Joe froze. A knock on a door in Odessa Street meant a stranger, not a good stranger, never someone you wanted to see.
He jumped up from the table. The two Rosenthal girls didn’t jump; they remained in the kitchen doorway watching him. At the second knock, louder this time, more insistent, he went to the back door ready to run, then he turned back and stood, undecided. And the two little girls watched. He put his finger to his lips, not that they had made a sound, and crept past them and went soundlessly up the stairs and they followed a step behind. Upstairs, he found Archie, who was third oldest, and Norman who was next after Archie and who was holding the baby. They were standing at the window staring down at the street below, and when they saw Joe the two boys shuffled wordlessly up to make room so that he, too, could see.
Joe looked down and all he could see was the top of a hat and two khaki shoulders. It was an officer’s hat. The head looked up at that moment and they all stepped back out of sight. Then the knocking started again and they leaned forward and looked down again. The man was an army officer, there was no mistaking it. And now he pressed his face to the downstairs window. Then he looked up.
‘He’s seen us!’ squealed Norman.
The thrill of it seemed to electrify the squalid little room and its occupants and for a long moment no one spoke. Joe looked at the four little faces of the Rosenthal children—five if you counted the baby, who gaped at him, wide-eyed and toothless. They waited to see what he would do. But he couldn’t think. He didn’t know what he would do. A panic had gripped him at the sight of that hat, those khaki shoulders. What could it mean that they would send the army to pick him up? The police, yes, the navy—but an army officer? Was the man from the ministry? From military intelligence? Had he been watching and seen Joe come into the house?
His foolishness at coming here became horribly apparent.
And having now seen them the man was not going to give up and there followed another knock, loud, insistent.
Joe left then, sprinting back down the stairs, out of the back door and into the yard, across the fence and into the narrow laneway that ran along the back of the houses. A voice called out to him, he thought he heard his name called, and it might have been Mrs Rosenthal, though he could not be sure and he did not stop. There was a collapsed wall halfway along the lane that led into the backyard of a bombed-out house. He made for that, feeling his way, clambering through the rubble and popping out into another laneway. It was dark now, pitch dark, but out of nowhere someone shone a torch directly in his face. Before he could throw up his hands to shield his eyes he was wrestled to the ground, where he lay for a moment, bewildered and winded.
‘What’s your game then?’ sneered a breathless but triumphant voice right in his ear, so that it became clear that the person holding the torch was a police constable, massive in the blackout in his cape and domed helmet, the smell of cooked onions on his breath. Before Joe could think, before he could move, he was hauled to his feet.
And the air-raid siren began to wail.
Joe felt the siren filling his head, filling the laneway. He felt that he had never in his life been less afraid of its awful urgent sound.
‘Show us your papers!’ the policeman demanded over the noise.
‘There’s a bloody raid on!’ Joe shouted back.
‘Then you better hope no one drops a bomb on you.’ And the constable roughly patted Joe down, finding his papers and angling his torch to read them, peering closer in the darkness. ‘You’re having a laugh. This says you’re born in 1876.’
But Joe wasn’t laughing. He could see a police van. He could see other men like himself, but not like himself, being lined up and loaded into the back of the van. They were doing a sweep then, picking up anyone who was out after dark and who looked suspicious. He had dodged the navy and the army and the detective who had pursued him for a week, only to be picked up in a routine sweep. He saw the faces of the men who had been picked up. They would be deserters, men who had been on the run and living in the shadows for months, years, and he saw the exhausted relief in their eyes. Their war was over. A year or two in prison, the war would end and they would be released. It would not end for him. If he stepped into that van he would never be free again. His life would be over.
He tried to run. Threw every ounce of strength into this last-ditch attempt, almost broke free, but the constable lunged after him and brought him down so that for a moment they wrestled, struggled, and a second policeman joined in and together they pulled Joe to his feet, holding his arms in a tight lock behind his back. They marched him towards the van, ducking at the roar of an aircraft engine overhead. It was followed almost at once by the whoosh of an incendiary then an explosion that could not have been more than a street away. Close by, a bomb-damaged shell of a house on which someone had tacked sheets of corrugated metal as a temporary roof shook and rumbled as some inner wall collapsed in a cloud of dust.
The raid had begun but it did not seem to matter.
‘Move it!’ shouted the first constable, a note of panic now noticeable in his voice. And suddenly the whole area was lit up by another incendiary and Joe saw that the constable was an old man, a special, not a regular at all, sporting a drooping old-fashioned moustache like the men had worn in the last war but white with age, the flesh on his face mottled and flushed almost purple by his exertions. A man who had done his forty years’ service and hung up his policeman’s helmet and his whistle and had no doubt looked forward to a quiet time in front of a fire with his pipe and his missus. Now he was back in uniform chasing looters in an air raid.
This was Joe’s thought as his final few seconds of freedom passed, one by one, stretched out and squeezed together both at the same time, an eternity and no time at all. He noticed how the old man raised his head to the sky, his eyes wide and fearful, and this was the last thing Joe saw before an incendiary exploded very close by.
When he came to he was lying face down on the pavement and his ears were roaring as though he was underwater. The roaring would not stop but he lifted his head then cautiously pulled himself to his feet. He was unhurt and perhaps the incendiary had exploded further away than he had imagined for the police van was untouched, so too all the men lined up inside the van gaping wordlessly at him. A sheet of corrugated metal, blown from the roof of the nearby house, lay on the ground not far away, dark splatters all along one edge. And standing before him was the elderly special constable—or, rather, there was his body.
His head was nowhere to be seen.
His torso ended at the collar of his uniform and his cape. As Joe watched the headless body wavered for a dreadful second, then tipped forward and crashed to the ground with a thud. Joe looked down and at his feet was the man’s head, the helmet still on, the eyes looking sightlessly up at him.
For a moment everything went black again, and when Joe came to a second time, he was some yards away, coughing up bile onto the pavement. He flung out both hands as the pavement reeled up before him and he tipped forward in a gross mimicry of the torso of the dead constable, his legs buckling beneath him. But he pulled himself up almost at once, made his legs move. A moment later he was running, faster than he had ever run before and with less idea of where he was going than at any other time in his life.