Twenty-two
EMMY had never been to a morgue before, makeshift or otherwise.
The sheet-covered bodies lay on the school cafeteria floor, where only six months earlier children had eaten sausages and peas at sturdy wooden tables. The fallen were arranged in even rows, each one with a cardboard label affixed to the chest, identifying them by name—if it was known—and where they had been killed. Several officials moved about the rows, escorting next of kin to the draped body of the family member they’d been looking for, lifting a corner of the covering, and revealing just half the face; all that a mother or brother or son or grandparent needed to see to identify and claim their beloved.
Emmy would not be able to recall every step to the school-turned-morgue or how she managed to remember the directions after she was told how far she needed to walk to claim her mother’s body.
She did remember being asked how old she was when at last her voice returned and she whispered to the volunteer at the IIP that Mum’s name was among those on the list of the dead.
The first lie came off her lips as easy as air out of a burst balloon.
To have said she was fifteen and orphaned was to have sentenced herself to a children’s home or worse. A social services worker would have been summoned. Emmy would have been escorted away. She wouldn’t have been able to return to the flat. She wouldn’t have been able to keep looking for Julia, whose name was not on the list.
Not on the list!
Emmy was all Julia had. She had to stay on her own. She had to.
“Eighteen,” Emmy had said.
And where was her father?
The second lie came just as effortlessly.
“Recovering in hospital. We got separated Sunday night.”
Kind condolences were offered to Emmy but she did not want the woman’s sympathy. She wanted nothing from her that would give weight and substance to yet another grief.
Emmy was tired of weight and substance. Tired of fear, of anguish, of hunger, of thirst, of despair.
She wanted to feel nothing.
It had taken supreme effort not to press her hand to the woman’s mouth and tell her to shut up about the terrible loss of her mother.
“Where is she?” Emmy had said, and the woman told her how to find the temporary morgue that had been set up near Holborn station for unclaimed dead.
Every step had seemed like the ticking off of the days and weeks and months the war was taking from her. With one word, she allowed her sixteenth and seventeenth years to be swallowed whole by the enemy—taken as swiftly and surely as the war had stolen everything else that was hers. This was all she had been aware of as she strode forward.
She could be a child no longer. Emmy had to be done with immature worries and juvenile hopes.
Orphan was a word to describe a child without parents. Emmy was not a child.
She was Julia’s only living hope, and as such, her little sister’s guardian.
Julia was Emmy’s sole concern.
She would tell whatever lies she must to find her sister. Mum would want only one thing from Emmy now. To find Julia.
When Emmy arrived at the temporary morgue, she was eighteen. She felt eighteen. There would be no looking back.
She approached a haggard-looking city official with a clipboard who seemed to be in charge of receiving callers to the morgue. He looked as though he hadn’t slept in days.
“I’ve come about my mother,” Emmy said, surprising herself with how grown-up she sounded. “Her name is Annie Downtree. Anne Louise Downtree. I was told I would find her body here.”
The man looked at his clipboard. “Are you the next of kin?” His voice sounded as tired as his body looked.
“I’m her only kin.”
He looked up to study Emmy’s face, wondering perhaps how old she was. But Emmy knew she no longer looked like a child.
“My father passed away when I was young.” Again, the lie flew off Emmy’s tongue with hardly a moment’s thought.
“I’m so sorry for ye, lass. Truly I am.”
Emmy did not want his sympathy. “Where is she?”
Again he consulted his clipboard, and then he checked a ledger on a nearby desk. When he looked up, he shook his head. “We aren’t able to keep the unclaimed bodies more than a few days. We always make what inquiries we can. I am so sorry.”
An odd sensation rippled through Emmy. Fear? Emptiness? Dread? “What did you do with her?” she said, restrained emotion thickening her words.
He consulted his clipboard yet again. When he looked up, he rubbed his chin with his hand, the gesture of one about to say something he was afraid to say. “She was buried proper; I can tell you that. In Tower Hamlets. Just this morning.”
Emmy needed a moment to understand what the man was telling her. Mum had been buried already. She was buried. Buried. “What is Tower Hamlets?”
“It’s the public cemetery, miss. Not far from Charing Cross. They were all given proper burials.”
She swallowed a lingering sensation of loss and fear. “‘They’?”
“There were others what no one came for and who had no kin near as we could tell. They were buried proper. A vicar and everything.”
“A vicar,” Emmy echoed.
“Yes.”
Emmy started to teeter and she steadied herself against the wall.
“Miss?” he said.
“Where—where was she found?”
The man checked the ledger; a different page this time. “In the basement of the Sharington Crescent Hotel. The place took a direct hit, I’m afraid. The upper floors collapsed into the basement, I hear. No one sheltering in the basement survived. I’m sorry.”
A hotel. She was at a hotel.
“Where is this place?” Emmy said evenly.
“I’m sure it was quick, miss. I’m sure she didn’t suffer.”