Dead Heat

3

T he bomb went off while I was crossing the corridor.

I didn’t understand immediately what had happened.

There was a great blast of heat on my neck, and it felt like someone had hit me in the back with a sledgehammer.

I crashed into the kitchen door upright and fell, half in and half out of the room.

I still couldn’t understand what was going on. Everything seemed to be in silence. I couldn’t hear. I tried to speak, but I couldn’t hear myself either. I shouted. Nothing. All I could hear was a high-pitched hissing that seemed to be in my head; it had no direction, and was unchanged when I turned my head from side to side.

I looked down at my hands, and they seemed to be all right. I moved them. No problem. I clapped. I could feel my hands coming together, but I couldn’t hear the sound. It was very frightening.

My left knee hurt. I looked down and noticed that my black-and-white checked trousers had been torn where they had hit the doorframe. The white checks were turning red with my blood. What’s black and white and red all over…? My brain was drifting.

When I felt with my hands, my knee appeared to be in the right place, and I could move my foot without any increase in pain. It seemed that the blood was from superficial damage only.

My hearing came back with a rush, and suddenly there was a mass of sound. Someone close by was screaming. A female, high-pitched scream that went on and on, breaking only occasionally for a moment as the screamer drew a breath. An alarm bell was ringing incessantly somewhere down the corridor, and there were shouts from some male voices, mostly pleading for help.

I lay back, and rested my head on the floor. It seemed that I was like that for ages, but, I suppose, it was only for a minute or two at most. The screaming went on; otherwise, I might have gone to sleep.

I became aware that I wasn’t very comfortable. As well as the pain in my left knee, my right leg was aching. I was lying on my foot, which was tangled up underneath my rear end. I straightened the leg and was rewarded with pins and needles. That’s a good sign, I thought.

I looked up and could see daylight between the walls and the ceiling where a large crack had opened up. That was not such a good sign. Water was pouring through the crack, I thought lazily, probably from some burst pipe above. It was running down the wall and spreading across the concrete floor towards me. I turned my head and watched it approach.

I decided that, lovely as it was to lie there and let the world get on without me, I didn’t fancy lying in a puddle. The floor was cold enough without being wet as well. Reluctantly, I rolled over and drew my knees up under me so that I was kneeling. Not a good idea, I thought. My left knee complained bitterly, and the calf muscle below it began to cramp. I pulled myself up to a standing position using the doorframe and surveyed the kitchen.

Not much seemed to have changed, except everything was covered in a fine white dust that also still hung in the air. I was wondering what had happened to Carl when he appeared next to me.

“Bloody hell,” he said, “what happened?”

“Don’t know,” I replied. “Where were you?”

“Having a pee in the gents’.” He pointed down the corridor. “Nearly shit myself when that bang went off.”

I clung on to the kitchen door and felt unwell. I didn’t particularly relish going to see what had become of my other two staff and the guests in the boxes, but I knew I must. I couldn’t just stand here all day while others might need help. The screaming had lessened to a whimper, as I gingerly made my way across the corridor and looked in.

I hadn’t expected there to be so much blood.

Bright, fresh, scarlet red blood. Masses of the stuff. It was not only on the floor but on the walls, and there were even great splashes of it on the ceiling. The tables had been thrown up against the back wall by the explosion, and I had to pick my way over broken chairs to get through the door and into the room that I had so recently vacated with ease.

When I had been a child, my father had regularly complained that my bedroom looked like a bomb had gone off in it. Like every other little boy, I had tended to dump all my stuff on the floor and happily had lived around it.

However, my bedroom had never looked like the inside of the two glass-fronted boxes at Newmarket that day. Not that the boxes had remained glass-fronted. The glass in the windows and doors had now completely vanished, and, along with it, large chunks of the balconies and about a third of the end wall from the side of box number 1.

I thought that if the blast could do such damage to concrete and steel, the occupants must have stood no chance.

Carnage was not too strong a word for the scene.

There had been thirty-three guests at lunch, two others having unexpectantly failed to appear, much to MaryLou’s frustration and displeasure. Then there were my two staff. So there must have been at least thirty-five people either in that room or on the balconies when the bomb exploded, not counting any people who may have been invited in to watch the race after lunch.

Most of them seemed to have disappeared altogether.

A whimper to my left had me scampering under the upturned tables to find the source.

