she was about to do something he wouldn’t like.
His Nan had simply jerked her chin and muttered, ‘I can see that.’
He had stayed with Nan before. He didn’t like sleeping in the little room beyond the kitchen because there was no window in it, and it was dark in the mornings when he woke up even when the sun was shining down on the High Street.
His mother had taken his case through into the room. He had seen her putting his things into it; too many, surely, for just one or two nights?
Nan had put the kettle on and made a pot of tea and his mother had drunk hers standing up by the kitchen window, smoking and looking out of the window. She wouldn’t look at him, and that made him afraid.
Then, when she had finished her tea she had come across the room to him and hugged him. She said, ‘Steve, are you listening to me? I’ve got to go away for a bit. Will you stay here and be a good boy for your Nan, and then I’ll come soon and take you home again?’
He had nodded, miserably, knowing that it was pointless to argue. And so his mother had gone and left him with his Nan, and he had gone into his bedroom and taken his toy cars out of his suitcase. He made a line of them on the kitchen lino, taking care not to look at the grease around the feet of the stove.
His mother had come back from time to time, less and less frequently. At first she had brought money, and Nan liked that.
‘Perhaps next week,’ she always said, when Steve asked her when she was going to take him back home. Then she began coming without money, and that made Nan angry.
In the end she didn’t come at all.
In the dark Steve lay holding Annie and trying to remember what it had been like, then.
It was hard, because it had been so featureless. There had been a long, long time when everything stayed exactly the same except that he grew bigger. He would recall the places clearly enough. Outside the flat there was the high, grey-brick school surrounded by a fenced yard. After school he had played between the lines of prefabs at the end of the street, and on the bombsites where the willowherb sprouted cheerfully. It had been the same for him, more or less, as for his friends. And if he had felt anything much, he had forgotten it.
Once, when Nan was angry with him for some reason, he had shouted at her, ‘I’m going away from here. I’m going to find my Dad, and tell him.’
All Nan had said was, ‘That’ll take a better detective than you are, my lad.’
At about the same time, he had learned that his mother had gone to live in Canada, with a friend.
Perhaps a year later, after months of silence, she had sent Nan some money in an envelope. There had been a letter with it, and in the letter his mother had said that part of the money was for a Christmas treat for Steve. Nan was to take him up to the West End, to Selfridges – she had stressed that, Selfridges, underlined – to see Father Christmas.
‘I was eight, or nine perhaps. Too old for Father Christmas. My mother had forgotten I was growing up. She must have thought I was still six. But we went, anyway. All the way, on the bus. I remember everything about it.’
He hadn’t been very interested in Father Christmas. An old boy with cotton wool stuck all over his chin. But the rest of it had been like a vision of Paradise. They had ridden on the escalators past mirrored pillars that reflected the stately lines of shoppers gliding upwards. He could look down at the floors below him, acres of things spread out for him to admire, lit and scented and brilliantly coloured. No one else, even Nan, had seemed to be surprised by it.
‘It’s all right for some,’ was all Nan had said.
But he could have stayed there all day, just wandering about, looking at things. And at the people, all brushed and glossy and furred. When Nan dragged him away at last they had walked along Oxford Street, looking into every glittering window. They had tea in Lyons’, and he sat at a table in the corner by the door so that he could look out at the taxis and big cars.
It was then, on that day, that Steve decided where he would live. And how he would live.
‘I can remember, when we got back to Nan’s, how grey it looked. Grey and bare.’
After that, it was just a matter of how long it took to get away.
Annie was so quiet. He stroked her hair again and whispered, ‘Did you hear all that, Annie? Are you still here?’
She had heard it, and she could see the children ahead of her. They stopped running to look in at a shop window. There was a Christmas tree in the window, hung with clear glass balls that captured the colours of the rainbow. There were presents all around the tree, wrapped in shiny scarlet paper and tied with scarlet satin ribbons.
She couldn’t see their faces, but the children looked so small and vulnerable, silhouetted against the bright, white lights. She wanted to reach out and draw them into her arms, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t even put her arms around the man in return for his warmth and the comfort of his voice. She turned her head a little and felt him tense, listening to her.
‘Children,’ she said again.
Steve nodded in the darkness, exhausted.
‘That’s right, Annie. Hold on to them. They’re coming for us. Can’t you hear?’
She could see them, still looking at the Christmas tree, but she couldn’t hear their voices. There were other noises, scraping and rattling, drowning them out. But she said, summoning up her strength, ‘Yes.’
They were working in silence now. They bent in a circle under the glare of the lights. Every minute or two they stopped work and listened, and when the silence settled around them, unbroken, they began again, burrowing downwards. In his trailer the police commander waited with his finger touching the corner of his moustache. Martin waited at his point on the barricade, never taking his eyes off the tarpaulin screen.
Children, Steve was thinking. If I had a daughter.
His face was wet, and he thought how stupid it was to cry for her because she had never been born.
I’d buy her a pony, he thought. And ballet lessons, and white satin shoes with ribbons to go dancing in. And when she’s seventeen I’ll buy her a car, and take her downstairs on the morning of her birthday to see it parked outside the house. I’ll open the front door, he thought, and say, There it is …
As the door opened inside Steve’s head, he saw a beam of light.
It shone straight down on to his face and the brightness of it was as sharp as pain. He closed his eyes because the light hurt so much and he saw the dazzle of it inside his eyelids. When it had faded a little he opened his eyes again, and the patch of light was bigger, and still brighter.
He opened his mouth and through the dust caked in his throat he shouted, ‘Here. Down here.’
The light blinked and went out and he felt a second’s terrible disappointment, but then he understood that it was a head, blocking the light to look down at them.
‘Down here,’ he said again. And then, ‘Please. Come quickly.’
‘You’re all right,’ a
