by Mel McGrath
The quiet of night-time illness is immediately soothing. He goes over to the hospital map, remembering Lea Keane mentioning something about Pine Ward. Following the directions, he takes the lift up two floors, walks through a couple of sets of swinging doors and along a cucumber-coloured corridor lined with cheerful artworks to the ICU’s nursing desk. Reduced night staff, no one around. He stands leaning an elbow on the counter, feeling disorientated and rather bilious, and waits. That second bottle of burgundy was probably a mistake. Time passes in slo-mo. Eventually a voice says, ‘Can I help you, sir?’
He turns and sees a woman in her thirties, tall, slender, dressed in navy scrubs.
‘I don’t know,’ he says, feeling suddenly confused.
‘Are you here to see someone?’
Yes, yes, of course, that’s it, he thinks. I’m much drunker than I realised.
The woman is close enough to be able to smell his breath. Her nose twitches. He wants to explain the reason for the drinking, to tell this tall, slender woman with the kind eyes everything, but he doesn’t know where to begin. Pulling himself upright, he lurches back. I’m too drunk for this, I should just leave, he thinks, but even as he’s having the thought his mouth is saying, ‘I am the Dean at Avon University.’
The nurse says kindly, ‘I’m going to have to ask you to leave.’
Yes, this is the sensible course of action, he needs to leave, he can see that now, and quick, before he loses it or makes a tit of himself. Or worse, says something he will regret. It was stupid to come. Absolutely crazy. He has no idea what he was thinking. He wasn’t thinking, was he? He is drunk, that’s the problem. He is a bloody stupid drunk.
‘We don’t want to have to call security,’ the slender woman says, sounding much darker, almost threatening.
His world is spinning. He has no idea how to stop and get off. ‘I don’t think I’m very well,’ he says.
The slender woman places a hand on his elbow and begins to lead him towards the swing doors. ‘You’ll need to report to triage in A&E.’ Her tone has changed completely. She knows I’m drunk, he thinks. She despises me for it and I don’t blame her. I despise myself.
She waits with him until the lift arrives. His face burns all the way down to the ground floor. What a fool! What a bloody stupid idiot! He makes his way back to his car and slumps into the driver’s seat. When he comes to someone is knocking on the driver’s side window.
He blinks, shaking himself awake and turning his head to the window sees a hefty man in uniform peering in.
‘Time to go home, mate.’
Chapter 24
Honor
Honor reaches the meeting place half an hour early, edgy and apprehensive, as if, instead of having coffee with her daughter, she’s arriving for a job interview. In a way, she thinks, she is doing exactly that. Whatever she has done to offend Nevis has led Honor to this meeting, here, in this cafe, with her last £50 in her pocket, feeling as if she is having to reapply for the job of Nevis’s mother. And perhaps she is. Maybe that’s how it always works between young adults and their parents. Or perhaps this is peculiar to adoptions. Sometimes, not often, Honor wonders what it would be like to have had biological children of her own, to be able to see in her offspring, intimations of herself. She might have done, had Zoe not died. Then again, perhaps not. Being Nevis’s adoptive mother has been the greatest privilege of her life. Everything good in Honor’s life has flowed from being Nevis’s mother. Without Nevis she might have remained in the Welsh Marches, hated by the locals and unable to summon the strength to leave. She had left a broken woman and in the society of bargees and boaters, she had discovered the first real peace she had ever known. People had been dizzyingly kind, lending her tools and equipment, bringing round plants and wood for the stove and even, when times were so tough she wasn’t sure that she and Nevis would be able to continue on the water, cooked food and store-cupboard rations. And it was a great gift for Nevis too. For all the damp and freezing winters, the cramped quarters and the constant financial insecurity, growing up in the community of bargees was the greatest experience Honor could ever have bestowed on any child.
She pushes the door of the cafe open and steps into a warm, cheerful, old-fashioned place. The table in the corner looks cosy and she can see both ways down the street. Odd to be nervous. Silly. Whatever this is between them will pass, won’t it? It has to because, Bill aside, they only really have each other.
