Three Hours(9)

‘Aleppo’s mentioned in the play,’ Rafi said. ‘In Act One, the First Witch says, “Her husband’s to Aleppo gone”.’

Daphne had never noticed that the poor sailor cursed by the witches was on his way to Aleppo and she was struck by the similarity to Rafi and his brother’s journey, also cursed and tempest tossed, in the opposite direction.

And now Benny is projecting a photo of a bombed street in Aleppo on to the back wall of the stage. It looks like an urban moonscape: collapsed chalk-white buildings, black shadow spaces where rooms and people should be, whitened cables and wires trailing down into the street that is piled high with chunks of houses. The streets in this photo are deserted but the original has a father holding his baby, her legs and small feet covered in white dust, but they’d edited them out; too much for children in the audience, for parents too, but the pair still hover there for Daphne.

She has never fully engaged with the photographer’s point of view before but looking at the photo now she realizes that the picture was taken looking down a street, and right off into the distance to other streets, and in the photo there is not one building that remains a building, not a room left intact; that the horror of this picture is that there is nowhere left to run.

Her mobile vibrates with a WhatsApp message from Neil. She reads it, appalled.

*

An eight-year-old boy is hiding in a shed; he has a stitch in his side from running, faster than he’s ever run before, and he’s still out of breath. The wooden door isn’t closed properly, because he’s scared of the dark. The cold creeps in through the gap. His red woolly gloves are wet with snow and freezing cold so he takes them off. There are canoes stacked up on the walls on special hooks and at the very back there’s a wooden rowing boat like Ratty’s in The Wind in the Willows. He can leave the door open just a tiny bit and if the man comes in he will hide in the rowing boat.

But the man has a gun.

He has to shut the door but it’s going to be all right because he’s got his mobile phone and its screen will glow in the dark, like the rabbit night light he had when he was little. He opens his mobile and puts it on the ground with the screen shining up at him.

He shuts the door, trying not to make any noise; then he grips the bolt, bumpy with rust, and pushes it across.

On his screen there’s a picture message of a frog and another one of a bowl, like a cereal bowl, full of sweets, and a message but he doesn’t read it because he’s seen that his battery level is 15%. He left his farm game running otherwise the animals run out of food and get hungry. He looks again hoping it will say 50% or even 25% but it’s still 15%.

If the man with the gun comes he’ll need his phone to get help. He closes the game, saying sorry to the chickens and pigs for not feeding them, and turns off his phone.

The smell of the shed is stronger in the dark: something rotting and damp wood; dank, dark smells that make him feel sick. He hears blood rushing in his ears, his limbs are shaking, he feels tears wet and warm on his cheek, like weeing yourself. Stupid arms, stupid legs, stupid tears. Eight’s too old to cry. He must be brave. Brave as a Barbary lion. Brave as a Bengal tiger. Brave as Sir Lancelot.





3.


9.25 a.m.


In the library, Hannah smells cigarette smoke. No one in the library is smoking. It must be coming through a gap in the door; the top part because most of the doorway is covered by the mound of books. He’s just outside. Is he taking fast drags or slow ones? What will he do when he finishes?

Mr Marr is trying to talk but she can’t make sense of what he’s saying. She bends her face closer to his as if his words lose their shape and meaning as they travel the distance between them. But it’s worse now because she can hear how hard this is for him, the rasping of his breath as he struggles to speak. Perhaps he sees that he’s upsetting her because he stops and his eyes meet hers as if it’s him who’s worried about her, rather than the other way round.

Frank hands her his laptop which is on a news channel. A presenter is talking about them. It’s the presenter Dad says wears too much lip gloss and that the news isn’t a cocktail party and she shouldn’t talk about people being killed while showing off so much. He means showing off so much cleavage though he wouldn’t say that to Hannah in case he embarrassed her but she knows exactly what he means. Dad’s normally pretty laid-back about that kind of thing, but he really doesn’t like lip gloss and low-cut tops on newsreaders. Distracting, he says. She thinks that people probably like to be distracted when the awful things are on.

Frank gives Hannah his headphones. ‘You’re live now, FaceTiming,’ he says.

‘You’re sure you don’t want to?’ she asks and Frank nods.

She puts on the headphones and looks at the screen.

Bloody hell, she’s on telly. Instead of the map of the school there’s a picture of her in a box; the presenter with the cleavage and lip gloss is talking about her –

‘We have a pupil at Cliff Heights School …’

She and Dad are going to find this hilarious tonight, when they watch it on TV. Of all the presenters in all the world … Dad’ll say to her.

‘I’m Melanie,’ the presenter says. ‘What’s your name?’

Even though the gunman in the corridor knows they’re in here, she keeps her voice quiet.