reading

1. Cara

It’s his eyes that grab my attention. Not the gun. Eyes like a doll’s: dark and malevolently blank.

Other details follow – the meagre scruff of beard skirting his young face, grey jeans and hoodie, a knife in his belt. These things register in a fleeting, abstract way as I walk towards the Tube station, my head still zinging with cocktails and revelations, the thrill of the illicit. The night is hot and clammy, a faintly faecal odour emanating from the drains masked somewhat by petrol fumes and cigarette smoke.

When I see the gun in his hands, my first thought is: That thing’s not real. Clunky and oversized, it seems an exaggeration of a weapon, like a toy, or one of those guns they give you when playing Quasar or Splatoon. The word terror doesn’t enter my head, even though the whole city has been on high alert all summer. Perhaps I am drunker than I realize, but when I see him prowling the street, his eyes sweeping for targets, I have the thought that this is a game – a stag party involving teams, some kind of jokey hunt that has spilled out on to the streets of Shoreditch. It’s the start of the bank holiday weekend and I don’t feel threatened yet. I’m too focused on my own misdemeanour – the person I’ve spent the past couple of hours with and how I’m going to explain it; how I’m going to cover it up. Sorrow is a long way off. I am giddy with alcohol and with the headiness of my encounter and all that trickles from it.

The air is split by the sound of screaming. My eyes dart across the street to a couple: professionals casually dressed for a Friday night date, kids probably at home with the babysitter. The woman is clutching at her partner, almost pushing him into a shop doorway as she recoils, face contorting with terror. The sound the gun makes seems too small for such an outlandish weapon – a firecracker, a sharply snapped branch.

It is not in any way like a game now. The woman crumples to the ground and the realization comes over me swiftly: I am witnessing a killing. Her companion reaches for her while looking up, his mouth open with the shock of an ending, the sweetness of the evening, his love, his whole life, already over. A bullet to the head and he is gone.

The street fills with panic. Screaming, feet pound the pavement, all of us running now. In the distance, an approaching siren whines. Everywhere swarms with movement, the crack of gunfire unleashed with abandon, limbs flailing, the wounded attempting to stagger away, flashes of blood on summer clothing, garish and visceral in its horror. I trip over a kerbstone and drop my bag, hands and knees on the asphalt, my breath high and light in my chest as I try to regain my footing. And it’s as I right myself that I see him: a second assailant coming in the other direction. He wears khaki fatigues, and heavy boots, and he walks with a military strut, plunging his knife with an air of detachment like he is stabbing pillows, not flesh and blood. His eyes lock on me now – those same doll’s eyes, glassy and unmoved, enmity in his blank stare.

My thoughts slow, and what returns to me now is a sensory memory of Mabel in my arms when she was a baby and I’d lift her from the cot – that instant when her soft, fragrant little body would meet with my chest – the familiarity of it coming over me in a way that is painful, knowing it’s going to be snatched away. And with it comes a rush of feeling: angry indignation because I’m nowhere near ready for this, rage because so much of my life is yet unlived. You fucker, I think with spitting venom as my executioner closes in, the blade of his knife dull with blood. And that is when I feel it: the sharp grip around my upper arm like a claw. A hard tug and I am falling backwards towards a voice in the darkness.

‘Get in!’ someone hisses, and I stumble back over a threshold, the hand still pulling at me, so hard it hurts.

We are scrambling up a stairway now, feet clattering over metal steps. How many of us are there? Three? Four? Is he coming after us? Up ahead, tiny red lights blink and dance through the darkness, and it takes me a moment to realize they are lights in the soles of trainers, like the shoes I bought for Mabel in Clarks. I have no idea where we are going as I charge up the flight of stairs after the others, my heart clamouring with fear, not knowing if this is a path to safety or if we are barrelling headlong towards our own slaughter.

‘In here!’ the voice says.

A doorway appears, fluorescent light beyond, and I hurry after the others, the door closing shut behind me, my breathing wild in my chest, three of us listening, an uneasy triumvirate, each face caught in a rictus of fear.

Strip lighting on the ceiling gives off a sibilant hum. Somewhere beyond this building there are whining sirens, screams, chaos, the crackling of firearms, but in here there is hushed silence and frightened eyes. A man and a woman and me, trapped in a room with a buzzing fridge, towers of bottled water and canned soft drinks, a table and some stacked chairs, empty hooks on the walls. There is a lingering odour of cigarette smoke, undercut by the hospital smell of detergent.

‘We should go,’ the man whispers urgently, and the girl shoots him a fierce look, puts her finger to her own lips to silence him.

