Three Hours(82)
Mr Marr doesn’t answer. He doesn’t answer. Mr Marr would talk to him if he could. Pain is muddling his thoughts, taking up too much room in his head. Why isn’t he answering?
But he can’t worry about Mr Marr, not till Basi is safe, just like he couldn’t worry about Hannah earlier, not till he’d got Basi to the beach, because he’s not big enough to worry about more than one person that he loves at the same time, and later he will hate himself for that, but now he just has to find Basi.
He could be in the woods near to Junior School or further away if he ran for longer, or not in the woods at all but on the path down to the beach. And the snow is so dense he can barely see in front of him.
He stumbles and falls heavily, pushing the jagged piece of metal shrapnel deeper into his right thigh. The same leg that was broken in Aleppo when the building collapsed on top of him. He lies on the snow, panting, trying to overcome the pain and get up again.
He remembers Mama’s slender fingers broken and bruised from digging for him, Baba’s hands bloody, but both of them smiling like it was the happiest day of their lives as they pulled him free.
Baba is dead and he left Mama behind; nobody digging for him now.
Only him to look for Basi.
He gets up, dragging his injured leg behind him.
There’s so much snow falling around him, like it’s isolating him in his own tiny spot in the world.
*
In the shed the noises are getting closer. Basi takes his hands out of his anorak sleeves and puts them over his ears, but he can still hear the creaks and groans. He closes his eyes and remembers the noises of the sea at night, the boat creaking, the black sky raining wet darkness on to them, and you were so frightened and cold you didn’t think anything good could ever happen ever again. Then Rafi turned on his laser pointer and shone it up at the darkness and made a magic shimmery tunnel of falling raindrops from their boat right up into the top of the black sky.
‘It’s all right. Don’t worry. I’ll come and find you.’
He must’ve told Rafi where he is; must’ve done.
*
Two minutes ago, the young police UAV operator with a headset under her hijab, who’s been hunting for a terrorist drone in the relatively small space of sky above the pottery room, spotted a dark shape amongst the snow but it disappeared. They are taking stills from the footage and enlarging the image to decipher what she saw.
There’s still time, Rose says to herself, thirty-eight minutes until Jamie Alton opens fire.
‘The girl on TV, who saw the glint at the top of the high ropes course, does anyone know where she was speaking from?’ Thandie asks.
‘The library,’ Amaal says. ‘She was trying to get medical help for their head teacher.’
‘Jesus,’ Rose says. She has a sudden glimpse into one of many stories that are playing out simultaneously here and she feels again this sense that she isn’t at the heart of things; that she is skimming surfaces and imposing metallic rationality but what is happening is human and extreme and she wants to leave this vehicle and go into the school itself. Which will accomplish what, exactly, Rose? Bloody hell, stop being so self-indulgent and focus on what you’re here to do.
Rose’s team and other officers have spoken to staff but none of them can give any information on 14 Words, none of them even knew of its existence, let alone that a pupil was involved. The police told them they had to keep the information about 14 Words confidential. ‘But not from the kids inside the school, surely?’ Neil Forbright had said to her. ‘They deserve to know who is attacking them; to be trusted.’ She’d told him that actually, yes, it did include them. But she thinks that the teachers as well as the kids are not used to being obedient, and she likes them for it.
An officer has spoken to the gardener who saw a possible intruder outside the maintenance shed but he couldn’t give a description; the man’s back was towards him, his hood up.
*
The stench in the library is stronger: vomit and urine; fear and captivity. The footsteps are coming towards them. They stop outside the door. They are all holding their bodies rigid and still, holding their breaths. Hannah joins Ed and Frank, sitting next to them, with her back to the books and the door, the three of them squashed together. She’s worried about leaving Mr Marr but the main thing is to stop the gunman getting inside, because she thinks the first person he’ll kill will be Mr Marr.
She feels a shove against her back, and she and Ed and Frank push back.
She thinks of people smugglers trying to shove Rafi and Basi down into the hold, where you would be drowned first or suffocated by the fumes of the engine, hundreds of them below deck. Rafi had held on to Basi and pushed back.
The door doesn’t open any further.
He knocks on the door, tap-tap, like he’s asking to come in; a joke.
Soon he’ll realize it’s their bodies pressing against the door and he’ll shoot; splashes of purple, a wrecked time machine, a smashed lighthouse lamp, and everything going dark.
She thinks of Dad’s arm around her and his voice, Courage, mon brave; and she must tell him that she’s had him with her all through this, because they’ve been growing a little apart, not in big obvious ways, but in small important ways, and now she knows they haven’t really grown apart at all.
If she’s going to die, it’s easier to think about Dad. No one can take away the time she’s had with him, years and years together and memories and words handed down like watches.