Inexpressible Island

“Is she soft?”

“Nah, she’s hard.”

“What about you?” He pauses. She blushes. “I mean … would you like some nylon stockings?”

Not answering, she points to her thick black hose. “I wouldn’t say no. We’re saving our money to go dancing sometime. And to the cinema. Gone with the Wind is playing at the Empire. They’re charging something exorbitant for it like half-a-shilling, and it’s always sold out now that there’s only one show a day, but we’re definitely going. I wouldn’t mind some nylon hose to go to the pictures. We’re planning to take a day off from the war for it. Would you like to come, too?”

“Would love to,” Julian says. “What else?” He points to the soles coming off her boots, the mud leaking in. “Maybe some new boots?”

“Good luck finding a pair of those.”

They’ve arrived at Finch’s vehicle.

Finch sticks his head out. “Where have you two been?” he says loudly, almost yelling. “We’ve been waiting an hour!”

“We got bandages, Finch. Show him, Julian. And we got caught in the downpour.”

“I just bet you have.” Wild wakes up just in time to quip and grin.

Julian raises his hand in a goodbye. “You go on without me, Finch,” he says. “I’ll be back tonight—maybe. Today, I have things to do.”

“Take all the time you need,” Finch says. “A week, a month.”

“No, don’t go by yourself, Swedish.” Wild starts to open the door. “I’ll come with you.”

Julian stops him. “Another time, Wild. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”

“Will you come back?” says Wild.

“Fuck, I hope not,” Finch mutters.

“Hey, aren’t you going to ask me my boot size?” Mia calls out to Julian.

“Nah, I’m good,” Julian says, waving. Around seven and a half, right, Mia? It’s all he can do to not blow her a kiss.

Julian has seen London unpaved and swallowed by a great fire. He’s seen London in the muck of the rookery and in the white gloved elegance of Sydenham. He’s seen the impoverished Monmouth Street and the well-to-do Piccadilly. He’s seen London in the present day, teeming and open, lit up and loud, Ferris wheels, museums, white marble houses, black doors, green parks, red coats of the Grenadier guards, everything familiar and right as rain.

Julian has never seen London like this.

A sore evil has ravaged the city. Bitter hail has mixed with smoke and blood, it has blackened the air and the sun, destroyed the things that were good, left behind jackhammered ruin.

Julian, who knows London so well he can walk it in his dreams, loses his way without any street signs.

Julian loses his way without any streets.

North and west and east of St. Paul’s, blocks of the old city have been cremated into skeletal dust. Nothing whole is left standing, nothing.

As he walks shellshocked through the deserted plain, Julian sees that the destruction of the cramped city around St. Paul’s has exposed the church from all sides. In somber marble immensity, it rises above the ruins of the city that once teemed at its feet. No more alleys and skewed close-up perspectives from which to admire St. Paul’s majesty. Yes, London has been brought to its knees, but the unbowed cathedral looms on its solitary hill, seen for miles from the ground and the air—now more unprotected than ever.

The area between St. Mary le Bow and Cheapside is a wasteland.

But because the British are the British, there’s an arrow on Ludgate Hill in the middle of the devastation, and a sign underneath it that reads: Berlin—600 miles.

At the church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, the statue of John Milton has been blown off its plinth, the bell tower destroyed, and the roof of the nave blown in. The walls have survived somehow, but the rest of the church lies broken on the ground.

The area around St. Giles, like St. Paul’s, has been bombed out of existence. There’s almost no Roman wall left where Julian hid his money. It’s dust like all the rest. Only a short, damaged chunk of the wall remains.

The stone with the little cross Julian etched into it stands exposed almost at the break. The graystone is loose, having been dislodged from its neighbors. Julian barely needs a chisel. As he’s pulling out the stone, there’s a loud rumble nearby and an explosion. It startles him, and he drops the boulder, almost on his foot. The stone falls and hits another. Both of them crack into smaller pieces.

For a long time, Julian sits on his haunches and stares at the weathered and dried-out leather bag with the dulled gold silk ribbons, stares at the shiny coins inside, forty-one of them, still gleaming. There is no stashing it away anymore for later. There is no later. He is never coming back. It’s impossible to believe, impossible to accept. There’s another explosion, another stray bomb detonated. It breaks his reverie. Black smoke, flames. The fire engine sirens slice through the silence. Julian grabs the purse with the coins in it, doesn’t bother closing up the hole in the wall, glances at it once last time, and walks away, leaving it for good.

