mother smoothed his hair again. ‘Graham,’ she pleaded.
‘I like Mr Fitchie,’ he told his mother.
‘So did I,’ said his mother.
‘He’s nice.’
‘Graham,’ she repeated.
‘Where’s he gone?’ asked Alexander.
‘He’s with Jesus, Alexander. Mr Fitchie’s gone to live with Jesus.’
‘Might have,’ his father joined in. ‘But then again –’
‘Graham. Please.’
Alexander closed his eyes once more, and in his head he saw the ambulance door and waggling feet. His father picked him up and carried him to his bed in the shelter.
From this night and from other nights Alexander would remember the top of the cellar steps, where the mud-coloured boards of the hallway ended at two shallow troughs of pale, splintery wood. The material of his father’s jacket scratched at his face when his father hunched over to duck through the gate of the cage in the cellar. He would recall his mattress in the corner of the cage, and the toy truck that was wedged into the folds of the blankets. He recalled gripping the wires in a span of his hand as his father climbed back up the steps, and testing his tongue against the metal, getting a taste that was tart.
Unequivocally from this February night he remembered waking in the darkness to hear first the grinding in the sky, and then his mother’s breathing. Her hand touched his forehead and its dampness made him shudder. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘They’ll soon be gone. We’ll be all right.’ He pressed his face against his mother’s arms, waiting for the ack-acks on the Heath and the woof of the big guns. Upstairs someone knocked on the door and he heard the clang of his father’s helmet against the wall as he left.
‘You were born on a night like this,’ his mother told him. ‘Nothing bad is going to happen to you, or to any of us.’ She sang to him quietly. ‘The cats and dogs will dance in the heather,’ she sang, and soon he could not hear the planes, but only his mother’s voice and her heartbeat, and Alexander slid into sleep, imagining tiny aeroplanes flying out from under a big blue gown like the flies around the bins at the end of the road, and the men on Shooters Hill firing their guns while the big balloons grazed in the clouds above them, and a factory full of seamen, and Mr Fitchie. Mr Fitchie was in a black suit that shone like a crow’s feathers and he was staring across a road at Alexander as if Alexander was floating past in a boat. Mr Fitchie was not happy but he was not sad either. He looked across the road with his head at an angle, and his hands in his pockets. His eyes blinked quickly three or four times, in the shadow of the brim of his hat, the way the geese blink at you through the railings around the lake in the park.
He was in the street with Jimmy Murrell, as Alexander was to recall in his fifty-eighth year, and they were taking it in turns to throw a ball against the kerbstone for the straw-coloured stray to catch. The ball was black and almost as hard as a cricket ball, and each time they took it from the dog’s mouth it left crumbs of rubber mixed with dog spit on their hands. Jimmy Murrell had a thick white gap in one eyebrow where he’d fallen from a rock and cracked his head in the farmyard at Exmouth, the town he soon went to live in, with his mother and father and his sisters.
To confuse the dog, Jimmy chucked a handful of air towards the kerb and the dog was twenty yards up the street before it heard the ball hit the tarmac down the slope. Its claws made a noise like a sewing machine as it ran, and its head went up and down in time with the bouncing ball. In Exmouth, Jimmy Murrell said, it was warmer than in London. With all the other children Jimmy used to go to a beach that was bigger than the Heath. Again he described the house at the back of the dunes, the only house for miles, with a fence of white boards around it and big nets hanging from the boards. The walls of the house were white wood, and right in the centre was a red door that looked like a pillarbox stuck in the sand. Thousands of pools were left on the sand when the tide went out, said Jimmy, with shreds of seaweed in them and sometimes a small green crab-shell. The tide went out so far that it was farther than walking from his house to the shops, and at night if the tide was low you couldn’t even hear the sea. But if the tide was high at night, you could see the waves glowing, as if there were torches under the water.
The dog, too tired to drop the ball, sat down beside Alexander. Its tongue was bent behind the ball and drooped sideways out of its mouth, dripping big dark circles onto the paving stones.
‘Bigger than all the houses,’ Jimmy Murrell said. ‘Higher and longer,’ and with a swing of his arm he made Alexander see the marvellous dunes.
Alexander would remember in his later years that Jimmy Murrell was waving his arms and speaking to him when he heard his mother’s voice. She was calling his name and she was running alongside the privet hedges with her arms straight up in the air in a gesture that frightened him.
‘Boys!’ she yelled, and then she did a couple of skips just like Jimmy’s sisters when they played on the path. ‘Boys! Come here!’ she shouted, though she was running so fast she was with them before they could get to their feet. She picked up Alexander and hugged him to her chest. It remained in Alexander’s memory that she was wearing the pale blue blouse with the daisies on it, and that the second button of her blouse was in the top buttonhole. Then she put him down and hugged Jimmy Murrell where he stood, squashing his face against her legs. She put out a hand and ruffled Alexander’s hair, and it was then he realised that nothing bad had happened.
‘It’s over,’ she said. ‘It’s over, it’s over, it’s over,’ she sang and she clapped her hands as she looked down on them, as though they had done something that had delighted her. ‘Your daddy will be back soon,’ she told Jimmy Murrell.
‘How soon?’ asked Jimmy.
‘Very soon,’ she said. With her left hand she took hold of Jimmy’s right and she gave the other to her son and whirled them both around her skirt. ‘Home we go,’ she declared, then hand in hand they walked back up the road, with the dog behind them.
The kitchen was full of women when they arrived. By the radio sat Mrs Murrell, her cheek close to the front of it, as if it was telling her something no one else was meant to hear, while Mrs Evans was at the sink, rinsing and wiping the tea cups. Other women stood around the table, and on the garden step was a woman Alexander knew worked at his mother’s factory, but he did not know her name; she was smoking a cigarette, and she turned as he came into the room and breathed out a cloud of smoke that covered her face for a moment. There was hardly any space for him to stand in.
‘Jimmy with you, Alexander?’ Mrs Murrell asked, then Jimmy stepped in from the hall. She did not get up, but held her arms wide open for her son to walk into, and pinched his cheeks so his lips stretched like a rubber band.
Setting the tray on the table, Mrs Evans remarked – ‘It’ll all be different now.’
‘It will that, Iris,’ said Irene MacIndoe. ‘Everything will change now.’
‘Different world,’ agreed Mrs Murrell.
Lying on the lawn beside his friend, Alexander stared at the sky and wondered in what way the sky would be a different sky. He imagined planes that were different planes, shaped like starfish or painted green. Rockets meandered over the horizon and nosed
