The La Scala was just about the most exciting place in the whole world to me at that time. I loved going to the pictures and I saw Gone With The Wind there, and Fantasia. I was scared of the sorcerer in Fantasia and I still don’t like brooms. My mum cried in Gone With The Wind. Sometimes we had a big bag of soor plooms, sticky boiled sweets that were too big for my mouth so I couldn’t help making a noise and dribbling. We didn’t always go to the La Scala picture house. There were other ones that cost less, but it was the best treat ever to go to the La Scala. I wanted nothing more than to sink into those velvety seats and watch Mickey Mouse or Shirley Temple doing a little dance routine.
But this was different. The doors of the picture house were broken, all three of them which actually made six because they were double doors. Their elegant glass peacock pictures were broken at the neck and squeaked under my feet on the hard floor as I followed the other kids inside. There were people in the foyer and dust everywhere, even on the fancy mirrors on the walls and the counter. The brassy rails that were usually so shiny and perfect were grey and grimy. The comforting warmth of the dark brown wood was dulled and a smear of blood led through the glass from the outer door to the inner, like a red carpet for a film star.
I tiptoed over it with baby Davie slung awkwardly over my arm and went up to the pay booth. It had a big sign over it in white on black that said ‘PAY HERE’ and a perfect circle cut into the glass to speak through except it was too high for me. I had to speak through the money slot at the bottom, but there was nobody there.
I didn’t like to go through the next set of doors; I had no money to pay. The kids from my school had somehow vanished while I was taking all this in – and I felt very alone and sore, and so cold all of a sudden that I began to shake again. A group of grown-ups were talking all at once close by. I don’t know who they were, and then a boy a few years older than me suddenly shot out the door. He stood on the steps for a few minutes before darting off into the cloud of dust.
‘Stop!’ I shouted after him. ‘Don’t go out there!’ I stepped into the bloody glass to call to him. It was horrible.
‘It’s alright. He’s a message boy,’ said a woman. She was wearing a thick red jumper and a rough tweed skirt. She reminded me of Miss Weatherbeaten, my teacher. ‘We need help here. He’s gone to get help.’
‘But he’ll be killed!’ I said, panting. ‘He hasn’t got a tin hat like the one Mr Chippie has.’ The tears started to pour down my face and it hurt terribly. I was shaking and shivering. The woman in the red jumper put her arm round me.
‘Now, don’t you worry,’ she said. ‘He’s had lots of training. He knows how to get a message through.’ But her arm was shaking across my shoulders.
‘The buildings are all on fire and there are bombs dropping everywhere!’ I said. I felt very sick again. A shudder ran through me as if I’d been picked up like a rag doll. The dead baby seemed to be very heavy now and I began to lose my grip.
‘Oh, dear, I’ll get him. What’s his name?’ I let her catch the dead baby, although I couldn’t hear her properly, and I put my sore bleeding hands to my face.
‘Ow!’ I whined. ‘Ow!’ My face hurt terribly, especially when I touched it.
‘Don’t touch!’ said the woman in the red jumper. ‘You’ll only make it worse.’
‘Ow!’ I said in reply.
‘Don’t!’ she said again, louder this time, to make sure I’d heard. She took my wrist and pulled it away from my face, but my wrist hurt too. Everything seemed to hurt.
‘Ow!’ I whined through my tears. ‘I lost my wee sister Mavis!’ I sobbed a big sob, and I drew my hand across my face and patted my sore wrist where she’d held it. A stabbing pain shot across my cheek.
‘Don’t . . . .’
‘Is my mum here?’ I said, glancing at my red hands, ignoring the pain in my cheek. I started towards the inner door, ticket or no, Mavis or no. ‘He’s called Davie,’ I said, nodding at the baby and pushed the door open. ‘I think he’s dead.’
But the door was too much for me, or it was locked or someone was standing against it, because I couldn’t get it open. I tried the next one then another woman appeared from amongst the people there. She was wearing a big fur coat and under it a big shiny handbag over her shoulder. She came over to me and bent down so that our heads were close together and I couldn’t get round her and she spoke very loudly. I heard every word.