Her face is small and triangular, like a cat’s. Short, cropped hair that has been bleached yellow-white, the colour of sour milk. She is smaller than the man, smaller than me, and she looks young – not much more than twenty.

The man mops his hand over his face and shuffles from one side of the room to the other. I wish he would stand still so that I can listen, so that I can think. His trainers squeak on the linoleum floor and I look down and see large orange sports shoes, their logo emblazoned in red, lights winking in the soles – the same lights I’d noticed on the stairs. I have a sudden flash of him trying these shoes on for the first time, admiring them in the shop mirror, and the thought makes me feel sad somehow. I bet he never thought he would be walking them into a situation like this.

‘Stay still, Neil, for fuck’s sake,’ the girl hisses. ‘You’re making me nervous.’

Her accent has an American inflection. I also realize that these two know each other, yet I can tell they are not a couple. Like the girl, Neil looks to be in his early twenties. Tall and heavy-set with hair that is probably reddish but looks blond under the fluorescent bulbs. His clothing, like hers, is nondescript – jeans and a white shirt. The words ‘Team PRET’ embroidered on the back of his shirt point to their connection. These two work together, and we are standing in the storeroom of whatever Pret store they work in. It’s only now that I notice, with a fresh plunge of panic, that the room has no windows. The only way out is the door we came in.

‘This doesn’t feel right,’ Neil says, and beyond the skittish nerves in his voice there is something else: movement in the corridor outside.

‘Quiet!’ I hiss, and we all freeze.

Blood pounds in my ears, and I see a small pulmonary throb in Neil’s neck, sweat beading on his upper lip. The girl says nothing, her angular features and tight mouth pulled taut in concentration. She is standing close to me and as we strain for a sound beyond the door, my eyes take in the white iPhone earbuds emerging from the neck of her shirt, dark circles under her eyes and a rash of tiny spots at the corner of her mouth. The three of us strain to hear a sound beyond the door, and when it comes again – a faint dropping sound, like a pebble falling on to wood – she moves quickly to the doorway, and reaches for the light switch, plunging us into a new darkness.

I have never experienced fear like this – not in my adult life. Fear that is pure and whole and occupies the body completely like some kind of parasitic invasion. Outside on the street, facing the killer, what I had felt was rage. But in here, trapped in this room, terror comes for me. I am rigid with it. Overhead, a blue glow fills the space where the fluorescent bulb had hummed. This ghostly memory of light redoubles the shivery fear I feel. In the darkness, we strain to hear a sound, poised on a terrifying threshold.

Neil moves and the lights of his shoes flicker briefly. From outside comes the sound of engines gunning, wheels screeching, but the night-filled streets seem suddenly distant. This room, our collective breathing, the furious throb of regret that has started inside me, seem to occupy a different plane, far from everything familiar, everything safe.

Run. Hide. Tell.

All summer long it’s been drilled into us. At work, we’ve conducted rehearsed emergency evacuations. Our building is a potential target for terrorism, and I have attended seminars and training courses to learn how I should react in various situations of danger.

But now that I am here, in this room, hiding, while murder takes place on the street outside, I do not feel safe. I feel trapped. I can’t escape the suspicion that we are sitting ducks.

‘We should go.’ There is heat in Neil’s urgent whisper.

‘No,’ the girl says firmly.

I look in the direction of her voice, and all at once her face is there, lit by the glow of her iPhone.

‘What are you doing?’

‘We need to tell someone where we are,’ she says. Her voice, although lowered, is firm and calm.

‘They might hear you!’ I whisper.

She ignores me and I watch her thumbs flying over the screen. There’s at least ten years between us, yet she seems the authoritative one.

As she taps out her message, I remember my bag – how I dropped it on the street. My phone, wallet, keys, Oyster card – everything gone.

‘Shit,’ the girl says in her deadpan tone. ‘No fucking reception.’

The glow from the screen fades, and the darkness feels cloying, claustrophobic.

‘We have to get out of here,’ Neil says, his voice punched with the jittery panic I feel.

‘No way,’ she replies.

‘I’m not standing around here, waiting for them to come and butcher me! We should run!’

‘Maybe he’s right,’ I say, my instincts thrown off kilter. ‘Is there another way out?’

‘The only other way is through the shop, and that’s shuttered. If you go back down on to the street, you could get killed.’

‘They were moving,’ I say. ‘If they haven’t already been shot by the police, they’ll have moved on to another street.’

‘You don’t know how many of them could be out there.’

