Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [109]
He could not understand why he couldn’t hear anything while at the same time his head was full of noise.
Frankie?
The word came from nowhere.
His eyes refocused on the hand at the end of his arm. Actually, it looked more like a red knitted glove that hadn’t been put on properly. Then fiery fingers that were colder than ice pressed themselves against the side of his face and ushered him down into a merciful and fathomless darkness.
IAWOKE BRIEFLY on days five, six, and seven and spoke her name before sliding back under the surface.
Ruth, who’d sat beside me all that time, must have been deeply disappointed. Sons are supposed to call out “Mother!” when Death comes to visit. I didn’t.
My first coherent question was, “If she alive?”
Ruth said, “Who?”
“Frankie.” It seemed to take the better part of an hour for my crippled mouth to form her name.
“That Mortimer gal?”
“Yef.”
“She’s alive.”
“If she orright?”
“I dunt know,” my mother said. “I hent asked.”
For which, God forgive me, I never forgave her, even though she’d been crying for a week.
They’d identified me by the label (which I had been at pains to conceal from Frankie) stitched to the waistband of my underpants.
Rule 19: All items of clothing, including socks and underwear, are to be clearly labeled with the pupil’s full name.
I don’t know how they identified Frankie.
Goz came to see me in Norwich sometime between my second and third operations. Not that there was much of me to see. I was bandaged like a mummy, just the right side of my face — eye, nose, and half mouth — showing. My white-packaged left arm was propped up on a sort of cradle. My white-parceled left leg hung from a wire attached to something like a gallows. Goz, to his credit, didn’t flinch. He sat down on a chair where I could see him by swiveling my eye.
“It probly don’t look that way to you,” he said, “but you are a lucky sod. That mine blew a hole in the beach you could park a bus in. Two buses. You heard about the three kids, I spose?”
I had, yes. George had told me, shakily.
“During the war,” he’d said, as though talking to himself, “we’d sometimes put stones in the coffins when we couldn’t find all their bits. To make up the weight, like.”
Goz said, “You were in all the papers. There was even a bit on the telly.”
I knew that, too.
“Frankie,” I managed to say.
Goz seemed to see something interesting on the floor.
With difficulty, slurping the words, I said, “D’yer know how sher if? No one’ll tell me anyfing. Gof?”
“She’s gone, comrade.”
“Gone? Gone where?”
“London, so I’m told. Some private hospital. A week ago.”
“Yer know how sher if?”
“No,” Goz said. “They wouldn’t tell me anything, neither. I said I was her cousin, but they didn’t believe me.”
It was Goz who told me, some days later, about Win and the Brethren. He’d been there, stayed to the bitter end. He hadn’t found out about me and Frankie until the following day.
Ruth and George had fled the shameful display in the square and gone home. They’d stopped answering the phone, unable to face any more calls about Win. Just before five o’clock, a police car stopped outside the house and two officers knocked at the front door. Ruth assumed their business concerned her humiliated mother, and it took her some time to grasp what they were telling her. When it sank in, she sank with it. She fainted and fell backward against George, who was unable to take her weight. He also fell backward and was pinned to the floor by his stout wife. After an ungainly struggle, he was freed by the policemen.
During that Sunday afternoon, the square had filled with people. Must have been all of Borstead there, Goz said, and more besides. The piss-taking and joking gradually died out, and it got very