Chapter 39
THE AFTERMATH
The storm followed me into my dreams, but somehow I escaped it and found something else: a forest of dead leaves.
I half-opened my eyes at the same moment Sander did, and realised that my leg was wrapped around his hip. His arm was still draped over me, his hand resting between my shoulder blades. He didn’t push me off. I closed my hand over his. Everything was silent.
‘What time is it?’ I mumbled, reluctantly turning over to my bedside alarm clock. The little screen was black and numberless. I clicked the lamp switch, to no avail. ‘Oh God, the power’s out. How long have we slept?’
In the half-light through the blinds, my wristwatch said it was a quarter to ten. Before I could fret about missing class for the first time in my career, I opened the blinds fully. ‘Jesus.’
Sander came to the window and inhaled sharply at the red car across the street, its roof in a V-shape under the weight of a felled tree, its roots starfished above ground. An entire section of pavement lay in pieces, and clumps of earth spilled into the road.
‘What should we do?’ Sander asked a few minutes later, looking out of the kitchen window in his T-shirt and boxer shorts, hair ruffled.
‘We need to find a working phone.’
When we stepped outside and crossed the road, I braced myself for the sight of the roof.
Tiles and shingles were strewn everywhere, along with bits of other people’s window boxes.
I scanned the three-storey house for missing patches but, astonishingly, saw none.
The gutters were still in place. Our chimney was one of the luckier stacks that hadn’t collapsed – further down the hill, bricks and masonry left powdery trails from roof to pavement.
Sander and I followed the carnage, looking for a phone box along the distorted streetscape.
A few other people were walking around, agape.
The only sound that cut through the silence was a distant chainsaw: I spotted the yellow hats and dark coats of the fire brigade as they worked to cut through a tree that had fallen across the road.
It was the sight of them, and the scaffolding poles that had fallen from a gutted house to smash a car window, that made me worry if anyone I knew had been hurt, and increased the urgency of finding a phone.
I ducked into a booth outside a shuttered off-licence, but the line was dead.
‘No good, we’ll have to… Sander?’ I stepped out of the booth to find he was nowhere near where I’d left him. I retraced my steps until I spotted him standing over a fallen magnolia tree, its amber leaves scattered around the branches. His hands were on the bark, as if consoling it.
‘They might have survived a storm in winter.’ He sighed. ‘But the leaves gave the wind something to gather in. Could not take the force.’
‘Poor tree,’ I said, because it was a sad sight, especially when this wasn’t the only one. ‘I need to keep looking. I want to be sure my parents are all right.’
After another fifteen minutes, we finally found a working phone in a bank of three near Notting Hill.
I waited for my parents to answer, staring up at a billboard that had been ripped clean in half.
A couple of other pedestrians noticed I was in the phone booth and crossed the road to form a small queue.
Just as I was about to give up on my parents and try the Dance Hall, Dad picked up with an irritated: ‘3 Walton Street.’ Realising it was me, he shouted for Mum, then explained that the house had been busy with far-flung neighbours using their phone line to do exactly what I was doing.
‘It’s been like Piccadilly Circus in here all morning.
But I’m glad you’re all right. Be careful with candles, and switch off all your electricals to—’
‘Avoid a surge when the power’s back, yes, Dad, I know. I’m glad you’re all right, too.’
After unsuccessfully trying to reach Fiona and Jamie, and failing to remember Charlie’s new number, I held up an apologetic hand to the queue behind me as I dialled the Dance Hall’s stage door.
The night manager picked up and told me, in the weary tones of a man who’d already said the same thing a dozen times, that the Hall would hopefully reopen on Tuesday and that, according to a note Nick had faxed over, all company members should “sit tight but stay limber”.
When I asked Sander if there was anyone he wanted to ring, he shook his head.
‘What a mess,’ I said, referring not just to the physical mess but to the fact that, even if everything went back to normal by Tuesday, we’d miss two whole days of studio time to tidy up and mentally prepare for Cinderella.
‘Sander? Trix?’
As I stepped out of the phone booth and the queue eagerly shuffled up, Charlie approached us with a cardboard box in his arms, Isabel by his side carrying a large Woolworths shopping bag. The two of them had moved in together a month earlier, near Portobello Road.
‘Candles,’ he said, nodding at the box. ‘Thought we’d better get some before they’re all gone. Are you guys… all right?’ He suddenly clocked how peculiar it was that we were both there.
‘I didn’t know you lived in this neck of the woods, Sander,’ Isabel said.
‘I don’t,’ he said, realising too late that he’d walked into a trap.
Charlie looked him up and down, then gave the quickest, naughtiest smile. ‘Aren’t those the same clothes you were wearing yesterday?’