They tell her the blast is by Bishopsgate and so it's Bishopsgate she goes to, all five thousand side-swaying pounds through night air lit only by fire and the occasional fresh blast. Bishopsgate? Why of course sir, you only had to say so, won't take a minute. Or envisioning the pilot who made this trip necessary; one hand in one glove pointed one finger and pressed it down, and a rough ton of close-packed powder took a swan-dive into London, reverberated flame. There, and then all over the East End. Christ. It's vaguely pornographic, these invasions, explosions. All the elements of power and panic required for a bad sexual experience, only without the sex. Just gritty tension and what's left of the road. Strand to Fleet, past the burning intersection (plugged, again, men are piling rubble into loose heaps leaving just enough space for her to squeeze by) to Ludgate, which becomes Newgate given a hard-enough left, and fortunately no additional detours are necessary. Through Cheapside onto Cornhill, a few blocks making it exactly what she wants it to be. Bishopsgate. The light is tremendous. She slows the van out of instinct and that's a lucky pull-an instant later some idiot dashes past the van's front, his arms loaded down with boxes. Boxes? Of what? She concludes it's a case of misplaced enthusiasm. She pulls over quickly in the likeliest place-findable but not overexposed-and swings out onto the macadam now made more shifty-footed by the bits of glass and wood-slivers spread unevenly everywhere. The light is nearly blinding on her left and imperfectly pitchblack night shears off to the right. It takes an act of will to move leftward, where the heat issues fiercely off one burning house and a congregation of men casts about to keep it from leaping on to others. One sees her approaching and half-walks, half-jogs up to meet her, sweat beading on a head mostly emptied of hair.
"You WVF?" He's panting, his irises ridiculously dilated from looking straight into flames.
"Yes."
"Cross the street. Tent set up. Some wounded, need to get to the hospital. You can-"
"Yes."
Grateful to be spared the explanation, he gives her the start of a smile, as he turns away. The wounded. She can ferry the wounded. But in her van? They aren't going to like it.

When she comes in she's the most beautiful thing he's ever seen, the most beautiful thing that ever was. The khaki is nothing. The dirt is nothing. Even through the bad light and the trousers he can tell she's a woman, an angel of light to his dim mind, a sister of mercy. When she gets close enough he takes a piece of the thick wool trousers in his hands. Christine sees it and lets it go. It's weird, but it's happened before. The place is uncomfortably short notice, noisy, dirty. No impromptu medical tent has ever met the ideal of safe and clean, but the young man currently clutching her clothing is lying on nothing more than a few folded blankets. The next person rushing past might well kick him in the ribs. With the flickering of the light, the dirt, the dark of the blankets, she can't tell where he's wounded, at all. "Hey," Christine calls sharply, casting briskly about the lean-to. Who knows what about this one?"
As she speaks, one of the rafters breaks in the building across the street. There's something awful about the cracking of wood that's hard to describe, the feel of something living being broken. She closes her eyes when it impacts. When it's over her hands relax and she uses the general pause to call again-"I said, who brought him in?" In very little time, an astonishingly young man in the uniform of the Home Guard walks up with that brisk snotty stride that sometimes codes efficiency. She hates the type, but at least maybe he'll know something. And so he does.
"'This one' was dragged out of the burning building just outside to your left. He's broken one of his legs and fractured some ribs."
"Are you sure you can't leave him here? I could kill him in transit, you know-can't it wait?" She looks down. The "him" at issue looks back, and from his vantage point her face is a long way up. He's conscious enough to hope that if there's blood on his face it's clotting in a manly fashion, that he still looks appreciably human. He hopes that she won't go away. Standing there in her huge trousers, with her face set, she is more than distracting; she gives off a strange illusion of safety as well. His head is just getting clear enough to register his numbness, he knows that at any moment his nerves may connect and fry him with pain instead of shock. He's grateful for the distraction she's providing; if she leaves he'll be all alone watching shoes stride by inches from his eyes. He'll feel even less human than he feels now.
