‘Might be better if the lad went inside if it’s safe to do that,’ suggests the man who introduces himself as the lead officer, while his crew and three soldiers are slamming doors and shouting to each other.
The fireman’s radio crackles; he confirms their location. Everyone is expecting her to do something with the boy, why her, why should she be any better at this than Edmund?
‘Come along, Michael.’ Diana relents under the pressure and holds out both hands. ‘We don’t say no to a soldier, do we? One, two. One, two.’
His weight is that of an inanimate object which has no momentum. Diana pulls more forcefully, catches hold of the sleeve of his borrowed coat, feels the strength of her grasp, tensing the muscles up her arm, even into her jawline and her neck, but he wriggles out of the over-large anorak so she falls with a fistful of air and he stays standing.
‘Let me help you, Michael,’ she pleads as she struggles to her feet.
‘No.’ Mikey starts to run to his uncle. ‘No.’
‘Leave him be,’ cries Grace.
But Diana catches up with the child and grabs him again by the arm. His head turns sideways, his mouth is open, and his teeth fasten on her flesh.
‘Call your dog off, sir!’ shouts one of the soldiers. ‘We’re going to use our search and rescue dog.’
‘Get away from me. I hate you, I hate you.’
‘Edmund, please . . . he bit me.’
The world is a cacophony of sounds, the words and requests hit Edmund like stones on the back of his head; he does not know which way to turn.
‘I’m sure he didn’t mean to hurt you, Di,’ he calls. ‘Mikey, stand by me here. Monty, come.’ He gathers in the child and the dog, keeps them close; they are both quivering. Monty listens to him, head up and eager for the fetch command as if they are at a shoot, waiting for the carcasses to fall from the sky. Over at the ruin, a Germen Shepherd noses between the masonry. It is a long, slow process, unreal to all of them except the emergency crews. This is their third call-out, the ambulance driver explains; one to a chimney crashed into a sitting room where an old lady slept on the sofa to be close to the fire for warmth, another to an explosion where a gas pipe had ruptured.
‘And were they all right?’ Edmund hardly dares to ask.
The man nods. ‘We haven’t seen anything quite like this,’ he says.
Which is probably why someone is filming it, thinks Edmund. He doesn’t ask who they are; nowadays you sort of accept that a filming is part of the happening, and, anyway, John seems to be sorting them out.
Finally, a subtle difference in the body language of the dog and the fire-fighters.
‘We’ve got something,’ confirms the handler. ‘Positive!’
‘Have they found Mummy?’
‘Bless him,’ says Grace, to no one in particular. Diana is all on her own and the housekeeper takes a step in that direction to comfort her – Valerie is her sister after all, half-sister – but she stops. It isn’t as if her offer of support would be welcome even if she made it. Instead, Grace is overwhelmed by the sight of the back of the little boy’s head and the tall, tense man beside him, and how dreadful this is for Edmund too, given everything that’s already happened here, and she offers up a little prayer. It’s not something she usually does, but what else can you do at a time like this, apart from hope that there’s someone or something out there who can put things right?
Edmund is a man accustomed to prayer, but ironically he finds himself without handholds, wrestling with the binary future which lies ahead of the boy, just as it did for him, once. With your mother or without. Mikey has stepped just a little away from him and he lets him go. It is a truth that this will happen to the boy on his own. There is no other way.
Chill creeps over her skin with insect feet. Diana puts her head between her knees. I will look up and they will be carrying her out saying, she’s alive, it’s a miracle, and the nine o’clock news will confirm it’s a miracle like the pope does with the confirmation of saints and the healing of sinners, except she can see Valerie as she was when she was small, running in from the garden when her dad gets in from work, face red, bleeding knees and broken fingernails and she will tell on me, all sorts of lies she’ll say, about what I did, how it is all my fault. Everyone will believe her. Tracing the tooth marks on her arm, just one budding drop of blood where the skin is broken, Diana prays for Valerie to be dead. Can she really do that? She can. Deep down inside, that is what she’s always wanted since Valerie arrived in this world – for Valerie to be gone. Leaning forwards onto her hands, she presses into the grass and pushes herself slowly up onto her heels.
‘Ed,’ she calls over, weakly.
He doesn’t even turn round. ‘Darling! Keep hoping.’
‘Quiet!’ The call went up.
One of the firemen is calling out, he is lying flat on his stomach with his head at a peculiar angle. ‘Valerie? We’re here to help you now, Valerie.’ He is stretching into the bowels of the collapsed tower. ‘I’ve got her wrist!’
The lead officer shouts over abruptly. ‘Keep hold of the boy, it’s not safe.’
Edmund holds the child tight. ‘Wait with me. He’s got her wrist, they’ve found Mummy, we just need to wait.’
‘Mum, it’s me. It’s me, Mikey. Can she hear me?’
‘Do we have a pulse?’
A small scurry of stones slides down the fractured walls of the tower.
‘Stand back, stand back.’
The waiting. For all of them, the cold waiting will never be forgotten. Having been so sure Valerie must be dead, now Diana chews the very real possibility of her living, a piece of meat impossible to swallow or spit out in company. Mikey is so sure she must be alive, his faith makes him jump up and down on the spot, energised by hope and his unshakeable faith in his mother.
Inch by inch, the fireman is sliding out of the collapsed tower, climbing over the rubble slowly, so slowly, two or three others clustering around him. He is shaking his head. They are turning away, tired now, they seem, all action ceased.
Dead then. After all that. Her little Valerie gone. Breath is snatched from Diana, as if death is catching.
Since he has been wound up like a jack in the box, Mikey is still jumping despite the weight of Edmund’s arm heavy on his shoulders, he cannot do anything else. Up and down, round and round he goes, he does not know where to go, which way to turn.
That way is the bronze boy and the wood and a little garden sunk beneath stone walls where you might hide and never be found out; that way, behind the house, just fields and woods and sheep ganging up, and he’s never been anywhere like that in his life, he would not know how to live in a place like that, all on his own; and over there, the woods with the giant Christmas trees where the birds were circling and screaming last night, they were the most frightening of all. But past the coach house, that’s where the drive goes, he can’t remember how it goes or where it goes, but it goes, away from here, all the way to the tall gates and then the road and then the town and then home where she’ll be in the kitchen, feeding the cat or maybe in the bedroom drying her hair or maybe in the yellow sitting room finishing her jigsaw. Where does this bit go? Mikey runs. Edmund is calling after him, but he runs all the same, very fast, faster than he knew he could. It is vital he outruns what has happened to stop it catching up with him. The cattle grid stops him. It isn’t that he can’t balance on the rails or avoid the gaps in between them, it is more that if he does cross it, he doesn’t know who he’d be, if he’d even still have the same name. Behind him Edmund is coming towards him, slowly, with his arms out wide.
‘Fuck