Afterwards

by Rosamund Lupton

  Both of us worry that it’s because you are a known face on TV, that your fame will attract more “press interest.”

  I see him leer at Tara and feel relieved rather than repulsed. So that’s the reason he’s here.

  We go closer to eavesdrop.

  “The fact it’s a school is irrelevant,” Prezzner is saying. “The point is that it’s a business. A multimillion-pound business. And it’s gone up in smoke. That’s what you should be investigating. That’s the angle.”

  Next to me, Jenny is listening intently.

  “The angle is that it’s a school,” Tara says, taking a teaspoon of cappuccino froth into her rosy mouth. “OK, so no children got hurt, but a seventeen-year-old girl did. A pretty, popular, seventeen-year-old girl. And that’s what people want to read about, Paul. Human drama. So much more interesting than balance sheets.”

  “You’re being deliberately naive.”

  “I simply understand what readers want to know about. Even the ones who buy the Telegraph.”

  He leans closer to her. “So you’re just supplying their need?”

  She doesn’t back away from him.

  “It’ll be about the money in the end, Tara; it always is.”

  “Columbine? Texas High? Virginia Tech? No financial motive in any of those, was there? Do you know how many schools in the last decade have been subject to violent attacks?”

  “They were gun attacks, not arson.”

  “Same difference. It’s violence in our schools.”

  “Our schools? Pap. And totally inaccurate. Your examples are all in America.”

  “There have been attacks in Germany, Finland, Canada.”

  “But not here.”

  “Dunblane?”

  “A one-off. Fifteen years ago.”

  “Maybe school violence is a new import. An unwelcome immigrant into our leafy suburbs.”

  “Your next piece?”

  “It may be the start of a new trend.”

  “This guy you’re fingering, he’s not a deranged student or an exstudent but a teacher.”

  “Fingering? You’ve been watching too many cop shows. And it’s ex-teacher. That’s the point.”

  “Well, you’ve come up with a good story, I’ll say that for you. Fake, concocted, and utterly libelous if you weren’t so sneaky with your layout, but a good story.”

  He smiles at her. I can’t take much more of this sickening flirtation.

  “And I like the pics. Bronze statue of a child as foreground when you couldn’t get any real ones to pose for you, and a photo of Jennifer, all on the same page.”

  “Let’s go and find Dad?” Jenny asks.

  We leave the cafeteria and I remember DI Baker asking how the press knew to get to the school so quickly. Did Tara have something to do with it? But if so, what?

  “He’s right,” Jenny says. “About the school being a business. I already told you that, didn’t I?”

  For a moment I see the flash of silver cups at the prize-giving, remember again the uncomfortable feeling that we were part of a successful business model.

  “But even if it is a business,” I say, “I don’t see why anyone would want to burn it down.”

  “Some kind of insurance fraud?” she asks.

  “I don’t see why. The school is full. And they keep raising the fees. In business terms it must be doing really well. So there’d be no point burning it down.”

  “Perhaps there’s something we don’t know about,” Jenny says, and I realize that she’s grabbing on to this as you grabbed on to Silas Hyman. Anything or anyone but the hate-mailer; for this not to be an attack on her.

  As we arrive at my acute neurology ward, I hear Dr. Bailstrom’s high heels clicking quickly across the linoleum. She turns to a senior nurse.

  “The case meeting on Grace Covey?”

  “Dr. Rhodes’s office. The whole crew.”

  “Waiting long?”

  “Fifteen minutes.”

  “Damn.”

  She hurries towards an office as fast as her shoes will let her.

  “Shall we wait for Dad here?” I ask Jenny.

  She doesn’t reply.

  “Jen …?”

  Nothing. I turn to look at her.

  Something is wrong. Terribly wrong. Her eyes glitter, and she’s shimmering with light; too bright, too vividly colorful, heat pulsating out of her.

  I am mute with terror. I cannot move.

  “Find out what’s happening to me,” Jenny says, and her voice is so quiet I can hardly hear it, and her face is iridescent now, so dazzling I can barely look at her.

