When the Sky Fell Apart Read Online Free

face. The smell of her: grass and sea and sweet sweat. That hair of hers, all around them, like something to take deep into your lungs and drown with.
    It was still as beautiful, her hair, still long and thick—the illness hadn’t touched it. He used his fingers to comb it back from her face and worked the soap in gently, so as not to hurt her. Then he washed, ever so carefully, her neck, shoulders, back. He counted each bone in her spine. Her chest, so flat now, like a child’s. The fuzz between her legs. He took extra care to rinse off all of the waste from her thighs and behind her knees, knowing she would flare up even redder if any trace remained.
    Afterwards he wrapped her in a towel and held her on his lap in front of the kitchen stove to rub the warmth back into her bird bones. He thought how he would have done this with the children they should have had. The children she should have been nursing and rocking and kissing right now. The children who should have been hanging off her skirts as she stood at that stove and stirred the broth…
    He stopped himself. Such thoughts did no one any good. He had driven himself mad over it all too many times to count.
    He sang instead. ‘Bobby Shaftoe’ was Marthe’s favourite—sometimes she snoozed as he sang.
    He was on the second verse— bright and fair —when he heard the explosions. Felt them, really. A deep echo that moved through the walls and floor and up into his body. Into Marthe’s delicate bones. A pause and then another boom as before, only louder.
    Maurice stopped singing. Marthe’s eyes snapped open.
    Another boom.
    He knew what it had to be. Everyone had been expecting it for weeks now, ever since the troops had left and they had announced on the wireless that the islanders would be left to fend for themselves.
    Demilitarised .
    A fancy word for abandonment.
    He kissed Marthe’s forehead, telling her he was sorry, so sorry, my love, as he laid her down on her blanket in front of the stove. She cried out, but he couldn’t mind her, not just then.
    He ran to the window. He could see the smoke billowing up as close as if it were from next door’s bonfire.
    Stomach jolting, blood singing, Maurice started to run.
    By the time he reached the beach, it was a scene from the end of the world. Just the empty stretch of sand and the black, smoking craters, spewing smoke skywards. No aeroplanes in the sky; the sea was flat and blank. But in the air, the stink of burning vraic and something else he couldn’t place. Something that made his mouth water. They’d already started the rationing—everyone’s meat, butter and sugar had been restricted from the moment they knew England was cutting them off.
    Back up the hill, smoke was spiralling from his chimney.
    Marthe .
    But he walked on towards the beach. He needed to see it for himself.
    There wasn’t another soul in sight. No fires either, now. Only huge, smoking holes, like blackened open mouths in the sand.
    Warily, he inched over to the closest one. It was a vast crater with stones and vraic scattered all around. He peered in, guts roiling. Deep enough to be filling up with water . It was like a laceration, as though Jerry had clutched an enormous knife, reached across the ocean and dragged a blade across the face of the beach, gleefully stabbing and gouging.
    Maurice felt suddenly chilled. His knees went and he sat down, cradled his head in his hands and tried not to think about who might have been on the beach when that bomb hit. Fishermen packing up their nets. Couples walking, hand in hand. Children playing…
    He retched a little, insides churning with each fresh image, each fresh puff of smoke. He squeezed his eyes shut, pressed his fists against his eyelids. Everything was darkness until, when he pressed harder, silent stars or fireworks or explosions.
    When Maurice opened his eyes, the bloody bomb holes were still there. Pockmarks on the face he had loved as long as he had drawn breath.
    Damn Jerry.