Short stories and articles

Aftermath

He was an artist, he told himself, but had never felt so irrelevant. His life, in a moment, had been reduced to no more than a sense or an awareness or a memory of dust: huge, choking mouthfuls, streetfuls, skyfuls of dust. Colour had vanished from it, overwhelmed, extinguished, destroyed even as a possibility he might once have believed in.

He was alone in the shop where he had run for shelter, realising too late what was happening. The force of the explosion – or was it the collapse? – had thrown him against the wall, bruising or breaking his ribs. Where had everyone gone? he wondered. How had they got away so quickly? He had a sense of screaming, of sirens, of more explosions, and then again there was the dust, nothing but dust, filling the air, making breathing impossible.

He struggled upstairs, looking for light, for fresh air, for anything that would help him. Beyond a closed door was an empty, darkened room. The dust had not reached it. He closed the door behind him and felt for the light switch. A dim light came on in the far corner. The room glowed, but without colour, as if it was his eyes that were affected, as if there would always be a film of dust covering them.

Everything had changed. He would have to learn to see the world differently.

He found more switches and turned on the pale central light and then a brighter light over a desk. The room was windowless. It felt abandoned or forgotten but a faint smell of chemicals suggested it had once been used as a darkroom. Its dark walls were lined with shelves and the shelves were piled high with photographs: portraits, landscapes, the city at night, the city at dawn, the city in the middle of the day, beaches, mountains, sunsets, football matches, horse races, politicians, bejewelled women, the moon in all its phases, the sun partially eclipsed. All of them in black and white, as far as he could see.

He picked one up and put it down then picked it up again. He found himself staring at it as if he had never seen anything like it before, as if he could never have imagined that something like this might happen, or might have happened before, somewhere else, to other people, in another city, in another time in history. In the foreground a small child stood alone on an empty road; in the background were ruined buildings; behind them a cloudless sky. An unseen autumn sun caught the inner walls of the buildings, lighting them up. A tall gable end, standing on its own, supported by nothing but the bricks beneath it, leant inwards, waiting to fall, and yet not falling. It was a moment of utter stillness, as if time had held its breath, waiting for something to happen.

Someone had been there, clearing the rubble, making the street safe to walk on. The facades of some of the buildings were intact; even the detailing over one of the doorways remained, though scorched as the bricks above the empty windows were scorched by the fires that had brought down floors and ceilings and roofs. Elsewhere, internal walls survived, wrapped around central chimneys, reaching out towards windows and doors that had ceased to exist. At every level where there had been a floor, he could see holes where joists had been embedded in the brickwork. He counted them – seven on each floor – needing to be sure that the building had once been solid, that someone had thought about what it should look like, how it should stand up, how it would support the people who lived their lives within it.

Who had been living there when this had happened? he wondered. He wanted to think it was the secret police or a much-hated death squad or perhaps some autocrat or dictator in exile with his retinue of torturing generals and propagandists and doctors whose reputations were built on experiments on live children, or a dictator with his generals not even in exile but actively murderous, actively destroying his country, his people, the world outside as far as his reach could extend. Looking at the ruins, sensing pain and the horror of death, he would have preferred to think that, but knew it was unlikely.

What was more likely was that these were buildings like so many others where people neither rich nor poor had lived lives that were neither innocent nor especially guilty. He wanted to be able to imagine their lives, to recreate them, to invent joy and laughter and a face turned sideways to look at the setting sun over the water – though the water was his own invention, somewhere beyond the photographer where he could only sense or hope that something worthwhile had existed. He was an artist, he could create the images, fashioning them in his own image, imposing a structure that made sense, matching the colours, establishing the shifting pattern of light and shade. It was easy, and at the same time impossible. He knew he was only trying to go back, to reverse the course of history, to make it not have happened. He knew he was trying to recreate not their lives but his own in a time of easy innocence and laughter, of casual cups of coffee at pavement cafés, visits to galleries, theatres, restaurants, occasional disputes with colleagues and bank managers, moments of joy and love and sadness with wives and children, all of them suddenly rendered pointless, meaningless, of no more significance than the uncaring sunlight on the walls of buildings burnt by fire, washed by rain, picked clean by those who had survived, who had kept on living.

He would keep on living, though the world had changed around him. Who could now feel safe? Who could now believe in the triumph of good over evil or the perfectibility of man or the value of paint on canvas? What was the worth of love or sorrow? And yet, he knew, life would go on.

