Afterwards

‘That’s why I went in,’ Rowena says quietly. ‘After what she’d said to Addie.’

She pauses a moment, upset.

‘I’d really like to see him, tell him it wasn’t his fault at all,’ Rowena says. ‘I mean, he probably won’t want to see me, but I’d really like to.’

Her voice peters out for a moment.

‘It was partly my fault,’ she continues. ‘I told Mummy about the volcano experiment. I was in Adam’s class as a teaching assistant, last summer term. And I told her how good Adam is. I thought it was so sweet the way he liked books about knights; how he almost saw himself as one – or at least wanted to be like one – and I told her.’

But I’d already told Maisie that, countless times – and that his goodness makes me worried for him. That I wished, for his sake, he was good at football instead.

Rowena is miserably silent. I want one of them to tell her it wasn’t her fault either, but they are police officers in that room, with a job. The ‘touchy-feely’ stuff, as Sarah called it once, would come later. I used to think it meant that she didn’t value empathy.

‘Do you know why your mother wanted to harm Jenny?’ Penny asks.

‘She didn’t mean to. It wasn’t till Grace ran in, shouting for her, that I knew she was in there. And Mum was the same, I’m sure. She wouldn’t have hurt Grace or Jenny. I know she wouldn’t. It was a terrible mistake.’

She’s shaking violently now. Mohsin looks at her with concern.

‘I don’t think she’s up to any more,’ he says to DI Baker.

‘Do you think your father knew what your mother intended?’ DI Baker asks.

‘No.’ She pauses a moment. ‘But he blames me for not stopping her in time. I mean, I was there. I should have stopped her.’

Penny escorts Rowena out of the room and back to the burns unit.

I go to my ward. The curtains are drawn around my bed.

Inside, you’re lying with me, pressing yourself against me, sobbing so hard that your body judders the bed.

Crying because you know I’m not there.

I long to go to you but it will make it harder; so much harder.

Then Sarah comes in and runs to you and puts her arms around you and I’m so grateful to her.

She tells you about Maisie, but you hardly listen.

Then she tells you that Adam was tricked into lighting the fire; that he was told it was his fault.

For the first time you turn from me.

‘Oh Christ, poor Ads.’

‘You’ll go and see him?’ Sarah asks.

You nod. ‘As soon as I’ve seen Grace’s doctors.’

You’ve asked for the meeting with my doctors to be at my bedside, as if you need to see my comatose body right here in front of you to do this.

I am at the far side of the ward. Any closer and I’m afraid you’ll sense me and this will be too hard for you.

A nurse is wheeling a drugs trolley from bed to bed, and the noise she makes as she unloads her cargo disguises the lower, subtler sounds of your conversation.

You’ve asked Dr Sandhu to be here too and it’s his kind face I look at, not yours. I can’t bear to look at yours. I was wrong about him a couple of days ago. He didn’t arrive where he is now through a series of coincidence and chances, this was a vocational straight-as-the-crow-flies journey to a family like ours.

The nurse with the drugs trolley has stopped at a bed for longer, and in the silence your voice carries across the ward to me.

You tell them that you know now that I won’t wake up.

That I am not ‘in there’ any more.

You tell them that Dad had Kahler’s disease and that Jenny and I were tested to see if we were suitable donors for bone marrow.

You tell them that Jenny and I are a tissue match.

You ask them to donate my heart.

I love you.

The squeaky trolley starts up again, and the nurse is chatting to someone and I can’t hear the rest of your conversation. But I know what it will be because I have already been down this seemingly logical path with Jenny.

Across the ward, I strain to listen, catching at words that make the sentences I expect.

Dr Bailstrom’s high voice carries furthest. She tells you I am breathing unaided. It will be at least a year, probably longer, before they’ll even contemplate getting a court order to withdraw food and fluid.

You faced my living-death out of love for Jenny and you think nothing has come of it. Now you’re only left with the brutal fact.

Dr Sandhu suggests a ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ document. I imagine that it’s pretty standard procedure in these circumstances. But, as Dr Bailstrom points out, standard procedure or not, there is no reason why I should collapse and need resuscitating. My body, ironically, is healthy.

I think Dr Sandhu is trying to give you a little kindness, a little hope. Because if my body does collapse, instead of being resuscitated, it would be kept oxygenated until my organs could be transplanted.

In Dr Sandhu’s office you sign the DNR form. Jenny comes in and watches.

‘You can’t do this, Mum.’

‘Of course I can and you-’

‘I’ve changed my mind.’

‘It’s too late to change your mind, sweetie.’

‘This isn’t custard instead of cream on my pudding, for fuck’s sake!’

I laugh. She’s furious.

‘I shouldn’t have said yes. I can’t believe I did. You got me at a really bad-’

‘I am never going to wake up again, Jen, but you can get better. So logically-’

‘Logically what? You’re turning into Jeremy Bentham now?’

‘You’ve read him?’

‘Mum!’

‘I’m impressed, that’s all.’

‘No, you’re changing the subject. And you can’t. It’s too big to change. If you go ahead with this, I refuse to get back into my body. Ever.’

‘Jenny, you want to live. You-’

‘But not by killing you.’

‘Jen-’

‘I refuse!’

She means it.

And yet she longs overwhelmingly to live.

You’re going home to see Adam and I go with you. As we walk down the corridor, you lean a little towards me, as if you know I’m with you. Maybe now you no longer think I’m in my body you can sense me with you in other places.

As we pass the garden, the shadows lengthening into evening, Jenny is joining Ivo. Before, I’d marvelled at him knowing where she was, amazed at the connection between them, which I saw as an almost spiritual thing. But looking at them now, I just want her to be in his world, the real world – for him to be able to physically touch her.

As I long to touch you.

In our car, I fantasise once more, just for a minute or so, that we’re back in our old life and we’re going out to dinner with a bottle of wine in the boot. I wish, absurdly, that it could be me driving. (That’s a decent Burgundy in the boot, Gracie! So go gently on the bends!)