INEXPRESSIBLE ISLAND

The conclusion of the End of Forever saga

Paullina Simons

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

The News Building

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty Ltd in 2019

This edition in Great Britain 2019

Copyright © Paullina Simons

Cover design by HarperCollins Design Studio

Cover images: Hands by Lee Avison / Trevillion Images (Houses of Parliament); hand by Paullina Simons; Part title illustrations by Paullina Simons

Author photo by Tatiana Ryan

Paullina Simons asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007441693

Ebook Edition © August 2019 ISBN: 9780007441709

Version: 2019-11-08

Praise for Paullina Simons

Tully

“You’ll never look at life in the same way again. Pick up this book and prepare to have your emotions wrung so completely you’ll be sobbing your heart out one minute and laughing through your tears the next. Read it and weep—literally.”

Company

Red Leaves

“Simons handles her characters and setting with skill, slowly peeling away deceptions to reveal denial, cowardice and chilling indifference … an engrossing story.”

Publishers Weekly

Eleven Hours

“Eleven Hours is a harrowing, hair-raising story that will keep you turning the pages late into the night.”

Janet Evanovich

The Bronze Horseman

“A love story both tender and fierce” (Publishers Weekly) that “recalls Dr. Zhivago.” (People Magazine)

The Bridge to Holy Cross

“This has everything a romance glutton could wish for: a bold, talented and dashing hero [and] a heart-stopping love affair that nourishes its two protagonists even when they are separated and lost.”

Daily Mail

The Girl in Times Square

“Part mystery, part romance, part family drama … in other words, the perfect book.”

Daily Mail

The Summer Garden

“If you’re looking for a historical epic to immerse yourself in, then this is the book for you.”

Closer

Road to Paradise

“One of our most exciting writers … Paullina Simons presents the perfect mix of page-turning plot and characters.”

Woman and Home

A Song in the Daylight

“Simons shows the frailties of families and of human nature, and demonstrates that there’s so much more to life, such as honesty and loyalty.”

Good Reading

Bellagrand

“Another epic saga from Simons, full of the emotion and heartache of the original trilogy. Summer reading at its finest.”

Canberra Times

Lone Star

“Another epic love story—perfect reading for a long, lazy day in bed.”

Better Reading

Dedication

To my four children “L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.”

Epigraph

“What punishments of God are not gifts?”

J.R.R. Tolkien

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for Paullina Simons

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue: The Two of Them

Part One: London Pride

1. Anonymous

2. It Didn’t Have To Be This Way

3. Once

4. The Importance of Being Julian

5. Wild

6. Musketeers

7. Folgate

8. Tales of Love and Hate

9. Cripplegate

10. Blood Brothers

11. Mia, Mia

12. Falling Beams

13. Gold Rings

14. Gone with the Wind

15. The Great Fire

16. Finch and Frankie

17. Ghost Bride and Johnny Blaze

18. Deepest Shelter in Town

19. A House on Grimsby Street

20. Lunch at the Ten Bells

21. Empty Igloo

22. A Girl Named Maria

23. Two Prayers

24. Mytholmroyd

25. Land of Hope and Glory

26. Dream Machine

27. Cargo Cult

Part Two: Trace Decay

28. Morecambe Bay

29. Junk Shop

30. The One-Eyed King

31. Dark Equinox

32. Fathers and Sons

33. Silver Angel

34. Seven Stars

35. Perennial Live-Forevers

Part Three: Future Imperfect

36. Phantasmagoria in Two, Take 2

37. Paradiso and Purgatorio

38. Hollywood Hills

39. A Dress for Beatrice

40. Free Licks

41. Crystal of Souls

42. Inferno

43. The Julian by Diane von Furstenberg

44. Mystique and Doctor Doom

45. Powers Devours

46. Hey Baby

47. Pink Palace

48. Big Ben

49. Everything Forever

50. The Dungeon of the Haunted Warlord

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading …

About the Author

By the same author

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE
The Two of Them

WAY DOWN WE GO.

“Julian, I’m going to tell you a story,” Ashton said, “about a rider and a preacher. The rider bet his only horse that the preacher could not recite the Lord’s Prayer without his thoughts wandering. The bet was gladly accepted, and the holy man began to mouth the familiar words. Halfway through, he stopped and said, ‘Did you mean the saddle also?’”

“That is not a story about a rider and a preacher,” Julian said. “It’s a story about how to lose a horse.”

“Ashton, why aren’t you eating my Kjøttkaker?” Julian’s mother said.

“Oh, he doesn’t like it, Mom,” Julian said. “He told me when you were in the kitchen. He doesn’t care for your Norwegian cooking.”

“Julian!”

“Ignore him, Mrs. C,” Ashton said. “I love your meatballs. You know he’s just trying to get a rise out of you.”

“Consider me risen. Why do you do that, son?”

“Do what, Mom, joke around?”

“Mrs. C,” Ashton said with a mouth full of Kjøttkaker, “the other day your son told me I was like a brother he never had.”

“Julian!” yelled his mother and five brothers.

“Jules, remember to look both ways before you go fuck yourself,” said his brother Harlan.

“Funny, I was about to say the same thing to Ashton,” Julian said. Ashton laughed and laughed.

Julian’s mother made Ashton’s favorite for dessert: lefse—rolled up sweet flatbread sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon.

“Ashton, did Julian ever tell you the story of how he stumped a mystic when he was thirteen?” Joanne Cruz said. “Eat, eat, while I tell you. A pillar of the church was visiting our parish, a revered Augustinian monk, a man of prodigious theological output. He gave a lecture and then invited some questions. And your skinny friend, his voice still unbroken, stepped up to the microphone and squeaked, ‘Um, excuse me, why did Jesus weep for Lazarus when He saw him dead, even though He knew that in a few minutes He would raise Lazarus from the dead?’ The monk thought about it and said, ‘I do not know the answer.’”

Ashton, wiping the cinnamon sugar off his face, smirked. His shaggy blond hair needed a cut; his happy blue eyes gleamed. “Even I have the answer to that, and I’m no wise man and certainly no monk—pardon me, Mrs. C. The God in Jesus may have known, but the Man in Him wept because Jesus was both—fully human and fully Divine. And to mourn the dead is the human way. Next time, Jules, ask me. I have an answer to everything.”

Fast forward.

“If you wake up first, don’t go out there without me, like you did yesterday,” Ashton said. They’d been camping for days. “Promise you’ll stay put?”

“I don’t know what you’re all up in my grill about. We’re camping, not caving.”

Fast forward.

“Oh my God, what happened, Jules? We’ve been looking everywhere for you. Everywhere but here. You don’t know what you’ve done to us.

“Julian, say something!

“You’re going to be okay. You’re going to be okay. Help him! Help him!

“Why did you do it, I told you not to go, why do you never listen, why did you leave without me?”

I’m sorry, Ashton, Julian wanted to say, but couldn’t speak. I don’t know what happened.

Fast forward.

“My buddy Jules over here used to be a boxer,” Ashton said to Riley and Gwen the night they met. The boys were groomed and shaved, wore jeans paired with Hugo Boss jackets. “You should be impressed, ladies.” The girls were young and sparkling. “He was nearly untouchable in the ring. He hit his opponents with shots that could’ve brought down mountains. Yes, he was a magnificent fighter but a flawed human being. Whereas now, he’s precisely the opposite—lucky for you, Gwen, and I mean the word lucky in the most literal sense—ouch, Jules! What are you hitting me for?”

“Lucky Gwen,” Riley said after a beat, turning her smile to Ashton.

A flirty Gwen scooted over to Julian. “Well, I am feeling pretty lucky, I must admit.”

Fast forward.

“Do you know any boxing jokes?” asked Riley. They had settled into a booth, ordered drinks and snacks. It was their first double date.

Julian did. “Did you hear what Manny Pacquiao planned to write on Floyd Mayweather’s tombstone? You can stop counting. I ain’t getting up.”

The girls laughed. Ashton laughed, even though he’d heard the joke before.

Fast forward.

“Riley, don’t try so hard,” Ashton said. “Women have no need to appeal to men by also being funny. They appeal to men already, you know what I mean?”

“Go to hell,” Riley said. “I’m funny.”

“No, no, my love. It’s not an insult. You’re under the mistaken impression that men want their women to be funny.”

“No, no, my love,” Riley said. “It’s you who’s under the mistaken impression that women don’t want their men to be funny.”

Julian nodded approvingly. “That was funny, Riles.”

“Thanks, Jules. Ashton, you should try being more like Jules. Because unlike you, see, he is actually funny.”

“Fuck you, Jules.”

“What did I do?” Then Julian added, “You know, Ash, if you can stimulate your girl to laughter, and I mean real, head thrown back, deep throated, full and loud laughter, perhaps she will become more open to you and you can stimulate her to other things.”

“Fuck you, Jules!” And later: “All right, I’ll try to be funnier,” Ashton said. “Let’s try it Julian’s way.”

“Said the bishop to the barmaid,” said Julian.

To be funnier, Ashton told a joke. “Joe Gideon says to the masseuse, ‘Excuse me, miss, how much do you charge for genitalia?’ and she replies, ‘Oh, the same as for Jews, Mr. Gideon!’”

The four of them threw back their heads and laughed. They loved L.A. and All That Jazz.

Fast forward.

“Yes, I’m moving to London. It will help my dear old dad, and you know how close we are. Kidding aside, though, I’ve always wanted to live in Notting Hill. It’s on my bucket list. Of course I’ll still keep the Treasure Box. Why would I give that up? It’s my life.”

Fast forward.

“Yes, I’m selling the Treasure Box. Don’t look so deflated. It’s just a store. I’ll get another one if I really want to be tied down again. Right now I’d like to travel, see the world. You in, Jules? Where have we been besides London? Nowhere, exactly. Want to go to France? We have the time. What do you say, we can be two free men in Paris, so we can do our best, maybe feel alive.” Ashton grinned, humming, drumming. “Because you’re a very good friend of mine.”

Fast forward.

“She is going to break you,” Ashton said as they were coming home one night, unconscionably intoxicated. “I told you she was going to bust you open, and did you listen? You never listen to me, because you think you know everything, you think you’re the only one with gut feelings.”

“You sure you’re talking about me?”

“She turned to you, eyes blazing,” Ashton continued, “like you were her enemy in the ring and said, tonight, I keel you. And so far, nothing you’ve done has stopped her from fulfilling her promise.”

“Why am I even here?” Julian said.

“You’re like my dad, you both keep asking, why are we here,” said Ashton. “Why is anything here is a better question. Not why do you bother to exist, but why does anything bother to exist at all?”

“Because. The art of living in this world,” Julian replied, recalling Marcus Aurelius, “is to teach us that whatsoever falls upon man, he may be ready for it—that nothing may cast him down.”

“Some things cast you down,” Ashton said. “Bow out, Julian. As if you have a choice. Admit when you’ve been defeated. Forget you ever loved her. That’s what I had to do.” His head was bowed. “Forget I ever loved them.”

“Let’s go to Paris, Ash.”

“Okay, let’s. But first come with me to the wedding in York.”

“I can’t.” He had a lot to do to get ready for the equinox.

Was this the end? Were these wretched memories Julian’s life passing before his eyes?

No, he realized.

Not his life.

Their friendship was the beginning of everything.

How could Ashton be the one on whom the tempests fell.

Run along, my only friend.

Rewind the reel, rewind.

Part One
London Pride

O’er fields and towns, from sea to sea, Passed the pageant swift and free, Tearing up, and trampling down; Till they came for London town.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

1
Anonymous

“ANYONE CAN STOP A MAN’S LIFE,” DEVI SAID, QUOTING Seneca, probably thinking he was being comforting, “but no one his death: a thousand doors open onto it.”

Don’t speak to me. Don’t look at me. Leave me alone.

He had begged her, begged her not to, yet Shae still left him behind.

“Stumble up from your river of loneliness,” Julian heard Devi say. “We know you’re in sorrow. But you’re not alone. Ava and I are with you. You’re separated from your heart, yes, but don’t think of how little you did for her, think rather about how much she did for you. Her love for you saved your life. That man would’ve killed you and desecrated you. And then killed her, and desecrated her. To give you a chance, she warned you, and then threw herself overboard. By sacrificing herself, she saved you. Even though you were lowly and unworthy. Take the gift from her and live.”

“I was unworthy? Did you hear my story?”

“Of course,” Devi said. “You should have never gone. You had no business going anywhere in the state you were in, in the state you’re still in. You should’ve waited until next year, or the one after. Or not gone at all. You were no good to her. You were in no shape to help her. That she helped you despite yourself is a testament to how her soul feels about you even when you least deserve it.”

“I least deserve it.”

“Stop rephrasing and repeating everything I say.”

“Why are you still talking to me?” Julian said. “Go away.”

You promised Mother no matter where I go, you would follow me. Did you mean it?

I didn’t promise it to your mother. I promised it to you.

Shae tried to take him with her. She jumped. But as always, he ran out of time, even for death.

Ava sat in horror. Nothing made her feel better, not the story of the frantic mother, not the bravery of the sainted Maori who stayed by Shae’s side to the end. “Kiritopa’s glory was in the union with that woman and my child,” Ava said.

Julian lost three fingers on his right hand. He nearly lost four. After multiple surgeries, the doctors managed to save his pointer. Steel screws now held it together. It was a robot finger. The pinky was gone, the ring and middle fingers sliced off below the second knuckle. Your fingers for your life, Devi said. Julian gave Devi the finger, but it was more like he gave Devi the nub.

In the corner, Ava sat weeping. It’s like the first time all over again, she said.

Julian’s body was a mess. Electrocution flowers. A weakened heart. Along with the amputated fingers, he had suffered numerous other injuries during his cagematch with Tama: a broken nose, a cracked cheekbone, a concussion, a dislocated shoulder, a shattered radial bone from blocking that fucking mere club, torn ligaments in his knees, a fractured fibula, and a dozen cracks in his knuckles and hands and the bones of his feet. He was black and blue from his forehead to his shins.

Slowly, his body healed.

There were things that didn’t heal.

You say to her be my goddess, and she agrees and opens her legs. What a burden you’ve put on her—and you. She must be what she is not. You must be what you’re not. She is not a goddess.

Goddesses don’t die.

Julian lived inside the silence, inside the silence of the ocean with her body in his arms.

“Is there a purpose to my suffering, an end to my despair?”

Devi got up and said no.

“What will I find at the end of my story?” Julian said another day, another mute afternoon. “Will there be a recognition of my labors, a list of my shortcomings?”

Devi got up and said yes.

Julian searched for the power within. He and Ava were catatonics, her sitting in his hospital room by the window, him sitting in his bed, both barely rocking, trying to draw the power from silence. He kept staring at the space above his palm where his fingers used to be.

Your fear that she will cease to be—will recede, will vanish into the vanishing point—has been allayed. Hallelujah. She is not vanishing.

You are.

My life is wind, Julian thought when he finally returned to the apartment after six weeks in the hospital and six weeks convalescing at Hampstead Heath. He would’ve stayed longer, but they kicked him out. He would’ve stayed the rest of his life.

Instead he came back home.

My eye will see no more good, because he will not return to this house, neither will any place ever know him. Julian stood by the mantle in his empty apartment in Notting Hill. Their heads bent, Ava and Devi stood with him. They were always with him. They went with him to York to bring Ashton’s body back, they flanked him at the funeral, they were with him now. To the end of his days, Julian would complain of the bitterness in his soul. He preferred a drowning death rather than his life. The Lord didn’t take away my iniquities. I still sleep in the dust. You will seek me in the morning, but I won’t be here.

