‘They’ve gone,’ Annie said.
The two old men sat with their backs turned, intent on the racing. It occurred to Annie that she was alone with Steve for the first time since the bombing and the blackness. The first time that they had been effectively out of sight and out of earshot of the nurses or the other patients.
Together the two of them seemed infinitely isolated, even within the tiny, cut-off world of the two hospital wards. For a moment Annie could have believed that reality extended no further than the stuffy air enclosed in the day room. She looked down again at their linked hands.
‘It’s very strange,’ she whispered.
‘What’s strange, Annie?’
‘This.’
Her hand moved in his, no more than a faint tensing of the muscles. Steve was wishing that she could have brought herself to say, You and me, or Us, here. He remembered her telling him about Matthew. I chose the easy option. The safe option. That’s what she had said. He looked at her, trying to take the measure of her courage. But Annie had infinite courage. He knew that.
‘I want to ask you such a lot of things,’ Annie said. The words tumbled out in a rush. ‘All sorts of things. Ends, to tie up everything you told me when we were buried. I think about them instead of going to sleep. Cowardly, because I’m afraid of the nightmares.’
‘Ask me,’ Steve said.
Annie smiled. ‘I wanted to ask you if you felt angry,’ she said. ‘About what they did to us. Whoever they are.’
He had been looking at her eyes. The blue was intensified by the dark shadows around them.
‘Angry?’ Steve thought for a moment. ‘No. Sad, for the other people. Not angry for myself. How could I be?’ That movement of her hand in his again. ‘It happened and we were there. That’s all. It’s hard to direct anger into a vacuum. I think what I feel most, now, is happy. I caught that from you, the other day. Do you feel angry, Annie?’
‘No. Not for myself. Sad for the others, like you. I feel angry for the boys’ sake, for Benjy, because he needs me. And for Martin. It was worse for him.’ Annie looked back at Steve. ‘I can’t imagine what I would have felt, or whether I would have been able to bear it. Waiting to know if Martin was alive. Waiting afterwards to find out if they could keep him alive.’
Her blue stare was level now, holding his.
‘I think you would have borne it with great courage,’ Steve said after a long moment. ‘I know how brave you are.’
‘You helped me to be brave down there.’
There was a pendulum swinging between them. It swooped from its high point, down and then up again, stirring the close air with its arcs. The bombing and their hours in the dark had set it swinging, Steve thought. Time would slow it down, and in the end it would stand still. Then they would know. He couldn’t ask her for anything while the pendulum still swung.
They sat facing each other, their hands still linked.
‘Did you think we were going to die?’ Annie asked him.
‘I was afraid, at the end, that they might not come in time.’
‘Yes. I can’t remember the end. Only you talking. You were telling me about your Nan, and when you were a little boy. You all got mixed up together, you and Thomas and Benjy. I could see you running away from me, the three of you, and I was afraid that I would never catch up with you again.’
‘And now you have,’ Steve said softly.
‘Now I have,’ she echoed.
Annie held out her other hand and he took it, folding both of hers between his own. Annie had the sense that she had been afraid of choices, and also that there was no choice now. The hours underground had changed all the neat, straight lines of her life, and the perspectives would never be the same again.
‘If we hadn’t been afraid that we would die,’ Annie said, ‘we wouldn’t have told each other all the things we did.’
‘Do you regret them?’
She looked up at him then. For a moment she saw a stranger’s face, a face as she would have seen it if she had glanced round in the doorway of the store. If nothing had happened then she would have gone on down the stairs.
But then. There had been the wind, and the thunderous noise, and the pain that held her in its fists. They had escaped from that. Relief renewed itself inside her and she felt the weightless brilliance of happiness again. It made her smile and she read the answering smile in Steve’s eyes.
He knew her thoughts. He was as close to her as her family; he was a part of herself. Not a stranger.
‘No,’ she told him. ‘I don’t regret anything.’
His hands moved over hers, warming them. Annie wanted him to reach forward and put his arms around her. He had held her in the dark, and she wanted to feel his touch again. She saw their joined hands, and the blue woollen weave of her dressing gown over her knees. She was clearly conscious of the whole of her body, patched and stitched as it was, and the slow movement of blood inside it. She felt her scars, and the new skin rawly pink at the margins. She was regenerating herself. She was suddenly almost drunk with the giddy pleasure of it, and the glow of it spread through her fingers to Steve’s.
‘Annie,’ he whispered.
They looked at each other still, motionless, silenced by the sudden need that drew them closer.
Another hermetic world, Annie thought wildly. The hospital enclosed them, just as the tangled girders and broken walls and floors had done. Did that make it all right, then?
Her skin prickled. Steve’s face was very close to hers. She looked in his eyes and saw the dark grey irises, flecked with gold.
Annie’s awareness of her body’s workings made her feel naked. The colour flooded into her cheeks and she looked down to hide the heat of it. Steve moved too and their heads bent. For a moment their foreheads touched.
At the opposite end of the room one of the old men levered himself out of his chair. There had been a muted, distantly hysterical racing commentator’s voice in the day room background, but a control button clicked on the television now and there was silence.
Steve raised his head. The circuit broke and Annie thought, No, don’t do that.
But at the same time she felt relief wash through her, cooling her skin.
‘Did your horse come in, Frank?’ Steve called. He squeezed Annie’s hands in his and then let them go. She folded them in her lap, empty.
‘Nah,’ Frank grumbled. ‘The bugger ran like a one-legged ostrich.’
He shuffled across the room towards them, peering at the clock on the window wall.
‘Five to visiting time. They’ll all be pouring in here with their talk, talk. I wish meself that they’d leave me in peace with the racing. Still,’ he winked across at Annie, ‘I wouldn’t miss the sight of Steve’s visitors. You should see ’em.’ His hands outlined explicitly in the air before he stumped off towards his ward.
Annie and Steve were laughing. Their laughter was another link, almost a safety valve.
‘He has me cast,’ Steve explained, ‘as a kind of hybrid between Warren Beatty and Frank Harris. Nothing could be further from the truth, I promise.’
‘Who’s coming to see you today?’
‘Vicky.’
‘Hm.’
Acknowledgement flickered between them, humorous, unexpressed. As if