On either side of the road was a string of forlorn terraced houses. At one stage this must have been council housing. The designs were cookie-cutter: cottage-cheese exterior walls encasing small, two-storey dwellings with thick windows containing fracture-proof glass. Worn grass gardens separated the front doors from the street.
‘There’s only one street in London beginning with Fortune.’
Sara stared at the street, willing a memory to return.
Each front garden had some form of debris lying in it: a doorless fridge, a semi-burned couch, a tattered flag. It looked like a demilitarized zone.
‘Shall we find 327?’ asked Baz.
‘Through the back,’ said Sara.
A few minutes later, Baz crept down the alleyway that ran behind the back gardens of the row of houses.
‘It’s that one there,’ said Baz, looking over the tops of the fences and pointing to the penultimate house on the row.
The rear plots of each house were worse than the fronts, resembling refuse tips more than gardens. Abandoned items such as rusting bedsprings lay on worn patches of scrub grass. Rear windows were smashed, boarded up or covered with grime.
Number 327 was no exception. The house looked abandoned. No lights were on inside. It resembled nothing more than a filthy shell.
‘They’ll be coming, won’t they?’
Sara said nothing.
‘How long?’ asked Baz.
‘Soon,’ was all she could reply.
Baz put his fist on the handle of the back-garden gate of 327 and rattled it, but the door remained wedged.
‘Must be rotted shut,’ he said, taking a step back and looking around for another way in. He shrugged his shoulders.
‘Only one way,’ he said, lifting up his knee and pointing to the top of the fence.
Sara accepted the offer and climbed up, grabbing the lip of the wooden slatted fence. It was still a foot above her head, and she strained to pull herself up.
‘Here,’ said Baz, sliding a cupped hand under her right armpit to lift her up. The action caused the sleeve of Sara’s t-shirt to ride up, pressing his fingers against the bare flesh of her upper arm.
‘No!’ screamed Sara.
Baz recoiled, letting Sara fall to the ground, where she rolled into a foetal ball and curled up against the wall. Both her hands gripped her temples, and she squeezed her eyes shut, rocking her body back and forth on her tailbone. Baz could hear a soft whimpering sound coming from her.
‘Sara?’
Baz took a step closer. A thin stream of blood was coming from Sara’s inner ear, dripping on to her shoulders.
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ said Sara, looking up at him with sightless eyes.
‘What did you say?’ he asked, his stomach lurching.
Her hands shot out and grabbed Baz’s arm, the movement so blindingly fast he cried out in shock. He tugged his arm back, but her grip was strong.
‘It was an accident … the sun was too bright … there was no way you could have seen him … it was an accident …’
The force of it took Baz by surprise, physically winding him and bringing stinging tears to his eyes. He never mentioned that day to anyone. The facts of it were hidden even to him. The moments seemed to have separated and drifted around each other, like a kaleidoscope, making recollection impossible. All he could see was the brilliant bright light, flashing in his eyes, obscuring everything around him. He remembered his breathing becoming erratic as he lifted up the rifle and pulled the trigger. The sound was muffled, like it was taking place far away, the resound distant and cushioned. He could feel the discharge kick into his shoulder. He pulled the trigger again and again. He waited, but the only sound was his tattered breathing in his ears. He craned his neck forwards, peering through the sun’s brightness. And that’s when Billy had fallen into his foxhole, choking from the bullet that had passed through his windpipe. Every day since then he had stared directly into the light, trying to see if he could find any clue to Billy’s cloaked presence within it. And now, it was as if the scene had been reconstituted for the first time. Each pixel arranged itself into place and he was there again, looking into the light. And all he could see was a brilliant glare. There was no sign of Billy. It would have been impossible to see him.
For the first time his tics and twitches subsided. A memory flashed in his mind of him and Billy sitting in the back of the Jeep Commando, heading to town on leave, uniforms pressed, the sun shining on Billy’s upturned face as it creased in laughter at a joke.
He was quiet for several seconds and slowly became aware of his surroundings. He was sitting on the stone path.
The shuddering of his shoulders was more subdued, like a punctured tyre slowly deflating.
He reached out a hand to where she was still sitting hunched in a ball on the concrete floor.
‘Sara.’
She did not move.