“Why?” she managed to say. “Why is it always you who runs off?”
He howled, chest heaving. “I’m sorry . . . I’m so sorry . . .”
She shook her head. “You have to come back. We can’t stay out here.”
“I’m not going back in the basement.”
“Oh yes you jolly well are.”
She half dragged, half led him back through the air raid, which was all around them now, and in the mouth of a side street she saw that Tom was lying on the pavement, asleep in the snow with the winter sun slanting over him. It was a stress reaction she had read about—the mind shutting down when it all got too much. She would have to go back for him as soon as she had delivered Zachary to the shelter. (How extraordinary that she was the one who was calm in this situation; who could take in everything clearly and without panic.) She hauled Zachary back to Hawley Street, with the bombing seeming distant again, and here there was an interesting phenomenon. (How glad her father would be to know that his daughter could be cool in a crisis.) This was how it sounded in her mind, as she held Zachary by his thin wrist and felt the pulse in it while the drone note of the bombers faded away into the east: I am witnessing a phenomenon related to the bombing.
The thing was that Hawley Street was there but the school was gone. She walked up and down the length of the street, twice, calmly but briskly, pulling Zachary by the wrist and looking for the school. Because of course the phenomenon would have a simple explanation: perhaps that someone unfamiliar with the area had taken the building and put it back in slightly the wrong place. She started laughing because it was silly that one couldn’t find something so big and stolidly Victorian as Hawley Street School. All she could find was an enormous pile of red bricks, dotted with decorative London yellows. What a ridiculous place to leave bricks. And this was when her stomach fell and she understood that the problem was a perceptual one: that her concussion was worse than she had supposed, that she was hallucinating. It was frightening but at least it all made sense now: Zachary turned white, Tom fast asleep, the school absent without leave. How funny the mind could be. She sat in the thick white dust and laughed.
Afterward they told her it was normal, with shock. Someone came and took Zachary away from her. They had to prise her fingers off his wrist. And then for hours all she could think was what a waste it was: a new carton of chalk had been delivered that morning and now it must be ruined, all twenty sticks of it. She explained to a nurse that they would simply have to make do, and write on the blackboard with the stubs of old chalk.
They took her to a rest center and wrapped her tight in blankets. They told her that it helped to be swaddled like a baby. Days passed, which she experienced as the daylight flickering on and off. As if there were a bad connection. They told her that no bodies had been recovered from inside the school, only fragments. The only body was Tom’s, recovered from the street, and they unwrapped her from the blankets long enough for her to be taken to identify him.
The morgue was an improvised facility, in a church hall. Someone had marked Tom’s forehead with an X, in red grease pencil. It meant that there was an internal injury. They told her Tom had been killed by the pressure wave of a bomb, which was why there wasn’t a mark on his body except for that X. Mary hardly heard them. It was evident to her that the bomb had done nothing to him—that the cause of death must somehow be connected to that terrible letter on his forehead: the unknown in all algebras, the singularity.
She explained this to the woman who was seeing to her in between signing for the deliveries of the remains that were still arriving at the morgue, in sixteen-inch rectangular cardboard containers requisitioned from a grocer, as and when the heavy rescue men brought them out.
Her mother flashed on and off. She told Mary that the heavy-rescue crews had dug into the rubble for four days and nights, bringing out what remains they could, and then they had put lime down.