A very long time later, I don’t know how long, the killer bees left and the boom-crashes stopped. I poked my head through the top of the fur coat and looked about me. The smell hit me again, whisky and sick, and smoke hovered in the foyer and pierced my eyes making them run again. There were more people lying down too with other people kneeling over them. There were two ladies at a table with paper and pencils and a hurricane lamp and three people were talking to them, one holding a wee kid. Another hurricane lamp was hanging from the chandelier in the middle of the foyer making it glisten like newly polished silver. I recognised a girl from my school with her mum and dad. Her arm was in a sling made from a scarf and one of our teachers was there too. A man was lying asleep further down the wall, sleeping the sleep of the dead. There was red blood on the green swirling carpet underneath him.
The two bad boys were crouched a little further along the wall. They were whispering to each other and glancing in my direction. I shrunk back into the coat but kept my eyes above the surface, just in case.
And then I saw Mavis.
She was coming in the middle of the three outer doors. Actually what I saw was the left-hand side of her except for her head which I only saw the back of because she was talking to the person she was with. She had on the same grey cardigan as me, the same blue dress, the same sock and the same shoe and she was filthy like me too. I only saw half of her because someone was in the way and my neck wasn’t long enough to reach up, but I was off the floor in a flash and dodging the crowd as if I had wings on my feet.
‘Mavis!’ I shouted.
Another person went past carried by the two men from the back corridor. They were blocking my view. I dodged one way then the other. A fat lady was bending to a child. An old man was leaning on the pillar.
‘Mavis!’
She was standing with Mr Chippie. She had her back to me and Mr Chippie was bending down to hear what she was saying. I couldn’t see his face for his hat, but I knew it was him.
‘Mavis!’ I said again.
Something wasn’t right.
Mr Chippie looked up and saw me there in my big fur coat. He didn’t smile. He just looked.
‘You found Mavis!’ I said again.
A look of sudden recognition came over his face. He turned to Mavis but I couldn’t hear what she said. I bent to throw my arms round her. She shook her head and turned round to me.
Mavis had no eyebrows and she had no fringe and she had big blue eyes instead of big brown ones. She had both hands in the pocket of her dress and there were stripes of wet tears through her blackened face. Mavis wasn’t Mavis, or not my Mavis. We stood looking at each other for what seemed like ages. I think I was waiting for her to turn back into the right Mavis. I heard Mr Chippie, and it was Mr Chippie, saying something to somebody else, to another grown-up somewhere over our heads, and then her face crumpled, this strange Mavis. It just folded in on itself and she began to sob. I think I sobbed too and I fell onto my knees so that I could put my arms around her and we hugged each other. I hugged Mavis with my arms out of the sleeves of the big coat which fell about us, and she hugged her big sister. She smelled of whisky and rubber and something else I’d never smelled before, and I hoped that when I stopped hugging her that she would be Mavis again.
We hugged for a long, long time but when we stopped, her eyes were still blue.
Mr Chippie wasn’t talking to whoever he’d been talking to any more. He was standing beside us with his forehead all crinkled.
‘This isn’t Mavis,’ I told him, standing up.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’s Rosie. You know her?’
White lines had appeared above his eyes where the crinkles had been.
‘No, not really.’
‘Not really?’ he said
‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Not. No.’
‘You don’t know who her grandparents are or an aunt or uncle that she could stay with?’
‘No. Sorry.’
I thought about this. Poor thing. She must have lost her mum and her sister too. I wondered if her dad was missing presumed dead. She was still holding my hand and was half inside my big fur coat which I’d lifted from the floor.
‘I have to go back out,’ said Mr Chippie. ‘Will you stand here and give the ladies her name when it’s her turn?’ He nodded towards the ladies with the hurricane lamp and the bits of paper.
I stared back at him.
‘I’m still looking for Mavis,’ he said. ‘I just haven’t found her yet. It’ll be daylight soon and . . . .’
A siren rose in a wail above us. He stopped what he was saying. So did everyone around us, and then cheers went up from all sides of the room and everyone stood up, those that could. They seemed to be clinging to each other, the shadows etched into their faces by the simple light of the hurricanes. They were all the same colour, the colour of dirt and debris, as if they themselves were just dirt and debris thrown up by a great explosion.
A small crowd was gathering by the front doors, peering into the smoky inferno beyond. Rosie had wormed her way right inside my coat and Mr Chippie had disappeared.
‘Have you seen my mum and dad?’ said Rosie. ‘And my gran and my auntie?’
I shook my head.
‘My big sister?’ she said.
‘Sorry, no. We can ask these ladies here,’ I said pointing at the ladies at the desk with the hurricane lamp.
The bad boys were still against the wall but they were standing now, very close together, not looking fierce at all with their mouths hanging open. The siren had changed everything but I wasn’t sure what to do so I just stood there with wee Rosie, watching everybody moving about.
After a bit the big girl came back and she and the bad boys huddled together, all hugged up tight as if they only had one body between them. Then it was Rosie’s turn with the ladies with the hurricane lamp and the paper.
‘Her name’s Rosie,’ I said when she wouldn’t speak.
‘And your name?’ asked one.
‘Lenny,’ I said. ‘Lenny Gillespie. Did you find my mum, Peggy Gillespie?’
She looked down a list of names and shook her head.
‘No, sorry darling.’ She looked sorry.
‘Or Mavis Gillespie, my wee sister?’
‘No, no Gillespies.’
‘Oh.’
