Afterwards

seems only a blink ago that it was me spending Saturday with friends in preparation for the main event of the evening. How can it be possible that I wake up each morning to find myself a thirty-nine-year-old mother of two? Even before Tara earlier, I sometimes think of myself in tabloid descriptions. I prefer it to be along the lines of ‘Daring bank robbery by thirty-nine-year-old mother of two!’ variety than anything more maudlin.

Jen gives me a kiss and goes ‘to make my own tea’.

Dr Sandhu tells you Jenny is getting weaker; slowly deteriorating, as they’d predicted.

‘Can she still have a transplant?’ you ask.

‘Yes. She’s still strong enough for that. But we don’t know how much longer that will be the case.’

Jenny is waiting for me outside ICU. She doesn’t ask if a heart has been found. Like me, she can now read an expression at ten paces and interpret a silence. Before, I thought the only crushing silence was the one after ‘I love you…’

‘Aunt Sarah’s gone to meet Belinda, that nurse,’ Jenny says.

‘Right.’

‘And she got a text from someone to meet in the cafeteria in half an hour. She looked really pleased. Do you think it could be her man?’

Last time I was jealous of Jen’s closeness to Sarah, but now it’s the other way around. Jen and I don’t talk about this kind of thing at all. I say this kind of thing because even the language is a minefield. For example, ‘sexy’ is old-fashioned and shows I don’t have a clue, but ‘hot’ is embarrassing for someone as old as me (a thirty-nine-year-old mother of two). Actually no, it isn’t a minefield to be negotiated, the entire area is off-limits; each generation linguistically roping it off for themselves. But somehow Sarah’s been allowed in.

But that doesn’t mean I see having sex as a rite of passage to becoming an adult. If anything, I think it’s sometimes the reverse. You tease me for being a hypocrite. It’s me who wants to use the creative ‘making love’ term rather than the acquisitive ‘having sex’. But I have to break off this little cul-de-sac of a conversation because we’ve caught up with Sarah who’s striding briskly down the corridor.

Belinda, spruce in her nurse’s uniform, goes through Maisie’s notes with Sarah.

‘She had a cracked wrist, last winter,’ Belinda says. ‘She said she slipped over on an icy doorstep.’

‘Any reason for the doctors or nurses looking after her to be suspicious?’

‘No. A &E gets filled with broken arms and legs when it’s icy. And then at the beginning of March this year there’s this.’

I read, with Sarah, the notes about Maisie being admitted unconscious to hospital with two broken ribs and a fractured skull. She’d said she’d fallen down the stairs. After being discharged from hospital two weeks later she had failed to keep any of her outpatient appointments.

I’d tried to ring her during that time, but had only got her voicemail. Later she said Donald had treated her to a spa break. I’d thought it an odd thing for her to do and when I’d asked her about it she’d seemed embarrassed. I’d thought it hadn’t been a success.

There’s nothing else in Maisie’s records. She hadn’t shown any doctors her bruised cheek, nor the bruises on her arm the day of the fire, hidden under her long FUN sleeves.

Belinda gets out Rowena’s notes, but it’s clear she’s already read them; her normally smiley face is upset.

‘She had a significant burn to her leg last year. She said she dropped an iron on it and the burn mark suggested an iron.’

I remember Donald’s lighted cigarette and Adam cowering away.

Was Rowena’s scar the reason she was wearing long trousers on sports day? I’d thought she was just being more sensibly dressed than Jenny.

‘Anything else?’ Sarah asks.

‘No. Unless they went to another hospital. It sometimes happens. Communication between hospitals isn’t as efficient as it should be.’

‘I’d like you to tell me if Donald White comes to visit again,’ Sarah says. ‘I don’t want him to have unsupervised access.’

Belinda nods. She meets Sarah’s eye.

‘There’s nothing I can do until one of them reports it,’ Sarah says with frustration.

‘You’ll encourage them to?’

‘Let’s get them both to a state where that’s an option. Get Rowena back on her feet and out of here first. I don’t want to ask them to do anything while they’re so vulnerable. For a start, if you get that kind of decision now they could well go back on it.’

Sarah joins Mohsin in the hospital cafeteria. His caramel-coloured face is tired; shadows under his eyes.

‘Is that him?’ Jenny asks.

‘No. Her lover’s younger and more gorgeous,’ I say.

She doesn’t even flinch when I say the embarrassing word ‘lover’, but instead smiles.

‘Good for her.’

Sarah and Mohsin’s heads are bent close together; old confidantes. We go to join them.

‘It looks like domestic abuse to both mum and daughter,’ Sarah is saying.

‘We’ve got nothing on him,’ Mohsin says. ‘One speeding ticket, issued last year, sum total.’

‘According to the head teacher’s transcript, Rowena White was going to be the school nurse on sports day,’ Sarah says. ‘They only changed their mind and swapped to Jenny last Thursday.’

‘You think he was trying to hurt his daughter?’ Mohsin asks, clearly thinking along the same lines as Jenny had earlier.

‘It’s possible,’ Sarah replies. ‘Maybe he believed Rowena was still the school nurse. Maybe no one told him about the substitution. Can you find Maisie and Rowena White’s medical notes at other hospitals? See if there was anything we’ve missed?’

He nods.

‘What about the investors at Sidley House?’ she asks.

‘There are a couple of small fry. Venture capitalists who invested in a number of similar projects; legit business people. Another investor, the largest one, is the Whitehall Park Road Trust Company.’

‘Do you know who that’s owned by?’

He shakes his head. ‘It could be one case of nasty domestic violence,’ he says, carefully. ‘And another case of malicious mail. And another of arson. All three completely separate.’

‘There’s a connection. I’m sure there is.’

‘Go into any institution – including a school – and you’d probably find an instance of domestic violence. And another of bullying, not to the malicious-mail level like Jenny had, but you’d find something cruel going on in the classroom or staffroom or cyber-bullying.’

‘And Jenny being attacked?’

Mohsin turns fractionally away.

‘You still don’t believe it?’ Sarah asks.

Mohsin is silent. Sarah studies him.

‘So what do you think?’

‘I think I need to set your mind at rest.’

‘Well, that’s more than anyone else is doing, so thank you.’

They are not used to this awkwardness.

He takes her hand, gives it a squeeze.

‘Poor Tim’s grieving for you.’

‘It wasn’t -’ She hesitates. ‘Appropriate, any more. I should get back to Mike.’

Almost before they’ve gone the cleaner sprays the table with something pungent.

Can you be homesick for a table? Because I’m overwhelmed with yearning for our old wooden table in the kitchen at home, with Adam’s knight figures at one end, yesterday’s newspaper at the other, someone’s jacket or jumper draped over a chair. I know, I used to get irritated by ‘the mess!’ and demand people ‘tidy up after themselves!’ Now I long for a messy life, not one devastated and transferred to an overly organised world of slick shiny surfaces.