Because he wasn’t here.

Because she wasn’t here.

Devi tried to lighten the mood, as only Devi could. He made food, brought Julian tiger water, told Julian things. They sat down with Ava; they broke their bread; they had sake and egg rolls with twice-cooked pork dunked in chili soy sauce; they sipped Ga tan, a Vietnamese chicken soup. And then Devi talked.

“My own son was raised a Catholic, too,” Devi said. “But by the time he was grown, barely a trace of any teaching remained inside him. A remnant of faith turned out to be nothing but empty space.”

“It’s not just your son,” Julian said. “That’s how I lived most of my adult life. I had a fairly religious upbringing, which I attempted to discard when I went to college. My father’s family were loud devout Catholics, but my mother was a silent Lutheran Norwegian. Except for my near-constant search for answers to life’s unsolvable riddles, I felt more akin to her than I did to my Dia de los Muertos relatives. I went to a secular school with other kids who felt the way I did. Any mention of church was met with an eye roll. We talked video games, football, boxing, music, movies, girls. God never entered our language except in blasphemy. Until I met Ashton. He didn’t go to church, but he had faith.”

Devi nodded. “That was my son, too,” he said. “A typical boy, growing up in London, not listening to his dad. He wanted to be a photographer. I thought it was frivolous. He thought I was hopelessly old-fashioned. He was embarrassed by me. After his mother died, all he did was party.”

Julian nodded. Ashton, too, except for the dad part. Dad left the family, found a new life back in England, and didn’t return for his son, not even after the mother died. Ashton shuttled between a dozen foster homes until UCLA.

“Then as now, it’s difficult to tell by a man’s life and actions whether or not he is a believer,” Devi said. “Religious thought and teachings are so disconnected from daily life. A man can go one week, then another, and soon through his whole existence and not encounter God in his dealings with himself or other people.”

“Maybe when new life is created?” Ava said.

“Despite the requisite exclamations of Oh my God, often not even then,” Devi said. “The only time man usually comes into contact with faith or his lack thereof is when life ends.”

Julian lowered his head.

“You can conceive without God,” said Devi, “you can give birth, marry, live every Sunday, every Good Friday, every day without God, but it’s difficult to confront death without God—especially for the living. We don’t know what the dead do when the door closes, and darkness or light swallows them. But we know what we the living do when tasked with the burden of their burial, ritual, funeral, memorial. We have a hard time with it. A man dies quietly in the hospital. Sometimes his family is present, sometimes not. A priest is often absent, for the man has no priest and has never been to church, at least not willingly. After some medical to and fro, the body gets taken away. The funeral director brings it to a place most people rarely enter. There it lies for a few hours or days or weeks until the family decides whether to bury or cremate. Cremation is now the most popular option, for it allows the body to return to dust without any theological fanfare. I once knew a man who had made his own funeral arrangements, planned for his own disposal. He died alone in Dover, and by the time his sons arrived, a few days later, his body had already been cremated.”

“How do you know?”

“I went to Dover and sat with him before he died,” Devi said. “His sons didn’t know me at all. They were presented with a cardboard box filled with their father’s ashes and another cardboard box that held the last of his earthly belongings. His drugstore-bought reading glasses. His disposable cell phone. The Timex watch he had since the ’70s. His thirty-year-old wallet, in which there was a ten-pound note, a National Health card, a credit card, one nearly expired license, and an old magazine about eagles. That was all. The sons kept the ashes and threw the other box into the trash on their way out. There was no funeral, no memorial, no wake, no dinner. Perhaps they went to the pub for a drink, I don’t know. There weren’t even any secular words to remind anyone of the man’s life, why he lived, what he meant, who loved him. There was nothing.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Julian said.

“That’s how you die without God,” Devi said. “Anonymously. But that is not how Ashton lived. And it’s not how he died.”

Julian wept.

2
It Didn’t Have To Be This Way

LITTLE BY LITTLE, THE APARTMENT STOPPED CONTAINING traces of the man who was gone. His clothes did not remain in the empty closets, the smell of his open cologne did not linger over his dresser, his toothbrush and razor did not lie in his unused bathroom, and the old expired coconut water, courtesy of the delicate and tormented Riley, was no longer in the fridge.

The things Ashton left behind:

His accounts and insurance policies, all to Julian.

His poster of Bob Marley, which Julian tried to give to Zakiyyah, but she refused to take it.

A photo of him and Julian high in the Sierra Madres, nineteen years old, backpacks on, baseball caps on, arms around each other, beaming for the camera.

A scribbled saying on the side of the fridge. If it hadn’t been in Ashton’s large bold hand, Julian might’ve forgotten who’d written it. It was from Don Marquis and it said, “My heart has followed all my days something I cannot name.”

Julian still walked through London looking for the Café with the Golden Awning.

When he grew tired, he would find a bench, and sometimes that spot would be by the church at Cripplegate. Unmoving he sat, looking across the canal at the preserved crumbling stretch of the London Wall. He hoped that through lack of motion, he would eventually regain his strength. It hadn’t happened yet. He wasn’t growing handsome. He was getting older, grayer, thinner, flailing his helpless arms, clenching and unclenching his mutilated hand, shuffling his feet, all splintering aching bones. The Q’an Doh Cave, once a place of hope and salvation, had become nothing but a stalagpipe organ without a church, playing out the last of its quiet dirge, not in absolution but oblivion.

Julian didn’t hear from Riley.

A few times he tried to get in touch with her but remained blocked on her phone. Indirectly—through her parents or Gwen—the path to her also remained closed, and Riley remained purposefully and utterly unreachable, in the level desert sands of Snowflake, Arizona, working on herself or hiding, which amounted to the same thing.

How is she, he would ask her parents.

Not good, they would say. How do you think she is?

No one asked how he was, not even Gwen.

And it was just as well.

Julian didn’t hear from Riley, but oh did he hear from Zakiyyah.

During some inopportune time during late London mornings she would call—when it was the dead of night in L.A. He knew it was her by the relentless mournful yawp of the neutral ring.

For hours he would sit at the island, elbows on the granite, eyes closed, phone pressed to his ear, and try not to hear the unendurable lament of a stricken woman—now married to someone else—the up and down modulation of outrage and anguish, punctuated every few minutes by a desperate, hoarse refrain. “It didn’t have to be this way.”

Zakiyyah didn’t require Julian to speak. She required of him nothing but the phone squeezed to his ear.

“It didn’t have to be this way!”

“It didn’t have to be this way …”

After weeks and months passed like this, she stopped calling.

Her silence deafening, Julian reached out to her himself.

The new husband answered her cell phone. “It’s not a good idea for you to talk to her anymore,” he said. “Especially in the middle of the night, when she should be sleeping, or doing other things. It’s just making her feel worse. We are trying to have a baby, and this is screwing up all our plans.”

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Julian said, feebly trying to argue, to persuade, to convince.

“Maybe,” the husband said as he hung up. “But that’s the way it is.”

Julian didn’t call her after that. His pose remained the same, even without the phone at his ear. Head bent. Eyes closed.

It didn’t have to be this way.

A line of love.

A line of hate.

It didn’t have to be this way.

A line of grief.

A line of rage.

It didn’t have to be this way.

Zakkiyah recalled the days.

The years.

The joy.

The fights.

The life.

It didn’t have to be this way.

She talked of L.A. with him by her side.

The bars, the hikes, the Space Mountain rides.

She talked of London, where she thought things were great.

But they weren’t, Z, Julian wanted to say. They weren’t. Things were already in a spiral, and I couldn’t see it, and you didn’t want to see it.

It didn’t have to be this way.

She sobbed for the future that was so close, yet never came.

Sometimes exclamation.

Sometimes a whisper.

Sometimes he could barely hear her.

It didn’t have to be this way.

Z … Z … please, you’re going to be okay.

But now that she stopped calling, he heard her nonstop, a raw siren wail in his head.

I will never love another man like I love him, never, she said.

He never heard from Zakiyyah again.

He never heard from Riley again.

It didn’t have to be this way.

Every morning when Julian woke up, he was cold. And when he looked outside, it was raining.

He never left the house without an umbrella.

On the weekends, if he ventured out at all, he wore his waterproof boots.

He pretended he went to work. He got up in the morning and put on his suit and walked to Notting Hill Gate station and rode the Circle Line all day. He’d change for another train somewhere, get off at a stop he’d never gotten off before, walk around, staring at the coffee shops, maybe have some lunch in a pub, read, and head home.

There was no way Julian could go back to Nextel with Nigel still there. It was impossible. Julian knew he could never face him, which was a blessing for Nigel, really. But in August Julian heard that Nigel died of acute alcohol poisoning. Julian wanted to thank someone but didn’t know who.

After Nigel’s death, he returned to work.

He stayed until October. He only stayed as long as he did because he liked the reactions of civilized people to his mysterious deformity.

“How did you say it happened?”

“I fought a Maori warrior to the death.”

And they would look benevolently at his slow-moving body and say, sure you did. But you won, right?

“Right. Otherwise I wouldn’t be standing here telling you about it.”

“Of course you wouldn’t. Malcolm, come here. Jules, tell Malcolm what you just told me.”

“I fought a Maori warrior to the death.”

“A Maori! Roger, come here, listen to this.”

Julian enjoyed being mocked. It reminded him of the old days. But soon even that got old.

After he took the payout and resigned, he spent the winter hanging around the boxing gym. Nobody mocked him there. You couldn’t shock those people with fucking anything.

“A Maori warrior? Bloody hell, that’s fantastic! Omar, come here, listen to this. Our Jules fought a Maori.”

“He did? Is that how you lost half your hand? Incredible. But he got it worse, right? Or you wouldn’t be standing here telling us about it. Dead men tell no stories. Rafa, come take a look at Julian’s hand, he fought a fucking Maori warrior.”

“No fuckin’ way!”

Julian had been going to Nextel in his leather dress shoes. They were soggy and misshapen because the puddles by the Underground, near Fitzroy House, never dried. It was like being in his water-logged fur boots on the Antarctic ice, sitting in the boat, drinking whisky with Edgar Evans, talking about igloos in barren lands. The shoes never dried in England, all sodden near Sainsbury’s where Julian still bought his milk, reflexively, despite knowing he would never drink it, because he didn’t eat cereal. Ashton had been the one who had cereal.

Ava, who had moved into Ashton’s room, made no comment about Julian’s dairy purchases. She just threw out the milk when the expiration day came.

Sometimes when the weather was not great in London and the wind howled, Julian would remember something he didn’t want to in the damp chill and double over. That described his life pretty well. Always trying to avoid remembering something he didn’t want to.

Once in Invercargill, where the wind also howled in freezing circles, Shae said why are you always like this and he said why are you always like this. They fought like they’d been together a long time, and weren’t on their best behavior anymore, smiling and making compliments, telling each other little jokes, asking cute questions. There was no flirting and no courting. There were no questions. Because they already knew everything there was to know, and it made them sick inside. She knew she was going to die, and he knew he was powerless to stop it.

Once, even longer ago, the blistering London wind broke his and Ashton’s umbrellas. Cracked them in half. He and Ashton had a good laugh about it. They reminisced about living in a place where it never rained, where, with a million others, they used to sit in traffic on the Freeway or the 405 and curse their life, thinking they had it so tough, the sun always shining, them having to drive everywhere to drink with friends, tell jokes to their girls, buy books at Book Soup.

And now Julian walked with his head down and no umbrella as he battled the rain, waiting fifteen minutes for the train, the Circle Line so slow. He had a different life now, a life in which every day by Notting Hill Gate, an eight-year-old girl offered to sell him a red rose and said, for your sweetheart, sir? To make her happy?

And every day Julian bought one.

His floor was strewn with three hundred dead roses.

Ava would wave him on. “Go,” she’d say. “Go out for a walk. Go look for your golden awning. I have much to do. I’m seeding a vegetable garden in the back so next summer you can have your own tomatoes.”

“Next summer?” They stared at each other, saying nothing. What was there to say? “I don’t like tomatoes.”

“Who asked you.”

In the evenings, she stayed up with him. Late at night, Julian would sometimes become talkative, tell Ava things she could bear to hear. Mostly he told her stories of mothers and daughters. He told her about Aurora and Lady Mary in Clerkenwell, about Agatha and Miri in the rookery, about Aubrey and Mirabelle in Kent. He didn’t tell her about Mallory in the brothel. The mother Anna was dead, the girl murdering men, burning in flames, blackening her soul. Nothing about that story could be told.

And he didn’t talk to her about Shae and Agnes because it wasn’t a story yet.

It wasn’t still life yet, like a bowl of fruit.

Ava wanted to know what each girl looked like, what she sounded like. She wanted to know if she danced, sang, if she told jokes. She asked Julian to reproduce her daughter’s best moments on the stage. She bought the plays and highlighted Mia’s spoken portions and asked Julian to recite them for her, but recite them standing up, just as her daughter would have.

Ava never asked about her death. “I don’t know how you can do it,” she whispered to him one night. “How you can do it over and over.”

“That’s not why I go,” Julian said. “I go to watch her live.”

He kept missing something, Ava said. That’s why he kept failing, he wasn’t seeing an important detail, wasn’t paying attention to some essential part of Mia’s existence.

“If only you could point me to what that might be,” Julian said.

“She was such a good girl,” Ava said. “She and her dad had the best time running our place on Coney Island, Sideshows by the Seashore. That child was a born carnival clown; she tap-danced, sang, did stand-up, a juggling act; she never left his side.” Ava smiled in remembrance. “She used to do this thing at the end of every show: after the curtain fell and she would thank people for coming, she’d fling out her arms, take the deepest bow, and say Make it real, make it last, make it beautiful.” Ava wiped her face. “We had the happiest life, the three of us,” she said. “Until Jack had a heart attack and died. But for twelve years before that, we were in paradise.”

Death did that, thought Julian. It ruined fucking everything.

Ava spent hours Skyping on the computer with her friends back in Brooklyn. It allowed her to be close to Julian if he needed something, yet still be plugged into her other life. Julian usually put on his headphones so he wouldn’t hear the details of her private conversations, but one afternoon when he didn’t, he heard something garbled in her speech that didn’t sound right. He put down his book and walked out into the hall. Disjointed words were spilling out of Ava’s mouth. The cadence was normal, but nothing in their content made sense. He heard someone’s voice crying, help her, help her! Ava, what’s wrong with you?

Julian ran inside the bedroom. Ava was sitting with her back to him, tilted to one side. She had stopped speaking almost completely except for one word she kept repeating over and over. “Once,” she kept saying. “Once once once once once once once.”

“Ava, what’s the matter?” Julian said, turning her chair to him and staring into her unfocused eyes. “What are you saying? Can you sit up? Just hold on to me, I’ll call the doctor.”

“Only once more,” she said, gripping his arm as she fell sideways. “Once.”

3
Once

AVA HAD A STROKE. SHE LOST HER MOBILITY, AND SHE LOST her speech. She was kept in the hospital until the doctors decided there was nothing more they could do for her. Either she was going to get better on her own, or she wasn’t. “She is close to eighty,” the on-call genius said.

So the fuck what, Julian wanted to say. He once knew a treasure hunter who scoured thousands of miles of London’s underground sewers looking for his vanished father, and he was eighty. He once knew a man who helmed a whaleship in the Antarctic ice storms, who flensed his own seals—among other things—and he was eighty.

