Afterwards

by Rosamund Lupton

  Mohsin is quiet. I hear a noise, maybe a biro point being clicked in and out.

  “What if the witness is right, Sarah?”

  “You’re not an uncle, are you?” she says.

  “Not yet, though my sister’s working on it.”

  “I know Adam. Who he really is, the bedrock of him, if you like, because he is a part of Michael. And therefore a part of me. And he didn’t do this.”

  Silence seems to ratchet up the heat in the car.

  “Silas Hyman had birthday cake candles,” Sarah says. “Eight blue ones, like the ones that must have been on Adam’s cake. And he has the school calendar with Adam’s birthday ringed. And his wife, I know she’s lying. Or hiding something at least. I’m sure she is.”

  “You went to his house?” He sounds horrified.

  “No one else is doing anything, are they?” she snaps. “Not now everyone’s decided that my gentle little nephew is an arsonist.”

  “For fuck’s sake, Sarah, you can’t just go to someone’s house.”

  She says nothing. The sound of a pen tapping hard now in the background, or maybe a foot.

  “I’m worried about you, darling, what’ll happen if someone finds out and—”

  Sarah interrupts, her tone weary now. “I know. Actually from a getting-into-hot-water angle, it’s a lot worse.”

  “How?”

  “His wife was bathing their kids and I just didn’t clock it. I’m a mother, an aunt; bathing children is just so normal and …”

  She breaks off. So that’s what rattled her. She’d been pretending to be on police business when children were naked.

  “I left once I realized,” Sarah continues. “But it made me so angry that I was in this position. And then I felt so angry about everything. And then this bloody woman was feeling sorry for herself, sorry for herself!”

  “Do you think she’ll report you?”

  “If she finds out I didn’t have any authorization to go round there, then yes. Most probably.”

  “Well, I’m kind of impressed, actually,” Mohsin says. “I knew you had a subversive streak but never had you down as an out-and-out rebel.”

  “Thanks. So will you help?”

  We both wait for the sound of Mohsin’s voice in the car. Nothing.

  “You told me the files wouldn’t be securely stored,” Sarah ventures.

  “I know. Totally out of line. Baker will bust my guts for that if he finds out.” The sound of the clicking biro again. “What do you need?”

  Sarah’s relief is an exhaled breath, changing the atmosphere in her car.

  “The names of the investors in Sidley House.”

  “Penny told me that fraud was ruled out almost straightaway,” Mohsin says. “They’re comfortably in the black, according to the bank.”

  “Yes, and they’re starting the school up again in September. There’s no reason for fraud that I can see. But I need to check all of it. And when I spoke to the head teacher, she didn’t like talking about the investors and I want to know why not.”

  “You spoke to her too?”

  Sarah was silent.

  “Jesus, honey.”

  “I also need to know if we’ve gotten anything on a man called Donald White. I’m pretty sure he’s abusive to his daughter, possibly his wife.”

  “OK. I’ll do what I can,” he says. “I’m doing an extra shift tonight. So I’ll meet you for breakfast tomorrow morning. Is that grim hospital café still going?”

  We arrive back at the hospital car park and the residual heat in the early evening air scalds me. I hurry ahead of Sarah towards the building. This time I can’t see Jenny waiting for me.

  Once inside the hospital’s protective skin, the pain again vanishes, and for a moment the state of not-being-in-pain makes me feel euphoric.

  I follow Sarah towards the ICU. Jenny is leaning against a wall in the corridor.

  “I tried, you know, the scratch-and-sniff memory thing,” she says. “But it’s no good. A school doesn’t smell like a hospital. At least Sidley House didn’t.”

  It’s what I’d been banking on. Sidley House smelt of polish and hoovered carpets and cut flowers, not strong disinfectant and antiseptic and lino.

  A little ahead of us, Sarah is scrolling through her texts and e-mails, at the last point before the ICU where mobiles are still allowed. We look over her shoulder. Nosiness and eavesdropping are becoming a habit.