At the counter she orders coffee.
‘Anything to eat with that?’ asks the server, a young woman wearing dungarees.
Mention of food makes Honor aware that she has not eaten since the spag bol with Alex yesterday evening and now it is nearly lunchtime. It’s easy to forget about such things when you’re on your own. When Nevis was still very young and the pain of losing Zoe was still as raw as a beating, she would sometimes go for days without food. She would feed Nevis always, spoon the pulpy mess into her mouth, watch the little smile of pleasure come to her smooth, blameless face but she would not give that to herself. She had thought that those days and months and weeks and years of punishment she took at her own hands had come and gone, that she had dealt with them and moved on, but perhaps not.
‘Just the coffee,’ she says. ‘I’m meeting my daughter here, but I’m early.’
‘Oh, that’s nice,’ the young woman says sweetly, adding, ‘you go and sit down and I’ll bring it over.’
Moving to the corner table she takes off her coat and hangs it on the back of the chair wondering why she said such a thing. What does the woman at the counter care? Sometimes, she thinks, I don’t think I’ve quite mastered being on my own. But there will be time. A lot of time.
She sits and waits and tries not to fidget. There are some leaflets and freesheets strewn about but she doesn’t feel like reading them. A few moments later the server brings over the coffee.
‘Like your fleece,’ the young woman says. ‘Purple’s a good mum colour.’
Honor hadn’t wanted to be a mum. She hadn’t not wanted it either. At nineteen she hadn’t given it much thought. In the weeks after Nevis was born, while Zoe was still alive, and they were living in the caravan, she’d done what people now call co-parenting. The caravan was so tiny that there hadn’t been much choice in the matter, but she’d actively wanted to be involved. Nappy changing, feeding, bathing, getting up in the night and soothing of tears and screams, all this she had done, none of it the same as if she had been Nevis’s mother. The buck still stopped at Zoe. Until Zoe was no more. And when that happened, motherhood had been thrust upon her in a way it never would have been had Nevis been her biological child.
A person less prepared for the role of adoptive mother to a three-month-old baby would have been hard to imagine. Honor had only begun to wash her hair regularly the year before and was still squeezing her pimples. Her parents, Jim and Tillie, had been too busy getting off their heads to worry about teaching their child to wash. Honor was a hippy kid, left, more or less, to fend for herself. She learned how to open a can of beans not long after she learned to walk, but it was only a month after she became Nevis’s mother, via the chance remark of a social worker who had come to see how ‘mum and baby’ were settling down, that she discovered that washing behind your ears was considered an essential part of basic grooming. It was a steep learning curve and she had been forced to scale it while grieving for her friend. Bringing up Nevis had been the best, the most joyful and the worst and the most terrible, thing she had ever done. For the most part, it was done. Or had been, until the incident on the bridge brought into stark relief just how vulnerable Nevis is and how much mothering there is still left to do.
She spots her daughter moments before she enters, alerted by the long shadow and the sloping, lilting walk. Moments later Nevis has spotted her and is approaching.
‘Hi. Is that new?’ Nevis says, pointing to the fleece. She looks even more anxious than she did on Sunday night.
‘Yeah, I mean, not new,
but…’
‘…new to you, which is as new as anything gets in your world.’
Oh, she thinks, with sinking heart, so it’s going to be like this, is it?
‘I’ll go and get a coffee, you want another?’
Honor holds her hand over her mug. ‘No, darling, thank you.’
At the word darling Nevis blinks and a fragile, awkward smile appears. You can’t bring up the rift or hurt or whatever it is, Honor says to herself, watching her daughter’s back move towards the counter, not unless it’s what Nevis has come to talk about. It wouldn’t be fair, not now. So you must talk about anything else.
In a few moments Nevis returns carrying a cup and takes a seat opposite her mother.
‘How is Satnam?’
‘I assume she’s the same. The student welfare office said they’d let me know if there was any big change,’ Nevis says, rubbing her right eye with her fingers.
