The last couple escape from the ghost train, the husband kicking his way through Frankenstein’s Monster painted on the plywood sheeting of the façade.
Twenty-five minutes. Sixty-one dead.
The lifeboat arrives and the crew begin hauling people from the water. Some cannot stop talking. Some slither into the bottom of the boat like netted fish, sodden, glassy-eyed, oblivious. A boy of thirteen floats in a dark recess between two fallen girders. He refuses to come out and will not respond to their calls. A crew member jumps into the water but the boy retreats into the flooded forest of wreckage and they are forced to abandon him.
The winch is stowed and the helicopter swings away with all the children on board. Many of them have left parents on the pier. Several don’t know if their parents are alive. For all of them the hammering roar is a comfort, filling their heads so completely that they are unable to entertain the terrifying thoughts that will return only when they are helped down onto the tarmac and run through the wind from the rotors towards the women from the St. John’s Ambulance waiting for them outside the little terminal building.
On the promenade a man in a dirty white apron squeezes through the crowd bearing hot dogs and sweet tea from the stand he runs beside the crazy golf. He returns with a second tray.
Other boats are being drawn towards the pier, a Bristol motor cruiser, an aluminium launch with a Mercury outboard, two fibreglass Hornets. They idle just beyond the moraine of bodies and debris, unable either to help or to turn away.
The boy of thirteen will not come out from the flooded forest because he knows that his sister is in there somewhere. He cannot find her. After thirty minutes he is hypothermic and feels desperately cold. Then, quite suddenly, he doesn’t feel cold at all. This doesn’t seem strange. Nothing seems strange anymore. He wants to take his clothes off but hardly has the energy to stay afloat. Out there, only yards away, the world continues — sunshine, boats, a helicopter. But he feels safe in here. He is not thinking about his sister anymore. He cannot remember having a sister. Only this deep need to be in the dark, to be contained, unseen, some primal circuit still alight on the dimming circuit board of the brainstem. He sinks into the water five times, coughs and forces himself back to the surface, but with less effort each time and with a less distinct sense of what he has just avoided. The sixth time there is so little left of his mind that he lets it go as easily as if it were a book falling from his sleeping hand.
A journalist from the Argus stands in a phone box reading the shorthand he has scribbled onto four pages of a ring-bound notebook. “Shortly before five in the afternoon…”
One of the men trapped on the far end of the pier is terrified of flying. He is wearing a Leeds United T-shirt. The prospect of being lifted into the helicopter is many times worse than that of the structure collapsing beneath him. He knows that his only other choice is to jump from the pier. He is a strong swimmer but the drop to the water is sixty feet. The two possibilities toggle at increasing speeds in his mind — fly, jump, fly, jump. He feels sick. His wife is airlifted in the second batch and in her absence his thoughts race at increasing speeds until he realises that he will lose his mind and that this possibility is worse than flying or jumping. At which point he sees himself turn away from the crowd and run towards the railing. The sensation of watching himself from a distance is so strong that he wants to cry out to this foolish man to remove his shoes and trousers first. He remembers nothing of the leap itself, only the terrible surprise of waking underwater with no memory of where he is or why. He fights his way to the surface, refills his lungs several times and forces off his double-knotted shoes. He can see now that he is at the seaside and that he is floating in the shadow of some vast object. He turns and the wrecked pier looms over him. He remembers what has happened and turns again and swims hard. After a hundred yards he stops and turns for a third time and finds that the distance has turned the pier into a part of the view. He looks towards the town, the crowds, the blue flashing lights, the Camden, the Royal. He is unaware that people saw him jump and that he is now starring in his own brief episode in the afternoon’s greater drama. He feels victorious, unburdened. He swims steadily towards the beach where he is cheered ashore, wrapped in a red blanket and led to an ambulance. His wife will spend three hours thinking he is dead and will not forgive him for a long time.
There is now no one left on the far end of the pier.
The final person dies, deep inside the tangle of planks and girders. He is fifteen years old. He helped his father on the helter-skelter, collecting the mats and going up the ladder at the back when kids got scared or started a fight inside. He has been unconscious since he fell.
The lifeboat returns and the crew retrieve fifteen bodies from the water.
An hour and a half. Sixty-four dead.
A Baptist minister offers the use of his church hall. Survivors are escorted by policemen and firemen over the road, up Hope Street, through a door beside Whelan’s Marine Stores and into a large warm room with fluorescent lighting and a parquet floor. The lid of a tea urn is rattling and two ladies are making sandwiches in the kitchenette. People slump onto chairs and onto the floor. They are no longer being observed. They are among people who understand. Some weep openly, some sit and stare. Three children are unaccompanied, two boys and a girl. The parents of the younger boy have been airlifted to Shoreham. The other two children are now orphans. The girl saw her parents die and is inconsolable. The boy has concocted a story in which his parents fell into the sea and were picked up by a fishing boat, a story so detailed and told with such earnestness that the elderly woman to whom he is telling it doesn’t realise anything is wrong until he explains that they are now living in France.
A policewoman moves quietly round the room, squatting beside each group in turn. “Are you missing anyone?”
Outside, the lifeboat returns for a third time with a cargo of rope and orange buoys to keep away the curious and the ghoulish.
Three hours and twenty minutes.
Six men from the council works department erect shuttering around the pier entrance, big frames of two-by-four covered with sheets of chipboard.
In the hospital most of the broken bones have been set and the girl with the shattered femur is having it pinned in surgery. A woman has had a splinter the size of a carving knife pulled from her chest.
Evening comes. The front is unnaturally empty. No one wants to look at the pier anymore. They are elsewhere eating scampi and baked Alaska, watching The Railway Children at the Coronet, or driving to neighbouring resorts for evening walks against a view that can be comfortably ignored. In spite of which the conversation keeps circling back, because at sometime this week everyone has stood in a spot which is now empty air. Everyone can feel the thrilling shiver of the Reaper passing close, dampened rapidly by the thought of those poor people. But was it a bomb? Was there a man on the front with a radio control and a trip switch? Had they perhaps sat next to him?
Nine people remain buried under wreckage. The authorities know about eight of these. The ninth is a girl of fifteen who ran away from her home in Stockport six months ago. Her parents will never connect her to the event in the newspaper and will spend the rest of their lives waiting for her to come home.
The orphaned boy and girl are driven to the house of a couple who foster for the local social services until their grandparents arrive tomorrow. The boy still believes his parents are living in France.
The reunited families have gone. The hall is almost empty now. The only people who remain are those waiting for family members who will never come.