Afterwards

She rang on the buzzer.

A nurse answered the door.

Rowena’s voice sounded fragile. She drew her dark blue, hooded dressing gown around herself.

‘I’m a friend of Jenny’s. Is she alright? I can’t sleep for worrying.’

‘She’s very ill.’

‘Will she die?’

The nurse was silent and sad.

Tears welled in Rowena’s eyes. ‘I thought you’d say that.’

So she’d come to make sure.

I couldn’t bear to look at her face.

But Jenny did.

‘I am going to live,’ Jenny said and her voice was loud with hope; a promise.

But Rowena turned, as if she’d heard a whispered threat.

Mum left the hospital and I went with her. The night was still heavy with heat. In the block of flats opposite the hospital, I saw people sleeping outside on their tiny balconies. That film of Wednesday afternoon kept playing, looping, over and over again, with me powerless to change anything that happened.

As I watched it, I knew that I should have looked at that police painting-by-numbers portrait of Maisie. I should have found the courage to do that. Because if I had, I would have seen the spaces they hadn’t filled in with criminal suspicions; the ones which were already coloured in with livid bruises.

And then I would have overlaid their suspicions with strong colours of knowledge from the years of knowing my friend.

But I had no doubts with Rowena. It was shocking it was her, not only because she’s a teenage girl, but also because it was so transparently and quickly the truth. Search and replace ‘Maisie’ with ‘Rowena’ and the story revealed is vile but clear. Her acting wasn’t that remarkable. She knew how to play the part of victim, who carries on loving her abuser, from years of watching her mother.

Rowena makes sense of it all, she connects to everything – to Silas and to the school and to the fraud and to domestic violence; but in none of the ways I’d imagined.

But I don’t think she’s entirely evil; wicked even.

She went into a burning building to rescue me and Jenny.

Jenny thinks she did it to appear courageous and deflect suspicion. But I don’t think that. I don’t want to think that.

I hold onto this one action as hugely courageous and honourable. I choose to see it as dramatic contrition; whatever went before or comes afterwards.

Because I need to believe she has some goodness; one bright colour in the acrid smoke.

Rowena herself talked about the angel and devil in a person. We’d thought she meant Silas Hyman or her father, but I think she was describing herself.

I don’t believe in grey any more. I think black and white, good and evil, co-exist but don’t mingle together; a world not of nanny voices but of devils and angels.

As the film loops again, and I watch her running into the burning building, I imagine that her angel is yelling at her loudly enough to drown out the devil. Really. An angel. Not one with a frilly dress and silver wings like the one at the top of the Christmas tree, but a muscular Old Testament one, a Raphael or Michael – a bold, strong angel as the good in her takes a shape and finds a voice.

Because I cannot leave this world thinking there is nothing redemptive in a teenage girl. I do not want to have hatred inside me when I die.

We arrived home. Mum went to bed, exhausted, and I was the only one awake. It was almost the witching hour, the house silent, everyone asleep. The last time I’d been up on my own like this was when Adam was a young baby.

I went to Jenny’s bedroom. I’d left her with Ivo in the garden, promising I’d see her again in the morning. No goodbyes yet.

‘What’s it like to have a teenage daughter?’ a mum at school asked me once, whose eldest child is the same age as Adam.

‘There are always boys in the house. Huge great boys with huge trainers in the hallway,’ I said, because I always trip over them. ‘You’re always out of food in the fridge because the same boys are always hungry. The girls eat nothing and then you worry about anorexia, and even if your daughter seems fine and eats fine you worry about bulimia.’

‘Does she borrow your clothes?’

I laughed. As if. ‘It’s the contrast that’s hard,’ I said. ‘Her skin glows. Mine is wrinkling. Even my legs look wrinkled next to hers.’

The school mum pulled a face, thinking it wouldn’t happen to her, not realising that it probably already had, but without a teenage daughter for comparison she wouldn’t know.

‘The main thing,’ I continued, warming to my theme, ‘is sex. It’s everywhere when you’ve got a teenager.’

‘You mean they… in your house?’ She sounded horrified.

‘No, not exactly,’ I said, wondering how to explain that sex comes into the house and takes it over; wafting through the corridors and loafing on the stairs, hormones funnelling out of the windows.

The scent of it lingered there, in Jenny’s room.

Not sex or hormones, I realised, but great quantities of life still to be lived.

I sat at her desk and saw that there were virtually no books, but a whole shelf of Ordnance Survey maps for hiking and climbing. As far as I could tell, her desk had mainly been used to paint her nails. I could see little smudges of shiny red on it.

Did I tell you that a few weeks before her A levels she said she’d rather ‘live my life now, than revise for a future one’? So different to me at that age, desperate to get to university; swotting the whole way through sixth form.

I thought university would be wonderful for her too. I thought she’d do the full three years and love every moment of it. I was going to make certain she didn’t get pregnant at the end of year two.

It wasn’t that I wanted her to live out the unlived part of my life, but that I thought what made me happy would make her happy too.

And I was cross with you when you didn’t try and stop her from going climbing in the Cairngorms instead of doing that revision course, or when she swapped a French exchange visit for canoeing in Wales with Ivo. I was so sure that she was being childish, not thinking of the future – not realising that she was living a life-choice right there in front of me. An outdoorsy girl, like you, my darling, who prefers canoeing and climbing to Dryden and Chaucer.

I should have looked at her life from her perspective; climbed up a mountain with her and seen the surrounding landscape of other ways to achieve fulfilment and happiness.

Or just come in here and properly looked around.

I’m lying next to you on Adam’s top bunk – a new perspective on his so-familiar room. From up here, I can see that the top of his globe lampshade needs dusting; Iceland is just a smudge. ‘A tidy house is a sign of a wasted life,’ Maisie once told me, kindly, knowing my antipathy to housework, and that’s good, because from up here mine’s clearly been very profitably spent.

I’m actually really proud of my mothering now, of both Jenny and Adam, if I had any hand in the making of the people they’ve become.

And I have no regrets about my choices, even the default ones. Other people can write the great book, paint the wonderful painting, because I don’t need a work of art to speak for me after I’ve gone; my family will do that. There is no need to throw something into the void, because it is full of people I love.

I go down to Addie’s bunk.

I’ve always known how much you love him. But until the fire, I didn’t know how much he was loved by Jenny and Mum and Sarah too. Between you, there’s enough love to inflate a lifeboat for him.

And look at you. You survived both your parents dying – more than survived it: you grew up to be this wonderful confident man. And Adam can too.

I hold his hand.