Afterwards

by Rosamund Lupton

  “She is a witch, Mum,” Jenny says.

  AB: Original plan?

  SH: Initially I’d allocated the job to Rowena White. Rowena has done a St. John Ambulance course. She was upset about the change, but I felt it was appropriate.

  Jenny turns to me. “Do you think Rowena could have told her father she was going to be nurse, to make him proud, same old, but then didn’t tell him when I replaced her?”

  “Maybe,” I say.

  Was the wrong girl hurt?

  AB: Who was at the Thursday staff meeting when you announced the change?

  SH: The senior management team. Then they disseminate the information to all the other members of staff.

  [SH is silent.]

  AB: Mrs. Healey?

  SH: Jenny, is she going to die?

  [SH cries.]

  It didn’t say for how long.

  Sarah takes the final photocopy out of her bag. I’d hoped it would be a transcript of Silas Hyman’s interview, but it’s Tilly Rogers’s, that archetype of a reception teacher—pink cheeks and long fair hair and smiling face with white, pearly teeth. A healthy, clean-living, nice girl who’ll do this job for a few years before marrying and having a family of her own. Children in her class love her, fathers feel wistful, mothers maternal.

  I can’t imagine she has anything to do with the fire.

  Tilly’s interview started at 6:30, so after Mrs. Healey’s. It was AB, Inspector Baker, who interviewed her.

  I skim-read it, just getting the basics. She was with her class doing circle time when the alarm went off. Maisie White helped evacuate the children, who all knew her already as a volunteer reader. She didn’t mention a delay before Annette brought her the register, maybe because she didn’t notice or because she didn’t think it was important. Nobody had noticed and asked her. It’s two pages before I see a question that seems relevant.

  AB: Do you know Silas Hyman?

  TR: Yes. He was a year-three teacher at Sidley House. Up until April that is. But I didn’t exactly know him. We taught on different floors. I’m right at the bottom—well, you know that already. And the reception classes don’t integrate with the rest of the school, not until they reach year one.

  Is she telling the truth about not really knowing Silas Hyman? Is it possible that she’s his accomplice? Did the fresh-faced, floral-frocked Tilly Rogers leave her class with their storybooks and Listening-Teddy to go upstairs and find the keys to the windows and open them for him? Pour out white spirit and find a match?

  Once I’d have said that it was impossible to imagine. But nothing is impossible to imagine anymore.

  But I can’t see how she could have gotten back to her classroom in time. Because if she’d started the fire, surely Maisie would have arrived to help with the evacuation and found her missing.

  AB: Is there anything else you think may be relevant?

  TR: Rowena White. I don’t know if it’s relevant, but it was extraordinary.

  AB: Go on.

  TR: I was outside the school with the children, but most of their mothers had arrived by then, so I was able to look around. I saw Rowena running into the PE shed and coming out with a towel. A big, blue swimming one. The children leave them in there sometimes. There were two bottles of water on the gravel at the side of the school, by the kitchen entrance. You know, the really large four-liter ones? And she poured water on the towel. Then I saw her going into the school. As she got to the door, I saw her putting the towel over her face. It was just so brave.

  Sarah has finished reading and leaves. Jenny and I wait a moment, both quiet with disappointment. No magic sentence to free Adam from guilt.

  “Maybe Aunt Sarah will see something we haven’t,” I say. “Or it will at least give her a lead.”

  “Yes.”

  A little while later, we join you and Sarah in the corridor of the ICU. You’re looking through the glass at Jenny, holding a transcript.

  Jenny is standing a little distance away, so that she can’t see herself through the glass.

  “Do you think it’s like my mobile?” she asks. “An infection risk?”

  “Must be.”

  But I wonder if the photocopied transcripts really are an infection risk or if Sarah is trying to be as discreet as possible, avoiding Jenny’s highly staffed bedside.

  You’re holding Annette Jenks’s transcript. I hope I’ll now hear Sarah’s take on it, which I could only guess at before.

