Moran

Somebody was in front of him.

He was on his way to the next one. A man, sitting up in the road by the kerb near the fire appliance on its side, moving his hands in front of his face as if he were looking for something in the air. He was on his way to him, across the junction, through the glass, and somebody was in front of him, and he went round them.

They were in front of him again.

He went round them the other way. He did not look at who it was. It was somebody standing in the road, between him and the next one, and he had a rule, and the rule was the next one, and he went round.

They were in front of him again.

He stopped.

He looked at them. At the uniform. The City’s. White with the dust of Grand Central and grey with the dust of here and red on the front, a lot of red, down the shirt, on the sleeves, to the elbows, like his. No hat. Hair white, and grey, and in one place at the side, over the ear, dark, stuck down. A face.

He looked at the face.

It was Teresa.

She was standing in front of him in the road with her hands at her sides, very still, a yard away, looking at him, and she was not saying anything. He could see that she was not saying anything. Her mouth was shut. She was standing there and looking at him, and she had been, he understood, for some time. She had been standing in front of him and stepping in front of him and standing in front of him again, and waiting, without saying anything, for him to see her.

He saw her.

---

She did not touch him at first. She stood there and let him see her, and he saw her face do the thing it had done at Grand Central on the floor in the dust, the thing he had never seen on it before, and this time it did not shut down like a lid. It stayed. It stayed on her face and she let it, and she looked at him with it on her face, and then she put her hands up and took his face between them.

Her hands were cold. He felt that. He had not felt anything for a long time, not the glass in his palms or the sun on his neck or his own feet on the road, and he felt her hands on his face, cold, on both sides, holding it still, the way his mother had held it when he was six and had come in from the street with his lip split and would not stop moving.

She held his face and looked at it.

Then she let go, and took her pocketbook out of her shirt pocket.

It was the ordinary one, the one everybody carried, black, with the City’s crest on the cover and the pages lined and numbered and a pencil in the spine, and it had blood on it. She opened it, against her palm, and took the pencil out of the spine, and wrote, fast, in capitals, and turned it round and held it up in front of his eyes.

KEANE. STOP. YOU’RE BLEEDING.

He looked at it.

He looked down at himself. At his shirt. At his hands. They were red, both of them, to the wrists, the way they had been for an hour, and he had thought that the red was other people’s, all of it, and he looked at them now, because she had written it, and the red on his hands was moving. It was coming out of the palms, slowly, from the cuts the glass had made, and running down the inside of his wrists into his sleeves, and it had been, all the time, and he had not seen it.

And there was something on his neck. She was looking at his neck. He put his hand up. There was something wet on the side of his neck below his ear, a lot of it, and when he took his hand away it was redder than it had been.

She was writing again.

BOTH EARS. YOU’VE GOT BLOOD COMING OUT OF BOTH EARS. COME WITH ME.

---

He went with her.

He did not argue. He did not decide not to argue. He found that the thing that had been making him go to the next one had stopped, the way a clock stops, all at once, between one second and the next, and that he was standing in the junction in the sun with his hands bleeding and Teresa in front of him with her pocketbook, and that he did not know where the next one was any more, and did not know how long he had been looking for them, and was very tired.

She took his arm. She walked him up the clear road.

It was still clear. The lines of people with their arms linked were still there on either side of it, but thinner now, and some of them had sat down on the kerb with their arms still linked, and at the top of the road, at the avenue, by the park, there were more uniforms than there had been: the City’s, from other houses, in cars with the names of other precincts on their doors, and firemen from companies he did not know, and men from the transit authority in orange jackets, and a man from the gas company, absurdly, in a van, standing beside it with his hands at his sides looking at the junction as if he had come to say that it was not him.

Teresa did not look at any of them. She walked him up the road between the lines of people, and past the cars, and a young constable from another house with a very white face looked at him going past and then looked away, quickly, as if he had seen something he had not been told he would see.

---

The Municipal Building was on the corner of the park.

He had been in it once, at twenty-two, to be sworn, in a room on the ninth floor with a flag in it and a framed copy of Article the Fifth on the wall. It was the Corporation’s building, the City’s, an enormous grey stone thing with columns at the bottom and a gold statue on the top, and the lobby at the bottom of it was a great high arched stone room with a vaulted ceiling and marble floors and brass, and it was full.

They had requisitioned it. He did not know who had. Somebody. Somebody had opened its doors and carried the people from the junction across the road and into the lobby and laid them on the marble, on coats and on curtains taken down from somewhere and on the long cushions off the benches where people waited to pay their parking fines, and there were doctors, he did not know where from, and nurses, and people kneeling, and the lobby was full of them, in rows, under the vaulted ceiling, and it was very bright and very quiet, the way the junction had been, because he could not hear it.

Teresa sat him down on the marble by the wall, under a brass plaque, and knelt in front of him, and took his hands, one at a time, and turned them over, and looked at the palms. She took a roll of something white out of her pocket, a bandage, from somewhere, from one of the ambulances, and wound it round his left hand, tight, round and round, and tore it with her teeth and tucked the end in, and did the right.