10

Blood Brothers

THAT NIGHT JULIAN RETURNS TO BANK A CONQUERING HERO. He has been to several gold dealers on Cheapside, shopped around, got the best price, and sold two of the coins for three hundred pounds each, half of what they’re actually worth but decent enough in the middle of a war. He has been to Smithfield, has strolled past all the lorries. He returns carrying a breakwater stormcollar raincoat as a gift to Wild for taking his cloak, and sackfuls of gifts for the rest; Julian, a blackened bearded wartime Santa Claus.

“The whisky is in!” shouts Wild in his new raincoat, jubilantly running up and down the empty platform. “The whisky is in!”

“Are the boots in?” Mia asks shyly.

He smiles at her. The boots are also in, black leather, brand new. She beams. Julian wants to kiss her. But Finch is watching.

He’s brought them bacon and dry sausage and ham that’s not in a tin. He’s brought more kerosene, boxes of matches, a knife for Wild, a straight razor to shave with, he’s brought soap, new gloves, a yellow wool cardigan for Mia (Wild: “How did he know what size to get you, Folgate? Did he measure you out with his hands?” Julian: “Lucky guess.” Mia: “Shut up, Wild!”), toothpaste, and bottles of ODO-RO-NO liquid deodorant. He’s brought three blankets that don’t itch. He bought all that he could carry. That night he makes another Swedish flame, uses Wild’s new knife to cut up the meats, they pour out the excellent Scottish whisky and for five minutes sit by the fire on the empty Central Line platform, drinking and smoking and joking around like they’re nothing but young.

Then the warden walks up to Julian with a police officer by his side. Julian looks up at the two men hovering over him. He debates whether or not to stand up. He really doesn’t want to. All he wants is what they’ve just been having.

“You got your ID on ya?” the warden asks Julian.

With a shake of his head at Finch, Julian reluctantly rises to his feet.

“You heard the guard,” the officer says. “You’re not allowed to be down here without your ID and your ration card.”

“I need a ration card to be in the Underground?”

“Stop mouthing off. You have it or don’t ya? Because I’ll have to take you in if you don’t have it.”

Mia and Wild are by Julian’s side. “He’s with us,” Wild says. “He’s with the Rescue Squad.”

“Yes,” Mia says. “He’s with the Home Guard. His house got bombed. He lost everything.”

“What are you two, his solicitors? Sit down. Mind your own business.”

They don’t move. Julian is grateful, but he steps forward, away from them. He doesn’t like to be flanked by friends when he’s being confronted by enemy combatants.

The rest of the squad jumps to their feet and comes to his rescue, too. Slowly, Finch rises so he’s not the only one sitting.

“He helped us out, leave him alone, Javert.”

“Don’t call me Javert.”

“He’ll show you his friggin’ ID card tomorrow.”

“He’s helping in the war effort, what do you think he is, a spy on the inside?”

“Jules, offer Javert some whisky, he’s ornery because he hasn’t had any.”

“Enough out of all of ya!” the policeman bellows.

The only one saying nothing is Finch.

“You want to see my ID card, officer?” Julian says. “Why, of course. That’s not a problem.” Reaching into his pocket, Julian produces the card, the best National ID card money can buy off the back of a truck. “There you go.” Julian Cruz, it reads. Address: 153 Great Eastern Road. Occupation: journalist. “I work at a small financial publication near Austin Friars,” Julian says. “Well, worked. A parachute mine fell on Throgmorton Avenue.”

Mia listens to him in impressed puzzlement. “I thought you told me you ran a restaurant?” she whispers.

“Like you, I wear many hats.” Julian found out that not only is 153 Great Eastern Road still standing, but there is no restaurant there. And he prefers to make his white fibs as truthful as possible. To mollify the public officials further, Julian even produces a ration card, with someone else’s name etched out and his own stamped in. The cop glares at the sheepish warden, who in turn glares at Finch.

“Thanks for wasting my time,” the officer says to Javert as they skulk away.

The squad descends on Finch.

“Was that your doing?”

