In truth, Hope was feeling increasingly afraid of the consequences of what she’d done. She was angry also. Angry that she was going to miss out on Bean.
She wanted to be the best grammy, to know Bean better than anyone other than her parents. She wanted to have special secret codes with her that were known to just the two of them. She wanted to introduce her to Toy Story and Up and be there to comfort her when she first saw the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and the Other Mother in Coraline.
She wanted to make Saturday soup for her with alphabet pasta in it.
She wanted to teach her alternative swear words.
She wanted to braid her hair.
She wanted to read her to sleep.
She wanted to google Captain Paul Cuffee with her.
She wanted to put a plaster on her hurty toe.
She wanted to take her to Center Parcs.
She wanted to apologize to other shoppers in Tesco when Bean ran around; she wanted to say, ‘Oops, sorry, she’s a wild one, my granddaughter!’
She wanted to count her fingers and toes.
She wanted to dance the reflection of light from the biscuit-tin lid on the walls and make it their own personal fairy.
She wanted to teach her about ‘wawa’.
She wanted to shout out ‘BUMS!’ extra loud any time they were in a quiet place, to make her laugh.
Yes, Hope wanted all that and plenty more, but she wasn’t going to get it, not for a long time, it seemed.
Hope had meetings with her officious legal-aid defence lawyer each week to clarify exactly what her defence was going to be when they eventually got into court. There were pre-trial meetings and planning meetings, and further interviews and lots of waiting for Julius’s lawyer and the Crown Prosecution Service to decide what the charge was going to be.
Hope had given up her jobs. She wanted to watch Minnie as closely as possible while she could. This pregnancy had to go well. Lee offered to give up his job too, but the Parker family persuaded him not to, and they reassured him that they were all there for support, which they certainly were.
Glory and Ky and Princess came round to cook and play on the PlayStation and help Minnie continue to do all her appliqué and clothes customizing. Nanna Doris brought DVDs (mainly of films she wanted to watch) and old photo albums to browse through with Minnie, to distract her. Her uncles came over and hosted card games with betting for pennies.
It felt strange and normal at the same time. Everyday stuff happening on the surface, whilst life-threatening ill health and life-changing court procedure were chugging on below. Occasionally, Hope would stop to consider it all, lock herself in the bathroom, breathe deep and sob at the enormity of it all, wishing she had someone to share it with, but mostly she just got on with it, moving from one cup of tea to the next, doing her best to keep it normal.
In between those cups of tea, ordinary extraordinary family life was taking place, where Minnie could feel comforted and as safe as she could be in light of the craziness. She had regular hospital appointments, which Hope went to with her. Hope wrote every word down in a notebook so she might better understand the confusing world of medicine.
Hope learnt a lot. The difference between doctors and consultants and surgeons. The difference between the various scans. How the blood pressure and heartbeat are monitored. Hope took every transplant leaflet home and spent hours online, researching the whole organ-donation world, and educating herself about the intricacies of blood groups and tissue-type compatibility and all the sundry complications. She urged everyone in the family to sign up for organ donation, once she realized how understocked the system was. She became a transplant bore. She wanted Minnie to be well informed and positive, but she also knew that time was limited, and she wanted Minnie to have plenty of slobby seventeen-year-old time, whenever she could.
Social services had allocated a support team to Minnie since the news of her discovery was now becoming daily tabloid fodder. No one had yet identified her or Hope, but it wasn’t going to be long. Minnie was the top of the pyramid when it came to priorities. She was labelled the ‘victim’. Then came Julius and Anna, her parents, also referred to as ‘victims’. Hope wasn’t anywhere on the pyramid. She was buried underneath, the lousy ‘criminal’.
They knew much more about Minnie’s biological parents now. They knew the couple had since divorced. Hope could put names to the sleeping woman on the bed and the snoring man in the chair in that fuggy hot room all those years ago. Minnie rolled these names around in her head. Julius. Anna. They were strangers to her.
Minnie was in her PJs one day with Cat curled up on her bed near her. Cat had been off her food recently. When Hope and Minnie returned from a hospital appointment, she was standing in the hallway with another dead Mouse in her jaw. If this was any other cat, it would be a normal sight. Cat catches mouse in garden, kills it and brings the trophy home to show human mother. A conquest. Not this Cat. This Cat was holding the corpse of her companion Mouse, who had simply conked out from old age and natural causes, as had all the descendants of Mouse every eighteen months or so, since the very first one.
