Czecho-Slovakia had fallen to Germany, and Hitler wanted Gdańsk to surrender. The newspapers did not have good news, and Audrey could not bear to read any more. She had recovered, tooth and infection now just a memory. But another malaise had replaced it; her work was stalled, the winter bringing everything to a halt, and she was in mourning. Not only for Elspeth, but for her own past that she seemed unable to surrender. She ignored the headlines but was drawn to the images: of soldiers in formation, of German lorries lined up to enter Czecho-Slovakia, of troops with anti-aircraft guns in the streets of Prague. In an instant she was there, at war again, twenty-three and behind the wheel of an ambulance, somewhere in the depths of the French countryside.
The night alive with light but none where she needed it.
The road appears and disappears according to incendiary activity—bombs, flashes, explosions. The words have become part of Audrey’s vocabulary.
Her foot pressed hard into the metal, hands numb, fingers gripping the steering wheel as she manoeuvres the ambulance. Her eyes hard open, alert to the shapes in the darkness, her heart pumping with such force she feels it pulsing under her skin.
Sparks, shrapnel, embers. The residue she has to watch out for as she tries to get back to safety.
Darkness again and she is driving into an abyss, trying to intuit the road, feeling it as she goes along, trying to let the tires guide her back to the hospital.
She shouldn’t have kept moving, she knows, shouldn’t have gone that far in, that close to the front. One more mile, one more mile, muttered under her breath as the sky explodes around her.
The moaning again.
This time it forces her to stop. She is not sure if she’s still on the road or off it, but she jumps out of the vehicle, senses the compression of air, even though the last blast was too far away to have any impact here, and goes to him. Swings open the back door, the squeal of hinges, the metal still warm from the explosion that sent a wall of fire at them not twenty minutes ago.
“I’m here, I’m here,” she says, but thinks he can’t hear her, can only listen to the pain that has seared the nerves in so much of his body she wonders how he is still alive.
“I’m here.”
She doesn’t touch him, she knows better, but she wants him to know she is going to get him out of here.
“You’re here.”
He’s conscious. The smell in the back of the ambulance is one of iodine, metal, singed skin, and she is glad she left the door open, the night air a relief to her at least.
The flashes go on and on across the sky, and she can see that he is looking at his hands as if they are no longer his.
“I took them off,” he whispers.
“It’s okay. I’m here,” she repeats. She sits beside him, leans into him, talking quietly as if there were others who might be listening.
“My goggles. My gloves.”
“Yes, I know.”
Another bomb. This time she does feel the compression and is knocked sideways into him. He does not move, does not react, and she panics, thinking for a second he is dead, that she has killed him. But he is whispering again.
She is taking short, quick breaths, her body humming as she calculates the distance to the hospital, but he is talking so she moves in closer, her mouth sour with dehydration.
“I had to feel it,” he was saying. “My thumb on the button. I had to feel when I was shooting.” He was lifting his head to her. “I couldn’t see. The goggles. I couldn’t see.” He was flicking his eyes back and forth, from right to left. “I couldn’t see when they came on the side of me.”
Peripheral vision. Audrey looks around, suddenly aware of how limited her own vision is here in this darkness, knowing she is an easy target despite the Red Cross signs on the ambulance.
“No peripheral vision. I know,” her voice soft, reassuring, despite this being the fourth time she’s heard the story since she picked him up.
She knows he can’t see her now, knows that she is too close as she crouches low, her mouth against his ear. She is outside his vision, even here, in the small space with his goggles off and nothing to stop him from turning to look at her, but she has decided that his sight has been compromised and that he needs her to be that close to him so that he only knows her by touch, by smell.
“You did the right thing,” she says. “That was the only way you could have shot down the German plane.”
She feels his hair, soft as though freshly washed, and she thinks about what he’d been like as a man, before he was a soldier, a pilot.
“What’s your name?” she asks.
A pause. Did he even know it now?
“John.”
“We need to go now, John.”
The moan like a pained sigh tells her he isn’t ready to move and that he’d like to stay forever listening to her try to placate him while their enemies toss bombs in all directions around them, and she would have liked to tell him some of her adventures since becoming an ambulance driver, this one the most daring, though there were others that came close. She could tell him she’d volunteered out of a sense of duty but would be lying because the only duty she’d had was to herself and the need to pour something into her that had substance, a weight that made her story one worth telling, especially after the familiar one that had been told so many times before. Jilted. Humiliated. No one had any appetite for these tales anymore. She’d signed up on impulse, without a thought to consequences. She could drive, it was her talent. She could drive into her own escape.
The night is too long for these stories. Another bomb goes off and Audrey jumps, throws her feet out the back of the ambulance, and starts the engine, driving like she has a bomber on her tail, like the noise that is all around her is bearing down on her alone, as if it were a matter of life and death.
Audrey opened her eyes, put her hands to her face, the remembered smell of diesel filling the caravan. The smell of his singed skin, too. She shivered and threw the blanket from her lap, pushed the caravan door open so that she could breathe air that did not smell like war. She needed to get out, to get back to work, for war would find her here if it were looking. It would find her anywhere.