Fragile Minds

‘Oh dear.’ I gathered my things, feeling guilty I hadn’t found Tessa earlier. ‘I hope she’s OK.’

‘Oh, Claudie,’ Mason barked as I opened the door to leave. ‘I completely forgot. She left you a note.’ As she bent to retrieve it from the pile on her desk, Mason knocked over her coffee, soaking everything with dark brown liquid. ‘Oh, damn and blast.’

After a bit of wrangling, Mason passed me the soggy bit of paper, but it was almost pulp already. I could just make out the words ‘Take’ and ‘the necklace’. The last word in the paragraph looked like it was possibly ‘Sorry’ with a big curly y.

I held it to the light but it was no good, it was illegible. I balled the note, tossing it in the bin. From the set of Mason’s expectant head, I could tell she had read it, she was dying to be asked; but I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. If it was important, Tessa would call me, I guessed. ‘See you guys tomorrow.’

‘Ta ta for now,’ Mason sniffed. ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t with that gorgeous Rafe. I know what MPs are like.’

‘Leaves me wide open then,’ I grinned at her, shouldering my bag, and left.

The summer afternoon was warm and the air outside seemed to almost shimmer. I suddenly felt more cheerful about life, almost euphoric even. Things were going to get better. They simply had to.

I had no idea of the level of my delusion.

But on the bus to meet Rafe, stuck at red lights, I felt less than euphoric and increasingly racked by a headache. I stared out at an Evening Standard billboard on the street which read ‘Dancer, 20, Missing or Dead?’; but the words moved up and down with alarming speed as I tried to focus.

Disoriented, I was jolted into a memory that terrified me. I felt like I had last year; my self fracturing into pieces – but it couldn’t be happening again – could it? I was over the worst, surely? I leant against the window, my head pounding so badly now I thought I might actually throw up, and I thought vaguely that maybe I should get off the bus before it was too late – only the idea of walking right now seemed a little like scaling Mount Everest. I looked down onto the pavement, onto the worker ants of London, and my phone was ringing in my bag. I tried to pull it out, the flickering lights in front of my burning eyes bewildering me until I felt like I was losing consciousness.

I woke in the dark, almost dribbling, absolutely freezing, my hands curled round my bag strap so tightly I had to fight to unfurl them. I could hear voices, and then Rafe was there, peering down at me, saying, ‘Oh my God, Claudie, what’s happened?’ And I found I could hardly speak, I was so disoriented, but I managed to croak something about my head, and he was saying, ‘Oh Christ, you’re frozen, how long have you been here?’ and practically carrying me up the few stairs to his flat. He gave me a warm drink of something tasteless, and laid me down on his sofa with a cashmere blanket – it was so warm and homely that I drifted off again.

FRIDAY 14TH JULY CLAUDIE

I came to in the early hours caught in the desperate state between sleep and consciousness; hearing frantic voices whispering in the dark, a woman’s voice too now, and I thought perhaps it was Tessa, and then I realised I was dreaming.

When I woke properly about six, Rafe had already gone. He was a gym addict, and there was a note, telling me to help myself to anything I wanted, and that he’d see me later, and he hoped I was feeling better.

The headache had gone, but I didn’t feel better. I just felt frightened. I’d lost a few hours from last night; I remembered leaving work, being on the bus and then – what? Waking in Rafe’s porch; being carried into the flat. An overwhelming sense of anxiety pulsed through me. Images from yesterday flickered through my mind, like a camera shutter opening and closing too fast. I sat on the sofa, my head in my hands, and tried to breathe.

Was it happening again?

I washed my face and hands beneath the expensive lighting in Rafe’s stark bathroom and, trying to calm my tousled hair, I opened the medicine cabinet above the basin, looking for what Rafe called ‘product’. A packet of Well Woman tablets fell out. I picked them up, frowning. Next to them, a pink electric toothbrush, and a jar of Clinique night cream.

I shut the cabinet door, and walked into his bedroom. It all looked the same as ever, until I opened the drawers by the side of the bed. There was a pale blue hairband and some expensive hand cream.

It underlined something I had been avoiding … that Rafe and I were really only a stopgap. Meeting by chance at the Sadler’s Wells charity do in January, it had always felt a little like I was one of his pet projects; that we were keeping each other warm on cold winter nights.

