Afterwards

I even fantasise a row, let’s make this a bit more realistic.

‘You were heavy on the indicator there,’ you say.

‘Heavy on an indicator? How can you be heavy on an indicator?’

I’m quite enjoying this, a mixture of teasing and arguing and flirting.

‘The stick, you need to be…’

I either laugh at you for being ridiculous in a mock row, or start a real row about you patronising me. We nearly always opt for the mock version. So I laugh at you and you hear what I am not saying. I continue to drive and five minutes later you don’t mention my illegal right turn.

The little fantasy shatters as I see our house.

The curtains are drawn in Adam’s room. It’s seven thirty now. Bed-time.

You turn to me, as if you’ve caught a glimpse of my face. Am I a ghost to you now? Haunting you?

You go into our house but I wait a little while before following you. Our windowboxes of geraniums have shrivelled and browned in the heat; but Adam’s two pots of carrots and his tomato growbags have been watered. I am strangely satisfied by that.

Is this what ghosts are? Are ghouls and ghosties actually sitting in cars fantasising mock rows with their husbands and checking on their growbags and windowboxes?

You’re with my mother in the kitchen. A little afraid, bracing herself, she says she told Adam after that first big meeting with my doctors that I wasn’t going to wake up; that I was dead.

But you are grateful.

And I think that, like me, you see Mum’s courage. The only one of us to take the body blow of what the doctors said first time.

You tell her about your failed attempt to donate my heart.

She says she hopes by some miracle it can happen.

‘I couldn’t bear it, for her to live when her child is dead. To suffer that.’

You put your arm around her.

‘And you, Georgina?’

‘Oh, you don’t need to worry about me. I’m a tough old bird. I won’t fall apart. Not till Adam’s left for university and I’m in the nursing home. I’ll fall apart then.’

‘Fall apart’ is one of my expressions from my twenties that Mum picked up. ‘Tough old bird’ is one of hers. I love the legacy of language. How much of what I say has gone into Jen’s and Adam’s vocabularies? And when they use those words they’ll think of me; feel me in a more than language-deep way.

‘Adam’s been talking about the great rain at the beginning of the world,’ Mum tells you.

You’re moved. ‘He thought of that?’

‘Yes. She doesn’t just go, Mike. Everything Gracie is, it can’t just go.’

‘No.’

You go up the stairs to Adam’s room.

I look in at the open doorway of our bedroom. Someone has made our bed but our things are exactly as we left them; my bedside table a stilled frame of a moment in my life. Before Jenny, crammed on a smaller bedside table, was a novel – a big classic with tiny print; a packet of Marlboro Lights and a glass of red wine taken up to bed with me. You were horrified by how unhealthy I was and I took no notice of your nagging. With Jenny the classic novel, cigarettes and wine were shoved aside for dummies and cloth books; nowadays I have reading glasses and novels again, newly published, with bright shiny covers and grabbing shoutlines.

You’re outside Adam’s bedroom door.

‘It’s Dad.’

The door remains closed.

‘Addie…?’

You wait. Silence the other side.

Open the door, I think, just bloody well open it!

My God, I’ve become my nanny voice. I’m sorry. Perhaps you’re right to wait for Addie to come to you; showing him you respect him. I’d have just barged in there, but that’s not the only way to do this.

‘I know you think you’re to blame, my lovely boy,’ you say. ‘But you’re not.’

You’ve never called him my lovely boy before. A whole phrase of mine you’ve adopted already and I’m glowing about that.

‘Let me in, please?’

The door is still shut between you.

I’d have my arms around him by now, and I’d-

‘OK, here’s how it is,’ you say. ‘I love you. Whatever you think you did I love you. Nothing – absolutely nothing – can ever change that.’

‘It is my fault, Daddy.’

The first words he’s spoken since the fire. Words so huge they’ve been smothering speech.

‘Addie, no-’

‘It didn’t really look like a volcano. Just a bucket, with some orange tissue paper on the top and something inside it. She said I was supposed to light it. But really it was a test. I wasn’t meant to do it.’

‘Addie-’

‘I don’t like matches. They scare me. And I know I’m not meant to use them. You and Mum and Jenny are always telling me that. I mean, when we have a fire and you light it, I’m not allowed to. Not till I’m twelve. So I knew it was wrong.’

‘Please, listen to me-’

‘Mr Hyman said Sir Covey would pass the test with flying colours. Sir Covey is me. He thought I was like a knight. But I’m not.’

‘Mr Hyman was never there, Addie. He cares about you and he’d never, ever ask you to do something like that. You’re still Sir Covey.’

‘No, you don’t understand-’

‘She made it all up. About Mr Hyman. The present for you. All of it. She made it up to get you to do something for her. The police have arrested her. Everyone knows it wasn’t your fault.’

‘But it is. I shouldn’t have done it, Dad! Whatever she said to me. Sirens and the green giant’s beautiful wife tempted people but the good people didn’t do what they said. The strong knights didn’t do it. But I did.’

‘They were grown men, Addie, and you’re eight. And a very brave eight-year-old.’

Silence the other side of the door.

‘What about the time you stood up for Mr Hyman? That was really brave. Not many adults would have the courage to do that. I should have told you that before. I’m sorry I didn’t. Because I am really proud of you.’

Still silence from Addie’s room; but what more can you say to him?

‘It’s not just that,’ he says.

You wait and the silence is awful.

‘I didn’t go and help them, Daddy.’

His voice, so full of shame, punches a hole in both of us.

‘Thank God,’ you say.

Addie opens the door and the barrier between you is gone.

‘I couldn’t bear it if I’d lost you too,’ you say.

You put your arms around him and something floods through his body, relaxing his taut limbs and frightened face.

‘Mum’s never going to wake up. Granny G told me.’

‘Yes,’ you say.

‘She’s dead.’

‘Yes. She…’

I think you’re going to say something more, perhaps the difference between ‘no cognitive function’ and being dead, but Adam is eight and you can’t talk to him about the details of why he has no mother now.