Out of This World by Graham Swift Page B

same paper. He used to tell a story about when he was at Nordhausen, the first of the camps he witnessed. He had not known then that he would later become a professional news photographer or whether he wanted to be one. Before the corpses were removed he deliberately went to look at them, because he thought he should do so without the protection, as it were, of his camera. He found himself virtually alone beside a row of bodies – people were staying clear because of the terrible smell – but while he was standing there an American corporal approached from the other end of the row. Bill used to say that the corporal’s uniform looked particularly new and pressed and his face clean and fresh, as if he had just stepped off the troop plane, but I wondered if this was Bill’s embellishment. The G.I. was approaching the corpses with a handkerchief held over his nose and mouth, but he also had a camera round his neck – his own camera, new-looking – and he started to take pictures. He would wrench his hand from his face, raise the camera and repeat, ‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ apparently not noticing Bill. Bill said it was like some parody of the determined sightseer desperate to take snaps for the folks back home. He wondered whether without the camera the corporal could have got so near. Or whether he needed, as if to convince himself, the future proof of what his own eyes were seeing.
    But the point of the story is that in his agitation the American had forgotten to take the lens-cap from his camera. Bill said he could have gone up to him and told him. He could have made that decision. But he didn’t.

Sophie
 
    How can I tell, Doctor K? Tell me how to tell it. People say: ‘It was all over in an instant’ or ‘It happened so quickly.’ But it isn’t like that. Something happens to time. Something happens to normality. A hole gets blasted in it. A hole with no bottom to it. So what is over in an instant just goes on happening. It happens in long slow-motion. And then it just keeps on happening. So that afterwards, when I was some place else, here in New York, three thousand miles away, it wasn’t afterwards or some other place, I was still there, on the terrace at Hyfield, standing, frozen, as if I might never move again, with that strange noise in my ears, the noise of absolute silence. Couldn’t even hear Mrs Keane screaming. Apparently she was screaming, her mouth was wide open. Only the voice in my head, like the distant voice down a telephone, which was saying: Something terrible has happened. Is happening. Is happening.
    Because you don’t believe it. You don’t believe that one moment – Then the next – Because you don’t believe it can have happened. So it goes on happening. Till you believe it. How can I tell you what I don’t believe? What do you want me to say? I was there. Heard. Saw. On the spot. How does that help?
    And what am I trying to tell you, anyway? That on an April morning ten years ago, my grandfather was blown up by terrorists, along with his chauffeur and a Daimler. And that if I hadn’t been standing there on the terrace, about to sit down with the cup of coffee Mrs Keane had brought, and thinking, Now I will talk to Harry – if I’d said goodbye to Grandad at the front porch and not on the terrace (‘Goodbye,’ he said, ‘no, stay here, sit down,’ like a husband who thinks that even a newly pregnant woman shouldn’t move) – then I might – Too.
    Goodbye. A kiss. Another sixty seconds –
    And if Harry hadn’t been up in the rear bedroom, packing his things – And if Mrs Keane hadn’t just stepped from the kitchen, with a fresh tray of coffee –
    But you know all that. Or you can look it up. Do you do your homework, Doctor K? ‘Lucky escape of Harry Beech and his Daughter’: that was how the newspapers put it, mentioning Mrs Keane only as an afterthought. Lucky escape! And then of course the pictures. The ‘gruesome’ pictures. Wreckage ‘littering the once