  “But how the hell can Jen have signed herself out?” you say as you read it. “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m not convinced yet that she did,” Sarah says. “It could be that Annette Jenks just wanted to stop people from blaming her. A hit-and-run mentality.”

  “So there’s nothing useful from it.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. It’s clear from her statement that she didn’t actually light the fire. She says she was with Rowena White in the office when the alarm went off, and Rowena told me the same thing earlier. The office is on the upper ground level; the art room is on the second floor. So neither of them could have started the fire.”

  “Could she have let Hyman in?”

  “She claims not to know him, or even have heard of him, but I find it strange that she didn’t hear any gossip about him at all. She strikes me as a gossipy kind of girl. So, for some reason, I think she’s probably lying. And we know from both Maisie and Rowena White that she waited a few minutes before coming outside. In here she makes no mention of that. We have to find out what she was doing.”

  As I expected, Sarah is bang on the button.

  You read through Sally Healey’s transcript, pausing when you get to the fire regulations she had in place.

  “It’s like she’s memorized the manual,” you say to Sarah.

  “I agree. And Baker picked up on it too. I think Sally Healey was worried about the real possibility of a fire. Almost as if she knew it was going to happen and was trying to minimize the consequences.” She catches your expression. “No fire regulations would have stood a chance against an accelerant and open windows and an old building.”

  “Maybe she knew that?”

  “I can’t see why she’d burn down her own school. But something’s not right. As well as having all this down pat, she said there were no hard feelings when Elizabeth Fisher, the old secretary, left. But on Elizabeth’s side, there clearly are.”

  “Is that relevant?” you ask, sounding a little impatient.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  I feel sick as I reread the head teacher’s statement. Because this time, her telling Baker that the medical room is on the third floor, right at the top of the building, leaps out at me. So too does her announcement that Jenny would be nurse, and that the information would be disseminated to all the other members of staff.

  Everyone at the school knew Jenny would be up on the top floor, on her own, in a virtually deserted building.

  “Is this all you’ve got?” you ask.

  “Yes. I’m afraid so.”

  “Can’t you—”

  “I was only able to get copies because the paperwork was temporarily in an insecure area. Everything will be securely filed by now.”

  “But you will talk to Silas Hyman?”

  “Yes. And I’ve already set up a meeting with the head teacher and Elizabeth Fisher. And while I’m doing that, you can go home and see Addie.”

  You are silent.

  “The ICU is heavily staffed, Mike. If you’re still worried, I could get Mohsin to sit with her.”

  You are still silent and she doesn’t understand.

  “Addie’s only got you right now, Mike. He needs you to be with him.”

  You shake your head.

  Her gray-blue eyes look deeply into your matching ones, as if searching for an answer there. Because you are a loving father, not a man who would ignore his eight-year-old child, especially not now. Surely, in there somewhere behind the hard expression on your face is the boy she’s known all his life. />
  You look away from Sarah as you speak so she can’t read your face anymore, can’t see the man inside.

  “They told me Jenny has three weeks to live unless she gets a heart transplant. A day less now.”

  “Oh God, Mike …”

  “I can’t leave her.”

  “No.”

  “She will get a heart transplant …” you begin, but I am looking at Jenny’s face as she hears a car speeding towards her. Death isn’t quiet but loud, deafening, getting closer. A joyriding grim reaper mounting the pavement, directly at her, and there’s nowhere to run.

  She leaves the room and I hurry after her.

  “Jen, please …”

  In the corridor, she stops and turns to me. “You should have told me.” Her face is white and her voice shaking. “I had a right to know.”

  I want to tell her that I was trying to protect her, that I knitted a shawl of untruths to wrap her up, that I believe in your hope for her.

  “I’m not a child anymore. Your daughter, yes. Always. But—”

  “Jen—”

  “Can’t you get it, Mum? Please? I’m an adult now. You can’t run my life for me. What’s left of it. I have my own life. My own death.”

