Afterwards

presence and he slips away.

The nurse is checking Jenny now. I can’t see anything different at all, not that I’d know what all the monitors are telling us, but to me it looks no different. But the nurse in the squeaky plimsolls is checking a piece of Jenny’s equipment.

Out in the corridor, the figure has disappeared.

I didn’t get close enough to see his face, just an outline in a long, dark blue coat. But the door to the burns unit is locked, so he must have been authorised to be in here. He must be a doctor, perhaps a nurse, probably going off shift, which is why he wasn’t wearing a white coat or nurse’s uniform, but an overcoat. Maybe he just wanted to check on Jenny before going home.

I see Jenny returning and I smile at her.

But I feel afraid.

Because who wears a long dark overcoat in the middle of July?

7

Garish artificial lights snapping on; doctors already alert and moving in packs; loud crashings of trolleys and nurses briskly whipping away breakfast trays and pulling out drugs charts. Christ, I think, you have to feel robust to face morning in a hospital. But at least all this noisy bright aggressive busyness turns my glimpsed figure last night into a quiet nothing.

When I arrive at my ward, I see that Mum’s already here and in an office with Dr Bailstrom. She’s aged years in a day; hard lines of misery are scraped across her face.

‘Grace chattered all the time when she was a little girl, such a bright button,’ Mum says, her voice quicker than usual. ‘I always knew that she’d grow up to be really bright, and she did. She got three As at A level and a scholarship to Cambridge to read Art History, with an option to switch to English, because they wanted her to come to their university.’

‘Mum, please!’ I say to no avail. Presumably she wants them to know what kind of brain I had – a top-notch one! as Dad used to say – so they’ll know what to aim for. The before photo.

‘She got pregnant before finals,’ Mum continues. ‘So she had to leave. She was a little disappointed, we all were, but she was happy too. About the baby. Jenny.’

I’ve never heard my life history potted before and it’s a little alarming. Is it really that simple?

‘That makes her sound like a brainbox, but she’s not really like that at all,’ Mum continues. ‘She’s a lovely girl. I know she’s nearly forty now, but she’s still a girl to me. And she’d do anything for anyone. Too good for her own good, that’s what I used to say to her. But when my husband died, I realised then that nobody can be too good for their own good, not when it’s you they’re helping.’

Mum never speaks in a rush. And hardly ever speaks more than two or three sentences at a time. Now she’s haring along in paragraphs as if she’s on a timer. And I wish there was a timer, because listening to this is terrible.

‘I don’t know what I’d have done without her; juggling her whole life around for me. I don’t mean that she has to get better for me, though. You mustn’t think that. I mean I love her more than you can possibly know but it’s her children who really need her, and Mike. You think it’s Mike who’s the strong one, he looks it, but really it’s Gracie. She’s the heart of the family.’

She stops for a moment, and Dr Bailstrom pounces in.

‘We’ll do everything we possibly can. I can absolutely assure you of that. But sometimes, with a severe head injury, there’s not a great deal that we can do.’

Mum looks at her.

And for a moment Dr Bailstrom is the doctor who told Mum and Dad that he had Kahler’s disease.

‘But there must be a cure!’ she’d said then.

She doesn’t say that now. Because when Dad died, the impossible, unthinkable happened to her and nothing would ever be unthinkable again.

I look away from her face to Dr Bailstrom’s same-as-yesterday high red shoes. I bet from time to time Dr Bailstrom looks at them too.

‘We’ll let you know what we find out when we’ve done the next set of tests,’ Dr Bailstrom says. ‘We are having a specialists’ meeting about your daughter later today.’

Once Mum would have told them Dad was a doctor. Once she’d have thought it would make a difference.

She thanks Dr Bailstrom – too nicely brought up not to always thank people properly.

Adam is hunched by my bed.

Mum rushes over to him.

‘Addie, poppet? I thought you were going to wait with the nurses for five minutes?’

He’s lying with his face against mine, holding my hand, and he’s crying. A desperate, terrible sound.

I put my arms around him and I tell him not to cry, I tell him I’m alright. But he can’t hear me.

As he cries I stroke his soft silky hair and I tell him over and over and over that it’s alright, that I love him, not to cry. But he still can’t hear me and I can’t bear it a moment longer and I have to wake up for him.

I fight my way into my body, through layers of flesh and muscle and bone. And suddenly I’m here. Inside.

I struggle to move this heavy hulk of a body, but I’m again trapped under the hull of a ship wrecked on the ocean floor and moving is impossible.

But Adam is out there crying for me and I have to open my eyes for him. Have to. But my eyelids are locked shut and rusting over.

A fragment of a poem echoes in the darkness.

A soul hung up, as ’twere, in chains

Of nerves, and arteries, and veins,

I’ve left Jenny on her own. Oh God. What if I can’t get out again?

I hear the panic in my heartbeat.

Deaf with the drumming of an ear.

But I can escape my body easily, just slipping out into the dark ocean and then struggling upwards towards the light.

Mum is putting her arm around Adam, magicking a smile onto her face for him, making her voice sound cheerful.

‘We’ll come back later, alright, my little man? We’ll go home now, then when you’ve had a bit of a rest, we can come back.’

And she’s mothering me by mothering my child.

She leads him away.

A few minutes later Jenny joins me.

‘Have you tried getting back into your body?’ I ask her.

She shakes her head. I’m an idiot. She can’t even look at her body let alone try to get into it. I want to say sorry but I think that would just make it worse. Klutz! A Jenny word.

She doesn’t ask me if I’ve tried getting back in. I think it’s because she’s afraid of the answer – either that I couldn’t; or that I could, but it made no difference.

No difference at all.

That ghastly poem I’d once thought so clever echoes still in our silence.

… with bolts of bones, that fettered stand

In feet, and manacled in hands.

‘Mum?’

‘I was thinking about the metaphysical poets.’

‘God, you really still want me to do retakes?’

I smile at her. ‘Absolutely.’