‘What if one of them has a bomb?’ Neil counters. ‘For all we know they might have explosives strapped to themselves and we should be evacuating this building right now, not waiting to be blown up.’ His voice rises with frustration.

‘The police advice is to hide until it’s safe.’

‘But at some point, some fuckhead is going to realize the next big way to terrorize people is to hunt them down in their hiding places.’

I feel a movement of air past me, and Neil is at the door.

‘Don’t,’ she warns him.

But he mutters, ‘I’ll take my chances. You two can do what you want.’

He flings the door wide, and I feel a new surge of panic at the prospect of him leaving. All my feminist principles take flight, and I find myself scared at the thought of being deserted by this man. Two women alone in a room. What chance will we have should one of those crazed attackers come up here? As Neil heads for the stairwell, I am suddenly sure that if I stay here, I will die. I have to take my chance now while there is still a chance to take. The door is closing and I can hear Neil’s feet in his big orange trainers clattering down the stairs, and something propels me to push open the door and follow, nerves pinging all over my body. But before I even reach the first step, I feel the pincer grip around my shoulder again, tugging me back.

‘No,’ she says firmly. ‘Let him go if he wants. We have to stay. We have to wait until it’s safe.’

Her voice is low, throaty, surprisingly deep for one so young. I feel myself straining after Neil – the exit is so close. I can’t hear his footsteps any more, and the darkness of the stairway seems vaguely threatening. From somewhere outside, I can hear breaking glass and I shrink from it now.

‘Trust me,’ she says, her voice softer. ‘We’ll wait together.’

At the top of the stairs, there’s an Emergency Exit sign. The light from it casts her face in a green glow, and her eyes seem melancholy, pleading.

All of a sudden, I start to cry. Fat, hot tears burn my eyes, and I turn from her and head into the room, finding the wall and sliding down so that I’m sitting with my knees pulled up, the heels of my hands pressing into my eye sockets. Mabel, I think, picturing my little girl asleep in bed, and fervently wishing I hadn’t been so stupid, so selfish and reckless, that I hadn’t made the decision I did.

The light snaps on and I look up.

The girl shrugs. ‘Less scary this way.’

‘But if someone sees the light –’

‘They won’t. No one’s going to come up here.’

‘But Neil –’

‘If Neil gets to safety, he’ll tell some cop where we are and they’ll come get us when it’s safe. If he doesn’t get to safety, well … then, I guess we made the right decision.’

Her voice seems to hold the shrug, and she seems more relaxed now, even though her shoulders are high with tension as she lopes across the small room to free a can of Coca-Cola from its tower.

‘You want one?’ she asks.

I say no, wincing at the loud snap as she pulls the ring. I swipe at my eyes, embarrassed by the lapse in my composure.

Perching on the edge of the table, she takes out her phone once more. Despite the confidence of her decisions, there is a nervous, caged-bird flutter about the way her hands move.

‘I dropped my bag outside,’ I tell her. ‘It had all my stuff in it.’

Turning her phone towards me, she asks, ‘You wanna contact someone?’

‘I thought you said there was no reception.’

‘There isn’t. But you could line up a WhatsApp or a text. It would go through whenever this shithole picks up coverage.’

I think about Jeff, but what would I tell him? How could I explain myself?

‘Thanks, but I’m okay.’

She goes back to her message, but my thoughts have strayed now to Jeff at home, watching rolling news reports of the attack, trying to call me again and again, only to get no answer. Will he call Kamila to check? Does he even know her number? I feel a drag of nausea in my stomach.

‘I shouldn’t even be here,’ I say, and she looks up, mildly curious. ‘I don’t mean here, in this room – I mean in this part of London. I wasn’t supposed to be here tonight.’

Her eyes take on a different sort of intensity. Do I imagine it, or do they flare a little with interest? Her hands grow still, and her fidgeting stops. How strange this is, I think. An hour or so ago I was sitting in a bar trading jokes at the expense of millennials, making disparaging remarks about snowflakes. And now here I am with one of them.

‘What is it?’ she asks, interest softening her voice.

‘Nothing,’ I say.

‘You can tell me. I won’t tell a soul.’

It feels strange. The way she’s looking at me – the concern in her eyes, so unexpected. I’m a little drunk. All those Aperols are making my head feel heavy. And here is this stranger, offering me a space to confide in the most bizarre circumstances. But somehow it feels right. It feels necessary. Like refuge in a storm. Whatever happens, I need to unburden myself before I leave the room.