“Finch, did you rat him out?”

“I didn’t!”

“Finch, you fink, did you tell Javert that Swedish had no ID?”

“I didn’t!”

“Finch, you’re such a Berkeley hunt,” Wild says. “We don’t do that to our own. Why would you do that?”

“He’s not my friend, he’s not my own, stop calling me names, and I didn’t.”

“I’m disappointed in you, Finch.” That’s Mia. “Apologize to Julian.”

“It’s fine, Mia, don’t worry,” Julian says. “Finch made a mistake. He misunderstood. I said I misplaced it, not lost it. Good thing I found it, though, right, Finch?”

“I’ll burn first before I apologize to that tosser,” Finch says, skulking away.

There is Coca Cola, and Bing Crosby, and jitterbugs and calm confidence and good humor.

Carry on.

Carry on.

Carry on.

The young keep life going. They help the city at night, they sleep, rush to work, paint fake buses, they unload freight ships and bandage wounds. And in the evenings, they stay young. They argue over petty slights, learn to fight and how to wield knives, they drink, sing, and entertain others trapped with them in the cave. They do dramatic readings from newspapers, from history books, from memory diluted with whisky, they butcher Shakespeare and Dickens. On Sundays they read Charles Spurgeon’s sermons. They have drunken discussions about the meaning of life and argue about where more bombs have fallen, Shadwell or Lambeth. Sometimes they dance. They’re close, yet afraid to get too close. They live like men in the trenches.

Early one morning after they’ve come back from another pulsing all nighter, and the others have gone to work, or are asleep like Mia, instead of going to sleep himself, Julian takes a bottle of whisky and two mugs out onto the empty platform where Wild is lying down, humming and smoking, unmindful of the Central Line trains that screech to a stop in front of him every fifteen minutes. He sits up, Julian drops down next to him, pours them both a drink, they clink, and sit together in their solitude, resting their sore backs against the wall of the station.

“Awake all night, and awake all day,” Julian says.

“I’ll be asleep soon,” Wild says. “There’s something soothing about the trains skidding and leaving.” He pauses. “Folgate told you, didn’t she? About me.”

They sit. “Told me what?”

“Whatever. It’s fine. Just don’t talk to me about it.”

“Wasn’t going to,” Julian says. “Did want to talk about something else, though. So what’s up with Finch?”

“Do you mean what’s up with Finch and Folgate?” Wild laughs. “What, you don’t think they’re meant to be?”

“Just asking. How long have they been at it?”

“Hard to tell,” Wild says. “For a long time they seemed like brother and sister, at least from the outside. I think he’s been carrying a torch for her, though, since primary school.”

“And she couldn’t find anyone else?” Julian is incredulous.

“Sure, she did. But she kept coming back to him.”

“Why?”

“I dunno. He was pretty good to her.”

“And that’s what you want in a guy you plan to marry.”

“Yes, and he liked her, and he was around. I mean always around. The other chaps got tired of him hanging over them. And she never told him to go. She could’ve. But she didn’t.”

“And she agreed to marry him?”

“Ask her why she did that, mate. I’m not privy to Folgate’s innermost thoughts. A woman’s heart is a mysterious thing. I don’t know why it beats. He asked her a few months ago, right after Dunkirk. And she took a few months to say yes.” Wild chuckles. “Duncan and I said to her, were you waiting for him to die so you wouldn’t have to give him an answer?”

“How did she respond?”

“She walloped us.”

“And you?” Julian glances at Wild. “You and she were never an item?”

“Me and Folgate? Nah.”

“Why not?”

“What, you’re trying to match us up?” Putting down his drink, Wild ruffles Julian’s hair. “When I first met her, she was going with a friend of mine, so she was off limits. And then she was never without a fella, and I was off doing my own thing. We’re like family now. It’s almost obscene what you’re suggesting.”

“You know what’s obscene?”

“Yes, yes, I know.” Wild laughs. “Finch laying his filthy hand on her. Anyone but you laying a hand on her, right?”

Julian doesn’t reply.

“How do you know her, Swedish?” Wild asks, picking up his stein and tipping the whisky into his throat. “I know I keep asking.” He wipes his mouth with his sleeve. “But you keep on not saying. She says she’s never met you before, yet you two act like you’re the oldest of friends.”

