Page 20 of 59 Minutes

FRANKIE

There are twelve human heads in front of them, another three have just gone inside, and two more have just appeared from different directions and joined the queue behind her.

Two red-faced, middle-aged men, one in a life preserver, the other a waxed jacket.

They nod to each other, and then to Frankie as she watches.

Silent and frowning, but with no sign of panic.

Chagford was clearly a village that coped well with the pandemic a few years ago.

Thrived, even. Bicycle deliveries, collection slots, shopping rotas for the vulnerable, Zoom book clubs and al fresco church services.

Frankie can tell they know what they’re doing here, with their calm, collective community organisation.

Outside the shop, there’s a boy of eighteen, nineteen tops, wearing a Spar uniform, letting people in and out.

He is tall and scatter-limbed like a baby deer.

Open faced and reed thin, he’d have no hope of stopping anyone, but people have submitted fully to this queueing system.

No shouting. Or pleading. Despite that church clock over there showing forty-two minutes until …

Until what? She can’t begin to fathom. Until an explosion?

Until something hits the ground hundreds of miles away in London and the fallout from it drifts slowly this way?

Until the whole of the south of England melts and—

‘Jesus, you okay?’ Otis looks at her in alarm. ‘You’ve gone dead pale.’

‘I’m just … this is a lot.’

‘It’s too much, that’s what it is.’

‘Zero out of ten,’ she says, as he hugs her tightly again.

Otis jiggles his legs, his knees bashing into her as the queue tightens.

A tic that happens when he’s being forced to wait, the impetus to move crackling through him.

The opposite of her, who knows never to get involved, Otis is a doer, a fidgeter, a fixer.

It’s how they first met after all, him coming to fix the broken blind in her dried flower studio early last year.

A happy handyman who lingered when he was finished, asking dumb questions about flowers to which he obviously didn’t need the answers.

Just a nice guy, four years younger than her, who said she was his last job and did she fancy a drink.

That drink in a pub turned into a few more drinks back at hers, turned into going to bed.

She assumed that was the end of that, and that was okay, that was safer all round.

No chance of anyone getting hurt. But the next morning, he was still there and that felt, somehow, safer still.

Only now he is the father of her child and the person with whom she will spend the last normal moments of life. And nobody is safe.

A woman joins the queue behind them, other people who are waiting greet her with weary tones and nodded heads. There’s an acceptance to all this that unnerves Frankie.

‘If we don’t get into the shop soon, we’re cutting it too fine to get back and do everything we need to do,’ Frankie says.

For a moment, she thinks Otis hasn’t heard her. Then he turns, cups her face and says, ‘Just for once, can you pretend to be an optimist?’ Then he kisses her mouth before she can protest this statement. Optimism, when the missiles are already locked and loaded? Sure, why not.

The queue grows restless. The orderly silence of a few minutes ago blisters into little snippets of sharp conversation, of complaint. There’s an edge to it now. It wasn’t calm collectivism they’d stepped into, Frankie realises now, it was dormant British rage.

‘… enough water?’

‘Jim’s doing all of that back home, we’ve got the bath, two, no, three buckets, every mug …’

‘Well, it’s good you’ve got your Jim then, isn’t it, Sheila? Dave’s stuck in Plymouth.’

‘Oh. Oh, I’m so sorry, Della. Does he still work at—’

‘Devonport. Yes.’

Silence comes like a handbrake.

Frankie waits for more, looking at the woman she now knows is Della.

Her hair is auburn, a sliver of soft silver at the roots.

She wears a waxed jacket with a torn pocket and sturdy walking boots.

Her eyes are red-rimmed but steely, cheeks scribbled with rosacea.

She catches Frankie’s gaze before she can look away.

‘Not from round here?’ she asks, her voice booming militarily. Frankie shakes her head. ‘Ah, I see. Well, Devonport is where they refit the subs.’

Otis and Frankie look at each other, like, does that mean—

‘Nuclear subs,’ Della says. Everyone in the queue is silent now, listening as if this is new information when it must really be information they’ve tried to forget.

‘I didn’t know,’ Frankie says, quietly. ‘Will that make it a—’

‘Target? Of course it will,’ Della says. ‘It’s only twenty-five miles from here, as the crow flies. Didn’t you hear the siren?’

‘I hoped I was imagining it,’ Frankie manages to say.