Everything in my life has been brought into sharp relief with this terror attack. The swarming confusion of my feelings – the doubts, the regrets over decisions made – all brought into focus in the light of imminent danger, the threat prowling the street outside. Private thoughts that I haven’t shared with anyone, stirred to life earlier this evening, now demand to be heard. And there is no one here except me and this girl with her dark eyes and plain face. There is something tranquil about her, as if she is unperturbed by the atrocities committed outside, but far from being wary of her unflappability, I find myself cleaving to it. Right now, she seems like the perfect person to share my secrets with, no thought given to the consequences.

I’m not sure how long we talk. Even afterwards, I cannot account for how much time we spend in that room. Whispered confidences in a strange place with a young woman I don’t even know. Giving voice to things I had never openly admitted to, not even within the privacy of my own thoughts. The atmosphere in this cramped space crackles with the static of fear, of time running out. The two of us wait to be gathered up.

‘I expect they’re dead by now,’ I say.

‘The terrorists?’

‘At Stoney Street, the police were there almost immediately. It was all over in less than twenty minutes.’

‘I guess.’

She fingers the rim of her empty Coca-Cola can, stares down at it and says, ‘I envy them.’

‘Who? The terrorists?’

A slight tilt of her eyebrows, and she looks up. I notice how her chin juts forward just a tiny bit. It lends her an air of determination, or stubbornness.

‘Not that they’re dead, I mean. But I admire their conviction.’

‘You do?’ I cannot keep the incredulity from my voice.

Her gaze is calm, clear-eyed. In a quiet voice, she almost mumbles, ‘I’d like to believe that much in something.’

There is something rueful and downbeat about her, but for the first time since entering this room, I feel wary of her. I think of all I have told her and feel the first shimmer of doubt.

When her phone skitters over the table, awakening like an angry wasp, we both jump.

She snatches it up, thumbs the screen, hesitates, then says, ‘We can leave.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes. But go carefully.’

We’ve been sequestered in this room for what feels like hours, and now, leaving it, I feel some residue of the place has seeped into my bones. I go first, down into the darkness, and it feels like a game I once played as a child in my cousins’ house: I was blindfolded, with all the lights turned out, everyone else hiding, as I stumbled from room to room, somehow afraid that I might never find anyone, that I would be trapped there alone, for ever.

I can feel her close behind me, and as I find the bottom step and move towards the door, fear clutching at my throat, instinctively my hand reaches out behind me until it finds hers. A hand that is cool and dry, papery skin over narrow bones. Our grip on each other tightens. Now is the moment. I reach for the latch, open the door, and slowly lead us out.

The street is cast in a greyish-orange light punctuated by a flash of blue. On the ground there are bodies writhing; medics in yellow jackets lean over them, bent on their ministrations. Splatters of blood and shattered glass litter the tarmac. Uniformed police swarm the area, herding zombie-like survivors away from the carnage. Ambulances and police cars stand guard on both sides, a police-cordon tape flickering in the breeze along the perimeter. Someone starts shouting at us the moment we emerge. But what stands out above all else are the white sheets on the ground that cover the slain. The street is littered with them. My insides turn to liquid, bile comes up the back of my throat, and just then the girl squeezes my hand. I had forgotten she was there. Her nails dig into me, reaffirming our connection. It is only now as the police officer reaches us that I realize I do not know her name.

‘Quickly,’ the officer says, taking hold of my arm.

I don’t look back, as I’m ushered away. But I do look down. And as we hurry away from that place, that glimpse of hell, my gaze is caught by a pair of feet emerging from beneath one of those sheets. Orange trainers. Lights that once danced in the soles, now extinguished.

3. Cara

It is six hours since it happened. Six hours since I hid in that room. Beyond the windows of our apartment, a grainy light filters through the night sky. I can feel Jeff’s hand in mine, the reassuring pressure of his thumb passing over the ridges of knuckles and bones.

A cup of tea sits cooling on the table in front of me. A cold skin has formed on the surface, the sight of which makes my stomach retract in tight revulsion. He has stopped urging me to drink it. I look down at his hand in mine, and note the whiteness of my skin, the unfamiliarity of it. For a disconcerting moment, I have the feeling that the hand is not mine, but a part of someone else. A foreign object. Everything in the room is impacting strangely upon me.

‘What did the police say?’ he asks gently. ‘Will they want to speak with you again?’

‘I don’t know. I gave them my contact details.’

‘But you did tell them what happened? You did tell them what you saw?’

‘Yes. But there were so many people. So many accounts.’