  Among her texts is one from Ivo. He’s got a standby flight from Barbados, an overnight, and will be here in the morning. I look at Jen, expecting to see her beamy-happy, but her face looks tight with anxiety, almost fear. Maybe she’s started to see their relationship for what it is. And perhaps that’s better now than when he actually arrives.

  “Jen—” I begin, but she cuts me off.

  “I was about to go in,” she says, pointing at a door behind her.

  It’s the entrance to the hospital chapel, which I’ve never noticed before. The chapel is the one place in the hospital that won’t smell of disinfectant and antiseptic.

  We go in together. But I’m not worried, because surely it won’t smell anything like a fire in here. In any case, I’ll be with her.

  Wooden pews and a carpet, threadbare but a carpet nonetheless. Even lilies, like the ones Mrs. Healey always has in the small waiting area outside her office, their smell pungent in the room.

  The combination of scents transports me momentarily into Sidley House, as if the gateway to a memory has a keypad and the right sensory code is punched in.

  Looking at Jenny, I know that she feels it too.

  “I was near Mrs. Healey’s office,” she says. “And the lilies smelt really strong; you could smell their stale water a little too. I can remember that.”

  She pauses a moment and I wait. She’s going further into the memory. Should I stop her?

  “I’m feeling happy. And I’m going down the stairs.”

  Behind us, the door closes. An elderly woman has come in. It’s broken the sensory thread to the past.

  “You were going down the stairs?” I ask. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. I must have reached the upper ground floor because that’s where Mrs. Healey has those lilies.”

  Maybe Annette Jenks was telling the truth after all about Jenny signing herself out.

  Jenny closes her eyes again, and again I don’t know whether to let her continue with this. But how else are we going to help Addie?

  Her face relaxes. It’s all OK. She’s back in a summer’s afternoon at school.

  She screams.

  “Jenny—?”

  She’s running out of the chapel.

  At the back, the elderly woman has lit a candle, the smoke no more than a charcoal line in the air. But enough.

  I catch up with her.

  “I’m sorry, I should never have—”

  “It wasn’t your fault.” I put my arm around her and she’s shaking.

  “I’m fine now, Mum. I wasn’t actually back in the fire, just close.”

  We walk to the garden together.

  I’d thought memories were kept behind a gateway—wrought iron, I’d visualized—with spaces to glimpse through and sometimes opening for a short time to let you actually wander in again.

  But I see a corridor, now, like a long hospital corridor, and behind each set of swing doors is another memory leading inexorably to the fire. I don’t think you can control how far you go along it, or know what lies behind the next set of doors. And I dread her reaching the end and the full horror of that afternoon.

  Out here in the garden, the shadows are lengthening into soothing darkness.

  “It was a good idea,” I say. “To think of the chapel.”

  The one place in the hospital that smelt like the school, that even had candles and matches.

  “That wasn’t why I was there,” she says.

  She turns a little away from me, her face half hidden in the dimness.

  “I was hoping to suck up to God.
A last-minute dot-com search for a place in heaven.”

  Anxieties hidden in sleeves and pockets and fears stuffed up jumpers, but my God, Mike, I didn’t expect this.

  “I’m not that scared actually,” she says. “I mean, this whole thing, whatever we are now, does make it likely there’s a heaven, some kind of an afterlife, doesn’t it? It proves that the physical world and the physical body isn’t all there is.”

  I’ve imagined talking to her about so many things: drugs, abortion, STDs, tattoos, piercings, Internet safety. Some of these we have actually discussed and I had all my research to hand. But I’ve never researched this conversation. Never imagined it.

  I thought we were so liberal, bringing up our children without God in the house—no churchgoing, no grace before food, no prayers at bedtime. I secretly thought we were more honest than our churchgoing friends, who I assumed used going to church as a means of getting their children into high-achieving free St. Swithun’s. No, I’d let my children make up their own minds, when they were older. In the meantime, we’d sleep in on Sunday morning and go to a garden center, not church.

  But my lazy lack of faith, my in-vogue atheism, has taken away the safety net hanging beneath our children’s lives.

