it’s a lottery ticket, I don’t want to see it.’
‘It’s not a lottery ticket.’
She knew what it was: wild hope.
‘My God,’ he said, suddenly looking at his watch. ‘Hey, Pedro, we’ve got to get going, man.’
‘Tell us the secret,’ said the children.
He lifted Gloria up and put her on her feet.
‘If I tell you that, it’s not a secret any more,’ he said. ‘You have to wait for the secret to be revealed.’
‘Tell us now!’
‘This evening,’ he said, kissing Lourdes on the head and taking Pedro’s tiny hand.
Gloria went to the door with them. She kissed Pedro, who was staring at his feet, and not much interested. She kissed her husband on the mouth and whispered on his lips:
‘I hate you.’
‘By this evening you’ll love me again.’
She went back to the breakfast table and sat opposite Lourdes. There were another fifteen minutes before they had to leave. They spent a few minutes looking at one of Lourdes’ drawings before going to the window. Fernando and Pedro appeared below in the car park in front of the pre-school. They waved. Fernando held Pedro above his head and he waved back.
Having delivered the boy to school, Fernando walked off between the apartment blocks to the main road to catch the bus to work. Gloria turned back into the room. Lourdes was already at the table working on another drawing. Gloria sipped her coffee and played with her daughter’s silky hair. Fernando and his secrets. He played these games to keep them amused and their hopes up that they would eventually be able to buy their own apartment, but the property prices had exploded and they now knew that they would be renting for the rest of their lives. Gloria was never going to be anything other than a rep and, though Fernando kept saying he was going to take a plumbing course, he still needed to make the money he did as a labourer on the construction site. They’d been lucky to find this apartment with such a cheap rent. They were lucky to have two healthy children. As Fernando said: ‘We might not be rich, but we are lucky and luck will serve us better than all the money in the world.’
She didn’t immediately associate the shuddering tremor beneath her feet with the booming crash that came from the outside world. It was a noise so loud that her rib cage seemed to clutch at her spine and drive the air out of her lungs. The coffee cup jumped out of her hand and broke on the floor.
‘MAMÁ!’ screamed Lourdes, but there was nothing for Gloria to hear, she saw only her daughter’s wide-eyed horror and grabbed her.
Terrible things happened simultaneously. Windows shattered. Cracks and giant fissures opened up in the walls. Daylight appeared where it shouldn’t. Level horizons tilted. Doorframes folded. Solid concrete flexed. The ceiling crowded the floor. Walls broke in half. Water spurted from nowhere. Electricity crackled and sparked under broken tiles. A wardrobe shot out of sight. Gravity showed them its remorselessness. Mother and daughter were falling. Their small, fragile bodies were hurtling downwards in a miasma of bricks, steel, concrete, wire, tubing, furniture and dust. There was no time for words. There was no sound, because the sound was already so loud it rendered everything else silent. There wasn’t even any fear, because it had all become grossly incomprehensible. There was just the sickening plummet, the stunning impact and then a vast blackness, as of a great receding universe.
‘What the fuck was that?’ said Pintado.
Falcón knew exactly what it was. He’d heard an ETA car bomb explode when he was working in Barcelona. This sounded big. He kicked back his chair and ran out of the Institute without replying to Pintado’s question. He punched the Jefatura’s number into his mobile as he left. His first thought was that it was something in the Santa Justa station, the high-speed AVE arriving from Madrid. The railway station was less than a kilometre away to the southeast of the hospital.
‘Diga,’ said Ramírez.
‘There’s been a bomb, José Luis…’
‘I heard it even out here,’ said Ramírez.
‘I’m at the Institute. It sounded close. Get me some news.’
‘Hold it.’
Falcón ran past the receptionist, the mobile pressed to his ear, listening to Ramírez’s feet pounding down the corridor and up the stairs and people shouting in the Jefatura. The traffic had stopped everywhere. Drivers and passengers were getting out of their cars, looking to the northeast at a plume of black smoke.
‘The reports we’re getting,’ said Ramírez, panting, ‘is that there’s been an explosion in an apartment block on the corner of Calle Blanca Paloma and Calle Los Romeros in the barrio of El Cerezo.’
‘Where’s that? I don’t know it. It must be close because I can see the smoke.’
Ramírez found a wall map and gave rapid instructions.
‘Is there any report of a gas leak?’ asked Falcón, knowing this was wildly optimistic, like the so-called power surge on the day of the London underground bombings.
‘I’m checking the gas company.’
Falcón sprinted through the hospital. People were running, but there was no panic, no shouting. They had been training for this moment. Everyone in a white coat was making for the casualty department. Orderlies were sprinting with empty trolleys. Nurses ran with boxes of saline. Plasma was on the move. Falcón slammed through endless double doors until he hit the main street and the wall of sound: a cacophony of sirens as ambulances swung out into the street.
The main road was miraculously clear of traffic. As he crossed the empty lanes he saw cars pulling up on to pavements. There were no police. This was the work of ordinary citizens, who knew that this stretch of road had to be kept clear to ferry the wounded. Ambulances careered down the street two abreast, whooping and delirious, with lights flashing queasily, in air that was filling with a grey/pink dust and smoke that billowed out from behind the apartment blocks.
At the crossroads bloodstained people stumbled about on their own or were being carried, or walked towards the hospital with handkerchiefs, tissues and kitchen roll held to foreheads, ears and cheeks. These were the superficially wounded victims, the ones sliced by flying glass and metal, the ones some distance from the epicentre, who would never make it into the top flight of disaster statistics but who might lose the sight in an eye, or their hearing from perforated eardrums, bear facial scars for the rest of their lives, lose the use of a finger or a hand, never walk again without a limp. They were being helped by the lucky ones, those who didn’t even have a scratch as the air whistled with flying glass, but who had the images burned on to their minds of someone they knew or loved who had been whole seconds before and was now sliced, torn, bludgeoned or broken.
In the blocks of flats leading up to Calle Los Romeros, the local police were evacuating the buildings. An old man in bloody pyjamas was being led by a boy, who had realized his importance. A young man holding a crimson-flashed towel to the side of his head stared through Falcón, his face horribly partitioned by rivulets of blood, coagulating with dust. He had his arm around his girlfriend, who appeared unhurt and was talking at full tilt into her mobile phone.
The air, more dust-filled