‘Stand still!’ she said. ‘Now, stop crying!’ I gulped, drew myself in, and kept very still, as ordered. ‘Tell me your mum’s name.’
‘Peggy Gillespie,’ I said.
‘And what’s your name?’
‘Lenny.’
‘Okay then, Lenny Gillespie, I’m going to take you into the Ladies and get you cleaned up.’
‘But . . . .’
‘Don’t interrupt! It has to be the Ladies if I’m to come with you,’ she interrupted. Then she continued, ‘This lady here is going to look for your mum.’ She pointed at the lady in the red jumper. And then she went on talking to the other grown-ups in the outer foyer, ‘And I think we all need to move further inside the building as quickly as possible. Come on everyone.’ The back of her fur coat tickled my knees as she turned first to them and then back to me. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘can I take your hand?’
I shook my head, even though this was clearly a lady who had to be obeyed, and I pointed to the bit of my arm Mr Chippie had held. She led me through the glass doors to the inner foyer and over to the sweetie kiosk. I stopped her there.
‘But I lost Mavis too,’ I half-whispered. I couldn’t bear to think it.
‘Oh, dear,’ she said. ‘And who is Mavis?’
‘She’s my wee sister and she ran away from me . . . and Mr Chippie said he’d find her.’
‘Oh, dear,’ she said again, and she crouched down beside me, this big lady with the fur coat and it tickled me about the ankles and the glass scrunched under her feet. ‘I bet your Mr Chippie does find her, but we’ll have a good look in here too, just in case. Now, stop crying.’
We went into the Ladies. There were other people in there too. Some of them were complaining that the toilets weren’t working. There was a strong smell of sick and the floor was wet. I hung onto the fur coat. Her hand lay across my back. Suddenly I needed to wee too, but I couldn’t bring myself to let go of that fur, so for a minute I jiggled about, shifting from foot to foot and hoping no-one would notice until finally the big fur lady did and her big hand across my back directed me into a cubicle.
When I came back out, embarrassed to leave what I had done behind me unflushed, I saw a boy about the same age as me right there in the Ladies. He had scruffy black hair and his face was filthy and there was blood by his ear. His cardigan was torn and his arm was bleeding, and he glistened all over like diamonds in amongst the dust and soot. He stood there looking at me for some time, cheeky thing, and I wondered who he was, and then a big lady in a fur coat appeared beside him, just like the one beside me. She pulled me over towards her.
‘Now, young Lenny,’ she said, ‘I’m going to start at the top and work my way to the bottom. You have to sit very still and try very hard not to cry, even though it might hurt a bit. You have to be a big boy, brave and manly, just like your dad. I bet he’s brave.’
I didn’t like the sound of this.
‘But . . . .’
‘And what happened to your trousers?’ she said.
‘I don’t have any trousers,’ I said. ‘I’m not a boy. Why would a boy be wearing a dress?’
And I looked for the first time at my clothes and realised that the only part of my dress left below my waist was the strip of material that held the pocket, and the shoe that I was clutching within it. Hurriedly I pulled my hand out and yanked my cardigan, what was left of it, down over my bottom. And while I was beginning to worry about the boy I had seen and wondering whether he was still there and had noticed my nakedness, the fur lady reached down and lifted me up onto a black Formica space beside the sink. As I flew through the air in her able arms, I realised the boy in the mirror was me.
I twisted myself away from her, transfixed by this boy whose eyes were wide and white in the blackness of his face and I looked at my transformation. I looked for myself in his hair, his forehead, the curve of his black face, the collar of his shirt and peering over the lip of the mirror I saw the pocket and recognised his hand, like mine, was hidden in its shallow depths, fumbling with the shoe. I took my hand out and held it up to the mirror and the boy waved back. He looked as scared as I was, as pleased to be me as I was to be him, and I wondered if he’d lost his wee sister and his mum too, and whether he felt sick. He had lines down his face where he’d been crying, white smears, and another from the bottom of his nose across his cheek and there were flecks of blood here and there on his cheeks. His hair was long for a boy and grey on top like an old man. But he wasn’t an old man. He was young like me. He was me.
