Three Hours(10)

‘Hannah Jacobs.’

She sees that on TV they’re blurring her out below her face, so that you can’t see the blood, or maybe it’s the bra, maybe that’s just too much cleavage for TV, although definitely not the cocktail-party kind. She finds this a little funny. She imagines someone getting out a pot of Vaseline or lip salve and smearing it over the lens. But in here nobody takes any notice of her just wearing a bra, when yesterday it would have been shocking and unthinkable.

‘Our headmaster has been shot,’ she says. Totally shocking, totally unthinkable. ‘He’s bleeding and he’s very pale and cold. We need to know when an ambulance will get to him. He’s in the library by the door.’ Surely they’re giving it an armed escort or something, surely they’ll get help to Mr Marr.

‘Okay. My producer is finding out now.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Are you okay, Hannah?’ Melanie asks.

The smell of the cigarette is making her nauseous. She imagines Dad’s arm around her, his terrible French accent, Courage, mon brave.

‘Yes. It’s not me who’s hurt, it’s Mr Marr who’s hurt.’

‘Can you tell me what’s happening?’

Maybe the gunman is watching this on his phone as he has his cigarette. The arsehole smoking gunman knew to charge up his phone fully this morning, probably brought a juice-pack with him. If he’s watching this on his phone she’s not going to show him she’s afraid and she’s definitely not going to give him any information. She looks at Melanie in her lovely safe TV studio.

‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea,’ she says. ‘Do you know when an ambulance will get here?’

‘I’ll let you know as soon as I do. We’ve heard it all began with an explosion …?’

Like the explosion was the beginning of a story: ‘What’s the story in Balamory?’, ‘Postman Pat and his black-and-white cat.’ She’s being sarky about Melanie – Your fault, Dad, you prejudiced me against her.

‘A teacher’s told us that they were warned about a possible explosion in the woods at 8.20, the reason for the amber alert,’ Melanie says. Hannah imagines the producer’s voice in Melanie’s discreet little earbud giving her info.

‘Yes.’

‘The school is right in the middle of the woods?’ Melanie asks.

So not a CBeebies TV story but old-style Grimms’ Fairy Tale woods: a huntsman taking Snow White into the deep dark woods to kill her, to return with her lungs and liver; a girl in a red cape being stalked by a wolf through the trees.

But the explosion in the woods an hour ago wasn’t the start of the story; a prologue maybe, an introduction; not the beginning. Because it began – whatever ‘it’ is and it’s not a story, not to any of them inside it – it began when someone shot their headmaster in the corridor of their school. That’s when life as they’d known it before ended and something else began and reset time. Because she thinks the something else is measured in lifespans and how long Mr Marr has left to live, maybe how long all of them have left, started at that moment.

‘Did you hear the explosion?’ Melanie asks, because for her the starting point is neutrally impersonal. But the police might need to know more about the explosion, it might be important.

‘Yes. We were in the woods …’ she says.

She sees Mr Marr looking at her, keeping his eyes on hers, and she finds it comforting; she thinks he knows that.

She remembers running through the woods with Rafi, holding hands tightly, cold, numb fingers together, so she could feel his bones, like two in-love young skeletons; which is morbidly weird but frankly she is a weird person and at a party four months ago told Rafi one of her weird (but not morbid) thoughts and wanted to grab the words back again because she had this huge crush on him. But he understood. Understood her. And it had been like their minds were touching.

The in-love bit isn’t true, not for Rafi anyway, because he is charismatic and has an extraordinary story and so that kind of thing happens to him on pretty much a daily basis; but it was unique for her – she touched a boy’s mind and he touched hers. She hasn’t ever told him she loves him.

Fuck’s sake, back to the woods, Hannah. Quarter past eight, but wintry dark, making you want to press a switch and turn on the lights. Rafi’s hand was pulling her along, helping her go faster, so she wouldn’t be late for English and he wouldn’t miss the start of the dress rehearsal. She’d left her puffer behind yesterday in the common room but she didn’t want to slow down. Rafi must have heard her wheezing because he stopped running. She sounded like an old man, not a gentlemanly one but a gross one who smokes sixty a day, huffing around in a tartan dressing gown.

‘It’s so quiet,’ she said, blaming the quietness of the woods for Rafi being able to hear her sixty-a-day old-geezer wheeze.

A cold touch on her face and she saw snowflakes, most getting caught in the trees, and it seemed for a moment that it was just her and Rafi alone in the dark tree-limbed world.

Then Rafi abruptly turned away from her. ‘Have to go,’ he said, hurrying away with his long-stride walk, a slight limp in his right leg. She wanted to tug him back to her, call after him, but made herself still and quiet. Every time Rafi left her she thought he’d seen what everyone else saw: a weird plain plump girl with too-pale skin and too-red hair and now with an old-geezer wheeze and totally undeserving of him.