Devi and Julian decided to move Ava to the Hampstead Heath convalescent home. It was familiar, clean, and the nurses were kind. “Plus it’s not far, and we can visit her,” Devi said.

Yes, said Julian, studying Devi. What did Ava mean by once? Was it the rantings of an unwell woman? Julian wouldn’t have given it any more thought, except it had been the only clear word out of her mouth after everything else got muddled.

“How am I going to make the trip two more times?” Julian said to Devi in a black cab, on the way home from Hampstead Heath. “I don’t mean in a whiny sense. I mean in an actual physical sense. All the bones in my body are unstable, like I’m about to fracture.”

“Why are you still boxing nonstop if you are such a fragile creature?”

Julian shrugged. “Plus I’m handicapped now.” He raised his right hand, as if Devi was confused by what Julian meant. “No matter what I want, I don’t know if my body can survive two more trips.”

“That’s good,” Devi said. “Because you can only go back once.”

Julian stopped feeling sorry for himself. “Twice, you mean.”

“Once.”

“You don’t think I can count to seven?”

“I don’t think you can, no.”

Julian stared at the back of the driver’s head, wondering if he should close the little window between them before he continued. He decided to plow on. “You said seven times. I didn’t imagine it.” Julian was almost sure the dry-witted Devi was messing with him. “I’ve gone five. 1603, 1666, 1775, 1854, 1911. That’s five. Next is six. I suppose if I fail again, then will come seven. That’s twice more. One of us can’t count.”

“That would be you.”

“What are you talking about?”

Devi signaled to the driver to stop by Marble Arch. They paid and got out, and when they had walked a little way down Bayswater Road, the cook spoke. “Her seventh and last incarnation is as Ava’s daughter, Mia. In L.A. With you.”

Julian waited for more.

“With you, Julian.”

“I don’t understand.”

“But who are you that is hobbling next to me? Aren’t you Julian?”

“So?”

“Where are you going to go?”

“You mean it won’t come again?”

“That’s not what I mean. It might come again. What I’m saying is, you can’t be there when it does.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re already there.”

Julian stopped walking.

“Come with me,” a sighing Devi said, pulling on Julian’s arm. “Let’s go inside the park, walk through the fountains in the Italian Gardens. It’s a nice day. For the first time in weeks, it’s not raining.”

The diminutive Asian man held on to Julian as they ambled in the blinding late February sunshine, both shielding their eyes from the blinding waters of the Serpentine. Or was it Julian who was holding on to Devi? Where did he go wrong, where did he go so far off the path? They didn’t speak until they found a secluded bench under a barely budding tree near the ducks on the Long Water.

Kneading the beads in his hands, the Hmong shaman stared at the people ambling by, at the ducklings swimming after their mothers.

“There’s a fallacy in your approach to this,” Devi said. “I can see you’re shellshocked, but you don’t have to go back even once more. You’re still a relatively young man. You have a little money now. You could travel a bit. There are places other than London and Invercargill. You can run a boxing gym. I see the way the other guys listen to you, spar with you, even with your mangled claw. They like and respect you. You have a knack. You could use your skills to remake men who need your help into better fighters and every day be around what matters most to you. What a gift to yourself that would be—every day to be around what you love. You can do that here, or in L.A. Your mother, I’m sure, would prefer to have you back. You might meet someone. The long-suffering loner is a popular option with some women. So much is still possible for you, Julian. Going back is only one of your choices.”

Motionless, Julian sat.

“When you first met her,” Devi said, “you thought you had forever. And the first time you went back for her, you thought you had forever. The second time at the Silver Cross, you were afraid and didn’t know of what. The third time, you felt doom but didn’t know when. The fourth time with Mirabelle, you knew exactly when. And last time, for the first time, Shae herself knew what was coming. How did that work out? What’s next for you two, I do not know. What is left for you to show her and for her to show you? Perhaps how to live amid death, as we all must learn. But”—Devi folded his hands—“if you choose to go back, it will be for the last time.”

The ducks in the Long Water were flapping, splashing. Somewhere a baby cried. Two women walked by, wrapped around each other. A man and woman perched on a bench, licking around the same cone of ice cream.

“You said seven.”

“Did you listen to a word I said?” Devi exclaimed. “Why do you keep repeating things over and over? You had seven.”

“The first time doesn’t count.”

“Why not?”

“Because it was just my life. I lived it.”

“It may have been your life, but it was her last life. That counts, no?”

“No.” Julian’s legs felt numb, the nubs on his hand pulsing.

“All the other times you’ve crossed the meridian and gone back in time,” said Devi, “you entered her life, not yours.”

“So?”

“Julian, you can’t breach a life in which you yourself exist.”

“Why not?”

Devi tried to stay patient. “How can you be inside a time in which you already are?” He enunciated every word. “In that one unique, singular spacetime, she exists in your world. You do not exist in hers.”

“What’s the difference?”

Devi sighed. “What are you going to do with yourself when this old crippled body crawls out into Los Angeles and encounters the younger, spry, horny you chatting her up in Book Soup?”

“That’s the other guy’s problem.”

“Instantly it will become your problem. It can’t happen is what I’m saying. There can’t be two of you,” Devi said. “You get that part, don’t you? One body, one soul. Not two bodies, one soul. Not two souls, one body. Not two souls, two bodies. One body. One soul.”

Julian sat. “What do I do with the other me?”

“There is no other you!” Devi said. “There is only this you. Right here, where your soul is, on the bench by the Serpentine. Your soul cannot be divided. You are not—what’s the thing that’s all the rage these days—you’re not a Horcrux. You are not a clone, a body without a soul. You can’t compete with your material self in the material world, you can’t co-exist with yourself in Los Angeles. How can you be so hostile to the thing that’s obviously true? Only one of you can touch her.”

At last Julian understood.

He wasn’t prepared for it. It was like another thing had been severed.

In the middle of March, in the middle of the night, Julian banged on Quatrang’s door.

“This has to stop,” Devi said, half-asleep in a black silk robe, letting Julian push past him and inside. “I have a life. I have to function during the day. I’m not a nocturnal like you.”

“What do I do, Devi? I don’t know what to do. Help me.”

“Would you like me to give you something to help you sleep?”

“Are you saying you don’t know how to help me save her, how to help me change her fate?”

Devi spoke low. “Yes, that’s what I’m saying. I don’t know how to help you change her fate.”

“But seven is not enough!”

“Seven is not enough,” Devi repeated dully. “Look what you’re doing, you’re making me repeat things, infecting me with your disease. Once more is not enough for you. Six journeys through time is not enough for you. Seven weeks is not enough for you. And if you had seventy times seven, what would you say? Would that also not be enough? And if you had seventy thousand times seven?”

“It would also not be enough,” Julian whispered.

“Seven weeks to change your life and hers,” Devi said. “Seven days to make the world. Seven words on the Cross. Seven times to perfect your soul so when you finally meet God, you’re the best you can be. Don’t be selfish, Julian. Think of her. You’d rather her immortal soul spin and toil for eternity? Over and over, trying and failing?” Devi shook his head. “Now that sounds like nothing but suffering for the sake of nothing but suffering. Look at yourself—your bones are crumbling. You are turning to dust before my eyes. Your body can’t take even one more time. But long gone are the days when you swore to me you were never going back, and I pretended to believe you. You’ve really gone out of your way to answer a question I of all people didn’t need answered: how does a man live when he must live without the thing he can’t live without? Poorly, that’s how. So go—for the last time go—and do what you can.”

“Like what?”

“To have something you’ve never had,” Devi said, “you must do something you’ve never done.”

This is it, ladies and gents!

Make it real.

Make it last.

Make it beautiful.

4
The Importance of Being Julian

THE RIVER ENDS. HIS MAKESHIFT DINGHY GRINDS AGAINST A muddy decaying bed. Julian turns off the headlamp to find the light, but there is nothing to see and nowhere to climb. Dusting himself off, he turns his headlamp back on and proceeds down the dried-out riverbed. It’s better than walking on ice, that’s for sure.

After a long time, the tubular walls of the cave get smoother, grayer, and the rocks under his feet disappear. He bumps his ankle against something that feels like iron. He leans down. It is iron. It’s a single rail. If it was a live rail, he’d be in real trouble. He wonders why it isn’t live. He walks and walks and walks. To look for the light, he once again switches off the headlamp. Finally, in the dark tunnel ahead of him he sees a faint yellow glimmer and hears some distant noise.

The tunnel empties into a train station. He pulls himself up onto a platform in a cavernous space, all of it in near total darkness except toward the opposite end around a blind curve. Julian recognizes the station. He’s been here many times, a thousand times. In case there’s any doubt, on the wall, a red circle with a blue line through it tells him what it is.

It’s Bank.

It’s the Bank tube station in the City of London. He is on the Central Line platform, with its unmistakable sharp bend (the station was built around the vaults of the Bank of England). Julian can almost hear the shriek of the screeching wheels as the train turns the corner. Another day, that is, not today, because today there are no trains because the rail is cut.

Just past the curve, he sees a cluster of ragamuffin people spread out on the platform near the exit to the lobby that leads to the escalators that lead to the street. They’re jammed together and sunk to the ground amid a few lit lamps. From the lobby, he can hear a single voice talking, modulating up and down the octaves, as if giving a soliloquy. Intermittently, the voices on the ground laugh.

It looks as if the crowd might be using the Underground as a bomb shelter. Which would explain why there is no live rail. The rail is cut at night, because people sleep in the Underground.

Julian pats himself on his proverbial back. Finally, he has guessed his destination correctly.

It’s London, during the Second World War.

To fit in with the times, Julian bought a three-piece Armani suit, two sizes too big. No one wears fitted suits in the 1940s. On his feet are waterproof combat boots. On his head is a newsboy cap, the kind even King George liked to wear. Julian kept his hair curly and longish, slicked back, away from his forehead, and he shaved, though after time in the cave, his stubble feels an inch thick as he runs his hand over his face.

He steps into the lobby between the platforms and languishes at the rear of the crowd, trying to catch the voice echoing off the tiled tubular walls.

On the platform, some are already lying down, covered by blankets as if this is where they will sleep, but in the poorly lit lobby, people are sitting cross-legged on the floor next to their bags and sacks and coats and pillows. They’re listening to the voice in front of them. Lit by a kerosene lamp, near the stopped escalator, a singular girl stands on a makeshift stage—a wide door ripped off its hinges and laid flat over some two-by-fours. She stands on top of the door, her long strands of dark hair spilling out of a blue headscarf. She looks tall, larger than life, because she’s up on a stage. She wears rags like the rest, a skirt with a frayed hem, a falling apart sweater, and torn boots. But the beige wool fits snugly over her breasts, her neck is white, her skin translucent, and her huge eyes blaze as she gestures with her hands to amplify her words. There’s a diamond smile on her face.

Already Julian is warmer. Shae never smiled. Not in the beginning, and certainly not at the end.

The young woman is reciting a humorous ditty about romantic love. It takes Julian a few moments to recognize it as a pretty solid paraphrase of Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance. Her captive audience is moderately amused.

“Oh, the Ideal Man!” the woman yells cheerfully. “Let me tell you about him! The Ideal Man should talk to us as if we were goddesses. He should refuse all our serious requests and gratify every one of our whims. He should encourage us to have caprices, yet discourage us to have goals. He should always say much more than he means and always mean much more than he says. He should never run down other pretty women. That would show he has no taste. If we ask him a question about anything, he should give us an answer only about ourselves. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the Ideal Man!”

From behind the crowd collected at the girl’s feet, Julian raises his voice, steps forward, and speaks.

“Cecily?” he calls to her, switching to his own paraphrase of The Importance of Being Earnest. “Is that you? The dog cart has been waiting, my dear. Are you ready to leave with me at last?”

With barely a pause the girl squints into the darkness, her hand at her forehead like a visor. “Algernon, is that you? Finally, you’re here. Come quick! Are you planning to stay until next week? I hope so, though my mother will be very cross to discover this is so. She doesn’t like the way you abruptly left me not long ago.”

Julian takes a few steps through the curious crowd. “I left you? You mean, you left me. And I don’t care about your mother, Cecily. I don’t care about anybody in the whole world but you. I love you. You will marry me as you promised, won’t you?”

The girl laughs like a church bell. “Algernon, you silly sausage. Now you want to marry me? Don’t you remember we were already engaged to be married, and then I broke it off with you?”

Two more strides forward. “But why would you do a thing like that, Cecily?”

“Well, it can hardly be called a serious engagement if it’s not broken off at least once. But I forgive you, Algernon.”

He crosses the concrete floor on which people sit and laugh and clap and jumps up onto the wobbling makeshift stage.

For a moment he stands, and she stands, in silence. For a moment it seems as if they both have forgotten their lines. Pulling off his cap, Julian presses it to his chest.

We, the drowned, are rising up for air.

He falls to his knees in front of her, to hide his exhaustion, to show her other things. “What a perfect thing you are, Cecily,” he says, staring up into her baffled face.

The girl looks him over, his suit, his decidedly out-of-time hair, the newsboy at his breast, the dark beard flecked with gray. “Oh, my, Algernon, I see you’ve neglected to shave.”

“Who can shave at a time like this?” Julian says, and the crowd murmurs, hear, hear. “No one is shaving. That’s how you know how shaken the men of London really are.”

Hear, hear, the crowd responds emotionally.

The young woman stares into his bottomless haunted eyes. A breath of animation passes across her face. Coyly she smiles. “You may be unshaven, but aren’t you a little overdressed for the occasion?”

“Why, yes, you’re right, I am a little overdressed,” Julian says. “But I make up for it by being immensely undereducated.”

The people laugh. Julian continues. “Josephine, do you know that this is the last time we will see each other? After this, I must leave you. I will not be staying for the rest of your performance. The dog cart is waiting, my dear. It is so painful parting.”

Confused, the girl mouths Josephine? “I agree, Algernon,” she says. “It is painful to part from people one has known for only a short while. The absence of old friends one can almost tolerate. But even a momentary separation from someone whom one has just met is unendurable.”

He is still on his knees, gazing up at her. She flushes, blushes. He doesn’t. He barely even moves. His eyes roam her face, her body. She is fair of skin and dark of hair. She is doe-eyed, pale-pink-lipped, long-necked, bosomy, beautiful. She is like she always is. Grimy in the Blitz, living underground, washed out in drab dress, her inner self is still a shining city on a hill.

Julian wanted a fairytale ending. Instead he is down on his knees. He stares at her open and unashamed as if he already knows her. He stares at her with eyes that have seen her. “Before I go, dear Cecily,” Julian says, his voice cracking, his gray eyes full, “I hope I don’t offend you when I state openly in front of all these good people that to me in every way you seem to be absolute perfection.”

The audience cheers.

She swallows, stammers. “I think, uh, your frankness does you credit, Algernon.”

“Ever since I first laid my eyes upon your wonderful, incomparable face,” Julian says, “all those years ago, Cecily, in another life, I have dared to love you—wildly, passionately, devotedly, hopelessly.”

The people on the platform are raucous with delight. He can barely be heard above their whistling and applause. His Cecily is frozen.

“Uh—I don’t think you should tell me you love me hopelessly, Algernon.” Her voice is croaky. “Hopelessly doesn’t make much sense, does it?”

“It’s the ideal word.” Dropping his cap to the ground, he rises to his feet.

“My dear romantic boy—”

Julian steps forward. Before she can finish, he takes her into his arms and kisses her, in a prolonged open kiss. He kisses with lips that have kissed her. There is nothing tentative about their embrace.