The lady in the fur coat appeared behind him. She had a pair of tweezers in one hand and a lace-trimmed handkerchief in the other. What would she need those for?
And then the lights went out and we were plunged into a darker darkness than I had ever known. I was never scared of the dark but in that moment I felt sicker than ever and someone started to scream. I think it was the boy, I wasn’t sure but it was someone very close because it was right in my ear, right inside my head, then the fur lady’s fur coat brushed past my cheek and I felt myself lifted back onto the sticky wet floor. She took my sore hand.
‘Stop that noise!’ she said, and the screaming stopped, and she led me out of the Ladies, banging my head and my elbows and knees on the swinging doors as we went. Other people were trying to squeeze past us, and when we got into the foyer again the beautiful green carpet that I loved so much with its swaying fronds, like in the canal, was strewn and scrunching with glass from both the inner and outer front doors.
We stumbled over someone sitting against the wall. The only light was from the blaze beyond the doors, the inferno that was still raging outside, and in its flickering glow I could make out shadow-like creatures moving across the foyer, hurrying to and fro.
And the noise was stupendous, as my dad used to say, but in a funny voice. Stupendous! But there was nothing funny about this. I had somehow forgotten the noise while we were between the deadening walls of the Ladies, buried as it was beneath the stairs. It hit us now like a sudden storm. There in the foyer beside the sweetie kiosk and the sweeping carpeted stairway, dust fell soundlessly from the ceiling, while the bang, crackle and rumble of exploding buildings hammered and roared all around us. The planes, the killer bees, were too far distant for us to hear now, blanked by the screams and shouts of people and the boom-crash of their deadly cargo. More people were arriving, stumbling in the doors, or what was left of them. The lady in the fur coat raised her voice.
‘Keep moving to the back of the foyer!’ she said. ‘There are sofas and space there! Do we have medical people yet?’
For a minute there was no reply and I wondered if anyone had heard her. I was just about to say that I didn’t think so (perhaps she was only talking to me) when a lady’s voice on the far side of the kiosk said, ‘We have a nurse. Just one. She’s over here looking after this baby.’
‘I’ll be there soon,’ came a muffled cry from the other side of the foyer.
The fur lady still had a grip on my sore hand and holding on tight she pulled me towards the back of the foyer. It was a long room with sofas along the walls but it was pitch-dark now that the lights had all gone out.
‘No!’ I shouted. ‘No! No!’
She dragged me along anyway and then suddenly let go of my hand and, like Mr Chippie not long before, she said, ‘Stand there and don’t move!’ She didn’t tell me to close my eyes thank goodness because I don’t think I could have done it, even though it made very little difference having them open, and I didn’t fancy having to disobey such a big fluffy commanding person all by myself without even Mavis beside me.
Mavis.
After a very long time, although it may only have been couple of minutes, a door on the opposite wall opened and the cool rays of a hurricane lamp seeped into the foyer. A man in a suit was holding it over his head and peering past it into the crowd. Mrs Fur came back, her face lit like those of the people around me, by a ghostly chill. She took my sore hand again, for which I was grateful even though it hurt, and she pulled me in beside her.
‘More lights are on their way,’ she said loudly to anyone who would listen. ‘And there’s plenty of room further back, if you could all move further in. Perhaps someone could check the kitchen for a broom. There’s glass all the way back here. Do we have a kitchen?’
As I’ve said, I don’t like brooms. It wasn’t going to be me. I did my best to hide in her fur.
A boy ran in the front door and pushed through the crowd. He handed her a slip of paper. She let go of my hand to hold it and read. I put my arm around her back and gripped the strands of her coat, shrinking into the darkest shadow behind her.
‘Well done!’ I heard her say, and, ‘Tell them . . . .’
I couldn’t make out the rest. Tell them Lenny is here and will wait until Mavis and her mum come for her. I’ll be in the downstairs foyer with the creamy walls and the green fronds under my feet. There’s a big fluffy lady holding my hand, and can I have a new dress?
