The Report by Jessica Francis Kane Read Free Book Online

chin-length hair was ragged from rain. There was a raw spot on each palm where she’d dug in her nails when they pulled her away from the stairs. She kept thinking about Emma’s birth. Wasn’t that a severing followed by a reunion? This had been a severing, so wouldn’t Emma be returned to her? Birth, death, reunion—the ideas grew confused in her mind.
    She knew she should go home. She kept thinking she had, so well could she picture the walk up the road to their house. Over and over again she thought she’d got up and was walking—she could feel just how to do it—but then she’d look down and discover her legs were still bent, her hands wrapped around her ankles, her cheeks pressed into her knees.
    “There was room along the right for an instant,” she said, then waited for the church bells to finish chiming the half hour before continuing. “That’s how Tilly and I, and I thought …”
    “Hush,” the women nearest her said. “Hush.” They patted and petted her.
    In the streets around the church few people spoke. Those who did shook their heads and whispered. Approaching and offering help seemed too loud an action in the boroughwide stillness. The mourners on the church steps were not the usual bombed-out homeless; they were not the disconnected victims of indifferent bombs. An awkward feeling grew: these mourners had survived a tragedy in which they’d somehow played a role, and no one knew what to do.
    Every now and then someone pointed at the shelter entrance, then up the road, tracing lines of approach, recounting what had happened. It was said that an off-duty constable had hoisted himself over the fallen people and in this way climbed from the top to the bottom of the accident but was still unable to do any good. Someone else said they’d heard about a woman who arrived late. She’d got in, but over ground she thought unusually soft. Later she knew she must have walked on bodies.
    The people stared, listening to the same stories again and again. They shook their heads. The impossible idea: the victims (no one knew how many—some said one hundred, others five hundred) had died for nothing. There had been no bombs.
    Without anyone asking him to, before anyone had any idea of the nature and extent of the accident at Bethnal Green, while the crew organized by the Regional Commissioners in the early morning hours after the disaster was still sweeping and scrubbing the steps, Warden Low resigned from his position at the shelter. He simply wrote a letter and posted it to the home secretary, Herbert S. Morrison. Warden Low would have written to the king if he’d known how. Then he sat in his kitchen and waited for dawn, for Sarah, for her help once again in making sense of the world.
    How would he tell her? They’d never had children, never conceived. This was the great disappointment of her life. Early in the war, they’d heard a baby crying in a collapsed building, and she’d dug in the broken cement for hours until she found the boy, alive.
    Low felt Sarah’s hand on his shoulder. He opened his eyes. “James?” she said. “What’s wrong?”
    “I thought we needed more light and that it would be all right.” He gulped from his mug, but the coffee he’d made and poured for them was cold.
    “What would be all right? James, what’s happened?”
    “It rained,” he started. “The stairs were slippery.” When he didn’t continue, Sarah pressed a bobby pin into the back of her upswept gray hair and put the coffee away. Tea and coffee each had a place: tea for comfort, coffee for courage. But what James needed now, she thought, was brandy. She opened the cabinet beneath the sink.
    “Sarah,” James said, so quietly she barely heard him. “Something terrible’s happened.”
    Sarah didn’t turn. “I know, and you’re going to tell me. But wait a minute while I get us settled.”
    She set out the brandy, two small glasses, and started peeling the potatoes for breakfast. Serve potatoes for