Afterwards

building.

‘Is this all you’ve got?’ you ask.

‘Yes. I’m afraid so.’

‘Can’t you-’

‘I was only able to get copies because the paperwork was temporarily in an insecure area. Everything will be securely filed by now.’

‘But you will talk to Silas Hyman?’

‘Yes. And I’ve already set up a meeting with the head teacher and Elizabeth Fisher. And while I’m doing that, you can go home and see Addie.’

You are silent.

‘ICU is heavily staffed, Mike. If you’re still worried, I could get Mohsin to sit with her.’

You are still silent and she doesn’t understand.

‘Addie’s only got you right now, Mike. He needs you to be with him.’

You shake your head.

Her grey-blue eyes look deeply into your matching ones, as if searching for an answer there. Because you are a loving father; not a man who would ignore his eight-year-old child, especially not now. Surely, in there somewhere behind the hard expression on your face, is the boy she’s known all his life.

You look away from Sarah as you speak so she can’t read your face any more; can’t see the man inside.

‘They told me Jenny has three weeks to live unless she gets a heart transplant. A day less now.’

‘Oh God, Mike…’

‘I can’t leave her.’

‘No.’

‘She will get a heart transplant…’ you begin, but I am looking at Jenny’s face as she hears a car speeding towards her. Death isn’t quiet but loud, deafening, getting closer. A joyriding grim reaper mounting the pavement, directly at her, and there’s nowhere to run.

She leaves the room and I hurry after her.

‘Jen, please…’

In the corridor, she stops and turns to me. ‘You should have told me.’ Her face is white and her voice shaking. ‘I had a right to know.’

I want to tell her that I was trying to protect her, that I knitted a shawl of untruths to wrap her up; that I believe in your hope for her.

‘I’m not a child any more. Your daughter, yes. Always. But-’

‘Jen-’

‘Can’t you get it, Mum? Please? I’m an adult now. You can’t run my life for me. What’s left of it. I have my own life. My own death.’

23

I see her at six in a pink and orange flowery swimming costume, diving underwater before popping up with a beaming wave, our little fish! And I am watching her, my eye beams a rope around her, because I will jump in – splash! – and rescue her the moment she’s in difficulty. And then she’s twelve years old, self-conscious in a modest navy sports swimsuit, checking everything’s in place as she swims; and then a metallic silver bikini over a perfect teenage body that makes everyone stare at her and she feels their gazes like sunshine on her skin, enjoying her beauty.

But she’s still the little girl in the pink and orange flowery swimming costume to me and I still have my invisible rope around her waist.

‘You can have my heart,’ I say.

She looks at me a moment and smiles and I see in her smile that I’m forgiven.

‘Oh for heaven’s sakes,’ she says.

‘If no one else’s turns up.’

‘“Turns up”?’

She’s teasing me.

‘We’re the same tissue type,’ I say.

I’d thought us both the wrong tissue type before; our bone marrow equally useless to help my father survive Kahler’s disease.

‘It’s really kind,’ she says. ‘That’s a huge understatement. But there are a few snags in the plan. You’re alive, for a start. And even if Dad and Aunt Sarah let them, which they won’t, they’re not going to stop giving you food and water for ages.’

‘Then I’ll just have to find a way of doing it myself.’

‘How, exactly?’

All these smiles! Now, of all times! I was wrong earlier, she hasn’t taken in the reality of how desperate the situation is at all. I used to wish that she took life ‘a little more seriously’.

‘Walking out of an A-level paper isn’t funny.’

‘It’s not that I’m laughing at.’

‘So what is it?’

‘No one ever tells you when you’re doing all that course work and revision and timed essays and study skills that it’s an option.’

‘But it isn’t an option.’

‘It is, because I just took it.’

And she found it funny, as if she’d been released from prison rather than slammed the door shut on her future.

I had despaired of this trait she has of hiding behind humour rather than facing the truth. Now, I’m glad.

But her question about how I actually intend to commit suicide is fair enough. I can’t open my eyelids or move a single finger so how can I organise an overdose or jump under a train? (A selfish option, I’ve always thought – those poor drivers.) Ironically, you need to be reasonably fit to commit suicide.

Sarah walks past us and you are with her, for the first time leaving your post.

‘They’ll get her a heart in time,’ you say. ‘She will live.’

But your words are harder to hear now. Your vigorous hope weakening by the time it gets to me.

I try to grip onto it again, searching for a handhold.

‘Of course she will, Mikey,’ Sarah says.

Sarah’s voice adds to yours, a doubling of belief, and my grip is firm again. Somehow, she will get better. She has to. ‘Of course she will.’

You return to the ward and Sarah walks on towards the exit of the hospital.

‘You go with Aunt Sarah,’ Jenny says. ‘I’ll wait here, in case Donald White comes back.’

‘I’ll stay with you.’

‘But you said we need to know everything, in case we’re the ones who have to put it all together.’

She wants me to go with Sarah.

She wants to be on her own.

I used to hate that – the closed bedroom door, the little walk away from me when she was on her mobile. I still hate that. I don’t want her to want to be on her own.

‘We have to let her make her own mistakes,’ you said, a few weeks ago. ‘Spread her wings. It’s natural for her to do that.’

‘Bubonic plague is “natural”,’ I snapped back. ‘Doesn’t mean it’s good for you.’

You put your arm around me. ‘You have to let go, Gracie.’

But I can’t let go of my rope around her. Not yet. I’ve been spooling it out as her legs got longer and her figure curvier and stares lingered, but I’ll keep on holding it until she can safely swim out of her depth, without drowning, from the shore of childhood to that of adulthood.