For a moment Julian is silent. “Like you and me?” he says.

“We’re men, it doesn’t count. We can make friends with anybody.”

“I suppose.” Julian stares down the tunnel, wishing for a train to come and derail his angst. “But about the other thing … does she like me?”

“Who wouldn’t like you, Swedish?”

“Well, Finch, for one.”

“Because you’re trying to pinch his butter. You won’t leave his butter alone.” Wild rattles his empty cup.

Julian pours again, they clink and drink. “So if she likes me,” he says, “why hasn’t she broken up with him?”

“You’re like a dog with a bone, aren’t you?” Wild says. “Why? Because she’s known him since they were in nappies, and she’s known you since yesterday, that’s why. As you appeared out of thin air, you could vanish into thin air. You’re an unknown quantity,” he adds. “An amusing quantity, but unknown nonetheless.” He burps. “But also, do you know what I do when I want to ask a girl a question? I ask the girl. I don’t ask her plastered friend who knows nothing.”

“I don’t want to put her on the spot.”

“Yes, but making love to her in public in front of her beau, such as he is, is not putting her on the spot?”

They clink.

Julian sighs. “You think I should leave her alone?”

“No, mate. I think you should ask her a question.”

Minutes pass. After a while, Wild speaks. He doesn’t look at Julian. “You got any brothers, Swedish?”

“Yeah,” Julian says. “I got five.”

“Five! Fuck me. So lucky.” Wild raises his cup. “What are their names?”

“Brandon, Rowan, Harlan, me, Tristan, and Dalton.”

“Amazing. How was that growing up?”

“Awesome. Loud.”

“I bet. And your mum handled it?”

“Mom is Norwegian. Nothing fazes her.”

“Do they all have kids now?”

“Yeah. Like fifteen all in all.”

“Unbelievable. Where are they all at, Wales?”

Julian clams up.

Wild misunderstands. “Your brothers, are they still alive?”

“Yeah.” Julian doesn’t say more. “I’m sorry, Wild.”

“But I know you lost somebody, too,” Wild says, his voice quaking. “I can tell. Who was it, that girl on the ship?”

“Yes,” Julian says. “The way you can’t talk to me about your brother, I can’t talk to you about her.”

“I could tell you ended your story too soon. Is that who Folgate reminds you of?”

“Something like that.” They both drink like they need it. “But I’ll tell you this,” Julian says. “I had friends growing up, though none of them especially close because I didn’t need it, you know? I had my brothers. But when I was eighteen and went to college, I met a guy named Ashton. I don’t remember a time in my adult life when he was not by my side, through everything, no matter what. My mother called him her seventh son. I was never closer to anyone than I was to him. He was my blood brother.” The memories, just behind his eyes, had not faded. Only life had faded. Julian moved through the days in the dark; he had lost his sight. But he remembered everything, as if he could still see. “I can tell you about him, if you want.”

“Oh, yeah?” Wild says absent-mindedly. “I like that name, Ashton. Never heard it before. What was he like?”

“He was a good guy. He was a great friend.” Julian inhales. “You remind me a bit of him.”

“I’m not surprised, because I’m a great guy. So what happened to him?”

“He’s still somewhere, over the earth. I’m sure of it.”

“My brother, too,” Wild says. “Awake all night, like us.”

“Drinking, talking about girls, uncovering the mysteries of life.”

“Knowing Louis, probably just drinking, Swedish.”

Side by side on the floor of the Central Line platform, Wild and Swedish sit, finishing the whisky, telling each other stories of those they lost and couldn’t save, of those they left behind.

11

Mia, Mia

A GIANT EXPLOSION ROCKS BANK. LOOSENED PLASTER tumbles to the ground, a pipe dangles. It feels like an earthquake. Some women scream, but in the Ten Bells passageway, things stay remarkably calm.

“Fuck off!” says Nick.

“That was close,” says Peter Roberts. Lucinda keeps knitting as if she didn’t hear a thing. Peter Roberts and Lucinda behave as if they’re in the library, and books have fallen off the shelves, books that are somebody else’s problem. Frankie picks up her puzzle pieces from the floor, one by one, and carries on.