But now it was summer.

Grabbing my stuff, I ran down the stairs and buzzed myself out, the fortress door slamming behind me. I stood at the top of the shiny steps to the street. A milk float trundled slowly down the deserted road, and a ginger cat cleaned its ears discreetly as it sat beneath the frothy mimosa tree; it looked at me with disdain and then carried on licking. And I remembered Tessa’s soaked and illegible note in my hand yesterday afternoon and I had this sudden overriding feeling that I should be somewhere, and I felt a rising panic, because I just didn’t know where.

FRIDAY 14TH JULY KENTON

How the hell she had ended up having to do this alone, she would never know. Cursing quietly, DS Lorraine Kenton backed the car into the small space, knocked the adjacent Audi’s mirror and then looked around guiltily to see if anyone had noticed. It had taken over half an hour to find a parking space because the bloody NCP was shut for some reason, and she was seriously over-tired and crochety. She’d slept badly because all night she’d kept dreaming that she’d forgotten what she was meant to say in the TV studio and no one would tell her the lines so she just sat frozen in fear on the famous cream sofa of Crime Live!, opposite the immaculate ice-maiden presenter who stared at her blankly.

At six, Kenton had woken with relief, before realising with horror she really did have to go on TV today. In an effort to rouse herself, she’d drunk too much black coffee in a foolish attempt to get those little grey cells working and thrown half a mug of it down her new white shirt, which meant she had to plump for the crumpled stripy one. She didn’t have time to iron it because she’d nicked the fuse out of the plug last week for her hairdryer, which had been unused for at least two years prior to her first date, on the Southbank, with Alison from the dating website Guardian Soulmates. Now the only consequence of all that coffee was a mismatched outfit and a horribly pounding heart, her brain exactly as slow and sludge-like as when she’d first woken.

The television studio was on a small side street off Berkeley Square. Kenton checked the A-Z and, grabbing her jacket from the back seat hoping it would cover the crumpled stripes, wondered for at least the forty-eighth time this morning why the hell she’d volunteered to replace Gill McCarthy from the Press Office when she had become ‘unavailable’ at the last minute yesterday evening (for unavailable read: had just found out her boyfriend in Organised Crime was screwing McCarthy’s number two, Jo Reid, who wore a wanton look, too much red lipstick and her dresses practically slashed to the waist. Obvious, maybe, but Kenton could definitely see her appeal).

Her phone rang. Her pounding heart slowed and sank. It was DI Craven.

‘I’ll meet you there, pet,’ he said. ‘At Audley Street. Running slightly late.’

‘Really? I thought I was—’ Kenton collected herself, ‘I didn’t realise you were coming too.’

‘Boss thought you might fuck it up,’ he said smugly, and hung up.

Kenton counted to ten slowly and then dug her iPod out to begin the walk west, shuffling the wheel for the Meditation CD Alison had rather shyly suggested she try for stress.

‘Breathe deeply. Now imagine yourself in a safe, secure place. Somewhere you are entirely comfortable,’ the man’s voice droned unconvincingly. ‘Perhaps you are in a childhood—’

Someone pushed Kenton so violently from behind that she stumbled, just righting herself in time before she fell; her iPod hitting the pavement hard.

Before she could pick it up, she was pushed again. Heart racing, she turned to see who her attacker was, but they had run on. There was some sort of commotion on the far side of the square behind her, beside the big Swiss bank – but she was too far away to see exactly what it was; the railings round the green blocked her view, so she could only see the edge of the building site beside the bank. About fifty metres away, a woman in a burqa stood on the edge of the pavement, about to push a buggy across the road. Now the woman began to run towards the group of people at the bus stop.

As Kenton neared, adrenaline flooding her veins now, she could hear shouting and then another, more eerie noise: a high-pitched wail not unlike the keening of the bereaved at an Arabic funeral.

A bus pulled in, blocking her view again; and then a woman was screaming and shouting something unintelligible and Kenton saw people on the bus look out, and then stand up, a man pointing, pointing out of the far window and then—

All was chaos and noise and white, exploding light.