The crowd goes wild. Her arms rise astonished to his elbows. Her soft warm lips kiss him back.

“Oh my,” she says.

Louder! Louder! the crowd cries.

“There is no other girl for me,” Julian says. “There never was.”

And in reply she says, “Ernest, my love, I know.”

Louder! demands the crowd.

“My dear,” she says, breathless but louder, “please tell me your name is Ernest. It’s always been my dream to marry someone named Ernest. There’s something in that name that inspires absolute confidence.”

“Cecily, are you saying you could not love me if I had some other name?” Tenderly he holds her wrapped head, touching the strands of her hair, pressing her body to him.

“What—what other name?”

“Julian,” he replies.

“You mean Algernon?”

“Do you mean you couldn’t love me if my name was Julian?”

She is still in his arms, but weak in the legs. Her lips are parted. Her breath is shallow.

“I might respect you,” she says, “I might admire you, but I’m afraid that yes, I could not give you my undivided attention …”

“We’ll just see about that, won’t we?” Cupping her face, he tilts his head to her. They kiss again. They kiss full on, and they don’t stop.

Tottering, she finally finds the strength to push him away. It’s impossible to talk above the roar of the crowd. Julian and the girl have given the embattled citizens something better than a play, something better than comedy. They have given them life masquerading as art, life real and poignant, an eerie revelry blooming in the dungeons below the blacked-out city.

“Hey, you, why don’t you get off there,” a tall, unhappy-looking guy calls out, elbowing his way forward. “I mean—get off that door. Two people are not supposed to be on it. It’s not safe. Are you all right, my dove?”

Julian’s arm is still around the dove’s waist. Dove pulls away, brushes Julian off her sweater.

“I’m fine, Finch,” she says. “Finch, this is …”

Julian stands. She knows his name. He’s not going to help her with it.

“Julian?” she says uncertainly.

“Yes. Julian.”

Julian and Finch do not shake hands. Julian brings his right hand behind his back to hide his missing fingers. Before he can ask dove what her actual name is, or what her connection is to the gangly humorless fellow, Finch asks where Julian has come from. He simply might mean tonight, but Julian replies with “Wales!” as confidently as he would say Simi Valley.

“Oh, my goodness,” the girl exclaims. “Finch, another Welshman! I’m gobsmacked. Finch is from a small city called Bangor. Where are you from, Julian?”

But of course Finch would be from damned Bangor. The only place Julian knows besides Bangor and Cardiff, which is too big and easily disproven, is Rhossili, where Edgar Evans hailed from. So that’s what he tells them. Rhossili.

Wouldn’t you know it, Finch’s entire family hailed from Rhossili! For some reason this pleases the girl tremendously, though it doesn’t please either Finch or Julian remotely.

“I haven’t been back for years,” Julian says.

“I should think not,” Finch says, “because you don’t sound at all like a Welshman.” Though Finch is probably thirty, he looks as if he shaves sporadically at best. His short hair is carefully parted to the side, and his triangular brown eyes are intense and hostile.

“Yes, lost my accent—”

“You sound almost American, frankly.”

“Don’t know what that’s about. Have the Americans come to London …?”

“Maria and I are getting married,” Finch blurts, “at Christmas.”

Look how much information Julian has gathered from just one short sentence. All sentences should be so brief and informative. Her name is Maria. She is getting married. To the annoyed string bean named Finch. At Christmas.

“Well, Finch,” Maria says, “let’s not count our chickens just yet. It’s almost two months away. There’s a war to get through between now and then. Plus, I’m still waiting for that ring you promised.”

“I told you I’ll get it, dove. Now come,” Finch says, extending his hand. “Don’t stand on that thing with him. Look, it’s teetering. You will fall. Remember last week? You almost fell.”

She takes his hand and jumps down, turning back to Julian. “Do you want to come meet our friends?”

“Would love to.”

Finch yanks her hand with irritation.

“What, Finch?” she says. “We can’t be impolite.”

“Why not? We don’t know him!”

An older woman stops Julian, grabbing him by the elbows. “Young man, you were terrific,” she says, squeezing him approvingly. “You gave us all quite a stir—why, me and my friends was saying we haven’t felt so aquiver since the Great War when we was young women ourselves. Where did you learn to act like that?”

“Who says I was acting?” Julian says. Both Finch and Maria spin around to stare at him in the tunneled darkness.

“I don’t like that man,” Julian hears Finch say to her as they walk down the platform. “I don’t like him at all. I have a good mind to deck him.”

“Finch, calm down. It’s in good fun. He’s just playing with you. Do you want him to continue trying to get under your skin? Keep this up.”

“Kissing you like that was playing with me? Who does he think he is?”

“That was acting, Finch.”

“You heard him, he said it wasn’t. And I didn’t know that Oscar Wilde called for that sort of passionate … acting.”

“What you don’t know is a lot, Finch.”

“I have a good mind to deck him. Why are you laughing, dove?”

“I wasn’t laughing. I was nodding.”

“I could do it. You don’t think I could do it? I could. I played a fighter in Jack Dempsey’s Life last year, remember? I know the moves. And what’s he going to do? He’s crippled like Wild.”

“Yes, Wild will love him.”

5
Wild

ADJACENT TO THE MAIN PASSAGEWAY BETWEEN TWO SUBWAY platforms is a small secondary walkway, rarely used. There, Julian comes face to face with a group of vagabonds who have made themselves an abode in the Underground. A dozen people, women and men, young and old, in suits and dregs, sit on stools and benches or lie across the half dozen bunks that line the walls. A bony twentysomething woman sits in an armchair at a wooden table, doing a jigsaw puzzle. Four or five kerosene lamps hang off the bunks; there’s a bookshelf, a clothes line, a coat stand; boots on the floor, purses and bags; a large oval mirror propped up against a wall; scarves and hats draping the posts of the beds; and weary faces staring curiously at Julian.

“Who the bloody hell are you, mate?” says a grinning blond man, stepping up to Julian. “You nearly gave our Finch a heart attack with your kissing. Well done!” The man is in his early thirties, floppy haired, good looking, but missing most of his right arm. The sweater hangs loose above his elbow. He gives Julian his left hand to shake. Gratefully Julian stretches out his own left hand.

“I’m Wild,” the smiling man says. Julian is not sure if he is hearing a name or an adjective. The man doesn’t elaborate. He is fit and strong, able-bodied in every way except for the missing arm. “How do you know Folgate?”

“Is that her last name?”

“Wild, leave him alone,” Maria says. “Stop interrogating him. Let him meet the rest of the gang before the siren goes.”

“Is the siren going?” Julian asks. He wishes for no sirens. He wishes for it to be 1942 or 1943, after the terrible beginning and before the terrible end, somewhere in the drudging middle. Please, no sirens.

“Fine, Folgate,” Wild says, “but I’m going to introduce him, not you. You are atrociously long-winded, as if there isn’t a war on. Listen up, everybody!” he yells. “We have a new member …”

Finch protests. “No, we don’t!”

“Julian, gang. Gang, Julian.” Self-satisfied, Wild turns to Maria. “That’s how it’s done.”

Rolling her eyes, she pushes him in the chest. “Go away,” she says. She is familiar with him, unafraid of him, and not in love with him despite his brazen good looks. “Julian, come here and meet Duncan.” Duncan is a big guy, at least 6′5″, with a gruff voice and a lamb-like demeanor. He’s deaf in one ear and can’t serve, Maria says, but like many of their friends, he’s a volunteer in the Home Guard, the London Defence League charged with doing whatever is required to help the city get through the nighttime attacks. During the day, Duncan works the docks at Wapping.

“London Defence League?” Julian asks Maria. “You’re not part of that, too, are you?” He thought only men could join the LDL. Before she can reply, Duncan and Wild pull him away.

“Folgate, the war will be over before you’re done introducing this man. Stop being in love with the sound of your own voice.”

“Leave him alone, Wild,” Maria says. “Let me—”

“This isn’t the stage,” Wild continues. “Julian doesn’t give a toss about Duncan’s deaf ear. I just showed you how to do it. Again, watch and learn. Julian—Nick Moore. Nick—Julian. Nick, say something.”

“Fuck off,” says Nick, a spindly albino chap, spread out on a lower bunk, smoking and not getting up.

“That’s all you need to know about Nick,” Wild says. “He knows only two words. Right, Nick?”

“Fuck off.”

Nick works at the Ford truck and munitions factory in Dagenham, Maria tells Julian, which at the moment is closed on account of being nearly burned to the ground. So at present Nick is working the Wapping docks with Duncan.

“Julian, do you want to come with us when we go out?” Wild asks.

“Absolutely not!” says Finch, idling close by.

“Sure,” Julian says. “Where are you going?”

“Finch, after losing Lester, you well know we could use an extra pair of hands.” Wild waves his stump around. “We’re a Rescue Squad, Julian. We call ourselves the Ten Bells Watch. Ever hear of the Ten Bells?”

“The pub over in Bethnal Green?” Julian knows that pub. It’s not too far from Devi.

“Yes! Good man. When the umpteenth bomb fell into the transept of St. Paul’s, and all the stained glass was blasted out, the church got itself a group of volunteers called the St. Paul’s Watch whose only job was to douse incendiaries. Well, we’re a group of volunteers who douse the incendiaries that fall near Ten Bells.”

Julian laughs. “Pub saving is so often overlooked during war.”

“My sentiments exactly!” Wild studies Julian with an approving grin.

“Is that where you’re all from, Bethnal Green?” Julian doesn’t want them to be from there. Bethnal Green gets incinerated during the Blitz. “Does anyone have a newspaper?” What year is it? What month is it?

Reaching into one of the bunks, Wild pulls out the Evening Standard and tosses it to Julian, saying to Maria—

But Julian has stopped listening. The paper hangs from his hands.

It’s November 8, 1940.

His shoulders turn inward. He couldn’t have come at a worse time, a worse month, a worse year. He can’t even look up. The math in his head is brutal. He almost wishes he were back in Invercargill where he did no math at all.

“Are you okay, Julian?” Maria says solicitously.

The 49th day is Boxing Day, the day after Christmas.

She peers into his face.

This can’t be the way it ends. It just can’t be.

Getting himself together, he takes a deep breath, lifts his head, and smiles.

“I’m fine,” he says.

“You want to meet some more people?”

“Sure.”

There are a surprising number of men in their motley crew considering all men under 42 must be conscripted. Uh-oh, a wilted Julian thinks, he’s only 39, could he, too, be conscripted, before he remembers his missing fingers, his wonky eye, oh and that he has no ID and is not a British citizen. Never mind. Anxiety and logic make strange bedfellows.

With vigor, Duncan takes over hosting duties. He wants to be the one to introduce Julian to the girls, he says. “You got yourself well acquainted with Maria—as we can all attest—but we have other beauties with us, too, who unlike her are currently available. Here are the lovely Sheila and Kate. They’re sisters and nurses. They’re like sisters of mercy,” Duncan adds with a mischievous grin, “and I’ve been asking them for months to show me some mercy.” A bald thin smiling man in his sixties jumps out from a lower bunk and cries, “Duncan!” to which Duncan rolls his eyes and sheepishly says, “Sorry, Phil.” And quieter to Julian: “That’s Dr. Phil Cozens. He’s their dad, unfortunately.” He sighs. “Over by his side is their mum, Lucinda. When you talk to her, don’t mention the war.”

Julian smirks. Isn’t that line right out of Fawlty Towers? But Duncan is not joking. Lucinda, a stout, gray-haired woman, sits on a low bench, knitting to keep her hands busy and chatting to Phil about a trip to the country in the spring. If they book their travel now, she says, they can get a hefty discount.

Julian has no time to shake his head at the idea of planning a holiday for the coming spring while sleeping underground in the middle of 1940 London before he’s shoved in front of “sexy Shona,” the driver of the medical services truck, and Liz Hope, “who is a virgin,” Duncan whispers, dragging Julian away—past the mute woman working diligently on the jigsaw puzzle.

“Who’s that?”

“Frankie, the bone counter. Never mind her. She doesn’t like living human beings.”

“The bone counter?”

“I said never mind her!”

Peter Roberts, or “Robbie,” has his nose buried in a Learn French in Two Months book. He is a 60-year-old journalist on Fleet Street. Formal and stiff, he stands up to shake Julian’s hand. He is clean shaven and sharply dressed in a suit and bowtie, which he carefully adjusts as he gets up, even though it’s perfectly straight. After he shakes Julian’s hand, he sits back down and reopens the French reader. His posture is impeccable.

“Here, Robbie, let me fix that for you, it got crooked again,” says Wild, flicking up one end of the bowtie.

“When are you going to stop playing your games, Wild,” Robbie says, calmly rearranging his neckwear.

Robbie’s family is in Sussex, Duncan tells Julian, which is unlucky because recently south England has become “bomb alley.”

“Where is safe?” Julian says to no one in particular, glancing behind him for a glimpse of Maria’s amiable face.

“Here, mate,” Wild says. “Home, sweet home.”

Julian acknowledges the lived-in, semi-permanent appearance of their quarters, the books, the coats, the lamps. It’s like a college dorm. “You live here?”

“Nice, right?” Flanking Julian, Wild grins. “We’re by the emergency stairs, so we have our own private entrance. We have Phil on call, several nurses, who also happen to be his daughters, a chemical toilet at the end of the platform, and even our own warden. True, he’s not especially friendly, but if we throw him five bob, he watches our stuff when we’re gone.”

Julian clears his throat.

“No, no, whatever you do, don’t cough,” Maria says, flanking him on the other side, pointing at Phil Cozens. “Even if you’re choking. Even if you’re sick. Especially if you’re sick. Phil assumes it’s TB and good old Javert throws you out.”

“Maybe it is TB,” Finch says, hovering over Maria. “Also, he doesn’t like to be called Javert, dove.”

“She calls them like she sees them,” Peter Roberts pipes in, his nose in his French lesson.

“Hear, hear, Robbie!” says Wild—and the air raid siren goes off.

Julian’s heart drops. Except for the knitting Lucinda, everyone else stops talking and moving and listens alertly, though no one looks crushed like Julian. “Maybe it’s just a warning?” he asks.

“It’s always the real thing,” Wild replies. “Once or twice a day for some minor shit, and twice a night for the really terrible shit. For the stray bombs, they don’t even bother alerting us anymore. Last week, we had our first all clear day since September. The Krauts couldn’t fly. We were never more grateful for crap British weather than we were that day, weren’t we, Folgate?”

The squad revs into action. Even Frankie leaves her puzzle, gets her coat and goes to stand by Phil’s side. The bone counter goes with the doctor? She has the stony demeanor of a mortician. Duncan grabs the sticks and cricket bats piled in the corner next to the umbrellas. In less than two minutes, eight of them are ready to head out. Peter Roberts, Lucinda, and Liz remain behind. So do Nick and Kate. “I’m working a double tomorrow at the docks,” says Nick.

“I’m working a double tomorrow at Royal London,” says Kate.

Liz says nothing.

“Julian, are you coming?” asks Maria.

“Of course.” Why couldn’t she be one of the ones who stays behind? Why couldn’t she be Liz.

A peevish Finch addresses Julian. “Do you have ID? You can’t go outside without it.”

“I lost my ID.”

“Then you can’t go.”

“Who’s gonna check it, Finch, you?” Wild says, pushing Julian past Finch and toward the stairs. Finch runs around to get in front of them.

“What about your ration card, got that?”

“Lost that, too,” Julian replies calmly, despite the fact that Finch is crowding him in the narrow stairwell. “Do I need my ration card? Are we going out to eat?”