  23

  I see her at six in a pink-and-orange flowery swimming costume, diving underwater before popping up with a beaming wave, our little fish! And I am watching her, my eye beams a rope around her, because I will jump in—splash!—and rescue her the moment she’s in difficulty. And then she’s twelve years old, self-conscious in a modest navy sports swimsuit, checking everything’s in place as she swims; and then a metallic silver bikini over a perfect teenage body that makes everyone stare at her and she feels their gazes like sunshine on her skin, enjoying her beauty.

  But she’s still the little girl in the pink-and-orange flowery swimming costume to me, and I still have my invisible rope around her waist.

  “You can have my heart,” I say.

  She looks at me a moment and smiles, and I see in her smile that I’m forgiven. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she says.

  “If no one else’s turns up.”

  “ ‘Turns up’?”

  She’s teasing me.

  “We’re the same tissue type,” I say.

  I’d thought us both the wrong tissue type before, our bone marrow equally useless to help my father survive Kahler’s disease.

  “It’s really kind,” she says. “That’s a huge understatement. But there are a few snags in the plan. You’re alive, for a start. And even if Dad and Aunt Sarah let them, which they won’t, they’re not going to stop giving you food and water for ages.”

  “Then I’ll just have to find a way of doing it myself.”

  “How, exactly?”

  All these smiles! Now, of all times! I was wrong earlier; she hasn’t taken in the reality of how desperate the situation is at all. I used to wish that she took life “a little more seriously.”

  “Walking out of an A-level paper isn’t funny.”

  “It’s not that I’m laughing at.”

  “So what is it?”

  “No one ever tells you when you’re doing all that course work and revision and timed essays and study skills that it’s an option.”

  “But it isn’t an option.”

  “It is, because I just took it.”

  And she found it funny, as if she’d been released from prison rather than slammed the door shut on her future.

  I had despaired of this trait she has of hiding behind humor rather than facing the truth. Now, I’m glad.

  But her question about how I actually intend to commit suicide is fair enough. I can’t open my eyelids or move a single finger, so how can I organize an overdose or jump under a train? (A selfish option, I’ve always thought—those poor drivers.) Ironically, you need to be reasonably fit to commit suicide.

  Sarah walks past us and you are with her, for the first time leaving your post.

  “They’ll get her a heart in time,” you say. “She will live.”

  But your words are harder to hear now. Your vigorous hope weakening by the time it gets to me.

  I try to grip on to it again, searching for a handhold.

  “Of course she will, Mikey,” Sarah says.

  Sarah’s voice adds to yours, a doubling of belief, and my grip is firm again. Somehow, she will get better. She has to. “Of course she will.”

  You return to the ward, and Sarah walks on towards the exit of the hospital.

  “You go with Aunt Sarah,” Jenny says. “I’ll wait here, in case Donald White comes back.”

  “I’ll stay with you.”

  “But you said we need to know everything, in case we’re the ones who have to put it all together.”

  She wants me to go with Sarah.

  She wants to be on her own.

  I used to hate that—the closed bedroom door, the little walk away from me when she was on her mobile. I still hate that. I don’t want her to want to be on her own.

  “We have to let her make her own mistakes,” you said, a few weeks ago. “Spread her wings. It’s natural for her to do that.”

  “Bubonic plague is ‘natural,’ ” I snapped back. “Doesn’t mean it’s good for you.”

  You put your arm around me. “You have to let go, Gracie.”

  But I can’t let go of my rope around her. Not yet. I’ve been spooling it out as her legs got longer and her figure curvier and stares lingered, but I’ll keep on holding it until she can safely swim out of her depth, without drowning, from the shore of childhood to that of adulthood.

  Until then I won’t let go.

  I walk with Sarah along the gravel path to the car park, but the stones are no longer needle-sharp and the harsh midday sun doesn’t scald me yet, as if I’m building up some kind of protective covering for myself.