All at once I am back there on the street, the strobe of blue lights cutting through the night air, white sheets on the ground concealing the lumpen shapes of bodies. A female officer’s hand gripping my upper arm with a firmness that only served to remind me of the flimsiness of my own flesh, my mortality.

‘You’re alright,’ she kept saying to me, her voice steady and reassuring, but I felt the urgency in her grip, the desire to get away from the site of all that killing.

I was ushered to an Italian café I knew well – a boisterous place, full of gentle mockery, each customer addressed in terms of intimacy. It was part of the strangeness of the night that this café now seemed to cower beneath a weight of hushed silence. Shaken survivors were herded inside to sit quietly at tables, some whispering into mobile phones, others holding their heads in their hands or staring blankly into the middle distance. The gregarious Italian waiters, sombre now, administered hot drinks while uniformed police hunkered down at tables, taking statements. It was only as I wordlessly accepted the hot coffee put in front of me that I realized she wasn’t with me – the girl from the storeroom. I got to my feet and looked about, craning for a glimpse of that yellow-white hair, those trailing earbuds, but to no avail. She was gone, and I could not explain to myself the disappointment it made me feel.

‘Cara?’

My thoughts snap back to the present. Jeff is staring at me, concern etched into his face. I look at him in the dawning light, still in his dressing gown, worry and lack of sleep making him look his age. It is only recently that his hair has thinned, whitish-grey hairs threading through a dark-brown thatch. The lines that run from the sides of his nose to the corners of his mouth have deepened into dark grooves. He is fifteen years older than me – a disparity that has never bothered me. When we got married five years ago, I believed that the difference in our ages was the only gap that could ever exist between us, and that it would blur in time. I believed that we were meant to be together.

‘You still look shaken,’ he remarks. ‘I wish there was something I could do or say to help.’ For just a moment, the way that he is holding my hand, the deep concern in his eyes, makes me think that this is the thing that will bring us close again. The knowledge that we could, so easily, have been violently torn apart. We love each other. We have made a life together. Surely that is all that matters?

‘I think you should have a brandy,’ he tells me, letting go of my hand and leaving his chair, heading towards the kitchen cabinet we call the drinks press. The thought of alcohol repulses me right now. I’ve already had a skinful, the dregs of it still spinning down the drain of my thoughts, making me feel heavy-limbed and overused, so I stop him and tell him no.

‘You’ve had a shock,’ he insists.

‘Look outside,’ I tell him, pointing towards our kitchen window. Beyond the glass panes, the sky shows signs of sunrise, dirty yellow clouds like nicotine stains.

‘Mabel will be awake soon. I can’t start the day with a drink, now, can I?’

He has his hand on the corner of the press, a frown puckering his forehead. His concern has morphed into something else. He no longer looks anxious. It’s something closer to unhappiness.

‘Have you called Kamila?’ he asks, shaking me from my thoughts.

‘Kamila?’

‘Didn’t you say you left her at the Tube station?’

A little trill of nerves pulses in my stomach.

‘Yes.’

‘Well, have you checked if she got home?’

‘I –’

‘Or let her know that you’re okay? She must be worried.’

‘I lost my phone, remember? How could I?’ Despite my best intentions, these words come out sounding scratchy and irritable.

I have already explained to him how I dropped my bag on the street, offering it up as the reason why I didn’t call him to let him know. Why his first inkling that something had happened was when I arrived through the front door, grey-faced and shaken, pushing past him to Mabel’s room. I needed to feast my eyes on my sleeping child to reassure myself that even though my world had tilted in the night, the important things remained constant, true, safe.

‘Besides, I saw her going down into the Tube station. She would have been well away by the time it happened.’ I don’t look at him as I say this.

‘You should still call her,’ he urges softly.

He is right, and I know it. My husband, who I have known and loved for six years now – the man I felt relieved and grateful to marry, knowing how safe and protected he made me feel, a harbour in a storm – is someone I trust and depend on, whatever the circumstances. But now, I feel a scream rising up inside me at his sound advice, his sensible approach. Hold me! I want to shout at him. Can’t you, just for once, forget about doing the right and sensible thing, and just hold me!

‘Do you want to borrow my phone?’ he asks.

‘That’s okay,’ I say calmly. ‘I’ll call her from the bedroom.’

And as I start up the stairs, I can hear him refilling the kettle, slotting bread into the toaster, flicking on the radio, and it occurs to me that an opportunity has been lost. That I might have sat him down and told him the truth – the real, deep truth about the night, about what happened. But I’m tired. Too tired for words. And part of me knows that the time for truths to be spoken has long since passed.