“Don’t fret, Folgate,” Wild says to Mia. “Finch is by your side, looking out for you. Put your arm around your girl, Finch, make her feel better. If anything happens, he’ll be sure to write it down. He’ll itemize every infraction against you and present it to the Incident Officer.”

“What do we say to Wild, Nick?” Finch asks the supine man.

“Fuck off!” says Nick.

“Precisely,” says Finch.

“You’re letting Nick do your dirty work, Finch?” Wild says. “You’re not fooling me. You’re as dirty as old Brentford at Christmas.”

“Are you happy we’re all together now, Mum?” Sheila asks Lucinda.

“Yes,” Lucinda replies without inflection. Most have settled into feisty defiance or resigned resolve. Lucinda has made a deliberate effort to remain nonchalant. The biggest fear for many British is to spread unnecessary panic. “Eight million people cannot become hysterical,” Lucinda tells her girls when they refuse to match their mother’s sanguine disposition.

“Our mum’s way of dealing with the war is to ignore it,” Kate says to Julian. “She acts like war is a terrible but temporary inconvenience that must be tolerated until it ends—in about a fortnight.”

Sheila adds to her sister’s description, “Mum contributes to the war effort by refusing to take part.”

“Must be nice to have your mum with you,” says Mia with a melancholy sigh.

Boom boom.

Thud thud.

The air shakes with the drone of planes. Little black things fall out of the sky. Every minute he is awake, Julian hears the rat-tat-tat of the anti-aircraft guns, even when they’re not being fired. But the black things keep falling. White caps open over them. Parachutes. The black things drift through the air, harmless, aimless, in slow motion, until they hover above a row of terraced houses. Then they explode.

The day they explode, Julian finally learns what Frankie does for the war effort. Mute medical student Frankie sifts through the brick and glass and pulls out pieces of ripped-apart bodies. She puts them back together in her deep-freeze laboratory called the morgue. She and her team of assistants search for fragments of arms, legs, feet, bits of torso, partial skulls. They place all the remains they can find into an open wagon lined with plastic. In the hours it takes Finch to itemize lost belongings, Frankie fastidiously, slowly, patiently sifts through the dust and recovers parts of lost human beings. The medical truck leaves, the Incident Officer leaves, the refreshment truck, the fire brigade, the police, Finch and the Rescue Squad all leave, only Frankie is still there, lifting up window frames and torn apart mattresses, making sure she hasn’t left a stray bone behind.

Back in the morgue, she spends days assembling. When she deems the jigsaw pieces of the body are put together with sufficient respect, then and only then does she sign off and release the body to the waiting family.

Some of them remain partials.

Frankie won’t release those. Day after day, she returns to the bomb site and sifts through the mortar, poking with her spear and her spade, digging mute and unhurried until she finds the parts that are missing.

“Frankie wasn’t always so quiet,” Mia tells Julian. “When the war began, she smiled, sometimes even talked. But then she found a woman’s arm, still in her overcoat, lying in the dirt. That arm has been torturing Frankie. She can’t make peace with not finding the rest of the woman. Where did the body go? The arm has been catalogued and left in the mortuary at Royal London. Frankie checks on it every time she’s there, to see if it’s been claimed.”

It’s still unclaimed.

That’s why no one has abandoned London. They are all fragments of a city. They’re part of something, they belong to something whole. If they leave, pieces will go missing.

Most of the days Julian has no time to think about it, but sometimes when he’s walking and has time, he doubles over under the weight of London pressing down on him. The enormity of what’s happening kicks him in the heart.

This can’t be London!

London whose roar never stopped, not even after the Black Plague, lies deserted and silent at night. This black plague falling out of the sky, drifting down on white parachutes, has muted the mighty city. This London is more silent than the countryside in Clerkenwell in 1603 when the rustling of rodents and the chirping of crickets could still be heard at night. It’s more silent than the dank cellar room in which Julian lay in a heroin haze, more silent than the cave with vertical ice walls hundreds of feet thick, more silent than the Southern Ocean in the ebony stillness of pack ice.

It is dead silent.

It’s a black hole, except for the droning of enemy planes, except for the wailing of relentless sirens.

The Strand is burning.

Cheapside is burning.

Paternoster Row, the historic publishing street next to St. Paul’s, is gone, gone like it never existed, wiped out, five million books destroyed.