‘You look a bit tired.’
‘My sleep app says I slept six hours and eighteen minutes, so I’m fine, just, you know…’ She takes a breath. ‘I don’t need you to be here, you know that don’t you?’
‘I know you’re very capable and competent, if that’s what you’re asking.’ All the same, Honor thinks, it was you who asked to meet. Besides which, I do need to be here. I need it very much. ‘I’ve got paid work here now though, a refurb on a boat down in the Floating Harbour. It’ll take a couple of months.’ Honor picks up her coffee and drains what remains in order not to have to look at her daughter. The work is not paid and is unlikely to take as long as she has said. It has always been so hard to lie to Nevis precisely because it has always been so easy.
‘But you’re not going to want to come round all the time, are you?’
The sting is small and teenager-shaped but painful still. Honor says, ‘Of course not, but you can come to the boat whenever you like. There are two bedrooms.’
Nevis has stopped listening, her face turning inward, the colour drained out, the strain apparent in a tightness around the eyes, a pulse at the jawline. ‘Everyone at Avon’s talking about it. It’s all over the university chat rooms and on social. Everyone knows I was there on the bridge. I go into the library, students I don’t even know pass me messages. What if people start to say I could have stopped her?’
So here it was, the reason she had got in touch. Part of her was still a kid in need of a mother’s reassurance.
‘Have you spoken to student welfare so they can put a stop to that stuff?’
‘They’re useless.’
‘Someone else at uni then?’
‘I’m speaking to you about it.’
Honor sinks back, despondent. What she hears is that she has failed, that there are other, better mothers out there, who would have been more suited, who would have known how to deal with this, and that in spite of this, she’s got the part, because no one else showed up to the audition.
‘Social media isn’t your friend and the people who are doing the gossiping aren’t your friends either.’ She wonders why the university is letting this pass.
‘I only have one friend.’
‘You have me.’
Nevis falls silent, considering this a moment. ‘I found something I want to show you.’ She removes some printed paper from her daypack and puts it on the table. Honor reaches for it, turns it over in her hand, scanning the pages. ‘Satnam’s essay on data integration in bioinformatics.’
‘Is it one of the ones you helped her with?’
Nevis shakes her head. ‘No, she never asks me to help any more, not even with the maths. She only finished this one a couple of weeks ago. I found it under her bed.’
‘Oh.’ Honor is unsure where this is going.
‘The point is, she told me she got a first for that paper but the calculations are full of errors. No way that paper was worth a first.’
Still perplexed. Why is Nevis bringing this up now?
‘Could you have misheard?’
‘No! We had a conversation about it. She kept saying how chuffed she was.’
Honor takes a breath. It sounds like what Nevis needs right now is reassurance.
‘But darling, everyone occasionally stretches the truth a bit to make themselves look better.’
She notes the scowl on Nevis’s face and kicks herself. Why can’t she get it right with Nevis? ‘I shouldn’t have showed you. I knew you wouldn’t get it.’
‘Give me another try.’
Nevis nods. ‘I spoke to a couple of Satnam’s friends but they got funny with me, like they knew something about Satnam that I didn’t.’
‘About her state of mind? Or something she did?’
Nevis shrugs. ‘I’m not good at picking up that stuff.’ Nevis bites her lip, considering this for a moment before deciding to risk it. ‘I’m going to go back and see the Dean.’
‘That sounds like a good idea, if you’re worried about it.’ Honor is struggling to put all this together. ‘Do you think Satnam could have been cheating? And got caught out?’
‘No, of course not!’ The flare of outrage on Nevis’s face is hard to bear. ‘Forget it, all right, it doesn’t matter. I just thought… never mind.’ Snatching up the sheets of paper, Nevis puts them into her backpack, closes the zip. ‘I’ve got to get going now.’
Honor watches her daughter disappear. Again. Whether Nevis’s real reason for coming to her was to get her opinion of Satnam’s paper or to talk to a friend or be comforted by a mother, she’d failed in all these things. Something has happened to my daughter since Satnam went to the bridge, Honor thinks, something new and very grown up and rather sad and I shall probably never know what.