The weekend is a blur of tiredness, relief and obligation. I end up spending a good deal of time on the phone – not just to Kamila, but to other friends, who have heard the news and are calling to express support and horror. With each call, I find it gets a little easier. The repeated phrases act as a defence of sorts, keeping me at a distance from what I actually experienced.

By the time I call Victor, the presenter of the radio show I work on, the story has moulded itself into an identifiable pattern in my mind, its nuances hardening into historical facts. Victor Segal: shock-jock or voice of the people, depending on your opinion. He has been in the radio business for almost thirty years and for the last six, he’s had me as his series producer. I know him better than either of his ex-wives and possibly better than his shrink. As I talk him through those moments of descending the staircase and stepping out into the street, my eyewitness account of the aftermath of carnage, it almost feels like a third-hand account of something that happened to someone else.

‘Listen to me,’ he intones gravely, ‘who else have you spoken to about this?’

I start listing the various friends but he cuts me off.

‘I mean at the station? Is there anyone you’ve spoken to about this, other than me?’

‘No, not yet.’

‘Do me a favour, will you, Cara? Just keep it to yourself for now, eh?’

‘Okay. But why?’

I hear the cigar wheeze of his indrawn breath, and when he speaks again, his tone is softer, almost avuncular.

‘You’ve had a bad night, love, but you were lucky. Put down the phone – better still, turn it off. The telly and radio too. It’s a beautiful day. Why not get out there with your husband and child. Smell the roses, eh?’

Grousing, snappish Vic, my ageing enfant terrible. It’s so strange to hear him speak to me like this. My guard falls momentarily, and for the first time since this whole thing ended, since leaving that room, I feel myself coming close to tears.

When I see Vic on Tuesday morning, it finally dawns on me why he urged me to keep my story to myself.

There’s a sleepy feeling about the place, as if the city is reluctant to drag itself out of the long weekend. I’m crossing the office floor towards my desk, my mind roaming over impending tasks: a pre-recorded interview with a children’s author will have to be bumped in order to make way for coverage of the terrorist attack and its aftermath; a decision will also have to be made about some of the other lighter segments we’d hoped to air; they might be deemed poor taste in light of Friday night’s atrocity. These are the thoughts running pitter-patter through my mind when a sharp rap on the glass wall of the meeting room makes me look up. Victor and Derek, one of our producers, are inside, along with Katie, my assistant. Derek is beckoning me to join them.

It’s still early – barely even dawn – and apart from Katie, I’m surprised the others are in already. There’s a sheepish look on Victor’s face, an eagerness on Derek’s, and as I open the door it strikes me with force what it is they want from me.

I pause at the door and hold Vic’s eye, then say, ‘Forget it. I’m not doing it.’

‘You have to, Cara. You were there! You saw it!’

I take my seat opposite him, the others looking on silently. Katie pushes a polystyrene cup of coffee towards me. It’s my second one this morning but I feel like I need it.

‘No way. It’s crossing a boundary. I’m the series producer. I’m not meant to be heard on air.’

‘What is it you always say when something big happens? Get me an eyewitness who can speak coherently and let’s put them on air.’ The exaggerated lilt of the bog Irish accent he affects sounds nothing like me. Apart from the soft ‘r’s and the occasional ‘grand’, all traces of my Irish accent were rubbed out long ago.

‘It doesn’t feel right –’

‘Oh, come on!’ he cries, exasperated, then gives me some guff about professional obligation and journalistic integrity.

‘Vic’s right,’ Derek chimes in, capping and uncapping his pen – a tic of his that I’ve seen hundreds of times, but this morning it gets on my nerves. A hipster in his early thirties, with leather brogues and rolled-up chinos, Derek is looking at me with grave intensity above his pointy beard that makes me think, for some reason, of the last tsar of the doomed house of Romanov. ‘When Vic rang me yesterday and told me what had happened to you, I was horrified. But I have to admit I had the same thought as Vic. This is exactly the kind of story our listeners are hungry for. It’s too good to pass up.’

‘Come on, love,’ Vic wheedles. ‘It’ll be fifteen minutes, that’s all.’

My eyes are scratchy with sleeplessness. I feel hung-over yet I haven’t had a drop since that last Aperol spritz in the Water Poet on Friday night.

