Rosamund Lupton - Afterwards

‘You’ll go and see him?’ Sarah asks.

You nod. ‘As soon as I’ve seen Grace’s doctors.’

You’ve asked for the meeting with my doctors to be at my bedside, as if you need to see my comatose body right here in front of you to do this.

I am at the far side of the ward. Any closer and I’m afraid you’ll sense me and this will be too hard for you.

A nurse is wheeling a drugs trolley from bed to bed, and the noise she makes as she unloads her cargo disguises the lower, subtler sounds of your conversation.

You’ve asked Dr Sandhu to be here too and it’s his kind face I look at, not yours. I can’t bear to look at yours. I was wrong about him a couple of days ago. He didn’t arrive where he is now through a series of coincidence and chances, this was a vocational straight-as-the-crow-flies journey to a family like ours.

The nurse with the drugs trolley has stopped at a bed for longer, and in the silence your voice carries across the ward to me.

You tell them that you know now that I won’t wake up.

That I am not ‘in there’ any more.

You tell them that Dad had Kahler’s disease and that Jenny and I were tested to see if we were suitable donors for bone marrow.

You tell them that Jenny and I are a tissue match.

You ask them to donate my heart.

I love you.

The squeaky trolley starts up again, and the nurse is chatting to someone and I can’t hear the rest of your conversation. But I know what it will be because I have already been down this seemingly logical path with Jenny.

Across the ward, I strain to listen, catching at words that make the sentences I expect.

Dr Bailstrom’s high voice carries furthest. She tells you I am breathing unaided. It will be at least a year, probably longer, before they’ll even contemplate getting a court order to withdraw food and fluid.

You faced my living-death out of love for Jenny and you think nothing has come of it. Now you’re only left with the brutal fact.

Dr Sandhu suggests a ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ document. I imagine that it’s pretty standard procedure in these circumstances. But, as Dr Bailstrom points out, standard procedure or not, there is no reason why I should collapse and need resuscitating. My body, ironically, is healthy.

I think Dr Sandhu is trying to give you a little kindness, a little hope. Because if my body does collapse, instead of being resuscitated, it would be kept oxygenated until my organs could be transplanted.

In Dr Sandhu’s office you sign the DNR form. Jenny comes in and watches.

‘You can’t do this, Mum.’

‘Of course I can and you-’

‘I’ve changed my mind.’

‘It’s too late to change your mind, sweetie.’

‘This isn’t custard instead of cream on my pudding, for fuck’s sake!’

I laugh. She’s furious.

‘I shouldn’t have said yes. I can’t believe I did. You got me at a really bad-’

‘I am never going to wake up again, Jen, but you can get better. So logically-’

‘Logically what? You’re turning into Jeremy Bentham now?’

‘You’ve read him?’

‘Mum!’

‘I’m impressed, that’s all.’

‘No, you’re changing the subject. And you can’t. It’s too big to change. If you go ahead with this, I refuse to get back into my body. Ever.’

‘Jenny, you want to live. You-’

‘But not by killing you.’

‘Jen-’

‘I refuse!’

She means it.

And yet she longs overwhelmingly to live.

You’re going home to see Adam and I go with you. As we walk down the corridor, you lean a little towards me, as if you know I’m with you. Maybe now you no longer think I’m in my body you can sense me with you in other places.

As we pass the garden, the shadows lengthening into evening, Jenny is joining Ivo. Before, I’d marvelled at him knowing where she was, amazed at the connection between them, which I saw as an almost spiritual thing. But looking at them now, I just want her to be in his world, the real world – for him to be able to physically touch her .

As I long to touch you.

In our car, I fantasise once more, just for a minute or so, that we’re back in our old life and we’re going out to dinner with a bottle of wine in the boot. I wish, absurdly, that it could be me driving. ( That’s a decent Burgundy in the boot, Gracie! So go gently on the bends!)

I even fantasise a row, let’s make this a bit more realistic.

‘You were heavy on the indicator there,’ you say.

‘ Heavy on an indicator? How can you be heavy on an indicator ?’

I’m quite enjoying this, a mixture of teasing and arguing and flirting.

‘The stick, you need to be…’

I either laugh at you for being ridiculous in a mock row, or start a real row about you patronising me. We nearly always opt for the mock version. So I laugh at you and you hear what I am not saying. I continue to drive and five minutes later you don’t mention my illegal right turn.

The little fantasy shatters as I see our house.

The curtains are drawn in Adam’s room. It’s seven thirty now. Bed-time.

You turn to me, as if you’ve caught a glimpse of my face. Am I a ghost to you now? Haunting you?

You go into our house but I wait a little while before following you. Our windowboxes of geraniums have shrivelled and browned in the heat; but Adam’s two pots of carrots and his tomato growbags have been watered. I am strangely satisfied by that.

Is this what ghosts are? Are ghouls and ghosties actually sitting in cars fantasising mock rows with their husbands and checking on their growbags and windowboxes?

You’re with my mother in the kitchen. A little afraid, bracing herself, she says she told Adam after that first big meeting with my doctors that I wasn’t going to wake up; that I was dead.

But you are grateful.

And I think that, like me, you see Mum’s courage. The only one of us to take the body blow of what the doctors said first time.

You tell her about your failed attempt to donate my heart.

She says she hopes by some miracle it can happen.

‘I couldn’t bear it, for her to live when her child is dead. To suffer that.’

You put your arm around her.

‘And you, Georgina?’

‘Oh, you don’t need to worry about me. I’m a tough old bird. I won’t fall apart. Not till Adam’s left for university and I’m in the nursing home. I’ll fall apart then.’

‘Fall apart’ is one of my expressions from my twenties that Mum picked up. ‘Tough old bird’ is one of hers. I love the legacy of language. How much of what I say has gone into Jen’s and Adam’s vocabularies? And when they use those words they’ll think of me; feel me in a more than language-deep way.

‘Adam’s been talking about the great rain at the beginning of the world,’ Mum tells you.

You’re moved. ‘He thought of that?’

‘Yes. She doesn’t just go, Mike. Everything Gracie is, it can’t just go.’

‘No.’

You go up the stairs to Adam’s room.

I look in at the open doorway of our bedroom. Someone has made our bed but our things are exactly as we left them; my bedside table a stilled frame of a moment in my life. Before Jenny, crammed on a smaller bedside table, was a novel – a big classic with tiny print; a packet of Marlboro Lights and a glass of red wine taken up to bed with me. You were horrified by how unhealthy I was and I took no notice of your nagging. With Jenny the classic novel, cigarettes and wine were shoved aside for dummies and cloth books; nowadays I have reading glasses and novels again, newly published, with bright shiny covers and grabbing shoutlines.

You’re outside Adam’s bedroom door.

‘It’s Dad.’