MaryLou Fordham lay on her back close to the rear wall. I could only see her from the waist up, since she was half covered with a torn and rapidly reddening tablecloth. The blood that was soaking into the white starched cotton was an exact color match with her bright scarlet chiffon blouse that had fared rather badly and now hung as a tattered mass around her neck.

I knelt down beside her on my right knee and touched her forehead. Her eyes swiveled round in my direction. Big, wide, frightened brown eyes in a deathly pale face, a face cut and bleeding from numerous shards of flying glass.

“Help will be on the way,” I said to her, somewhat inadequately given the circumstances. “Just hang on.”

There was a lot of blood below her waist, so I lifted the tablecloth a little to see what damage had been done. It was not easy to see. There was not much light under the blood-soaked cloth, and there was a tangle of broken chairs and tables in the way. I shuffled down to get a better look and only then did my confused brain take in the true horror. Both of MaryLou’s lovely legs were gone. Blown away.

Oh my God, what do I do now?

I stupidly looked around me, as if I could find her missing legs and snap them back into place. Only then did I see the other victims. Those who had lost not only their legs and feet but arms and hands too, and their lives. I began to shake. I simply didn’t know what to do.

Suddenly, the room filled with voices and bustling people in black-and-yellow coats and big yellow helmets. The fire brigade had arrived. None too soon, I thought. I started to cry. It was unlike me to cry. My father had been one of the old school who believed that men shouldn’t. “Stop blubbing,” he would say to me when I was about ten. “Grow up, boy. Be a man. Men don’t cry.” And so I had been taught. I hadn’t cried when my father had been killed by the brick truck. I hadn’t even cried at his funeral. I knew that he wouldn’t have wanted me to.

But now the shock, the tiredness, the feeling of inadequacy and the relief that the cavalry had arrived was just too much, and so the tears streamed down my face.

“Come on, sir,” said one of the firemen into my ear as he held my shoulders, “let’s get you out of here. Are you in any pain?”

My tongue felt enormous in my mouth, stifling me. “No,” I croaked. “Well, my knee hurts a bit. But I’m fine…But she…” I pointed at MaryLou, unable to say anything further.

“Don’t worry, sir,” he said to me, “we’ll look after her.”

He helped me to my feet and turned my shoulders away. My gaze remained on where MaryLou’s legs should have been until the fireman turned me so far that my head just had to follow. He held me firmly and pushed me towards the door, where a second fireman put a bright red blanket over my shoulders and led me out. I wondered if they used red blankets so that the blood didn’t show.

The fireman guided me down the corridor towards the stairwell. I looked into the kitchen as we passed by. Carl was leaning over the sink, throwing up. I knew how he felt.

A man in a green jacket with DOCTOR written large across the back pushed past me. “Is he all right?” he asked my escort.

“Seems so,” was the reply.

I wanted to say that no, I wasn’t all right. I wanted to tell him that I had glimpsed an image of hell and that it would surely live with me forever. I wanted to shout out that I was far from all right and that I might never be all right again.

Instead, I allowed myself to be led to the stairwell, where I obeyed instructions to go down. I was assured that others would be waiting at the bottom to help me. But can they erase the memory? Can they give me back my innocence? Can they prevent the nightmares?

HAVING BEEN INSTRUCTED by the fireman, I obediently descended to ground level and, as promised, was met by helping hands and soothing voices. A brief assessment of my physical injuries left me, still wrapped in my red blanket, sitting on a row of white plastic chairs for what seemed like a very, very long time. Several times a young man in a bright green outfit with PARAMEDIC emblazoned in white letters across his shoulders came over to ask if I was OK. He said that they were sorry about the delay, but there were others in greater need. I nodded. I knew. I could still see them in my mind’s eye.

“I’m fine,” I said. But I didn’t really mean it.

Ambulances came and went, their sirens wailing, and a line of black body bags, laid out close to the back of the grandstand, grew longer as the afternoon sunlight slowly faded towards evening.

I was finally taken to the hospital about seven o’clock. After so long sitting in the plastic chair, I was unable to stand properly on my left leg since my knee had swollen up and stiffened badly. My young paramedic friend helped me to an ambulance that then sedately drove off with no siren or flashing lights. It was as if the urgency of the crisis was passed. Those seriously injured and dying had been whisked away at speed. Those already dead were beyond help. We, the almost-walking wounded, could now be cared for with composure and calm.

