Caught

They sat at the kitchen table and watched the television with no sound.

There was no point in the sound. Tom could not hear it, and his father did not turn it up, and did not seem to want it; he had had it off, Tom thought, all evening, or so low that it was the same thing, and had sat there with the picture going and his hand on the paper and his eyes on the door. Now his eyes were on the picture, and so were Tom’s, and the picture went on in the blue light on the counter by the stove, changing, and neither of them said anything, because one of them could not hear and the other one did not.

The man at the desk was the night man now. Younger, in a dark suit, with a face that looked as if it had been brought in from somewhere at six and told to sit there. Behind him the screen showed what it had shown all day: the four places, one after another, from the air, at night now, lit up, with the tape round them and the lights and the smoke still going up, thin, from two of them. Grand Central, the roof, from above, with a hole in it. A long building at the airport with its end gone. The terminal at the Battery, the boarding hall, low, on the water, black. The junction at the foot of the bridge, the four streets meeting at the corner of the park, with the trees of the park beside it in their thin new green lit white by the floodlights and the buildings round it with their windows gone, black and empty, like a row of skulls.

He looked at the junction for as long as it was there.

Along the bottom of the screen the white letters crawled on the dark red. He read them. He had been reading them all day.

…ABC CORRESPONDENT DESMOND ACHEBE, REPORTING FROM KENNEDY THIS MORNING, IS ALIVE / SERIOUSLY INJURED, EXPECTED TO LIVE / JAMAICA HOSPITAL, QUEENS / ABC STAFF KILLED AT GRAND CENTRAL WILL BE NAMED WHEN FAMILIES HAVE BEEN TOLD / AIRSPACE CLOSED / MILITARY CORDON IN PLACE AT ALL FOUR SITES / PROVINCIAL ASSEMBLY ADJOURNED / LIEUTENANT-GOVERNOR’S OFFICE VACANT / …

He did not know who Desmond Achebe was. He read it go past and thought of the voice from the coffee place on Vanderbilt Avenue at a quarter to twelve, younger, close, with a great deal of room round it, Hugh, it is very full and it is very quiet, and the line from Kennedy going, and the man in New Westminster stopping in the middle of a sentence and starting again on a shorter one. He thought that was who it was. He was glad. It was a small, plain gladness, the size of a pebble, and he held it in his hand for a while and then put it down.

---

At ten to twelve the picture changed.

It went to a room. A plain room with a wall behind it, dark blue, and on the wall the crown and the eagle and three yellow letters, the same three letters that had been on the backs of the windcheaters coming across the floor from Forty-Second Street at twenty-five past eleven this morning, the same letters as on the tape. RAC. A lectern in front of the wall with a microphone on it, and a man at the lectern in a dark suit with a sheet of paper.

It was not Hale, the superintendent with the clipboard and the little black radio who had come down the Vanderbilt steps to stand next to Costello and be one radio. It was an older man, grey, very thin, with gold on his collar and a face that did not move, and he looked at the sheet of paper and read it, the way they had all read their sheets of paper today, the Prime Minister and the woman at the lectern at Government House and the man at the lectern at Albany: steadily, the same size words all the way down.

At the bottom of the screen, not crawling, still:

ROYAL AMERICAN CONSTABULARY: ARRESTS.

His father had taken his hand off the paper.

---

The man read for perhaps a minute. Then the picture went from him to photographs.

Three of them, side by side, filling the screen. Faces. The kind of photograph that is taken for a licence or a pass or a card you carry in a wallet, against a pale background, from the front, with nothing in the face because the person has been told to put nothing in it.

He looked at them.

They were faces. That was all. He looked at them for a long time, all three, and they were faces that could have been on any train he had ever stood in with his back against the doors. A man of about thirty with short hair and a thin face and glasses. A man of about forty, heavier, with a beard trimmed close and his hair going at the front. A younger man, twenty-five, with a round face and his hair cut very short at the sides and nothing at all in his eyes. They could have been anybody. They could have been the man in the dark blue raincoat who bought his coffee at five to seven at the stand by the Vanderbilt stairs every morning and drank it standing up. They could have been the man in the suit who wanted the Forty-Second Street doors at twenty-five to eleven. They could have been anybody on the floor.

Under each photograph, in white letters, a name.

