Ocean E-Book

Polly Clark

• Herausgeber: Eye Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 424

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

A powerful yacht, a warring family, the unforgiving deep... Caught in a terrorist explosion on the London Underground, inner-city schoolteacher Helen is pregnant and lost until a stranger leads her to safety then vanishes. Obsessed with finding him, she begins to lose her grip on reality – and her family. As their marriage fractures, her husband Frank proposes a daring plan: sell up and sail the Atlantic with their son Nicholas and troubled foster daughter Sindi on the Innisfree, the very boat on which the couple first fell in love. What begins as a daring bid for salvation turns into an epic journey. The ocean proves as wild and unpredictable as the heartbreak Helen is trying to outrun. Will the voyage meant to save them destroy them instead? With a fiercely funny and maverick heroine at its helm, Ocean is a powerful exploration of the uncharted waters of the human heart. The award-winning author of Larchfield takes us on a gripping, beautifully written voyage into the depths of what it means to heal – and to live.

Leseprobe

Praise for Ocean

‘A ferociously intense portrait of a mind, marriage and family in extreme turbulence. Startling and dramatic, it made me very glad to be on terra firma’

Amanda Craig

‘Such a powerful novel, with moments of real tenderness and outright terror, but all firmly in the realm of real feelings and emotions. Assured, human and compelling’

Gerard Woodward

‘Polly Clark is one of the most gifted writers working in Britain today. Ocean is both lyrical and page-turning, a thrilling novel that takes the reader on an epic journey, not only on the high seas but also in a marriage and within the mind of its fiercely intelligent and witty heroine’

Jane Harris

‘Visceral, lyrical…speaks to any woman who has ever loved and feared to lose’

Jane Campbell

‘Such a thriller – I was gasping at the end of each chapter’

Clare Pollard

Praise for Tiger

‘Combining the propulsiveness of a thriller with the raw yet meditative tone of a memoir, Clark writes with a poet’s ear and a naturalist’s eye’

Liz Jensen, The Guardian

‘Fierce, elegant and compelling as the tiger itself, this is less a novel than the very force of nature caught in fiction’

Laline Paull

‘A real and memorable achievement’

Allan Massie, The Scotsman

‘A captivating walk on the wild side’

Heat

‘Visceral … exotic … an impassioned celebration of second chances’

Daily Mail

Praise for Larchfield

‘That rare first novel that utterly achieves its great ambition’

Richard Ford

‘A beautiful novel: passionate, lyrical and surprising’

John Boyne, Irish Times

‘Clark has a wonderful eye for detail and a light comic touch… Funny, poised and affecting’

The Times

‘A beautiful debut about a woman’s struggle with isolation and sanity woven with the story of poet W.H. Auden, which signals Polly Clark as an author to watch’

The i Paper

‘An imaginative novel, written with poetic force… Moving and wonderful’

Daily Express

‘A measured and graceful novel’

The Observer

‘Mysterious, wondrous, captivating’

Louis de Bernières

Published in 2025 by Lightning

Imprint of Eye Books Ltd

29A Barrow Street

Much Wenlock

Shropshire

TF13 6EN

www.eye-books.com

ISBN: 9781785634468

Copyright © Polly Clark 2025

Cover design by Ifan Bates

Typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro, Zona Pro and Brandon Grotesque

The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Our authorised representative in the EU for product safety is: Logos Europe, 9 rue Nicolas Poussin, 17000, La Rochelle, France [email protected]

The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself

William Blake 

If you don’t become the ocean, you’ll be seasick every day

Leonard Cohen

For Lucy

Contents

PROLOGUE

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Prologue

Beauty in a wife is so essential that if it does not exist, it must be invented. I became quite a bit better looking as a direct result of being Frank’s wife. I was his prize, and my body remodelled itself to fit the pedestal. My accent improved. My hair thickened. Can you imagine? To be prized when you have never even really been noticed before? Who’d have thought that clunky old heteronormative marriage could have such transforming power? There is no woman its inferno cannot fire from plain Jane clay into porcelain Venus. And no woman it cannot contain, no matter how ship-launchingly lovely she may be, for marriage is a gallery of possessions; a display case, with the wife at the centre. Other men will look, and covet, and plot, but they will factor into their considerations that the wife belongs to another man. Of course I could not be Frank’s prize without being his possession, but I loved that too. Beauty in the wife reinforces the marriage.

But beauty in the husband is a catastrophe. It’s a bomb rolling unexploded in the hull. The beautiful husband draws assaults on the marriage, and the assaults will not relent until either the marriage is extinguished or the beauty fades. Women, as Frank and I found, recognise no possessions of another woman, respect no marriage. The beautiful husband remains free and at large.

Frank’s catastrophic beauty came upon us so gradually, like a kind of weathering, or even a despoiling of the Frank I once knew, that I did not spot the moment of definitive change. But then, one day, he accompanied me to nursery to pick up our son Nicholas, and one of the other mothers stared at the baby, then at Frank, then sidled up to me to whisper, ‘That’s your husband?’ and I realised something momentous had taken place. I was confused because my husband was still in my mind shy dreamer Frank of the Innisfree. That night I observed him critically as he undressed to come to bed.

