Chapter Sixteen
One instant, a café terrace, families and friends sitting having breakfast. The next, a blast of fire engulfed everything, blew everything apart. The shockwave rolled across the pavement and out into the road, tearing down everything in its path. Pieces of tables and chairs and parasols were hurled into the air, tumbled and spun burning in all directions. Flying glass exploded across the street like a giant shotgun blast. The shock lifted the van off its wheels and threw it sideways, its windows bursting outwards.
Ben had been clambering to his feet, still holding on to the child, when the stunning force of the explosion blew him down. He instinctively rolled his body across the boy’s to protect him. Wreckage rained down.
Just as suddenly, and for one eerie moment, everything was completely still. Then the screams began.
Ben’s ears were ringing badly and his head was swimming. His first thought was for the boy. He slowly raised himself up, kneeling in the broken glass. The boy’s eyes met his, wide and terrified. Ben checked for injury. There was no blood. The kid hadn’t been touched. He was just rigid with shock.
Then Ben thought of Charlie. He staggered to his feet, suddenly aware of terrible pain in his neck and shoulder. His shirt was ripped and wet with blood. He raised his hand up to his neck and his fingers felt something there that they shouldn’t. But he ignored it. He stepped out from behind the burning van and saw the full devastation of the explosion.
It was carnage. Blood-spattered corpses and smouldering body parts were strewn across what used to be the café terrace. People were screaming in horror, others moaning, calling for help, others dying. Some of the wounded were already up on their feet, staggering dazed through the wreckage. Black smoke and the acrid smell of burning filled the air. The street was littered with little fires.
Ben shouted for Charlie. Then he saw him.
Charlie’s hand was still gripping the back of his chair. The hand ended at the wrist. The rest of him was spread across the pavement. Ben looked away and closed his eyes.
It wasn’t long before the screech of sirens drowned out the screams of the survivors and the urgent shouts and chatter of the people flocking to help them. Then all was frantic activity. Paramedics waded in hard and fast, like soldiers through the wreckage. In minutes the street was flooded with emergency vehicles and equipment. Police streamed everywhere, yelling into radios, working fast to cordon off the scene, holding off the hundreds of onlookers crowding in from neighbouring streets. People were crying and hugging each other, faces contorted in anguish.
Meanwhile the ambulance and coroner’s teams carried out their grim work. The dead were covered with sheets where they lay, waiting to be bagged and loaded. The medics did what they could to patch up the wounded before the ambulances took them away. One by one, vehicles screeched away up the street, fresh ones arriving in a steady flow.
Ben watched the whole thing from across the road. Beside him on the edge of the pavement, the boy sat quietly with his ball between his feet, staring at the scene in front of them. He looked up at Ben with questioning eyes. There was a cut oozing blood above his left eyebrow. Ben patted his shoulder.
Then the boy seemed to see something. He straightened up and then jumped to his feet and ran off before Ben could stop him. He disappeared into the crowd and then was lost in the milling chaos.
After another minute, a paramedic pointed Ben out to his team-mate. They jogged over to him, and he remembered that his shirt was soaked in blood down one side. He hardly felt the pain any more. He was numb all over, and he couldn’t hear properly. He tried to protest as they wrapped a blanket over his shoulders and attended to his wound. He didn’t understand what they were telling him, but they seemed to think the injury was serious. He didn’t have the strength to resist them as they walked him to an ambulance.
He looked over to the terrace. What was left of Charlie was lying under a bloody sheet. The hand had been removed from the back of the chair. In his daze, Ben wondered where they’d put the hand, and whether they’d found all of him. Then the paramedics got him inside the ambulance and made him lie on a bunk. Doors slammed, an engine revved and the siren started up.
He felt the ambulance accelerate hard up the street. He looked around him. Saw medical equipment, tubes dangling and rattling with the motion of the vehicle. A drip swinging on a stand above him.
He wasn’t alone. Hands were moving over his body, faces peering down at him, the sound of voices somewhere behind the constant ringing in his ears. The distant impressions began to blur. After that, he was drifting, spinning weightlessly into a black space. He dreamed of fire and explosions, saw Charlie’s face smiling at him. Then Charlie’s face was the child’s face, giving him a last look before he ran away into the crowd. Then it became nothing at all.
The twelfth day
Ben woke with a start and sat bolt upright. He blinked and looked around him, disorientated for a second. He was alone in a room. Everything white and clinical. The smell hit him – a sickly combination of disinfectant and hospital food. A trolley clattered past the open door, pushed by an orderly in a blue overall.
As he shifted on the hard bed, Ben winced at the tearing pain in his neck and shoulder. He reached his hand up and felt the big dressing. He remembered now. The moment of the blast. The shards of glass sticking in his neck. The paramedics taking him away.
Then he remembered something else.
Charlie was dead.
His diver’s watch and the wedding ring on its leather thong were on the bedside table. He reached for them gingerly, feeling the pull of the stitches. He stared at the date and time. Nearly twenty-two hours since the explosion. He’d been asleep all day and all night.
He climbed slowly out of bed and walked around his hospital room, slipping on the watch and hanging the ring around his neck. He found a small private bathroom and wandered in to inspect his dressing in the mirror. He peeled back the edge of it and looked at the wound.
He’d had worse. He couldn’t afford to let a couple of slivers of glass stop him. He pulled the hospital gown off over his head, washed quickly in the sink, then walked back into the room to dress. What was left of his clothes had been folded and left on a chair near the bedside. The ripped, bloody shirt was gone. He stepped into his jeans and shoes.
A nurse came into the room, stared at him and started talking in rapid Greek.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand.’
She gestured towards the bed, trying to shoo him back into it.
He shook his head. ‘I’m getting out of here. But I need a shirt.’
‘You no leave,’ she said, and pointed to his neck. ‘You hurt.’
‘I’m OK,’ he said. ‘I want to leave now.’
‘I call the doctor.’ She turned and went off, shaking her head and muttering to herself. She slammed the door behind her.
He sat down heavily on the edge of the bed,