She asked lots of other questions, mostly about Rosie, but I wasn’t really paying attention by then. I was trying to figure out what to do next and waiting for someone to tell me. Daylight was peering through the smoke outside like the mist that had been there a few days before only hot, and I still hadn’t found Mavis or my mum. The thought of going outside was very scary. What did hot mist feel like, and what would I find?
Rosie was pulling at my dress.
‘Rosie says you’re not her big sister. Is that right? Lenny?’ said the lady.
‘No, I’m not her big sister. I’m . . . .’
‘So she’s no relatives that you know of?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Rosie, where did you last see your mum and dad? Have you got any aunties or a gran or anyone?’
She shook her head and stood still as a statue, as my mum used to say, then her little hand flew out of her dress pocket and pulled at her earlobe, again and again and again.
‘My dad took me to the shelter first,’ she said, ‘and when he didn’t come back with Mum and Gran and . . . I looked out and . . . .’
Her mouth was hanging open and she’d have pulled her earlobe right off if I hadn’t taken hold of her hand and held on tight. The lady with the hurricane lamp was still as a statue now herself and her mouth was hanging open too. I felt an ache in my stomach and I tried again to will wee Rosie to be Mavis so that Mavis could be safe and sound with me, and something really awful wouldn’t be true. But Rosie didn’t feel like Mavis. Rosie was taut like a frightened cat and every part of her was sore and hard against me.
‘They might have forgotten me,’ said Rosie. ‘Are they here?’
The two ladies seemed to have forgotten her too for a minute and were talking to each other instead. I glanced over at the bad boys but they were gone and for some reason this scared me witless and I felt my body go tight like Rosie’s and there wasn’t enough air and I twisted this way and that, straining myself to full height to find them amongst the shifting crowd. And people were coming from other parts of the building now, mostly heading towards the doors. I knew that I knew the bad boys’ names but I’d never used them and I couldn’t find them in my head just when I needed them most, and I couldn’t move to hunt for them because Rosie was so firmly attached and because of the big fur coat, so I stumbled and thrashed about and frightened myself even more until finally I screamed, ‘Stop it!’
I wriggled out of the coat and out of Rosie’s grip and squeezed with my skinny body and my lack of decent clothes, just a slip and half a dress, through all the people between me and the door until I found the bad boys and the big girl tiptoeing on the brink of outdoors. They looked at me in surprise. I was surprised too.
‘Where are you going?’ I demanded, in a fury, breathing heavily despite the stench out there.
They looked at me uncomprehending but I was as baffled as they.
‘Where are you going?’ I demanded again.
The bad boys looked at the big sister.
‘Where are we going?’ said the older one to the girl. I noticed she had the same eyes as them, dark in their dirty faces, and scared.
‘Home,’ she said at last. ‘We’re going home. And we’d better check on Gran too, I suppose. Got to find Mum and Dad.’
‘Wait there,’ I said. ‘I’m coming with you but I’ve got to give back the coat first.’
I nearly fell right over the top of Rosie on my flight back inside. She’d been standing right behind me. And when I got back to where I’d dropped the coat, it was gone. I asked the hurricane lamp ladies but they didn’t answer. They were talking to someone else. I searched the faces in the crowd as it flowed on towards the doors, then I slipped into what spaces I could find, fighting upstream to the foyer on the first floor and into the picture house itself.
‘Mum!’ I shouted. ‘Mavis! Peggy Gillespie!’ I watched all the people shifting about in the gloom, silent and drawn, my eyes darting from face to face, and behind them on the big safety curtain that I loved so well I could just make out the picture of the Queen Mary liner coming into dock in New York Harbour, as on a cold quiet night, oblivious to the grim reality beneath her.
‘Your mum wasn’t here, Lenny.’ It was Miss Weatherbeaten, from school who wanted really good ‘r’s. ‘I’d have seen her if she was. Sorry. Try the librrarry.’
‘The librrarry?’ I didn’t think she’d have gone to the library. She didn’t read.
‘Or the Palace. Or maybe she went to the Rrregal.’
‘Rrright then!’ I said, and squeezed and slipped once more through the people. The Palace, not the Regal, which was too far, and certainly not the library.
But when I finally got back to the front doors without Mavis, my mum, the lady in red, the fur coat lady or even the fur coat, the bad boys and their big girl sister were all gone. But Rosie was still there, standing on the doorstep staring at a brick that lay there. I was overcome with fury again.
‘Where did they go?’ I demanded of poor Rosie. ‘Why did you let them go?’
Now that it was daylight I could see that she wasn’t remotely like Mavis apart from her hair which was probably the only bit that might have been very like Mavis’s except that she’d singed off the fringe and both her eyebrows. Her little face crumpled again and she began to sob.
‘I want my mum!’ she wailed, angry now, like me, and I wanted my mum too, my mum who should have known all this was going to happen and gone to the pictures with her nice young man another night, and then we’d all be standing there and I wouldn’t have been left in charge and lost Mavis.
‘Where do you live?’ I snapped, after all of this had hurtled through my head.
She started to pull at her earlobe again.
‘Okay,’ I said with a sigh, giving in. ‘It’s okay. We’ll find them. We’ll find them all. Just don’t cry again.’
‘Where’s my mum? I want my dad and my nan.’ She was trying hard not to cry. ‘Where’s my big sister?’
I took her by the wrist and led her back inside to the ladies with the hurricanes.
‘Stay there,’ I told her firmly. ‘They’ll look after you. I have to go and find Mavis. Excuse me,’ I said to the ladies who were busy with someone else. ‘Excuse me!’ They didn’t hear.
‘Stay here,’ I said to Rosie again and left her there pulling her earlobe with her little face all crumpled.