Afterwards

by Rosamund Lupton

  “Mr. Hyman taught in the other classroom on that floor. You’d hear his class laughing. And there was often music too. I worked it out in the end. It was Mozart for math and jazz for getting changed for sports because it speeded them up. I once heard him telling off Robert Fleming, but he didn’t shout at him. He didn’t need to shut the classroom door like some of the teachers in case parents overheard. And he had special names for them all. His whole focus in the school seemed to be the children. Not getting ahead in his career, or making sure there was impressive work up on the walls for parents to see. Just the children, inspiring them and making them happy. So you can see why he had me fooled, can’t you? I mean, I think he fooled all of us.”

  Sarah joins her with two new cups of tea. In all the time I’ve known her, Sarah has never drunk tea, only coffee, and it has to be real, not instant. Maybe her police persona drinks tea because despite telling Maisie she was talking to her as a member of our family, it’s the professional Sarah I’m watching.

  “When did you realize you’d been fooled?” Sarah asks.

  Maisie takes the tea and fusses with a little pink packet of fake sugar before she answers.

  “At the school prize-giving. We give a prize, you see, every year. For science. Rowena’s going to read science at Oxford, St. Hilda’s. Sorry. I mean, that’s why we were there.” She pauses for a moment, as if thinking back. “He barged in, looking so angry, and then he swore at the headmistress. Threatened all of us.

  “But no one else took it seriously. I mean, they just found him embarrassing rather than threatening.”

  “But you took him seriously?”

  “Yes.”

  At the prize-giving Donald was sitting pressed up next to her. Maisie knows firsthand that threats of violence can translate into the real thing. Or perhaps Donald doesn’t give a warning first.

  “Did you tell anyone your anxieties about him?” Sarah asks.

  “Yes. I phoned Sally Healey, the head teacher, later that evening and told her she should get the police to make sure he wasn’t allowed near the school again. A restraining order, I think it’s called? I’m not sure. Something that meant he wasn’t allowed near the children.”

  “Did she?”

  Maisie shook her head, and I saw the upset on her face.

  “You said he gets young people to love him,” Sarah continues. “And exploits their feelings?” But Maisie seems to have clammed up now, lost in her own thoughts. “Maisie?” Sarah asks, but still Maisie is silent. Sarah waits patiently, giving Maisie time.

  “Grace told me that Addie adored him,” Maisie says eventually. “But I didn’t realize how much till the prize-giving.”

  “What happened?”

  “Has no one told you?”

  “No.” You hadn’t said anything to Sarah, and I wasn’t close enough to her to risk this touchy subject.

  “Addie stood up and defended Silas Hyman,” Maisie says. “Told everyone that he shouldn’t have been fired.”

  “That was brave,” Sarah says. I should have risked telling her.

  “But it’s wrong to make someone adore you,” Maisie says, emotion shaking her voice. “When they’re so much younger and can’t properly think for themselves. That’s exploitation. Wicked. And you can make them do what you want.” Her anger is both startling and touching. I know what she’s suggesting and so does Sarah. But no one could have made Addie light a fire.

  I don’t blame Maisie for thinking Adam easily manipulated. He’s shy with adults, even Maisie. And after the prize-giving, he’d looked so cowed, flinching from Donald’s lighter.

  “I should get back to my daughter,” Maisie says. “I told her I wouldn’t be long.”

  “Of course,” Sarah says, standing up. “One of my colleagues spoke to a firefighter at the scene. He told me of her bravery.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d like to speak to her, if that would be all right? Just to get it all straight for myself.”

  “She’s upset at the moment,” Maisie says, looking fearful. “In a bit of a state. I mean, that’s understandable, isn’t it, after everything that’s happened. So would you mind waiting?”

  Is she afraid Rowena will tell Sarah about Donald?

  “Not at all,” Sarah replies. “And you’ve been very kind to spare some of your time. I’ll pop by tomorrow. See if she’s feeling up to talking to me then.”