“He’s got you there, Finch,” Wild says.

“He won’t fit in the jeep,” Finch says.

“He will,” Wild says. “We’ll tie Dunk to the roof.”

“Try it,” Duncan says, his huge frame towering over Wild.

“Where’s your gas mask?” Finch demands. He’s being petty and rude and doesn’t care. “Because you can’t be outside if you don’t have one. It’s the law.”

“Pipe down, archbishop!” Wild says to Finch. “Jules gave his to a dying child. That’s why he doesn’t have it. Right, Jules?” Smiling, he adds, “You don’t mind if I call you Jules, do you?”

“I don’t mind,” Julian says, scanning Wild’s open face.

From his trench coat, Wild produces a gas mask. “Here, take mine. We’ll get you another one. Just go to the council tomorrow, say you lost yours.”

“Council won’t give it to him without ID,” Finch says. “You can’t go without yours either, Wild. It’s the law.”

“Blimey, shut up, Finch!” Wild yells. “Folgate, of all the guys out there, why him? You’d be better off with Nick. The man never says a word.”

“Fuck off!” says Nick.

“Or old Robbie.”

“I’m married, thank you,” Peter Roberts says, glancing up from his French book. “Married thirty-five years.”

“Us, too,” Lucinda says, glancing up from her knitting. “Married thirty-five years. But my Phil is clearly intent on making me a widow, the way he keeps going out there in the mobile units, risking not just his life, but our daughters’ lives as well. Why are you going again, Phil? You just went yesterday. You, too, Sheila.”

“I’m a doctor, Luce.”

“I’m a nurse, Mum.”

“They have plenty of other doctors, other nurses.”

“No, they don’t.”

“I told my kids—peace, war, no matter what, we’re staying together,” Lucinda tells Julian. “No one is getting evacuated.”

“And here we all are, Mum,” Sheila says. “Staying together. Going out together on the Mobile Unit. Mum, Kate, want to come? So we can all stay together?”

“Don’t be cheeky,” Lucinda says. “Someone has to stay with your sister.”

The siren continues to wail.

“Mia,” Julian calls out, “you don’t happen to have an extra coat for me, do you?” Why is he always grubbing for a cloak?

The passageway quietens down. The pitched warble above is the only sound.

“Why did you call me that?” she says. “No one calls me Mia but my mum.”

“Yeah,” Finch says. “Her name is Ma-ri-a.”

“You can pronounce your own girlfriend’s name?” Wild says. “Well done!” He throws Julian one of his coats. “Here, take mine. Let’s go.”

“I don’t mind you calling me that, by the way,” Mia says quietly to Julian in the stairwell. “I just wanted to know why you did, that’s all.”

“I knew someone like you once,” Julian says. “Her name was Mia.”

Mia smiles. “Yeah, but did she look like me?”

“She looked just like you.”

He doesn’t meet her questioning eye as they climb the stairs.

6
Musketeers

THE STREET IS COLD AND DARK. JULIAN BUTTONS HIS COAT. They feel their way down Princes Street, down the block-long granite sidewall of the Bank of England. The Rescue Squad jeep and the Heavy Mobile Unit medical truck are parked behind the bank on Lothbury. Julian doesn’t know how anyone can find Lothbury. He cannot see his hand before his face. In the blacked-out city, the streetlights are off, and the windows are covered with curtains. The night sky is under cloud. Finch gets behind the wheel of the jeep, Duncan rides shotgun, Julian, Mia, and Wild pile in the back. Phil, Sheila, Shona, and Frankie ride separately in the HMU van.

Julian had gambled on where he might end up and has read a bit about the Battle of Britain, about the bombs and the ruins. Here’s what he didn’t read about: under the night sky, the relentless air raid alarm is an insanity maker. It’s an echoey, up and down howling of a million wolves. Julian doesn’t know how everyone doesn’t plug up their ears and scream. His compatriots seem a lot calmer than he is, even the girl.

Especially the girl.

“Where are we headed to tonight, dove?” Finch says to her.

Leaning over Julian’s lap, Mia sticks her head out the window and listens to the drone of the enemy plane engines. Julian sucks in his breath and closes his eyes. Do any of us really know where we’re going, C.J.?

“Let’s drive to Stepney,” she says, settling back between Julian and Wild. “Something always falls near the docks.” She glances at Julian. He attempts to affect a neutral face. “Stepney, Wapping, Bethnal Green, Shadwell. All of East End is in pretty bad shape. Where are you from, Julian?”

“The East End,” Julian replies. “The East End originally,” he amends, knowing he won’t be able to fake a “been there, seen that” indifference to the coming destruction. “I’ve been away. Is Finch going to turn the lights on?” Finch is driving without them.

Mia shakes her head. “Can’t. Not allowed.”

“He plans to drive all the way to Stepney in the dark?”

“That’s one of Finch’s many gifts,” Mia says.

“You mean his only gift,” says Wild.

“Shut up, Wild.”

“Finch knows the city like a blind man,” Mia says.

“And drives like one,” says Wild as the jeep rattles over a pothole.

“You’re not in the Rescue Squad, are you?” Julian asks Mia. Women aren’t allowed to join the Home Guard, he refrains from adding. It’s for their own safety.

“I am,” she replies. “From the side. I’m with the Women’s Voluntary Services.”

“So what do you do?” Stay in the truck? Keep it running?

“Anything. Everything. Depending on what needs doing. Tonight, for example, you can help by being security with Dunk and Wild until the police come.”

Finch scoffs. “What’s he going to be able to do? You might want to put a glove on that hand of yours, mate. Might appear more menacing.”

“He’ll act menacing,” Mia says. “You’re a pretty good actor, right?” Lightly she nudges Julian. “They liked you tonight. They’ve been getting quite bored with me. Maybe we can put on something else for them if we make it out alive.”

If we make it out alive? She says it so carelessly. It’s a good thing it’s dark, and she can’t see the expression on his face.

With the streets empty of vehicles and people, it takes Finch less than seven minutes to get from the Bank of England to Commercial Street, where he pulls up to a curb and idles the engine. Even though it’s cold, everyone leaves their windows rolled down. The rumble of a hundred enemy planes is not distant enough.

It takes Julian a few moments to figure out that the squad is waiting to see where the bombs will drop. But what if the bombs fall on Commercial Street? he wants to ask. What if the bombs fall on the jeep where they sit and wait? The rising and falling of the piercing siren has not stopped. The sky flares up, followed by the sound of thunder. The night air is suddenly not as dark. In the brief bursts of light, he can see Mia’s calm, focused face.

Lightning.

Thunder.

Rise and fall of the wolf howl.

Like fireworks at a state fair, one two three, a dozen flares all at once, still at some distance downriver. The sound of long booms and sharp cracks gets nearer, grows louder. The bombs whistle and explode. It’s one of the most unnerving noises Julian has ever heard. He can’t help himself. Turning slightly, he leans against Mia. He wants to cover her with his body. Why would anyone be out in this awful ruckus? It’s like being out in a category 5 hurricane.

Lightning is followed by instant thunder over the buildings a few blocks away. Brick-busting explosions, plumes of flame, smoke.

There’s screaming.

“Now we go,” Mia says.

Finch shifts into drive and races the jeep around the corner, to one of the narrow residential side streets.

Between rows of terraced houses, two bombs have fallen in the street. Choking dusty wreckage rises in the air and small fires light up the cratered holes in the smashed-up homes, windows blown out, doors blown off. The street is littered with brick and wood and glass. There is some human exclamation, but not much on balance, not very much at all, considering. As they get out of the vehicle, Julian hears someone say, rather calmly, “Bloody hell.”

Three women covered in black ash stand crying. One of them holds a small child. Wild immediately goes to her and tells her to move away from the house. She refuses. There’s a fire in her kitchen, she says, and she just had the cabinets redone, “last spring!” The fire brigade is nowhere to be found. Julian feels that the woman’s renovated kitchen might not be the brigade’s priority. Four other houses on their street need dousing, and on the next street, the fire already rages. Julian can see it over the rooftops. Because of the fire, there is now light. Night is now day. It’s a perversion of what’s good in the world.

From the back of the jeep, Wild grabs one of the buckets filled with sand and runs into the woman’s house, through the gaping hole in the wall. He heads to the kitchen.

“What is he doing?” Julian asks Duncan, watching Wild fling sand on the woman’s cabinets. “By himself, with one arm? Why don’t you go help him?”

“You go help him,” Duncan rejoins. “Wild used to be a fireman. Who else is crazy enough to run inside a burning house? Don’t worry about him. He’s wearing a flameproof coat. He knows what he’s doing.”

The HMU with Shona at the wheel and Phil Cozens shotgun pulls up to Finch, patrolling the street to assess the damage. Finch gives Phil the all clear—meaning there are no injuries at the moment requiring the doctor’s immediate attention. This does not seem credible to Julian.

“Duncan, go!” Mia calls, gesturing down the street. Standing next to Julian, Duncan doesn’t move. “You’re needed there, not here,” she says, stepping over the bricks in the street to get closer to them. “Wild will be fine.” Julian resists the urge to give her his hand. “Julian, will you go with Duncan, please? The valuables in the bombed houses need to be protected from looters.” She must see Julian’s expression because she shrugs. “War brings out the worst in some people. Though not that many, fortunately. But if they do come, it’s immediately after the bombing. They hurry to get here before the police do.”

“The thieves like the jewelry,” Duncan says, “but prefer not to put themselves in any real danger.”

Mia nods. “Somehow they always manage to find the street with the least catastrophic damage.”

Julian glances up and down the block. “This is not catastrophic damage?”

Mia chuckles. “I thought you were from the East End? This is nothing. No real fire, no major casualties. Go, you two. Take the cricket bats.”

“Don’t need a cricket bat,” says Julian.

“I’ll take one,” Duncan says to Mia. “But I don’t need him. I’ll be fine. What’s he gonna do?”

“Wait, where are you going?” Julian catches Mia’s arm. “Don’t wander off,” he says, holding her. “It’s not safe.” The planes have droned off farther west. But the street is full of flying debris, of falling unstable beams. The air raid siren continues to howl.

“What do you think I do, sit in the car and knit like Lucinda?” Mia says. But she hasn’t disengaged from him.

“That sounds wise.”

“Wise but not helpful. Look at that poor woman.” Mia points down the block where a dusty disheveled older woman stands wailing. “I’m going to help her get her things out before the house falls on her head.”

“Oh, you shouldn’t do that,” Julian says earnestly.

Mia chuckles, as if he is being so funny! and rushes off. Julian fights off the urge to rush after her.

Duncan smirks with amusement.

“What?”

“Nothing. Stay put. Watch over Wild. He should be done soon.” Both men shake their heads as Wild swats one-armed at the remnants of the flame, using blankets and a piece of cardboard. “He’s bloody mental,” Duncan says with gruff affection. “As if the mother is going to be able to warm up the milk for her baby in that kitchen. What’s the difference if her house burns down now or is demolished in a week? There’s no repairing it. Kitchen cabinets! Mental, I tell you. Stay with him, okay?” He walks away.

“If you need help, holler,” Julian calls after Duncan, who turns, glances at Julian’s fingerless hand, and says yeah, I’ll be sure to do that.

A minute later, Wild comes to stand by Julian’s side, smelling of heat and smoke.

“How did you do?”

“Not great. There’s no saving that kitchen.”

“You knew that going in, though, didn’t you?”

“I did,” Wild says. “But you gotta do what you can. What are you standing guard for?”

“Doing what I can.”

“Duncan left you alone? That fucker.”

“Not alone,” Julian says. “With you. We’re going to protect this house together, Wild.”

“Nah,” Wild says. “I’m no good in a scuffle. Not anymore. I know my limits.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Sometimes those bastards bring sticks and bricks. We need Duncan. Duncan!”

Julian stops him. “We don’t need him, and he’s busy besides. Just stand on my right, will you? And look tough.”

“I got no problem looking tough,” Wild says, moving around to Julian’s right. “But usually only Duncan can take care of the looters.”

“Tonight, you and I are going to take care of them.”

With skepticism but no fear, Wild points at Julian’s hand. “You want my glove to cover that up? As it so happens, I have an extra.” He grins.

Julian shakes his head. “I want whoever comes to see my hand. It acts like an anesthetic. It lulls my opponents into a false sense of confidence in their own strength. My missing fingers become my lucky fingers.” He smiles.

“Okay, say they’re lulled. Then what?”

“Then, you and I will solve problems together. We’ll get creative.”

“I can’t use a bat.”

“Do you see a bat on me?” Julian says. “But you should carry a knife, Wild.” Recalling Edgar Evans’s Bowie knife that saved his life even as it nearly ended it.

“I’m a righty. Can’t use a knife with my left hand.”

“Sure you can. I was a righty, too. Once.”

Wild appraises the severed half-hand, the man. “You want to show me how?”

“Not in the next five minutes. Have you got a hammer at least?”

“For you?”

“No, for you.”

Wild shakes his incredulous head.

“What, you can’t even swing a hammer left-handed? You just spent fifteen minutes whacking a useless kitchen cabinet!”

For now, knifeless and batless and hammerless, Julian and Wild stand shoulder to shoulder on a pile of bricks and wood. The siren wails up and down. What has Julian’s girl gotten herself into? Doesn’t she know it’s the end of the line?

“Stepney has it worse,” Wild says as they wait. “Anything near the river is a shambles. That’s how you gotta look at everything—some poor fucker somewhere has it worse. Like: sure my arm is gone, but that’s why the good Lord thought to give me a spare.”

“How’d you lose it?”

“Don’t want to talk about it.”

Julian glances at Wild’s suddenly distorted face, at his body struggling not to double over, and looks away.

The ambient light from the nearby fires illuminates the street. In the glimmer, Julian’s eyes search for Mia. He spots her a few houses down, comforting the old woman who has stopped wailing. His gaze steadies and rests on her. When he blinks, he catches Wild staring at him.

“Who are you?” Wild says. “It’s like you know Folgate from another life.”

“That must be it.” He nudges his new friend. “Heads up,” Julian says quietly. “On my ten.”

From the left, three young guys appear stealthily out of the darkness, heading for the house in front of which Wild and Julian stand. “See, if you hadn’t put out the fire in the damn kitchen, they’d walk right past us,” Julian says to Wild, and louder to the trio, “Move along. You have no business here.”

“And what business do you have here?” one of them says.

Wild shows them his Home Guard badge.

“Step out of the way, cripple,” an intense-looking chap says, approaching them. “You too, old man,” he says to Julian. “You don’t want to get hurt.”

“You don’t want to get hurt,” Julian says.

“Nice one, Jules,” Wild whispers.

“Thanks, Wild.”

The three boys laugh. They taunt Julian. “What are you going to do, swat at us? Point at us with your pointer?”

“He can’t even make a V sign!”

Julian turns his body sideways and kicks the talking bloke straight in the chest. The guy falls backwards. His head hits the bricks. “Move, Wild,” Julian says, and to the attackers, “Go on, you two. I told you, you don’t want to get hurt.”

The two young men menace Julian, both edging to his right, where they assume he is weakest. One guy swings a stick. Julian catches the stick in the crook of his right elbow and chops the guy on the side of the neck with his open left palm. The boy reels, is thrown off balance, and now Julian is armed. He hits the guy once on the forearm and even harder across his shoulder, all secondary but debilitating injuries. He squares off against the remaining youth. “Did you see how gently I tapped your friend’s arm with his own stick?” Julian says. “I could’ve bashed him in the face. And then he’d be dead. But, the night is still young. So what would you like to do? Run? Or fence?”