The fur began to move.
‘Where’s Lenny? Where’s that girl gone?’ she said. ‘Oh, there you are, now come along and don’t waste time. We need to get you seen to.’
A right good seeing-to.
She took my hand again and I found myself at the back of the foyer on a dark-green sofa. Everyone was very busy. There was an argument going on over by some small doors on one wall but it didn’t last long. Two ladies, one in a black uniform, the other being the lady in the red jumper, disappeared through a door which said ‘STAFF’ on it in white letters on black, like the PAY HERE desk. They reappeared shortly afterwards carrying brooms and buckets and dish towels.
‘Did you find my mum?’ I asked. ‘And Mavis?’ But the lady in the red jumper didn’t seem to hear.
More hurricane lamps appeared and were hung from the electric-light fittings. A boom on the other side of the wall (we were by now at the very back of the building) made everybody scream. Mrs Fur sat down beside me on the sofa and took me quickly by the shoulders.
‘Sit down!’ she said rather unnecessarily. I had already sat down. I nearly stood up again so that I could sit down again specially for her but thought better of it. Once more she brought out her tweezers and her lace handkerchief and laid them down on her lap. Then she changed her mind and put the handkerchief back in the pocket of her huge coat. There was a cut-glass ashtray on a small table nearby which she balanced carefully on my knees.
‘Now, my darling,’ she said. ‘You’ve been very brave so far. Can you be brave a bit longer?’
I nodded and squirmed. I didn’t want to be brave.
‘Right then, here goes,’ she said. ‘It may hurt.’
It hurt alright. As the bombs fell, and the buildings fell, as more people fell into the foyer, some quite literally landing in a heap on the floor, the fur lady picked her way in sharp little pricks from the top of my head to my ankles until there was enough glass in the glass ashtray to make another ashtray altogether. My face was wet, and when I touched it my hand was red with blood but also washed with tears, and I was scared to move anything at all but most especially my face. It was like my skin was humming, if I could have given it a sound, humming with stinginess that was like pressing a bruise if I moved it. Yet she had been very gentle. I looked into her face all the time she was doing it. I followed the lines under her eyes to see where they went. She looked very worried and very old, older than my gran who came with Auntie May last year.
‘Well,’ she said finally, with a great puff of her lips that made the hair above her forehead jump, ‘I think I got them all.’ She smiled a big smile and some of her wrinkles disappeared. I couldn’t smile back. ‘You are the bravest little girl I have ever come across in the whole of my life!’
I tried a little smile then.
‘Aw, now don’t you smile if it hurts, you poor darling,’ she said.
Her hand disappeared inside her coat pocket and the lacy handkerchief reappeared. She mopped my face, very gently with it and then handed it to me with a frown. Then she produced a pair of tiny scissors, embroidery scissors I think, from her big shiny handbag under her coat. Very quickly she glanced at the door where the man with the first hurricane lamp had appeared, which said ‘MANAGER’ on it in white on black, then she whisked the green chair cover from the top of the sofa (what my gran calls an antimacassar). She was so fast I wasn’t sure I could believe my eyes. It was a green square, the same colour as the rest of the sofa, put there to keep hair grease off the sofa itself, very posh. She cut it in several places then tore it into strips. I glanced over at the kitchen door. She and I caught eyes, conspirators in a terrible deed. She picked up another antimacassar and began to wipe around the cuts and then tie strips of the torn one around my hands and arms.
‘Now what are we going to do for clothes?’ she said.
I shivered at the reminder of how ill-clad I was and looked at my legs which were bare but for smatterings of blood. I leant forward and laid both arms across the tops of my legs.
The furry lady thought for a bit then she took off her fur coat and hung it over the arm of the sofa and in doing so she instantly shrunk to normal size, a bit bigger than my mum and a lot older, but kind of normal anyway.