He read the names. He read them twice. They were names. They were the kind of names that are on any list: on the rota in the muster room at Fifty-First Street, on the board in the waiting hall at Bellevue, on the list on Dinny Shea’s table at the Trades Council, on the forty papers folded under Mrs Abelson’s counter every morning. He did not know them and they did not mean anything; he read them on the screen at ten to twelve in his father’s kitchen and they went in and did not stay.

Under the three names, all the way across the bottom of the screen, still:

DETAINED WITHIN HOURS OF THE ATTACKS. OTHERS SOUGHT. NO CLAIM OF RESPONSIBILITY HAS BEEN MADE. NO STATEMENT.

The photographs stayed on the screen for a long time.

He looked at the man of about thirty with the glasses. At his face, from the front, against the pale background, with nothing in it. He looked for something in it. He looked for a long time, the way his mother had looked at the face on every trolley that came down the corridor, for an eyebrow with a scar through it, for anything. There was nothing. It was a face with nothing in it, and the white letters under it said there had been no claim and no statement, and he did not know what he had thought he would see.

He had thought, he understood, that there would be a reason.

He had thought, without ever thinking it, all day, since the light at the gates and the weight, since the steward line and the second light, that at the end of it, somewhere, on some screen, at some hour, somebody would come to a lectern with a sheet of paper and read out the reason. Not a good one. He had not thought there would be a good one. But a reason. A thing somebody wanted, that they had done this to get, so that you could hate the thing, and know what it was, and hold it in your hand.

There was a face with nothing in it, and a name, and no statement.

---

He looked at his father.

His father was looking at the screen. He had not moved. He sat very straight in the hard chair with both feet flat on the floor and his hands on his knees, now, not on the paper, and looked at the three faces, and his long brown face did not do anything at all. It did not do anything the way it did not do anything when his back was bad; on purpose, held, the way you hold a beam steady in the wind with your whole body so that nothing shows.

Tom reached across the table and pulled the Sunday paper towards him.

It was folded, still, as thick as a brick, the way it had come from Hrynko’s yesterday. On the front of it, across the top, the masthead, and under the masthead the date, SUNDAY 30 APRIL, and a photograph of a baseball player, and a headline about the price of something. Down the side of the front page there was a white margin, an inch wide, where nothing was printed.

He took the pen out of his shirt pocket, his mother’s, which he had not given back.

He wrote in the margin. One word. He wrote it slowly, because of the bandages, in capitals that went up and down, and it took the whole of the width of the margin.

WHY

He turned the paper round on the table and pushed it back across to his father.

---

His father looked down at it.

He looked at the word in the margin of yesterday’s paper for a long time. Tom watched him look. He watched the pale blue eyes in the long brown face go across the word, slowly, the three letters, and stop at the end of it, and go back to the beginning, and go across it again.

Then his father looked up at him.

He did not say anything. He did not pick up the pen. He looked at Tom across the kitchen table, in the blue light of the portable television and the yellow of the lamp over the stove, at his son, the eldest, in a City constable’s uniform white and grey and red with his shoes off and standing side by side on the lino by the chair with their toes to the door, and his long face was very calm, the calm it always had, the calm the old men at the local said he had had on the steel in a gale with a beam swinging; and then he shook his head.

Slowly. Once to the left, and once to the right, and back. Not no. Not don’t. The other one. The one that meant I don’t know.

He did not know.

He had marched over the bridge every first of May since 1953, at fifteen, with his own father, behind the banner, and walked out along beams forty storeys up for other men’s lunches, and come down off the steel with a back like a post, and raised two sons in this kitchen, and sat at this table for four years between them and said nothing, and tonight he had defrosted a tub of his wife’s soup in case, and knelt on the lino with his back to undo his son’s laces; and he did not know why. Nobody had told him. Nobody was going to tell him. He shook his head, once, slowly, at the word in the margin of yesterday’s paper, and then he put his hand flat on top of it, over the word, and kept it there.

On the screen the three faces went, and the studio came back, and the night man at the desk, and the four places from the air, lit up, one after another, with the smoke still going up from two of them.

At midnight the clock on the cooker, which was green, and which Tom could see from where he sat, changed from one day to the next.

His father did not look at it. He looked at the door to the hall.