Thicker Than Water

I was profoundly relieved when I got to the ground floor and the doors, after a few premonitory clicks and ratcheting sounds, slid open.

Outside on the concrete apron, paramedics were tacking between the other towers and the fleet of waiting ambulances, carrying bodies on stretchers: all alive, thank God, but then again they’d have left the dead where they were as a substantially lower priority. The police and fire crews were moving too, clearing barricades and locking off stairwells while they conducted shouted conversations on walkie-talkies.

I walked through the melee, unnoticed, and descended the steps to the New Kent Road. More ambulances here, and more cops. Also, away behind the barriers, the media crews and the disaster tourists.

I almost walked past Trudie Pax without seeing her. She was sitting at the edge of the kerb, her shoulders slumped, staring at the ground.

‘Long night,’ I said. ‘How’s Bic?’

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She started at the sound of my voice, looked up at me as though for a moment she’d forgotten where she was.

‘Castor—’ She scrambled to her feet with a kind of urgency, but then didn’t seem to know what to do when she’d got there. Her hands moved without purpose, and I suddenly realised that she’d been crying.

‘What?’ I asked. A horrible portent crashed into me from nowhere: like a contact on my death-sense, but with no ghost present. ‘What’s wrong? Did something happen to the kid?’

Trudie shook her head, but I read something else in her face: something like guilt, or maybe shame.

I took a hold on her shoulders without even knowing I was doing it.

‘Where is he?’ I demanded. ‘Where did you take him?’

Her gaze flicked left. I turned my head to see a light green tent where two or three nurses fussed around a huge water-heater while half a dozen others distributed the resultant hot horse-piss among the shell-shocked survivors: a comfort station.

‘He’s . . . in there,’ she said.

And he was. I caught a sudden glimpse of him, still in his pyjamas, sitting next to his father while his mother knelt in front of him and wiped at his grimy face with a damp J-cloth, showing the same merciless assiduity that all mothers show when they decide that you need a public face-washing.

And Bic was fighting back the way all kids do, by squirming and shifting around to make the task as hard as possible.

‘He’s fine,’ Trudie blurted. And he was. It was plain to see.

‘Then is there something else on your mind?’ I began.