The ambulance took me all the way to Bedford, as the hospitals more local to Newmarket had been overwhelmed by the seriously injured. At Bedford, an X-ray revealed no fractures in my swollen left knee. A doctor speculated that the collision with the door may have caused a temporary dislocation of my patella-my kneecap-which had resulted in some internal bleeding. A hematoma had formed in the joint, causing both the swelling and the pain. The blood loss that had stained my trousers was found to be due to a tear of the soft tissue of my lower thigh, also probably a consequence of the collision with the door. Although the flow had all but stopped, the doctor insisted on applying some adhesive strips to close the edges of the wound, which he then covered with a large white rectangular bandage. No such care was afforded to my trousers, which were unceremoniously cut off short on the left side. The hospital provided me with a tight blue rubberized sleeve for my knee to both provide support for the joint and to apply pressure to the hematoma to reduce the bruising. They also thoughtfully equipped me with a long white, closely woven cotton sock to wear on my left foot to reduce swelling in the lower leg and a supply of large white painkillers. I would be fine, they said, after a few days’ rest. Fine in body, I thought, although it would take longer to heal the emotional injury.

A taxi was ordered to take me home. So I sat waiting in the hospital reception, somewhat embarrassed at having caused such a fuss and feeling guilty that I had escaped so lightly while others had not. I was utterly drained. I thought about Robert and Louisa, my staff. Had they survived? What should I do to find out? Who should I ask?

“Taxi for Mr. Moreton,” said a voice, bringing me back to the present.

“That’s me,” I replied.

I realized I had no money in my pockets.

“That’s all right, the National Health Service is paying,” said the driver. “But they don’t tip,” he added. He’s going to be unlucky, I thought, if he thinks he’s going to get a tip from me.

He looked me up and down. I must have been quite a sight. I still wore my chef’s tunic, but my black-and-white checked trousers now had one leg long and one short, with a blue knee brace and white stocking below.

“Are you some sort of clown?” asked the driver.

“No,” I said, “I’m a chef.”

He lost interest.

“Where to?” he asked.

“Newmarket.”

THE TAXI ARRIVED at my cottage on the southern edge of Newmarket at about eleven o’clock. I had slept the whole way from Bedford Hospital, and the driver had real difficulty waking me up to get me out of the vehicle. Eventually, I was roused sufficiently for him to help me hop across the small stretch of grass between the road and my front door.

“Will you be OK?” he asked as I put the key in the lock.

“Fine,” I said, and he drove away.

I hopped into the kitchen and took a couple of the painkillers with some water from the sink tap. The stairs were too much, I decided, so I lay down on the sofa in my tiny sitting room and went eagerly back to my slumbers.

I was lying on a hospital gurney that was moving slowly along a gray-colored, windowless corridor. I could see the ceiling lights passing overhead. They were bright rectangular panels set into the gray ceiling. The corridor seemed to go on forever, and the lights were all the same one after the other, one after the other. I looked up and back to see that I was being pushed by a lady in a red chiffon blouse with a mass of curly hair bouncing on her shoulders. It was MaryLou Fordham, and she was smiling at me. I looked down at her lovely legs, but she didn’t have any legs and seemed to be floating across the gray floor. I sat up with a jerk and looked at my own legs. The bedding was flat where my legs should have been, and there was blood, lots of blood, bright red pools of blood. I screamed and rolled off the gurney. I was falling, falling, falling…

I woke up with a start, my heart pounding, my face cold, clammy, sweaty. So vivid had been the dream that I had to feel with my hands to be sure that my legs were actually there. I lay in the dark, breathing hard, while my pulse returned to something near normal.

It was the first of a repeating pattern.

Two disturbed nights in a row left me totally exhausted.

I SPENT MOST of Sunday morning lying down, first on the sofa and then on the floor, which was more comfortable. I watched the twenty-four-hour news channels to find out more about what was being dubbed “Terror at the Guineas.” There had been dozens of television cameras covering the races, but only one had, peripherally, captured the scene on the balcony Head On Grandstand box numbers 1 and 2 at the moment the bomb went off. The fleeting footage was played over and over again with every news bulletin. It showed a bright flash, with bits of glass, steel and concrete being flung outwards, along with bodies. Many of the Delafield Industries guests had been literally blown from the balcony, falling, rag doll like, onto the flat roof below and then onto the unsuspecting racegoers in the viewing areas below that. They, apparently, had been the lucky ones, injured but alive. It had been those inside the rooms, like MaryLou, who had suffered the worst.