  You’re leaving the meeting room and running full tilt down the corridor, doors swinging back behind you, people getting out of your way.

  I’m running after you, trying to keep up.

  You reach the burns unit and bang on the door, but a nurse is expecting you and opens it hurriedly. She says Jenny’s heart has arrested. They’re trying to restart it.

  But it’s criminals who are arrested, not a heart. Not Jenny’s heart. Because it isn’t meant to stop; it’s meant to keep beating, every second, every minute, every hour of every day, long after yours and mine have stopped. Long after. I think of that Sylvia Plath poem, “Love set you going like a fat gold watch,” and I think love did set our daughter’s heart going, but it isn’t a bloody watch that needs winding up, or sending to the mender’s. Thoughts about words, things, poetry to keep thoughts about Jenny’s body away. A useless semantic screen. Ripped away the moment I catch up with you by her bed.

  There are too many people, their actions speeded up, and machines are bleeping and flashing and in the middle of it all is Jenny. You can’t reach her; the people around her bed block your path. I feel your frustrated anguish, wanting to barge your way through to her. But if she’s to be saved, it’s these people who’ll do it, not you.

  And I know that Jenny is outside in the corridor, blindingly bright, as if formed by light, and I start to scream.

  On the heart monitor is a flat line. A depiction of death.

  Is she still there, outside in the corridor?

  She can’t be dead. She can’t.

  They’re trying so hard to bring her back to us again, speaking quickly to one another with words we don’t understand; their actions are deft and practiced, a modern pagan ritual with high-tech magic that might summon her back from the dead.

  A spike on her heart monitor.

  Her heart is beating! Not a fat gold watch but a girl’s heart.

  She’s alive.

  Elation buoys me up and everyone around me so that for a moment we are all outside the normal, contained, pragmatic world.

  Jenny arrives next to me, no longer too bright.

  “Still here,” she says and smiles at me.

  She can’t see her body, screened by the doctors and nurses.

  Dr. Sandhu turns to you. His brown face no longer looks indecently healthy, but exhausted. What must it be like to hold someone’s life in your hands? How heavy Jenny’s must be for him, weighted with our love for her.

  “We’ll be taking her directly to our intensive care unit,” he tells you. “I’m afraid we think her heart is likely to have suffered damage. Possibly very severe damage. We’ll be running tests straightaway.”

  I try to usher Jenny away, but she doesn’t budge.

  “You’ll get through this,” you say to Jenny’s unconscious body. “You will get better.”

  As if you know that Jenny can hear you.

  “I’m Miss Logan, Jennifer’s consultant cardiologist,” a young woman says, who was at the forefront of the resuscitation. “Let’s talk when we have her test results back. But I have to warn you that if the findings are as we predict, then—”

  But you leave the room, refusing to hear the end of her sentence.

  Jenny goes too. Because medical staff are leaving her bedside and she can’t bear to see her face and body.

  Sarah’s waiting outside. “She’s alive,” you
say. Sarah hugs you. She’s shaking.

  I join Jenny farther down the corridor.

  “It was amazing, Mum,” she says.

  “Amazing?” I ask. Will this be the one adjective Jenny uses to describe her near-death experience? The same adjective she and her friends use to describe ice cream. I used to worry that the subtlety of verbal adjectives had been vandalized by TV and computer screens; I used to lecture her about it sometimes.

  “It was as if all the light and color and warmth and love in my body was leaving it and being put into me,” she says. “It was beautiful. The feeling. And what I was. Beautiful.” She searches a moment for the right words. “And I think, what was happening, was that my soul was being born.”

  I am stunned by her description. Not just by the content but by the way she describes it, our daughter who has previously never used more than one adjectival phrase in a sentence.

  “But it’s not going to happen again,” I say. “Not till you’re an old lady, OK?”

  Dr. Sandhu joins you and Sarah.

