a long way. There were no trees along this part of the King’s Road. There was the smell of turning earth and –

For some reason she was in the road, on her stomach, in the road. Hands gritty, stinging. On her belly on the ground.

There was noise all around her. Not quite a thunderous rumble, not quite a shattering crack. It was a single deep sound with an unbotched quality, the force of a command, and it stretched out and out, thinning into a vicious whine, and Susie, incredibly — Susie was lying on the other side of the road, against the iron railings.

Freya’s arms all glittery. Glitter for some reason in the tiny downy hairs. Muck in her mouth that she now spat out. The air was fogging up and she heard people moaning. Dust was pattering down all around her.

MOOSE WAS IN his office when the ceiling came down. As he fell to the floor he saw himself in a car on a road, wheels rolling as he drove down the middle lane to nowhere, vehicles roaring to the left and the right — a race, a dream. Then his sticky eyes were opening and he saw that the room had become a cloud, a malarial thickness to the air. There were places where the wall had crumbled away and he’d been looking for a letter, had he? Correspondence containing a promise of promotion. His leg was trapped under a concrete block.

He coughed and thick black sludge found his hand. Pain sprung in his chest; he fought for breath. His office door was hanging off its hinges. Slants of electric light came through the old spoiled wall. His leg. His face. He heard someone shouting ‘Please!’ and realised it was him.

He touched his cheek. A string of something sticky came away. It clung to his fingers and he didn’t understand. Plaster dust was coming down in fuzzed aimless flurries, everything eerily quiet. His leg was trapped. Fractured hatstand, dulled bricks. Broken painting in its frame. Couldn’t move his leg. He was wheezing. The world was pressing at his chest. Bits of lamp and bits of table all around. Outbreaks of shredded furniture. The atmosphere was larded up with incredible dust and nothing here was whole. He was taking air in quick breaths, ah, ah, ah . He coughed. Vomited. Light crept from the doorway. He was a moth inside a lantern for a moment. The heaps of debris all around were so rich in different textures of grey-and-black crud that they achieved a kind of abstraction. Evil taste in his mouth. Ah, ah, ah . He took it all in, this small wrecked room, the astonishing evidence of his situation.

Slapping Susie. Susie saying ‘Gurghh’ and opening her eyes. There was blood on her chin and her mouth was fully huge. Her left foot was twisted round the wrong way, Freya saw. Susie looked and screamed. Mrs Cooke was over there in a blood-spattered dress, begging the night air for water. She was holding her fox drape in one hand.

The Grand Hotel. The brickwork wedding cake her father had encouraged her to admire so many thousand times. She was thinking of the cliché that you can’t believe your eyes. The night sky had eaten into the roofline. The wound in the building went three floors deep. Smoke gushed up out of the dark space where rooms were supposed to live. The railings of balconies arced down, trailing off into nothing. Rubble tumbled in from left and right. She didn’t know what had gone wrong with the rules of the world. She stood there with all she’d learned. It amounted to nothing.

A man staggered out of the hotel’s entrance, covered in dust and moving onto all fours, scrabbling over rubble, an expression of wary amusement on his face, unsure if he was being teased. He stood and looked back at the building. He shook his head as if the Grand had badly let him down. Twisty bits of balcony at Freya’s feet. Pieces of brick and blown-out glass. Susie seemed to survey the damage too, then remembered her foot was fractured. She started to scream again.

Freya lay down with her friend and took her in her arms, spoons, didn’t know what else to do. ‘Be all right, Sooz. It’ll be all right.’ Everything so quiet. What do you do with a foot that’s the wrong way round? A dozen people staggering out in ripped dresses and suits, indecent and ashamed, their hair all turned to grey, and why were none of them screaming?

‘Hello?’ Susie said. ‘Hello?’ She was shaking.

Freya held her. ‘Best wait here for help.’

Another man coming out of the entrance. He had a beer glass in his hand. The liquid was grey, the same grey powder that coated his shoulders and shoes, like a cape on his shoulders and toecaps on his shoes, and he took a sip which turned into a spit and vomit shot out of his mouth. A woman ran out in her underwear shouting ‘Bomb’ — good, someone should be shouting, good — and then an old man, naked except for one sock, one shoe, emerged from behind a pile of bricks in a way that couldn’t be real. His skin was pink and slack down one side of his body. You could tell he didn’t yet know he was hurt. The not-knowing gave him a kind of power. She closed her eyes and held Susie tighter.

Rumbling building. Soft chatter. Susie was mewing and rocking back and forth. A cloud of grey puffed out from the hotel’s entrance and silently swallowed the moon. Freya watched the cloud move towards her and Susie. It did so with a dreamlike lack of speed. It was dust, not smoke, just dust from a thousand different surfaces and spaces. It was expelled all at once, disgusting dust. It seemed for a moment like it might pick them up, this dust cloud, and drop them somewhere clean and sane.

She was facing the water, coughing and spitting, and the cloud was scribbling out to sea. Some thoughts had settled into place and the first was My dad is in there, oh God. He’s in there, isn’t he? He is.

The ceiling groaned and the walls coughed up rubble. Moose winced and covered his head with his hands, saying ‘Please’. Hot chips of plaster came down through the soup at different speeds. Heavy brickwork followed. Pipes and tiles clattering. Chunks of stone burst lazily around him, sending up more dust, making cruel music, and something sharp and hot found his ear and caused more wetness to flower there. He screamed ‘No!’ as a dull force shoved him in the throat and ‘No’ again as more music consumed him.