was a flurry of movement amongst the firemen working under the tilted, ragged floors of the store. A broken beam was winched up and swung away to the side and one of the waiting ambulances started up and inched forward. A stretcher was carried across to where the firemen and doctors crouched in a circle, looking down. Then one of the doctors stood up and stepped backwards, over the heaps of wreckage. The firemen worked on until the watchers saw a flutter of something pale as another chunk of masonry was pulled away. A moment later a woman was lifted out of the hole. They laid her on the stretcher, and covered her face with a blanket.
The only sound was the crowd’s sigh, as if it came from a single throat.
The cameramen swung their long black lenses with the stretcher as it was carried, swaying and bumping, over to the ambulance. It was lifted inside and the heavy doors slammed. A moment later the ambulance nosed slowly away down the street.
‘Fight for it, if you want it so much.’
Annie only half heard him. The sense of what she would lose had taken such a powerful hold of her. Her life seemed her own creation, not passionate or original, but warm, and sweet, and infinitely valuable. The threatening darkness, looming and shivering over her head, was unbearable. She wanted to move, throwing her limbs convulsively to fight her way out of it, and yet she couldn’t. Her body hurt, and where it didn’t hurt it didn’t seem to exist any longer. Claustrophobia took hold of her and she felt a scream of terror rising again in her throat.
Annie opened her mouth and the scream came, and she heard the invisible mass around her swallow it up like a whisper.
‘Don’t,’ Steve said harshly. ‘Save that for when they might be able to hear us.’
Could they hear? Where were they? He felt the darkness as a weight now, too, heavy all around them. He strained his ears for a sound of the rescue that his reason told him must be under way, but he could hear nothing except the multiplying echoes of Annie’s scream.
‘Wait,’ he whispered. He let go of her hand and moved his arm across his chest to feel for the watch. His fingers felt numb, but he stroked the face of it, trying to make sense of the tiny hands. He thought it might be half past eleven, and so a whole hour had passed, but then he realized that the hands might just be in the same position as last time. Perhaps he had misread them then, and the watch was broken after all. The dislocation frightened him. He had relied on being able to monitor the time passing, thinking that he could gauge how their strength was holding out. Then he felt the second hand brush against his fingertip again. He slipped the watch back into its place, reassured, and reached out for Annie’s hand again.
‘It’s half past eleven. A whole hour has gone. We’re doing all right.’
The relief in his voice and the touch of his hand pushed Annie’s fear back again.
Fight, he had said, if you want it so much. To live. She moved her head and felt the door tilted against her cheek.
‘You want to fight,’ she said. ‘It’s precious for you, too, isn’t it?’
Precious?
Steve tasted the word, trying it out against his memories of the last months. He began to understand it for Annie, listening to her talk about her children. The need to see them growing up, the fierce determination to protect them that he had glimpsed fleetingly in other women, that was part of her. He had nothing like that. Steve thought often, without much surprise or regret, that he was living at one step removed from life.
How long then, since the sharp edge of pleasure had gone? Not just pleasure, but anticipation, need, fear, even?
He thought backwards, a long tunnel of days and nights.
Before Vicky. He had wanted Vicky, but he had also been quite sure of getting her.
He had met her at a party, a party for a book that Cass had done some modelling for. Vicky worked for the publishing company. She looked frumpy, in a corduroy skirt and a thick, knitted jersey. They had been introduced and Steve had asked some polite questions and then looked past her, to see where Cass had gone. But Vicky had moved to stand squarely in front of him again. Then he had noticed that she had unusual dark eyes in a clever, challenging face, and that something was amusing her. He suddenly realized that he wanted to find out what it was, and at the same moment Vicky had shifted her weight, resting it on one leg with the other knee bent. She had tilted her head to one side, still looking at him, and he had imagined the line of her body under the thick clothes. They had talked for a moment or two more and then Vicky had licked the corner of her mouth, quickly, like a cat. She had put her hand up to cover it, like a schoolgirl trying out a kiss in the mirror. They had both laughed, then.
Steve had taken her to bed two days later. Her inventiveness, her energy and her exotic tastes had surprised him.
‘Did you learn that at LMH?’ he had asked.
‘Some of it,’ she grinned at him.
Yet even then he had been moving with the sense of inevitability, and their affair had unfolded in front of him as though he were watching it on screen.
Was he so used to the distance, then, that he couldn’t remember when it had opened up? Steve lay still, feeling the cramp in his outstretched arm and listening to the painful, irregular indrawn breaths of the girl beside him. The girl was real, he felt her as close as if he were holding her in his arms. He was waiting for each of her breaths, willing her to draw the next, and the next. The blackness was real, and so was the dust that coated his mouth and stung in his eyes, and the pain was real too.
Steve felt a sudden frightening desire to laugh at the fact that it should take this to stir him. He understood the fragility of his life and the possibility of survival, the need for it, reared in front of him like a wall. He was afraid, as frightened as Annie was, but he forced himself to shake off the clutch of it with a determination that was almost pleasurable.
Precious, she had said. No, his life wasn’t that. It was hollow and mechanical and faintly shameful. The need to laugh faded, and Steve saw as clearly as if a bright light had been turned on overhead that what was precious was the need to fight, and he had lost that long ago.
‘I always wanted to be rich,’ he said.
‘And are you?’
He thought for a moment. ‘It’s a long time since I’ve had to live without something I wanted because I didn’t have the money to buy it.’ There was a pause before he added, ‘The natural result is that you find yourself not wanting anything anyway. I’ve got a handsome, rather unlived-in flat and several quite good modern paintings. I’ve got a little house in the hills behind Draguignan that I hardly ever go to. I’ve got a BMW, more suits than I can get around to wearing, all sorts of things. What else is there?’
Annie listened, trying to picture what he looked like from the sound of his voice and the warmth of his hand. Something in what he said touched her. She knew that he had never said it before.
‘Is that what you wanted?’ she asked.
Steve didn’t answer. To have answered would have been to peer into an abyss, gaping darker than the real darkness where they lay. It was suddenly so very far from what he wanted that he had completely lost his bearings. Wasn’t there anything, then, waiting, if this weight was ever lifted off the two of them?
He lifted his head an inch or two, straining his neck muscles, as if the hopeless movement could
