‘You understand, don’t you? I was worried for you – you were so far out. I was concerned that you would put yourself in danger without realizing it.’
I can’t make myself breathe normally, as I would if I were asleep. The air seems to catch inside me and burn in my chest.
‘Goodnight, Stella.’ He places his hand on my hip and I flinch involuntarily. It is not the reaction of a sleeping person. But it is a tiny movement. He doesn’t mention it – perhaps he doesn’t notice, after all.
I don’t know exactly what happened. I started out with no real sense of purpose. Then, at the point at which I might usually have turned around, I found I wanted to continue. I felt that I could have continued forever, in fact, outswimming all that has been resurfacing around me. When I told him, I saw it again, all that could not be unseen – and how it had altered me. It was more than just a loss, you see. It was a realignment; a sea change.
February 1937
I am lying on my back on the tarmac of the road. Above me the sky rushes, but I seem to be fixed in place. It is too silent. I wait for the one sound that is important: the sound of Tino’s voice.
There are things scattered about me: things that I recognize, out of place here in their domesticity. The brightly coloured pages of a children’s book, a wicker basket: Tino’s things, relatively unscathed.
But where the cabin of the truck used to be is a catastrophe of blackened metal, twisted by incredible force, shattered glass. Somehow, I have landed clear of it.
I understand, as I look about me, that Tino has not. He is in there, still.
I try to stand, but my body won’t obey me. I begin to crawl, instead, through the littered glass, keeping my eyes upon the horror in front of me, waiting for any sign of movement. I have never felt fear like this.
There is something beneath that ruin of metal: a colour that I recognize. Something that insists itself, but that I cannot allow myself to believe. Even as I refuse to do so, and even before I reach him and try to free him, to take him in my arms, I know.
Since I first held him I have done everything in my power to keep him safe. It has not been enough.
Light, pressing pale red through my eyelids. There is pain in my hand, a hot concentration of it, and I hold to it, to distract me from that other pain.
I am in Madrid. I have lost two fingers from my right hand and have a slight concussion. Some of the sounds come to me as though through water. Otherwise, I am unharmed. I was miraculously lucky. The convoy was targeted by a fleet of Heinkel bombers. The driver of the final truck, uninjured himself, had found me beside the wreckage.
‘There wasn’t …’ I sit up. ‘He didn’t see …’ I don’t know why I am asking. I know. I saw. But it is almost still possible to believe in it as a terrible waking dream. Until the nurse stops me and says, ‘There was no one else, querida.’
They need to discharge me: there are others with injuries far worse. They wear their strain heavy about them, these men and women. These are people stretched to their limit. I wonder what they have seen – and then try not to think. Do I have anywhere to go? They ask it, but without the requirement of an answer. Either way, my bed is required – I must be on my way.
‘Your cat,’ the nurse comes to me, holding what appears to be a brown bundle. When she sees my face she says, ‘It isn’t yours? We thought …’
I look into the hoary old face of Se?or Bombón and feel a sudden, brief loathing for the animal, who has somehow managed to live when my little brother has died.
‘No,’ I hold out my left hand, the one without the dressing. ‘He’s mine.’
I am not myself. Madrid, too, is at once the same and strangely altered – like somewhere in a nightmare. I have known it as a place visited for Christmas, holidays, special occasions. Sometimes, when Papa did not want to be disturbed from his work, Tino and I would come here to stay with my aunt and uncle. They would take us for trips into the city, and I understood then what it might be like to have a parent who had a little more time to give.