FRIDAY 14TH JULY CLAUDIE

I stood on the quiet street outside Rafe’s flat. The church clock on the green struck seven, and a double decker slid into place at the bus stop in front of me. Unthinking, I climbed on. I didn’t check the destination, I just slapped my Oyster card on the reader like it was a dead fish, and I sat in the first seat I came to.

I kept thinking I need to be somewhere only I couldn’t seem to collect my thoughts; and when I did manage to assemble them a little, I found I was thinking of Ned, and then of Will. I fiddled anxiously with my locket, realising I had a sudden urge to see my husband. Oh the sweet irony: an irony Will would not thank me for.

The old lady beside me smelt high, as if she’d been ripened especially for months. She kept grumbling about the driver, on and on she droned. ‘He’s trying to scare us, that lad, you mark my words, it’s because they don’t learn to drive here, they learn in Africa, too many holes in the roads, those jigaboos.’ After a few minutes, I said, ‘I’m afraid I don’t share your horrible opinions,’ and I moved to the back, stumbling against the other commuters who stared at me with empty eyes.

We reached Russell Square. Tessa; that was it; that was what I had to do. I changed buses and boarded a new one. It seemed to take forever to reach Oxford Street where we became one in a line of nose to tail buses, crawling at tortoise pace – something was holding us up, but we couldn’t see what; until eventually I knew, I knew I had to get off the bus NOW. I began to smash on the doors until the other passengers stepped back in fear, until the driver thought I was truly mad, and gave in, and let me off.

And I ran, ran, ran towards Berkeley Square.

FRIDAY 14TH JULY KENTON

Somehow the bus protected her. Forever after she would be grateful; she would look on London’s famous red double decker as some kind of lucky charm; some kind of talisman to her.

Instinctively, Kenton had hit the floor when the explosion ripped through the north side of the square. She had lain motionless on the pavement with her hands over her head for a minute or two, until the noise settled, the rumble stopped, and there was quiet across the square. A strange pocket of silence in the city, broken only by the incongruous sound of birdsong.

And then a new noise began. Now it was the alarms that filled the air: the cars, the shops and flats; the electrics triggered by the huge explosion. There was thick dust swirling in the air, making Kenton cough as she thought absently of 9/11 and the survivors staggering about covered in white like ash-covered ghosts.

She tasted it in her mouth and spat a few times, trying to find some moisture. She stood slowly, trembling, and began to walk towards the mutilated bus that had inclined fatally to the right, towards the crying and the wailing – towards the devastation, glass crunching underfoot. Her inclination might be to run back, but she knew it was her duty to go forward. She stopped for a moment, and breathed deeply and then pulled her phone from her pocket to ring for help. Afterwards, she couldn’t remember the conversation, or whom she spoke to, but soon after, the air was filled with police sirens.

Nothing could prepare her for what she was about to witness. In her mind’s eye, she imagined her late mother, smiling with encouragement from her usual place at the kitchen sink. ‘You can do it, Lorraine,’ she heard her mother say, snapping off her yellow Marigolds. ‘That’s my girl.’

The smell of burning filled the air as Kenton stepped over something, walking towards the bank in the far right corner. She looked again: it was a hand. She retched into the gutter; the pavement nearest the bank was red with blood. She held her phone tighter. She looked for the first ambulance. She saw another mutilated body. She kept breathing. She didn’t retch this time.

A blonde woman was lying on her back, face bloodied and blackened, one foot extended gracefully; glassy eyes open. Dead. Most definitely dead. Another woman lay at a right angle to her; this one was alive, whimpering in terror and pain. Kenton knelt beside her gratefully.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

‘Maeve,’ the woman whispered. Her face was entirely drained of colour. ‘Maeve O’Connor.’

‘You’re going to be all right, Maeve.’ Kenton had no idea if the woman would be all right but it seemed the thing to say. ‘Where does it hurt?’

Desperately Kenton looked again for an ambulance. Where the hell were they? She held the woman’s hand, and she tied her belt round the woman’s bleeding leg. Then she spoke to a young man; a builder from the neighbouring site. He seemed delirious, worried he’d lost his hard hat; his face was speckled with shrapnel cuts. Other people were coming now; moving amongst the dead and injured. Kenton looked up. The front and side of the Hoffman Bank were gone; it looked naked, like a half-dressed man. The building site beside it had lost its front hoarding; gentle flames licked the side of it. The dust flew in the air.