He had definitely filled out; he had hardened round the eyes and jaw; confidence inhabited his movements. If I squinted, he was still benign, still sweet to someone who had known the young man, but to someone who had not… I could see it now, the accumulation of masculinity, like a patina upon him. Instead of devotion, equality, fun – he radiated sex.

In that moment, as he casually threw his trousers over the chair, my husband Frank transcended us both, for now he held a monopoly over all the resources of the marriage. He occupied more space and seemed to have more weight than both of us put together. The beautiful husband recasts the physics of the marriage. He alters gravity.

Perhaps a different woman would be delighted to see her partner of many years in a new and ravishing light. But Frank’s beauty did not ignite desire in me. It struck me dumb with fear.

Love does not alter when it alteration finds…

The words turned in my head.

But what does it do when faced with a premonition?

The day Frank’s beauty announced itself was an anniversary more profound than the one we marked with cards and varying levels of ardour every year on 29th April. It was as if a countdown to a devastating event had begun, from which no amount of cultivated cynicism about marriage, trust in Frank, nor love for my child could save me. Sometimes I lay awake at night beside my beautiful husband and wondered if the devastating event had actually already happened, I had missed it, and I was wandering deluded in its aftermath.

For the truth of it was that I loved my husband, with all my heart. My love for Frank embarrassed me with its cheerfulness and its hope. When we married, back then on the deck of the Innisfree, I cried with happiness, and not because I was young and stupid.

I believed our marriage to be the most beautiful thing either of us had made, outshining even the child it contained. Even as it would come to splinter inside us and smash around us, still I could not fully imagine myself without it. And this was surely why I could not breathe a word to Frank about what I had glimpsed in our future. The survival of our relationship felt basic to my own survival, as vital a mechanism as thirst. My faith in what we had created made any journey comprehensible, every fire possible to withstand; without it there was only wreckage strewn all the way to the lonely horizon, and the slow collapse to the deep sea bed.

1

The day everything changed was a day suffused with quiet excitement. I waved Nicholas off to primary school with a packed lunch that pleased me, with its neat crustless sandwiches, hand-cut cucumber batons, and its little illicit surprise, a Kinder Egg that I knew he loved, tucked in. Frank gave me a lift to work, as he did every morning now. At the grand age of forty-three I was unexpectedly pregnant for the second time, and felt like I was carrying my own ocean, the person formerly me bobbing about on its surface like a shipwreck. At the school gates Frank helped me out of the passenger side and hugged me tenderly.

‘Call me if you need anything, and I’ll zoom round here and bring it to you,’ he said.

‘Even pickles?’ I said, remembering my craving when pregnant with Nicholas.

‘Even pickles. I’ll feed them to you in the staffroom.’

‘That will be entertaining for them all.’

He threw me a full-wattage smile as he reversed the car. Despite my bulk I felt myself floating towards my day. Things were falling right, this time around.

Between me and my science classroom loomed the technical block, a brutalist concrete box on stilts. In this dank cavern the loners, losers, graffiti artists and skateboarders collected to smoke, grope and fight. I peered in as I shuffled by, looking for familiar faces. It was early, and cold, so it wasn’t too busy. Just a few students getting in their first smoke of the day against the backdrop of graffiti.

Sindi gave me a nod over her shoulder as she contemplated a tiny patch of undefaced wall, spray can in one hand, cigarette in the other. Her bare thighs beneath the tucked-up skirt gleamed like stalagmites. Dwayne roared so close to me on his skateboard I almost overbalanced. ‘Sorry, Miss!’ He swept between the pillars, then hopped off and flipped the board up into his arms before vanishing into a corner with his mates.

I waved, and shuffled on.

Horizon Heights was not for everyone, but I’d unexpectedly found my niche. These kids were survivors, mavericks and weirdos, and I felt drawn to them. I had trained as a biology teacher long ago in Preston, near Fleetwood, where I grew up, having a nerdy interest in the natural world that I longed to share with others. But after my father died, my mother wanted me to stay nearby, and I could see my life shrinking before it had even begun. I’d run away as far as I could, taking a sailing course in Lanzarote in order to escape further, and the idea of teaching fell away. I met and fell in love with Frank, so deeply that even when eventually a life with him meant coming back to land, a baby, adult responsibilities, it still felt like freedom. We had, after all, come to London, one of the biggest cities in the world.

When Nicholas was no longer a baby and staying at home all day became unbearable, I returned to the idea of teaching, and was grateful that Horizon Heights liked the look of me. It was a rough school, like the one I had attended myself. We might be in the capital, but I recognised these kids. They seemed to recognise me too. We gave each other the benefit of the doubt.

