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, Face-Timing,’ 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.
‘Hannah Jacobs.’
She sees that on TV they’re blurring her out below her face, so that you can’t see the blood, or maybe it’s the bra, maybe that’s just too much cleavage for TV, although definitely not the cocktail-party kind. She finds this a little funny. She imagines someone getting out a pot of Vaseline or lip salve and smearing it over the lens. But in here nobody takes any notice of her just wearing a bra, when yesterday it would have been shocking and unthinkable.
‘Our headmaster has been shot,’ she says. Totally shocking, totally unthinkable. ‘He’s bleeding and he’s very pale and cold. We need to know when an ambulance will get to him. He’s in the library by the door.’ Surely they’re giving it an armed escort or something, surely they’ll get help to Mr Marr.
‘Okay. My producer is finding out now.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Are you okay, Hannah?’ Melanie asks.
The smell of the cigarette is making her nauseous. She imagines Dad’s arm around her, his terrible French accent, Courage, mon brave.
‘Yes. It’s not me who’s hurt, it’s Mr Marr who’s hurt.’
‘Can you tell me what’s happening?’
Maybe the gunman is watching this on his phone as he has his cigarette. The arsehole smoking gunman knew to charge up his phone fully this morning, probably brought a juice-pack with him. If he’s watching this on his phone she’s not going to show him she’s afraid and she’s definitely not going to give him any information. She looks at Melanie in her lovely safe TV studio.
‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea,’ she says. ‘Do you know when an ambulance will get here?’
‘I’ll let you know as soon as I do. We’ve heard it all began with an explosion …?’
Like the explosion was the beginning of a story: ‘What’s the story in Balamory?’, ‘Postman Pat and his black-and-white cat.’ She’s being sarky about Melanie – Your fault, Dad, you prejudiced me against her.
‘A teacher’s told us that they were warned about a possible explosion in the woods at 8.20, the reason for the amber alert,’ Melanie says. Hannah imagines the producer’s voice in Melanie’s discreet little earbud giving her info.
‘Yes.’
‘The school is right in the middle of the woods?’ Melanie asks.
So not a CBeebies TV story but old-style Grimms’ Fairy Tale woods: a huntsman taking Snow White into the deep dark woods to kill her, to return with her lungs and liver; a girl in a red cape being stalked by a wolf through the trees.
But the explosion in the woods an hour ago wasn’t the start of the story; a prologue maybe, an introduction; not the beginning. Because it began – whatever ‘it’ is and it’s not a story, not to any of them inside it – it began when someone shot their headmaster in the corridor of their school. That’s when life as they’d known it before ended and something else began and reset time. Because she thinks the something else is measured in lifespans and how long Mr Marr has left to live, maybe how long all of them have left, started at that moment.