  Sarah sticks rigidly to the speed limits, obeying one small law as she drives to break large ones.

  My nanny voice tells me that my swimming image is “totally out of date!” Jenny has told me to “cut my rope; she’s grown up! She doesn’t want it anymore!”

  I retort that underneath she still needs me as much as ever, especially now. All teenagers have to make an escape attempt from childhood, just to keep face to themselves, but I think that most, like Jen, hope to be caught before they’ve gone too far.

  “She didn’t come to you about the red paint, did she?” my nanny voice says, rapping me harshly over the knuckles with a hard-edged fact. “She didn’t turn to you then, didn’t need you then.”

  Maybe I was out all day.

  It was the tenth of May. You know that date.

  It was Adam’s class trip and although I’d cleared my diary for it, I hadn’t been allowed to go.

  “You’ve already been on three trips this year, Mrs. Covey; better give another mother a chance.” Like there were mothers queuing up with compasses in their Prada handbags to go orienteering in the pouring rain, rather than mean Miss Madden not wanting me around. (I glared at her when she shouted at them at the Royal Portrait Gallery.)

  So I stayed at home and worried about Adam not finding due north and being partnerless. Not worrying about Jenny. Because we thought the hate mail had stopped.

  I was at home all day.

  Jenny came back that evening, later than she’d said, her long hair cut into a bob. She’d seemed anxious and I thought it was about her new haircut. I’d tried to reassure her that it suited her.

  Even for Jen, she spent an absurdly long time on the phone, and although I didn’t hear what she was saying (her door was closed), her tone sounded fraught.

  If she’d come to me, I’d have washed her hair, got the paint out for her somehow, and she wouldn’t have had to have it cut.

  I’d have taken her coat to that really good but expensive dry cleaner’s in Richmond that can get almost anything out.

  If she’d come to me, I’d have reported the attack to the police and maybe she wouldn’t be in hospital now.

/>   She still needs my rope around her, even if she doesn’t realize it.

  “What is it with this drowning thing?” nanny voice demands. “Adam and his armbands, Jenny and the rope?” Well, maybe it’s because swimming is the only thing in careful modern life you allow your children to do, on a regular Saturday basis, which is potentially life-threatening. Psychoanalysts put sexual content into water imagery; mothers imagine danger.

  And then I imagine them safe.

  Snared in thoughts about Jenny and arguments with myself, I’m shocked to see we’re driving up to the school. I’m afraid of seeing the site of the fire, nauseated with anxiety.

  Sarah turns off along the small road towards the playing field and parks next to it.

  There are three Portakabins on the playing field now. They make it look so different from sports day and I’m relieved. I don’t want to remember. But as we leave the car I see the painted white lines are still here, reflecting in the harsh overhead sun; I hurriedly look away.

  I can smell grass, the heated air shot through with the scent of it, and I am being pulled back inside Wednesday afternoon, with teachers’ whistles glinting in the sun and little legs pounding the ground and Adam hurrying towards me, beaming.

  Can you get a summer snow-globe instead of a winter one with green grass and flowering azalea bushes and blue sky? Because I’m here, inside it. If you shake it, perhaps it fills with black smoke, not swirling snowflakes.

  Sarah knocks on a Portakabin door, and the sound jolts me out of the memory snow-globe.

  Mrs. Healey answers the door. Her normally foundationed face is flushed, her linen skirt creased and covered in dust.

  “Detective Sergeant McBride,” Sarah says, holding out her hand—disguising by default that she is related to us. I never understood why she didn’t keep her maiden name, but I think now it’s because she wants a public self—responsible, grown-up Detective Sergeant McBride, married to sensible, stolid Roger—to keep teenage Sarah Covey safely hidden inside.

  We go into the stifling Portakabin. Stale particles of Mrs. Healey’s perfume, Chanel 19, float like scum in the hotly humid air.