When the Sky Fell Apart (12 page)

She moaned as though the poison was already burning in her blood, as though the sea water was already bubbling in her mouth.

He didn't stop.
It's all for the best.

They were halfway down the hill when Marthe kicked her legs out, hard. The bowl fell from his hand and smashed on the stone. Apples with milk and bread spattered all over the path, like vomit. The white crumbs of tablet and powder seeped into the soil.

Maurice cursed, tried to scrape it back into half of the bowl. The edges were sharp and he sliced his finger open, but he carried on. Stones and grit and drops of blood had all mixed in with it. He cursed again.

She would never swallow it.

He felt rage in the pit of his stomach, spreading up to his hands, his face, blood boiling through his veins until he felt like one of the damned German bombs. One false movement would detonate him.

So he put down the shattered bowl and walked to the cliff's edge and looked out at the flat blue sea and the unbroken sky. Never the same, yet unchangeable, immutable—even when the land was crawling with pissing, shitting dogs.

He drew in a steadying lungful of air. Sharp tang of salt in it. He listened to the seagulls screeching away and diving for fish. The same as ever, they paid no mind to the poison on the land. There must have been a decent shoal out there because there was a fair-sized flock of birds and they kept diving and coming up with wriggling silver in their beaks or gullets.

The sea had everything you needed, if you knew where to look. He had always fancied drowning would be a peaceful way to go. Just a few breaths, a burning while your lungs swelled for air and found water instead, and then darkness. How to miss the cliff face, though? That was the devil of it—avoiding being smashed to pieces on those rocks.

He was so lost in thought that when he heard the voice behind him he nearly jumped out of his skin and tumbled down the cliff there and then.

‘Why hello there, Maurice. And Marthe too. Lovely view today. You can see clear across to France.'

Edith Bisson.

Maurice nodded and croaked a hello. He didn't say anything else, because how must it look with his sickly wife lying beside a cliff path while he stood gaping at the view?

Edith had always seemed kindly. She had never talked down to Marthe like she was some sort of baby—she'd always asked questions and spoken as if Marthe still understood what she was saying. And she had never been one to skirt around Maurice like he'd two heads, as so many folk did because they didn't know what to say to a man who was playing the nursemaid to his wife.

He didn't see too much of her in the normal run of things, but he knew that some people didn't trust her, had her marked out as a witch or some nonsense. He'd never taken much heed of gossip and she'd always been pleasant enough to him.

Sometimes, she'd found him out on market day and pressed a tea or a lotion into his hand, though she'd no reason to look after him or Marthe. The concoctions didn't hurt; some even seemed to make Marthe a little brighter, but Maurice had felt ashamed to ask for more when he didn't always have the money or the fish to pay.

He kept on staring out at the flat body of the sea, stretching off to lands where people had never heard of Germany—or Jersey, for that matter. Places where people had never heard the word
Nazi
.

Edith stood next to him, watching the seagulls. She had a quiet way about her that didn't intrude on your thoughts.

‘Must be a fair few fish out there,' she said. ‘Those gulls are having a feast.'

He nodded. ‘I was thinking the same.'

‘Good weather for it, I suppose—bit of a wind, but the water's clear enough to see the fish.'

‘Yes, it's a north-easter.'

‘Mackerel, then, you think?'

‘Could be. Or bass. Something smaller, sand eels, perhaps. Difficult to tell at this distance.'

She stood a little closer. ‘Had much to do with our German guests, then?'

‘Not especially. I've not been out much. Best avoided, I think. You?'

‘A little. They're het up with me because they keep catching me out before curfew ends in the early mornings. As if I could be making off to the mainland with nothing but a basket of nightshade.'

In spite of the turmoil churning in his gut, Maurice had to grin.

‘I did offer one of the patrols a delicious nightshade tea,' she continued. ‘He nearly drank it too. But one of his cronies spotted it, so I spent a few nights in Gloucester Street Prison. Which I wouldn't mind, but it's freezing at night in there and my old bones can't be doing with stone floors. Do you know, buggers didn't even give me a bed? At my age. Barbarians! Still, it gave me a chuckle to offer him the tea. I wouldn't have let him drink it. But then, you never know what you can do, once you're driven to it. I think most folks surprise themselves, when they're pushed.'

Maurice caught her glancing at the apple-mush and the smashed bowl, a few white flakes of tablet showing. He shifted his boot to cover them.

Edith looked back out to sea and carried on, just as if they were having a cosy chat in a tearoom.

‘Still, it beats taking the whole thing lying down. I like to shake them up a bit—if we do everything they say then they really have beaten us. Speaking of which, have you been out on your boat yet?'

How does she know?

She reminded him of a tiny owl: head cocked to one side, eyes bright and sharp, looking right into him. So he didn't tell the story he had prepared for anyone who asked about his boat: that he had sunk it when he heard the Germans were coming.

Instead he said, ‘Not since they arrived. I can't leave Marthe, you see.'

‘Ah. Well, I've overheard a whisper that they're sending out a patrol to search the caves around the coast. Some swine has given out that people are hiding their boats there. Can you credit it? Folk giving information to the enemy, just for a little extra bread? I think it's sickening, I really do. Anyway, they're starting the search in an hour. They'll stop just before curfew tonight, I'd have thought, once they've been around all those caves.'

A muddle of words unspoken stretched between them. How did she know he'd moored his boat in one of the caves? It didn't matter, he supposed. But it did mean he had to get to his boat as soon as he could—keep it away from the island while the search went on.

