them together.
‘The priest in charge – Father Martin – took me round the place. He’s the only one left of all the priests there in the eighties. He actually made me feel sorry for him, which is a bit of a bloody miracle in itself. Anyway, two more kids have been found so the inquiry has enough evidence to move to court. His head will roll – but I doubt he cares now; he may not even live that long. Social services will probably get the real drubbing, and the police.’
He brushed her hair then, having slipped a CD into the player attached to the COMPASS –
Outside he could see grainy snow falling in the super-cooled air. The drop in temperature with nightfall reduced the flakes to pellets of lightweight hail, blown with the wind.
‘It’s too cold to snow properly,’ he said. ‘But the water-meadows have got plenty of ice on them so they may race this weekend – or sooner. Remember when we skated at Burnt Fen?’
He always paused for an answer, keeping alive the hope that one day there would be one.
‘I’ll dig the skates out just in case. I could run into town on the river – give Humph a day off. God knows what he’d do with it, mind. Probably drive round in circles.’
He switched the brush to his left hand, trying not to think, trying to concentrate on the details of his day that didn’t matter, but the central faultline of his life was inescapable. After Laura’s accident he had been able to hope that one day they would be as they had been before that winter’s night. That he would go back to his job on Fleet Street, that she could return to her career as an actress – at that point a very promising career. Childishly he had held on to this dream longer than his wife. By contrast her hopes were a compromise, a deliberate attempt to lower expectations, to hope only for the next improvement, the tiny, almost unnoticeable triumphs which made her life worth living.
Triumphs he had begun to despise. He suspected now that ‘recovery’ was a relative term, that he would never have his life back, never have his wife back, that the best they could hope for was an extended convalescence, a lifetime spent waiting beside a wheelchair or a hospital bed. And he despised himself for finding that that was not enough.
She had sensed the change as well, despite being immersed in her battle to make her brain re-establish contact with her body. He could only imagine the hours she spent dwelling on her predicament, and on theirs. One evening earlier that winter he had found a message on the COMPASS screen. He wondered how long it had taken her to compose, for it was free of the literals and errors which marked her usual attempts to operate the machine.
I CAN’T ASK YOU TO STAY FOREVER. THIS IS MY LIFE NOW. GO IF IT’S BEST. I’LL LOVE YOU ALWAYS.
He’d held her that night, crying freely at the thought she had doubted him, promising that he would always be there. And she’d been honest about her life, admitting that the long periods of silence, sometimes stretching out over days, were not always lost in a dreamlike coma. Depression, as debilitating as the coma itself, sometimes made it impossible to think, or write.
She’d asked him, then, about the life she often found unbearable:
IF I WANT YOU TO END IT PROMISE THAT YOU WILL.
He’d promised too quickly, as if to a child.
One day, when the black depression had been with her for a week, she’d told him something else.
I DONT WANT TO DIE HERE.
Which begged the question, where did she want to die?