With a purely procedural imperiousness the Guardsman says, "No. He can't stay, I'm sure he's bleeding internally and I can't tell how badly, and we're not set up for this." But she's not paying attention, hasn't stopped looking down yet. The invalid is focusing hazily on the scrap of pant leg in his hand. His knuckles tighten and shift around the fabric, gathering it in until the cloth isn't just between his fingers but in as far as his fist. He imagines that the piece of wool he's holding is warmer, that his hands are getting warmer. As for the pant leg, folds rise up radiating from his hands. Christine leans back to balance the tension, and the Home Guard gives her a look, one of those looks, a tomato-teasing look. In a voice equally low, sarcastic, and awful, he says "Here, how can you leave him, he already likes you."
Right. Without thinking Christine shifts into explode mode, no action, just the turn of her shoulders and face. It's enough to make the HG step back, which is good because at that moment a body with a clipboard brushes past at speed and Christine bends at the waist and puts a brief hand on his arm, straining not to step forward for her balance.
"Besides, if he stays here" the Guard observes, "he might well get kicked to death."
"Right. Well." He won on that point. "Are there any others?"
"Went with the previous shipment."
"Well, we're going to need a board or a plank to move him-at least a foot wide, 3-4 feet long. And two men to carry it." At some point she would have to stop these sexist games but right now she was feeling ornery.
"What about you?"
"Me, I just drive."

With an incongruous swiftness all the necessities are assembled. A plank is found, a blanket set over it. Papers are put into Christine's hands detailing the young man's name (Henry) age (25) occupation (Ministry of Information) and address (illegible). The Home Guardsman, who was conspicuously absent throughout most of this process, is suddenly back at her elbow when they are ready to take Henry out to her van.
"So. You'll be taking him to the volunteer hospital on Woburn. Shouldn't take you more than half and hour. They'll be expecting you."

The two plank-bearers hoist Henry up to about mid-thigh height and start shuffling with him toward the street. Swallowing an impolite "Oh, really" she steps to the front of the small procession and points. "All I have is a stripped down van" she says. She doesn't expect him to refuse to let her put Henry in it but doesn't feel like hearing him complain, either. He doesn't, but by the way he's looking over its somewhat smashed exterior, without the warning he might have. Smiling to herself, she yanks her keys out of her pocket, pausing to be pleased with the way the dull steel chain catches the dying firelight. She can't tell why she should be so cross with a kind of official she meets eight times a day but she is, nonetheless, is doing anything to make herself seem even a slight bit nastier.
She jerks the back doors open cavalierly, in sharp contrast to the attention she pays as they put Henry in. When they step back she climbs in, firms up the sides and rearranges the ambient stuff until his position is solid, all the while ignoring the way Henry's eyes are tracking her face. Yes, he's attractive but so what; the wounded will always do this to you, people will always do this to you, as long as they're hurt and you're human. If she was holding a sock puppet with a face, she didn't doubt his eyes would track that too.
Christine steps back out onto the street, closes the doors, and gets up to the cab, all without looking the Guardsman in the eye. Hintless, he follows.
"Woburn."
Did he think she'd forgotten? Violence to the gearshift, violence to the clutch. The engine catches, and she looks out the window. What was that odd Yank word? "Roger. Cheers."

Welcome to London, some coolish side of winter, 194_. The Blitz, a short bright word for a long dark experience wherein no-one sleeps, eats, or lives well, and the dust never settles long enough for a body to draw a clear breath. Grim to be alive for almost everybody, though some have it worse than others. Riding the changes, Christine has felt a group mind emerge in terms of damage control, a unified answer to the question of how-bad-is-it which changes more day to day than mouth to mouth. Estimations of damage get done in architecture, which was once presumably familiar to everybody and at any rate never gets put in a body bag and dragged away. And, classwise, buildings are no mean benchmark; the west end is nearly flat. The east end is politely pocked. Buckingham Palace, by some weird freak of fate, Hitler has yet to torch or touch, but as for more perishable indicators, butcheries are selling horsemeat now and housewives are queuing up to buy it. Days are difficult to distinguish in the dust that settles over everything, but night is obvious enough. Night is unavoidable.