The dude clearly has learned nothing. He swings. Julian blocks, and kicks him in the knee. Howling, the guy drops to the ground. The entire confrontation has taken no more than twenty seconds.

Wild is overjoyed. “Finch, Dunk!” he yells. “Come here. I can’t fucking believe it! Did you see that?”

“He hit the dirt with such a beautiful thud,” Julian says with a light smile.

Finch and Duncan run over. Finch is not overjoyed. “No reason to knock them out like that,” he says dourly. “The cops will be here soon.”

“And now there’s less for them to do,” says Julian.

“Don’t listen to a word Finch says, Jules,” Duncan says. “That was amazing.”

“You got lucky, that’s all,” Finch says. “You caught them off guard.”

“You’re right, I did,” Julian says agreeably. “Otherwise I wouldn’t stand a chance.” He winks at Wild.

Wild throws his one arm around Julian. “Jules, you’ve been baptized by fire. You’re now officially a member of our Ten Bells Watch. Finch, go get him a Home Guard badge.”

“I can’t get him anything without an ID.”

“Get him an ID, too, Finch, or I’ll beat you with his stick,” Duncan says cheerfully.

Finch points to the groaning men. “What do you propose to do with them?” he says to Julian.

“Get me some rope, Duncan,” Julian says. “More may be coming, and I don’t want to worry about these three.”

“The rope we have is not for tying up delinquents,” Finch says. “The rope is for rescues, for saving lives. In case people are trapped and need to be pulled out.”

“Yes, thank you, Finch,” Julian says. “I know what rescue means. I don’t need a lot. I do need a knife, though.”

Duncan brings him a tangle of rope and a knife.

“No one here knows how to tie a knot,” Finch says. “So I don’t know what good the rope will do you.”

In half a minute, Julian binds all three men’s ankles and wrists with handcuff knots. Grimly Finch looks on, while Duncan and Wild celebrate. “We finally found our third musketeer, Dunk!” Wild says.

“We sure did, Wild.”

“So what was I, then?” says Finch.

“Aww, you’re not a musketeer, Finch,” Wild says. “You’re more like Richelieu.”

Finch ignores the mockery. “I think you made it too tight,” he says to Julian, “their circulation will be cut off.”

“That’ll teach them to loot houses,” Julian says, kicking one of them in the ribs. “Bastards.”

When Mia reappears in the street, Wild and Duncan call her over and interrupting each other tell her what happened, while she listens, twinkling approvingly at Julian. “He did that, did he?” she says. A disgusted Finch storms off.

“Folgate, Julian’s going to show me how to use a knife and a hammer,” Wild says. “And tie a handcuff knot.”

“Okay, let’s pipe down, Wild,” Julian says. “I’m not a magician. You can’t tie knots with one hand.”

“Who says?”

“As you were, boys,” Mia says. “But, Duncan, I need you. That woman is trying to drag a trunk the size of a cupboard out of her house. It’s too heavy for her, and it’s too heavy for me. I tried, but I can’t move it.”

“I’ll help you, Mia,” Julian immediately says, handing the stick to Wild.

“There you go,” Wild says. “Jules will help you, Mia.”

“Shut up, Wild,” she says.

“Yeah,” says Julian. “Shut up, Wild.”

“Folgate, are you sure you don’t want Finch to help you move some heavy furniture?” Wild says, not shutting up—just the opposite.

“Shut up, I said! Of course I asked Finch first, but he’s busy. Pay no attention to him, Julian, come along.”

Leaving the boys snickering behind them, Julian and Mia make their way through the debris on the street to the old woman’s house. “They’re impossible,” she says. “Don’t mind them. They’re just teasing.”

“I know,” Julian says, inexpressibly pleased to be teased. “And I don’t mind.”

“So you know how to fight?” Mia says.

“I got lucky.”

“Sure you did,” she says, giving him an amused up and down. “I think it’s us who got lucky when you found us. I can’t tell you how badly we needed someone like you. Now that Lester’s gone, Duncan’s the only one facing the thieves. Nick comes sometimes, but he doesn’t like to fight. Wild likes to, but can’t. Hard to find someone who likes to and can.”

“Who says I like to?”

“I don’t know.” She squints at him. “You have that look about you.”

Julian squints at her in return, takes a breath. “Glad to help. Who is Lester?”

“One of us. He died last week,” she says.

“A blast got him.” At the house, Mia holds the kerosene lamp to light the way, and together she and Julian locate the woman’s half-open trunk in the debris of her partially destroyed home. The woman stands out in the street, shouting orders in a trembling but grateful voice. Near the spilled-out trunk lie necklaces and photo albums, a torn and dusty wedding veil, a child’s baptismal gown.

“Thanks for helping me,” Mia says to Julian as they collect the valuables. “Look how precious these small things are to her.”

“They’re not small,” Julian says. “They’re irreplaceable.”

“I guess. Often, finding these items is what matters most to these poor people. Not the house, but the wedding rings.”

Before he can respond, the all clear sounds. It’s an intense, one-note, high-pitched shriek, and it lasts one interminable minute. Julian can’t express the relief he feels for the blessed silence that follows. “Mia, you don’t do this every night, do you?” he says as they drag the trunk over the bricks. Please tell me you don’t do this every night.

“We try for every night. It doesn’t always work out.” She chuckles. “Sometimes Nick and Wild and Dunk get so drunk they can’t go anywhere when the siren calls. Finch judges them pretty harshly for that. He never overindulges.”

“In anything?”

That makes Mia blush for some reason and hurry past it without replying. “And the week Dunk had a concussion, I didn’t go. It wasn’t safe.” She shrugs, calmly acknowledging the reality of certain disadvantages of being a woman during war. “The thieves bring big wooden sticks. It’s a good thing all scrap metal, including tire irons, has been requisitioned by the city. Otherwise they’d be swinging iron, not wood, and we’d all be in a lot worse shape.”

After they pull the trunk out into the street and leave the old woman sitting on it, Julian looks Mia over. “Are you okay?” He stops her from walking. With his thumb, he wipes a trickle of blood off her forehead.

“Tonight was nothing.” She smiles. “It’s not always this easy.”

“This was easy?” Three houses destroyed, valuables lost, families homeless, looters. Seeing her quizzical expression, he coughs. “I mean, of course it’s been worse, but surely this wasn’t easy.”

Mia tells Julian that once Duncan had to battle six guys on his own.

“Well, I can attest that’s certainly not easy,” Julian says.

Sometimes parachute mines float down, she tells him, and when you get close to them, they explode and rip you open. That’s what happened to Lester. “Have you seen them?” When Julian shakes his head, she continues. Sometimes the incendiaries fall and everything is aflame and no one can get out. “Have you seen any of that?”

Julian nods. That he has seen, everything on fire and no way out. “People get caught under walls and broken glass.”

“Yes. Children—the few that are left—get trapped in the houses with their mums and grandmas and aunts. The older men and the kids can’t help. They sit nearby and watch their loved ones die under rubble no one can move or in a fire that’s out of control.”

“Are you afraid of fire, Mia?” Julian says, mining her face.

“I’m not not afraid of it,” she says, undisturbed by his scrutiny. “It’s not my favorite thing.”

He wants to ask her what her favorite thing is but doesn’t. What if she says it’s Finch?

“Today we helped a little,” Mia says. “But sometimes we can’t. Are you ready for that, to do everything in your power and still not be able to save the lady under the rubble?”

“No.”

He will never be ready for that.

7
Folgate

MIA BRINGS HIM A MUG OF HOT TEA FROM THE REFRESHMENT truck. Julian must look as if he needs it.

“Where are you really from?” she says, looking at him calmly but questioningly. “Forgive me for saying this, but you look like this was your first bombing.”

“No, no, not my first,” he says hurriedly. “But I told you, I’ve been away. Just came back recently.”

“You’ll get used to it,” Mia says. “We all did. We had to. What a time to come back, though. Why didn’t you stay where you were? Where were you, Wales?” she asks, sparing him an answer. “Bet it was safer.”

“It’s true, Mia, there are magical dangers here,” Julian says. “But this is our last stand.”

“By our, you mean London, right? Not …” She flicks her finger between him and her and smiles, like a joke. And he forces a smile in return, like a joke also.

They remain at the site until almost daybreak. Eventually the fire brigades arrive and the police, and the rescue services, who remove the possessions from the blasted-out homes. The Incident Officer appears in an enormous truck. Finch works closely with the IO and without Finch’s meticulous itemization of damages, the IO’s job would be much harder. Finch is indefatigable. Hours after the all clear, he is still interviewing people, taking down information, even comforting them occasionally, if awkwardly. He tags what’s been found, he lists what’s been lost. He catalogs everything. He is like a less genius and less genial George Airy.

“Finch does this every night?” Julian asks Mia, a grudging respect creeping into his voice.

“Day and night,” she replies. “This is his full-time job. He gets paid by the Bethnal Green Council. There’s bombing during the day, too. You don’t know that either, East Ender? When did you get here, yesterday?”

“Hardy-har-har.” Sipping the tea that has cooled down much too quickly, Julian chortles and sputters, pretending her question is a rhetorical jest. Daytime attacks, too? Julian thought Wild had been exaggerating.

After the anarchy of the bombing, the organized, measured response to the madness makes Julian feel worse, even more out of sorts. He is used to punch for punch, slam for slam, kick for kick. He is not used to clipboards and quiet conversation after a wholesale demolition, not used to pale slim cordial indispensable women casually sifting through the debacle on a stranger’s behalf, looking for lost dolls and pearls.

In the blue icy pre-dawn, things look more surreal, not less.

The IO’s men spend hours loading the truck with items that have been recovered and tagged to haul to the storage depot or the “strong room.” Mia, Julian, Finch and Duncan continue to bring the valuables out into the street, one by one, little by little, precious toys, a fire truck, an heirloom Bible. Mia advises the dispossessed families to keep what’s most dear to them on their person, not to lose sight of it. The face she presents to the families is one of unflagging optimism and kindness. It’s going to be okay, she keeps saying. Your things will be found. The council will find you a new place to live. The shelters are warm and there’s food. Don’t worry. Keep your chin up. Don’t panic.

She’s a far cry from the frightened and desperate woman Julian found in Invercargill. Mia lives amid death, yet has not been ruined by the knowledge of her own death. Poor Shae, Julian thinks, bowing his head as if in prayer.

Julian, you’re a fool.

The Inferno is no place for pity.

In the past, he tried to look too far ahead, and now he’s being punished by being unable to look ahead even one more day.

Punished or rewarded?

We may be hopeless, Mia. But we’re not broken.

“Who are you praying for, Julian?” Mia says, coming up to him. The face she presents to him, too, is one of unflagging optimism and kindness.

His expression must confuse her, because she averts her gaze. “Do you want to sit, rest your feet a bit? You look exhausted. They’ll be okay, they’re used to it,” she says when she sees him scanning for Duncan and Wild. “Let’s sit.”

He and Mia huddle on the debris. Now that the fires have been doused and there’s hardly any warmth, the slush is turning to ice. Julian wants to put his arm around her. She seems so cold. He gauges how far Finch is from them, whether he can see them. He’s quite far and paying them no attention, but Julian decides not to antagonize the man any more than necessary, though he yearns to draw her to him, to embrace her.

“Maybe we should all go inside the strong room,” Julian says, “and leave the trinkets outside.”

“Why, are you tired of living?” She says it in jest.

“I’m not not tired,” he replies, wanting to fall asleep right then and there, on top of a crumbled house, next to her. He has been in the river, in the dry beds, in the tunnels, in the flames, awake for weeks or days. “What are we waiting for?”

“Finch,” Mia says. “It’s at least another hour before he’s done. He drives us back.”

Julian’s head bobs forward. Feeling her gaze on him, he shakes to stay alert.

“You got nowhere to go,” she asks. It’s not a question.

“I got nowhere to go.”

“So come back with us. We have room. The more, the merrier. Come back.”

What Julian wants is for her to go with him. Come with me, Mia. Come away with me. Away from this madness.

But come with him where, the hospital in Scutari, the demon fire, the deepest ocean? “Are you sure?” he says. “You look pretty full up at Bank. And your boyfriend doesn’t like me.”

“Can you blame him?” Mia smiles, self-aware but jokey. “Don’t worry, you’ve made a friend in Wild. You’ll be fine. He loves the girls but doesn’t usually take to the boys like he’s taken to you.”

“There’s no place for me,” he says.

“Sure, there is,” she says. “At night, you’ll be with us, and during the day you can sleep in Robbie’s bunk. He leaves for work at seven.”

“What about you, where do you sleep?”

“Who wants to know?” She smiles. “Just kidding. You saw where. One of the top bunks is mine. All the girls are in the top bunks.”

They exchange a glance. “For safety?” he asks.

She nods. “At Bank, we haven’t had any problems with assaults and whatnot—touch wood, as Mum would say—but other places have had some trouble, and it’s always better to be safe.”

Always better to be safe, says the fragile girl whose life has been threatened and snuffed out up and down the centuries, now sitting in the rubble caused by high explosives, the rubble to which she has traveled out of her soul’s own free will.

“You don’t have a house in London,” Julian asks, “a family?”

“I had both,” Mia replies. “The house got bombed, the family left. Of course I could go to a proper rest center up on Old City Road, but they’re overcrowded, and I don’t want to stand in the street all day with my blanket, queueing for a space. Finch and I did that back in September. Bollocks to that, we said after a day.” Mia takes out a cigarette, offering one to Julian. At first he refuses, and then accepts. Why not? They light up. Her lighter says sad girls smoke a lot.

“You don’t seem sad,” Julian says, inhaling the smoke, coughing, inhaling again.

Mia concurs. “I’m not sad. But the girl who died, she was sad. It was hers.”

“Why was she sad?”

“Because she died.”

He likes the camaraderie of smoking with his beloved over bombed-out ruins in a war. In the war. It’s not the worst thing they’ve shared, by far. “None of you has a home?”

“Robbie has a home,” Mia replies. “In Sussex. Liz has a home in Birmingham. But those places are getting hit pretty hard. Phil Cozens has a home, but he doesn’t sleep there, because he’s paid to be on call at Bank. It’s not too bad at Bank, really. You’ll see. They’ve spruced up many of the Underground shelters. Bank is like a fine hotel. There’s even a refreshment center.” She smiles wistfully, glancing down the street for the refreshment truck that’s long left.

“Do you work?” Julian asks. “Or is this your day job, too?”

Mia has a different day job. She works at the Lebus Furniture Factory on Tottenham Court Road. She sleeps until ten or eleven in the morning and then goes in. Her boss doesn’t mind; he knows why she is up all night.

“Do you work?” she asks, looking inside Wild’s cloak at Julian’s well-made suit, now dusty.

“I did. I had a restaurant on Great Eastern Road. It’s gone now. Along with my flat right above it.”

“Restaurant? I’m so hungry,” she says. “What kind of food did you make, Cornish pasties? Shepherd’s pies?”

“Beef noodle soup. Squid with garlic. Shrimp rolls.”

“Tell me about it. Don’t spare any details.”

When Finch spots them sitting on the broken pile next to each other, he looks upset, even at a distance, even in the early light. But Julian takes the cue for how to behave from Mia. She doesn’t move away from him. So he doesn’t move away from her. Julian is not the keeper of her relationship with Finch. If he’s overstepping his bounds, she’ll let him know. But Julian doesn’t think he is overstepping. Something about the way she kissed him back when they pretended to be Cecily and Algernon. As if she had been longing to be truly kissed.