She did not write anything while she did it. She did not need to. He watched her do it, her face bent over his hands, her hair with the dark place over the ear, and he looked at the dark place.

He took her pocketbook out of her shirt pocket. She let him. He took the pencil out of the spine and wrote, badly, with his bandaged hand, in capitals that went up and down the line.

YOUR HEAD.

She looked at it. She took the pocketbook back and wrote under it.

GLASS. NOTHING. SHUT UP.

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There was a television on the security desk.

It was a small one, at the far end of the lobby, on the long marble desk where the Corporation’s guards sat and signed people in, turned round to face the room, the way somebody had turned it so that the people lying on the marble could see it, and there was a man standing in front of it, a clerk, by the look of him, a man of fifty in a cardigan with a lanyard round his neck and his glasses pushed up on his forehead, with a clipboard in his hand.

On the screen was the Commons.

Tom knew it at once. The green benches, the long table, the mace, the Speaker in his chair at the end in his wig, high up. He had seen it on Mrs Abelson’s television on Wednesday, with the Prime Minister standing at the despatch box with one hand going up and down, and the Opposition benches laughing.

They were not laughing.

The chamber was full. He had never seen it full. Every bench, both sides, and people standing at the end by the bar, and in the galleries above, all of them, and nobody was moving. Nobody at all. Not a head turning, not a hand. They sat on the green benches and looked at one man, and the camera looked at him too, the Prime Minister, at the despatch box, standing, with both hands on it, flat, not going up and down, and a sheet of paper between them, and he was speaking.

There was no sound. There was no sound anywhere. Tom watched his mouth.

He could not read it. It was too far and the screen was too small. He saw the mouth move, steadily, not fast, the way a man speaks who has written down what he is going to say and is going to say exactly that and nothing else. He saw the Prime Minister look up from the paper, once, at the House, all of it, and down again. He saw the Leader of the Opposition, on the front bench opposite, sitting very still with his arms folded and his face set like a rock, listening.

At the bottom of the screen there were white letters. He could not read those either from where he sat. They were too small. They moved.

The clerk in the cardigan was writing.

He was standing in front of the television with his clipboard, writing on the back of a form, fast, looking up at the screen and down at the form, and when the Prime Minister on the screen stopped, and sat down, and the Leader of the Opposition got up, the clerk stopped writing, and looked at what he had written, and then looked round the lobby, at the people lying on the marble, and at the people kneeling by them, and at the two constables sitting under the brass plaque against the wall, white and grey and red, one of them with blood coming out of his ears.

He came across the lobby with the form and held it out to Tom.

He did not say anything. He seemed to understand that there was no point. He held it out, and Tom took it with his bandaged hand, and the clerk went back to the television.

It was the back of a form for a parking appeal. Written across it in biro, in a clerk’s hand, quick and neat and slanting, with lines under some of it:

PRIME MINISTER. 1.15. COMMONS.

Emergency declared. New York Province only.

Money, transport, premises for rescue. Single command, provincial & federal.

SOLDIERS. A cordon. First time ever. “They are not police. They will not police.” 14 days then they come back to the House and ask.

Does NOT suspend Parliament. Does NOT suspend any court. No detention. Nothing over speech, assembly, press. “Takes nothing from any person they had when they woke up this morning.”

Will not say who. “Nobody knows. Anyone who says otherwise is guessing.”

No number.

King at 2.

He read it twice. Then he gave it to Teresa, and she read it, and her mouth went in at one corner, the way it did, and she gave it back to him.

He folded it, and put it in his shirt pocket, with the telephone that had Mum’s stitches on it, unsent.

---

He took her pocketbook again. He wrote, slowly, in the capitals that went up and down.

MY BROTHER.

She looked at it.

STEWARD. IRONWORKERS. THE RED BANNER. AT THE LINE. HE HELD ME.

He stopped. He looked at what he had written. Then he wrote:

WHERE IS HE.

Teresa took the pocketbook back. She looked at the page for a long time. Then she looked at him, and he saw her decide not to write the thing she had been going to write, and write another.

I DON’T KNOW. THE LINE’S GONE. THEY ALL WENT IN. THE STEWARDS WENT IN LAST, WHEN THEY SAID. I’LL FIND OUT.

He read it. He nodded.

He took the pocketbook back once more. He wrote one word under hers, and a question mark, and turned it round.

EDDIE?

Teresa looked at it.

She did not write anything. She looked at the word for a long time, with the pencil in her hand, kneeling on the marble in front of him in the lobby of the Municipal Building with the people lying in rows behind her under the vaulted ceiling and the soldiers outside on the avenue and the television on the security desk at the far end with the Commons on it, silent.

Then she wrote, very small, under it, the same thing she had written about Frank.

I DON’T KNOW.

She closed the pocketbook, and put the pencil back in its spine, and put it in her shirt pocket, and buttoned the pocket, and sat down on the marble beside him, against the wall, under the brass plaque, with her shoulder against his shoulder, and did not take it away.