Breathing heavily, I paused at the bins. I had to pace myself today. A full day of classes, followed by an intervention, which I had been planning for ages. I was a little apprehensive about it, as I simply got so tired these days, and an Intervention was not something to be undertaken lightly. Frank kept urging me to take my maternity leave early, and I was starting to see his point. I was tired of lugging myself around. Looking down, I realised how much I missed my feet. I used to love shoes, and I had small, pretty feet that looked wonderful in anything, or naked. Now my belly charged ahead of me like some kind of ill-designed hull pounding through the waves of life. I was only twenty-three weeks gone, but my body had gone into overdrive at the sheer impossibility of this pregnancy. It was throwing everything at it. As if expressing its own astonishment at being here again, it was creating the most marvellous grotesque out of my base material. I sallied on to the front door, and all my weariness was swept away by the joy I felt as I entered my own domain.

Sprayed in purple on the door of the classroom, new words:

FUCK U MISS AND

THE HORSE U RODE IN ON

The smell of paint was overwhelming. I covered my nose and mouth and observed the tag, the uneven lettering. A snort at the inclusion of ‘Miss’ leaked out from behind my fingers. This was Sindi’s work. I imagined her sneaking out early, breakfastless, yelled at by Clint, her foster father, the can stashed in her rucksack. And then, lifting off after ‘Fuck U’, where so many would have stopped in triumph, her tongue fat in her cheek.

The thing was, she was proud of her vandalism, and lately the incidents had been escalating. I believed they showed spirit, rather than personal attack. Nevertheless, it couldn’t go on – her rude talents would never be appreciated by wider society. I braced myself to inform Sindi and the whole class that any more defacements of the classroom would have consequences. In addition, the fumes were bad for me now. Coughing, I opened the door and went in. A moderate quiet fell across my science class.

I consider myself a practical person; in no sense a dreamer. No schmalzy Hollywood film would be made about my inspirational teaching. No children would stand on their desks in unified protest at my sacking. But I had found my niche. I did what I could. Day to day, I dealt in scientific facts. Simplified for lower streams and younger children, but facts all the same. And every now and then, when I could see a child was falling too far into hopelessness, I dealt in transformation. Today was one such day.

I shuffled to the desk, as if we were not all suffocating in the stink of paint, and paused to gather myself. My biggest and gentlest loner, Chalmers, appeared before me and laid, solemnly on my desk, a tiny pottery fawn, curled up, the size of my palm. No box, just a square of toilet paper neatly folded for it to sit on.

‘Congratulations, Miss,’ he said, nodding at the bulge of my belly, with the shy smile that is the preserve of some boys in the presence of women who could be their mothers. I didn’t know why I was to be congratulated now, as everyone had known about the pregnancy for some time. I wasn’t prepared, and stood frozen, a teenage-intensity blush detonating slowly up my neck.

Chalmers had a marvellous squall of black greasy hair and was eternally reviled for having wet himself repeatedly in class between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. He’d sit on the high stools around the benches to the side, and suddenly the ransacked silence, the warm stench. He survived it, in part because of his sheer pale mass. He seemed to be made of an indestructible yet benign substance, like a cow. And also, he said, the intervention had saved him. It was the first time I had attempted such a thing – realising that, without action, he would be bullied to a place from which he would never be retrieved.

I held the fawn up to examine it. It wasn’t expensive, but these were kids who had no money. Without its box, and with this odd timing, I knew they had stolen it – but I didn’t care. I turned away and wrote on the board behind me:

Intervention, Technical Block, 5.00 pm — Sindi Jackson.

Then I had to exit to the staff toilets to collect myself. Chalmers gave me a thumbs-up which I saw in the gloss of the door as I fled. I was so proud of him, as he was proud himself, of surviving and of becoming the natural orchestrator of a class activity, the theft of the fawn.

From time to time, throughout the day, I reached into my pocket and clutched the fawn in my hand. I felt its rough underside, the hole in its belly for firing. It was my lucky charm, from kids who loved me, and I would be so sorry when it was gone.

2

Rush hour found me leaning against the map on the wall of the Underground, eyes closing in exhaustion. Frank had texted to tell me he had a client meeting and couldn’t drive me home, so I had hauled myself along to the Tube. I willed the train to arrive; all I wanted was to sink into a warm, comfortable place, drift on the soar of hormones like a pleasure boat on a holiday sea, feel the turn of the baby like a porpoise in the waves. Nicholas was with his friend Louis; Frank ended his text with a promise to cook something delicious tonight to compensate for not picking me up. On the surface, all was well. But as the day played back over my half-closed eyelids, I worried that perhaps I had gone too far.

The train arrived, and gratefully I crumpled into a vacant seat.

How marvellous it would be never to disembark from this train, I thought; instead, simply pound drowsily back and forth along the Northern Line forever. In that way I could remain the timeless orb of possibility I was now. I was full of love for this baby. It was a love more direct and simple than that for my son, conceived and experienced in a very different time. I could say this to myself, because I had not always been suffused with love for the baby. I was grateful for the baby, because I had come to feel our lives were no longer enough for Frank and me, and we desperately needed a fresh start. That’s how it began. But love can begin in all kinds of ways, can’t it, and evolve into something else? It can begin incomprehensibly, wrongly, and yet become something that defines an entire life.

