Every time that the moth reached the wooden lip at the top of the windowsill where escape was possible and the world appeared in a brighter strip, it missed its opportunity and slowly headbutted its way back down the windowpane. Up and then down, up and then down, taking in the view as the train cut a journey through London. Tattered clouds, black brick and gutters. Winceworth thought of all the moths that he had trapped beneath tumblers and deposited outside over the years. The moth reached the top of the window and again turned on its heels and began its descent. Winceworth slid an eye to the passenger sitting opposite him – a mixed metaphor of an older man, tamarin-moustache jutting a few good white inches beyond his cheeks with liver spots like giraffe skin and the surface of Jupiter on his hands. The man was watching the moth too, apparently unperturbed.
Winceworth got to his feet, unsteady with the pitch and roll of the carriage, and opened the window by pulling on the leather strap.
‘Come on, old thing.’ He tried chivvying the moth out with his document folder. The moth refused to take this advantage. Up and then down, up and then down again as cold air snapped around Winceworth’s ears.
‘Close that, won’t you?’ said the other passenger, and Winceworth acquiesced at once.
Winceworth’s later recollection of this train journey would be hazy. The train ran through East Ham with its glue factories and sad-faced, easily led horses. The marine paint factories disgorged columns of steam and a smell that you first sensed in your stomach before any flavour hit your nose. The moth made its way up and down, up and down the window. He knew that bombilating was the verb for bees – what of moths? His human carriagemate leaned forward and produced a newspaper. The page facing Winceworth featured an advertisement in bold italics: Don’t Mutilate Your Papers with Pins or Fasteners, but Use the Gem Paper Clip. A nap curdled in Winceworth’s mind and did its thing to senses of time, place and space. January beyond his window had made the sky above the city paperclip-coloured. The moth continued to rumble up and down the window, up and down.
Later, Winceworth would not be able to recall the scene very clearly.
The train carriage bucked and swayed a little and Winceworth would recall that he had been quite cold and his crumpled jacket was thin. He would remember closing his eyes, and that briefly there was nothing but the swaying of the train, the smell of the leather seats, previous travellers’ cigarettes and the paint factories outside. The moth’s coat at the window was attracting dust and cobwebs, growing infinitesimally heavier, up and down, up and down. The train worked out its shunting solfeggio as it coursed along, the telegraph posts and buildings flicked past the window and caused weak afternoon sun to the-opposite-of-flash through Winceworth’s eyelids. The undersides of his eyelids shifted from a deadened ruddy colour to bursts of red light as each post passed by. There was a false sense of depth to the shapes that he began to see forming there and he experienced an instant, pleasantly terrifying giddiness. The silver of his new pen flashed in the sun. He added Barking as a title to the notepad page, and he underlined the word twice, with a flourish.
The moth humming its way up the windowpane – that detail he would remember. He would remember coming out of his nap just as the tamarin-faced, Jupiter-giraffe-skin man opposite made a noise, rolled up his newspaper, and smacked it against the glass, against the moth, and at that very moment that the world went
whumppp
A number of Winceworth’s colleagues cut out and kept some of the headlines from the following day’s papers: TERRIBLE EXPLOSION, MANY KILLED AND INJURED – GREAT DESTRUCTION OF PROPERTY. Later articles listed the injuries and the damage: ‘parts of the body were found 60 yards distant’, ‘the dome of the boiler is lying in an adjoining field’. The lexicographers who kept these papers would stress that they collected the snippets not out of some new-found desire to chase souvenirs of awful events, but to help account for Winceworth’s movements and assist in putting the narrative together. He had no memory of alighting from the train, nor of how he might have made it to the site of the explosion. Bielefeld found one photograph in the press that featured a figure that if you squinted might well have been Winceworth at the scene of the disaster. At least, the man in the photograph had glasses and was pictured carrying a slim paper folder. There was certainly a corresponding stain over his chest where, say, a new and unopened bottle of Pelikan ink had smashed in a breast pocket of his jacket. Everybody else in the photograph either looked infinitely more capable than this figure or was lying under a sheet on a stretcher.
Winceworth could only remember a batch of moments out of sequence. He could remember every detail of a moth at a window, but not how he got down from the train to the site of the explosion. From the snapshots he could remember, he might construe that the afternoon was spent with his sleeves rolled up in dust and masonry and wood and steam, being shouted at by a fireman. He remembered kneeling in order to throw up, and finding a man’s face next to his. He had been holding a man’s jaw in his hand. The man was trapped under some sort of girder or column or beam: it was a very straight line made of very black metal that was too hot to touch. The man’s jaw was not where it should have been on his face. The angles were all wrong and at odds with conventional perspective. Winceworth might remember that he had got a small stone in his shoe and that somehow dust had got behind his back teeth. He remembered thinking that the firemen’s brass all looked remarkably clean amongst so much soot. Everyone except for the firemen had been entirely silent. He would not remember seeing the fire engine.
He remembered the dampness of ink against his chest, that there was broken glass in his hair and that, at the time of the explosion, the colour that he had seen through the zoetropic train carriage window was one he simply could not name.
The facts are these: in the hour after the blast, Winceworth came-to in the middle of a line of firemen and bystanders, coughing with smoke and rheumy eyes. He was on his feet and did not think he had fainted but he had no idea where he was or how he had got there. That was how shock was supposed to work, wasn’t it? In his hand was a pail of water. He looked behind him and saw frightened, drawn or soot-blackened faces. He was so close to the centre of the blast that Winceworth could feel the warmth of fire beat against his cheek. He helped pass buckets of water into the heart of the heat. Above them, as it coiled away into the dusky pink-sliced sky, the smoke was a purple tinged with the red of the flames.
Winceworth’s knees were unsteady and for some reason, even as he watched the bucket of water leave his hands and pass on down the line, he had no sensation in his fingers. All of a sudden he was watching a reflection of his face distend and warp in some kind of gold flux in front of him. He accepted that the world had entirely changed and that natural processes and dimensions no longer applied. He concentrated and shook his head as if dislodging something. His reflection in the fireman’s helmet shook back at him. He looked dismayed. The fireman was leaning down and shouting something at him, pointing, but Winceworth did not understand the words.
‘He says we should leave,’ another voice then said, calmly, in his ear. It was the man with the impressive moustachios with whom he had shared a train carriage – he too must have climbed down to the site of the newly ruined factory to help. He was also caked in debris and ash. All of the people around him were panting and one was being silently, violently sick by a sweetshop’s storefront.