‘The water that rained down four billion years ago is exactly the same water we have today,’ you continue. ‘It might be frozen into glaciers, or in the clouds, or in rivers or raining. But it’s the same water. And exactly the same amount. No more, but no less. It didn’t go anywhere. It couldn’t.’
Dr Bailstrom taps an impatient red heel, either not getting it or not wanting to try. But I like the idea that I’m a melted bit of glacier joining the ocean; the same but outwardly changed. Or, optimistically, part of a cloud, which will be rained down again, back to where I came from.
‘We will continue to do tests,’ Dr Bailstrom says to you. ‘But there really is no chance that your wife will ever regain consciousness.’
‘You said that she could live for years,’ you say to her. ‘So one day there’ll be a cure. And we’ll just have to wait, for as long as it takes.’
Had we but worlds enough and time.
In time, a cloud rejoins the ocean.
Wait long enough and a dull piece of grit becomes a luminous pearl. I feel it in my hand, round and smooth until it became warm; Adam’s hand in mine as he falls asleep.
17
A little while later Mum arrives at my bedside. Unlike you and Sarah, she didn’t argue with the doctors, and I’d seen each medical fact – supposed medical fact – hitting her face like flying glass, cutting new lines.
‘A nurse is with Addie,’ she says. ‘Just for a little while. I can’t leave him long. But I had to talk to you on my own.’ She pauses a moment. ‘Someone’s going to have to tell him that you’re not going to wake up.’
‘For fuck’s sake, Mum, you can’t do that!’
I have never, ever, said fuck to my mother before.
‘I just want what’s best for him,’ Mum says quietly.
‘How can this be best for Ads? Jesus!’
It’s been years since we argued, and even then it was more of a disagreement. Of all times and places we shouldn’t start now, here.
‘I know that you can hear me, Gracie, angel. Wherever you are.’
‘I’m right here, Mum. Right here. And soon their tests will pick it up. I’m going to be Roger fucking Federer, smashing the ball at a hundred miles an hour over the net for a “YES I CAN UNDERSTAND YOU!” And once they know that I can still think, then they’ll try and find a way of getting me well again.’
‘I’d better get back to Addie.’
She pulls the curtain back. Jenny is outside and has clearly overheard; the curtains obey the laws of science after all.
She looks so anxious.
‘Granny G is wrong,’ I say to her. ‘And so are the doctors. I can think and feel, can’t I? Talk to you now? Their scans aren’t sophisticated enough, that’s all. So one day, hopefully soon, I’ll give them a great big surprise.’
‘Roger fucking Federer?’ she says.
‘Absolutely. Venus Williams, if I don’t fancy a sex change. Honestly, sweetheart, once they give me the right scans, they’ll know I’m OK.’
But she’s still anxious; her head bent down and her narrow shoulders hunched together.
‘You were so brave. Going into the school for me.’
‘Dad said that too, and it’s really nice of you both, but it’s not in the least accurate and makes me feel a fraud.’
She half smiles. ‘Oh right. So what does qualify as brave? If you’re not allowed running into a burning building to rescue someone?’
‘It was just instinct, that’s all. Really. Something any mother would do for their child.’
But I’m not being totally honest. Most mothers – maybe all apart from me – would instinctively risk her life to rescue her child. And to start with I ran without thinking too. I just saw the school on fire and knew Jenny was inside and ran. But once I was inside.
Inside.
Every moment in that heat and choking smoke, my love for Jenny had to fight against my overwhelming urge to run away. A riptide of selfishness, which was trying to pull me out of the building. I was ashamed to tell you before.
‘You said you could get back into your body?’ she asks.
‘Yes. That’s right.’
‘I think that if you can get back into your body,’ she continues, ‘it means you’re not going to die. When my heart stopped, and I was technically dead, I suppose, it was warmth and light leaving my body and coming into me, not the other way around. I think it’s living that’s the other way around.’
‘Absolutely.’
Because surely she is right.
We are interrupted by Sarah arriving, with a ramrod-straight woman with steel-grey hair in her late sixties, who I know but can’t quite place.
‘Mrs Fisher,’ Jenny says, surprised.
The old secretary at Sidley House.
She’s brought me a fat bunch of sweet-peas wrapped in newspaper and the scent is glorious, temporarily overpowering the sanitised smell of the ward.
Sarah looks along my vases of flowers, then deftly bins Silas Hyman’s ugly yellow roses. She smiles at Mrs Fisher.
‘I think in the race for space here, yours win,’ she says lightly, but I see her notice Mr Hyman’s card and pocket it.
‘I didn’t think I’d actually see her,’ Mrs Fisher says to Sarah. ‘I just wanted to bring her flowers. We used to talk about gardening sometimes. But I hardly know her.’
I remember now that Mrs Fisher is the only person on her stretch of allotments to grow sweet-peas rather than their edible cousins. She told me about it on Jenny’s first day at school, distracting me with flowers, and by the end of our horticultural conversation Jenny had stopped crying and was on the reading rug.
‘Would you mind having a chat with me?’ Sarah asks. ‘I’m a police officer and Grace’s sister-in-law.’
Sisters-in-law. I’ve never before properly considered that we have our own separate and connecting thread in the matrix of the family.
‘Of course,’ Mrs Fisher replies. ‘But I really don’t think I’ll be of any help.’
Sarah escorts her into the relatives’ room.
‘Before you ask me anything,’ Mrs Fisher says, ‘I have a police record.’
Jenny and I are both startled. Mrs Fisher?
‘I was an activist for CND and Greenpeace. I still am, but I don’t tend to get arrested nowadays.’
Sarah looks a little judgmental, but I know not to misinterpret that now.
‘You said you were the secretary at Sidley House?’
‘For almost thirteen years. I had to leave in April.’
‘Why was that?’
‘Apparently I was too old to do the job. The head teacher told me that if I looked at my contract I’d see that there was “a policy of non-voluntary retirement for all support staff at sixty”. I’m sixty-seven. She’d waited seven years before enforcing the clause.’
‘And were you too old for the job?’
‘No. I was still bloody good at it. Everyone knew it, including Sally Healey.’
‘So do you know why she got rid of you?’
‘You don’t mince your words. No. I’ve no idea.’
Sarah took out a notebook, an incongruous Paperchase one with little owls on it, and wrote something down.
‘Can I have your details?’ Sarah asks. ‘Your full name is Mrs…?’
‘Elizabeth Fisher. And it’s Ms, however you pronounce it. My husband left me six months ago and I think it’s customary to drop the “Mrs” at that point. The ring won’t come off. I have to get it cut, apparently. The symbolism is a little brutal for me at the moment.’
Sarah looks sympathetic but I feel cold. Mrs Healey sent all the parents a letter saying Mrs Fisher’s husband was terminally ill and that was the reason she’d had to leave the school. I’d organised a card and Maisie had traipsed off to some super-snazzy flower place in Richmond for a bouquet for her and, at my suggestion, bulbs.