‘Do Christians believe that you go to purgatory if you’re not baptised?’ Jenny asks.
She’s facing this.
‘You won’t go to purgatory,’ I snap, furious. ‘There’s no such thing as purgatory.’
How dare any God send my daughter to purgatory? As if I could walk into the head teacher’s study and say that it’s absolutely unjust for her to have a detention and I am taking her home right now.
Still talking too much.
I have to join her. Face this too.
I turn to look at the gorgon.
And death isn’t a clock ticking or a car speeding towards her.
I see a girl falling overboard from life and no one is able to reach her.
Exposed and alone.
Three weeks less a day until she drowns.
Maybe it has been there all the time; this girl-alone-in-an-ocean silence; that ghastly vast expanse of it which I didn’t want to hear.
‘So that was what this drowning thing was really about,’ Nanny Voice says. ‘All along it was really this.’
Perhaps. Yes.
But she’s not going to drown. I won’t let her.
My certainty startles me. And there’s fear in it; the nervous, jittery-as-hell kind. But anything else is simply unthinkable.
Jenny dying before August the twentieth, an actual date on our calendar in the kitchen, and all those days afterwards that won’t contain her is ludicrous. Unbearable.
And I’m not clinging onto your hope now but believing it – knowing it – for myself.
Jenny living is my only truth.
Because your child staying alive trumps everything. ‘You’re going to live,’ I say to Jenny. ‘You don’t need to think about any of this. Because you’re going to live.’
I have my rope around her.
27
Saturday morning. The radio should be going and I should be drinking coffee in bed, which you brought me half an hour ago, but didn’t wake me so it’s tepid now, but I’m glad of it. I should smell bacon and sausages frying downstairs as you prepare your monster breakfast for you and Addie and I’m hoping you’ve remembered to open the kitchen window so our neurotic, overly sensitive heat detector won’t blast out the neighbours and make the guinea pigs bolt around their hutch. Jenny is still slumbering deeply, not hearing the bleeping of a text on her mobile, which has been going off since about eight – clearly a wrong number because none of Jenny’s friends will be up yet either. But soon she’ll arrive, sleepy-eyed, and sit on the end of my bed, bemoaning you not bringing her tea.
‘Tea’s more effort than coffee, Jen.’
‘Tea-bag tea ’ud be fine.’
‘You still have to soak it and then take it out, put it in the bin. Then put in the milk. Dad only does one-step morning drinks.’
She leans back against the pillows, next to me, and tells me who she’s meeting up with this morning and it seems only a blink ago that it was me spending Saturday with friends in preparation for the main event of the evening. How can it be possible that I wake up each morning to find myself a thirty-nine-year-old mother of two? Even before Tara earlier, I sometimes think of myself in tabloid descriptions. I prefer it to be along the lines of ‘Daring bank robbery by thirty-nine-year-old mother of two!’ variety than anything more maudlin.
Jen gives me a kiss and goes ‘to make my own tea’.
Dr Sandhu tells you Jenny is getting weaker; slowly deteriorating, as they’d predicted.
‘Can she still have a transplant?’ you ask.
‘Yes. She’s still strong enough for that. But we don’t know how much longer that will be the case.’
Jenny is waiting for me outside ICU. She doesn’t ask if a heart has been found. Like me, she can now read an expression at ten paces and interpret a silence. Before, I thought the only crushing silence was the one after ‘I love you…’
‘Aunt Sarah’s gone to meet Belinda, that nurse,’ Jenny says.
‘Right.’
‘And she got a text from someone to meet in the cafeteria in half an hour. She looked really pleased. Do you think it could be her man?’
Last time I was jealous of Jen’s closeness to Sarah, but now it’s the other way around. Jen and I don’t talk about this kind of thing at all. I say this kind of thing because even the language is a minefield. For example, ‘sexy’ is old-fashioned and shows I don’t have a clue, but ‘hot’ is embarrassing for someone as old as me (a thirty-nine-year-old mother of two). Actually no, it isn’t a minefield to be negotiated, the entire area is off-limits; each generation linguistically roping it off for themselves. But somehow Sarah’s been allowed in.
But that doesn’t mean I see having sex as a rite of passage to becoming an adult. If anything, I think it’s sometimes the reverse. You tease me for being a hypocrite. It’s me who wants to use the creative ‘making love’ term rather than the acquisitive ‘having sex’. But I have to break off this little cul-de-sac of a conversation because we’ve caught up with Sarah who’s striding briskly down the corridor.
Belinda, spruce in her nurse’s uniform, goes through Maisie’s notes with Sarah.
‘She had a cracked wrist, last winter,’ Belinda says. ‘She said she slipped over on an icy doorstep.’
‘Any reason for the doctors or nurses looking after her to be suspicious?’
‘No. A &E gets filled with broken arms and legs when it’s icy. And then at the beginning of March this year there’s this.’
I read, with Sarah, the notes about Maisie being admitted unconscious to hospital with two broken ribs and a fractured skull. She’d said she’d fallen down the stairs. After being discharged from hospital two weeks later she had failed to keep any of her outpatient appointments.
I’d tried to ring her during that time, but had only got her voicemail. Later she said Donald had treated her to a spa break. I’d thought it an odd thing for her to do and when I’d asked her about it she’d seemed embarrassed. I’d thought it hadn’t been a success.
There’s nothing else in Maisie’s records. She hadn’t shown any doctors her bruised cheek, nor the bruises on her arm the day of the fire, hidden under her long FUN sleeves.
Belinda gets out Rowena’s notes, but it’s clear she’s already read them; her normally smiley face is upset.
‘She had a significant burn to her leg last year. She said she dropped an iron on it and the burn mark suggested an iron.’
I remember Donald’s lighted cigarette and Adam cowering away.
Was Rowena’s scar the reason she was wearing long trousers on sports day? I’d thought she was just being more sensibly dressed than Jenny.
‘Anything else?’ Sarah asks.
‘No. Unless they went to another hospital. It sometimes happens. Communication between hospitals isn’t as efficient as it should be.’
‘I’d like you to tell me if Donald White comes to visit again,’ Sarah says. ‘I don’t want him to have unsupervised access.’
Belinda nods. She meets Sarah’s eye.
‘There’s nothing I can do until one of them reports it,’ Sarah says with frustration.
‘You’ll encourage them to?’
‘Let’s get them both to a state where that’s an option. Get Rowena back on her feet and out of here first. I don’t want to ask them to do anything while they’re so vulnerable. For a start, if you get that kind of decision now they could well go back on it.’
Sarah joins Mohsin in the hospital cafeteria. His caramel-coloured face is tired; shadows under his eyes.
‘Is that him?’ Jenny asks.
‘No. Her lover’s younger and more gorgeous,’ I say.
She doesn’t even flinch when I say the embarrassing word ‘lover’, but instead smiles.