Coventry by Helen Humphreys

can’t be sure that the flaps of black she sees there are people or the dark tuck of the stone walls.
    There’s a hollow booming sound above them, and the basement shudders. Harriet is exhausted, feels she can’t endure another blast. Her nerves are completely raw.
    “I wanted to enlist,” explains Jeremy. “I wanted to fight the Jerries, but they won’t let me.”
    “Why not?”
    “I’m colour-blind.”
    Harriet turns on the bench and looks at Jeremy as though she will be able to tell from staring into his eyes what they are capable of seeing. He has dark hair, eyebrows that are two black slashes across his face, lips that are pale. He appears older than he had on the roof of the cathedral.
    “You don’t see red or green?” she asks because she knows that, like dogs, certain people can’t make out all the colours in the spectrum.
    “I don’t see any colour,” says Jeremy. “It’s a severe sort of colour-blindness.”
    “You only see in black and white?”
    “Well.” Jeremy grins at her and Harriet can’t help but smile back. “I don’t think of it as black and white. It’s more like night and day.” He looks around the small underground room. “That wall opposite is night. That lamp is day. His hair is night. You.” He smiles at Harriet again. “You are a sunny day.”
    “Flatterer,” says Harriet, but she is secretly pleased.
    A man passes silently along the pews with a tin cup and bucket of water. Harriet and Jeremy take a drink. The water is soft and cool and tastes of stone.
    On the bench beside Harriet are an elderly man and woman. The woman sits bolt upright, her hands curled around each other in her lap. The man has removed his hat. This is, after all, a church. They stare straight ahead, as though they are on a journey, are watching the countryside unfold before them.
    We could die here, thinks Harriet. And worse, we are prepared for it.
    Jeremy shifts on the bench, shifts again. “My mother will be worried about me,” he says. “There’s just the two of us. She relies on me.”
    Harriet’s own mother never did a thing for her. A good thing. She sent Harriet out to root the potatoes, collect the eggs, bring in the coal. Once, she showed her daughter how to press flowers but later, in a fit of rage, she crumbled the dry, delicate blossoms into the fire. Harriet can’t imagine that her mother ever worried about her. She eventually went mad, trying to burn the house down with Harriet inside.
    Harriet crosses her legs, uncrosses them on the hard wooden pew. Her mother remains a mystery to her, a woman full of alarming volatility. She always said she was full of passion, but Harriet now thinks she was just full of rage. When Harriet was brave enough to move away with Owen, her mother did burn the house down, with herself inside it.
    For a long time Harriet thought it was her fault, and then one day she didn’t, and that felt worse because at least when it was her fault her guilt kept her tied to her mother. Being absolved freed her not just of responsibility but of connection. For a long time she had lain awake, imagining her childhood home ablaze, her mother’s screaming face at an upstairs window. The last time she made a visit to her father, at the start of this war, he was drunk for the entire three days she was there. He couldn’t drive her to the station to catch her train home because he had passed out in the potting shed. She had to walk, and then, because she was in danger of missing her train, she had to cadge a lift with the milkman.
    “Do you have any family waiting for you?” asks Jeremy.
    “No. I’m alone.”
    One of the children opposite Harriet has begun to cry. Small, ratcheting sobs break from her body until the room and the dark are filled with the noise of her crying. Harriet wants her to stop, wants her to shut up.
    “I’m unbelievably selfish,” she says to Jeremy, but he appears not to have heard her.
    “I work at the Triumph plant,” he says.