Beyond the glass walls of the meeting room, the office is filling up. I can see the cluster of desks I manage – the researchers and producers, the broadcasting coordinators, all in their places. By 10 a.m. this place will be humming with a melange of different people, from the young interns barely out of school to the seasoned old-timers coasting towards their pensions. A girl – one of the Marketing staff – passes the window. There are white iPhone buds in her ears, the slender cables disappearing into the collar of her shirt, and the sight of this touches something within me – a raw spot. That girl in the room. Jesus, all those things I told her. The memory of it brings a vertiginous swing. In my shoes, I feel my toes clench.

‘Think of the ratings,’ Derek says.

It starts to build again, that sense of unease, the moment I sit in front of the mike. There are three of us in the inner sanctum of the studio: Vic peering down at his notes through half-moon lenses, a pugnacious air about him as he smooths down his tie, Angela delivering the news and weather in a briskly elegiac tone, while I draw the hair back off my face, the heat of the room pressing down on me.

No small talk this morning – once Angela’s done, Vic quickly dispatches her. Arms folded on the desk, he leans forward and launches into my intro. I’ve seen him do this hundreds of times, but always from the safety of distance. My heart thuds against the unfamiliarity of the situation. Everything seems slightly off-kilter, and as he announces my name to his listeners, I feel that drag of nausea again in my stomach and I shift a little in my seat.

‘Tell us, Cara,’ he says in a kindly tone, ‘what did you feel when you looked up and saw a terrorist coming towards you wielding a knife and a gun?’

Unused to talking about myself so publicly, I begin clumsily, my voice sounding strange in my ears.

‘It took me a moment to feel anything. It was all so unreal. There had been a buzz in the air, I was out enjoying myself, and then to see a man armed in that way … it seemed incongruous.’

Vic gives me a slight frown. Keep it simple is his motto.

‘At what point did you realize the seriousness of the situation?’

My answer comes out clearer now, and I find myself relaxing into my account, Vic drawing me out with questions, leading me back up that staircase, placing me in the storeroom once more. I tell it like it’s a story – something that might have happened to someone else. It is only the two of us in the studio now. There is intimacy here, a gathering hush that feels far from the busy industry of the office beyond, further still from the traffic and life percolating through the city below.

‘And when you came out on to the street, what did you see?’ Vic asks, the register of his voice dropping a little.

‘I saw bodies. On the road, on the pavement. They had been covered with sheets. I don’t know how many there were. It was awful. Shocking.’

He lets that sit for a couple of seconds, and then asks, ‘And the two other people who had been in the room with you?’

He knows about Neil. When I gave my account to him on the phone on Sunday, I told him. The image comes again: the sheet covering whatever remains lay there, but those feet sticking out, immediately identifiable. A quiet impression branded on the mind. It advances and recedes, a pulse in my brain.

‘I lost them,’ I say. ‘I don’t know what happened to them.’

His eyes narrow. ‘You don’t?’

I talk quickly then about the time that followed, the confusion, the Italian café, giving my account to the police, and as my words fill the space between us I see Vic’s eyes flicker to one side and know from this he is receiving a message through his headphones.

‘Now, let’s just leave things there for one moment, Cara, because we have a caller on the line,’ he announces, his voice gaining authority, while at the same time indicating to me to put on the headphones in front of me. ‘Someone you may recognize,’ he adds, before booming into the mike, ‘Hello? Is that Amy?’

I feel a soft-edged confusion as I slip on the headset and half-turn to glance back. Derek is in the producer’s seat, his face unreadable.

There is a pause, and then I hear it: that same low throaty voice, the casual American inflection. I recognize it straight away. ‘Hey, Vic. Hey, Cara,’ she says.

I stutter through a response, something startled and awkward that conveys my unpreparedness. How did they find her? I wonder, my mind grasping for an answer.

‘Amy, first of all, let me ask you if you are alright?’ Vic asks, all concerned.

Her name doesn’t suit her. It’s too soft, too homespun for a young woman with her hard edges.

‘Yeah, I’m okay. Glad to be alive, I guess. How’re you doing, Cara?’ she asks.

I try to keep my voice even, saying, ‘Like you say, I’m glad to be alive.’ My antennae are twitching all over the place.

‘And we have you to thank for that, Amy,’ Vic says, adding, ‘So tell us what happened? How did you come to rescue Cara?’

It seems wrong, to put it that way, passing it off as some gallant act. In a way, it lessens the impact of what she did, by turning it into a soundbite. The gratitude I feel for her is immeasurable. Vic’s schmaltzy tone somehow cheapens that. I think she feels it too.

There’s a pause before she laughs a little – a mirthless breath that sounds closer to a cough – and then says, ‘I don’t know. It wasn’t something thought out. I just saw her and pulled her back out of the street.’