I thought again about Robert and Louisa. I knew I should call someone to ask what had happened to them. I also knew that I didn’t want to make the call because I was afraid of the answer. I went on lying on the floor.

I discovered from the television that while I had been sitting obediently on my white plastic chair wrapped in my red blanket, there had been much activity at the racetrack. The police had moved in, en masse, and had taken the names and addresses of all the thousands in the crowd. I had somehow been missed.

The racing had been abandoned and the 2,000 Guineas had been declared void, as half the horses had stopped during the final furlong while others had been driven hard for the line, their jockeys concentrating so intently on the race that they were unaware of the explosion until they pulled up after the finish. The television pictures clearly showed how one young rider’s joy at winning his first Classic had quickly turned to despair as realization struck that he had won a race that wouldn’t be.

Speculation was rife as to who had caused such murder and why.

One television channel had a reporter situated near the Devil’s Dyke, with the racetrack clearly visible in the background, the front of boxes 1 and 2 now covered by a large blue tarpaulin. He claimed that a police source had indicated to him that the bomb may have struck the wrong target. The track manager, who was unavailable for comment due to ill health, had apparently confirmed to police that the occupants of box number 1 had been switched at the last minute. The reporter, who I thought was rather inappropriately dressed in an open-neck striped shirt with no jacket, went on to speculate that the real targets had been an Arab prince and his entourage who originally had been expected to be in box 1. The Middle East conflict has once again been brought to our shores, the reporter stated with confidence.

I wondered if MaryLou would feel better in the knowledge that she had lost her legs by mistake. I doubted it.

I called my mother, in case she was worrying about me.

She wasn’t.

“Hello, darling,” she trilled down the wire. “What an awful thing to have happened.”

“I was there,” I said.

“What, at the races?”

“No, I mean right there when the bomb exploded.”

“Really. How exciting,” she said. She didn’t seem the least bit concerned that I might have been killed.

“I am very lucky to be alive,” I said, hoping for some compassionate words from my parent.

“Of course you are, dear.”

Since my father died, my mother had become somewhat blasé about death. I think she really believed that whether one lived or died was preordained and out of one’s control. Recently, I thought that the collision with the brick truck had been, in my mother’s eyes, a neat way out of what was becoming a loveless marriage. Some time after his death, I had discovered that he had been having several minor affairs. Perhaps my mother believed that the accident was some sort of divine retribution.

“Well,” I said, “I thought I would let you know that I was OK.”

“Thank you, dear,” she said.

She didn’t ask me what had happened, and I decided not to share the horror. She enjoyed her quiet world of coffee mornings, church flower arranging and outings to visit well-tended gardens. Missing limbs and mutilated torsos didn’t have a place.

“Speak to you soon, Mum,” I said.

“Lovely, darling,” she said. “Bye.” She hung up.

We had never been very close.

As a child, it had always been to my father that I had gone for advice and affection. We had laughed together at my mother’s little foibles and joked about her political naivety. We had smiled and rolled our eyes when she had committed another faux pas, an all-too-regular occurrence.

I may not have actually cried when my father died, but I was devastated nevertheless. I worshipped him as my hero, and the loss was almost too much to bear. I remember clearly the feeling of despair when, a few weeks after his death, I could no longer smell him in the house. I had come home from boarding school for the weekend, and, suddenly, he wasn’t there anymore. The lack of his smell brought his demise into sharp reality-he wasn’t just out getting a newspaper, he was gone forever. I had rushed upstairs to his dressing room to smell his clothes. I had opened his wardrobes and drawers, and I had held his favorite sweaters to my nose. But he had gone. I had sat on the floor in that room for a very long time, just staring into space, totally bereft but unable to shed the tears, unable to properly grieve for his passing. Even now, I ached to be able to tell him about my life and my job, my joys and my sadnesses. I cursed him out loud for being dead and not being around when I needed him. I longed for him to be there to talk to, to soothe my hurting knee, to ease my troubled brain and to take away the horrors in my memory. But, still, I couldn’t cry for him.

