shout, the warnings you want to scream, rattle round and round and round in your head like pebbles in a wave and will not be cast out.
Now he has the door open. Now he is in the car. Door shut, belt on, key in the ignition—
This time you know the blast for what it is. This time you are prepared and can appreciate its every vital moment in dreadful action-replay.
The ball of light fills the interior of the Ford Sierra. An instant after, still twilit by the killing light, the roof swells up like a balloon and the doors bulge on their hinges. Another instant later the windows shatter into white sugar and then the picture window before you flies into shards, a gale of whirling knives carried on a white wind that blasts you from your feet and blows you across the room in a whirling jumble of glass and smashes you into the sofa. The skin of the car disintegrates and the pieces take flight. The hood follows through the window to join you on the sofa. The roof has blown clean away and is flying up to heaven, up to join God. The car roars into flames and within, behind the flames, a black puppet thing gibbers and dances for a few endless moments before it falls into crisp black ashes.
A red rain has spattered the wallpaper. There is not a window intact on Clifton Road. Your mother is lying at a crazy angle against the door, her dressing gown hitched around her waist. Out in the drive the pyre roars and trickles of burning fuel melt the tarmac. Smoke plumes into the sky, black oily smoke, and there at the place where your eyes are drawn, the place where the smoke can no longer be seen, there is a bird-bright white dot: an Imperial X15 Astrofighter coming in from space, and now you know that it must happen all over again, the landing, the running Major Tom, the strange transformations, the man in the green uniform stepping into his car, the explosion, the burning, the Astrofighter coming in for a landing, the changes, the blast, the burning, the Astrofighter, the blast, the burning, the landing, the blast, the burning, landing blast burning, blast burning blast burning blast burning, over and over and over.
“Major Tom!” you cry, “Major Tom, don’t leave me! Daddy! Daddy!”
* * * *
When the alarms had sounded, when the flashing lights had thrown their thin red flickering shadows across the floor, she had said to herself, He’s dead, they have lost him, and though the world had ended she could not bear any hatred in her heart for those who had killed her son. They had acted in good faith. She had consented. All responsibility was hers. She could forgive them, but never herself. God might forgive Catherine Semple, but she never would.
Gone, she thought, and had risen from her chair to leave. Empty coffee cups and women’s magazines covered the table. She would slip away quietly while the alarms were still ringing and the lights still flashing. Nurses’ running footsteps had come chasing down the corridors, but at the door the sudden, terrifying quiet had stopped her like ice in the heart. Then, after the storm had come, the still, small voice, pitifully frail and poignant.
“Major Tom! Major Tom! Don’t leave me! Daddy! Daddy!”
“I won’t,” she had whispered. “I won’t leave you,” and everything had stopped then. It was as if the whole city had fallen silent to hear the cries of the new nativity, and then with a shudder the world had restarted. Lines had danced and chased across the oscilloscopes, rubber bladders had breathed their ersatz breaths, valves had hissed, and the electronic blip of the pulsebeat had counted out time. But even she had known the difference. The red lights which had been red so long she could not remember them being any other color were now defiantly green, and though she could not read the traces she had known that they were the normal signs of a twelve-year-old boy waking gently from a troubled, healthy sleep. She could feel the warmth from his bed upon her skin and smell the