Free A World of Other People by Steven Carroll Page B

wink that says you never heard this from me. Not since the bombs stopped falling. Even though it’s been over a year since the last raid there’s still that lingering feeling that this can’t last. Maybe tonight’s the night. And each day brings her nearer to the day she promised to meet the young man whose name she never learned.
    The curious thing is she’s conscious that the days are passing. More and more slowly. And she’s beginning to wonder if, amongst all that dutiful sense of obligation, of keeping one’s word and fulfilling a promise, some part of her is anticipating the day as well. She tells herself it is absurd. She doesn’t even know the man and he may very well not be there. And if he is there’ll probably just be ten minutes of awkward conversation. And so when the day arrives and she enters the park it is in a come-what-may state of mind.
    She quickly looks about and there he is. On the same bench. Same attitude. That of a thoughtfulstatue. Staring down at his feet. But when he looks up and spots her, it’s the eyes she takes in. The eyes, a sparkle in them that wasn’t there before, that say it all; the eyes that say you’ve come. You’ve come, after all, and I never thought you would. For what’s a casual promise? And he is about to stand when she approaches and tells him to stay just where he is. That there’s no need to get up. And as much as the voice of her cautious nature, the voice of the reserved Iris, is warning her to be careful, the devil-may-care Iris is in the ascendancy, and as she stands in front of him staring down at his motionless form, she knows exactly what to say.

5.
THE SECRET SOCIETY OF LOVE
    It’s the girl in the ARP coat that he’s looking at. There’s a circle of dancers, but she shines, and it’s her he’s looking at. They’re playing a sort of musical chairs. Everybody’s cleared a space and the pub is large enough for the game. Somebody’s playing a piano in a corner behind a veil of smoke, and the chairs, six or seven, have been arranged in a line in the middle of the room. The chairs are shelters, and there are always two or three unlucky sods left standing when the music stops and the bomb goes off.
    It’s a sort of rumba, and they’re all in a circle dancing round the chairs: a Canadian, a couple of Indians, a Polish pilot — uniformed and un-uniformed dancers from all over the place, each with their handson the hips of the dancer in front of them, singing along with the piano and rotating slowly around the line of chairs in the middle of the circle. But it’s the girl in the ARP coat that he’s looking at: her head thrown back, a cigarette hanging from her lips one minute, singing the next. And he’s convinced that everybody else must be looking at her too. She’s got this life in her, that life he first saw in the park. In her eyes. Everything. She’s bursting with it.
    And when the music suddenly stops and the whole pub — all the onlookers, all of those like Jim, seated at tables or standing round the circle of dancers — shouts in a deafening chorus, ‘BOOM’, and the mad scramble for the chairs begins, he becomes tense. He knows it’s just a dance. Just a game. But his eyes stay fixed upon her, willing her to find the shelter of a chair, and he does not relax until she does. For she is quick. No, swift. She’s played this game before. In more innocent parlours, in more innocent times. Once in the chair, she takes a deep breath, eyes alight, face beaming. The scramble is over. The dead shuffle off into the pub to rejoin their friends or manoeuvre their way to the bar.
    And in that uncertain time between the aftermath of the ‘BOOM’ and the music’s starting again (likethe eerie silence between the end of a raid and the resumption of the working day), she stands, one hand on her hip, the other holding a cigarette. A picture, he imagines, of triumph. At the same time he’s noting again the sheer youthfulness of her, and that whole