As the various risk points of pregnancy passed, and scan after scan showed a perfect foetus gazing kindly back at me, my love for the baby grew. It grew as we told people and imagined our family having this new person in it. And it grew as we talked about the baby to Nicholas, whose eyes lit up as he realised he would no longer be alone.

I love my baby. I smiled to myself, leaning back in the seat, imagining the day this new life would be out in the world and safe in my arms.

But my pleasure was interrupted by unease about Sindi’s Intervention. Though I am a scientist by training, life is painful and I believed that sometimes the only defence against it was radical metaphor. And I’d found it was a strong defence, as strong as anything science or society could throw up. But not everyone is strong enough to be reminded of their broken heart. I unpicked Sindi’s intervention, trying to find where I might have slipped up.

These rituals took the form I had developed over several years. It took place in a corner of the block completely out of view, which I had decorated with candles and lights. Dwayne produced an oil drum and wood to burn, as it was a December evening. No matter the cold, there was always an excellent turnout for Interventions. No truancy for such theatre. Chalmers was master of ceremonies, stooped and half-smiling with the photocopied schedule in his hand. Over time the interventions had become quite elaborate, though never exceeding the hour of a detention. I encouraged this sense of occasion. I grew excited myself as the day approached.

In the centre of the space, supported on some bricks, stood an open coffin. This was lovingly made from plywood by Dwayne and Carol, whose woodwork skills were enthusiastic, and painted black with gorgeous silver curlicues by Petra, who was on track for an A at GCSE in art, but clinging by her fingernails in science. The space inside was lined with sheets in different colours. They had been lifted from different homes – including mine – then carefully pleated and upholstered with scraps of material pilfered from the Home Technology classroom. Dwayne and Carol had cleverly installed hinges, so that the whole ensemble could be folded away and stored. It was really very beautiful. I laid flowers inside.

With twenty or so students gathered round, Sindi hopped into the casket with a kind of alacrity that I remembered in my own little boy, leaping into bed with me with not a tweak of shame at his need. Eagerly, she got into position, her uniform pulled modestly to the correct length, woolly tights on, her eyes closed, her hands crossed over her chest. I laid the lid over her, sending an obelisk of shadow over her pale skin, a wisp of frosty breath escaping from her lips. A barely discernible ripple of fear faded from her cheek as the lid closed.

Now, it was sealed shut, with a little vent for air. I leaned over the vent and said, ‘You okay in there, Sindi?’

A tiny yes Miss.

Sindi was fifteen, and I had been thinking about her Intervention for weeks. I could not see that anything less radical could save her. An orphan, she strolled around inside in my conscience as if auditioning to be my daughter. She had the kind of charisma that was about force, not beauty; like certain men possessed. She was not vain in any way, wore no makeup, but if anything her lack of mask over her strong features only increased her magnetism.

Every day, when Sindi got off the bus, she would hitch up her skirt to micro length and tie her blouse up, exposing as much midriff and leg as possible. Having done this, however, all she’d go on to do, the same every day, was to spray her tags beneath the Technical Block, or sit barelegged alone in a corner of the playing field and smoke her Embassy Regals. She wore no jewellery and her long hay-coloured hair hung around her in matted vines, less a deliberate attempt to cultivate dreadlocks than indifference.

No one, not the boys, not the male teachers, let alone the world outside, was going to let Sindi smoke peacefully, half-naked, alone. It had started already, lads making that journey across the scrub to loiter beside her. Teachers lifted their heads as she made her sensational way down the drive. She was an inspiration to the younger girls, who tried to copy her. Classroom windows would fly open: ‘Sindi, pull your skirt down!’ And she would, absently, until out of range, when up it would go. I brought in wool tights because she looked so cold. It was a sign of the trust between us that she did, later, wear them if it was freezing in the class. Off they’d come for the technical block or the playing fields though. She resented covering herself, but had no coherent reason for why. She didn’t see any provocation in her actions, nor danger. She expressed no interest in her future.

Watching her in the hallucinogenic swirl of my hormones in the early days of pregnancy made me want to cry. In the end I could stand it no longer. I waddled over the playing fields to sit with her, putting my arms around her and resting my swollen cheek on her cold shoulder. She turned that strong face to me, nose too big, eyes too close together, gap in the front teeth, the whole effect enough to make me give her everything to save her from all the things I didn’t understand, and all those I understood too well. She breathed Embassy Regal smoke into my face and said, good-naturedly, ‘Miss, if you’re going to do that, budge your chin.’ We sat there like that for the rest of the lunch hour, mostly in silence, with occasional flurries of chat about things that interested her. She was interested in money, how it worked, what it meant, how bits of paper or numbers on a screen could mean anything. She asked me to explain the stock exchange, which I couldn’t, but I promised we’d look it up together. My back hurt and my legs went to sleep and I inhaled at least three cigarettes’ worth of second-hand smoke, but I loved that hour. I had deterred the hyena approaches of the lads. But it wasn’t enough. Only transformation would be enough.

With a wave of his hand, Chalmers indicated that the ceremony was about to begin. The lid was lifted to reveal Sindi, eyes closed, wearing the Funeral Tie, velvet black, awarded to the corpse. The ceremony would stop if the corpse showed any sign of life. This was serious.

