Page 23 of 59 Minutes

FRANKIE

Frankie thought there was some level of safety in Dartmoor, that there was nothing to bomb here.

‘Do we stand any chance?’ she says, not to Della or Otis or anyone in particular. But a man a few paces away answers, his power belly swinging around as he turns to face her.

‘We don’t know where the targets are, how many missiles are coming or where they’re coming from.

The warning was longer than I’d expect for the obvious candidates,’ he says.

His red jacket is zipped tight and he’s coiled a purple scarf around his neck that he loosens as he speaks, his voice soft but intense.

‘We’ve no idea whether it or they are coming by air or sea, or how strong the payload could be.

If they send a missile by air to Devonport, the whole Plymouth region will be vaporised, totally destroyed. ’

‘Robert!’ Sheila hisses at the portly man, flicking her eyes at her queue neighbour, Della.

‘I am aware,’ Della says. She stares ahead and straightens her back, but Frankie can see her hands trembling.

‘But we’d be okay this far out?’ Frankie asks, even though she can feel Otis’s hand on her shoulder, trying to stop her. For her sake or his, she doesn’t know.

The man – Robert – looks at her so closely she backs away. ‘Do you actually want the truth?’ he says, wiping his slick forehead on his coat sleeve and pulling his scarf clean off, bundling it under his arm.

‘Hope for the best and plan for the worst,’ she says, trying and failing to find a smile. She can see more and more people arriving and bulging at the back of the queue, as if forming an audience to hear this man speak.

He swallows. ‘Well, see, I’m retired now but I worked at Devonport for a very long time and we did a lot of drills and scenarios, ’specially in the early eighties.

From what I was told back then, well, if a missile hit Plymouth, then out here, yes, some of us won’t die straight away.

Maybe you can call that “being okay” but I’m not sure I would. ’

Otis shifts beside her as she asks, ‘What would you call it?’

‘Robert,’ Sheila says again, pleading now. ‘Don’t.’

He looks at Sheila but then addresses Frankie.

‘Well,’ he says. His voice is growing harder, more confident.

This is his area of expertise and he’s been brought out of retirement for this special occasion.

‘Those that don’t die will be seriously injured.

And I mean seriously. We’ll all be burned, every one of us here.

And it won’t be safe. What little food and water is left will have to last for god knows how long because we’ll be too toxic for anyone to come and help us.

And the food we have will become toxic from the radiation anyway. ’

He swallows, pulls one of his fingers to crack the knuckle.

‘Buildings will collapse, fires will rip through all the villages. There’ll be no …

’ He looks across the pretty village square.

‘It’ll never look like this again and the fallout, the radiation poisoning, the water supply …

the bombs they have now have never been fired at populations.

So we just don’t know. We don’t know anything.

And now the Ruskis have nuclear torpedoes that cause radioactive tsunamis …

according to them, anyway, and if they hit Plymouth—’

‘What if they don’t hit Plymouth at all,’ Otis says. ‘What if it’s just London?’

‘Then we have a chance, maybe, of some kind of life afterwards. But there’s no such thing as “just London”, we all breathe the same air eventually.

And if our capital city’s vaporised, that’s our government, banking centres, all sorts.

And millions and millions of people just wiped out. Can you fathom that?’

‘No,’ Otis says. ‘I can’t.’

‘That’s if it doesn’t trigger a retaliation and a full-scale nuclear war,’ Robert says. His face is pink and waxy, and he wipes his sleeve over it again. He’s no longer making eye contact with anyone. ‘Then it’s not just about us, not about England. It’s about all life on the planet.’

‘But why are they bloody doing this to us?’ an old man with a strong Devon accent cries out. ‘What have we ever done to them? We’re not the bloody government, we didn’t do nothing.’

‘At least you get to vote for the government,’ a teenage girl of sixteen or seventeen says, hugging herself in her duffel coat, tears and eye make-up all down her face.

‘I didn’t vote for anyone,’ the man says in alarm. ‘Not one of those bastards, they’re all the same.’

‘Jesus, well if you didn’t even bother to vote—’ the girl starts, but her companion, her mother by the looks of it, tells her to stop.

‘It’s the Russians, it has to be,’ another old man four heads down says, his voice a bark.

‘Oh, come on,’ says Sheila, stamping her feet as if to stay warm. ‘They’ve got their hands full, ’aven’t they, would they really—’

‘It’s out of spite. Because we helped the Ukrainians. You remember what they’re like, you know what they did to the Germans after—’

‘Yeah, an’ I know what the Germans did to us and we don’t—’

‘You weren’t even born then,’ the old man barks, and turns to face her. ‘What would you know?’

Sheila takes a step back, colliding with the covered window of the shop and letting out a sudden whimper.

‘That’s enough,’ Della says to the aggressive old man, pushing her body between him and Sheila.

‘I just mean,’ Sheila says, her face flushing, ‘that all of that was a long time ago and we can’t base our opinions on the past.’

‘What else is there to base our opinions on?’ the old man says, genuinely surprised.

For a moment no one says anything and then an old woman near the front of the line calls over to the old man. ‘They’ll be in on it with the Chinese, I’d say.’

‘Mum,’ the teenage girl says, ‘we need to get in the shop now and get home quick. You heard what Robert said, we need to be inside and we need to get any food we can. And we need to be with Dad and Matty, to make sure they’re running the taps and that. You know what Dad’s like.’

The mother is a hall of mirrors version of her daughter, softer and more rounded.

Both wear woolly hats, blue for the mum, green for the girl.

Even in this situation, people are wearing hats and wrapping up warm.

Were they wearing these get-ups anyway when the message came, or was it just autopilot for them to layer up?

It’s mild for November but it’s still cold and Frankie realises she’s trembling, that her jaw has clenched again.

The whole of London will be vaporised. What must be happening in the city now?

But even here … skin burns and fires and radiation and …

Otis holds her up as her knees start to buckle.

‘It’s okay,’ he whispers. But it’s nothing like okay.

More people have arrived since Frankie and Otis got here, the queue now billowing and ballooning from a line to a crowd.

‘We just need to wait our turn, we’ll be in soon enough,’ the teenage girl’s mother says.

‘It’s going to be too late at this rate, Mum!’

The old man who blames the Russians looks up, hedgerow eyebrows knitted together. ‘Yes, it will, my maid, it will be too late.’ As if they’ve rehearsed it, the old man and the teenage girl push past the young lad on the door. For a moment, no one does anything else. A held breath.

And then, mayhem.

Frankie and Otis are jostled from all angles as people stream past them into the shop. The genteel wax-jacketed villagers have become looters in an instant, fighting their neighbours for food. Robert crunches an elbow into Della’s shoulder, his pink face shining.

‘We need to go in as well, there’ll be nothing left,’ Frankie says but Otis grabs her arm and pulls her back.

‘No, just me. It’s too volatile.’

‘But—’

‘No,’ he says again, with a firmness she’s never heard from him. ‘It’s not just about you. I’ll be able to focus on getting more stuff if I’m not worrying about you and the baby. You find somewhere safe on the way back to the car and just wait for me. Okay?’

He has elbowed his way inside before she can reply.