She stood for a minute, gasping for breath. The lift? No, she’d be seen, she was in enough trouble already. Instead, she walked in the other direction, turned right along a side corridor and out through the double doors at the end. There was a ramp leading up to a yard in which the mortuary vans turned, but it was a steep climb. She had to keep stopping to get her breath.
“You all right, love?” one of the drivers asked.
She nodded and, not wanting to attract any more attention, took shelter behind a parked van. Well, that’s me job down the drain, she thought. But perhaps not; he hadn’t asked for her name. Nah, but they’d know who she was. She wasn’t exactly easy to miss. What the hell was she supposed to do now? If she lost the job, she’d be depending on the seances, and it wasn’t enough. Would’ve been if she got her fair share of the house, but she didn’t. Blood-sucking bastards. No, the only way she was going to make money was to go back to the ports, and give them what they wanted: spirits they could see and touch. More cheesecloth up her fanny. Whatever they’d done to her insides that time, it had left a bloody big hole. Which was…convenient. She mightn’t have been much use giving birth to the living, but my God she was a dab hand giving birth to the dead.
All this time, while she was worrying about money and paying the rent, she’d been feeling the soles of his feet, how hard and cold they were, and, at the same time, seeing that purple, howling, convulsed dwarf, whose long, delicate fingers had clawed the air. That’s it. When you come right down to it, what else matters? Oh, my boy. My poor, poor boy.
NINETEEN
The raids came thick and fast, all night, every night. Paul had more or less made up his mind he was going to die and this acceptance freed him from fear and moral scruple. Nothing quite like the proximity of death to make you feel entitled to grab anything that’s going. What he wanted, though, was not easily got. He didn’t want casual sex, still less commercial sex; he wanted precisely what he couldn’t have. The girls he’d kissed and fumbled when he was a boy, the excitement of those first encounters, back home, before he left for London.
Gemma, especially — he thought a lot about her. Buying fish and chips from Sweaty Betty’s, newspaper dark with grease and vinegar, kissing her good night on her doorstep, tasting salt on her lips, pushing her not-entirely-reluctant fingers down onto his groin, then her dad throwing open the bedroom window and demanding to know what sort of time they thought this was. Slinking away, after a final, clumsy kiss, exhilarated, sticky and ashamed.
Living, as he now did, in one room with a gas ring and a bathroom down the stairs, it was easy to feel like a student again. Everything: his clothes, his towels, even, for all he knew, his hair and skin smelled of oil paint and turps. Every morning, when he came off duty, he made himself a cup of tea and went to look out of the window at the sunlit street. The houses had a dazed look, as if buildings, no less than people, could marvel at another day of life. But then — unless he was so tired he really had to sleep — he started work, and he worked most of the day. Sleep was for later, for the afternoon, when the light was changing.
On one particularly fine morning, he opened the window and leaned out into the street. No bombs had fallen here last night, so no clouds of billowing black smoke marred the flawless beauty of this day. And there, in one of the houses opposite, was a girl. She was looking out into the street, exactly as he was doing, chafing her bare arms against the morning chill. As she leaned farther out, he realized she was almost naked, no more than a skimpy camisole half covering her breasts. He felt a delight in looking at her that was both sensual and innocent, and then she turned in his direction and he saw that it was Sandra Jobling. At the same moment, she recognized him. He expected her to withdraw in confusion, but instead, to his amazement, she leaned even farther out, raised her arm and waved.
He remembered kissing her, though now it seemed like an episode in a dream. They’d been going off duty, the All Clear had only just sounded, and he’d been light-headed with exhaustion and relief. Kissing her then had seemed the most natural thing in the world. He remembered the dryness of her lips, the mingled smell of smoke and soap on damp skin. That was only eight or nine days ago, though it seemed much longer. With the destruction of his house, a door had clanged shut, cutting him off from his previous life. From his adult life — curiously, his youth seemed to become more and more vivid every day.
With a final wave, Sandra withdrew into the darkness of her room. From then on, it was a matter of waiting to go on duty. But he worked as usual until the light changed, then snatched an hour or so of sleep, before setting off to walk the short distance to Russell Square. He often spent the last hours before going on duty lying on the grass, watching the sun dip below the trees.
Despite the continuing hot weather, there were signs of autumn everywhere. Rows of abandoned deck chairs lined the grassy open spaces, some of them nursing lapfuls of dead leaves. Ignoring them, he lay on the ground, wanting to smell cut grass and crumbly soil, slept for another twenty minutes or so, then, dry-mouthed and sun-sozzled, set off in search of a drink.
The streets were emptying fast, the day’s spaciousness narrowing to a single crack of light. Soon would come blackout and the wail of sirens, and people were hurrying home to face another night. He was about to turn into the Russell Hotel when a voice hailed him from the other side of the road. Sandra. Oh my God. For a moment he saw her objectively: a stocky, fearless young woman, bright, amused eyes peering through an overgrown fringe. Not pretty, oh no, God, not pretty. What did he care? She was amazing.
She ran across the road, arriving in front of him, breathless. “Fancy a drink?”
There wasn’t an ounce of flirtatiousness about her, but then they were colleagues, co-workers, comrades. Asking a colleague to go for a drink means precisely nothing. He was going to have to play this very carefully.
He nodded towards the hotel. “I was just going in there.”
“Bit posh, isn’t it?”
“No, it’s all right.”
“I think I’d rather sit out.”
They found a pub that had put benches on the pavement. She asked for a Guinness, though normally she drank bitter: in fact, she could sink a pint of beer as fast as any man on the team. The area round the bar was packed with businessmen, snatching one last drink before returning to wives and children in the safety of the country. He carried the drinks outside and sat opposite her. They didn’t speak much at first, just sat in the sunshine, looking around them with the smugness of stayers-on. It had become a big part of your identity, whether you spent your nights in London or merely came in during the day to work. More important now than sex or class: whether you got on that evening train. Or not.
“Didn’t I see you at the seance?” he asked, feeling the silence had gone on long enough.
“Yes, Angela wanted to go.”
“Funny, I hadn’t got her down as a—”
“As a what?”
Superstitious, neurotic loony. “I just didn’t know she was interested.”
“Just curious, I think. I was surprised to see you there.”
“I met her, in this square, actually, a couple of weeks ago. I was curious. What about you?”
“She used to come to the Spiritualist Church near us, before the war. Me mam goes now and then. It’s not a big thing with her. You know, if she gets a message from me nanna she’s pleased, but she doesn’t make a lot of it. More of a night out, really. She always says if it wasn’t for the spuggies, she wouldn’t get out.”