‘Stay there!’ she said sternly and disappeared back towards the front door. When she came back she had a lady’s slip in her hand which she handed to me and told me to put on. ‘No, no, no,’ she said. ‘Take off your shirt, I mean your dress, first. That’s it. Mmm, bit long isn’t it?’
The slip was so long in fact that it hung all the way to my ankles and folded onto the floor. She tied the straps into loops on my shoulders. I put the remaining top half of my filthy torn dress back on over this snow-white garment and immediately its perfect surface was ruined. I smoothed down the front of my old dress and took care to check Mavis’s shoe was still in the pocket. There I stood, apparently dressed in Victorian fancy dress, just like last Hallowe’en and surrounded by gigantic bonfires.
‘Do you think the bombs will land here too?’ I said.
She looked up at me. She was on the floor now on her knees in front of me with her head on one side, looking at the bottom of the slip.
‘What?’ she said.
‘Do you think the bombs . . . ?’
‘No,’ she broke in. ‘We’re safe as houses here.’ And then her hand flew to her mouth, and this time I couldn’t help but smile although it wasn’t really funny. ‘Oh, dear,’ she said. ‘Yes, of course we’re safe here. This is a big solid building made of brick and stone. Even the roof’s made of stone.’
I didn’t believe her. It was nonsense, of course, but I didn’t mind her lying, not really and I knew there wasn’t much point in asking about Mavis and my mum but I thought I would anyway, even though I knew she’d fib.
She took a long time to answer but that might have been because she had taken her scissors out again and had started to cut the slip around my knees. It was a plain slip which bumfled up under the arms beneath my dress. There was another great bang the other side of the wall. We both ducked.
‘Tell you what, I’ll go and find out if there’s any news of them. You stay here.’
She’d finished her cutting now and the scissors were back in her bag. She stood up and put her hand on her fur coat, stroking it like I had done when I was hiding behind her in the foyer. Then she lifted it and draped it gently over my shoulders.
‘Sit there and keep warm,’ she said. Her big shiny handbag swung under her arm and she disappeared again towards the front door and the great stairways that wound up to the upstairs foyer, on either side of the PAY HERE desk.
The coat was still warm from her body and very, very heavy. I pulled it around about me and sniffed it. I closed my eyes and succumbed to its warmth, and let my bruised arms be held in its embrace.
The noise continued to rage, and people fell over my legs or crossed the foyer weeping or shouting. Names were called in the darkness and for a while I joined in. ‘Mavis!’ I called. ‘Mum!’ But I couldn’t bear not hearing them call back. ‘Lenny!’ I imagined them saying, Mavis and my mum, in all the ways they said my name: ‘Lenny!’ that angry way; ‘Lenny!’ the glad-you’re-there way; ‘Linny!’ which was Mavis’s baby way; ‘Lenny’, just me. I’m just here, just here by the wall on the dark-green sofa.
A lot of time passed, or I think it did, and my eyes got used to the gloomy dark. I’d already scanned the foyer many times for Mavis and my mum. Now, I wondered if I knew any of these other people and realised suddenly that I did. The kids from my school were in a huddle by the stairway, and a few feet along from me were the two bad boys, two boys a bit older than me, at least eleven or twelve and better fed. They were shivering against the wall. It was their granny who gave me sweets and who might have a ceiling on her head now. I pulled my own head down into the fur and peered at them over the row of shadows between us. The big boy was crying. His head was bobbing up and down on his knees and his brother was close up beside him. They both had dust in their hair and their clothes, like everyone else. The younger one was staring hard towards the outside doors.
Not scary at all now.
Not like before. Not like earlier that day . . . .
After we’d left my mum and got chips from Mr Chippie, me and Mavis had been eating our chips by the canal sitting on a lock gate while the sun began to set. Then Mavis had dropped her shoe in the water – kicking it against the side – and quickly taking off my coat I’d climbed down the metal steps to get it. But the water under the gate kept nudging it away from me and reaching for it I’d lost my grip and fallen in. It was very, very cold but I’d managed to grab the shoe and fling it onto the canal bank, spraying dark water across the gravel. A dog had come and sniffed at it then jumped up at Mavis and taken our last chip, nearly knocking her into the canal after me.
