Under the Rainbow

‘I just want to hear you say it!’ Peggy screams into the old tunnel, covered on the inside with slime: gangrenous growths.

‘Fucking say what?’ he bellows back, the air blasting out of his lungs with the force of dynamite.

They’re so close they can hardly hear each other over the howling of death. It’s a dark night for Coventry. Black and occasional flashes of white haunt the sky, ululating like a discordant piano. I can feel the city levelling out under the bombs in an endless undulation. Flames, rubble and dust explode into the thick air as somewhere behind the couple Mr. Westwood’s hardware shop implodes from a direct hit. It’s near, but too far away to be actually happening.

The destruction is lost on them, this monochrome couple, and it’s almost funny how they stand there, uncompromisingly angry.

‘Tell me you want to be with me, Martin! Tell me that after all this is over you’ll take me away!’ she hisses into the tunnel, her talon-like fingernails springing out to grab hold of his arm. She’s a tiger in my mind, one of those giant animals that you see in the zoo, which the brave soldiers took home from India. Peggy’s not as scary as a tiger, she’s just my sister, but she looks as angry as one in her starchy black overcoat, reaching down to her ankles. The way her hips stick out through the coat so broadly makes me think of hippopotamuses, from the storybooks at home.

In my head, I can’t see the midnight lights anymore or the swirling black water of the night. I see purple skies and yellow sunsets and people as dark as coal chasing wild dogs the size of deer with their big bows. I hear ocean waves tickling the shore and harrumphing elephants calling to one another. I smell dust from the savannah and leather drying in the sun. Breathing out, I can feel my storybook Africa, but the words are my thoughts and the pictures are my drawings.

Somewhere far off, in a place where little girls can’t be happy, I hear Martin whispering reassurances in a fatherly voice, all honeyed up. Blue birds warble in the place of the screeching bombs and people aren’t hiding anymore, they’re dancing in the air, like me. I’m somewhere over the rainbow and beyond the smoggy chimney-tops.

‘Peggy for fuck’s sake, you know I can’t aff– shit! Is that your sister?! There, by the–’ I hear a voice shout.

‘Erica? What? I– Erica! No! Erica!’ I think that’s Peggy. She’s ruining my blue skies, so I open my eyes to glare at her and…

It’s not –

Not –

Blue. Black. White. Red. Brick. Fire.

‘Run!’ they scream together, and I can see them racing out from under the old, sad bridge, with his droopy arches and rotten bricks towards me. Martin’s neatly oiled hair is now all straggly and grey in places, with ash.

Running, running, roaring, screaming, begging, folding, and I hold Teddy close to my heart and I think he whines like a dog. Peggy’s mouth is wide open in the distance, a silent cave of despair, and I just want to tell her that I’m safe, that it’s ok, Teddy will look after me, there’s no need to be worried. And then something beside me finally sags and slumps, sighing slowly like the curtains closing at the end of a play. Peggy and Martin vanish behind a pillar of smoke. I crumple and feel my skin peel away from my bones like old rubber gloves.

Looking back now, all this time later, I think it was a wall that did it: one of the walls from Mr. Westwood’s hardware shop. I must have wandered up next to it as the flames finally collapsed what was left of the front of the house, crushing and burning me with it. There should have been blue skies and endless rainbows after the pain, but I think Teddy and I did something wrong because we’re still here, the spirits of Wymond Avenue. A phantom and a teddy bear lost in a ghost town.

The bridge still stands, Greyfriar’s Bridge, and some nights I sleep under it with Teddy and we dream of Africa. Each night the mossy slime drips down from the droopy arches, pus from festering wounds, and I feel the bridge shaking with sobs. He was left behind too.

Sometimes I climb to the top of the bridge in the dead of the night and call out to Peggy, though she must be old and grey now. I don't know if she can hear me or if she ever could, but the bridge groans too, yodelling with me. If we can't live in hope, at least we can dream of it. Sometimes though, the light is lost in the shadows and I just sit down on the old, cracked and dusty path under the arch and cry. No one walks by here.

No flowers grow under the bridge or anywhere on Wymond Avenue; I can’t even make flower chains or push daisies. Sometimes I see a rainbow, but even though I'm under it I can't find any pot of gold. Maybe I'm too far down. Sometimes I pray to God and beg him for Peggy, but all I can hear is the bluebirds laughing at me...

Please don't cry for me; I'm already dead.