Everyone Brave Is Forgiven(82)

At Billiter Street they understood straight away that it would be nothing like the first callout. A crowd was pressing, in various states of dress from pajamas to duffel coats, with a policeman struggling to keep them to one side of the street. With the raid over, people had been making their way home from the public shelters. And now this. Mary used the horn and nosed the ambulance through the crowd.

When they got to the center of the damage there were a dozen houses down in one terrace. The ones where the bomb had hit were simply gone, while those at the blast’s extremity gaped open. The scene was ten minutes old, and no one knew which houses had been occupied. People milled in the dark and yelled for their families. More police arrived and tried to push people back. An ARP patrol searched by torchlight in the shattered houses.

A woman was struggling with the police, demanding to look for her son. She was hysterical, hitting out.

Mary took her arm. “We can look for him. Tell me where he is.”

The woman pointed at a house. The front was gone, and inside Mary could see ARP men playing their torch beams over the interior walls. It was not a wallpaper she would have chosen.

The missing boy’s mother said that they had just got back from the shelter at the corner of the street, and that she had left her boy inside while she went to fetch a candle from a neighbor.

“Wait for us here,” said Mary.

She went into the house with Hilda. They climbed over the pile of brick that had been the front wall. They found the ARP men picking through the front room and the kitchen at the back.

“Anyone?” said Mary.

The men shook their heads.

“Upstairs then,” she said to Hilda.

They went up together. The banister was gone, fallen into the hallway below, and the stairs hung from the party wall they were keyed in to. The staircase swayed, but it held. There was a stair runner up the middle of the treads, patterned with a broad stripe up the center. At the head of the stairs was a bathroom, and by the flame of Mary’s lighter they could see there was no one in it. The ceiling was down, the contents of the attic poking through the joists in a muddle of albums and suitcases.

On the landing that ran back parallel with the stairs, there was a fecal smell in the air—a soil pipe must have cracked. The landing gave on to two bedrooms. Hilda took the first and Mary the second. They trod as softly as they could, since the floor was unsupported at the street end and the whole thing was bouncing nastily. She flicked on her lighter, looked for a moment, then snapped it off and knelt in the dark, forcing breath in and out of her body. In the snap of light she had seen a boy lying still, his face gray, his body covered in shreds of blue flannel pajamas and some foul-smelling mess that must have come from the broken waste pipe.

“Hilda,” she said. “Could you come as quick as you can?”

Outside, the mother was still shouting, the fear in her voice more awful now the crowd was quietening down. Mary made sure that the place she was kneeling couldn’t be seen from the street. She flicked her lighter back on, and set it on an upended toy box.

“Oh,” said Hilda when she came in.

They knelt beside the boy’s body. Hilda put her ear to his mouth.

“Anything?” said Mary.

Hilda shook her head. The mess was not from a broken pipe. The boy’s insides were out.

“Oughtn’t we to pump his chest?” said Mary.

“How should I know?” said Hilda in a small voice. “It might make it worse.”

“Worse how?”

Hilda knelt very still with her back straight.

“Come on, Hilda, what shall we do?”

“I think it might be hopeless,” said Hilda.

“But there must be something we can do. There must have been something in the training?”

“I’m sorry,” said Hilda, covering her face with her hands.

The boy was brown-haired, slight, eight or nine years old. His eyes were open and his gray face was fixed in an agony that was hard to look at. In his bedroom there were postcards on the wall: silhouettes of every aircraft type. On a chest of drawers was a trophy collection of the kind boys had: fallen iron splinters, a brass shell case from a Bofors gun, a scrap of tortured aluminium that looked as if it might have flown. The metal on its ridges had been polished to a shine by the boy’s fingers. Outside, the mother in a raw voice was shouting, “Mouse! Mouse!”

Mary stood, took her lighter and left the room. Outside on the warped landing, she fought back nausea. The stripe along the center of the carpet was not a pattern after all. Even now the stain was widening as the sisal took it up. Mary lit a cigarette. The boy had been downstairs when the bomb hit and he had dragged himself up to his room, and died.

“Hilda?” she said.

Hilda came, and Mary passed her the lit cigarette. Hilda couldn’t hold it, and so Mary held it to her lips for her while she drew on it, then exhaled.

“What are we doing?” said Mary. “What are the two of us doing?”

Hilda hugged herself tight around the stomach. “Don’t.”

“Remember after that first raid? When we took a cab to see the mess?”

“But everyone was doing it, it wasn’t just—”

Mary cut her off. “Do you think we’ve seen enough now?”

“But it’s different now. We’re helping.”