Page 11 of The Moment I Met You
‘Ha! Feel free; I won’t think any less of you … that was scary. Anyway. I’m glad it’s over … what a relief …’
I look down at our hands, still clinging on to each other. Somehow it surprises me. I know I should let go. I know I should laugh it off. I know that Harry is here, and he will be back soon, and that whatever faults there are in our relationship, I shouldn’t be getting so close to another man. Hand-holding after an earth tremor is forgivable – enjoying it so much is not.
He is staring at me intensely, and I wonder if he is having some kind of internal monologue about it as well, whether he is telling himself to back off, to let go, to retreat.
If he is, he takes about as much notice of it as me. We leave our hands where they are, skin against skin, the excuse of adrenaline fading into something different now.
It is so perfect, so right, that I simply stare at him as he starts to speak.
‘We should probably—’
I never find out what we should probably do. It could have been anything. We should probably stop holding hands. We should probably go our separate ways. We should probably run away together, off into the hills, to live in splendid isolation amid the hummingbirds and the wild flowers and the sun-soaked mesas.
I never find out, because the world explodes.
Chapter 3
He leaps from his chair and shouts something at me. I see his lips moving and the frantic hand gestures, but I can’t hear what he is saying. All I can hear is the deafening roar that seems to be coming from the ground, the air, the buildings, from everything. Like a thousand storms howling through my ears all at once.
I stare at him, lost, confused, terrified. The noise is horrendous, the sound of the earth eating itself.
He staggers towards me, wobbling and unsteady, like he is walking across a bouncy castle, and yells into my face, ‘Get under the table! Now!’
He grabs hold of me, pulls me down, tugs me beneath the table. I wonder what use it will be, a few slats of wood against whatever is about to be thrown at us. I’m aware of my knees crunching into the ground as I am pushed down, of clanging and banging and screaming, of him, climbing beneath with me.
I’ve instinctively curled into as small a ball as I can, and he has wound his long body around mine, cocooning me. He wraps his arms around my head, clutching it to his chest, whispering words that are probably reassuring but are in Swedish. We huddle together, fragile and human in the face of what is being unleashed around us.
I glance up at him, see him looking around, a strangely analytical look on his face. I realise that he is staring at the church, at the taverna walls, that even while he tries to comfort and protect me, he is assessing the structures around us. His architect’s brain is working away, and he will know even better than I do that these buildings are old. They won’t have earthquake-proofed foundations. They won’t have the same precautions as more modern buildings. They won’t survive if this carries on – and neither will we.
I narrow my eyes against the dust that is starting to fly up, and hear a terrible tearing sound from somewhere close by. It’s a scraping, a grinding, a slow, deep groan. I can tell from his reaction that it is bad, and he grips me more tightly.
All around us, people are screaming, glass is shattering, stalls collapsing. The noise is indescribable. The grill that was being used to cook our meal whooshes into a ball of fire as the gas tank ruptures and ignites, the neon lanterns strung along the walls fall and dangle, and clouds of red and brown dust and earth are billowing into the air, like the ground is coughing them up.
Shouting, crying, yelling in different languages. It’s a Tower of Babel of panic and terror. The piped pop music finally stops, and I hear the thud and tumble of a nearby building coming down, swallowed by its own foundations.
The fountain in the centre of the square cracks and folds in on itself, water pouring through its rent tiles, gushing along the red earth. An electrical wire is ripped free, whipping in the turmoil, sparking and twisting like a luminous snake.
Shards of glass and pottery and snapped wood are flying around us, and through my squinting eyes, I see a child running through it all, a football crushed to his chest, shouting for his mama. He stumbles as the earth moves beneath his feet, falls, disappears. The fountain follows him, swallowed into a sudden void where no void should exist. It is horrifying, and fast, and unreal.
The man is trying to turn my face away, trying to shield me, to shelter me from seeing it all, but I resist his gentle pressure. I need to see.
Even if I couldn’t, I can hear, and I can smell. I can smell fire and blood and gas and old stone reduced to rubble, the clogging dust of the collapse clinging to my nostrils, invading my eyeballs, coating my tongue.
I see a young boy, the family from our coach trip. He is crouched under a table like us, his sister next to him. They are clinging on to each other in terror, the teenaged girl’s long red hair whipping around both their faces. Their mother is trying to wrap her arms around both of them at once, their father has laid himself across the table top in a bid to anchor it down above them. His hair is matted with dust and blood as rubble rains down onto him, a human shield.
The pretty adobe houses with their whitewashed walls and red tile roofs are coming down, bottom first, tumbling as though pulled and tugged by an invisible hand, Jenga blocks crashing. A car alarm goes off, bleating a low repetitive note, a counterpoint to the awful screech and whine of twisting metal.
The table above us shakes and judders, wracked by intermittent loud slams of scattered debris as bricks and stonework fall. Our backpacks are long gone, the glasses and wine bottle shattered nearby, glinting in the reflected glow of the fires. A lone plastic water bottle rolls past, and I reach out to grab it in a strange moment of clarity.
I am choking on the foul air, compressed beneath the protective body of a man I barely know, witnessing what feels like the end of the world. Harry is out there somewhere, and I have a sharp pang of panic as I think of him.
‘I can’t breathe!’ I shout, my voice muffled as I turn my face into the chest of the man above me.
‘It’s okay, it’ll be all right … it’ll stop soon …’ he says, stroking my hair, trying to calm me. Trying to calm himself maybe, his voice shaking.
The screams around us continue, people who were only minutes ago having a normal night now in pain and misery. Children are crying, parents are running in a desperate attempt to find them, braving falling chunks of their former homes, their arms held over their heads, inadequate flesh umbrellas.
The rumbling sound from deep below continues, the stomach-turning churn throwing everything off-balance. I wipe my eyes, peek out at the insanity. I look at the church, at its looming towers, its already decaying brickwork. I have lost all sense of time, no idea how long we have been enduring this.