All the pupils were in full uniform, or as full as they could manage on their meagre household budgets. The uniform was black and gold. Not yellow, although the school did turn a blind eye to yellow items, instantly marking out those who could not afford to go to Farrah and Sons on the high street next to the school for the correct colours. There was a lot of yellow in my lower-stream classes. I kept an eye on the second-hand sales of uniform, occasionally slipping a pupil a gold item. I believed in uniform; it was probably the only thing that prevented many of the girls from coming in a glittery boob tube. But gold? This was a battle I had decided against taking up with the Head. I was doing what I could. I had found my niche. And in return I knew the Head ignored my theatrical activities.

Chalmers, with his shy smile from under the black mop, said, ‘We are here today to celebrate the short life of Sindi Jackson, who was hung for murder.’ His voice echoed round the shadowy pillars. Corpses were allowed to choose the manner of their untimely deaths. The only proviso was that they should be believable.

‘Hanged,’ I corrected. ‘Sindi deserves good grammar.’

This scenario was truly excellent. I could see Sindi snapping after yet another worthless man abused her, whacking him in his sleep with one of his own spanners or stabbing him in the heart with a screwdriver. I could also see her as misunderstood in a time of witches, where she could never be sexy and unpunished. Anyway, a hush fell over the group.

Chalmers went on, ‘Although Sindi’s neck was snapped so violently her head actually came off, miraculously her face was untouched.’

There was a pause as everyone digested this vivid scene.

Sindi remained as stony as if she was smoking out on the playing fields.

‘So,’ Chalmers continued, ‘I turn to her classmate Petra for what she would like to say about what she remembers of Sindi.’

‘Remember Sindi nicked that microphone thing from music? On my birthday?’ said Petra. Nods and soft laughter went round the coffin. ‘And we had that party down here and took turns singing. And she got out this red wig and sang “Dancing Queen”?’

Sindi remained like alabaster. It was very impressive.

‘Remember she got you to play it on your phone, Dwayne, – the music? But I’d told her a bit before about how…depressed I was since my dad left and how I…had been cutting myself and I don’t know, it was just so funny.’ Petra stopped and bit her lip. Then she added, ‘Also she had a really nice voice.’

‘Thank you, Petra. Who’s next?’ Chalmers said.

And so the ceremony went on, with each student coming forward to praise Sindi’s good nature, her sexy voice from the smoking… (This one was borderline as I insisted all praise had to be about what she had done, or had potential to do, or her character. Thinking of herself as sexy was the mess I was trying to save her from.) One lad surprised us all by mumbling, ‘Sindi could always tell you how many cigs you’ll get for your money. In a flash. She could tell you how many twenties, or tens, or even singles.’ There was nodding round the group.

‘Had she lived,’ I asked them, ‘what might she have done with her life?’

Fortunately interventions were planned. Everyone had two days to think up their answers. Without that time we would all have gawped, mesmerised, at Sindi in her casket, unable to visualise anything else.

Carol said, ‘I think Sindi would have made a great nurse, because she was so caring.’

We all stared fervently into the coffin.

I said, ‘I think she’d have been a good artist. Her graffiti was brilliant! Any more from the boys?’

Dwayne raised his hand. He spoke off the cuff, having clearly only just thought of it. ‘I think she could have been anything she wanted to be,’ he said, and there was a silence while we pondered this blessing that so many luckier children had bestowed upon them from infancy. I had said it often to my own little boy.

Uttered over Sindi, it sounded like a curse. Her perfectly composed face suddenly crumpled, and a tear slid out of the corner of her eye swiftly down into her hair. Her nail bitten hands covered her face and she began to sob inconsolably. I had never seen Sindi cry and I was horrified. The other children looked to me for guidance.

Dwayne said, ‘Did I say something wrong?’

‘No, Dwayne. That was a great thing to say.’

‘Put the lid down!’ Sindi cried.

‘But Sindi—’

‘Now!’

Reluctantly I lowered the lid and directed the other kids’ attention to the cake. There was always cake after the ceremony, which the kids usually guzzled with the solemn intensity of five-year-olds.

‘Sindi will be fine – eat up!’ I said cheerily.

Sindi’s muffled sobbing drifted out in pauses across the hovering students. Chalmers got the music going, drowning out the sound, and slowly everyone began to relax. I stood beside the casket in the gloom, hand on the lid, a smile stuck on my face, frightened to open it. Had it been too much? I tapped gently and asked though the vent. ‘Won’t you come out Sindi? Have some cake?’

To my enormous relief, the lid slowly raised and Sindi clambered out. Her eyes were red, her face pale. She submitted to an embrace and accepted a cigarette from Dwayne. ‘That was intense Miss,’ she said.

‘Did you hear them?’ I asked. ‘All the wonderful things about you?’ There was a daisy crumpled in her hair. I picked it out and she stared at me.

‘I wish you were my mum,’ she said.

With that, she wandered off into the group.

