Page 64 of 59 Minutes
CARRIE
On the middle floor, Carrie tugs off her filthy shoes, slicing blistered skin off with them.
Her hands are foul but Pepper leads her by one of them anyway.
She’s shaking violently as she walks down the familiar hallway lined with black-and-white photos, theatrical posters and a huge ornate mirror. She looks in it without thinking.
The woman in the reflection is filthy. Black mess from the tube, blood from her head, grass and soil from falling over so many times.
It’s all gummed together into a kind of mask, her bleached hair now bog-coloured.
Soon, she thinks, will come the most heavenly shower of her life.
The clean hot water, a gift from the gods that she will never take for granted again.
All her lovely bubbly things, the shampoo, the fruity shower gel.
Things she didn’t even consider but nearly never had again.
But first, Clementine and Emma. Above anything else. Against the odds. Her family.
She casts one eye back to the small landing window. She cannot see the crashed helicopter from here, or the damage it did, only the black smoke that still fills the night air.
She reaches the open-plan living room diner, expecting to be knocked over by her people but nothing happens.
Pepper’s flat looks completely normal. He has prepared nothing.
No buckets of water, no gathered tins, no covered windows.
On the table sits a plastic IKEA cup and two cocktail glasses, rimmed in gold.
And finally, oh god, finally there is Clementine.
Curled almost invisible into a cushion nest on Pepper’s velvet sofa, her ever-present soft rabbit in the crook of her arm, bought for her by Emma before she was even born.
A nearly finished bowl of Zurek sits on the table with a plastic spoon. They must have fed her even as they thought the world was about to end.
‘Baby!’ she says, in what she hopes is her cheeriest, mummiest voice even though she can’t hear it properly under the whine in her ears. Clementine turns coolly, frowns at how filthy one of her mothers is, then looks back at the television. Full pre-schooler nonchalance.
They have protected her from it all, she realises, as she sits gingerly next to her daughter and gently pulls her into a hug with her good arm.
They have protected her from everything, and she is so grateful that now, finally, she starts to cry.
Hard sobs that she hopes are silent. It’s hard to know with the siren sound still in her head.
She presses her face into Clementine’s beautiful soft curls and sobs until Clementine wriggles free, her jumper now streaked with grime from Carrie’s coat and hands.
‘Where is Mama?’ she asks Clementine, but Clementine doesn’t help, she’s too interested in the TV.
‘Where is Emma?’ she calls to Pepper, her aching throat the only confirmation that she’s made a sound. He is fussing around in the kitchen, bashing about clumsily, movements she’s never seen from him before. He can usually make emptying the bins look elegant.
When she walks over to him, he stops moving and stands there, staring back.
‘What is it?’ she says, apparently sharp enough that Clementine looks up in surprise.
Still he stares. ‘Where is she?’ Carrie might be shouting now.
But she’s been back minutes on a day when seconds are a lifetime and Emma, her Emma, the love of her lifetime, has not emerged.
And maybe Carrie knows. Maybe she knew straight away.
Maybe the moments and the knowledge had accordion-folded inside her, and now they are expanding as he tells her what she already knows, with his sad eyes and his clamped mouth which never normally stops. Maybe she will burst.
She steps forward and clutches his dressing gown, bunching its slippery soft fabric and staring dead straight into his eyes, begging for an answer she doesn’t really want.
He is breathing fast and she is breathing fast too, and Clementine has turned from the TV to watch this, two of her best adults locked together in an unspoken conversation she cannot understand.
‘Where is she, Pepper?’ Carrie manages to say.
He finally opens his mouth but she points to her ruined ears.
He prises her fingers from the fabric and points to the little table, a notepad and pen on it.
He is always writing there, ‘catching up with his correspondence’ to old theatre friends that have mostly left the city in their old age. To his disgust.
She walks to the table and sits heavily, the adrenaline that got her home seeping away leaving nausea and pain behind. He follows her and picks up the pen like a condemned man.
He holds the nib in the air for too long and she must growl in frustration as Clementine cries and he tries to go to her, to comfort her, but Carrie grabs his hand with her own good hand and pulls him back to the chair.
He must tell her, he has to tell her, she cannot live in this limbo for one more second.
He starts to write.