Afterwards

‘Well?’ she asks.

‘You’re going to be alright,’ I say. A brazen, bare-faced lie. A deceit. A shawl woven of untruths in which a mother wraps her child.

She looks so relieved.

‘But they can’t be totally sure?’ she asks me.

‘Not totally.’

As close as I will get to the truth.

We see you coming out of ICU and going towards my ward. Sarah must be with Jenny.

You sit next to my comatose body and you tell me what the doctors have said. You tell me that she will get a transplant. She will be alright. Of course she will!

I press against you and I can feel your courageous hope for Jenny.

I hold onto it as I hold onto you.

For now, at least, I can believe in your hope for her and the ghastly ticking down of Jenny’s life is paused.

* * *

Jenny is in the corridor.

‘Shall we go to the garden?’ she suggests. She must see my surprise because she smiles with a note of triumph. ‘I found one.’

She takes me to a corridor with a glass wall. Still holding tightly to your hope, I look through the glass to see a courtyard garden. It’s in the heart of the hospital, walls rising up on all four sides. It must have been designed to be seen from the many overlooking windows, rather than be used. The entrance on the ground floor is a nondescript, unmarked door, presumably only used by whoever looks after it.

Through the glass, the garden looks so pretty with its profusion of English flowers: tissue-paper pink roses and frilly white jasmine and velvet peonies. There’s a wrought-iron seat and a fountain; a stone bird-bath.

I go outside with Jen, thinking the garden will be a gentle place to be.

The walls surrounding this garden have trapped the heat, funnelling it down. The water in the bird-bath has evaporated. The edges of the tissue-paper roses have curled and dried; the peony is dropping with the weighted humid air.

Summer boxed in.

‘At least it’s sort of outside,’ she says.

Through the glass wall, which abuts one side of the garden, you can see through to rooms and corridors. We watch people walking along. And I know why she likes it now, because even though it’s not outside proper, we are separate from the hospital.

As I sit with her, the lie I told digs into me like razor wire.

We carry on watching people through the glass wall. For a long time. Jen seems soothed by it and it is quite soporific, like watching tropical fish in a tank.

‘That’s Rowena’s dad, isn’t it?’ Jenny asks.

Amongst the melee of fish-people I spot Donald.

‘Yes.’

‘But why’s he here?’

‘Rowena’s in the hospital,’ I say.

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. I saw her with Adam outside the school and she looked fine then.’

After Maisie’s visit, I’d again forgotten about Rowena; my anxiety for Jenny still making me too selfish to have room for her as well.

‘Maisie will be with her,’ Jenny says. ‘Shall we go and visit?’

It’s sweet of her to think I’d like to be with my old friend.

‘It gets kind of boring here after a while,’ she says.

We’re near the burns unit now and are catching up with Donald. A nurse is with him. As we follow him, I’m glad that for a little while at least Jenny and I have a focus that is not on her injuries or mine.

Donald is wearing a dark suit, jacket still on despite the hotly humid day, and is carrying a briefcase.

I can smell cigarettes on his clothes. I’ve never noticed that before, but my sense of smell has become so much more acute now, overpoweringly so.

We’re now close enough to hear the nurse talking to him. Her voice is briskly competent.

‘… and when someone has been in an enclosed space in a fire, we have to monitor them extremely carefully in case there have been any inhalation injuries. It can some-times take a little while before there are any symptoms, so it’s wise to be on the safe side.’

Donald’s face looks severe, barely recognisable from the smiling, avuncular man I last saw at the prize-giving. It’s probably these horrible, glaring striplights partitioning the corridor ceiling, which gouge out shadows in people’s faces, making them look harsher.

The nurse presses a keypad on the door to the burns unit and holds the door for him.

‘Your daughter’s bed is this way,’ she says.

But surely he’s been to see her before? He wouldn’t have waited a day before coming to her bedside. Maisie has told me how protective he is of his family countless times. ‘He’d kill crocodiles for us with his bare hands! Good job there aren’t that many crocs in Chiswick!’

Jenny and I reach Rowena’s side-room a little before Donald and look through the glass panel in the door. Rowena has a drip in her arm and her hands are bandaged. But her face is undamaged. How could I not have thought her face beautiful before? Next to her is Maisie.

I wait for Donald to arrive and take Rowena in his arms and for the three of them to be reunited.

I brace myself against the stinging contrast.

Donald goes into the room, passing Jenny in the doorway. I notice she’s very pale.

‘Jen?’

She turns to me, as if snapping out of a reverie.

‘I know it’s mad but for a moment, well, it was like I was back in the school, really back there, and -’ she pauses – ‘I heard the fire alarm going off. I heard it, Mum.’

I put my arm around her.

‘Has it gone now?’

‘Yeah.’ She smiles at me. ‘Maybe it’s mad person’s tinnitus.’

We look through the glass in the door to Rowena’s room.

Donald is going towards Rowena and I think she looks panicked. But that can’t be right, surely? His back is towards me, and I can’t see the expression on his face.

Maisie is hurriedly pulling down her sleeves to cover large livid bruises on her arms.

‘I told you he’d be here soon,’ she says to Rowena in a too-bright, nervy voice.

Donald has reached Rowena. He grabs hold of her bandaged burnt hands; she gives a sharp scream of pain.

‘Quite the little heroine, aren’t you?’

There’s hatred in his voice. Ugly and raw and shocking.

Maisie tries to pull him away. ‘You’re hurting her, Donald, please. Stop.’

I’m in the room now, wanting to help, but there’s nothing I can do but watch. Still he holds Rowena’s bandaged hands, and she’s trying not to cry out.

I think of Adam flinching from Donald’s lighter as he lit a cigarette after the prize-giving; his foot grinding the stub into the ground.

He lets go of Rowena’s hands and turns to leave.

Rowena is crying.

‘Daddy…’

She gets out of bed and walks shakily towards him. She looks fragile and slight in the cotton hospital gown, so much smaller than Donald in his hard dark suit.

‘You disgust me,’ he says as she reaches him.