3

The squeal of the train as it arrived into into London Bridge jolted me from my thoughts of Sindi. The doors heaved open and I pushed myself towards the exit to cross to the Jubilee Line. But my way was blocked by people pouring into the carriage. How rude, I thought, wishing for once I had one of those Baby on Board badges so that I might receive some small consideration. Why did no one remind these people that you’re supposed to let passengers get off first?

Then I realised the people were screaming. And by pouring, I mean they were an undifferentiated slam of torsos and smoking hair. There was no room for any more people, but still they came. Smoke filled the carriage and someone pushed me so roughly I hit my head on the central pole. My arms swept around myself, because that’s a primal action. Protect the baby. I was falling, though in the crush it seemed impossible to fall, bodies were pressed against every inch of me. Light shrivelled, like that final moment of birth, when you know you’re going to die and you accept it.

For a second I fell back to my childhood; the times my trawlerman father let me come on the boat with him, with the crew he knew far better than he knew us. I loved to be among them, their oilskins drenched in scales, as they hauled the creatures from the sea. Numberless shoals creaked in the net, and crashed like treasure upon the deck. Now my own cheek slammed, unwanted, on the floor, and a body, a woman, was squashing me, the buckle of her coat digging into my cheek – how? And a heel, a spike, like a needle in a microscope against the edge of a cell. That cell being my belly, her heel digging in.

The baby fluttered in my belly, like the first time I felt it. Quickening, they call this, but now it felt like a struggle. Coughing, I pushed vainly against the hot floor, against the woman slumped upon me, as if we were in a Flanders trench and she was a dead comrade toppled onto me. I knew she was dead; she had the weight of the dead. She was a mess of broken parts all in the wrong orientation. Her ribs were crushing the last of the oxygen out of my throat; her heel was puncturing me; her metal belt was branding my cheek. Maybe she was in fact many people; I could not be sure, but outrage gripped me, that my baby was kicking and turning, that my baby was wriggling to reach me, and I was doing nothing, pinioned like a dissected frog.

In the stories I would hear from other survivors, many were certain they were going to die, and their only regret in that moment was that they would be so badly burned they would not be recognisable to their families. I was prevented from that kind of equanimity by the fact of my baby, which was fiercely alive in the tiny crushed space of my body. The smoke was affecting the foetus; it thrashed like a panicky heart; like a fish hauled over the gunnels. All I could see, writhing on the screen of my eyelids, were my baby’s eyes, similarly closed, sealed for the ta-da moment of birth when the world would be revealed. The two of us, blind and gasping for oxygen. The grimy floor of the carriage was our slab, and a body our lid.

I screamed, but there was no sound. The heel poked into my abdomen and the air turned to ash.

Something hooked my arm. Yanked. Again. I was hauled inch by inch through smoke and flesh to the open door. Blindly I kicked, giving everything to return to my element. Fingers clutched at my body, like sinners in a crater of hell.

Mind the gap! – an almost-laugh gnashed through my jaws because air, a tiny trickle of air, like water, was whistling down the tracks alongside the train. It was bulky with diesel, brittle with the abandoned atoms of old electrics, but it was not smoke and I drank it, I sucked it like an infant. Then I was pulled slithering onto the platform. No no no, I cried, because the smoke came down like a burning cannonball onto my face. Somehow I got onto my knees. The hand turned into an arm around my waist, a man’s voice in my ear. Hold on to me.

The arm I was clutching was hot and torn. I did not know then if I was clinging to fabric or burned-off skin. The air was a furnace: I dared not open my eyes, fearing my eyeballs would melt, or perhaps they had already melted and this was afterwards – the world of blindness. Everything hurt, especially my belly, where my baby lay still. This must be because – and this I knew, I knew for certain – I had taken up the load. I was saving us, fortified with my life-giving gulp of track air, and so my baby could rest, while I dragged us to safety.

At the end of the platform, the arms lifted me down onto the track. The chaos of shouting and screaming faded as we stumbled away from the scene, leaving a wall of heat and smoke behind us. Gravel prickled the soles of my bare feet as I felt along the sooty warmth of the tunnel wall. We walked for a long time.

‘Here, step into my hands,’ said the voice, at last, and I found myself being pushed up into a space in the wall. It was damp and lightless. I crawled into the space, dark as a grave.

A cigarette lighter smacked alight. A face glimmered into view. A man, soot-faced, glasses broken, blinked behind the flame.

I shouted, ‘I’m pregnant. Help me!’

Please let the baby move again. My arms cradled my belly.

‘You’re safe now,’ he said. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Helen,’ I whispered.

‘I’m James. I saw you falling inside the train. I was on the platform. There’s been an explosion.’ He erupted into spluttering.

‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

‘A bomb went off on the other platform as you were pulling in. Everyone rushed onto your train. But I guess all the electrics are gone, so it stopped dead. Ow!’ He dropped the lighter which had burned his fingertip, and we were in darkness again. He felt around on the floor and clicked it into life again. ‘I just went back to cigarettes from the vape last week,’ he said. ‘Stroke of luck. Lost my cigarettes though.’