Chapter 25
Cullen
Cullen is walking by the library when he spots Nevis Smith emerging from the lift. He stops and smiles.
‘How are you, Nevis?’
‘OK, thank you.’ She is red-faced. Shyness he thinks, but who knows. An odd one. Hard to read. He is hoping very much that she hasn’t got wind of the embarrassing escapade at the hospital last night, though if she has, he has already concocted a defensive strategy for dealing with it.
‘I got your email about coming to see me. I have a spare moment now if you like.’
He waits while she consults her phone. ‘I have a seminar group with Dr Ratner in forty-seven minutes.’
‘Oh, well, I don’t suppose we’ll be that long, will we? Shall we go to my office?’ Her eyebrows raise enquiringly. An unworldly girl, but beguiling in a funny sort of way. Something intriguing about her at least. After their last encounter he had been left with the strong sense that she hadn’t told him everything she knows about Satnam Mann and this concerns him.
They walk down the corridor and through the swing doors to the Deanery in silence, Nevis following awkwardly a couple of paces behind. He opens the door and waves her in.
‘You look a little tired,’ he says, going round to his side of the desk.
‘So do you,’ she says, perching on the edge of the visitor’s seat. He glances at her, trying to gauge where that remark came from but her face is an open book or an empty plain, depending on your point of view.
He lets out an awkward laugh. ‘At my age everyone looks tired.’
‘What age is that?’ she says.
He finds himself laughing. Either the girl is a complete innocent or she is a monster. He hopes the former. Easier to manage. ‘I always think age is just a number.’
She frowns and closes her eyes for a moment and then, in a soft and puzzled voice, says, ‘Everything is a number.’
‘Indeed,’ he says, steepling his hands. She amuses him. Reminds him of himself at fifteen, a boy with a single-track mind, newly arrived on campus, wildly clever and not a little clueless. ‘Now, how can I help?’
‘It’s about Satnam.’ He catches her glance and holding it notes in those clever hazel eyes pain and perhaps a touch of wariness.
‘I see. You’ve heard that her condition remains the same. Seri
ous but stable. We’ll have to continue to hope. Are you getting the support you need?’
‘No.’
‘Oh,’ he says, ‘Well, we should contact student welfare.’
‘I mean I don’t need any,’ she says, hastily.
He looks at her for a moment. There is something rather amazing about her. Perhaps she is that very rare thing, he thinks, a person who speaks her mind. What does she know, he wonders, and how much of what she knows does she really understand?
‘Perhaps a different kind of support might be more helpful?’ He smiles.
‘Like what?’
‘How does a coffee sound for a start?’
She returns the smile and nods. Not entirely without a sense of humour, at least.
Standing, he goes over to the coffee machine, slots in a capsule and taps the ‘make’ key. ‘Was that why you asked to see me? Because you were finding student welfare unhelpful?’
‘No,’ she says, bluntly, ‘I came to see you because I found something.’
‘Oh?’ As he walks back to the desk with the coffee cup it is hard to prevent his hand from shaking. He takes a seat and pushes the coffee towards her, waits for her to put it to her lips before saying, ‘What kind of thing?’
‘One of Satnam’s essays. It’s on data integration in bioinformatics. She must have printed it out.’
A lump catches painfully in his voice box but he manages to keep the smile on his face. He swallows, hard. No cause for alarm just yet.
‘Oh?’ he says, in what he hopes is a casual tone. Not that she’ll notice, he suspects, though it never hurts to put on a good show of ignorance. ‘If you give it to me, I’ll make sure Dr Ratner sees it. You focus on your coursework.’
‘It’s been graded,’ she says.
‘Really?’ he says, with a feeling of foreboding. ‘I don’t recall marking it myself.’
‘But you teach the bioinformatics module.’
‘I do, yes.’ An anxious thread spirals its way up his spine.