He looked at the photo again, holding it up to the light, sure that if he looked long enough he would recognise the street. He recalled that he had experimented once with aerial photos of cities he had visited and thought he should remember. He had looked from one to the other at the street patterns set out below him, with variations that should have been clues, landmarks that should have guided him. But whichever one he looked at could have been anywhere, a city from any country and any time, each of them different but united by destruction, by a new formlessness, by mounds of rubble, drifting smoke, silence, emptiness. Looking at the photo, he realised this was not a street he knew or ever could have known. The people in it had lived lives he could only pretend to understand by imposing on them the contours of his own imagination. He would never know them. They would remain for ever absent, extras called away to perform in a different scene, leaving him staring at what might have been no more than an abandoned film set in a Hollywood studio, with a forgotten child in the middle of a wide, empty street.

What was the child doing there, transfixed, staring towards the photographer? Had he been scavenging among the ruins? Had he once lived there, in one of those burnt houses, with a mother to look after him, brothers and sisters to play with, a cat sleeping at the end of his bed? Had he come there from somewhere else, some other ruin that still had a roof to shelter him at night and a fireplace to keep him warm or to cook on, if only he could keep on gathering wood to burn and finding food to cook? Did he lie awake at night, hungry, shivering as the fire died? Did he sleep at last and dream of what it was like, what it felt like, the exact moment when it had all happened, when the world had changed for ever, suddenly disintegrating, taking with it all that might have kept him alive: shelter and food and people and love and the certainty he would never know again?

It was a strange photo, beautifully composed. It made him long to see the colour of the cloudless sky. He could feel the clear coldness of the air and the warmth of the sunshine on the high, exposed walls. And there was something miraculous about the fine, clean lines of the empty street, and the tidiness of everything, even the ruined buildings, even the piles of rubble set against their walls. He could imagine someone appearing from beyond the edge of the photo, setting up goal posts, marking out the pitch, organising a game of football, and at the end taking the posts away again, leaving it as empty as before with just the solitary child staring, waiting.

As he looked again, he saw that the child had something tucked under one arm. He could not make out what it was. A toy? A bundle of sticks for the fire? A dead rat?

The child was shivering. Even from so far away he could sense him shivering, despite the hat on his head and what looked like gloves but might have been old socks on his hands. Perhaps he felt winter closing in on him, bringing with it the prospect of darkness and snow, of the fire going out, the wood too damp to light, the food too old to cook, while ice formed on the pond that was his only source of water. Or perhaps he was afraid. Of the emptiness. Of the photographer. Of someone unseen behind the photographer, kneeling with a rifle cocked, checking the distance, focusing on the one living target.

He could not make out the face of the child and was no longer sure that he wanted to. He turned away from him, looking to one side and then the other, seeing for the first time the leafless tree, stripped clean by winter or by the fire reaching out from the burning buildings. If he were the boy, he would come back with an axe and chop the tree down and have firewood for the whole winter, he thought, as if it was as simple as that. As if nothing had really changed. Or as if he, like the boy, was adjusting already, living a different life, finding ways to survive in this new, transformed world even as the mountain of dust rolled by in the street outside and the sound of further explosions came to him in this hidden, darkened room.

He put the photo in the pocket of his jacket, then pulled it out and stared at it again, frowning. A scarf, he saw. A woollen scarf. He had not noticed it before, the softness of it around the boy’s neck, the sense of something different that it conveyed. He saw his hands were shaking as he held the photo. Suddenly he wanted nothing – nothing in the world – but to see beyond the edges of the photo, to reach out to the person – mother, father, older brother, friend, neighbour or some anonymous person in the street – who had taken such care, who had wrapped a scarf around the child’s neck and tucked it inside his jacket. A single gesture of concern. Of care. Perhaps even of something more to which he could no longer put a name.

He would never paint again, he thought. Not with shaking hands and eyes that only saw in black and white.

He shivered and stared at the photo, unable to put it down. Broken buildings. Ruins. And still the chance of life. But beyond the leaning gable end, he saw finally what the photographer had not had time to see: a tall chimney tilted at an impossible angle, disconnected already and falling, for ever falling towards the clean street, the leafless tree, the mounds of rubble, and the boy in the winter sunlight with his scarf soft around his neck, a dead rat tucked beneath his arm.

He sat down and closed his eyes and waited for it to be over.