Christine, for her part, is driving. One of the members of the Women's Volunteer Force, she drives around wherever she's needed and does whatever she's asked for at least twelve hours of the day and frequently twice that. The thing, the main point, is that the van keeps her moving and that motion is a necessity. She lets the insomniac restlessness that would have simply driven her into the streets drive her around London, wherever she's sent to go. Even her unreliable brain is only nominally involved. Thank God for small favours. Besides, driving, keeping the bombs' schedule, the hours pass differently and keep her on their own mechanistic time. The world has divided itself with oil-water extremity between pre-war and war, between the ordered past and now, with all of the former time becoming a blur of inapplicability, and the latter collapsing readily into yesterday, last week, or tomorrow. Avoiding depth, Christine fixates on width, keeping a shallow eye on the whole structure of the city. Motion is necessary; no other recourse. She can't tell, at times, who is strictly in charge of the motion, whether the streets she takes don't choose themselves. Not a problem, by now she knows every one. London is to her no longer a collection of places-Charing Cross, Tower Bridge-so much as a rhythm of motions, not the places themselves but the connection between them. Wherever destruction marks a roadblock here she can always find a way to get around there, because stopping isn't an option. Neither, really, is slowing down.

The sky is a queer livid pastel, the all clear hasn't sounded. If she were driving in the east end she'd consider hauling off underground but as it is she figures she's all right enough. And Henry?
"Henry?"
No answer. "Henry?"
At one time, perhaps, the van was sufficiently furnished to obscure the driver's interior view. No longer. If the back were lit Christine could see everything. But as it is she has only the low glow of her headlamps and the occasional fire, and the occasional outline of Henry's limbs when her look and the light coincide. He moves occasionally. She isn't reassured.
"Henry?"
"Yes." Finally. She wagers a point of possible interest.
"First girlfriend?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"The name of your first girlfriend."
"Celia."
"The place you first made it." Can she, she can, feel the shock. The road is proving smoother than she thought possible, much easier to drive here than any other elsewhere she's been lately. All the same, she doesn't like it, doesn't like driving in the city where there's no half-way horizon, where the view is all street or all sky. And her cargo?
"I didn't-"
"Ever?"
"No, not with her, not..." he pauses. Well-bred boy- question is, will he ask her to stop? If he can get up the breath for the request her real question's answered, for the moment, anyway. But the pause continues, and that's not wh at he ends up a sking.
"How about you?"
This is novel. "Name, Stephen. Place, service elevator at Harrod's."
"Really?"
"No, I'm lying. The family flat, one night. Parents went out, we stayed in." And Lord was it awkward, stuck on the sofa, straining to hear the doorbell. Was this Old St. or Aldersgate? And how was he feeling, really? By the sound of it, he was the kind what'd have a thumb chopped off and try to write with a pen.
"Oh. And the second?"
"The second?"
"The second time?"
"Service elevator at Harrod's."
It might be the engine, but she thinks she can hear him try to laugh.
"No, really. Halfway above floor five. Midway between cufflinks and women's shoes." And then enter the inevitable, and just when her story was getting good. Somewhere to the front she thinks she sees something falling. Something small. She slows.
Henry feels the deceleration turning his body, bending his ribs, and hardly thinks before asking what's happening.
Christine looks past him out the back, wraps her hand around the gearshift. She does not answer. Without looking at him she asks "How are you feeling?" She sounds mighty preoccupied, and it makes him nervous.
"I feel well enough"
Henry can't see save straight up at the van's gray roof, and hardly catches the whine, but it's impossible to miss the huge bang that sounds somewhere out ahead. He hasn't quite caught his breath before another comes, far off on the left, and initial shock, and then street noises. Fortunately, they're much too far off to pick up human screams. He reflects that the problem with bombs is- another whine, another smash-the problem with bombs is that even when they haven't hit you yet, even when they sound far away, you still feel weak and small and pinned. The more so when you're wounded and immobile. As if she could hear him think, Christine catches him before the thought goes much further.
