‘They’ll bring it back,’ he says, banging on the back of the truck as it gets as close as is safe to the open storeroom doors. ‘They’re journalists, not drunks. We don’t need to worry about them nicking it. The worst they’ll do is forget to bring it back till later. And besides, they’ll be going through some pretty horrific stuff the next few weeks.’

He pauses, jumping on to the ledge at the back of the van to open the doors.

‘Let’s do these by hand so we get a few out quickly,’ he says, passing me a stack of newspapers. ‘Just put these ones out front to start with.’

I stare at the brick of papers in my arms, all bearing the same photo of the burning towers.

‘Crack on, will you?’ Moe frowns at me from inside the van, balancing another stack of newspapers on his bent knees.

‘I don’t understand,’ I say, gaping at the picture screaming from the front of every paper. ‘The planes crashed into the buildings? Both of them?’

‘It was a terror attack,’ he says, climbing down next to me with 207more papers. ‘They did it deliberately. Two flew into the towers, another into the Pentagon. There was a fourth jet, but it crashed into a field. Who the hell knows where it was supposed to be going? There must be thousands dead. Thousands. Awful.’

‘But why?’ My eyes trace the loops and curls of flames and smoke, immortalised mid-rage against a sky so blue it looks like it’s never seen a cloud before.

‘Who knows,’ Moe says, hurrying back inside with his papers. I have to trot to keep up. ‘But it’s all anyone will talk about for months. And the press, they’ll have to hear every horrific detail, listen to every last desperate phone call made from those planes.’

I slow behind him, bright-lit shop dazzling as usual after the 2.00 am dark of the back alley. And it’s then that it hits me. I haven’t thought about anything else except the burning buildings since I first saw them an hour ago. Carly’s gone, and Katie Jolley, up in those billowing clouds of horror, so choked with terror and despair it’s impossible to imagine anything else.

I look down at my papers, electrified, tingles running up and down my back as I realise.

This is how I make them evaporate. With worse stories than mine. I know they’re out there. I’ve just never thought to go looking for them.

208

Marie ~ Just outside Warchester ~ 2006