John Redwood from the thingy unit, the Policy Unit, bottom right corner of Moose’s ‘Briefing Bios’ document; John Redwood pacing around saying, ‘After all that, I’ve left the bloody speech in there!’ Another guy saying, ‘We need to cut the Kinnock stuff. Where’s Ronnie um? We need to yes recast in case of —’ People seemed to fall into two camps, the panicked and the merely inconvenienced. Another dinosaur rumble from the building. ‘Back, back, get back.’
A fireman came out carrying a box of teacups, set it down on the ground and ran back in. A paramedic said, ‘Water from the hose. Eyebaths.’ People staggering blind, rubbing at their eyes, she saw them now, saw them quietly forming a queue. She was so grateful for this minor demonstration of order. She wiped the tears from her eyes.
Sir Keith Joseph was wearing silk pyjamas and a fine patterned dressing gown. He looked miraculously clean sitting there on a red box of government papers. He was humming and rocking very slightly from side to side.
‘Have you seen Daniel, is he staying here?’
‘Have you seen Amy, was she staying here?’
‘There’s coffee and wine in the Metropole, bar opened, Blitz spirit.’
‘Metropole evacuated, another bomb.’
‘Get her back to Downing Street.’
‘There’s no other bomb.’
‘She won’t go.’
‘Fuck’s sake.’
‘Skipper!’
‘Police stations.’
‘She’s safe.’
‘Have you seen my wife?’
‘Second device.’
‘Hospital.’
‘What to do?’
‘We’ve been married thirty years.’
No one wanted to help her find her dad. Surfer John talked to the policemen. They wanted names of staff, a floor plan.
A cat ran across the road in several smooth leaps, ears pinned back, body lengthening and lowering as it crept under a car — Barbara. Her tail disappearing, only the yellow eyes aglow.
Glass shattered.
‘Get back!’
Voices and torches, dust, luminous jackets, yellow tape, bathrobes, dust, police, cameras, lights, dust. A helicopter had begun to hover in the sky.
Dan’s mother had been taken in by Mrs Whelan: cocoa and a bath. When he walked into the living room he found her sitting on the sofa. Books on the shelves had been arranged according to their colours, yellows blending into greens, the Whelans’ OCD thing. Outside, smoke still poured from his home.
He stood in front of her. ‘Ma,’ he said. She complained and leaned to the left. The TV was in the corner, murmuring in black and white. She said she was trying to watch it.
He sat beside her and turned the volume up. Minutes and minutes of pointless shite before the newscaster said Mrs Thatcher had survived. The news emptied Dan’s head. He felt only relief. He would fall into history’s footnotes, become one of its unseen failures. The newscaster’s next revelation: Alistair McAlpine was talking to Marks & Spencer about opening early, to sell clean clothes to those ‘affected’. Cut to Thatcher saying the conference would go ahead as planned, no delay to the speeches. Cut to a picture of Marks & Spencer. Marks & Spencer! A great British success story was piecing itself together. A nausea began to swell in his stomach. Cut to the Grand Hotel still standing, a chunk torn out. Cut to a doctor standing outside the Royal Sussex hospital, curly grey hair. He said the number of dead could not yet be ascertained, the rescue operation continues, so do the efforts to treat the wounded. The word ‘wounded’ crawled inside Dan. The word ‘dead’ did nothing. He turned the sound down, looked around the room. Through the window the sky was such a smooth black that it seemed a thing he ought to be able to feel, a blackboard or a piece of slate.
He tried to put his arm around his mother. She moved away. Did not even lift her chin from her hands. ‘Come here,’ he said. ‘Come here.’
His mother shook her head. Three or four women who’d been in the kitchen came into the living room now. One said, with undisguised excitement in her voice, ‘She’s lost everything, Dan. Give her time.’
He stood and said no. ‘Half the building’s being saved.’
‘What?’ his mother said.
‘Ma, there’s no fresh fire out there now, only smoke. We can rebuild.’
‘Come on, Dan.’
‘We can. Some of the belongings, Dad’s things, they’ll be salvageable. And Jones’s home is mostly OK. Don’t mistake me, these people will pay.’
She shook her head and pinched the skin of her forearm. ‘These people,’ she said.
‘We could have lost more, I’m saying.’
She laughed again. ‘Who are you talking about, Dan? Who is it you’re calling “these people”? These people are the only people here.’
He began to explain. She shook her head, did not want to learn. His skin still tingled from all the ash that had fallen upon him. His clothes stank of smoke.
‘Some things,’ he said. ‘Some of it we’ll get cleaned up and will be fine. We’ll hold on to some of it, we will. Things aren’t as bad as you think, Ma.’
Slack skin, liver spots, eyes greyer than before. She seemed to have aged ten years in the last two hours. The other women in the room were whispering. She said, ‘Things aren’t as bad as you think, Dan? True. Things are worse than you think. Being general, they’re much, much worse.’
‘No.’
‘Catch yourself on, Dan. You no longer look like my son.’
He tried not to linger on this.
‘Insurance,’ one of the women said, as if insurance covered families like his in neighbourhoods like this.
Kind Mrs Whelan arrived bearing a teapot and an assortment of mugs. She settled her tray on the table, touched it twice.
His mother spoke again. ‘I didn’t know what was happening, Catty.’ A nickname unused for years. ‘A brick came through the bedroom. I was watching the little TV in the bedroom about the bomb and the brick — a brick, you know? I mean I was expecting something but. The brick came through like this. I looked out the back. A brick like they knew. The garden was having a fire. I took a couple of the half-good cookbooks and went out like this for the door.’
‘It’s OK,’ he said.
‘Why weren’t you here, Dan?’
‘I was with friends.’
‘Friends. You’re never this late.’
‘This time I was.’
‘Where are my cookbooks? The cookbooks are out there. I couldn’t find the golf club. You expect me to believe.’
‘What?’
‘That the timing.’
‘What?’
‘A coincidence,’ she said. She was beginning to weep, to shake.
‘Stop it,’ he said. He told the women to leave the room. They did not leave. ‘Ma, it’s OK.’
‘The news,’ she said, vicious. ‘Look at it. I had a phone call! Hour before the brick. They said that. And. And Provos boys, those boys with the scarves, they’d been hanging around an hour before and I heard that —’
‘What do you mean? What did you hear?’
She was crying.
‘Stop it,’ he said. ‘Don’t cry on me. You’re not making sense.’
‘The news,’ she said. ‘The news.’