  “One of our nurses has told us that a piece of equipment we’re using to help Jenny, the endotracheal tube that connects to her ventilator, came loose last night. There’s a chance that it was tampered with. She should have reported this last night but I’m afraid it hasn’t been brought to light until this emergency.”

  My anxiety for Jenny last night expands to terror.

  “Was that why her heart stopped?” Sarah asks.

  “There’s no way to be sure,” Dr. Sandhu replies. “We were already concerned about organ failure.”

  I saw him. The figure in the coat. I saw him.

  “Someone did this to her?” you ask, incredulous.

  “Pieces of equipment can occasionally be faulty,” Dr. Sandhu says. “It’s rare, but it happens. And it’s very hard to see how tampering could have occurred. We are one of the few units in the hospital with a low turnover of staff. Most of us have worked here for a long time. And nothing like that has ever happened.”

  “What about someone coming in?” Sarah asks.

  “The door to the burns unit is kept locked, with a code keypad. Only members of staff know the code, and visitors have to be let in.”

  Just like the school. Why hadn’t I realized that before?

  Just like the school.

  I see anxiety pinching at Sarah’s face.

  “Thank you,” she says quietly. “One of my colleagues will need to talk to you.”

  “Of course. In fact, we have already followed protocol and the clinical director has just spoken to the police. But I wanted to tell you myself.”

  Next to me Jenny has gone rigid, her face afraid.

  “You heard him, Mum. Equipment can be faulty.”

  She doesn’t want to believe this.

  “Yes,” I say, because how can I tell her what I saw last night? How can I frighten her more now?

  You walk away down the corridor, and I’m worried you’re walking away from what you’ve been told. Even the suggestion of it. I go after you, away from Jenny.

  “Someone’s trying to kill her, Mike,” I say to you.

  But you can’t hear me.

  “I’ll stay with Jenny,” you say to Sarah. “Twenty-four/seven. Make sure the bastard can’t get to her.”

  I love you.

  An hour or so later and Jenny has gone for a wander around the hospital, which worries me, but: “I’m seventeen, for heaven’s sake, Mum. Besides, what more can go wrong now?”

  I’m with you, next to Jenny’s bed. The world of the intensive care unit is so alien, so utterly foreign to anything in our previous life, that having a policeman next to Jenny now is no more peculiar than the banks of monitors that surround her. I think you are grateful to have a uniformed presence, but hover close to Jenny, still wanting to protect her yourself.

  Although Jenny’s description of almost-dying—her birth of a soul—amazed me, it’s not totally accurate. Love can’t leave your body as it’s not there in the first place. Because I know as I look at you, and at Jenny’s damaged body, that love is held in whatever I am now.

  “Mr. Covey?”

  Miss Logan, that young consultant cardiologist, has come up to you.

  “We have the results of Jennifer’s tests back now,” she says. “Shall we go into my office?”

  But how can this pretty Miss Logan, this slip of a thing, as Dad would have said, possibly know what’s going on in the complex intricacies of Jenny’s heart? Surely she’s too young to be a proper consultant, to really know what she’s talking about. And even as I think this, I know I’m trying to invalidate what she might say before the words are spoken.

  I follow you into a doctor’s office, the air dense with heat.

  Dr. Sandhu is waiting. He takes your hand in his and pats your arm and I try not to think that he’s giving you sympathy in advance.

  Nobody sits down.

  And I hate this hot institutional room with its depressing carpet tiles and plastic stacking chairs and drug company calendar. I want to be in the kitchen with Adam and Jenny, just back from school, the French windows wide open, making Jenny tea and squash for Adam and listening to gripes about homework. For a moment I imagine myself there so clearly that I almost hear the thump of Jen’s bag on the table and Adam asking if there are chocolate minirolls left. Surely there’s a wormhole you can step into, taking you into a parallel universe where your old life, your real life, is going on the same if only you can find your way back to it.

  It’s Dr. Sandhu who speaks first, taking responsibility for breaking the news, like an eggshell, I think as he speaks, the contents poisonous and corrosive, destroying the way home.