"How are you feeling?"
"Frightened."
"No, idiot, physically. Few minutes rough driving?"
What? "Where will you go?"
"West, up. Might not help but I hate waiting in the streets for these things. We'll at least get off the road."
He braces himself as best he can, which pretty much means extending his elbows and holding his breath. He can't decide whether to keep his eyes open or closed, but when the van starts moving and all metal hues shift he decides his final word is closed. Seeing the occasional flicker in the roof is making him feel worse than ever.
She throws it in gear and gets going, never mind that this is the direction the first one fell, she'll turn soon enough. The city is awfully black but the sky itself is keeping everything dimly lit.
Another blast off to the side, startles her slightly and this with a bump in the road makes for a sharp jerk in the van. Henry cries out. The quick way he breaks it off tells her it was involuntary. Oh, fair enough, she knows where she is, she knows where she's going, there's time enough to get there. Woburn can wait, they're not driving in this weather.

Christine pulls off into the impromptu courtya rd created by the wholesale smashing out of a set of flats. Happened half a month ago and she still isn't used to it. Nor can she decide whether the place is safer, or more dangerous, for its rooflessness. On the one hand it doesn't matter and on the other she likes to look at the sky. Likes having the option, anyw ay. They stop.
"Henry, you still there?" Henry makes the two consonant sounds constituting assent. For Christine that's good enough. "Listen, Henry; I'm going to get out and come round to the back and sit up with you. I'm not leaving, I'll be right there. All right? Look pretty." She heaves open the door but closes it carefully. Patches of the sky are clearing up and it's eerily quiet; she knows the planes are up there, just can't hear them. Without the headlamps, the ambient light is an odd dull blue, making the air look thick. Would make the place lonely if she weren't so exhausted, if there weren't company on hand.
Lately Christine's thoughts have acquired a geography as local as her living space, and as she walks to the back of the van, cracked cement shifting between her boots, eyes on the sky, her mind follows a familiar path. She thinks about air. It's much in currency these days. The air that bombs use. The air that planes use. And the air of the radio. She's a big fan of aviation, avid admirer of the automobile, but she can't stand the wireless, hates the radio. Her mother thinks she's crazy but Christine has her reasons. Airplanes are actual. The wireless lies. And changes everything.
She thinks, fingering the pocks on the van's flanks, looking over the tires, a radio in every house somehow makes every house interchangeable. No matter how nondescript the people were before the radio, no matter how depressingly similar, no matter how much the men, all the same and the women, all the same, assembled in the evenings to do the same damn things, they were still themselves, they had an individuality the radio destroyed. Before the box, couple one and couple two could each be locked in their individual flats arguing fist and fury over the exact same thing-but for all of that, their voices were still uniquely theirs, their fights their own. And their voices were being used. With the radio on, only one voice transmits, is received. And it's the same voice in room after room after room. This, to Christine, is more horrific than corpses, more maiming, more malicious. It's a power that should be reserved only for God and even he, she thinks, would get darker for doing it.
Of course, her mother feels differently. Her mother maintains that without the machinery of which Christine is so fond, England would still look like England, and another whole generation wouldn't be as good as dead.
Right. She fishes out the keys, opens the doors. Henry is looking straight up, but when she climbs in he turns his head to watch her. Same effect as always but it's a good sign. He says nothing and she has time to wonder just where he's bleeding internally, has time to wonder whether she were better not to have stopped, and then there's another whine and blast and the question answers itself.
He crouches at the impacts, she notices. Raises his hands a little. Breathes out too fast.
She's wearing a coat but pulls a blanket up anyway. She takes his hand. "Of course, it wasn't very comfortable. The walls were wire mesh and I practically had to leave my sweater stuck to the damn thing."
