“I’ve come to give Rowena a lift home,” she said, beaming. “She texted me a little while ago, said the tubes were up the spout. So Chauffeur-Mum to the fore!”
I told her that Rowena had gone to get the medals from school and that Addie was getting his cake, a chocolate tray-bake from the store that we’d turned into a World War One trench scene.
“Fantastic!” she said, laughing.
Maisie, my surprising kindred spirit. Our daughters, those apples-and-oranges little girls, never became friends but Maisie and I did. We’d meet on our own and share small details of our children’s lives: Rowena’s tears when she didn’t make the netball team and Maisie offering Mr. Cobin new team outfits or sex if he’d make Rowena wing attack—and having to explain the second offer was a joke! Rowena’s horror when her big teeth came through and demanding the dentist give her small ones again; exchanged like a gift with my dentist story of Jenny refusing to eat or smile when she got braces until we found a make that was sky blue.
And it was Maisie I turned to when I started my third miscarriage at Jenny’s seventh birthday party, when you were away filming.
“Listen to me, kiddly-winks! Jenny’s mummy has to go and visit Father Christmas now—yes, it is three months early!—but he needs advance warning of REALLY GOOD children—and because you’ve all been so FANTASTIC this afternoon she wants to make sure you’ll all get an extra-special present in your stocking.”
Aside to me. “Materialism and Father Christmas usually works.”
“So it’ll be me now doing musical chairs, all right? Everyone ready?!”
And it was all right. And nobody knew. And she kept twenty children entertained while I went to the hospital, and she had Jenny to stay that night.
Three years later, she waited for those twelve weeks with me till Adam was safely inside and likely to go to term. Like our family, she understood how deeply precious Adam is to us; our hard-won baby.
And now she’s sitting next to me, my old friend, crying. She cries all the time—“Stupidly soppy!” she’d say at carol services—but these are painful tears. She tightens her grip on my hand.
“It’s my fault,” she says. “I was inside, going to the loo, when the fire alarm went off. But I didn’t know Jenny was in the building. I didn’t know to call for her. I just went looking for Rowena and Adam. But they were fine, outside in no time.”
At sports day I’d told her Adam and Rowena were at the school. If I’d said, “And Jenny,” she’d have called for her too, made sure she was out before the fire took hold.
Two words.
But instead I’d nattered on about Adam’s cake.
Her voice is a whisper. “Then I saw you running towards the school. And I knew how relieved you were going to be when you saw that Addie was safe.”
I remember Maisie outside, comforting the reception teacher, Rowena comforting Adam by the bronze statue of a child, as black smoke was swirled by the wind, dirtying the blue sky.
“And then you shouted for Jenny and I realized she must be in there. And you ran inside.” She pauses for a moment, her face pale. “But I didn’t go to help you.” Her voice is staccato with guilt.
But how can she think I blame her? I’m just moved that she thought, even for one moment, of going into a burning building after me.
“I knew I should help you,” she continues. “Of course I should. But I wasn’t brave enough. So I ran to the fire engines that were still on the bridge instead. Away from the fire. I told them there were people inside. I thought if they knew, they’d get there more quickly, that it would be more urgent. And they did. I mean, as soon as I told them, one of the fire engines drove at a parked car and shoved it off the road onto the pavement. And then people parked behind them realized what was happening and got out of their cars and the firemen were shouting that there were people in the school and then we were all pushing cars out of the way. Everyone pushing the cars out of the way so they could get through.”
I can see that her memory is overspilling into her present, so that it’s happening now in front of her, and she can smell it and hear it—diesel fumes, I imagine, and people shouting and horns going and the smell of fire reaching the bridge.
I want to interrupt her from her reverie, rescue her from it. I want to ask her if Rowena’s all right, because I remember seeing her in Accident & Emergency when I was searching for Jenny. And I remember the suited man talking to the journalists and saying Rowena was in hospital too. But I hadn’t paused to think about her since; anxiety for my own child selfishly pushing out space for anybody else.