When the ambulances finally arrived, and the police cars and fire engines, and there were no injured left to talk or tend to, Kenton sat on the kerb in the debris until she was moved off, like any other member of the public, and after a while, she wept.

FRIDAY 14TH JULY CLAUDIE

I came to in St Thomas’s A&E, on a bed in a curtained cubicle, with no memory of what or who had brought me here. Concussion they said, but I’d be fine. I’d collided with a cyclist ten minutes – quite literally – after the ‘major incident’ that had apparently just shut central London. I couldn’t remember any of it, but the cyclist lay in the next cubicle with a twisted knee. My head was hurting even more than it had last night, and I kept trying to say I didn’t know what had happened, but they thought that was normal. I wasn’t sure they were listening; they kept saying it was just shock. And the pain, it was different to last night; a dull throb, and the nice nurse who had treated me delivered me to the waiting area, and patted me on the head like a well-behaved puppy. She propped me up with a print-out on concussion and a vial of painkillers, and told me to hang on, someone would be here soon.

‘You’ll be all right,’ she said, in an accent that was probably Nigerian. Her bobbed wig was slightly askew; I wanted to straighten it. ‘You got a hard head, child. Praise the Lord you were not nearer the incident.’ She glanced up to where God obviously resided. ‘Go well, Claudia. And don’t forget to ring through for your results in a few days.’

The consultant’s single concession to my confusion and mention of blinding migraines had been to give me a blood test.

‘The confusion is probably partial concussion.’ He looked about ten, slightly nervous, hardly old enough to have left school, and his ears protruded at alarming right angles. ‘Which is what you must watch for now. Tell your family, OK? Re: the migraines, well, I haven’t got time to do a full set of bloods now,’ he filled in a form, which is what he had to find time for, ‘we’re too stretched. But let me just do a test for your hormone levels. It could explain a lot. We’ll have to wait for the results of course.’

And I hadn’t been in a hospital since that terrible day two years ago, the day that Ned had finally given up on life; and it was even worse than I remembered. There was an air of flattened panic throughout the building and everyone who entered through the sliding doors seemed almost shifty; they would check the room quickly to see who else was here as if they were casing the joint: the walking wounded, the traumatised. A constant stream of ambulances arrived in the bay outside the doors; the seriously injured were whisked somewhere we were not allowed. After a while we all averted our eyes because it was simply too much.

And the sirens; the sirens were a constant chorus of the morning, screaming through the stultifying air. The doctors and nurses walked with a different tread, faster, and they seemed different to how they would be in a normal Emergency Room; quicker, more energised. Frightened.

About an hour after I had been led to that shiny orange chair, my younger sister trotted through the doors at a fair pace, like a circus pony, anxious to perform.

‘Oh, thank God!’ she said. She was almost breathless with fear and excitement, her fair hair tumbling around her broad, friendly face, only missing its circus plume. ‘Are you OK? Isn’t this awful?’

‘Thanks for coming, Nat.’ Gingerly I stood, clutching my medication and my bag. ‘I know you’re busy.’

‘Of course I’d come.’ Her face was flushed and she had put her pink lipstick on crooked. ‘Who else would? Though I didn’t want to bring Ella into the zone, you know, the danger zone,’ and I almost laughed. ‘I left her with Glynnis next door. Such a nice woman. She understood.’

What exactly Glynnis had understood, I wasn’t sure.

‘We’d better get out of here quickly.’

‘It’s not Afghanistan you know,’ I said, but perhaps it was; perhaps this crisis that I did not understand yet was the start of something truly terrible. Natalie rolled her eyes, guiding me towards the car park now.

‘Well, who knows what it is yet, Claudia? They haven’t said. They’re saying nothing on the radio, just that it was an explosion, and don’t go into town. The traffic’s appalling. Oh God I was so worried, it’s right beside your work isn’t it? Thank goodness it happened so early.’

‘I should have been there,’ I said. I should have been there, I should have been there. ‘I was on my way in.’

‘You should? Oh my goodness, Claudia!’ she exhaled noisily. ‘You must be in shock. I would be. Your poor face. I’ve got a thermos of tea in the car.’ My ever-efficient little sister, the prizewinning Girl Guide, the soloist chorister, the parent rep. ‘You know, I can’t stop watching the news. It’s so horrific. We need to ring Mum. Let’s get home.’

