“What if I told you,” Julian says, “that Blackpool will never come under direct attack?”
Mia is quiet. “What do you mean, never? You mean, not yet?”
“I guess.”
“Then I’m right, and there’s no reason it won’t be bombed tomorrow or the next day.”
“It won’t be bombed tomorrow or the next day.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do.”
“How?”
“I just know.”
“How sure are you?”
“One hundred percent.”
She mulls. “You don’t think it will ever be bombed?”
He shakes his head.
“Oh, yeah? Where’s Wild, then?”
“That I don’t know.” He may never learn of Wild’s fate. It cuts him up to think this, to say this. It’s an open wound.
* * *
And then there were three.
Julian, Mia and Liz return to Bank. Liz has nasty burns on her legs that need to be cleaned three times a day.
In the passageway that’s been Mia’s home since September, a dozen new people lie in their bunks. One exquisitely far-sighted young bloke with a pair of magnifying lenses for glasses, one lens cracked, says, “Sorry, mates, we in your spot? It was empty for days, the warden said we could . . .”
Liz asks if anyone has seen a blond man without an arm. He’s easy to recognize. No one speaks up. “Let’s go sleep somewhere else,” Liz says to Julian and Mia after she collects her few things that have been thrown in the corner with the rest of the trash. “I have to go to work in the morning. The Evening Standard still needs me to proofread.”
Challengingly, Mia stares down Julian, as if she believes Julian is too nice a guy to tell Liz they’re about to abandon her and run for the hills. Julian is about to open his mouth to prove to Mia just how wrong she is when he hears a familiar voice calling for them from the top of the station, coming down the escalator. The speed with which all three of them spin around would make a stone weep if a stone was watching them, and could weep.
But it’s not Wild.
It’s Nick Moore, unharmed and joyously ignorant.
“What happened to your head, Ghost Bride?” he says, all chipper and jokey. “It’s a good look for you. Did you miss me, kids? I’ve been at the Ford plant!” he announces, as if it’s the most exciting news. “Well, it is exciting. We’re bombed every fugging day, yet look at me, not a scratch. Well, that’s not true.” He pulls up his pant leg to show them a cut on his shin. “A scratch.” He laughs. “I gotta show Dunk. Where is everybody?” He glances inside their passageway and frowns in disgust. “Fuck off, who are they?”
“Javert told them they could bunk there,” Liz says.
“Fuck off, why would he do that?” Nick still has a smile on. “Where’s our crew?”
Mia shakes her head.
Nick is still smiling but frozen. Like his mouth can’t catch up with what his brain is processing. “What, no one?”
Mia shakes her head. “Sheila might be okay.”
“Fuck off, I don’t believe you. Duncan?”
“He broke his back. He’s at Royal London.”
“Fuck off!” says Nick. The smile is gone. “Fuck off! Robbie? Kate? Frankie? Doc Cozens? Wild?”
Mia shakes her head. Liz looks away.
Nick stops saying anything else, just keeps repeating his two worn-out words over and over. A few minutes later he spins and leaves. They watch him stumbling up the motionless escalator, crying, “Fuck off! Fuck off! Fuck off!”
Julian gets an idea. He tells Mia. They ask Liz to wait and run up the escalator after Nick. “Nick! Wait! Nick!”
“Fuck off!” sobs Nick.
* * *
“Fuck off!” Nick says when Julian tells him of his plan.
“Come on,” Julian says. “Liz can’t go to Birmingham. Her mother told her so. And we’re leaving for Blackpool . . .”
“Jules insists.” Mia rolls her eyes.
“We’ll leave today if you take her,” Julian says. “There’s no one to look after her here.”
“So take her with you.”
“Nick, Dagenham is five miles away,” Julian says. “Blackpool is half a country away. She is not safe with us. In the spring, the British Museum will reopen. She has a job. She’ll move back to London. It’s just for a little while.”
“Well, I can’t look after her! Are you daft? Fuck off!”
“Come on, mate,” Julian says. “Just take her with you.”
“And where will she live, may I ask?”
“You must have an aunt, a grandma, a spinster cousin she can bunk with, no?”
“Fuck off,” says Nick, but quieter.
“And Duncan still needs you to visit. Shona, too. And maybe when spring