THE VIRGIN RESCUE
Twenty-Eight Hours after the Earthquake
Before the flight to Bhuj, Andy jitters with nervous energy. His fingers thrum against his knuckles. Not just him, though: the four on-call rota UK Fire Services Search and Rescue Teams gathered at RAF Brize Norton can’t keep still. They circle the perimeter, greeting old chums, handshakes all around. Armenia, right? No, Turkey.
Andy envies the men’s easy camaraderie, the shared experiences that harness them to one another. For every fire that Andy’s battled, he’s done twenty times as much outreach: going to year one and two classrooms, teaching fire safety — matches, electrical outlets, the like. They listen to him, bright-eyed. They ask about the engines, the sirens. They touch his helmet. Important, necessary work. But not always exciting. It’s silly to expect a burning building every shift, but he’s getting paid to wait around for a pan of bacon fat to catch flame.
The other members of the UKFSSART remember their first time like it was a birth or death — so momentous they can’t shut up about it. Every detail is etched in their memory: the time, the place, the date, the quality of the light, the color of the air. It drives Andy mental.
Boarding the RAF TriStar for his first mission is like boarding a can of spray paint: he’s the little metal ball clattering around inside. The men make themselves comfortable. They roll their suits into lumbar logs and cross their arms across their chests. Andy sits between Les and Colin, not entirely at ease. Les has been his mentor since he first joined the fire brigade, sharing mundane duties on their shifts: stacking the dishes in the fire hall mess, running to the nearest chip cart. Les cheats when they play cards, but Andy hasn’t quite figured out how. Les doesn’t try to change the channel when Andy’s watching telly but plops down and watches along. Les was the first to ask Andy to dinner outside work, and Andy listened as Les talked about his wife and children, about his burgeoning beer gut, about what a twat Reg was. Everything Andy had to say seemed small and useless. He lived in a tiny flat and sent money home to his mum.
“Jesus,” Les said, “don’t be so hard on yourself. You just started shaving, what, yesterday? If my son grew up half as set as you, I’d be happy.”
Even if your son was queer? Andy had grown used to all manner of insult; he was even adept at using them, putting the same force into the words as he would into his shoulder to break down a door. When Andy told Les that he was, in fact, gay, Les was more than surprised but less than shocked.
“Fuck, man,” Les said. “I didn’t know. How long have you been looking at my ass in the shower?”
“You’re not my type,” Andy said.
“What? You don’t think I have a nice ass?” Les turned to check himself out. It was true: Andy had seen Les’s ass in the shower. He had seen Les’s cock, along with the cocks of all the men in the company. What intrigued him most about Les’s body was the blotchy scar running the length of his left arm, a burn from two years ago. Les had been holding a support beam when a cherry-hot cinder fell into his coat sleeve. He let the cinder singe his arm rather than drop the beam.
Les tapped Andy’s chest with an open palm. “You’re a good lad and a good firefighter. To me, that’s what matters. But I wouldn’t go telling just anyone. You understand me, right?” Not just anyone. Right. It sounded odd coming from Les, who wasn’t above calling someone a dirty queer. But Andy knew that if the rest of the crew found out, he’d be sent to Coventry. Les, bless his heart, ran interference. If someone razzed Andy about not having a girlfriend, Les interjected, “Give the kid a break. He only hit puberty last week.” And even though Les continued to call people dirty queers, he always mouthed a silent Sorry! afterward.
On the plane, Les snores louder than the hum of the propellers. Andy wants to check him for apnea. Jostled from all directions: the airplane’s vibrations through his feet, Les’s snoring into his brain.
Colin, the DCO, sorts through papers. He passes some to Mike, who shuffles and returns them. Colin catches Andy trying to read them. “Nothing you need concern yourself with,” he whispers. “You just be ready to go when we land.”
Be ready. Crikey, for what? Andy’s first major call with the brigade was the Paddington train crash at Ladbroke Grove. Two trains, head-on. The firehouse got the call at 8:15, two hours into Andy’s twenty-four-hour shift. Major emergency, HQ said, major emergency. Respond immediately. The house was halfway across town, but as the Atego pulled out of the house, Andy saw the streaks of smoke dredged across the sky. He steeled himself for unbearable flames, the trapped and the burning, all the horrors he’d read about in simulation exercises. Unnavigable chaos. Severed limbs. Dead children.
But they were the fifth brigade on the scene, and there was nothing more to be done. The diesel had burned itself out. Twisted, charred wreckage fumed in the crisp October air. Andy led survivors to the nearby Sainsbury’s car park, where the doctors of St. Mary’s Hospital had set up. Ambulances from Hammersmith Hospital and the Royal Free Hospital stood at the ready. The car park was all emergency lights and sirens, and the bruised and abraded queued as if waiting to check out groceries. Andy pointed those who could walk toward a nearby school playground, toward a larger transport from Wexham Park Hospital. Move this way; move that way. The people couldn’t hear him, dazed and shocked as they were, ears ringing from the explosion, but they could follow his finger.
The evacuation took three hours, and afterward, he and Colin walked the tracks, marking smoldering scraps of metal for investigators. Wheel casings and bogeys strewn about, blackened with seared grease. In the scrub far to the left of the tracks, a sheet of steel with the First Great Western logo, blown far from the rest of the wreckage. Survivors described a fireball coming down the center aisle of the car, a great whomp as the fire sucked away the oxygen. No one could avoid it. The heat melted armrests into their skin. How small Andy felt, spritzing pulped metal with a handheld extinguisher, the foam sizzling as it hit the ground, a strange frost. He smelled burning polyester and remembered how, at sixteen, he set an old pair of gym shorts on fire. He picked out the acrid tang of burned leather from the seats.
“That’s not leather,” Colin said. “That’s flesh.”
And so it was. Andy counted to ten, tensed and relaxed his stomach muscles until he stopped heaving.
“I’m all right,” Andy said. “Really, I am.”
Forty Hours after the Earthquake
They debark in Ahmadabad, down a rolling set of stairs to the tarmac. The asphalt is crisscrossed with tarry repairs. Inside the airport, people lie on the floor, the lines stretching out the door and into the street. These are the lucky ones who can afford a ticket. They don’t budge, and Andy walks around them. He slips his thumbs underneath the straps at his shoulders and pulls tight. If he takes a tumble, his three-stone bag could do serious damage.
A few blocks away, the face of an apartment building has sheared off to show its insides. Rubble is heaped on the ground, a barricade. Men stand in the street — not walking, not milling, just standing. But then, prompted by nothing, one throws his head back and howls. So raw, so animalistic; Andy shivers. He’s attended memorial services for fallen brothers before. Last year, one was killed in a motorway accident. The funeral was a dress uniform affair, shoes polished, bell caps low and tight on their heads. The tears jumped from one man to another, like pinkeye, but nothing excessive, nothing embarrassing. Andy didn’t cry. Sadness hit a dam within him, no spillway. It was OK for them to cry, but not for him.