THE ONE O’CLOCK news program started on the television, and I realized that I was hungry. Apart from a couple of pieces of French bread at the racetrack and a chocolate bar at the hospital, I hadn’t eaten since Friday night, and that meal hadn’t got past my stomach. Now that I thought about it, hunger was a nagging pain in my abdomen. It was one pain that I could do something about.

I limped gingerly into the kitchen and made myself a Spanish omelette. Food is often said to be a great comforter; indeed, most people under stress eat sugary foods like chocolate not only because it gives them energy but because it makes them feel better. I had done just the same at Bedford Hospital. However, for me, food gave me comfort when I cooked it.

I took some spring onions from my vegetable rack, diced them into small rounds, then fried them in a pan with a little extra-virgin olive oil. I found some cooked new potatoes hiding in the rear recesses of my fridge, so I sliced and added them to the onions with a splash of soy sauce to season and flavor. Three eggs, I thought, and broke them one-handed into a glass bowl. I really loved to cook, and I felt much better, in both mind and body, long before I sat down on my sofa to complete the experience by actually eating my creation.

Carl called sometime during the afternoon.

“Thank God you’re there,” he said.

“Been here all night,” I said.

“Sorry, should have called you earlier.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “I didn’t call you either.” I knew why. No news was better news than we feared.

“What happened to you?” he asked.

“Hurt my knee,” I said. “I was taken to Bedford Hospital, and then home by taxi late last night. And you?”

“I’m fine,” he said. “I helped people to get down at the far end of the stand. Police took my name and address, then they sent me home.”

“Did you see Louisa or Robert?” I dreaded the answer.

“I haven’t seen either of them,” he said, “but Robert called me this morning. He’s all right, although quite badly shaken up. He was asking if I knew what had happened to Louisa.”

“Wasn’t Robert in the box when the bomb went off?”

“He said that the bomb was definitely in box 1, and he was behind the folded back dividing wall in box 2 when it exploded and that protected him. But it seems to have left him somewhat deaf. I had to shout down the telephone.”

I knew how he felt.

“How about Louisa?” I asked.

“No idea,” said Carl. “I tried the emergency number the police gave out, but it’s permanently busy.”

“Any news on anyone else?” I asked.

“Nothing, except what’s on the TV. How about you? Heard anything?”

“No, nothing. I saw the American woman organizer, you know, MaryLou Fordham, just after the bomb went off.” I could see the image in my head. “She’d lost her legs.”

“Oh God.”

“I felt so bloody helpless,” I said.

“Was she still alive?” he asked.

“When I saw her she was, but I don’t know if they got her out. She had lost so much blood. I was finally led away by a fireman, who told me to go down.”

There was a pause, as if both of us were reliving the events at the racetrack.

“What shall we do about the restaurant?” Carl asked at length.

“I haven’t even thought about it,” I said. “I suppose the kitchen’s still sealed. I’ll start sorting it out tomorrow. I’m too tired now.”

“Yeah, me too. Didn’t get much sleep last night. Call me in the morning.”

“OK,” I said. “Call me tonight if you hear anything.”

“Will do,” he said, and hung up.

I spent the afternoon in an armchair with my left leg supported by a cushion on the coffee table. I seemed unable to turn the television away from the news channels, so I watched the same not-new news repeated time and time again. The Arab prince theory gained more credence throughout the day, mostly, it appeared to me, because there was nothing new to report and they had to fill the time somehow. Middle East experts were wheeled in to the studio to make endless, meaningless comments about a speculative theory about which they had no facts or evidence. It occurred to me that the TV networks were simply allowing several of these “so-called experts” the opportunity to postulate their own extremist positions, something that would do nothing to calm the turmoil that existed in their lands. Violent death and destruction were clearly nothing out of the ordinary to many of them, and some even appeared to justify the carnage, saying that the prince may have been seen as a legitimate target by rebel forces in his homeland, and the fact that innocents had died by mistake was merely unfortunate…you know, casualties of war and all that. It all made me very angry, but I still couldn’t switch it off, just in case I missed some new item.

At some point around five o’clock, I drifted off to sleep.

I woke suddenly with the now-familiar thumping heart and clammy face. Another encounter with the hospital gurney, the windowless corridor, the legless MaryLou and the blood.

Oh God, I said to myself, not another night of this.

But, indeed, it was.