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"Basement?" She blinked again. It was a filthy place, not even used for storage anymore.
"Best chance we've got." I clapped my hands. "Come on! Everyone! Go! Go!"
Where did it come from, the sudden authority? I ask myself again and again, and have no clue. And then I stop asking, because I mustn't. The ball is rolling now, and I have to stay like this. Responsibility. It's like a millstone round your neck.
The staff ran out of the room. Except old Makin. He just sat there, blinking, old eyes full of tears.
I knew what I had to do. I reached across and touched his arm. "George?"
He stared at me.
"Go home, George. Be with your wife."
"I… " He wanted to, of course, but duty pulled him the other way. I absolved him.
"We'll be fine, sir," I said. "Just go. You deserve to… " I stopped.
He nodded once, rose. "Thank you, Paul," was all he said. His head was down and he couldn't look at me, but as he left the room, he began to run, surprisingly fast for a man his age.
A moment later, I was ru
The tu
The same, and the same, and the same. Again, and again, and again.
"Paul?" Jean's voice is a whisper. Her hand on my arm. "Where are we going?"
"I don't know," I say, and then remember I have to. I have to know something. "Not yet." I think. "There'll be a gallery soon, or a landing stage. Or something."
"What then?"
How should I know? I want to scream. But of course I can't. "We'll have to see, Jean. Might be fish here." I wouldn't bet on it, though. Rats in the tu
Worry about food later, I think to myself. Once you're underground and safe somewhere.
Safe? Where is safe?
I stop thinking that way. It may all be pointless, just delaying the inevitable, but what am I supposed to do? Just stop and wait to die, when the poison seeps down here into the mine and the canal? No. I can't. As much for me as anyone else. If I stop, you see, I'll think of Anya. And I mustn't. I mustn't do that.
Anya was… well, Anya was my girlfriend, of course. You must have worked that out for yourselves. Except that doesn't cover it.
Girlfriend always sounds so casual, so teenage. And it wasn't like that.
We weren't married or engaged. Hadn't even talked about it. Weren't even living together, although we had talked about that. Just weren't sure where we'd live. Her poky flat, my poky flat, or somewhere new.
I first saw her in a bar in the city centre, near where she worked-I went over to her, to talk to her, of course, but I never thought I stood a chance. She was blonde, with blue eyes, a classic beauty. But she liked me. More than "liked" as it turned out
You see loads like that from the old Eastern Bloc countries. God knows why. I once joked that if Polish women looked like her, it was no wonder they kept getting invaded. She whacked me round the head with a pillow as I recall. But she was laughing when she did it.
She wasn't a dumb blonde. She was a student. A mature student, I should add. At twenty-eight, two years older than me. And me a teacher. She already had a degree, taken back in Poland. English Lit. She could hold her own in any discussion about poetry. Which was good. We had lots to talk about. Keats and John Do
We'd been together about a year. Around the same time, give or take, as I got the teaching post at the school. A good little school, a small suburb with small classes, a plum job. I had that and Anya. I was so lucky. So bloody lucky.
I ought to have known it couldn't last.
She would've been working. She was in her final year, had two or three days free each week, so she'd taken an office job to pay the bills. Right in the city centre. Practically at Ground Zero, I'm guessing. She wouldn't have stood a chance.
I tell myself it must have been quick.
The caretaker, Mr Rutter, forced the basement door open, then stumbled away. Never saw him again. Well, I did, but I wouldn't have recognised him if not for his shoes. Old brown brogues, they were. He never wore anything else. All that was left intact of him.
He stumbled away. I have no idea where he thought he was going. I had other things to worry about.
We herded the kids down the stairs and into the basement, slammed doors shut behind us.
"Lie down," I shouted over the scared babble, then shouted it again, louder. "Lie down. Everybody. Shut your eyes. Put your hands over your ears and open your mouths." As far as I remembered, that was how you prepared yourself for the blast. I'd seen it in an old war movie, somewhere.
"Paul-" Jean's face was scared. She was about ten years older than me, competent and attractive, but didn't look much older than the kids, now. I wondered what I looked like.
"Yeah."
"What are we going to do?" she asked.
"Lie down," I told her, clambering to the floor myself. "And if we-"
That was when the bomb hit.
Brilliant light blazed, outlining the door at the top of the stairs. I looked away fast. Someone screamed-they hadn't, not in time.
A heat equal to that of the sun was consuming-had consumed-the centre of Manchester. The CIS tower, the Arndale Centre, the Lowry Hotel-all gone.
And Anya. Among all the rest, Anya too.
Then there was a distant rumbling. The sound was coming. The sound and the blast.
"Hands over your ears! Mouths open! Shut your eyes!"
And then, as I followed my own advice, the blast wave struck the school.
I've almost forgotten I'm in a tu
Got on a computer. The light effects a screen created. If you played a CD. It's all past tense now. I have to get used to the idea. All past tense.
Someone once asked Einstein, what would be the weapons of the Third World War? He said he didn't know. But that the weapons of the Fourth World War would be stones and clubs.
If anyone's left in a hundred years, and they read this-will they even understand what I'm talking about? So many reference points I took for granted, and they'll mean nothing to whoever-whatever?-survives, landmarks and signposts of a world long gone.
Christ, in a hundred years, will they still even read?
We used to bandy that one round the staff room, but then we were worried about literacy declining because the kids'd rather play on their Playstations and cruise porn sites on the internet. Reading? Who needs it if you can get rich and famous making a dick of yourself on a reality TV show?
Old Byerscough, the History master-he said it was capitalism's final and cleverest game to keep the working class in its place. Time was, you couldn't get an education if you were poor. Now? Now, they convince you education's for nancy-boys. Books? Being clever? Bollocks to that. Just get pissed or E'd up and have fun. And you think that's the best way, when you're just being kept happy and docile and stupid.
Past tense again. Byerscough too. He was close to retirement as well, and lived nearby, just like Makin, but he never thought about leaving. His wife had died a few years before. He died at the school. Not in the blast, but after when-