FRIDAY 14TH JULY SILVER

Despite it being his day off, Joseph Silver woke at 5.15 a.m. Despite or because of … Habit was a forceful thing, he thought sourly, burying his head beneath the pillow. Silver loathed his days off, hated having time to think; he would happily spend the whole time unconscious until it was time to go to work again.

Naturally this morning, try as he might, sleep eluded him until eventually he emerged from the Egyptian cotton he’d replaced his landlady’s cheap polyester with, and lay on his back in the bed that was too soft, that sent him precariously close to one edge each time he rolled over. His upper arm was bruised from smashing into the squash court wall last night, so it was hard to get comfortable. Hands beneath his head, he stared at the ceiling, at the damp patch near the small window. And then at the framed photo beside him. He knew the picture intimately, the Dales rolling gently behind the figures in the foreground, the wide open space of his own childhood calling him, his children’s carefree faces beaming out at him, gap-toothed grins, dimples, freckles like join-the-dots. A photo pored over too many times now until it almost meant nothing. He knew it almost as well as his own face, but that brought little relief from the homesickness he so often suffered.

Silver rolled away from the three grins. Missing the children was a constant weight, like knees on his chest; a pain he fought every bloody day alongside the guilt, a guilt that called him northwards again but that he had not yet succumbed to. He wondered idly what Julie was doing today and then acknowledged that he didn’t really care. She had a good body (‘nice rack’, Craven would say and everybody else would tut and roll their eyes) but nothing much to say. She’d giggled a lot when they went to that dreadful wine bar last week and talked about police dramas. In particular, Lewis’s sidekick Hathaway, who was played by a Fox, who apparently was a fox: until Silver had had to grit his teeth. And later the sex was fine but not good enough to warrant that incessant gurgle that she thought was alluring but really wasn’t; that reminded him more of water going down a plug hole than anything else. Not good enough for him to call her on his day off – and anyway he thought he remembered her saying she was away, on some middle management course this week, which no doubt meant trust exercises of the sort that involved falling backwards and catching one another before getting pissed in the identikit hotel bar and waking up hungover and horrified next morning beside a married colleague.

Silver allowed himself a wry smile and briefly debated going to the gym, but for some reason the soulless space in the station basement held little appeal today. He swung his legs out of the bed, his bare feet meeting the polished floorboards, rubbing his short hair impatiently with both hands until it stood on end. He felt confined and caged and suddenly incredibly depressed.

Philippa’s tribe were all still in bed, which was a rare piece of luck. In an effort to cheer himself, Silver spent the next hour drinking coffee in his landlady’s huge kitchen, the early morning sunlight spilling through the old sash windows, and booking a holiday in Corfu for the kids’ October half term. Lana had actually agreed to it last time they spoke, albeit reluctantly, and he wouldn’t take the risk of asking again; he knew it was now or never. Eventually a ping from his email said he’d succeeded: three grand poorer maybe but still, the proud owner of one package holiday with perks.

Philippa plodded into the kitchen now, yawning, rubbing sleep from her almond-shaped eyes, and switched the kettle on. He raised a hand in greeting as he dialled home: the kids would be about to leave for school. He missed the boys, they’d left already, but Molly was breathless with excitement, despite Lana’s low tones chiding her to put her shoes on whilst she talked.

‘Come on, Molly.’

He heard the dull exasperation in his ex-wife’s tone and his fist clenched unconsciously, wondering why the hell she couldn’t just let him have this time, why she couldn’t relax for one moment. But he still managed to absorb the pleasure in his youngest child’s voice, words tumbling over each other about the plane, about beaches and ice cream and staying up late. Halfway through the excited patter, as Philippa padded out to the hall to start screeching at her kids who were not getting up, his mobile rang.

Kenton’s name flashed up.

‘Hang on, kiddo,’ he said to Molly and answered the mobile. ‘Silver.’

‘Sir,’ she was stammering; he could hardly hear her words for the jarring dissonance of sound behind her. ‘There’s been an incident. An explosion.’

He spoke to Molly quickly. ‘Mol. I’ll call you tonight.’