Her shift had ended and she’d just shut up the shop with her co-worker, she explains, when they saw the terrorists coming.

‘We backed into the doorway, towards the stairs. I just saw Cara standing there – this guy coming right towards her – and … I don’t know … instinct kicked in, or something …’ Her voice trails off, embarrassment radiating through the brief silence that follows.

Vic jumps in to fill it, asking, ‘What happened when you were hiding in the storeroom together? What were your thoughts?’

‘I don’t know. We were all kind of panicked. Neil wanted to leave – to try to run – but I just thought we ought to stay there and wait it out.’

‘So did one of you take charge?’

‘Not really. Neil was kind of spooked, and after a few minutes, he ran back down into the street. Cara went to go after him, but I pulled her back.’

‘Why?’

‘I knew if she went down into the street, she’d die.’

‘How did you know?’

‘I just did. I can feel these things. It’s like an instinct.’ She coughs then, in a way that seems to ground the outlandishness of her statement. ‘It was the same when my mom died. The morning when she left to go to work, I just knew something bad was going to happen to her. I knew I wouldn’t see her again.’

Unlike so many of her contemporaries whose sentences rise at the end in an irritating up-tick, Amy speaks plainly, making definite statements. Her voice, though low and throaty, hums with quiet conviction.

‘And when was this?’

‘Sixteen years ago – I had just turned eight.’

‘And, if you don’t mind me asking, what happened to her?’

‘My mom worked in the Twin Towers. She was killed in the 9/11 attacks.’

The declaration snaps like an electric current. Vic lets it lie there for a beat, allowing the significance to reverberate across the airwaves. My body has grown very still, but inside my thoughts skitter around madly. I feel the coffee churn in my stomach. But this girl’s words affect me in a way I can’t understand.

‘So that’s twice in your life you’ve been directly affected by a terrorist attack,’ Vic states in a tone that lies somewhere between respectful and appalled.

‘That’s right.’

‘Is this something you talked about when you were hiding in the room together?’

‘No,’ I answer firmly.

‘I was listening more than talking,’ she adds quickly. Do I imagine it, or is the manner in which she says this pointed?

‘How so?’ Vic asks.

‘Cara was upset,’ she explains. ‘I felt like she needed to talk. There were things she needed to say.’

My thoughts slow. All the things I said in that room – the admissions and declarations, regrets, fears, unresolved passions – all of it seems to rise up now and fill the air around me with heat. A deep twang of nerves announces itself in the pit of my stomach.

‘How long were you in that room together?’ Vic asks.

‘Two hours.’

‘Two hours. I imagine in a situation like that, a situation charged with emotion, not knowing if you’re going to come out alive, you must both have felt the need to reach out, to share confidences.’

‘You make it sound like a Confessional,’ she says in a wry tone, but her voice has gone quiet.

I don’t trust myself to speak.

Vic glances at the clock.

‘Well, Amy, I’m so glad you called into the show this morning, and that you two were able to make contact with each other after your shared ordeal,’ Vic intones, and I feel the danger begin to recede. He is going to wrap things up now, deliver some pat line before offloading us both. I can almost feel the relief of escaping the studio, the heavy door closing behind me.

‘Can I say something to Cara?’ she asks then, and from her tone I know something is coming. Immediately the danger is back.

‘Go ahead,’ Vic urges, surprise in his voice.

Her breath echoes in my headset, as if she’s steadying herself for something.

‘He says I saved you … but really, you saved me. It feels like we were meant to meet that night. And what you said … what you told me when we were alone in the room … I just want you to know that I’ll keep it close. I want you to know: you’re safe.’

Vic’s head is cocked with interest. Behind me I can feel the intensity of the others’ gaze. All the unease I have been pushing away comes over me now in a wave, like sickness. My headset abandoned on the desk, I push through the door, out to the safety of the antechamber.

The broadcasting coordinator is there, her headset on, looking at me expectantly.

‘She’s still on the line,’ she whispers, her hand held over the mouthpiece. ‘Do you want me to patch her through to your desk?’

I think of all I have told this girl – that crazed spewing out of secrets. A great sea wall of regret rears up in front of me.

With effort, I keep my voice steady and firm. ‘No, that’s not necessary,’ I say, and I turn and walk away.

PENGUIN BOOKS

YOUR CLOSEST FRIEND

Praise for Karen Perry

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Karen Perry

YOUR CLOSEST FRIEND

PENGUIN BOOKS

Part One

1.

Cara

2.

Amy

3.

Cara