He smiles, weakly. "Like Peter Rabbit. Come to think of it, Potter's creatures always were losing their clothes."
Christine laughs to encourage him and pats her free hand over her pockets to find her cigarettes. He's not so bad. Sheepish, maybe, but not so bad. "Weren't they though. I see I'm not embarrassing you overmuch."
"No. I..." He pauses, and closes his eyes briefly before continuing. "It keeps my thoughts off...it-" she looks away to let him to continue-"it keeps my mind off everything in my body that hurts. Makes me think I want to keep it."
Christine stops and looks at him. Then pointedly reminds herself to soften her expression. "Yeah," she says, pulling out the pack, "that's why I do it, actually."
He pulls back, insofar as a prone person can.
"Yeah, it's true. My first air raid, I was alone in the house. It was the building beside ours what got it, but the shock threw everything about, and a bookcase fell on me. It broke my arm, trapped me. And I lay there, feeling stuck in my body even more than under the damned piece of furniture, and I was screaming but no-one was hearing me, so I tried to quiet down and get my thoughts together. I thought of all the good things I could think of, and doing it turned out to be my clearest memory. Also, to think of it I had to remember my body being whole." Christine pauses. Even here, even with strangers, sometimes it's difficult not to.
"It must have been awful."
"What, sex?"
"No, being pinned during a raid."
"Ah-hah, lookit you. It wasn't that bad. Someone came round eventually." He's utterly distracted until she turns away from him to look out at the sky. Then he remembers that it's getting difficult to breathe. Have they told her how bad he is? Is she stopping because it's all right? He can see a piece of strangely lit, patchy cloud cover out the van's back, but it's hard to focus on. His neck hurts. He turns back to look at the ceiling.
"Ever seen one fall?"
"Have you?"
"No, I can't say as that I have. Is it at all exciting?"
She obviously isn't entirely satisfied with what she's seeing outside but half turns back, and it helps. Not looking out or at him, she's assembling her answer. "Yes and no. It's bloody unnatural, the first few times. Very War of the Worlds, very unsettling. And then you just connect it with the other things it's like and it isn't odd at all. Just awful."
"I'm afraid I don't see what you mean."
"Look-the first time you see the thing in the sky, it's weird as hell. Small piece of metal falling down like a dropped toy, all alone, you think of two things. It and the blast. And the difference between the two-or the fear of the second, makes the first-that little scrap of tin -the most fearsome thing you've ever seen. But then gradually the shock wears off and your eyes open a little wider. It isn't just the bomb and the blast. You think of the plane it fell out of, a plane most the same as this beast here"-she thumps the side of the van with the flat of her hand, but only lightly, because she's still listening-"just more sculpted metal. You think of the things it blows up, and they're just more things. You see enough bomb bits in the streets, gradually it's just a thing that happens."
"That's not keeping you from looking out for them."
"I didn't say their becoming less novel makes them safe."
There's a pause. Christine has out the cigarette but not the lighter. Henry hopes she doesn't get it because then they'll have to wait at least until she smokes it before they go. There's this weird and growing heaviness in his head and breathing's becoming harder. He wants to leave now. The cigarette is like physical time and he wants it to go away.
"What's wrong? Are you all right?"
"Can we leave? Please? I. I want to go."
Christine leans forward, puts a hand on his face. He flinches away from the heat of her breath.
"Are you all right? What's wrong? What hurts?"
"Nothing, I just-want a little space to breathe. Don't want anything near my face. Is there really a chance we'll be hit? Can we go?"
She looks him over a little more closely. His eyes are bright and his breath is becoming shallow and fast. This, too, she's seen, and this she's learned not to like. Looks like if she stays much longer it'll be only her life she's saving. Reluctance lingers but she tries to ignore it. "All right. We'll go. But listen, I want you to do something. Just try and breath a little deeper. Count to three-"
He does, briskly.
"and breath in for that long and then out for that long. We'll go. We'll be there before you know it."
"Thank you."