But why is Rowena hurt when I saw her safely outside next to the statue with Adam?
Dr. Bailstrom arrives on her precipitous red heels and Maisie has to go. I think she leaves reluctantly, as if there’s something more she wants to tell me.
It’s late now and the pull of home is unbearably strong. Own bed. Own house. Own life back again to be lived as usual tomorrow.
You are on the phone to Adam and for a few moments I hang back, as if it’ll be my turn in a minute to speak to him. Then I hurry close to you, listening for his voice.
“I’m going to spend the night with Mum and Jenny here. But I’ll see you as soon as I can, OK?”
I can just hear Adam breathing. Short, hurried breaths.
“OK, Ads?”
Still just breathing, terrified breathing.
“I need you to be a soldier right now, Addie, please?”
You should ask him to be a knight, not a soldier. He doesn’t want to be a soldier. Still he doesn’t speak. And I hear the gap between you, the one that used to make me sad and now frightens me.
“Good night then. Sleep tight, and send my love to Granny G.”
I have to hug him, right this moment, feel his warm little body and ruffle his soft hair and tell him how much I love him.
“I’m sure Granny G will bring him to see you tomorrow,” Jenny says to me, as if reading my thoughts. “I’d probably scare him too much, but you look all right.”
You want to spend the night next to me and next to Jenny—splitting yourself in two, to keep watch over both of us.
A nurse tries to persuade you to go to the bed they’ve sorted out for you. She tells you that I am unconscious and therefore unaware of whether you’re with me or not, and that Jenny’s too deeply drugged to be aware of anything either. As the nurse says this, Jenny pulls a silly face at her and I laugh. There’s really a lot of opportunity for bedroom-farce-style comedy here and I think Jenny will try and beat me to it.
The nurse promises you that if my condition or Jenny’s “worsens,” they’ll get you immediately.
She’s telling you that neither of us will die without you.
Perhaps I jumped the gun a bit in the potential for comedy.
You still refuse to go to bed.
“It’s late, Mike,” your sister says firmly. “You’re exhausted. And you need to function properly tomorrow for Jenny’s sake. And for Grace’s.”
I think it’s her advice that you need to function properly tomorrow that decides you—it’s optimistic to go to bed, demonstrating your belief that we will still be alive in the morning.
Jenny and I stay with you next to the single bed they’ve given you in the family room, just by the burns unit. We watch you as you fitfully sleep, your hands tightly tensed.
I think of Adam in his bunk bed.
“He has several lions among his soft toy menagerie,” I tell you. “But his favorite is Aslan, and he needs Aslan to get to sleep. If he’s fallen off the bunk, you have to find him. Sometimes you have to pull the whole bed out because he falls down the side.”
“Mum?” Jenny says. “Dad’s asleep.”
As if when you’re awake you can hear me. I am touched by this distinction.
“Anyway,” she continues. “He must know about Aslan.”
“D’you think?”
“Of course.”
But I’m not sure you do. Anyway, you thi
nk it would be better if Adam grew out of soft toys, now he’s eight. But he’s only just eight.
“You’ll be able to put Adam to bed yourself soon,” Jenny says. “Find Aslan. All of that.”
I think of holding Adam’s hand in mine as he drifts into sleep. All of that.
“Yes.”
Because of course I’ll be at home again. I have to be.
“Is it all right if I go for a walk?” she asks. “I’m feeling a little stir-crazy.”
“Fine.”
Poor Jenny; an outdoorsy person like you, it’s so difficult for her to be cooped up in a hospital.
We’re alone and I look at your sleeping face.
I remember watching you as you slept not long after we’d started going out together and I’d thought of that passage in Middlemarch—I know, not fair! I can quote to you now and there’s not a thing you can do about it! Anyway, it’s when the poor heroine realizes that in her elderly husband’s head there are just dusty corridors and musty old attics. But in yours I imagined there to be mountains and rivers and prairies—wide-open spaces with wind and sky.
