Actually, I never told him. I just kept putting it off. I told myself I needed to get on grip on things myself first of all, so I could deal with his questions and emotions. Then I thought I’d put it off until after Hastings. Which made sense. And then after Hastings, summer was coming and he seemed happy and somehow the moment was never quite right and so on and so on.
He never asked what had happened in Hawking. It wasn’t that he was incurious. He was very curious. Almost terminally so sometimes, according to Miss Lingoss, but I think, in his past life, he’d been discouraged from asking questions. Probably quite brutally discouraged. So he shut up, watched what was going on around him, took it all in and kept it all to himself. Occasionally I wondered about this, but he seemed happy, so I dodged the issue and told myself the right moment would present itself. One day.
They discharged me after a day or two. I collected Matthew from Miss Lingoss and made a pathetic stab at resuming a normal life. I kept us both busy. We had our daily routines and then in the evening there was television, his beloved jigsaws, a book at bedtime and his Time Map. I made sure there were little treats occasionally. I took him into town and we sat in the park and fed the ducks. At least, we did once I’d persuaded him to take out the bread he’d hidden in his pockets. The ducks were grateful and we had a Knickerbocker Glory afterwards, so everyone was a winner that day.
I’ve always been good at compartmentalising. You take the stuff you want and lay it out on the mantelpiece of your mind, all ready to be looked at and enjoyed in those quiet moments. The stuff you don’t want – and doesn’t that increase as the years go by? – gets shoved in a dark room somewhere at the back of your mind. To be forgotten. Slam the door. Turn the key. Walk away. It works for me.
I couldn’t escape completely, of course. The day I left Sick Bay, Dr Bairstow sent for me.
He looked dreadful. Worse than me and I wasn’t looking good these days. Leon had been his long-time friend. Ian Guthrie and Markham had both been with him on the day he first walked through the front doors of St Mary’s.
‘Good morning, sir.’
‘Good morning, Max. How are you?’
‘Absolutely fine, sir, thank you.’
He had the big screen set up at his briefing table.
Gesturing, he said, ‘It’s taken a while, but the technical section has finally been able to restore a very little of the damaged footage from the cameras in Hawking. This is entirely your decision, of course, but we are now able to see exactly what happened. I’ve viewed the tapes. Several times, in fact. Do you wish to see them yourself? Please do not feel uncomfortable about saying no.’
I thought. Did I want to see them? Did I want to see Leon and Guthrie die? Or Markham, racing to help with no thought for his own safety. Did I want to see that?
Someone once asked me why I do this job. Why I – all of us – turn up at some of History’s most gruesome moments and watch people die? I had replied that we should never turn away. That by turning away from those unpleasant events does not mean they cease to happen. These were three of the people I loved best in all the world. The least I could do was bear witness to their deaths. After all, didn’t most of my job consist of watching people die?
‘Yes, sir. I want to see.’
He gestured and we sat at his table. I remember how quiet his room was. All the familiar noises of St Mary’s just seemed to fade away.
The screen blinked into life and, suddenly, I was back in Hawking, looking down from an unfamiliar angle.
The quality wasn’t too bad. I clearly saw Number Five materialise. I saw my team depart, arguing. They passed out of shot.
I saw Dieter go in, and for a few minutes nothing happened. The picture jumped a couple of times and then I appeared in the doorway.
I saw myself look around, say something to Dieter, heft my bag to a more comfortable position, and set off down the hangar towards the far doors and Sick Bay.
The image jumped again and suddenly, every light was flashing on and off in agitation. The soundtrack was crackly, but I could hear the alarms going off.
The picture jumped badly as the blast doors crashed together.
I saw Ronan’s pod materialise from nowhere. Right slap bang in the central gangway between the pods. Between Number Three on the right and Number Four on the left. TB2 was behind him.
His door opened and there he stood, looking around.
Dr Bairstow adjusted the controls slightly, and everything slowed down.
I saw myself stand, frozen again. I was doing a lot of that recently.
I saw Leon’s pod arrive, away to my left. The door slid open and there they were. Guthrie and Leon. Their visors were down, which I had forgotten. Such a simple detail, but I’d forgotten. Every time I had run the pictures through my memory, I’d been able to see their faces, even though I knew I hadn’t – if you know what I mean. Just another example of my memory playing tricks on me.
I could see Ronan stand quite still. I peered closely at the screen and could swear he was smiling. Then he turned his head and saw me standing stock still a little way off.
‘Excellent. Three birds with one stone.’ I could hear the words quite distinctly.
The picture broke up and when it reassembled itself again, Markham was appearing from nowhere. I never did establish where he’d come from. He was just there, moving fast.
He tore past me, giving me a shove to get me moving. I couldn’t make out his words, but that must have been when he was telling me to get out.
Leon and Guthrie stood as I’d last seen them, two or three steps away from their pod, thinking they had control of the situation. Until Ronan opened his hands and revealed his intentions.
The picture jumped again and then I was racing down the hangar towards Dieter, who grabbed my arm as I passed, and yanked me inside the pod. I saw the door close.
I saw Ronan say something. Sound quality was not so good now.
Ronan turned directly towards the cameras, smiled and bowed, his arms held wide. He kissed his hand to the camera.
And then – one after the other – like a juggler at the circus – he casually tossed the two blinking devices high into the air.
And now it was just a blur of motion. And then everything went black. For five or six seconds, this time, and when eventually it was restored, there was nothing like the clarity there had been before.
Actually, there wasn’t anything there that had been before. The original camera must have been destroyed in the blast because this one had a different point of view. This was the one from Leon’s office down at the other end of the hangar. The picture was very grainy, due, in no small part, to the swirling mass of dust and dirt inside the hangar.
But not all the dust and dirt in the world could conceal the damage. There was no sign anywhere of Leon’s or Ronan’s pods. Just a huge crater in the concrete floor. TB2 was a mangled wreck. A large lump of it was embedded in Number Seven. Number Eight had been blown off its plinth and slammed back into the hangar wall. As had Three. Four was completely destroyed. Shattered pieces of twisted metal lay everywhere. Number Five, still with me and Dieter inside, lay on its side, half on and half off its plinth.
Everything was gone. Nothing was left alive. The only movement was the clouds of dust and smoke swirling around the hangar before being sucked upwards through the gaping hole that had been the roof.
I swallowed. I was looking at the stuff of nightmares. Hawking was devastated. Just like me. Just like my life.
The whole roof was completely gone. Just like Leon. And Guthrie. And Markham.