  I just didn’t think it through, never thought what it would be like facing death with no knowledge of a heaven or a father-figure God to go to.

  Maybe in the old days, when children died so frequently, people were more religious because they had to know where their dead children were. And if a child was dying, they needed to tell her where she was going next. That it would be all right. And to believe that. No wonder they all flocked to church. Did antibiotics kill off the devout in us? Penicillin replacing faith?

  I’m talking too much, my thoughts jabbering away, like Maisie trying to hide the jagged truth with a swirl of words, trying to drown out the ticking clock, the speeding car, the sound death makes.

  “Do Christians believe that you go to purgatory if you’re not baptized?” Jenny asks.

  She’s facing this.

  “You won’t go to purgatory,” I snap, furious. “There’s no such thing as purgatory.”

  How dare any God send my daughter to purgatory? As if I could walk into the head teacher’s study and say that it’s absolutely unjust for her to have a detention and I am taking her home right now.

  Still talking too much.

  I have to join her. Face this too.

  I turn to look at the gorgon.

  And death isn’t a clock ticking or a car speeding towards her.

  I see a girl falling overboard from life and no one is able to reach her.

  Exposed and alone.

  Three weeks less a day until she drowns.

  Maybe it has been there all the time, this girl-alone-in-an-ocean silence, that ghastly vast expanse of it which I didn’t want to hear.

  “So that was what this drowning thing was really about,” nanny voice says. “All along it was really this.”

  Perhaps. Yes.

  But she’s not going to drown. I won’t let her.

  My certainty startles me. And there’s fear in it, the nervous, jittery-as-hell kind. But anything else is simply unthinkable.

  Jenny dying before August the twentieth, an actual date on our calendar in the kitchen, and all those days afterwards that won’t contain her is ludicrous. Unbearable.

  And I’m not clinging on to your hope now but believing it—knowing it—for myself.

  Jenny living is my only truth.

  Because your child staying alive trumps everything. “You’re going to live,” I say to Jenny. “You don’t need to think about any of this. Because you’re going to live.” I have my rope around her.

  27

  Saturday morning. The radio should be going and I should be drinking coffee in bed, which you brought me half an hour ago, but didn’t wake me so it’s tepid now, but I’m glad of it. I should smell bacon and sausages frying downstairs as you prepare your monster breakfast for you and Addie and I’m hoping you’ve remembered to open the kitchen window so our neurotic, overly sensitive heat detector won’t blast out the neighbors and make the guinea pigs bolt around their hutch. Jenny is still slumbering deeply, not hearing the beeping of a text on her mobile, which has been going off since about eight—clearly a wrong number because none of Jenny’s friends will be up yet either. But soon she’ll arrive, sleepy-eyed, and sit on the end of my bed, bemoaning you not bringing her tea.

  “Tea’s more effort than coffee, Jen.”

  “Tea-bag tea ’ud be fine.”

  “You still have to soak it and then take it out, put it in the bin. Then put in the milk. Dad only does one-step morning drinks.”

  She leans back against the pillows, next to me, and tells me who she’s meeting up with this morning and it seems only a blink ago that it was me spending Saturday with friends in preparation for the main event of the evening. How can it be possible that I wake up each morning to find myself a thirty-nine-year-old mother of two? Even before Tara earlier, I sometimes think of myself in tabloid descriptions. I prefer it to be along the lines of “Daring bank robbery by thirty-nine-year-old mother of two!” variety than anything more maudlin.

  Jen gives me a kiss and goes “to make my own tea.”

  Dr. Sandhu tells you Jenny is getting weaker; slowly deteriorating, as they’d predicted.

  “Can she still have a transplant?” you ask.

  “Yes. She’s still strong enough for that. But we don’t know how much longer that will be the case.”

  Jenny is waiting for me outside the ICU. She doesn’t ask if a heart has been found. Like me, she can now read an expression at ten paces and interpret a silence. Before, I thought the only crushing silence was the one after “I love you …”

  “Aunt Sarah’s gone to meet Belinda, that nurse,” Jenny says.

