Afterwards

Behind us, the door closes. An elderly woman has come in. It’s broken the sensory thread to the past.

‘You were going down the stairs?’ I ask. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah. I must have already got to the upper ground floor because that’s where Mrs Healey has those lilies.’

Maybe Annette Jenks was telling the truth after all about Jenny signing herself out.

Jenny closes her eyes again, and again I don’t know whether to let her continue with this. But how else are we going to help Addie?

Her face relaxes. It’s all OK. She’s back in a summer’s afternoon at school.

She screams.

‘Jenny-?’

She’s running out of the chapel.

At the back, the elderly woman has lit a candle, the smoke no more than a charcoal line in the air. But enough.

I catch up with her.

‘I’m sorry, I should never have-’

‘It wasn’t your fault.’

I put my arm around her and she’s shaking.

‘I’m fine now, Mum. I wasn’t actually back in the fire, just close.’

We walk to the garden together.

I’d thought memories were kept behind a gateway, wrought-iron, I’d visualised, with spaces to glimpse through and sometimes opening for a short time to let you actually wander in again.

But I see a corridor, now, like a long hospital corridor, and behind each set of swing doors is another memory leading inexorably to the fire. I don’t think you can control how far you go along it, or know what lies behind the next set of doors. And I dread her reaching the end and the full horror of that afternoon.

Out here in the garden, the shadows are lengthening into soothing darkness.

‘It was a good idea,’ I say. ‘To think of the chapel.’

The one place in the hospital that smelt like the school; that even had candles and matches.

‘That wasn’t why I was there,’ she says.

She turns a little away from me, her face half hidden in darkness.

‘I was hoping to suck up to God. A last minute dot com search for a place in heaven.’

Anxieties hidden in sleeves and pockets and fears stuffed up jumpers, but my God, Mike, I didn’t expect this.

‘I’m not that scared actually,’ she says. ‘I mean, this whole thing, whatever we are now, does make it likely there’s a heaven, some kind of an afterlife, doesn’t it? It proves that the physical world and the physical body isn’t all there is.’

I’ve imagined talking to her about so many things: drugs, abortion, STDs, tattoos, piercings, internet safety. Some of these we have actually discussed and I had all my research to hand. But I’ve never researched this conversation. Never imagined it.

I thought we were so liberal, bringing up our children without God in the house – no church-going, no grace before food, no prayers at bedtime. I secretly thought we were more honest than our church-going friends, who I assumed used going to church as a means of getting their children into high-achieving free St Swithun’s. No, I’d let my children make up their own minds, when they were older. In the meantime, we’d sleep in on Sunday morning and go to a garden centre, not church.

But my lazy lack of faith, my in-vogue atheism, has taken away the safety net hanging beneath our children’s lives.

I just didn’t think it through; never thought what it would be like facing death with no knowledge of a heaven or a father-figure God to go to.

Maybe in the old days, when children died so frequently, people were more religious because they had to know where their dead children were. And if a child was dying they needed to tell her where she was going next. That it would all be alright. And to believe that. No wonder they all flocked to church. Did antibiotics kill off the devout in us? Penicillin replacing faith?

I’m talking too much, my thoughts jabbering away; like Maisie trying to hide the jagged truth with a swirl of words; trying to drown out the ticking clock, the speeding car, the sound death makes.

‘Do Christians believe that you go to purgatory if you’re not baptised?’ Jenny asks.

She’s facing this.

‘You won’t go to purgatory,’ I snap, furious. ‘There’s no such thing as purgatory.’

How dare any God send my daughter to purgatory? As if I could walk into the head teacher’s study and say that it’s absolutely unjust for her to have a detention and I am taking her home right now.

Still talking too much.

I have to join her. Face this too.

I turn to look at the gorgon.

And death isn’t a clock ticking or a car speeding towards her.

I see a girl falling overboard from life and no one is able to reach her.

Exposed and alone.

Three weeks less a day until she drowns.

Maybe it has been there all the time; this girl-alone-in-an-ocean silence; that ghastly vast expanse of it which I didn’t want to hear.

‘So that was what this drowning thing was really about,’ Nanny Voice says. ‘All along it was really this.’

Perhaps. Yes.

But she’s not going to drown. I won’t let her.

My certainty startles me. And there’s fear in it; the nervous, jittery-as-hell kind. But anything else is simply unthinkable.

Jenny dying before August the twentieth, an actual date on our calendar in the kitchen, and all those days afterwards that won’t contain her is ludicrous. Unbearable.

And I’m not clinging onto your hope now but believing it – knowing it – for myself.

Jenny living is my only truth.

Because your child staying alive trumps everything. ‘You’re going to live,’ I say to Jenny. ‘You don’t need to think about any of this. Because you’re going to live.’

I have my rope around her.

27

Saturday morning. The radio should be going and I should be drinking coffee in bed, which you brought me half an hour ago, but didn’t wake me so it’s tepid now, but I’m glad of it. I should smell bacon and sausages frying downstairs as you prepare your monster breakfast for you and Addie and I’m hoping you’ve remembered to open the kitchen window so our neurotic, overly sensitive heat detector won’t blast out the neighbours and make the guinea pigs bolt around their hutch. Jenny is still slumbering deeply, not hearing the bleeping of a text on her mobile, which has been going off since about eight – clearly a wrong number because none of Jenny’s friends will be up yet either. But soon she’ll arrive, sleepy-eyed, and sit on the end of my bed, bemoaning you not bringing her tea.

‘Tea’s more effort than coffee, Jen.’

‘Tea-bag tea ’ud be fine.’

‘You still have to soak it and then take it out, put it in the bin. Then put in the milk. Dad only does one-step morning drinks.’

She leans back against the pillows, next to me, and tells me who she’s meeting up with this morning and it