You haven’t yet said you love me. But it’s a given, isn’t it? A taken-as-read thing, as it has been for the last few years. In our early days you’d write it in the steamed-up mirror in the bathroom after you’d shaved, for me to find when I came in later to clean my teeth. You’d phone me, just to tell me. I’d sit down at my computer and you’d have changed the screen saver so that “I love you!” marched across it. You’d never done this to anyone before, and it was as if you needed to keep practicing.
I know hearts don’t really store emotion. But there must be some place in us that does. I think it’s a jagged and anxiously spiky place until someone loves you. And then, like pilgrims touching a rough stone with their fingertips, nineteen years of practicing wears it smooth.
Someone has just passed the family room. I saw a glimpse in the glass panel in the door; a shadow fleetingly under it. I better just check.
A figure is hurrying along the burns unit corridor. For some reason, I think of that shadowy figure on the edge of the playing field.
He’s going towards Jenny’s side ward.
He goes in, and through the half-open doorway I see his shape bending over her.
I scream, making no sound.
I can see a nurse walking towards Jenny’s room. Her sneakers squeaking on the linoleum alert the figure to her presence and he slips away.
The nurse is checking Jenny now. I can’t see anything different at all, not that I’d know what all the monitors are telling us, but to me it looks no different. But the nurse in the squeaky sneakers is checking a piece of Jenny’s equipment.
Out in the corridor, the figure has disappeared.
I didn’t get close enough to see his face, just an outline in a long, dark blue coat. But the door to the burns unit is locked, so he must have been authorized to be in here. He must be a doctor, perhaps a nurse, probably going off shift, which is why he wasn’t wearing a white coat or nurse’s uniform, but an overcoat. Maybe he just wanted to check on Jenny before going home.
I see Jenny returning and I smile at her.
But I feel afraid.
Because who wears a long dark overcoat in the middle of July?
7
Garish artificial lights snapping on; doctors already alert and moving in packs; loud crashings of trolleys and nurses briskly whipping away breakfast trays and pulling out drugs charts. Christ, I think, you have to feel robust to face morning in a hospital. But at least all this noisy bright aggressive busyness turns my glimpsed figure last night into a quiet nothing.
When I arrive at my ward, I see that Mum’s already here and in an office with Dr. Bailstrom. She’s aged years in a day; hard lines of misery are scraped across her face.
“Grace chattered all the time when she was a little girl, such a bright button,” Mum says, her voice quicker than usual. “I knew that she’d grow up to be really intelligent, and she did. She got three As at A level and a scholarship to Cambridge to read art history, with an option to switch to English, because they wanted her to come to their university.”
“Mum, please!” I say to no avail. Presumably she wants them to know what kind of brain I had—a top-notch one! as Dad used to say—so they’ll know what to aim for. The before photo.
“She got pregnant before finals,” Mum continues. “So she had to leave. She was a little disappointed—we all were—but she was happy too. About the baby. Jenny.”
I’ve never heard my life history potted before and it’s a little alarming. Is it really that simple?
“That makes her sound like a brainbox, but she’s not really like that at all,” Mum continues. “She’s a lovely girl. I know she’s nearly forty now, but she’s still a girl to me. And she’d do anything for anyone. Too good for her own good, that’s what I used to say to her. But when my husband died, I realized then that nobody can be too good for their own good, not when it’s you they’re helping.”
Mum never speaks in a rush. And hardly ever speaks more than two or three sentences at a time. Now she’s haring along in paragraphs as if she’s on a timer. And I wish there was a timer, because listening to this is terrible.
“I don’t know what I’d have done without her, juggling her whole life around for me. I don’t mean that she has to get better for me, though. You mustn’t think that. I mean I love her more than you can possibly know, but it’s her children who really need her, and Mike. You think it’s Mike who’s the strong one—he looks it—but really it’s Gracie. She’s the heart of the family.”
She stops for a moment, and Dr. Bailstrom pounces in.
“We’ll do everything we possibly can. I can absolutely assure you of that. But sometimes, with a severe head injury, there’s not a great deal that we can do.”
