Opened her eyes:
No you won’t. They wouldn’t believe you anyway.
‘I didn’t kill him,’ she said.
Her voice didn’t sound convincing.
Ping:
Returning to the crime scene wasn’t smart.
Surtsey rubbed at the skin beneath her eyes. Pushed at the sockets until her focus blurred. Felt tears come.
She looked around the room then touched the screen, slow, fingers clumsy:
Who are you?
Send.
She sat looking at the screen waiting for an answer, but no answer came.
26
She was an ancient god made of stone, held captive in the core of the earth. Slowly the magma melted her chains until she broke free, swimming in the molten rock, upwards towards the surface, faster and faster, the pressure around her lessening until she burst into water then open air, fists held high, lava and rock and steam surrounding her as she soared into the atmosphere and gazed down on the planet from space, marvelling that only minutes before it had been her prison.
A ringing.
She bumped out of sleep, head in a fug, the raw rasp of grass sticking in her throat and mouth.
Phone. It was a ring not a ping, a call not a message.
She clambered for Tom’s phone, pulled it from under the pillow. Nothing. She stared at it, the ringing still in her ears.
Not Tom’s phone. Hers.
She found it on the floor next to the bed.
St Columba’s.
They never usually called. In fact, she couldn’t think of a time they’d ever called her.
Her stomach slumped and her skin prickled.
She didn’t answer straight away.
Six rings, seven.
Ten.
She pressed the button.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello, is this Ms Mackenzie?’
The formality confirmed it.
‘Yes.’
‘This is Deborah Steel, the registered nurse at St Columba’s Hospice. I’m afraid I have some bad news.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m sorry but your mother Louise passed away in the night.’
‘Yes.’
Like she couldn’t say anything else, like she was stuck on ‘yes’ for the rest of her life.
‘It was peaceful,’ the nurse said. ‘In her sleep. I’m so sorry.’
Surtsey looked at the poster on her wall, lightning delivering hundreds of amps, shooting life into the Inch. She thought about yesterday with her mum, touching the sand, breathing the air.
‘Is there someone there with you?’ the nurse said.
Surtsey had forgotten the nurse was still there and jumped at the sound of her voice. She thought about the question, looked at her bedroom door. Halima down the hall, if she wasn’t up and out already. Iona too. Shit.
‘Yes,’ she said. It seemed easiest. Just go along with all this, follow protocol. Deliver her lines as best she could, hope that everyone was convinced she was still human, still breathing.
‘I’m afraid I have to ask you a couple of questions, Ms Mackenzie.’
‘Surtsey.’
‘Pardon?’
‘It’s my name.’
‘Surtsey, yes. Is it OK if I ask you a few things?’
‘Sure.’ Surtsey took the phone away from her ear for a second and stared at it. The little smudged area at the top of the screen where her ear had been pressed. The red button to end the call. She put it on speaker to feel less intimate, less connected.
‘Wait a minute,’ she said. ‘I have some questions first. Is that OK?’
‘Of course.’
Surtsey tried to remember the nurse’s name but it was already gone.
‘How did it happen?’ she said.
A pause while Surtsey stared at the screen.
‘As I said, your mother passed away peacefully in the night.’
‘From what?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘What did she die of?’
‘Surtsey, Louise had terminal cancer. You know that.’
‘Yes, but what specifically killed her?’
‘The cancer killed her.’
‘I was with her yesterday. She was fine.’ Surtsey pictured her mum on the boat, spray in her hair and wind whipping around them both.
‘That’s often the case in my experience,’ the nurse said. ‘Clients frequently perk up before the end.’
‘It wasn’t like that.’
‘I understand it’s hard to accept,’ the nurse said. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘I can accept it,’ Surtsey said. ‘It’s just…’
Silence.
Eventually Surtsey spoke, as much to herself as into the phone. ‘Couldn’t you have kept her alive a little longer?’
‘It was her time,’ the nurse said.
‘How do you know it was peaceful?’ Surtsey said.
‘Sorry?’
‘You said she died peacefully in her sleep. How do you know? How do you know she wasn’t writhing in agony for hours while your staff were pissing around on Facebook or reading Hello magazine?’
‘She was asleep,’ the nurse said, ‘and she didn’t wake up. And anyway, she had a DNR order in her paperwork.’
‘What?’
‘Do Not Resuscitate. We discussed it when she first came. She didn’t mention it to you?’
She had done, Surtsey remembered, but it seemed so far away, a theoretical discussion with no relevance to her mum actually fucking dying.
The nurse spoke again. ‘So even if someone had been with her, we couldn’t have done anything. Legally, I mean.’
‘Did you see her yesterday?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You personally, did you see my mum yesterday?’
Surtsey heard a sigh down the phone. What must it be like to give people this information all day long? To be the one who steps into people’s lives and gives them the worst news imaginable? The harbinger of death, a real-life grim reaper.
‘I spoke to Louise at teatime,’ the nurse said.
‘And did she seem to you, as a professional, like someone about to die?’
‘It’s not like that. You never know.’
‘So what’s the point of all the nursing training, if you can’t tell when someone is going to die?’
Here eyes were wet with tears, dripping onto the phone screen. She didn’t wipe them away, worried she might end the call by accident, end this final connection with her mum. If they could just keep talking, maybe Louise wasn’t really dead. A clerical error, someone typed the wrong name into the computer, it happened all the time.
‘I’m sorry, but I do have to ask a couple of questions,’ the nurse said. Diplomatic, unprovokable. What must that be like?
‘OK.’
‘Firstly, did your mother have an end-of-life plan?’
‘What?’
‘A plan for what to do when this happens. We have no note of one in our records. Normally if a client has one we would have a copy.’
Client. Louise Mackenzie, aged forty-six, just another fucking client. But then how else would you deal with it if