‘Stay on the gate,’ I’d shouted, but she didn’t listen. And it was then that the bad boys had come. They’d kept shoving me back into the canal with a stick until I thought I’d have to swim to the other side and come back by the lock gate. But I wasn’t going to leave Mavis.
‘Come on, wee sprat,’ said the smaller of the two.
‘Hello, Mavis,’ said the other.
‘Leave her alone!’ I said. The smaller one’s stick caught in the dip in those bones at my throat. I fell back in, coughing.
‘Looks just like her ma . . . ,’ said the big one.
‘Leave her alone!’ I said, back at the surface.
‘Cat got your tongue, wee yin?’ he said.
Mavis had been silent, a storm brewing on her brow. She’d stood facing this boy, a boy we both knew to fear, and kicked one foot against the other. She’d glanced at me sideways beneath her scraggy shock of hair. Her hands were fidgeting behind her back. She’d lifted her face again and stuck her tongue out at him.
‘Oh, cheeky little madam then, are we? We’ll see about that then.’ He’d made a grab for her but she stepped back just in the nick of time and flung a small handful of dirt in his eyes that she’d been hiding.
‘Filthy wee bastard, dirty scumbag! Christ!’ He’d danced from foot to foot, edging blindly to the side of the canal, rubbing the dirt into his red running eyes.
The other boy had stopped poking me with his stick and turned from where he was crouching by the water’s edge to lunge at Mavis. He took hold of her by both shoulders and shook and shook and shook her until she screamed, but the moment he stopped she’d whipped out her other hand and flung a handful of dirt in his face too. Then she’d taken off down the towpath faster than you could whistle.
‘We’ll get our dad to you, filthy wee shites!’ they’d shouted.
Both blind now, they were easy. I was freezing cold, but, back on dry land and feeling gallus with a tummy full of chips, I’d shoved the smaller one and he’d fallen into the water. The other fell after him without any help from me. I’d wrung out my dress and hurried down the towpath after Mavis, squeezing water and weeds from my cardigan as I went, and forgetting my coat.
But Mavis had gone . . . .
‘Mavis!’ I said, suddenly back in the La Scala. The boys looked over. ‘Mavis!’ I said again. I pulled myself to my feet, the fur coat dragging along the floor behind me and stood uncertainly in front of them. Four big white eyes stared at me from sooty faces. I felt sick and didn’t get too close.
‘Sorry about . . . ,’ I started.
The older one waved his hand vaguely in my direction. There was another bang and smoke flew in sharp clouds across the room. Their four big white eyes blinked and gazed towards the front door.
‘Have you seen Mavis?’ I said. ‘Mavis? Remember?’
They shook their heads.
‘Mavis,’ I shouted, thinking they might not be able to hear me. ‘She was with me down at the canal.’ I didn’t want to enlarge on this. ‘The canal . . . ?’
They looked at me now.
‘I look a bit different,’ I said, patting the fur with my bandaged hands. ‘My hair was about this length,’ I said, indicating my shoulder, ‘and my dress was blue, and attached. To the rest of it. And I was in the canal?’ I took a step back, just in case. ‘Mavis is like me only she’s four. Her shoes are like this one.’ I drew it out of my pocket with great difficulty, the fur coat was so heavy. ‘You know my mum,’ I added, although I didn’t want to bring my mum into this.
The big girl sitting next to them turned to face me now too. I recognised her from one of the baker’s shops on the main road. She looked me up and down, which I hate. Why do grown-ups do that? And then she nudged the older boy hard with her elbow. They both winced.
‘Sorry,’ he said, to me, or I think that’s what he said. His mouth made a ‘sorry’ sort of shape, then it smiled. I couldn’t smile so I nodded and hoped he understood. I was very surprised to see him say sorry. I didn’t think bad boys said sorry.
