Afterwards

I knew I’d never get to the third floor; that it would kill me before I could reach her.

I felt her at the top of the stairs. She had managed to get down one flight.

She was my little girl and I was here and everything was going to be alright. All alright now.

‘Jenny?’

She didn’t speak or move and the fire’s roar was getting closer and I couldn’t breathe much longer.

I tried to pick her up as if she was still tiny, but she was too heavy.

I dragged her down the stairs, trying to use my body to shield her from the heat and smoke. I wouldn’t think how badly hurt she was. Not yet. Not till the bottom of the stairs. Not till she was safe.

I cried to you, silently, as if by telepathy I could summon you to help us.

And as I dragged her, step by step, down the stairs, trying to get away from burning heat and raging flames and smoke, I thought of love. I held onto it. And it was cool and clear and quiet.

Maybe there was telepathy between us, because at that moment you must have been in your meeting with the BBC commissioning editors about the follow-up to your ‘Hostile Environments’ series. You’d done hot, steamy jungles and blazing, arid deserts, and you want the next series to be in the contrasting frozen wilds of Antarctica. So maybe it was you who helped me envisage a silent, white acreage of love as I dragged Jenny down the stairs.

But before I reached the bottom, something hit me, throwing me forwards, and everything went dark.

As I lost consciousness I talked to you.

I said, ‘An unborn baby doesn’t need air at all, did you know that?’ I thought you probably didn’t. When I was pregnant with Jenny I found out everything I could, but you were too impatient for her to arrive to bother with her prologue. So you don’t know that an unborn baby, swimming around in amniotic fluid, can’t take a breath or she would drown. There aren’t any temporary gills so that she can swim, fish-like, until birth. No, the baby gets her oxygen from the umbilical cord attached to her mother. I felt like an oxygen supply attached to a tiny, intrepid diver.

But the moment she was born, the oxygen supply was cut off and she entered the new element of air. There was a moment of silence, a precipitous second, as if she stood on the edge of life, deciding. In the old days they used to slap the baby to hear the reassuring yell of lungs filled with air. Nowadays they look closely to see the minute rise of a baby-soft chest, and listen to the whispering – in and out – to know that life in the new medium of air has begun.

And then I cried and you cheered – actually cheered! – and the baby equipment trolley was wheeled out, no need for that now. A normal delivery. A healthy infant. To join all the billions of others on the planet who breathe, in and out, without thinking about it.

The next day your sister sent me a bouquet of roses with gypsophila, known as ‘baby’s breath’, sprays of pretty white flowers. But a newborn baby’s breath is finer than a single parachute from a blown dandelion clock.

You told me once that when you lose consciousness the last of the senses to go is hearing.

In the darkness I thought I heard Jenny take a dandelion-clock breath.

3

I told you already what happened when I woke up – that I was trapped under the hull of a vast ship wrecked on the ocean floor.

That I slipped out of the wrecked ship of my body into the inky black ocean and swam upwards towards the daylight.

That I saw the body part of ‘me’ in a hospital bed.

That I felt afraid and, as I felt fear, I remembered.

Blistering heat and raging flames and suffocating smoke.

Jenny.

I ran from the room to find her. Do you think I should have tried to go back into my body? But what if I was trapped, uselessly, inside again, but this time couldn’t get out? How would I find her then?

In the burning school, I had searched for her in darkness and smoke. Now I was in brightly lit white corridors but the desperation to find her was the same. Panicking, I forgot about the me in the hospital bed and I went up to a doctor, asking where she was: ‘Jennifer Covey. Seventeen years old. My daughter. She was in a fire.’ The doctor turned away. I went after him, shouting, ‘Where’s my daughter?’ He still walked away from me.

I interrupted two nurses. ‘Where’s my daughter? She was in a fire. Jenny Covey.’

They carried on talking to each other.

Again and again I was ignored.

I started screaming, loud as I could, screaming the house down, but everyone around me was deaf and blind.

Then I remembered that it was me who was mute and invisible.

No one would help me find her.

I ran down a corridor, away from the ward where my body was and into other wards, and then on again, frantically searching.

‘I can’t believe you’ve lost her!’ said the nanny who lives in my head. She arrived just before I gave birth to Jenny, her critical voice replacing my teachers’ praise. ‘You’re never going to find her like this, are you?’

She was right. Panic had turned me into a Brownian motion molecule, darting hither and thither, with no logic or clear direction.

I thought of you, what you would do, and made myself slow down.

You would start on the bottom floor, far left, like you do at home when something is lost for good, and then you’d work your way to the far right, then up to the next floor, methodically doing a sweep and finding the missing mobile phone/earring/Oyster card/number 8 Beast Quest book.

Thinking about Beast Quest books and missing earrings because the little details of our lives helped to root me a little, calmed me a little.

So I went more slowly along the corridors, although desperate to run, trying to read signs rather than race past them. There were signs to lift banks, and oncology and outpatients and paediatrics – a mini-kingdom of wards and clinics and operating theatres and support services.

A sign to the mortuary tore into my vision and lodged there, but I wouldn’t go to the mortuary. Wouldn’t even consider it.

I saw a sign to Accident & Emergency. Maybe she hadn’t been transferred to a ward yet.

I ran as fast as I could towards it.

I went in. A woman on a trolley was pushed past, bleeding. A doctor was running, his stethoscope flapping against his stomach; the doors to the ambulance bay swung open and a screeching siren filled the white corridor, panic bouncing off the walls. A place of urgency and tension and pain.

I looked into cubicle after cubicle, flimsy blue curtains dividing intense scenes from separate dramas. In one cubicle was Rowena, barely conscious. Maisie was sobbing next to her, but I only paused long enough to see that it wasn’t Jenny and then I moved on.

At the end of the corridor was a room rather than a cubicle. I’d noticed doctors going in, and none coming out.

I went in.

There was someone appallingly hurt on the bed in the middle of the room, surrounded by doctors.

I didn’t know it was her.

I had known her baby’s cry from any other baby’s almost the moment she was born; her calling for Mummy had sounded unique, unmistakable amongst other toddlers; I could find her face immediately, however crowded the stage. I knew her more intimately than I knew myself.

As a baby I knew every square centimetre of her; each hair in her eyebrows. I’d watched them being drawn, pencil stroke by pencil stroke, in the first days after birth. For months, I’d stared down at her for hour after hour,