Mum looks at her.
And for a moment Dr. Bailstrom is the doctor who told Mum and Dad that he had Kahler’s disease.
“But there must be a cure!” she’d said then.
She doesn’t say that now. Because when Dad died, the impossible, unthinkable happened to her and nothing would ever be unthinkable again.
I look away from her face to Dr. Bailstrom’s same-as-yesterday high red shoes. I bet from time to time Dr. Bailstrom looks at them too.
“We’ll let you know what we find out when we’ve done the next set of tests,” Dr. Bailstrom says. “We are having a specialists’ meeting about your daughter later today.”
Once Mum would have told them Dad was a doctor. Once she’d have thought it would make a difference.
She thanks Dr. Bailstrom—too nicely brought up not to thank people properly.
Adam is hunched by my bed.
Mum rushes over to him.
“Addie, poppet? I thought you were going to wait with the nurses for five minutes?”
He’s lying with his face against mine, holding my hand, and he’s crying. A desperate sound.
I put my arms around him and I tell him not to cry; I tell him I’m all right. But he can’t hear me.
As he cries I stroke his soft silky hair and I tell him over and over and over that it’s all right, that I love him, not to cry. But he still can’t hear me and I can’t bear it a moment longer and I have to wake up for him.
I fight my way into my body, through layers of flesh and muscle and bone. And suddenly I’m here. Inside.
I struggle to move this heavy hulk of a body, but I’m again trapped under the hull of a ship wrecked on the ocean floor and moving is impossible.
But Adam is out there crying for me and I have to open my eyes for him. Have to. But my eyelids are locked shut and rusting over.
A fragment of a poem echoes in the darkness.
A soul hung up, as ’twere, in chains
Of nerves, and arteries, and veins.
I’ve left Jenny on her own. Oh God. What if I can’t get out again?
I hear the panic in my heartbeat.
Deaf with
the drumming of an ear.
But I can escape my body easily, just slipping out into the black ocean and then struggling upwards towards the light.
Mum is putting her arm around Adam, magicking a smile onto her face for him, making her voice sound cheerful.
“We’ll come back later, all right, my little man? We’ll go home now, then when you’ve had a bit of a rest, we can come back.”
And she’s mothering me by mothering my child.
She leads him away.
A few minutes later Jenny joins me.
“Have you tried getting back into your body?” I ask her.
She shakes her head. I’m an idiot. She can’t even look at her body, let alone try to get into it. I want to say sorry, but I think that would just make it worse. Klutz! A Jenny word.
She doesn’t ask me if I’ve tried getting back in. I think it’s because she’s afraid of the answer—either that I couldn’t; or that I could, but it made no difference.
No difference at all.
That ghastly poem I’d once thought so clever echoes still in our silence.
… with bolts of bones, that fettered stands
In feet, and manacled in hands.
“Mum?”
“I was thinking about the metaphysical poets.”
“God, you really still want me to do retakes?”
I smile at her. “Absolutely.”
You’re having a meeting with Sarah’s boss in an office downstairs. We go to join you.
“Aunt Sarah’s normal boss is on maternity leave,” Jenny says. “Rosemary, remember, the really quirky one?”
I don’t remember Rosemary-the-really-quirky-one. I’ve never heard of a Rosemary.
“Aunt Sarah loathes this guy, Baker. Thinks he’s an idiot,” Jenny continues. She’s been fascinated by the flashing-lights-and-sirens side of Sarah’s police life since she was six years old. And I get that. How can my part-time job writing an arts review page in the Richmond Post compete with being a detective sergeant in the Met? What film, book, or exhibition is going to out-cool directing a helicopter during a drug bust? Bust. You may as well throw in the towel at the start on that one. But joking about fellow workers, that’s what Jenny and I do. OK, so Sarah didn’t joke to Jenny about quirky-Rosemary and Baker, whoever he is, but she clearly tells her the gossip.
Afterwards Page 5