  “I haven’t told her yet,” Maisie says. “How badly hurt they both are.”

  “I understand.”

  Maisie leaves and Sarah scrupulously writes up notes in the owl-covered notebook.

  So get her to give a new statement right now,” you say vehemently.

  Sarah has joined you at Jenny’s bedside.

  “Tell Baker that someone else knew that he was violent,” you continue. “Christ, if Maisie thinks that about him, other people will too.”

  “At the moment there’s no point,” Sarah says patiently. “Not unless and until his alibi is broken. And I also need to pursue other avenues at the same time.”

  She makes you go for a sleep, while she takes your place at Jenny’s bedside.

  I return to the garden, where Jenny is waiting.

  It’s different out here in the cool of the evening. Someone has watered the flowers and filled the birdbath. If you look straight up, past the perpendicular walls on all sides, studded with glass windows, you can see the sky, that shot-silk dark blue that you get late on a summer’s evening with stars punched through the fabric.

  We don’t feel any pain out here and I think it’s because, although we’re outside, the garden is in the middle of the hospital and those perpendicular walls that rise up all around us offer us protection.

  My senses are so much more receptive now—I can smell the subtlest, smallest thing, as if lacking a body has left my senses exposed and quivering. Me, who couldn’t even smell when the toast was burning—Grace, for heaven’s sake, it’s charcoal!

  Now the air feels softly weighted with the heavy summer perfumes of jasmine and roses and honeysuckle, strata of scents layered in the air like the colored stripes in Adam’s sand jar.

  And there’s another perfume. Sweeter than the others, it’s igniting an emotion I shouldn’t be feeling, not now—a twanging of nervousness and an expansive unlimited excitement. Time ahead of me is opening up, unbounded, a river through Grantchester then onwards away from clocks at ten to three towards London and beyond to ever more possibilities.

  It’s stocks. The smell of night stocks and I am in a Cambridge garden, late on a warm summer evening, close to the Part One exams, my mind filled with paintings and books and ideas. I’m with you. And the nighttime stocks are releasing their fragrance like confetti over my love for you and my anxiety about exams and my excitement for the future.

  Memories are usually like a DVD playing, not connected to the room you’re in while you remember. But I’m actually there, Mike. My feelings pungently real. Love punches me in the solar plexus. Then it’s over and I’m back in this boxed piece of summer. The loss feels cold and colorless. But there’s no time for self-indulgence. There is something significant about what’s just happened, something I can use to help my children. But the thought is slipping away, and I have to grab it by its coattails before it’s gone. It was Jenny hearing the fire alarm going off at the school. “It was like I was back in the school, really back there.” I turn to her.

  “When we saw Donald White with Maisie and Rowena, do you remember smelling something?” Because I remember now the smell of Donald’s aftershave and cigarettes.

  “Perhaps. Yes,” Jenny replies.

  “Do you think that’s why you heard the fire alarm?” I ask.

  “My mad person’s tinnitus? It’s possible, I suppose. I didn’t really analyze it.”

  I hear a child screaming. Adam. I jerk my head around. He isn’t here.

  “No! She’s not dead. She’s not!”

  Too small a voice for such huge words.

 
; I run to him.

  He’s hunched over my bed, silent. He’d never cried out his grief, but I’d heard him. Mum’s arms are around him.

  “I’m here!” I say to him. “Right here. No one knows that yet, but they will. And I’ll wake up, my sweetie! Of course I will! I’m giving you a kiss and you can’t feel it, but I’m here. Kissing you now.”

  I have no voice.

  Screaming in a nightmare, making no sound.

  I force myself into my body, but my vocal cords are still snapped and useless and my eyelids still welded shut. I try with all my might to touch him, but my arms are beams of impossible weight. In this black, vile, inert place, there is nothing I can do to reach him.

  And out there he’s in a dark angry ocean, drowning.

  Panicking, I’m breathing more quickly. I try to slow my breathing and I can! I take breaths quickly, in and out, in and out—and then deliberately slowly—surely Mum will realize I’m trying to communicate! Adam too!

