Three Hours(8)
There’s a number to ring ‘if you have any information’ tickertaping along the bottom of the screen. Hannah supposes it’s to keep the story going, little titbits added to keep it fresh and spicy. Because Frank is right, the police won’t be telling them anything.
She’s holding her phone tightly, even though it’s out of charge, like it still connects her to Dad and Rafi, and she knows that’s ridiculous but doesn’t loosen her grip.
Frank is searching through news sites; all of them are about their school, not like the usual news, all slick and organized, but hurriedly put together. On one site, there’s a male reporter she recognizes talking straight to the camera, as if directly to her.
‘Could this be a terror attack?’ he asks. ‘We’re going now to our terrorism expert, David Delaney.’
She looks up at the skylight. Snow is falling down on top of them, smothering the daylight.
*
In the theatre, Daphne and Sally-Anne get a WhatsApp message from Neil Forbright, the deputy head, who is alone in the headmaster’s office in Old School.
We can’t get to you. You must lock the doors
‘What do you think?’ Sally-Anne asks.
Daphne thinks their young deputy head is astonishingly brave.
‘We must do as he says.’
She closes the security doors across the entrance to the glass corridor, then locks and bolts them. Everyone who was critical of Neil Forbright will have to see his courage now, even that wretched father of his, who Daphne could cheerfully throttle. But Daphne has seen Neil’s courage for the last year, because teaching with depression is impossibly hard and he managed it on and off for months. Not bravery like this though; because Neil hasn’t only locked himself out of safety – only! – but is shouldering the burden of that decision so she doesn’t need to. But it’s her fingers that locked the door, slid the bolt across, and her hands feel treacherous.
Neil often comes round to theirs for pasta and a chat; other staff trapped in Old School are friends too. And the teenagers. Dear God. She’s known many of them since they were young children in junior school. And now she’s locked the doors against them and left them with a gunman.
Neil didn’t say if anyone was hurt and he would have told them. Surely he would? She hurriedly WhatsApps him.
‘I’ll wait here by the doors,’ Sally-Anne says. ‘In case something changes. In case they can get to us.’
‘Good plan,’ Daphne replies, because she wants to believe something will change, but fears that if it does the likelihood is that it will be for the worse.
But worrying’s no use to anyone in Old School, Daphne, no use at all. You just have to get on with it; put your best foot forward for the children in the theatre until this terrible thing is over; shove to the back of your mind this terrible anxiety about the people in Old School and the missing children and everyone in Junior School and this new love for your husband that keeps inappropriately pressing itself forward. Right then, a phrase she has never used before, suspicious of people who used it, right then, she must keep everyone calm; keep them busy. They came to school this morning thinking they were going to be doing a dress rehearsal of Macbeth so that is what they are going to do.
She claps her hands, forces her voice to be loud and strong.
‘Tell your parents that you’re safe in the theatre, if you haven’t already, and that you’re turning your phones off – then all mobiles off, please.’
Phones aren’t allowed in the library but the students in Jacintha’s English classroom will have their mobiles with them. She thinks that, like her kids in the theatre, they’ll be phoning their parents first, poor loves, of course they will, not yet siblings or friends, but they most probably will. If bad news happens, she doesn’t want her kids in the theatre to get it.
They all protest about turning off their phones. She raises her voice above the hubbub of theirs, but keeps it calm.
‘We are going to rehearse Macbeth – Joanna, that was absolutely the right thing to suggest earlier – and I don’t want phones pinging.’
Amazingly, the kids seem to buy this bit of normality, her usual rule, and turn their mobiles off, though she doubts it will last for long.
‘Finish off your costumes and keep your faces as they are. Zac, Luisa and Benny, lighting and set, please. Once you’re ready, refresh your lines.’
No WhatsApp reply from Neil. She opens her copy of Macbeth, playing her part in this charade, and reads the opening; the same opening Shakespeare’s King’s Men would have read four hundred years ago.
Macbeth
Act 1, Scene 1
A desolate place.
Thunder and lightning. Enter three WITCHES
The kids had brainstormed ideas for ‘A desolate place’, sitting in a safe, warm rehearsal room. Tim wanted a shopping mall and Daphne liked the idea, Princesshay Shopping Centre being her idea of Dante’s fourth circle of hell, but Luisa said, ‘Desolate actually means bleak, abandoned and forsaken, not Zara and Lush.’ Josh came up with a windswept moor, but that was ‘a bit Heathcliff ’n’ Cathy’, and then Rafi Bukhari suggested Aleppo.
‘But does Syria have any link with Macbeth, really?’ Luisa, ever the realist, asked.
‘You don’t have to be literal in your staging,’ Daphne said.