Afterwards

grabbed onto Silas Hyman. Anything or anyone but the hate-mailer; for this not to be an attack on her.

As we arrive at my acute neurology ward, I hear Dr Bailstrom’s high heels clicking quickly across the linoleum. She turns to a senior nurse.

‘The case meeting on Grace Covey?’

‘Dr Rhodes’s office. The whole crew.’

‘Waiting long?’

‘Fifteen minutes.’

‘Damn.’

She hurries towards an office as fast as her shoes will let her.

‘Shall we wait for Dad here?’ I ask Jenny.

She doesn’t reply.

‘Jen…?’

Nothing. I turn to look at her.

Something is wrong. Terribly wrong. Her eyes glitter and she’s shimmering with light; too bright; too vividly colourful; heat pulsating out of her.

I am mute with terror. I cannot move.

‘Find out what’s happening to me,’ Jenny says and her voice is so quiet I can hardly hear it, and her face is iridescent now, so dazzling I can barely look at her.

You’re leaving the meeting room and running full tilt down the corridor, doors swinging back behind you, people getting out of your way.

I’m running after you, trying to keep up.

You reach the burns unit and bang on the door but a nurse is expecting you and opens it hurriedly. She says Jenny’s heart has arrested. They’re trying to restart it.

But it’s criminals who are arrested, not a heart. Not Jenny’s heart. Because it isn’t meant to stop, it’s meant to keep beating, every second, every minute, every hour of every day, long after yours and mine have stopped. Long after. I think of that Sylvia Plath poem, ‘love set you going like a fat gold watch’, and I think love did set our daughter’s heart going, but it isn’t a bloody watch that needs winding up, or sending to the mender’s. Thoughts about words, things, poetry to keep thoughts about Jenny’s body away. A useless semantic screen. Ripped away the moment I catch up with you by her bed.

There are too many people, their actions speeded up, and machines are bleeping and flashing and in the middle of it all is Jenny. You can’t reach her; the people around her bed block your path. I feel your frustrated anguish, wanting to barge your way through to her. But if she’s to be saved it’s these people who’ll do it, not you.

And I know that Jenny is outside in the corridor, blindingly bright, as if formed by light, and I start to scream.

On the heart monitor is a flat line. A depiction of death.

Is she still there, outside in the corridor?

She can’t be dead. She can’t.

They’re trying so hard to bring her back to us again, speaking quickly to one another with words we don’t understand; their actions deft and practised; a modern pagan ritual with high-tech magic that might summon her back from the dead.

A spike on her heart monitor.

Her heart is beating! Not a fat gold watch but a girl’s heart.

She’s alive.

Elation buoys me up and everyone around me so that for a moment we are all outside the normal, contained, pragmatic world.

Jenny arrives next to me; no longer too bright.

‘Still here,’ she says and smiles at me.

She can’t see her body, screened by the doctors and nurses.

Dr Sandhu turns to you. His brown face no longer looks indecently healthy, but exhausted. What must it be like to hold someone’s life in your hands? How heavy Jenny’s must be for him, weighted with our love for her.

‘We’ll be taking her directly to our intensive care unit,’ he tells you. ‘I’m afraid we think her heart is likely to have suffered damage. Possibly very severe damage. We’ll be running tests straight away.’

I try to usher Jenny away, but she doesn’t budge.

‘You’ll get through this,’ you say to Jenny’s unconscious body. ‘You will get better.’

As if you know that Jenny can hear you.

‘I’m Miss Logan, Jennifer’s consultant cardiologist,’ a young woman says, who was at the forefront of the resuscitation. ‘Let’s talk when we have her test results back. But I have to warn you that if the findings are as we predict, then-’

But you leave the room, refusing to hear the end of her sentence.

Jenny goes too. Because medical staff are leaving her bedside and she can’t bear to see her face and body.

Sarah’s waiting outside.

‘She’s alive,’ you say.

Sarah hugs you. She’s shaking.

I join Jenny further down the corridor.

‘It was amazing, Mum,’ she says.

‘Amazing?’ I ask. Will this be the one adjective Jenny uses to describe her near-death experience? The same adjective she and her friends use to describe ice cream. I used to worry that the subtlety of verbal adjectives had been vandalised by TV and computer screens; I used to lecture her about it sometimes.

‘It was as if all the light and colour and warmth and love in my body was leaving it and being put into me,’ she says. ‘It was beautiful. The feeling. And what I was. Beautiful.’ She searches a moment for the right words. ‘And I think, what was happening, was that my soul was being born.’

I am stunned by her description. Not just by the content but by the way she describes it; our daughter who has previously never used more than one adjectival phrase in a sentence.

‘But it’s not going to happen again,’ I say. ‘Not till you’re an old lady, OK?’

Dr Sandhu joins you and Sarah.

‘One of our nurses has told us that a piece of equipment we’re using to help Jenny, the endotracheal tube which connects to her ventilator, came loose last night. There’s a chance that it was tampered with. She should have reported this last night but I’m afraid it hasn’t been brought to light until this emergency.’

My anxiety for Jenny last night expands to terror.

‘Was that why her heart stopped?’ Sarah asks.

‘There’s no way to be sure,’ Dr Sandhu replies. ‘We were already concerned about organ failure.’

I saw him. The figure in the coat. I saw him.

‘Someone did this to her?’ you ask, incredulous.

‘Pieces of equipment can occasionally be faulty,’ Dr Sandhu says. ‘It’s rare, but it happens. And it’s very hard to see how tampering could have occurred. We are one of the few units in the hospital with a low turnover of staff. Most of us have worked here for a long time. And nothing like that has ever happened.’

‘What about someone coming in?’ Sarah asks.

‘The door to the burns unit is kept locked, with a code keypad. Only members of staff know the code and visitors have to be let in.’

Just like the school. Why hadn’t I realised that before? Just like the school.

I see anxiety pinching at Sarah’s face.

‘Thank you,’ she says quietly. ‘One of my colleagues will need to talk to you.’

‘Of course. In fact, we have already followed protocol and the clinical director has just spoken to the police. But I wanted to tell you myself.’

Next to me Jenny has gone rigid, her face afraid.

‘You heard him, Mum. Equipment can be faulty.’