Page 60 of Strangers in Time

Cold and stiff, and as unlike Gran as it was possible to be. She always gave off heat; he had warmed his slender bones next to her many a frigid night.

He sat down next to her, his knobby knees touching, his hand resting protectively on her cheek, which was chilled, too, as though she had been outside in weather and had just come in seeking warmth before taking a serious fall.

“Gran? Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

As the rain fell outside, Charlie felt a fragile part of himself rise to the ceiling and then look down at the pair of them there on the scuffed bathroom floor. The beating rain took on the elements of a mournful tune, like the organ in church produced.

His “floating self” merged with what was left on the floor and a familiar refrain abruptly assembled in his head.

I’m not a boy.

I’m a man.

Act like it, Charlie.

He managed to roll Gran over on her back and put his ear to her chest, his finger to her neck. He had seen the ambulance men do this to the bloodied people on the streets after the dropping of bombs.

Heart beating.

Lungs swelling.

Gran had neither.

He put his finger over her lips, trying to detect breath.

He felt her cheek. She was even colder now.

He sat back and looked at her as she lay there, helpless—no, dead, he had to admit. The body limp, the mouth sagging, the eyes unblinking.

He tried to close her eyelids, but they refused to fall. He neededto tell someone of this, but his mind wouldn’t inform him as to whom that might be. Then he finally had a spark of decision.

There was a neighbor upstairs, a man who worked at the butcher shop two squares over. He had been kind to Gran, occasionally giving her a bone to drop in the soup pot, finding meaty scraps here and there for them when he could, always a cheery hello when passing by, checking on them when the Jerries had finished their business in the skies for the night.

Charlie opened the front door and hurried up one flight of stairs. He kept knocking until he heard the man say, “All right, all right, ’ang on, I’m comin’.”

Charlie said just enough to fully engage the man. The fellow’s bare feet raced down the stairs and Charlie followed slowly. He knew what awaited him in the bathroom and was in no hurry to embrace it once again.

Later, a constable came along with a dark-suited, bowler-hatted gent carrying a black bag, who spent a little time in the bathroom with Gran still on the floor. He pulled out a stiff-backed official-looking booklet, filled out something on one of its pages, signed it, neatly tore out the sheet, and handed it to the policeman.

Charlie thought he heard the man say something about Gran’s heart.

The bobby had asked Charlie where his parents were. He said, almost automatically, that his father was in the army and his mother was at work. The bobby had nodded and told Charlie to give his mother his condolences. Then the two men left.

The neighbor man had asked Charlie if there was someone to contact, somewhere for Charlie to go. A fearful Charlie told him there was, though he couldn’t think of who or where that was right now.

A while later a long, black motorcar came with men in respectably somber suits and tall hats and holding umbrellas against the inclemency. One of the dark-suited men told Charlie that the doctor who had declared his grandmother dead had alerted them as tothe need for their mortuary services. Charlie had dully nodded and shown them where Gran was.

As they carried her body down the stairs on a stretcher, a sheet placed over her, Charlie thought of the address for some reason: Flat 4a, 13 Dapleton Terrace, Bethnal Green, London.

It was no longer his home.

Neighbors stood outside the building and watched Gran being loaded into the back of the long motorcar. Some crossed themselves, others bowed their heads, and still others shed tears because life was so hard here and Gran had been kind and helpful to all. Knitting a cap or gloves for a neighbor’s child, bringing up a bowl of hot soup, freely giving away hunks of crusty bread from her shop throwaways, producing a plaster for a wheezy chest, or simply offering another pair of sturdy, loving hands and a soothing voice to help a weary mum with her newborn.

The long motorcar pulled off, and Gran was gone forever. A bewhiskered man in a high hat had given Charlie a card with the name and address of where they were taking her. He had told Charlie to have his parents come around the next day. He had not asked for payment. He had not asked for anything. He had not asked if Charlie evenhadparents or where they might be right now. It was apparently just that way during a war, particularly where Charlie lived.

His family had not buried his father because there had been no body with which to do so. And Charlie was still in hospital when they had laid his mother’s remains in the ground. He could clearly recall attending his grandfather’s funeral, a matter that his gran had handled. Now it was Charlie’s turn, and he wasn’t at all sure how to manage it. For the longest time, he just stood there on the top step of Number 13 Dapleton Terrace, as the folks passed by to go back inside and move on with their day. Some touched his arm, said a few commiserating words, or tousled his hair. Two women gave him hugs. Another pressed in his cold hands a piece of cheese between two thin slices of coal-warmed bread. Still, he stood there because 4a was no longer his home.

He had no home.

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