"Why, you're even welcome." Somehow she feels compelled to give the reassurance again. Probably because she's not sure she means it. "We'll be there in a moment." She strokes his cheek, then leans back and lands outside on the gravel. Closes the doors. Damn it all, she can still hear explosions. Does she want the cigarette? Yes. Driving in this, yes.

She pulls back onto the street with a calm certainty of purpose that surprises her. Adrenaline, maybe. Fear so strong you can't feel it. Almost worse that everything here looks so nearly normal, so close to healthy. Save for that one building, most of the architecture here is whole. The windows aren't broken, just blacked out, relentlessly curtained. Christine imagines people huddled under tables afraid to light matches. She's never quite gotten over the huge night-gulf between house and street, the way the road and the room become two different worlds. In peacetime it was bad enough. Now it's demonic. She steps on the gas. Ah well, perhaps she should chat up Henry. What hasn't she asked him?
The voice from the back is faint and urgent. "When did you start doing this?"
Ah. She's avoided talking at any length, so he won't pass out without her noticing. Well. As long as she keeps her responses short-"Four months ago? Five?"
"You don't remember?"
"I've been trying not to keep track of dates."
"Do they make you wear those overalls?"
"No." She pauses. "They just make everything easier." What is it with hating other instances and approximations of the thing one desires? What she decries in the radio she is desperate to see visited upon herself. A way to look like everyone else is a way to disappear.
"You're beautiful."
"Oh yeah? My father once attacked me in the garden. I was coming home at dawn. He thought I was a burglar. Couldn't tell if he was more surprised to find me female or related. How are you breathing?"
"Fine." A pause, filled with his intake and exhalation of breath. "What does your father do?"
"Munitions factory. They're working mostly all the time and the night shift pays more. He hadn't gotten home more than fifteen minutes before me. And you? What do you do?"
"I play the evil scientist. Defense intelligence." Why is he telling her this? Because she's saving his life and he thinks he might be dying. "Radar."
She keeps hearing the whining, is ignoring the crashing. As long as they whine they don't hit. As long as they whine they don't hit. Who did she hear this from? Why is it such an article of universal faith?
"You mean like decoder rings?"
"More like radio."

Certainly she had moved her foot toward the brake pedal to start making a point. Certainly she would have said something. And then this shape slammed into a building on her right, some two or three blocks down. Far enough to see it flower out, to see the fires start, to see the shock wave rolling forward with a creepy inexorability. For a brief moment she could feel everything-every inch of clothing on her body, the temperature of the air, and she could hear Henry, breathing, very very slowly. And she thought, I love you Henry, I don't care what you do for a living, I'm going to die. But while all her senses shattered, while she was thinking what she was thinking and seeing what she was seeing, while she saw the initial building crumble and was kalidoscopically capable of watching every brick fall her flesh and blood body took mechanically over, she didn't brake, but turned, and kept going.
The shock wave still caught them, of course. The van must have spent some few memorable moments off the ground, because she certainly remembers Henry screaming, and certainly remembers the sound of him falling back down on the padded plank, his outcry and the dull silence that followed.
And she remembers a dim succession of streets, and street signs, and causal connections her brain went on and made without her, a series of places she was led through dumbly, by her self.
The first time it happens. And then the shock wears off and your eyes open a little wider.
They didn't make it to Woburn. But she put in at Mercer, and helped them pull Henry out. She couldn't tell but he seemed alive, and before she'd had any chance to check they'd had him strapped up and rolled away she was left facing a pile of forms nearly as thick as her thumb. Daylight made its gritty entrance she was summarily shooed away, her van's tires squealing like a chorus of cats.

Somewhere in the infirmary, drugged and delirious, Henry watches the advance of the sunlight as it warms his face and bleaches his sheets. Everything in motion, from the gurneys to the tool trays, haunts him with a link to a certain mobile, hunted face. Ig noring the low gr oans of pa in fr om the neat ranks of casualties that surround him, Henry sinks into the cushions and reassures himself, tells himself until he's certain, that Christine isn't gone for good.