  “Right.”

  “And she got a text from someone to meet in the cafeteria in half an hour. She looked really pleased. Do you think it could be her man?”

  Last time I was jealous of Jen’s closeness to Sarah, but now it’s the other way around. Jen and I don’t talk about this kind of thing at all. I say this kind of thing, because even the language is a minefield. For example, “sexy” is old-fashioned and shows I don’t have a clue, but “hot” is embarrassing for someone as old as me (a thirty-nine-year-old mother of two). Actually no, it isn’t a minefield to be negotiated; the entire area is off-limits, each generation linguistically roping it off for themselves. But somehow Sarah’s been allowed in.

  But that doesn’t mean I see having sex as a rite of passage to becoming an adult. If anything, I think it’s sometimes the reverse. You tease me for being a hypocrite. It’s me who wants to use the creative “making love” term rather than the acquisitive “having sex.” But I have to break off this little cul-de-sac of a conversation because we’ve caught up with Sarah, who’s striding briskly down the corridor.

  Belinda, spruce in her nurse’s uniform, goes through Maisie’s notes with Sarah.

  “She had a cracked wrist, last winter,” Belinda says. “She said she slipped over on an icy doorstep.”

  “Any reason for the doctors or nurses looking after her to be suspicious?”

  “No. We get lots of broken arms and legs when it’s icy. And then at the beginning of March this year there’s this.”

  I read, with Sarah, the notes about Maisie being admitted unconscious to hospital with two broken ribs and a fractured skull. She said she’d fallen down the stairs. After being discharged from the hospital two weeks later she’d failed to keep any of her outpatient appointments.

  I’d tried to ring her during that time but had only gotten her voice mail. Later, she’d told me that she’d collided with a pillar in the supermarket car park. “Pride more wounded than anything else!” And that after her “little mishap,” Donald had treated her to a spa break. When I’d asked her more about it, she’d seemed embarrassed. I’d thought it hadn’t been a succ
ess.

  There’s nothing else in Maisie’s records. She hadn’t shown any doctors her bruised cheek, nor the bruises on her arm the day of the fire, hidden under her long fun sleeves.

  Belinda gets out Rowena’s notes, but it’s clear she’s already read them; her normally smiley face is upset.

  “She had a significant burn to her leg last year. She said she dropped an iron on it and the burn mark suggested an iron.”

  I remember Donald’s lighted cigarette and Adam cowering away.

  Was Rowena’s scar the reason she was wearing long trousers on sports day? I’d thought she was just being more sensibly dressed than Jenny.

  “Anything else?” Sarah asks.

  “No. Unless they went to another hospital. It sometimes happens. Communication between hospitals isn’t as efficient as it should be.”

  “I’d like you to tell me if Donald White comes to visit again,” Sarah says. “I don’t want him to have unsupervised access.”

  Belinda nods. She meets Sarah’s eye.

  “There’s nothing I can do until one of them reports it,” Sarah says with frustration.

  “You’ll encourage them to?”

  “Let’s get them both to a state where that’s an option. Get Rowena back on her feet and out of here first. I don’t want to ask them to do anything while they’re so vulnerable. For a start, if you get that kind of decision now, they could well go back on it.”

  Sarah leaves, with Jenny and I following, and joins Mohsin in the hospital cafeteria. His caramel-colored face is tired, shadows under his eyes.

  “Is that him?” Jenny asks.

  “No. Her lover’s younger and more gorgeous,” I say.

  She doesn’t even flinch when I say the embarrassing word lover, but instead smiles.

  “Good for her.”

  Sarah’s and Mohsin’s heads are bent close together, old confidantes. We go to join them.

  “It looks like domestic abuse to both mum and daughter,” Sarah is saying.

  “We’ve got nothing on him,” Mohsin says. “One speeding ticket, issued last year, sum total.”

  “According to the head teacher’s transcript, Rowena White was going to be the school nurse on sports day,” Sarah says. “They only changed their mind and swapped to Jenny last Thursday.”