  I can do something! Maybe this means we won’t need to wait for years for me to wake up!

  As I take deliberate slow deep breaths I think of blowing up Adam’s orange armbands before he could swim, tight around his thin white arms, and how he’d bobbed happily in the water, not feeling any fear, my breath keeping him safe.

  I slip out of my body—surely Mum will be calling to a doctor, pointing out this signal from me that I am in here, and Adam won’t be crying anymore. But Mum is with Adam at my bedside, her face white as she tries to comfort him as he cries. Maybe I should feel angry with her. But it’s tearing her apart, and I know the courage it took.

  Addie pulls away from her and runs. She goes after him and grabs him and they tussle. He goes limp and she puts her arms around him, like a body cushion against excruciating pain. She half carries him out of the ward, and I go with them.

  His face looks so pale, bruised shadows under his eyes. He’s withdrawn even further into himself, as if his whole body is now mute. I put my arms tightly around him.

  “Next Halloween, Mum, I’m going to have a bath in invisible ink! Then I’ll be invisible.”

  “I don’t think it works that way.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well …”

  “I’ll have a glove. So that they know someone’s there. I mean, otherwise, how will I get any sweets?”

  Halloween was four months away still. He’d have supplanted this idea with a new one by then.

  “Good idea, the glove.”

  “Yup.”

  He can’t see or feel my arms around him. I will wake up. One day I will wake up.

  It’s dusk now. Through the glass wall abutting the garden, most of the wards are in half-light. In one of the rooms, through the uncurtained window, I see a child in bed, just a shape, with small arms. Another big shape, which I make out to be his father, smooths the child’s hair and then waits. The small shape in the bed grows motionless as the child falls into sleep. The father is just standing there now, rigidly upright and alone, flapping his arms up and down, up and down, up and down as if he can fly them both away.

  19

  Around us, on all four sides, flickering electric lights are coming on in the windows, a man-made hospital dawn two hours after the outside natural one.

  It seems impossible that only the day before yesterday I was putting frozen pain au chocolat into the oven. As if there’s been an earthquake in time, with the fire separating the tectonic plates of our past and present irrevocably. A little high falutin’, sorry, but who else can I tell? Poor Jen would probably think I was prepping her for an A-level retake in something.

  As soon as I see your face, I know that no heart has been found for her. I go close to you, and you tell me that there’s time! It’s still going to be all right! Not to be defeatist! She will get better. Of course she will. You don’t need to speak for me to hear your burly tough optimism. Because although we no longer have a solar plexus love, we have the married kind, which means that your voice—you—are inside my mind.

  Sarah arrives, her clothes crumpled, her hair a mess. She was doing shifts at Jenny’s bedside with you last night.

  “I got through to Ivo,” she says. “He’s trying to get a standby flight.”

  You just nod.

  You knew about this, Mike? You must have for Sarah to have his number. And you thought this was OK? My voice clearly isn’t in your head, because this is a terrible idea. Or perhaps my voice is in your head and you just ignored me. Yes, I’m cross. Of course I’m bloody cross!

  Has Sarah told him what she looks like now?

  Can anyone describe Jenny’s face and body now?

  Last Saturday they went to Chiswick House Park together. “What did you do?” I’d asked her that evening, thinking they’d gone to the café, or had a picnic, maybe read. When she didn’t answer, I’d imagined all sorts of canoodling. Finally, a little embarrassed, she’d told me—they’d just looked at each other, the long sunny hours spent staring at each other’s faces.

  Maybe if you’d known about how they spent their afternoon, you’d have known it wasn’t a good idea.

  Because what will he think when he looks at her now?

  And how can she bear his rejection?

  I’m sorry. You think she’s unconscious and will be totally unaware of him. You’ve no idea how badly she may be hurt by this.

  Crossness and apologies. As in our old life together, our children pull us apart as frequently as they unite us, causing tensions we had no idea about when we married—although at the moment I’m the only one who’s aware of them.