While they wait for Finch to finish up, Mia tells Julian bedtime stories, and he nearly falls unconscious to the sound of her achingly familiar soft breathy voice. She’s known most of the Ten Bells gang since primary school. She, Shona, and Finch grew up together on Folgate Street in the back of Spitalfields Market, and in September were made homeless together. For the first few weeks, they roamed the streets like beggars, and then found the passageway at Bank.

Shona, the medi truck driver, is a tough cookie, while Liz Hope is the opposite. “She is a soft cookie. Like a sponge cake.” Liz began a promising, bookish career at the British Museum, but now that the Museum has shuttered indefinitely for the war, she’s out of a job and out of sorts. Sometimes she volunteers for the church truck, serving refreshments to the dislocated, but mostly feels she’s not doing enough. “She can’t help it,” Mia says. “People are not going to change just because of a little bombing. The truth is, Liz is terrified of the bombs. Going out into the darkness during the attacks is not an option for her.”

Liz seems like the sanest of the bunch. “Why can’t you be more like Liz,” Julian says.

“You mean chaste and shy?” Mia is grimy yet shiny. She smiles. Every time Mia smiles, Finch manages to see it from wherever he is. Maybe because she lights up like a firework.

“I mean safe and underground,” Julian says. “But chaste and shy, too, if you want, sure.”

“You want me to hide from life in the dungeons?”

“Not from life,” he says. “From death.”

“There’s nowhere to hide,” she says. “A month ago, a bomb fell near the entrance at Bank. It killed twenty people and left a crater in the road so large it had to be spanned by a makeshift bridge. The Bank of England was untouched, though.”

“Maybe we should hide inside the Bank of England.” Julian says we but he means you.

Liz likes being part of the squad, Mia says, but because of her agonizing shyness has a hard time speaking up in a group setting. And a group setting is how they live these days. There is no private setting.

“So how do you and Finch make it work?” Julian asks, looking at his hands instead of at her. “In a group setting,” he adds carefully.

There is a longish pause. “Biding our time is how,” she replies. She returns to talking about Liz, glossing over his silence with a brisk “What option do we have?” as if she can read his thoughts.

Who’s got the time to stay put, to linger?

Not you.

Last week, Robbie started taking Liz to work with him on Fleet Street. She now proofs his articles for the Evening Standard. She’s never had a boyfriend but has had a paralyzing crush on Wild for years, and after his accident last summer, if anything, loves him even more because he is less perfect and therefore more accessible to her and therefore more perfect.

Wild’s real name is Fred Wilder. “Isn’t that funny? Wild is Freddie. He’s been trying to rebel against his plumber name since birth.” As if the moniker weren’t punishment enough, his parents had named his younger brother Louis. “So one brother’s a plumber, the other a French king. I mean, that’s Wild’s life in a nutshell.”

“Where’s Louis?”

Mia shakes her head, glancing around for Wild, as if he might be nearby and can hear. “We don’t talk about Louis.”

“Ah,” Julian says. “Okay.” Beat. “So, tell me about you.”

“What about me?”

“You’ve told me about Liz, about Shona, about Wild. What’s your story?”

“I told you.”

“I mean, other than the war.”

“Is there anything other than the war?” she says. “I almost don’t remember.” Before the war, she strived for the West End stage, but that’s been put on hold, like everything. “Two bombings and my beloved Palace Theatre on Cambridge Circus has been boarded up!” she says with indignation. “As if people don’t need entertainment during war. They need it even more, if you ask me.”

Julian agrees.

“Do you know that theatre?”

“I do,” he says. “Once upon a time, a man loved his wife so much, he built her the most magnificent theatre in all of London, so she could go to the grand opera any time she wanted.”

“Yes!” Mia exclaims, staring at him in amazement. “How do you know that? No one but me knows that.”

“And me.”

Warmed and softened, Mia tells him about her work at Lebus, the furniture factory, becoming especially animated when she describes what they’ve started building for the war. “We take the hollowed-out frames of double-decker buses and paint them red. No engines, no transmissions, just the frames.”

“Like the cargo cult planes in Melanesia,” Julian says pensively.

“The what?”

“Never mind. Continue. Why do you do that?”

“We paint on the fake windshields, the wheels, even the numbers on the buses,” Mia says, “and we place them around the outskirts of town, where they’re easy to spot. The Germans bomb our decoy buses, while inside the city, we get to carry on with our business.”

“Aha. Like building film sets. Except for real life.”

“Yes, precisely! Fake buses for real life.”

Julian and Mia continue to sit together on top of the crumpled exterior wall, hunched over, their feet on the window frames. They’re covered head to toe in mortar dust, even their faces and mouths. She tightens her headscarf under her wool hat, breathes into her gloved hands.

Her mother is up in Blackpool with her Aunt Wilma, her three cousins and their seven kids. Aunt Wilma is atypically British. She is not calm. When the bombs started falling in September on a daily basis, Wilma became hysterical. Her vocal panic traumatized her grandchildren, Mia’s second cousins. “And don’t think that my mum doesn’t mention every chance she gets that her sister is a grandmother seven times over and my mum not even once.” So Wilma packed up the family and shuffled off to Blackpool where their family is from.

“Why didn’t you go with them?” Why, why, didn’t you go with them.

“My life is here.” She draws the coat across herself. “I’m with my friends, so I don’t care. I’ll admit that when I first saw the Luftwaffe fly overhead with no Spitfires or Hurricanes in sight, I thought I was watching my own destruction.” She peers at him. “Kind of the way you’re acting today.”

Julian says nothing. His eyes lock with hers. “Like I’m watching whose destruction?” he says quietly.

Mia sputters and moves on. “The first bomb that hit our house blew the roof off,” she says.

“The first bomb?”

“Oh, yes. The brigade pulled my mum out from under the dining room table, the table fine, my mum fine, and she yells to me, Mia, I told you it was a good table!” The young woman smiles in remembrance. “The council said they could do nothing for us, and we should consider ourselves lucky that we had a roof over our heads, and I pointed up to the open sky and said, do you have eyes? What roof? The chap got mad and left.” She laughs. “After we got bombed, we got free refreshment for two days. At first, Mum said it was nice and we should get bombed more often. We had the Emergency Londoners’ Meal Service. We had our bath in the mobile bath units—I call it the human laundry—and did our washing in the mobile laundry that was parked a block away from us on Commercial Street. It was cold in our house without a roof, but it was still September so it wasn’t too bad, and we were together. Aunt Wilma was next door with her kids and her kids’ kids, and Mum liked that. Truth be told, I liked it, too. I’m close to Wilma’s youngest daughter, Kara. She and I were born the same year. She’s like my twin. She’s funny.”

“Funnier than you?”

“Like, who even could be?” Mia smiles. “But then a bomb fell on Wilma’s house, and all the wood and glass ended up in our living room, and then it rained for a week straight, and that wasn’t funny. So Mum agreed that maybe it was time to go and my aunt said, you think? After they left, I stayed for a few days alone in the house, but then another incendiary fell, and, well, you know.” Mia hops up and extends her hand to him. “You want to go see what’s left of my house? Come on. We still have a few minutes before Finch is done. It’s just around the corner.”

They hurry to Commercial Street. “The bombs have torn all the leaves off the trees,” Julian says. “That’s why it looks like winter.”

“Silly boy,” Mia says. “It looks like winter because it’s actually winter.”

Folgate Street is a short narrow road between two large wide thoroughfares, Bishopsgate and Commercial.

Not much is left of Folgate. Most of the two dozen homes are rubble except for the four corner ones. They have craters inside them, and only partial roofs, but families continue to live there. Even milk and newspapers continue to be delivered, the milk in tins.

In the middle of Folgate, Mia’s flattened house is black cinder and dust.

“Mum said she’d be back as soon as she had my aunt and cousins settled,” Mia says, “but I telegraphed her to say not to bother. Where is she going to go? She can’t live at Bank with me. I admit, I’m a little jealous of Lucinda and her family. Sure, Lucinda’s a nutter, but Sheila and Kate have their mum. It was nice when Mum and I were together and could wash our clothes in the laundry truck. Of course then the gal who’d been driving it died. Her lungs got filled with dust. It’s her lighter I’m using.” Mia smokes another cigarette as they walk back, slowly. “When my house collapsed, I walked away. Mum taught me to do that. She said, eyes forward, and never look back; otherwise, you’ll be carrying the weight of that house with you the rest of your life.”

If only Julian could heed that advice.

“What’s Wild’s story, Mia? Tell me quick, before we return.”

“Okay, but you can never tell him I told you,” she says. “He lost his arm when he was trying to save his brother. A bomb fell during one of the early attacks in July, and Louis got trapped in their burning house. Wild tried to get him out. Louis kept telling Wild to go, but Wild wouldn’t leave him. Then the wall frame shifted, and he got stuck. He couldn’t get even himself out. Wild watched his brother die as their house burned down around them. He barely escaped himself. The firemen had to cut off his arm to save his life. Their parents were outside in the street, while their two sons were trapped inside.”

Julian lowers his head.

“It wasn’t great,” Mia says. “It’s still not good. Being a fireman was all Wild wanted to be since we were kids, and now he’s got no brother, no arm, and can never be a fireman. Can you imagine?”

“Yes,” says Julian.

8
Tales of Love and Hate

HE DOESN’T NEED TO USE ROBBIE’S BUNK BECAUSE WILD offers him his. Julian sleeps like the dead, all day and through two sirens, as he learns when he wakes up. At night the Ten Bells collect in the alcove. They’ve eaten and drunk elsewhere, but Wild somehow divines that Julian is starving and shares some bread with him and the rest of his small bottle of cheap whiskey. The gang appears to be in good spirits, except for Finch, who looks as if he can’t believe Julian is still around.

“Why are you giving him your food, Wild?” Finch asks.

“I share my food with him, Finch, because that’s what Jesus would do,” Wild replies, mock-solemn. “Who are you serving?”

“That’s not what I mean, and you know it. He could use some charity, obviously. I mean, where is the man’s ration card?”

“Or what, he’d eat like a king if he had one?” Wild says. “Hey, all you kingly ration-card holders, who wants some whalemeat? Delicious whalemeat right here! And look what else I might have for you with your royal ration card. I have one ounce of creamy butter, freshly churned. Now, Jules,” Wild says, his one arm hooking around Julian’s neck, “when you find your card, you will get one pat of butter a week. But it’s your choice how you use it. You have free will during the war, and don’t ever forget it. You can eat your pat of butter all at once or you could spread it out over seven days—like Finch.”

“Everybody’s always pinching me butter,” Mia sings with a naughty wink. “They won’t leave me butter alone.”

“Come on, dove, don’t joke like that,” Finch says. “It’s not proper.”

“Who won’t leave your butter alone, Folgate?” Wild says with a naughty wink himself, not letting go of Julian’s neck. “Put a name on it, will ya?”

“Do you see what I mean?” Finch says to Mia.

“Just having fun, Finch,” says Mia.

“Just having fun, Finch,” says Wild.

“Someone, explain to Finch what fun is,” says Duncan.

“How is making fun of me fun?” says Finch.

“In so many ways, Finch, I can’t count them all,” says Wild.

Carefully, quietly, Julian pats Wild on the back, two gentle pats, hoping no one will notice, not even Wild.

The men and women in the alcove circle around Julian to make him feel welcome. “Don’t worry, Julian, it’s nice here at Bank,” Shona the driver tells him, speaking in a loud, guttural twang. She is narrow of eye and body. Her hair is tied up with a head scarf. “But it would be even better if we had a place to keep chickens and pigs. Then we’d really have something. What I wouldn’t give for some extra bacon and a chicken.”

“We’re not allowed chicken and pigs in the Underground, Shona,” says Finch.

Shona ignores him, continuing to address Julian. “Hyde Park has a piggery, right next to where the buses park for the night.”

“Exactly. A park. Not the Underground,” Finch says.

“But, Shona, darling,” says Duncan, his gruff voice softened to a quaver, “if we had somewhere to put your chickens and pigs, Wild would kill them, cook the shit out of them, and eat them before you had a chance to say where is my little piggy.”

“Dunk’s right, Shona,” Wild says. “That’s exactly what I would do.”

“You can’t have chickens in the Underground,” Finch doggedly repeats, in the deep black underground where beneath a gap in the busted pavement human beings have made themselves a home.

It’s chilly in the tunnels. To repay their hospitality, Julian shows his new friends how to make a Swedish flame. Out on the empty eastbound Central Line platform, he uses a small axe (not an ice axe) to make six vertical cuts in one of the wood logs, as if he’s slicing a cake. He makes the cuts not all the way through, leaving the log with a few inches intact at the base. He pours two spoonfuls of kerosene into the center of the log and throws a match after it. The log burns for over two hours. They leave it standing, warm their hands and faces over it, make hot water, make tea, and then fit around it right on the platform, as if having a campfire.

Wild happily starts referring to Julian as Swedish.

As in, “Swedish, where did you learn to do that?”

And, “Swedish, what else do you know? Anything, for example, that might be useful to Folgate?”

“Shut up, Wild!”

“Shut up, Wild!” Finch says, and then quieter to Mia, “It’s because you were singing that butter pinching song that he talks like that.”

“Believe me, Finch, it’s not because of that song,” Wild says, turning to Julian. “Swedish, where did you learn to fight with your left?”

The young people on the platform sit around the burning log, sipping tea and whiskey. Their eyes are on Julian. Mia sits next to Finch. Her eyes are on him, too.

“You can learn it, too, Wild,” Julian replies. “Show them your mangled right claw, and while they’re gloating about how they’re going to lick you, wallop them with your left. You don’t even need to make a fist. Though you can.”

“That’s not what you did.”

“I trained for a long time to learn to fight southpaw. Also, to be fair, last night I didn’t fight.”

“What was it, then?” Duncan says. “Those three were down on the ground before they knew what hit them.”

“Like I said.”

When he sees Mia smile, Finch points to Julian’s missing fingers. “One of the real fights didn’t go so well for you, eh?”

Julian shrugs. “As they say, Finch, dead men tell no tales. And I’m still here. Make of that what you will.”

“Oh, tell us, Swedish!” Wild says. “Don’t hold back. We love a good story. Nothing better in the dungeons during war than to drink awful Irish whiskey with friends and listen to a rousing tale of mayhem. The only thing better than a story about a fight is a real fight.”

Everyone seconds hear, hear, even the girls!

“But I suppose that’s too much to ask,” Wild adds wistfully. “So, tell us what happened.”

Julian shrugs. “I got into it with a guy.”

“What guy?”

“A guy who wanted a fight. He grabbed my knife that dropped on the ground. I jerked my hand just enough, or he would’ve taken it off at the wrist, and I would’ve bled out. That knife was like the fucking guillotine—excuse me, ladies.”

Julian! Watch out! Unsteadily, he reaches for the cup of whiskey in Wild’s hand.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have left your knife lying around like that,” Finch says.

“You’re right, Finch,” Julian says. “I definitely shouldn’t have.”

“That is a terrible story.” To everyone’s surprise, the man who says this is Peter Roberts. They didn’t think he was even listening. He is a few feet away from them at the table, at his customary spot next to Frankie the puzzle maker. “Young man,” Roberts says sternly, as if scolding Julian, “don’t you know that the human capacity to contemplate life, to feel, to tell stories, is holy? It comes from the immortal soul. No animal does it, sits around the fire and tells stories. Only humans. And what you’ve just told us is not a story. You’ve merely summarized some distant events without passion or prejudice. There was nothing real in it, and therefore we felt nothing. For shame.”

