The windows along the street blazed their Christmas displays at her. She looked at them for a moment, savouring the sight of satin ribbons and fir branches frosted with dry, sparkling snow. The real thing in the street outside was already grey-brown, spraying in filthy plumes under the wheels of the traffic. Annie pushed gratefully in through the big glass doors and breathed in the warm, perfumed air. She took her knitted hat off and shook her hair out, then turned towards the lift. She would start on the top floor and work her way down. Her list was ready in her coat pocket.
There was no one in the lift. She looked up at the indicator, congratulating herself on having arrived before the crowds. The doors opened at the top floor and she stepped out. A long counter heaped up with coloured balls faced her, red and green and silver and gold, and a pyramid of clear glass ones that held the iridescence of soap bubbles. She was drawn to the display and picked up a clear ball, turning it so that the colours changed in the light. Expensive, she thought regretfully. Nearly a pound each. But she took four, guiltily, putting them carefully into a wire basket. She moved across the department to the waterfalls of tinsel and buried her hands amongst the strands.
Two assistants waited at the nearest cash till.
‘What time d’you finish?’ Annie heard one of them ask.
‘Seven, tonight,’ her friend answered. ‘Makes the day seem endless, doesn’t it?’
The tinsel was coiled in Annie’s basket now, a bright silver serpent. They needed some new stuff, she reassured herself. Theirs was tarnished from too many annual appearances. But she wouldn’t spend any more money on decorations. She would go on down to the kitchen department and look for something for Martin’s mother. Her own mother needed a new dressing gown. She would go on to Selfridge’s for that, later. Annie’s face clouded as if she had remembered something painful, and she turned quickly with her basket towards the cash desk.
Yawning, one of the assistants wrapped up her purchases in green tissue. The other tapped the till keys and the electronic total flashed at Annie. She counted out the notes, picked up her carrier bag and walked towards the stairs at the back of the store. They were nearer than the lifts. She would walk down two floors. Heavy swing doors led to the stairwell. A sign over them announced Emergency Exit.
Annie reached the doors. She was vaguely conscious of someone else heading the same way. It was a man, he had been standing beside her at the cash desk, and now he was right behind her. She half turned her head, and his arm reached past to push the heavy door open for them both to pass through.
‘After you,’ the man said. She didn’t see his face. Nor did she ever say Thank you, although the words had formed in her head.
It was then that the bomb exploded.
It destroyed the staff cloakroom where it had been left overnight. It blew a hole up through the roof of the store, and the blast waves racing downwards into the heart of the structure ripped a great hole into which the floors tilted and fell. The terrible thunder of the explosion shook the surrounding streets and jolted the houses a mile away.
Annie didn’t hear a sound. There was an instant, an instant as long as infinity, when gravity deserted the world. In total silence she saw a blur of red and gold as the counter threw its load of glass balls into the whirling air, and then smashed them into fragments. She felt a silent wind that tore her clothes and flayed her skin and lifted her up only to pitch her forwards, down into a deathly pit where broken beams and chunks of wall boiled around her.
The fierce, white light was abruptly extinguished, and the dark descended.
The noise came then, like thunder receding, and in the wake of it came the roar of falling masonry as the store was sucked inwards on itself, molten, a whirlpool of stone and steel.
Annie fell, and went on falling, into the dark.
The noise had possessed her, but now it abandoned her again, growing fainter. The roaring crash was finished and in its place was the rattle of chunks of stone and plaster falling down on top of her. That grew fainter too, until it was only a whisper of dust, trickling into the crevices and settling as gravity took hold of the world again.
The girls at the cash desk were both dead. So was the cleaner who had been working in the cloakroom and who had lifted the tartan holdall out of its hiding place. Annie didn’t know it yet, but she was alive. She had fallen into the hole, with the heavy fire door half on top of her, like a shield.
Even the dust had stopped whispering now. The silence came again, long seconds, and nothing stirred. Then, up in the light, above the smoking rubble where tinsel and fragments of pretty glass were mixed with torn girders and other, terrible things, and where the snowflakes drifted and settled impartially, the first siren began to wail.
Annie couldn’t hear it. Her head thundered with the echo of the explosion and her eyes burned with the white flash of light. She closed her eyes, opened them again, but the glare was undimmed. Where had the dark gone? Her own, private darkness, how could that have been taken away? Were her eyes open or shut?
She lay without moving for a long time, she didn’t know how long. The roaring in her ears dropped in pitch, became muffled. The white blaze turned egg-yellow with a brassy point at the centre. The first bodily sensation to return was a wave of nausea. Annie tried instinctively to turn her head in order to be sick, but a sharp pain that seemed to be inside her head cut short the movement. She lay still again, staring up into the middle of the yellow glow. Slowly, like a fist unclenching, the nausea released its grip, and the light dwindled to a little point. Her eyes were opening and closing, she was sure of that now. It dawned on her that the light was inside her own head, and she could see nothing else because she was in utter darkness.
Annie’s tongue moved, finding her lips. They were coated with dust, except for one corner that was clogged with sticky moisture. There was the brackish taste of her own blood. She was suddenly possessed by panic, more powerful than the nausea. She tried to roll sideways, to draw her knees up into the foetal position, and found that she could not. She was hurt, badly hurt, and she was trapped in total blackness.
Annie could hear screaming, a scream that went on and on, up and then down again as the sufferer gasped for breath. When it stopped she wondered if the screams could have been her own.
Where was she? What had happened?
Oh God, please help me.
The screams had been hers. She could feel another one, the voice of pure terror, rising inside her. She clenched her teeth, and felt the grit crunch between them. She tried to swallow it, to clear her mouth, focusing on the smallest thing to keep the fear at bay. She could feel it all around her, like a living thing.
Think. Try to work out what had happened.
Slowly this time, she tried to move. Her right side, arm and shoulder right across to her breastbone, and her hip and thigh, wouldn’t do anything. She was pinned down by something smooth, sloping upwards at an angle. She discovered it by feeling cautiously upwards with her left hand. On her left side, higher up, there was something jagged that felt both hard and crumbling at the same time. She gave up her useless search and let her arm drop to her side again. Legs. Where were her legs? She could feel nothing at all in the lower part of them. It was as if her body was clay that had been crumpled up and crudely remodelled, stopping short at the knees.
And her head, the pain in her head. She rolled it, just a little, to one side and then the other. There was perhaps an inch or two of play before the pain gripped her. Suddenly Annie realized that her hair was caught underneath something. She had taken her knitted hat off – how long ago?