  Sarah outlines her plan for the day—talking to Rowena and then going to the police station—but you are going to stay put; your only mission is to guard Jenny. Despite the multitude of medical staff in the ICU, you’re not going to leave your post.

  In the corridor Jenny is beaming.

  “He’s going to get a standby flight. Aunt Sarah phoned him.”

  “Did she …” How can I ask this?

  “No. She didn’t tell him what I look like now, if that’s what you’re worried about? But it won’t matter. That sounds stupid. Of course it will matter. What I mean is, it won’t change anything.”

  What can I say? That only tough-as-old-boots married love could withstand this, not their fragile five-months-old romance; that “love is not love which alters when it alteration finds” doesn’t apply to teenage boys.

  “Young love,” you used to say, smiling, and I’d want to hurl a potato at you, or whatever I was washing or peeling at the time—as if this kind of relationship could age into wrinkles and smile lines. Because what Ivo felt for Jenny had built-in obsolescence, even without the fire.

  “I thought you’d be pleased,” Jenny says, a little baffled. “I mean, I know you don’t like him much.” A very short pause, just space enough for me to argue, but I don’t and she continues. “He’ll tell the police about the red paint now, won’t he?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  Sarah walks past us on the phone. “This takes precedence,” Sarah says, then pauses. “I don’t know. [Pause.] No, you take some time off work. [Pause.] I don’t have time for this right now.”

  She must be talking to Roger. You try and like him out of loyalty to your sister, but I annually resent his sneering face at the Christmas table when he is the only person not to wear one of Addie’s homemade paper crowns. Competitive about his own children, dismissive of ours; frankly, I loathe him, and perhaps that’s one reason I used to dislike Sarah, for being a unit with him.

  She hasn’t mentioned her own family to you, or her job, putting us absolutely center stage. I’m only just discovering that how someone behaves in everyday life gives no clue how they’ll be when it counts. Maybe Roger—in the right circumstances—would risk looking silly in a paper crown and rise to the occasion. Though he’s hardly shining now if Sarah’s half of the conversation is anything to go by. I think I see disappointment on her face, but not surprise.

  “S
he and Uncle Roger don’t get along anymore,” Jenny says to me as if reading my thoughts. So Sarah has talked to Jenny about her marriage. My God, who isn’t talking to Jenny about their marriage? Perhaps a teenage daughter in the room doesn’t smooth adult relationships but makes them gripe.

  Sarah abruptly ends the conversation, saying she has to go.

  Jenny and I go with her.

  A nurse answers the locked door of the burns unit, surprised to see Sarah.

  “Jenny’s been taken to the ICU, didn’t anyone—?”

  “Yes, actually it’s Rowena White I want to see. She’s been friends with Jenny since primary school, and you know how people become friends of the family too.”

  She stumbles as she speaks; telling half-truths, like crumpled clothes, has never been Sarah before.

  The nurse lets her in, and we follow her to Rowena’s side room. An injured woman is wheeled past on a trolley.

  “I can’t do this right now, Mum,” Jenny says, and I curse myself for bringing her into the burns unit. “I’ll be back in a little while, OK?”

  “OK.”

  She leaves.

  In Rowena’s side room, a nurse is taking the dressings off Rowena’s hands.

  Sarah waits a little way from the open doorway for the nurse to finish. “The burns have been damaged,” the nurse says to Rowena, surprised. “Some of the blisters have burst …?”

  “Yes, I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Not your fault, sweetie. But how?”

  In the doorway I see Sarah listening intently to this, but the nurse and Rowena haven’t seen her. I remember now that Sarah did a two-year stint in the domestic violence unit.

  “I told the other nurse about it yesterday,” Rowena says.

  The nurse looks through Rowena’s notes.

  “So you did. You said you slipped …?”

  “Yes. I’m really clumsy.”

  I shudder at her use of Maisie’s vocabulary.

  “But there’s damage to the top of your hands as well as the palms?” the nurse says.

  Rowena is silent and doesn’t meet her eye.