‘Where am I?’ I said, sure then that I was going to die here, in this crack deep in the earth, my last human contact this person whose face I could not make out. I would never see Nicholas again, never see Frank, never hold my baby. The walls flickered, giving echoes to James’s every movement.

He held the lighter up to examine the space we were now in. It was a stone chamber, built quite deep into the tunnel wall, but just wide and high enough for the two of us to crouch inside. At the end of the chamber was an opening to a shaft, wide enough to crawl into. Cold air wafted thinly down it, and, I thought I heard tinny voices and sirens.

‘We’re in a vent,’ he said. ‘Lucky this station has one. I studied them, years ago. I never thought it would come in handy. You know there are vents from the Underground all over London? They look like little buildings on the surface.’ He smiled at me in the shadows.

‘What are you talking about?’ I gasped. The thought flashed across my brain that I was in some kind of intervention of my own. I blinked hard, in case he wasn’t real. But there he remained, curiously examining the walls.

‘Sorry, I’m just amazed at the coincidence. I went down quite a nerdy rabbit hole of this stuff years ago. Anything broken? I had to pull you really hard. I thought your arm might come out of its socket.’

I lifted each arm to show him, and myself. Pain seared through every movement: it was the pain of joints crushed, panels of muscle compressed like chipboard into unnatural alliances with other materials. The shouts and screams from the platform sharpened and then faded, like reflections in a pool. I wondered if this little chamber – James himself –were a vision, like people reportedly get before they die, and really I was crushed on that carriage floor, the woman on top of me. But the floor was cold, and I was in pain, and there was no white light of bliss; just the tiny orange segment that wavered as he breathed.

James went on, ‘I was just going into King’s Cross to see something. Last minute. About to get on your train and then – and I saw you. Where were you going?’

‘Home. After work. I live in Rotherhithe… So I was getting off to go onto the Jubilee Line.’

‘I…couldn’t help anyone else. There wasn’t time.’ He rubbed his eyes behind the glasses.

My…my baby.’ I whispered. Pain was beginning to focus on my belly. I had to look. I had to know.

The flame in James’s hand soared on its tiny mooring towards the oxygen from above. I ran my hands over my belly, wincing where the heel had pressed into me. My dress had the cracked shine of dried blood.

‘Do you think my baby is still alive?’ I asked James, urgently. My voice died to a whisper. ‘I mean it must be, right?’

James put his glasses in his pocket, so broken they were useless. His eyes were bright in the darkness, like an animal’s. ‘Helen, try to focus on what we do now, okay? Imagine we’re in an aircraft. You have to fit your own mask first so that you can help the baby. So, we know you have no broken bones. You’re not bleeding too badly. You’re awake. We are doing well. Here. Have a drink of this. You need to steady yourself.’ He placed an object in my hands. There was a lid: as I unscrewed it, alcohol wafted over me.

‘What’s this?’ I asked.

‘Talisker! It’s malt…’

‘I don’t know if I should,’ I said.

‘I think we’re beyond government guidelines, don’t you?’ he said. ‘It’s medicine at this point. You need to feel calm, and warm.’

Eagerly I gulped, and warmth enveloped the cold void inside me.

‘Good. Right. My phone’s gone. Don’t suppose you have yours? We could use the torch on it. There’s not much left in this lighter.’ But I had nothing, no bag, no phone, no coat. My bare feet were cut and sore.

‘I’m sorry…’ I mumbled.

‘Don’t worry.’ He shuffled to the vent entrance, his movements exaggerated by the shadows. ‘It’s steep but doable. We just need to wait till you’re strong enough to crawl up there. No problem!’ He beamed in the gloom.

There was absolutely no chance of me getting up that shaft. Pain was spreading from the wound in my belly. I slumped against the wall. James shuffled back and peered at me. There was a desperate edge to his voice as he said, ‘Take a look at it. That flask in your hand.’

‘What is it?’ I murmured, squinting.

‘You can’t see in this light, but it’s silver; really beautiful. Engraved. It belonged to my father.’

I ran my fingertips over the engraving. It was an intricately detailed sailing boat with a single tall mast and elegant lines. He said, ‘There’s an inscription along the bottom: I place my hope in the sea.’

‘I sailed on a boat like that! When I was young. She was called the Innisfree.’ I felt air closing round me as if I was falling asleep.

The lighter flame sputtered out. The darkness enveloped us as cold and final as a vault.

James’s voice echoed close to me. I felt the vibration on my lips.

He said, ‘Helen, tell me about that, the Innisfree, when you were young. Don’t stop. Tell me it all.’

‘I can’t remember… I…’ Leaning now against him, the memory drained from my mind. I rested my head on his chest, and through the charred fabric caught the faint scent of lemons. It transported me for a moment to a garden Frank and I had once visited in Lanzarote, and there was a lemon tree in it, and the lemons were massive and ripe, filling the palm of Frank’s hand. Dreams were coming for me, I knew this. Tears poured down my face. I knew what was going to happen, what had already happened.

‘James, I can’t live without my baby,’ I whispered.

In the darkness, I felt James’s hand upon my head. He said nothing, just stroked my hair while I wept.

4

Frank’s voice: ‘There are cordons everywhere. I ran all the way from the intersection.’