And then while I was standing there thinking about this I got very cold and shivery even though I was still wearing the big fur coat, so I pulled it round about me again, right up to my neck and over my ears so that I didn’t have to hear the noise outside so much, just my heartbeat. Being in the picture house was like being in a cave, the one we went to when we were on holiday in Rothesay, when my dad wasn’t missing presumed dead and Auntie May was there with the baby, and being inside the coat made my heartbeat echo loudly about my head. It felt nice, even though the hair of the coat went up my nose. After a bit I was forced to come out for air.
The bad boys and the big girl had forgotten about me so I wondered where the owner of my fine coat might have got to and whether she, or the lady in red or Mr Chippie had found my mum or Mavis. I know I should have sat still, like I’d been told.
On the other side of the foyer there was an area slightly back from the bit where people were milling about. It had two doors off it which both said ‘PRIVATE’. One of them was open and on the other side there was a short corridor lit through a small window without glass by the flickering of the fire outside. On the floor of the corridor there were people lying asleep in a row, asleep of all things, in all that noise and clamour when there was an emergency happening and all the buildings were burning! The flickering light fell on their closed faces without even a pane of glass between them and the danger. I looked at them and wondered how they could do that and a panic got me by the throat and I wondered who was watching the sky and whether I should go out there and watch it for them. Somebody had to, but they were so ordered in such a neat little row that I thought somebody must have told them to go in there and be already watching the sky for them. They were very still and that cold feeling I’d had not long before came back.
And then I saw that one of them was wearing a grey coat like my mum’s and my stomach leap up into my throat. I murmured her name, ‘Mum.’
Something kept me hovering at the door, unable to step in there, unable to step back, barely breathing with my head sinking back lower and lower into the folds of the huge fur coat. She was not moving, and while it was true that my mum didn’t move much when she was asleep, and as I’ve already mentioned, she slept the sleep of the dead, as my gran said last summer, I knew she wasn’t asleep. I don’t know how I knew from that distance and with all that noise, but there was no doubt in my mind at all.
There was a long strange silence and then a whine somewhere up in the sky, like a firework – a Guy Fawkes rocket screeching off up into the distance – only I could tell this one was going the other way, heading fast towards the earth. And like the rocket the whine stopped and in its pregnant pause I waited for the bang, holding my breath then throwing myself down in a big fluffy heap between the door jambs.
‘BOOM!’ it went, and something smacked hard off the wall outside, like hailstones on a classroom window, and a puff of grit flew through the small window and landed on the sleeping people. No-one moved. When I was sure nothing else was on its way in I stuck my head fully above the fur coat and stood up.
‘Mum!’ I said in a loud whisper, a stage whisper my dad would have called it. ‘Mum!’ I said, urgently, in the way I would if she was busy and hadn’t noticed there was someone at our front door.
Her face was turned away and she’d lost her hat. I felt a hot breeze flow past me between the window and the foyer at my back. At last I tiptoed into the abyss, holding my breath, heart banging in the confines of my chest, my throat dry from more than debris dust, and my eyes wide.
Step-by-baby-step I edged forward as if I was on the high brick wall near the factory my mum works in. The flickering light faded. I waited. It grew again and I edged forward until I saw that her ear was not the same and the curve of her cheekbone had gone. Bolder now I strained my head round to see, the heavy fur coat shaking my balance, and just when I thought I’d fall and land on these poor souls I saw the face of Annie thrown carelessly to one side as if she really didn’t want anything to do with the world any more, Annie who had led me through the wall of fire and had fallen behind me. Annie and her baby, Davie. Annie not my mum. Annie who’d entrusted me with Davie. I was so grateful to her for not being my mum! Not my mum! Absolutely not my mum!
A smile cracked my face and the tears smarted to my eyes. My shoulders shook and I breathed heavily in shudders of relief. Big wet tears ran down my chin and slithered onto the beautiful coat. Snotters slipped over my lip and salt was in my mouth. My hand was in my pocket and I thought if I could just stand still long enough then time would wind itself back and we’d be in our house, on the edge of the bed, with dinner on our laps listening to the radio and Mum dancing across the room, like she did before Dad wasn’t coming back, before Mavis’s shoe fell in the canal, before I lost her and Mavis.
