‘Your boyfriend is Rafi Bukhari?’
Should have listened to you, Dad.
‘He’s a Muslim from Syria?’
‘Tell the ambulance to hurry.’
She smiles at the screen again in case Dad is watching then she ends the FaceTime call with Melanie and takes off the headphones.
On Frank’s laptop, Melanie’s mouth is opening and closing as she speaks, tiny on the laptop screen and far away and not connected to her and the others trapped in school, because that’s the truth. When she was talking to Melanie, even though she didn’t much like her, it stopped her from feeling like they were totally alone.
Mr Marr has closed his eyes and she doesn’t think he’s still conscious.
She’s been imagining an ambulance with paramedics hurrying to the rescue, blue lights winking, siren calling – I’m here I’m here I’m here – but they can’t get to Mr Marr because of the gunman in the corridor and another one in the woods, and she thinks she knew that, secretly, all along but just wanted to believe help was coming for him. An armed escort had felt unlikely even as she’d thought it to herself. And even if that is what’s going to happen, they’re miles from any city so how long will it take? She’s frightened it will take too long.
‘We’re almost out of 4G data,’ Frank says, coming back towards her holding his anorak. ‘Not enough for FaceTime or the internet. Just emails now.’
He’s so cold. He must be lying in snow. Why’s he lying in snow? A game with Reception children? He must have just fallen asleep. His muscles are frozen, unable to flex, so his whole body jerks with the shivering. He opens his eyes. Hannah is bending over him. Not a game. His mind an island thick with fog. He tries to move. Can’t move. Try harder. Still nothing; as if the command and control centre in his brain has been disconnected. Why’s he thinking of a command and control centre?
It’s the soldier in you. Not too late to join me and the boys in the Paras.
I’m forty-five years old and a pacifist, Rob, he tells his older brother. And you’ve been dead for fifteen years.
But for a moment his brother reaches across from his single bed in their new foster home to Matthew’s and takes his hand and the dense fog thins a little.
He’s in the library. Something terrible has happened. And he just fell asleep and left them. What’s happened?
Hannah moves and in his line of vision he sees that she’s covered in blood. Please God let it be his and not hers. Must be his surely because she looks afraid but not in pain. She’s just wearing a bra and she must be so cold, much colder than him. He’s got someone’s clothes covering him, he can glimpse the edge of a coat, and he must give it to her but he still can’t move.
He sees Frank wrapping an anorak around Hannah and is grateful to him.
What the hell’s happened?
A flashback to this morning; a dealer flicking memories in front of him, no control of them. Putting the bins out in the dark. Crushing down the stiff black bin bags. The car iced up. Hands cold on the ice scraper. The print of a fox in the deep frost. The coldest day for five years. Snow forecast. Everything normal apart from the cold.
Lighting a fire in his office, the wood catching. Warmth taking the chill off the large Victorian room. Nothing to alert him.
An image spikes through his semi-consciousness: little hands are playing with clay, snow falling around them. But the young children aren’t in coats. They are inside the pottery room. It’s snowing outside the windows and one of the children looks up at it. Huge glass windows with no shutters: no protection. In the woods. Far from help.
Questions not memories barge their way into his mind, sharp-edged and brutal.
Are the children in the pottery room safe?
Did junior school get out?
Who is safe? Who is missing?
What in Christ’s name has he allowed to happen?
4.
8.15 a.m.
An hour and sixteen minutes ago
From the top of the high ropes course he watched the school. He was the deus ex machina, apò mēkhanês theós, άπó μηχανῆς θεóς; the god from the machine that nobody expects.
Earlier, he’d watched parents taking their children into Junior School, the gate in the fence left open for busy drop-off time. The school started early, 8.10 drop-off, 8.15 registration. And then the ant parents had left again in their ant cars, going along the drive to the road a mile away.
And then it was quiet.
It started to snow, just a few flakes, and he knew before the ants because the flakes weren’t yet reaching the ground. But he was prepared. His hands were in gloves and he didn’t feel cold. The man next to him cursed, but he ignored him.
In an hour, give or take a minute here or there, the headmaster would be shot and that would be a starting gun – he liked the economy, the violence, the aptness of that – and everyone would realize, if they hadn’t already feared it, if they were a bit slow on the uptake, that their lives and stories weren’t their own; and all the different stories he’d set in motion would play out at the same time, the simultaneity generated by him.
And he was trying so damn hard to be serious, but he was playing a game, a fucking game; he was a croupier, using hours and minutes as counters, and none of the ant people knew that they were on a roulette wheel, a wheel of fortune, wheel of fate, rota fortunae, Bhavacakra, with him about to turn it.
Movement in the woods below. He trained his binoculars and saw the back view of two teenagers running, holding hands. In another part of the woods, a class of young children and a teacher were hurrying along a path towards the pottery room. But he didn’t leave his place; not yet. Everything was set up, everything planned.
Before the starting gun, there would be a little alert. Perhaps the teenage couple would see, perhaps not. Didn’t matter. It was just a warning, a tap at the door; a joke.
* * *
A class of seven-year-olds, coats buttoned and zipped up against the freezing weather, raced through the woods, some breaking into a skip, jostling and laughing, with Camille Giraud, their sixty-year-old teacher, leading the charge along the path. She’d been ferrying them in a school minibus from Junior School to the art block in New School, the distance judged too far for little legs, when she’d asked them if they’d like to make clay acorns and now the minibus was parked at the side of the drive and the same legs that were too little to walk far were running and skipping, because clay was magic and part of the enchantment was the pottery room in the middle of the woods.
One of the skipping girls said she was frightened of the pottery room because it was like a witch’s house! And then a boy grabbed hold of the story, embellished it, and the kiln was the witch’s oven! Roasting children inside to eat! And they were all enjoying the quiver of fear because Camille was with them and it was just the pottery room and a kiln which had baked their clay-coil snails; fun to be a little afraid. And then it started snowing, a few flakes but enough to banish the witch and her oven, the children screeching the word ‘SNOW!!’ as though it was a visiting deity.
Camille had an odd sensation, a chill that wasn’t the snow; a feeling of being watched. Perhaps Lily, who’d been fearful of the witch’s house, had felt something too, which had prompted the image; something not quite right in the woods. But Camille knew her artistic nature could make her overly sensitive, so she ignored the sensation and listened instead to the children planning a snowball fight, a snowman and an optimistic igloo for break time.