Rosamund Lupton - Afterwards

When you were away filming, we spoke long distance, the words between us hissing and fading in and out, but I still painted a picture of my day, and you – well, I was going to say you framed it, neat and pat, but it’s not that. Because we might not have young love, or find each other beautiful in that eyebeams-threading way any more, but you give me the canvas to paint on tomorrow.

And it’s only now, right now, that I properly appreciate you sitting with me and still talking to me. Every chance you get, whenever Sarah and now Ivo can guard Jenny, you come to me.

Do you remember Sarah’s reading at our wedding?

At the time I didn’t take much notice. We were only in the church to please my father (‘ It’ll mean so much to him ’ and I’d wanted to make up for being a pregnant bride) and we’d gone for the usual off-the-shelf ready-made-for-weddings reading from Corinthians.

‘ Love is patient and kind ,’ Sarah read out, standing in the pulpit. But I felt far from patient or kind as she read, so bloody slowly! My shoes were much too high, Mum had been right about that, and my toes were pinched. How come the guests were allowed to sit down but we weren’t?

‘ Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. ’

Apart from killer-heels on a hard church floor.

But I do remember the ending of her reading.

‘ … now faith, hope and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love. ’

And I think that you loving me still takes faith.

And your faith that I can hear you now takes love.

Again a watched-pot hope as we return to Jenny’s bedside together.

She isn’t here.

A nurse sees your panic and tells you she’s just been taken to the MRI suite and her boyfriend and a doctor from ICU have gone with her.

You hurry out.

ICU is secure with its locked door and high ratio of medical staff but out here danger prowls the corridors and jostles into the crowded lifts and maybe a murderer is striding towards our vulnerable daughter.

I try and still my panic. Ivo is with her. And there’s a doctor with her too. They won’t let anything happen to her. Besides, surely both Donald and Silas are too intelligent to risk another attack.

I slow my pace to a walk while you race on.

I pass the chapel door and hear a low, animal keening sound. I go in.

She’s kneeling at the front of the church. Her crying is the sound of despair; a scream fragmenting into tears.

Every nerve in me jangles into a run to her. I put my arms around her.

‘I didn’t want to be with him, Mum.’

‘But he loves you. I saw that. He’s only left you now so that he could go to the MRI suite, because Dad was with me. He hasn’t rejected you, if that’s what you-’

‘I know he loves me. I’ve always known that.’

She turns to me and I can hardly bear to look at the anguish on her face. As bad as looking at her burnt face. Blistering with pain in front of me.

‘I knew that if I saw him I’d want to live too much.’

‘Jenny-wren-’

‘I don’t want to die,’ she shouts; and her shout echoes around the chapel until it’s a sonic boom of emotion that breaks bones.

‘ I don’t want to die! ’

‘Jen, listen-’

Her face is starting to shimmer. She’s getting too bright to look at. When this happened before her heart had stopped.

This can’t happen. Not now. Please.

This can’t happen.

And I’m running to the MRI suite, down corridors, through swing doors, passing too many people, their faces so harsh in the barred overhead lights.

She needs a heart. Right now. Right this moment. The surgeons need to be taking her old damaged one out and putting in one that will keep her alive.

I race to the lifts and get in as the doors close.

But Miss Logan had told you, rammed it home, that she had to be stable first. Not dying. Not this.

I think of that awful sound in the chapel.

She’s been so frightened as she faced death. Terrified. But all along standing tall and sheltering me with her humour.

Sheltering me.

I’d discovered she’d grown up, but I hadn’t seen her courage.

The lift is going too slowly. Too bloody slowly.

I think about the red paint. ‘ She said her parents would be so upset, she didn’t want to worry them…’ But I hadn’t paused to hear her words.

How long has she been protecting us? And I called her immature.

I remember Sarah hadn’t looked surprised.

The lift stops, stops! People politely waiting to get in. I run to the stairs.

I think of the gravel cutting into her feet and the sun scorching her as she made herself remember back to the fire, to help Adam. Because she loves him and is courageous in her love for him.

I reach the ground floor, and hurry to the MRI suite.

I think of the times that I’ve been tactless and insensitive and patronising and she’s just teased me; her generosity of spirit.

Nearly there. Nearly there.

Why haven’t I seen this before? Seen Jenny? The extraordinary person that she has grown into.

No longer a child; an astonishing adult.

‘ But your daughter, yes. Always. ’

There’s a cubicle and medical staff are hurrying towards it.

I go in.

Doctors surround her and their machinery makes inhuman noises and you are there and I think of the river Styx and Jenny being rowed towards the underworld. But the doctors are trying to reach her, throwing ropes with grappling hooks over the side of the boat, and they’re pulling it, pulling her, back to the land of the living.

You are staring at the monitor.

It has a trace.

It has a trace!

I feel euphoric.

‘Her physical condition has drastically deteriorated,’ Miss Logan tells you and Sarah at Jenny’s bedside. ‘We can keep her stable for two, maybe three, days.’

‘And then…?’ you ask.

‘We’ve run out of options. I have to tell you that the chance of finding a donor heart in the time frame left to her is non-existent.’

I feel your exhaustion. The boulder of love you’ve been carrying up that mountain has slipped all the way down to the bottom. And you have to start that Herculean task all over again.

‘You’ve got it wrong, Mum!’ Addie told me. ‘The boulder wasn’t Hercules. Hercules had to kill loads of monsters, the really awful ones, you know, like Cerberus? Although he did have to clean out a cow-shed too.’

‘That sounds easier.’

‘No, cos the cattle were special god-cattle and they made huge amounts of poo and he had to divert a river. It was Sisyphuswho had to push the boulder.’

‘Poor Sisyphus.’

‘I’d rather push a boulder than fight a monster.’

Mohsin arrives in the ward.

‘I’m sorry, but I thought you ought to know straight away. It was deliberate. Just now, while she was in the MRI suite, someone disconnected her respirator.’

In the parched garden, I sit with Jenny.

‘They’ll give you proper protection now,’ I say. ‘Apparently Baker’s sending half of Chiswick police station down here. And Penny’s already started taking statements.’

‘Bolting the stable door and all that…’

‘Yes.’

Then we talk, properly; privately.

It wouldn’t be right to tell you our conversation, that’s up to Jenny – one day; if she can remember. But I can tell you I apologise to her. And that I’m now going to tell her my shoe analogy because I think she’ll like it.

She looks at me with amusement.

‘So I was soft little bootees until one day I was boots striding away from you?’