And then I felt sick again, and scared and cold, and I backed out of that little corridor a lot more quickly than I went in and stood in the doorway with the fluff of the fur coat at my nose, watching the shadows of the flames ripple across the shoulders of the sleeping dead. I drew my hand across my face and wiped it on the remains of my dress.
I had to find Mavis. It was crystal clear.
I turned to the foyer, but first, just out of the corner of my eye I noticed a bundle by the door. I bent to look. It was baby Davie, still wrapped in his blue blanket. He was a little way off from the others and his cheek was cold. His mum, Annie, was looking the other way.
‘He’s over here, Annie,’ I whispered. ‘Davie, your mum’s just over there, not far away.’ My voice seemed loud, like when you put your fingers in your ears and speak. I knew they couldn’t, but I waited for them to move. They’d say ‘Thanks Lenny!’ and Annie would coo the way Auntie May did.
But it was very quiet in there, and I realised suddenly there were no killer bees overhead, no great booms, only the crackle and roar of the blaze outside.
‘Sorry,’ I whispered into the gloom, for no particular reason and went to leave. If the Germans had stopped bombing us the lights might come back on and then I could find Mavis and my mum. I had to get a move on.
But I hated to leave them like that, so I went quickly back in and lifted baby Davie, awkwardly in my strange clothes, and took him to Annie and laid him beside her under her chin and along the front of her body so that they could sleep the sleep of the dead together.
‘Sorry,’ I whispered again, and went to the door.
‘’Scuse me,’ said a man who was backing towards me in the dark.
He and another man were carrying a woman by the legs and shoulders. I got out of their way.
‘You shouldn’t be in there,’ he said. ‘Go on now. Don’t be hanging about here.’
They shoogled past me with their awkward burden, bumping me out of the way with their backs. The woman’s hand fell from her lap and dunted the fur coat, sliding quickly down its length, stroking its lovely softness. Her head was slumped to one side, like Annie’s. They disappeared into the little corridor. There was a muffled thud and a murmur of voices. I had taken my arms out of the sleeves of the big fur coat and pulled it around my ears again.
‘It’s quiet now,’ I heard one of them say, ‘but you never know. Let’s hope this is the end of it.’
They pushed past me again and disappeared into the smoky crowd.
I had to find the lady with the fur coat but it was hard because I had the fur coat and although I’d looked right into her face when she was taking the glass out of me I wasn’t sure I’d know her. I moved about the foyer, a big puff of fur with a head on top, peering into the gloom at all the people sitting against walls or stumbling about. The bad boys were still there, but the big girl had gone, and the lady in the red jumper was nowhere to be seen, never mind Mr Chippie.
Figures appeared in front of me, lit now by candles as well as hurricane lamps, a yellowy glow bringing pink to their ashen faces. Their voices seemed louder, all louder than each other, calling names out, calling for quiet, calling for help, calling. I tapped a man on the arm.
‘Have you seen . . . ?’ but he didn’t hear me. I could barely hear myself, even though it was true, the bombs had stopped. Perhaps I had some debris stuck in my ears. I tried someone else but no-one seemed to hear me. Maybe they had dirt in their ears too.
The killer bees had gone away at last. I could go and find my mum, because although I’d lost Mavis, Mr Chippie was right that she’d be happy to find me and she might even be looking everywhere for me right then, just like I’d been looking for Mavis.
So I kept my eye on the doors of the La Scala in case Mavis or my mum might come walking through them.
But as I was watching, I saw the message boy who had gone out earlier. He ran up the steps to the ladies with the hurricane lamps and gave them a piece of paper then he ran back out again. And just as he disappeared into the smoke, there was a drone overhead and the whistling, the waiting and the boom-crash as it all started up again and the bombs fell once more. Everyone screamed and ran inside and I went to a wall as far back as I could and slid down against it and pulled the big fluffy coat over my head and around my hunched-up knees and held on tight to the shoe in my pocket, waiting for the ground to stop shaking.