Short Story:

Marching In Time by Kristy Nicolle

Marching In Time

London smelled like smog once.

Sometimes it stank of raw fish. Even that was better.

Today it smells like smoke, like ash and death.

Black clouds hang overhead in a threatening blanket, and I kick what was once the corner piece of a brick down the street. My socks are uneven, one rumpled at the ankle, fallen from the grace of my knee as I force myself to keep walking.

My eyes are raw from crying, and the acrid sting of the air in my nose makes them water even more as I squint down the street.

I want to see it, and yet I don’t.

I’m caught in this moment, stuck between the warm nostalgia of my memories, and the cold truth of what I know is now reality.

I had known, after the sirens wailed and the planes had swarmed like angry hornets, that people had died.

It had not occurred to me, a mere thirteen years of age, that it could happen to anyone I loved.

Tragedy was what happened to other people, even in the middle of a war.

I thought I was safe, in my childhood bubble of blankets and bedtime stories, but after last night I know the flawless skin of this fragile illusion has been pierced.

I have been left to shed my false sense of security, exposed in the harsh light of this post-raid morning.

I walk the length of the road where I had skipped rope, and played hopscotch, where we had held street parties, and mothers had leaned over fences for bags of sugar or a spare speckled egg. Everything is deathly quiet, my heartbeat the only audible sound - a metronomic siren of warning for the surge of grief I know is just around the bend.

I tuck a strand of my muddy hair behind my ear, a motion my mother so often performed, fingers trembling.

The street had been high on both sides once, but now it is as though a dinosaur has come to attack, as it does frequently among the building block creations of my younger siblings. Dwarfing me, I stare with wide eyes at the plasterwork now crenelated with missing bricks and blackened by scorch marks.

A laundry line hangs from the destroyed balcony of an upstairs apartment, socks flapping like chargrilled flags of surrender in the breeze.

This street always seemed so permanent, and yet now it seems like a single sneeze could send it tumbling to dust.

I shudder, realising that my father, with his broad shoulders and immense height, had seemed just as permanent.

Then, turning the corner, it’s real.

In the blink of an eye, the memory of my home is replaced with a new, brutal image.

I run through the barren doorway, the instability of the wreckage seeming less dangerous than the assumptions of my anxious imagination.

Piles of burned fabric from the three-piece upholstery, the one my mother had been so proud of, lie atop the fleur de lis design of the living room carpet. I tread over what had once been the hallway wall, now a meagre molehill of plaster beside the devastated staircase, my heart shattering more with each step.

The wooden dining room table is no longer smooth and varnished, but splintered and jagged, half of it blown to pieces.

I wonder, were they left cowering beneath it, or had they made it to the Anderson?

I find their faces in family pictures strewn among the blackened wallpaper, shredded to ribbons by the blast.

A tear falling down the babyish curve of my cheek.

Then, I hear it.

The sound which had tracked my days since I’d taken my first breath, that had accompanied the wails of early bedtime and the elation of 5’o clock supper.

I scrabble around the skeleton of the table, ears pricked. Then, stumbling over to the debris which had once been the far wall, I see it.

A glimmer of gold, the cool clicks of its still grinding gears.

I kick the bricks obscuring it aside, pulling it from the wreckage and holding it in my hands like a new-born.

The grandfather clock, that had been my grandfather’s clock.

His words are not lost on me.

“Time just keeps on marching, whether you like it or not, Susie.”

Like the Jerries, like the Tommies, always marching.

I do not know how to keep step with the seconds.

I am no soldier, not yet a woman, nor a child any longer.