  “We’ve run extensive tests on Jenny. And I’m afraid that, as we feared, her heart has suffered catastrophic damage.”

  I look at Dr. Sandhu’s face and quickly turn away, but it’s too late. In his expression I’ve seen there’s a moment when a doctor realizes that the life he holds in his hands is too fragile for the medicine he knows.

  “Her heart will only be able to function for a few weeks,” he says.

  “How many weeks?” you ask, each syllable a physical strain, tongue forced against the palate of your mouth, sounds bitter as wormwood.

  “It’s impossible to be accurate,” he says, hating having to do this.

  “How many?” you ask again.

  “Our guess would be three weeks,” replies Miss Logan.

  “This time in three weeks we’ll be in Italy! Only three weeks till Christmas, Ads! Just three weeks to A levels, don’t you realize how soon that is?”

  When Jenny was born, her life was measured first in hours, then days, then weeks. At about sixteen weeks it turned to months—four months, five months, eighteen months—until two, when you measure your child’s age in half years. Then gradually the measurement of her life became whole years. Now they’re measuring what’s left of it in weeks again.

  I won’t let it happen.

  I have gotten her from two cells to a five-foot-five-inches-tall teenager and she’s still growing, for crying out loud, and she can’t stop now. She can’t.

  “There must be something you can do,” you say, as always, even now, certain there must be a solution.

  “Her only option is a transplant,” said Miss Logan. “But I’m afraid—”

  “Then she’ll get a transplant,” you interrupt.

  “It’s highly unlikely that a donor whose tissue matches Jennifer’s will be found in time,” she says. Her youth gives her an edge, which separates her from the information she’s giving. “I have to tell you that the chance of her receiving a donor heart in time is extremely remote.”

  “Then I’ll do it,” you say. “I’ll go to that place in Switzerland, Dignitas or whatever it’s called. They let you die if you want to. There must be a way of doing it so that my heart can be donated to her.”

  I look at their faces, not yours; I can’t bear to look at yours. I see compassion rather than astonish
ment. You can’t be the first parent to suggest this.

  “I’m afraid there are many reasons why you can’t do that,” Dr. Sandhu says. “Primarily legal ones.”

  “I heard that your wife is still unconscious—” tough Miss Logan begins, but you interrupt her again.

  “What the hell are you suggesting? That I donate her heart?”

  I feel a leap of hope inside me. Can I do this? Is it possible?

  “I just want to offer my sympathy,” Miss Logan says. “It must be particularly hard for you with Jennifer.” Almost as if she has to spell it out to herself. “In any case,” she says, “even if your wife is found to have extremely limited brain function, she is breathing for herself so—”

  “She can also hear me,” you interrupt, vigorously. “And she’s thinking and she’s feeling. She can’t show it yet. But she will. Because she will get better. And Jenny will too. They’ll both recover.”

  And I admire you so much because in the face of “catastrophic” and “three weeks” and “extremely remote” and your suicide bid proving futile, you refuse to admit defeat for Jenny or for me.

  Inside your head now, on those wide-open prairies, I see a one-man stockade of hope, built by your strength of spirit.

  Dr. Sandhu and the young cardiologist say nothing.

  An honest, ghastly quietness in place of agreement or reassurance.

  You leave the mute room. Shortly afterwards Miss Logan also leaves.

  I want to bolt to your one-man stockade of hope, but I can’t, Mike. I just can’t get there.

  I can’t move at all.

  Because I am surrounded by sharp spikes of information, and a step in any direction will mean I am pierced through. So if I don’t move, I can stop it from being true.

  Dr. Sandhu thinks he’s alone. He brusquely wipes his tears away. What has led him to this room? I imagine a science teacher noticing his intelligence and suggesting medical school, and his parents being proudly encouraging, and then a career path, with a right turn here and a straight ahead there, ending up here, now. But the Dr. Sandhu career-path distraction is useless. The spikes are coming towards me and they have a sound, the sound they’ve had since the words three weeks were spoken—a tick tick tick over every thought, every action, every word until they are used up.