I walk into his dreams and I tell him how special he is.
‘The most special boy in the whole world,’ I say.
‘The galaxy?’
‘The universe.’
‘If there’s life out there.’
‘I’m sure there is.’
‘There’s probably another me out there, exactly the same.’
‘No one could be exactly the same as you.’
‘In a good way?’
‘Yes.’
36
Another oven-hot day; the sky a sadistic cloudless blue.
I return to my ward.
The windows are open but there’s no breeze, heat from outside seeping in. Nurses are sweating; wisps of hair sticking to their foreheads.
No sign of Dr Bailstrom’s clicking red heels and I’m grateful that I won’t be distracted by fashion in what should surely be a serious, high-minded moment.
I take a last look at shiny linoleum and nasty metal lockers and ugly curtains. We twenty-first-century people really don’t know how to do death properly at all. I remember the ending of the film about J.M. Barrie, when he wheeled his dying lover into a magical Peter Pan set he’d secretly constructed in the garden. No brown geometric curtains for her. But they’ll have to do.
I fight my way back into my body, through layers of flesh and muscle and bone, until I am inside.
I am trapped, as I knew I would be, under the hull of a vast ship wrecked on the ocean floor.
My eyelids welded shut; my eardrums broken; my vocal cords snapped off.
Pitch dark and silent and so heavy in here; a mile of black water above me.
All I can do is breathe.
I remember that the Latin word for breath and spirit is the same.
I hold my breath.
When Jenny faced her death in that chapel and looked for a heaven, I faced mine too. Properly. Fully. I told you then that I wouldn’t let her die.
I knew that my child staying alive trumps everything. Adam’s grief. And yours. My fear. Everything.
I must not breathe.
But I still hoped it would be someone else. Somebody else’s mother and daughter and wife. Someone else’s life.
My hope was desperate and ugly and futile. Because it was never really going to be someone else. And maybe that’s fair. We keep our child but lose me. A balance.
I must not breathe.
But she’s an adult, not a child, and I know that now; a lesson learnt.
I think, underneath, I knew it already. I was just afraid that when she was an adult she wouldn’t need me any more.
I was afraid she wouldn’t love me so much.
Not realising that she’d already grown up.
That she still loves me so much.
I must not breathe.
Instinct is fighting back; a riptide of selfish desire for life against every pulse of energy in me. But I have become far stronger over the last few days. And although it wasn’t the reason I left the hospital’s protective skin, it does mean I have the stamina to do this.
I must not breathe.
When I was twenty weeks pregnant with Jenny, I found out that her ovaries were already formed. Inside our unborn baby daughter were our potential grandchildren (or at least the part of us that would be a part of them). I felt the future curled up inside me; my body a Russian doll of time.
I must not breathe.
I think of Adam far above me, up there on the surface in his inflatable lifeboat made out of other people’s breath.
I think of Jenny reaching the shore of adulthood.
I think that the fear of my children drowning showed me how I could do this.
So little air in my lungs now.
Will you read Addie ‘The Little Mermaid’? It’s in his
You’ll read to him about the pain the little mermaid felt when she left the water, walking on knives, because she loved her prince so. Because I want him to know that when I left my body in the hospital, when I went too far away for their scans, I was walking on knives because I couldn’t bear for him to be accused of this terrible crime. Because I believed in him. Because I love him. Tell him that the hardest thing in this world is leaving him.
I don’t have to try to hold my breath any more.
I slip out of the wrecked ship of my body into the mile-deep dark ocean.
You told me once that the last of the senses to go is hearing. But you’re wrong. The last of the senses to go is love.
I am floating up to the surface, and with no effort I am slipping out of my body.
An alarm is going off, shuddering the air, and a doctor is running towards me.
A trolley loaded with equipment is being speeded across the lino, as if it’s on skates, a frightened nurse at the helm.
My heart has stopped.
I hear clicking red heels.
Dr Bailstrom says there’s a DNR order.
They talk of transplant.
They will keep my body functioning until my heart can be given to Jenny.
I watch their machinery as my inert body has oxygen artificially pumped through it. You are ushered hurriedly into a room to sign a consent form.
I shouldn’t really be here, surely, hanging around like this. Shouldn’t I be going to the next place now? A guest still at the table when the hosts are washing up in the kitchen.
And I’m still talking to you!
Last weekend, sitting at our kitchen table in our old life, I read in the paper about ‘sticky air’. A futurologist predicts that people will be able to leave messages for each other suspended in the ether. So you never know but maybe, one day, you’ll hear what I’ve been saying to you. Because surely as I talked to you the molecules in the air around me were changed; the air charged with words.
It must be when my heart is taken out and the machinery switched off that I will finally leave.
I remember that at the end of ‘The Little Mermaid’ she doesn’t get a prince but a soul.
I go to ICU where Jenny is being prepared for the transplant. She’s watching herself, Sarah bending over her body. I was jealous of Sarah’s closeness to Jenny once, but I’m now outrageously grateful.
Jenny sees me and I take her hand.
‘So much for becoming independent from me,’ I say. ‘I’ll always be with you now.’
‘Mum, that’s macabre.’
‘Beating away.’