Wild grins, knocking into Julian. “That’s a first, Swedish. With your deeply inadequate storytelling skills, you’ve roused the previously silent Robbie. The bowtie journalist claims you can do better. What say you?”

Julian takes a long swig of whiskey. Finch complains about how much of the common liquor he’s drinking. Julian promises Finch he’ll get more. But for now, he’s sufficiently langered to tell them a proper story. He has many. Which one would they like to hear first? He’s got one about a hanging in Tyburn. He’s got one about murder in a brothel. And he’s got one about a fight to the death at sea.

The kids look to Peter Roberts for guidance. The dignified man considers his choices. He’s even put down his French lesson book! “Robbie,” Mia says, “would you like to come over here and sit with us by the fire? Duncan, go help Robbie with his chair.”

“Don’t you dare, Duncan.” Getting up, Peter Roberts grabs his own chair. “I’m sixty, Maria, I’m not an invalid. Someday when you’re sixty, you’ll understand.”

“Swedish,” Wild says, “why did you flinch just now when Robbie said that?”

“Why are you always studying him, Wild?” Finch snaps. “Who cares why he flinched? Who cares why he does anything,” the man adds in a peevish mumble.

“Finch, shh. Robbie, come,” Mia says. “Guys, make room.”

Peter Roberts sets his chair in the circle among the young. “Since there may not be a tomorrow,” he states philosophically, “Julian might as well start with the sea battle.”

The young women grumble, pleading for something more delicate, all except the tough-cookie Shona, who doesn’t do delicate, and Frankie, who remains with her puzzle and offers no opinion.

The boys shout the girls down. “No one wants a soft story, ladies,” Wild says.

“Don’t worry, Wild,” Julian says, “even my soft stories end in death.”

“Is there any love in your stories?” Liz asks quietly, leaning forward. The gang gasps. Liz has spoken! Liz opened her mouth and spoke to a stranger in a public setting! They cheer. They raise a glass to Julian for making Liz speak and for getting Peter Roberts to put down his French book.

“If only we could separate Frankie from her puzzle, then we’d really have something,” Kate says, glancing over to the table. Frankie blinks but doesn’t respond.

Julian smiles at Liz. “What kind of slapdash story would it be, Liz, if it wasn’t about love?” he says. “Yes. Every good story is about love.”

Now they really want to hear.

“Even the death at sea story?” Liz asks. A romantic tremble animates and beautifies her plain, freckled face.

“Especially that one,” Julian says. “Because that one is about the truest love of all. A love that just is, and asks for nothing back. It’s easy to tell a story full of sexy words about beautiful people loving each other in sunny climes.”

“I wouldn’t mind hearing that story,” Mia echoes, sounding like someone who’s rarely seen either.

Julian doesn’t dare look at her, lest he give himself away. He continues to address Liz. “But just try telling an imperfect story about ugly damaged people loving other ugly damaged people and see how far you get.”

With the Swedish flame burning between them and whiskey and nicotine burning their throats, Julian begins by telling his newfound friends about the frozen cave. Bound by grief, he embarked on a perilous journey to find the secret to eternal life. He tells them how long he walked along the river until he was blocked by a vertical cliff of ice, hundreds of feet tall and smooth like a sculpture, with no way to climb it or break it. No way in and no way back. He lay down on the ice and went to sleep, and when he woke up, the mountain was gone. It had melted into the river and refrozen. The only thing left from it was a small mound with a circular opening, like an icy halo. “It is called a moongate,” Julian says. “So I walked through this moongate and continued on my quest. This is before I knew,” he adds, “that the life I looked for, I would never find.”

“What did you really travel to the end of the earth in search for, Swedish?” Wild laughs. “It was some girl, right?”

Mia, Mia, my heart, my dearest one, you are the one.

“What do you call the cliff?” Wild asks when Julian doesn’t answer.

“Mount Terror,” Julian replies.

“Fuck, yeah!”

“Fuck off!” says Nick.

Finch scoffs.

Mia jumps to her feet. “Wait! Stop speaking, Julian.”

“What a splendid suggestion, dove,” Finch says.

“Your story is too good to waste on us wankers.”

“Thanks a lot, Folgate,” Wild says.

“I, for one, would enjoy hearing the rest,” Peter Roberts says in a measured baritone. “The man has finally got around to telling a real story. He began at the beginning and was continuing capably until you stopped him, Maria.”

“That wasn’t the beginning, Robbie,” says Julian. “Not by a long shot.”

“You’ll hear all of it, Robbie, I promise you,” Mia says. “Follow me. Bring your chair.”

Mia leads Julian and the rest to the escalator lobby where a hundred Londoners have collected for the night, spilling out onto both platforms. “These poor folks are starving for entertainment,” Mia says. “You saw how fired up they were last night. What do you say? Let’s give them a story. Some drama, some comedy, a fight. You’ll lift their spirits, make the time pass. What could be better? I wish we had enough drink for them. They would so enjoy a little sip of whiskey.”

“I’ll get some,” Julian says. “I’ll get some as soon as I can.”

“Sure you will.” Mia smiles, as if she’s heard a lot of promises men have not kept. “We’ll do it interview style, okay? I’ll ask you questions and in your answers you’ll tell them what happened.”

“Thank you, Mia,” Julian says, gazing at her, “for explaining to me what an interview is.”

She giggles. “You’re welcome, Julian.” She hops up onto the makeshift stage. “Ladies and gentlemen, come closer,” she yells, motioning the Londoners to her. “Gather round. Tonight, for your listening entertainment, we want to present our new series of tales. They’re called … what are they called, Julian?”

“Tales of Love and Hate.”

“Tales of Love and Hate!” she exclaims. “Tonight, we’ll start with the first of—” She glances at Julian. “First of how many?”

“First of five.”

“Tonight, we will start with the first of five, called ‘The Death Match at Sea,’ or the mystery of how Julian nearly lost his hand. I’m Maria Delacourt. Please welcome to the stage, my co-star in The Importance of Being Earnest, Julian Cruz.”

There’s tepid clapping.

“Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for that smattering of applause,” an unperturbed Mia continues. “Rest assured, when you hear the story of this fight, you will be standing in the aisles.” She leans to Julian. “Am I overpromising?”

“Underpromising, I reckon,” Julian says.

“Why don’t we have a real fight instead?” a man in the back says.

“Yeah,” another man says. “Now that would be bloody entertainment.”

“Well, it wouldn’t be fair for me to fight Mr. Cruz,” Mia says. “He wouldn’t stand a chance.” She winks at Julian. “How about if we begin with a story, and then we’ll see what we see. Prick up your ears, give Julian your full attention. You won’t be disappointed.”

And they’re not.

Raptly they listen, gasping at the horror of being vastly outnumbered by murderous men with evil intent in the middle of an ocean, gasping even more at the girl’s shocking betrayal. Even Mia loses her put-on composure. “Did she really do that?” she whispers, wide-eyed.

“She really did,” Julian replies, studying her face.

“How could she do it? I thought she loved you.”

“She did. But she didn’t want to die.”

“Julian, why do you keep staring at me, as if I have the answers to my own questions?” she whispers. “Did you forgive her?”

“What do you think?”

“You fool, I think you did.”

Julian ends the story of his Valkyrie, the chooser of the slain, with Tama’s demise, not with the actual end, which is too cruel for this setting and these people. Probably too cruel for any setting. Ending it early makes it almost a happy ending. Masha at the Cherry Lane was lost and then was found, just as she had always dreamed of.

The crowd applauds with gusto. Wild cheers wildly. Even Peter Roberts claps, his face flushed and satisfied. The only one who doesn’t clap is Finch.

“Well done! You definitely want them more ecstatic at the end,” Mia says to Julian, grabbing his arm and raising it together with hers as they take their bows. “That’s how you know you’ve done your job.”

“I agree, it’s always good to end ecstatically,” Julian says, squeezing her fingers. Blushing, she doesn’t return his gaze.

“Fight! Fight!” the crowd keeps yelling. “Show us a real fight! A boxing match! There must be some plonker in your group who’ll fight you. Come on! Give us something!”

“We’re not going to do that,” Mia tells the audience. “But if we’re still here tomorrow, God willing, and you return, we might have some whiskey for you … and we’ll tell you another story—which one, Julian? The murder in a brothel?”

“That one’s good.”

“Okay,” she says. “Are there any details to the brothel story besides cold-blooded murder?”

“Oh, one or two,” Julian says, making Mia blush again. He smiles. She smiles.

“How about a hot-blooded fight right now, Swedish?” Wild yells from the sidelines. “Finch over here just told me he’ll fight you.”

“You bet I will,” Finch says. “I’ll kick his arse. He won’t know what hit him.”

“Finch is dying to fight you, Swedish!” Wild yells. “What do you say?”

“Fight! Fight!”

The howl of the siren sounds. There’s a collective groan of disappointment and misery. The bad part of life has intruded on the good part of life.

9
Cripplegate

“ARE THE DOORS OF ST. PAUL’S STILL OPEN?” JULIAN AND MIA are walking briskly down Whitechapel. Earlier that morning, they rode with Shona to the Royal London Hospital to get resupplied with bandages and antiseptic. With Julian carrying the heavy canvas bag, they’re headed back to the jeep on Commercial Street, where Finch is undoubtedly steaming and waiting.

“Sure, it’s open,” Mia says. “Why, do you want to hide inside?”

“Yes,” Julian says. “Inside the Bank of England, inside St. Paul’s. Inside the Stock Exchange. Inside Monument.” Inside things that don’t fall. Things that won’t fall. The gods of the city have cloaked the Bank of England and St. Paul’s in an invisible shield, as if the mystical dragons of London jealously guard its greatest treasures.

“I’ve never seen London like this,” Julian says as they walk, “without its people.”

Mia nods. “It’s like a ghost town. But believe me, the people are still here.”

“Yes,” he replies, not looking at her. “They’re just ghosts.”

The rain turns to ice. Frozen pellets drop out of the sky and pound Julian and Mia like gunfire. He notes her falling apart boots as they hurry down the street.

“Did you know,” he says to her, “that if you run in the rain instead of walk, you won’t get as wet?”

“You’re pulling my leg.”

“I’m serious. If we run, we won’t get as wet as when we dawdle and take in the sights. Want to try it? Here, give me your hand.”

They race down Whitechapel to where it crosses Commercial Street and duck into a covered archway at Aldgate East tube station to catch their breath and get out of the hailstorm for a minute.

“I don’t know, Swedish.” Mia laughs. “I’m pretty soaked.”

“Well, you started out soaked,” Julian says, “so it doesn’t count. Try it when you’re dry. Run through the rain. You won’t get as wet.”

“If you say so.” She is full of good humor.

His newsboy hat on, her winter hat on, they resume their dash up Commercial Street, slowing down when they realize they’re almost at the jeep, parked at the usual spot near the Ten Bells pub.

“Hey, so where’s the best place for me to get things?” Julian asks. “Things that aren’t rationed.”

“Like on the black market? They cost a lot.”

“I didn’t ask that. I asked where to go.”

“Find the back of a lorry,” Mia says. “Not in the center of town, or where you need to be good.” She points to the police station they pass on Commercial. The sign on its door says, “BE GOOD. WE’RE STILL OPEN.”

Mia tells him to try north Cripplegate. “Though I should warn you, if you haven’t been that way recently, you’re in for a nasty shock. But if you manage to get beyond it, in the back of Smithfield Market there’s a lot of stuff being sold off lorries. Watch out, though, because Finch doesn’t like that stuff.”

“What doesn’t he like, whisky, bacon, wool blankets?”

“All that.” She pauses. “But also be careful because stray bombs are always falling, even during the day. You keep forgetting that. They fall without a siren. Are you looking for something in particular?”

“I promised Finch good Scotch whisky, so that’s one thing I’m getting.”

“You’re not going to win him over with that.”

“Trust me, nothing I do is going to win him over,” Julian says. Mia bites her lip. “What else should I get? What would your friends like?”

“Bacon rashers. Eggs. Anything out of ration would be good.”

“What about you? Would you like something?”

She gets flustered. “I wouldn’t mind putting on a costume and singing a song. All the girls would love some nylon stockings, even tough old Shona, even Kate, who pretends to be hard but that’s only because she doesn’t want people to think she’s soft and take advantage of her.”

“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.

Winter. Snow, then rain. The city is a muddy wreck.

Cold nights in heavy fog, visibility three feet. Mia, Mia!

In Battersea, no ceilings, no glass, no light.

Doors are torn off, doors they bring underground and fashion into stages.

The destruction of the doors above them means that in the caves below, they can put on a skit and dance, and maybe even laugh.

Mia, Mia.

It doesn’t seem right for people to stay in a city where bombs fall daily.

And yet they stay.

It doesn’t seem right to put themselves in harm’s way.

And yet they do.

They are surprised in the mornings that buildings still stand like mountains. Nothing seems to be that permanent. Not the buildings, not the people.

And yet they remain.

London, the most lit up nighttime city in the world, has been plunged into darkness. The metropolis has vanished. Two thousand years thriving, and in two months it’s a clutter of wattle and daub shacks, made of sticks and bricks, burning and crumbling. And they can’t see any of it until the next morning when the streets are gone. Holborn, Tottenham Court Road. All the roads are misshapen. Dust, dust everywhere in the great dead city.

Parts of the city are ashes. The history of London is laid waste, made without meaning. If its tangible relics can vanish overnight, if London’s physical manifest glory can disappear, what’s left?

Mia, Mia.

She paints the fake buses red.

Fire engines are painted gray.

And policemen wear hats painted blue.

And yet they stay.

They get up and go to work, take buses and cabs, they walk, and the pubs are still open, and beer is terrible because sugar is rationed, but at least the terrible beer is not rationed.

And in the caves, there is life.

There’s a stage and a boxing ring.

Unreality weighs upon Julian.

He wants to tell his friends, brightly colored flowers will grow in the ashes come spring. On Bread Street and Milk Street ragwort will bloom, lily of the valley, white and purple lilac, London pride. For seven hundred years, the earth near Cripplegate has been tamped down by stone. But underneath, it’s still fertile soil. In it, leaps and bounds of asphodel will grow. The wounded city will see the immortal flowers return.

But not in the dead of November. In November, the kingdom will fall for a song.

Julian has picked up some new things for Mia on the black market. He got her a Brodie, a tin hat. Does she wear it? Of course not. Discarded it lies at the foot of her bunk. He bought her high heeled shoes, not patriotic wedges, bought her garters and nylon stockings, not patriotic lederhosen, acquired for her a long pink fake-fur scarf, some red lipstick, a garland for her hair, and a black velvet dress with a silk red trim.

Mia cries when he opens his hands full of offerings. “Why are you bringing me these?” she whispers so Finch doesn’t hear. “These are the most wonderful things anyone’s ever given me.” She tries to act composed, but her eyes are wet. “Brodie’s good, too, but not like this.” In five minutes, she gussies herself up in velvet and fur and brushes out her hair, pulling it back from one side of her face with the floral hair clip. Twirling the ends of the fluffy scarf, Mia gets Wild to introduce her, jumps up on the door, and lustily sings and tap dances for the damp sullen people. For three minutes, she makes them happy. They cheer for an encore. She happily obliges. Four times she obliges, as if she is nothing but jaunty and carefree.

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