Jenny is standing a little distance away, so that she can’t see herself through the glass.
‘Do you think it’s like my mobile?’ she asks. ‘An infection risk?’
‘Must be.’
But I wonder if the photocopied transcripts really are an infection risk or if Sarah is trying to be as discreet as possible, avoiding Jenny’s highly staffed bedside.
You’re holding Annette Jenks’s transcript. I hope I’ll now hear Sarah’s take on it, which I could only guess at before.
‘But how the hell can Jen have signed herself out?’ you say as you read it. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘I’m not convinced yet that she did,’ Sarah says. ‘It could be that Annette Jenks just wanted to stop people from blaming her. A hit-and-run mentality.’
‘So there’s nothing useful from it.’
‘I wouldn’t say that. It’s clear from her statement that she didn’t actually light the fire. She says she was with Rowena White in the office when the alarm went off and Rowena told me the same thing earlier. The office is on the upper-ground level; the Art room on the second floor. So neither of them could have started the fire.’
‘Could she have let Hyman in?’
‘She claims not to know him, or even have heard of him, but I find it strange that she didn’t hear any gossip about him at all. She strikes me as a gossipy kind of girl. So, for some reason, I think she’s probably lying. And we know from both Maisie and Rowena White that she waited a few minutes before coming outside. In here she makes no mention of that. We have to find out what she was doing.’
As I expected, Sarah is bang on the button.
You read through Sally Healey’s transcript, pausing when you get to the fire regulations she had in place.
‘It’s like she’s memorised the manual,’ you say to Sarah.
‘I agree. And Baker picked up on it too. I think Sally Healey was worried about the real possibility of a fire. Almost as if she knew it was going to happen and was trying to minimise the consequences.’ She catches your expression. ‘No fire regulations would have stood a chance against an accelerant and open windows and an old building.’
‘Maybe she knew that?’
‘I can’t see why she’d burn down her own school. But something’s not right. As well as having all this down pat, she said there were no hard feelings when Elizabeth Fisher, the old secretary, left. But on Elizabeth’s side, there clearly are.’
‘Is that relevant?’ you ask, sounding a little impatient.
‘I don’t know yet.’
I feel sick as I reread the head teacher’s statement. Because this time her telling Baker that the medical room is on the third floor, right at the top of the building, leaps out at me. So too does her announcement that Jenny would be nurse, and that the information would be disseminated to all the other members of staff.
Everyone at the school knew Jenny would be up on the top floor, on her own, in a virtually deserted building.
‘Is this all you’ve got?’ you ask.
‘Yes. I’m afraid so.’
‘Can’t you-’
‘I was only able to get copies because the paperwork was temporarily in an insecure area. Everything will be securely filed by now.’
‘But you will talk to Silas Hyman?’
‘Yes. And I’ve already set up a meeting with the head teacher and Elizabeth Fisher. And while I’m doing that, you can go home and see Addie.’
You are silent.
‘ICU is heavily staffed, Mike. If you’re still worried, I could get Mohsin to sit with her.’
You are still silent and she doesn’t understand.
‘Addie’s only got you right now, Mike. He needs you to be with him.’
You shake your head.
Her grey-blue eyes look deeply into your matching ones, as if searching for an answer there. Because you are a loving father; not a man who would ignore his eight-year-old child, especially not now. Surely, in there somewhere behind the hard expression on your face, is the boy she’s known all his life.
You look away from Sarah as you speak so she can’t read your face any more; can’t see the man inside.
‘They told me Jenny has three weeks to live unless she gets a heart transplant. A day less now.’
‘Oh God, Mike…’
‘I can’t leave her.’
‘No.’
‘She will get a heart transplant…’ you begin, but I am looking at Jenny’s face as she hears a car speeding towards her. Death isn’t quiet but loud, deafening, getting closer. A joyriding grim reaper mounting the pavement, directly at her, and there’s nowhere to run.
She leaves the room and I hurry after her.
‘Jen, please…’
In the corridor, she stops and turns to me. ‘You should have told me.’ Her face is white and her voice shaking. ‘I had a right to know.’
I want to tell her that I was trying to protect her, that I knitted a shawl of untruths to wrap her up; that I believe in your hope for her.
‘I’m not a child any more. Your daughter, yes. Always. But-’
‘Jen-’
‘Can’t you get it, Mum? Please? I’m an adult now. You can’t run my life for me. What’s left of it. I have my own life. My own death.’
23
I see her at six in a pink and orange flowery swimming costume, diving underwater before popping up with a beaming wave, our little fish! And I am watching her, my eye beams a rope around her, because I will jump in – splash! – and rescue her the moment she’s in difficulty. And then she’s twelve years old, self-conscious in a modest navy sports swimsuit, checking everything’s in place as she swims; and then a metallic silver bikini over a perfect teenage body that makes everyone stare at her and she feels their gazes like sunshine on her skin, enjoying her beauty.
But she’s still the little girl in the pink and orange flowery swimming costume to me and I still have my invisible rope around her waist.
‘You can have my heart,’ I say.
She looks at me a moment and smiles and I see in her smile that I’m forgiven.
‘Oh for heaven’s sakes,’ she says.
‘If no one else’s turns up.’
‘“Turns up”?’
She’s teasing me.
‘We’re the same tissue type,’ I say.
I’d thought us both the wrong tissue type before; our bone marrow equally useless to help my father survive Kahler’s disease.
‘It’s really kind,’ she says. ‘That’s a huge understatement. But there are a few snags in the plan. You’re alive, for a start. And even if Dad and Aunt Sarah let them, which they won’t, they’re not going to stop giving you food and water for ages.’
‘Then I’ll just have to find a way of doing it myself.’
‘How, exactly?’
All these smiles! Now, of all times! I was wrong earlier, she hasn’t taken in the reality of how desperate the situation is at all. I used to wish that she took life ‘a little more seriously’.
‘Walking out of an A-level paper isn’t funny.’
‘It’s not that I’m laughing at.’
‘So what is it?’
‘No one ever tells you when you’re doing all that course work and revision and timed essays and study skills that it’s an option.’
‘But it isn’t an option.’
‘It is, because I just took it.’
And she found it funny, as if she’d been released from prison rather than slammed the door shut on her future.
I had despaired of this trait she has of hiding behind humour rather than facing the truth. Now, I’m glad.
But her question about how I actually intend to commit suicide is fair enough. I can’t open my eyelids or move a single finger so how can I organise an overdose or jump under a train? (A selfish option, I’ve always thought – those poor drivers.) Ironically, you need to be reasonably fit to commit suicide.