Rosamund Lupton - Afterwards

I think of Adam in his bunk bed.

‘He has several lions among his soft toy menagerie,’ I tell you. ‘But his favourite is Aslan and he needs Aslan to get to sleep. If he’s fallen off the bunk, you have to find him. Sometimes you have to pull the whole bed out because he falls down the side.’

‘Mum?’ Jenny says. ‘Dad’s asleep. ’

As if when you’re awake you can hear me. I am touched by this distinction.

‘Anyway,’ she continues. ‘He must know about Aslan.’

‘D’you think?’

‘Of course.’

But I’m not sure you do. Anyway, you think it would be better if Adam grew out of soft toys, now he’s eight. But he’s only just eight.

‘You’ll be able to put Adam to bed yourself soon,’ Jenny says. ‘Find Aslan. All of that.’

I think of holding Adam’s hand in mine as he drifts into sleep. All of that.

‘Yes.’

Because of course I’ll be at home again. I have to be.

‘Is it alright if I go for a walk?’ she asks. ‘I’m feeling a little stir-crazy.’

‘Fine.’

Poor Jenny; an outdoorsy person like you, it’s terrible for her to be cooped up in a hospital.

We’re alone and I look at your sleeping face.

I remember watching you as you slept not long after we’d started going out together and I’d thought of that passage in Middlemarch – I know, not fair! I can quote to you now and there’s not a thing you can do about it! Anyway it’s when the poor heroine realises that in her elderly husband’s head there are just dusty corridors and musty old attics. But in yours I imagined there to be mountains and rivers and prairies – wide-open spaces with wind and sky.

You haven’t yet said you love me. But it’s a given, isn’t it? A taken-as-read thing, as it has been for the last few years. In our early days you’d write it in the steamed-up mirror in the bathroom after you’d shaved, for me to find when I came in later to clean my teeth. You’d phone me, just to tell me. I’d sit down at my computer and you’d have changed the screen saver so that ‘I love you!’ marched across it. You’d never done this to anyone before, and it was as if you needed to keep practising.

I know hearts don’t really store emotion. But there must be some place in us that does. I think it’s a jagged and anxiously spiky place until someone loves you. And then, like pilgrims touching a rough stone with their fingertips, nineteen years of practising wears it smooth.

Someone has just passed the family room. I saw a glimpse in the glass panel in the door; a shadow fleetingly under it. I better just check.

A figure is hurrying along the burns unit corridor. For some reason, I think of that shadowy figure on the edge of the playing field.

He’s going towards Jenny’s side-ward.

He goes in and through the half-open doorway I see his shape bending over her.

I scream, making no sound.

I can see a nurse walking towards Jenny’s room. Her plimsolls squeaking on the linoleum alert the figure to her presence and he slips away.

The nurse is checking Jenny now. I can’t see anything different at all, not that I’d know what all the monitors are telling us, but to me it looks no different. But the nurse in the squeaky plimsolls is checking a piece of Jenny’s equipment.

Out in the corridor, the figure has disappeared.

I didn’t get close enough to see his face, just an outline in a long, dark blue coat. But the door to the burns unit is locked, so he must have been authorised to be in here. He must be a doctor, perhaps a nurse, probably going off shift, which is why he wasn’t wearing a white coat or nurse’s uniform, but an overcoat. Maybe he just wanted to check on Jenny before going home.

I see Jenny returning and I smile at her.

But I feel afraid.

Because who wears a long dark overcoat in the middle of July?

Garish artificial lights snapping on; doctors already alert and moving in packs; loud crashings of trolleys and nurses briskly whipping away breakfast trays and pulling out drugs charts. Christ, I think, you have to feel robust to face morning in a hospital. But at least all this noisy bright aggressive busyness turns my glimpsed figure last night into a quiet nothing.

When I arrive at my ward, I see that Mum’s already here and in an office with Dr Bailstrom. She’s aged years in a day; hard lines of misery are scraped across her face.

‘Grace chattered all the time when she was a little girl, such a bright button,’ Mum says, her voice quicker than usual. ‘I always knew that she’d grow up to be really bright, and she did. She got three As at A level and a scholarship to Cambridge to read Art History, with an option to switch to English, because they wanted her to come to their university.’

‘Mum, please! ’ I say to no avail. Presumably she wants them to know what kind of brain I had – a top-notch one! as Dad used to say – so they’ll know what to aim for. The before photo.

‘She got pregnant before finals,’ Mum continues. ‘So she had to leave. She was a little disappointed, we all were, but she was happy too. About the baby. Jenny.’

I’ve never heard my life history potted before and it’s a little alarming. Is it really that simple?

‘That makes her sound like a brainbox, but she’s not really like that at all,’ Mum continues. ‘She’s a lovely girl. I know she’s nearly forty now, but she’s still a girl to me. And she’d do anything for anyone. Too good for her own good , that’s what I used to say to her. But when my husband died, I realised then that nobody can be too good for their own good, not when it’s you they’re helping.’

Mum never speaks in a rush. And hardly ever speaks more than two or three sentences at a time. Now she’s haring along in paragraphs as if she’s on a timer. And I wish there was a timer, because listening to this is terrible.

‘I don’t know what I’d have done without her; juggling her whole life around for me. I don’t mean that she has to get better for me, though. You mustn’t think that. I mean I love her more than you can possibly know but it’s her children who really need her, and Mike. You think it’s Mike who’s the strong one, he looks it, but really it’s Gracie. She’s the heart of the family.’

She stops for a moment, and Dr Bailstrom pounces in.

‘We’ll do everything we possibly can. I can absolutely assure you of that. But sometimes, with a severe head injury, there’s not a great deal that we can do.’

Mum looks at her.

And for a moment Dr Bailstrom is the doctor who told Mum and Dad that he had Kahler’s disease.

‘ But there must be a cure! ’ she’d said then.

She doesn’t say that now. Because when Dad died, the impossible, unthinkable happened to her and nothing would ever be unthinkable again.

I look away from her face to Dr Bailstrom’s same-as-yesterday high red shoes. I bet from time to time Dr Bailstrom looks at them too.

‘We’ll let you know what we find out when we’ve done the next set of tests,’ Dr Bailstrom says. ‘We are having a specialists’ meeting about your daughter later today.’

Once Mum would have told them Dad was a doctor. Once she’d have thought it would make a difference.

She thanks Dr Bailstrom – too nicely brought up not to always thank people properly.

Adam is hunched by my bed.

Mum rushes over to him.

‘Addie, poppet? I thought you were going to wait with the nurses for five minutes?’

He’s lying with his face against mine, holding my hand, and he’s crying. A desperate, terrible sound.

I put my arms around him and I tell him not to cry, I tell him I’m alright. But he can’t hear me.