Perhaps he could sneak out through one of the sheltered inlets where he wouldn't be seen? He could catch something decent, put it on the black market. Perhaps trade for some warmer clothes for the winter and some milk. Marthe did love her milk. But it was the same old problem: what could he do with her while he was gone?

As if she could read his reeling thoughts, Edith said, ‘I can look after Marthe for you.'

He held up his hands, shook his head, ‘No, no, I—'

‘Why? What's the bother? You're at your wits' end, Maurice. Any fool can see that. I suppose you haven't much food?'

He slumped, sighed.

‘Well, neither have I,' she said. ‘Just scraps and leftovers, and I enjoy fish now and then. So off you go. Go on, chop chop!' She smiled suddenly. ‘I'll look after her as if she were my own, love her.' She stroked Marthe's hair and the tenderness in that touch decided him.

‘
Mèrcie
.
Mèrcie!
'

‘Don't be grovelling, I haven't done anything worth thanking me for yet. Now, off you go. And don't worry about her food in the meantime. We'll make do. But I'd love a mackerel for supper, if you chance across one.'

He laughed. ‘Of course.'

‘And once you're back, I have a boon to beg of you.'

‘Yes, yes. Anything!' He felt as light as the winged gulls, swinging through the air.

‘Don't run ahead of yourself, we'll talk later.'

She bent down and lifted Marthe gently, as if she weighed nothing at all.

‘Come on, my love. We'll be all right, won't we?'

He kissed Marthe's forehead, once, twice,
I love you more than life, my soul.
And then he started to run down towards the caves. The wind buffeted Edith's words after him.

‘There may come a day when I'll be holding you to that favour, mind!'

CARTER was near breaking point. It was November, nearly five months after the Germans' arrival and they were making patient care impossible. Not only was he contending with the lack of medication and the slippage in the standards of nutrition, which meant that more people were succumbing to fairly minor illnesses, but there were the rules, the endless blasted
rules
.

By the time winter set in, the number of laws issued by the Commandant was absurd. The curfew and blackout were expected by everyone, and as long as the ward sisters used a little common sense when they organised the shifts, then the law wasn't much more than a minor irritation, but other rules were ludicrous. For instance, the regulation forbidding more than four people to meet in one place at any one time. It made gaining a reasonable consult or discussing a patient's progress almost impossible. The soldiers who patrolled the hospital seemed especially suspicious of the nurses, as if their harmless chatter were a plot for insurrection.

One soldier in particular took this law very seriously and questioned any doctor, nurse or patient he observed in long discussion. His name was Hans Haas and he was a burly brute of a man, pig-faced, with skin like corned beef; he enjoyed being able to push others around. Many of Carter's conversations with his patients were interrupted by shouts of
‘Beeil dich!'
with an accompanying wave of Hans's pistol if Carter did not immediately scuttle away.

Carter always obeyed, but felt like a boy again and suffered the familiar feeble, simmering rage that plagued him whenever faced with a bully, whether it was a snot-nosed boy in the schoolyard or his own father at home, towering above him, face brick-red from bellowing.

Carter and Father had parted, before he came to Jersey, on uncomfortable terms. Because of Will, of course.

Will had been a friend from university. At twenty-six, Carter was older than the other students, having already tried (and failed) to learn how to manage the farm alongside Father. So when he started his training, Carter knew he had to succeed, to prove to Father that he was not a dreamer, a feckless disappointment.

Carter had kept himself apart from the other students, preferring to spend his free time studying instead of drinking, and they soon stopped trying to talk to him. But Will, bright-eyed and sunny-natured, had gone out of his way to befriend Carter, always trying to pair with him in laboratory and dissection classes.

When Carter had looked askance at him, Will had grinned. ‘Why on earth would I avoid you? You're my safest chance of qualifying, Tim.'

Tim.
Carter had liked the warm way Will had said his name. And he began to like other things about him too: his easy laugh if a practical went badly; the way his blue eyes widened with joy when they had done well; the soft curve of his mouth when he met Carter's gaze. The way he shouted, ‘Good man, Tim!' and pulled him into a quick, hard embrace when they gained the top marks in their class.

Carter felt like a stone against Will's warm body, but the memory of the touch settled into him, as water will seep into cracks in a rock, pushing the boulder apart, even as it freezes.

And, by slow degrees, Will became the only person Carter wanted to see. He spent nights in Will's tiny flat and slept on the sofa or on the floor. Gradually, it seemed perfectly natural to sleep side by side, in the same tiny, single bed, bodies crushed together. Despite Will's hipbones digging into his side and the way he flung his arms out and elbowed Carter in the face in the night, Carter felt blissfully peaceful, separate from the world. Life and everything in it had squeezed closed, like the contracted fist of a heart. The only things that existed were this room, this tiny bed, this bright-eyed man, who teased light and life into Carter's darkness: tickled him until he couldn't breathe; tenderly bit his shoulder; mumbled, through bleary half-sleep, ‘You're
won
derful, Tim.'

The rhythm of Will's breath on his back, as he slept, rocked Carter as the sea rocks the land, as the pulsing heart rocks the body. He felt, for the first time in his life, utterly content.

Outside the room, among the other medical students, despite the dull thud of shame and fear Carter felt whenever he caught Will's eye, there was also something else: a secret thrill of belonging, of being
known.

After they had finished training, Will returned to London.

‘Come with me, Tim,' he'd pleaded, holding Carter's hands in his. ‘We'll find a flat near one of the London hospitals. Imagine it—our own little hovel. We can live on boiled potatoes and wine.' He laughed.

‘I…' Carter shook his head. ‘I couldn't bring that shame on you. Your parents—'