A woman’s voice: ‘You’re James?’

‘No, I’m her husband, Frank. You rang me!’

‘Oh! It’s just that she called out James and woke up very distressed. We gave her some sedatives.’

My dry eyes opened a crack. A bag of saline dripping light. A harsh smell of antiseptic. Frank. My swollen tongue tried and failed to form his name. I was so happy to see him. He would sort out this mess. But my face remained immobile, my arms trapped beneath the sheet.

Frank said, ‘She’s pregnant. You know that, don’t you? And I meant to drive her home, and I couldn’t. I had a client meeting and I couldn’t, I didn’t…’ His eyes were red and wide, like a man stumbling into a smoking carriage. ‘Is she going to be all right?’ he asked.

The nurse adjusted my drip, right at the edge of my field of vision. Even though I could barely see her, I knew she was staring at my husband. It is perfectly possible to be half-conscious in hospital and simultaneously fully cognisant of the effect of Frank. She was very young and had dyed black hair volumised and arranged into a generous bun at the back of her head, like an air hostess or Jackie Kennedy. ‘Your wife lost a lot of blood when we operated. She has torn muscles in her shoulder and, we think, a concussion. She will be all right. But James – Frank – she may be very shocked when she comes round. You should prepare yourself.’

The nurse laid a hand on my husband’s arm. It is entirely possible to receive good news about your survival, and yet to want to smack your nurse in the face. Frank didn’t react to her hand on his arm, nor her standing close to him. He seemed not even to notice. The sedatives were like quicksand, dragging me down and away.

‘Do you want to know?’ she asked.

Of course he doesn’t want to know! He’s nodding because…because…

‘A little girl. We couldn’t save her. I’m so sorry.’

My husband put his head in his hands and wept. I watched him sorrowfully through the bars of my eyelashes. Sleep clawed me down again.

*

Frank said, laying some very expensive chocolates on the nurses’ station, ‘Thank you for all you’ve done.’

It was a week later, I’d been cleaned and tidied, and I was being discharged. They’d have preferred to keep me in, for psych evaluations. But I was a walking burial mound now and would permit no further exhumation.

Breezily, I’d agreed to some outpatient counselling so that doctors’ brows would stop furrowing and I would be allowed to go. But I knew that what awaited me could not be exorcised by words or tamed with medication. Already I was a stranger to myself, as if I had been raised by wolves and stumbled back into society. Everything carries on, the world keeps turning, running on dismay.

The three nurses at the station cooed thanks as one for the chocolates. They were, I was sure, given every brand and type of chocolate in existence multiple times a day, and I hoped our unoriginality didn’t make us seem ungrateful. For I was not ungrateful. I was indeed alive. It was just that this fact was irrelevant now.

The nurses were incarcerated in identical uniforms. Despite this they had an individuality that mesmerised me – one had a paperback of Game Of Thrones splayed to the side, and her hand kept creeping towards it and resting on it, as if it was a tiny hand-pillow; another brought me out in a sweat with her resemblance to my mother; the third, my Jackie O, my ghastly flirt-nurse, was smiling fretfully at Frank as she sashayed out from behind the station and handed me an office file box. It had the clothes I’d been found in, and an ultrasound. I slammed the lid back shut.

She placed a sympathetic hand on my arm. ‘I know it doesn’t seem that way right now, but you have been really lucky. Seventy dead! That’s many more than the July 2005 attacks.’

‘My baby wasn’t lucky,’ I said.

‘Of course. I’m so sorry. I wasn’t thinking…’ she said.

Frank smiled amiably, said, ‘Thanks again,’ and gently turned us away.

We walked in silence down the stairs, as I could not face the lift. Our shoes squeaked on the floor. I remembered a long time ago when I had taken a three-year-old Nicholas on his only visit to my mother. The house had a chilly, sad feel. Nicholas had climbed down from my knee and gone to the front door and waited there like a dog. When I went to bring him back to the sitting room, he whispered, ‘I want to go home.’ Sometimes the world you know explodes, depositing you in another. You can’t talk about your baby, because no one speaks that language here. The person who brought you here has gone.

At the exit I pressed the box with its ultrasound into the bin. The automatic doors were iridescent in the winter sun. I took a deep breath and touched them and they sailed open, bathing us in freezing air.

Frank squeezed my hand. ‘Now I should warn you,’ he said. ‘Nicholas is extremely excited and he has supervised a whole welcoming party. Balloons. A cake. Can you cope with it?’

‘Does he understand about the baby?’

‘I told him, and he only cares about you.’

‘Okay,’ I said.

Frank kept his hand over mine in the car, only moving it to change gear. As we sat for a while in traffic, he said, ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t there, Helen. I’m so sorry.’

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘It’s not your fault.’

When at last we pulled up outside the house, with its clutch of balloons on the door, I did not, at first, recognise it as my home.

5

Romy, the bereavement counsellor, was straight-backed and clear and her clothes crackled like a newly kindled fire. She had a strict parting in her luscious white hair, but a libidinous crown, where the hair bobbed up and would not be contained.