Strangers. Rosie Thomas

wind by the threatening frontage. A medical team stood a few yards away, huddled together, not speaking. Everyone was watching the black-coated backs of two firemen who were kneeling side by side to lift chunks of masonry away from the lip of a black hollow.

      ‘Heat camera pinpointed this one. They can see her now. It’s another young girl.’

      The commander glanced across at the medical team.

      ‘Alive?’

      ‘I’m afraid not.’

      The minutes passed. Overhead a crane was being manoeuvred into position to begin the painstaking process of dismantling the toppling store front, piece by piece. The rescue workers in their helmets passed to and fro underneath it, never looking up. The commander waited until the second body was recovered. The girl’s legs looked pitifully thin and white as they lifted her out and laid her on a stretcher. She followed her friend into an ambulance and then away through the cordons towards the hospital.

      The commander ducked his head and walked back through the splinters of glass to the trailer. A preliminary report from the bomb squad was waiting for him. It had been a single bomb, sited on the third floor towards the back of the store, probably in a cloakroom. It appeared now that the possibility of another unexploded bomb hidden elsewhere in the store could be discounted.

      ‘Thank Christ for that, at least,’ the commander murmured. The explosives experts had been at work for an hour. One of them handed him a second report and he glanced quickly at it. Diagrams showed the probable direction of the blast waves following the explosion, and the sliding masses of rubble.

      ‘Almost exactly the same as at Brighton, sir,’ one of the officers murmured.

      ‘Except that by a rare stroke of good fortune the PM hadn’t slipped in there for her Christmas shopping.’

      ‘No, sir.’

      According to the calculations, the most hopeful place for survivors in the centre of the store was the basement, sheltered from the falling wreckage by the reinforced thickness of the ground floor. The commander stared through the trailer window at the tangled mountain resting on top of that floor. He put his finger up to his moustache again.

      ‘Side access to the basement?’ he asked.

      ‘Almost entirely blocked, sir. They’re working to clear it from both sides now.’

      The commander looked down at his watch. It was eleven fifty-five. If there were any survivors in the basement, they had been buried for two hours and thirteen minutes.

      Eleven years ago.

      Annie wasn’t cold any more. She felt almost comfortable, as if she was drifting in a small boat on a wide, dark lake. Steve’s hand was her anchor.

      She was trying to remember what had happened eleven years ago. It was important for herself, but it was more important still because she wanted to tell Steve. She felt him close to her, listening. The sensation of drifting intensified. They were both of them afloat, a long way from the shore.

      ‘I chose the easy option,’ she said again.

      ‘And what was it?’ His voice was as warm as if his mouth was against her ear and his fingers tangled in her hair.

      ‘I chose what would be safe, and simple. Because it would be … wholesome.’ Annie laughed, a cracked note. ‘That’s a funny notion, isn’t it? As if you can turn your life into wholemeal bread.’

      Her memory was clear now, the images as vivid as early-morning dreams.

      The day she met Matthew was exactly eight weeks before her wedding day. She came up the stairs to the fifth floor of the mansion block where her friend Louise lived. The green-painted stairwell smelt of carbolic soap and metal polish, just as it always did. The lift was out of order, just as it always was and Annie was panting, the John Lewis carrier bag bumping against her leg, as she reached Louise’s door. She rang the bell and when Louise opened the door Annie held the bag up in triumph.

      ‘I got it. Ten yards, hideously expensive. You’d better like it.’

      ‘Hmm.’ Louise had taken the bag and peered into it. ‘Oh, yes. I’ll make you a wedding dress such as has never been made before. Annie, this is Matthew.’

      He was sitting on the floor with his back against Louise’s sofa and his legs stretched out in jeans with frayed bottoms. He had fair, almost colourless hair cut too short for his thin face, grey eyes, and his bare chest showed under his half-open shirt. He was in his early twenties, two or three years younger than Annie was.

      He looked up at her and the first thing he said to her was ‘Don’t marry him, whoever he is. Marry me.’

      Annie laughed, slotting him into her category automatically flirtatious, but Matthew hadn’t even smiled. He had just looked at her, and Louise stood awkwardly behind them with the carrier bag dangling in her hand. They didn’t talk about the dress that day. They had tea instead, sitting in a sunlit circle on Louise’s rug.

      Matthew had been living in Mexico for a year, working as a labourer on a peasant farm in exchange for his food and a bed in a lean-to shack. He told them about the long days monotonously working the thin soil, the efforts at summer irrigation using water brought on the backs of donkeys from the trickling river.

      ‘Why were you there?’ Annie asked. The self-conscious hippiedom would have irritated her in anyone else, but Matthew was perfectly matter-of-fact.

      ‘I was thinking. I’m very bad at it. Can’t do it when there are any distractions.’

      ‘And why did you come home?’

      He grinned at her. ‘I’d finished thinking.’

      They went on talking while the sun moved across the rug. Annie realized that it was herself and Matthew talking. Louise was sitting in silence, watching them. At six o’clock Annie stood up to go. Matthew stood up too, and she saw that he was tall and very thin.

      ‘I’ll come a little way with you,’ he said.

      ‘I …’

      ‘I would like to.’

      Annie left her bag of wedding dress material on Louise’s floor. When she was standing with Matthew on the pavement outside she remembered that she hadn’t even arranged to come back and look at Louise’s design sketches. She hesitated, wondering whether she should go back upstairs, but a taxi came rumbling down the street and Matthew flagged it down. He opened the door for her and they sat side by side on the slippery seat, looking out at the rush-hour traffic idling in the sun.

      ‘Where are we going?’

      ‘To St James’s Park,’ Matthew said. She discovered later that he used his last two pound notes to pay the driver.

      It was May, the first day of summer’s warm weather. The grass was dotted with abandoned deckchairs, in secretive pairs and in sociable groups of three or four.

      The setting sun slanted obliquely through patterns of curled leaves and glittered on the water. They walked under the trees, talking. It seemed to Annie that this hollow-cheeked boy had simply side-stepped the rituals of acquaintanceship and friendship, and had made her a lover without ever having touched her.

      They stopped on the bridge to look down at the ducks drawing fans of ripples in their wake, and their shadows fell superimposed on the water.

      Looking at the shape they made, Matthew said, ‘You see? We belong together.’

      ‘No. I’m going to marry Martin. We’ve known each other for seven years.’

      ‘That’s no reason for marrying him. Any more than you can dismiss me because you’ve known me for less than seven hours.’

      She turned to look at him then, suddenly sombre. He had come to block the wide, smooth road she was walking down and he was pointing his finger down narrow lanes that turned sharply, enticing her. She felt angry with him, and