Rosamund Lupton - Afterwards

Maisie is coming out of the ladies’ toilets, the alarm sounding, and she sees him as he runs from the Art room.

Adam dashes down the stairs, past the secretary’s office, and out of the main exit.

And the two films collide now because Maisie sees Rowena.

‘I saw Adam coming out of the Art room,’ she says. ‘Oh God, what have you done, Ro?’

And Jenny hears their argument; sees Rowena hit Maisie.

So Rowena tells her that Adam is looking for her up in the medical room.

A single sentence and our family is destroyed.

Because Jenny goes up to the third floor, looking for Addie.

She smells smoke, but it’s not too bad, not yet, and maybe she hears flames, but nothing yet to see.

She doesn’t know that the fire is travelling through the wall cavities and ceiling spaces and through vents.

Outside, on the gravel, Rowena has her arm around Adam. Next to them is the statue of herself as a child.

And I think it’s now that Rowena texts Jenny. I think she tells Jenny that Adam is still in the school; to keep her in there. I see her fingers quickly pressing the pads on her mobile.

By the side of the school, near the discarded water bottles, Jenny’s mobile bleeps with a message.

But no one hears.

Because the fire explodes. Flames ricochet along walls; heat tunnels along corridors and through ceiling cavities, punching through into rooms and blowing out the windows and the school is drowning in choking smoke.

On the playing field I see the thick black smoke and start running.

Next to the bronze child Rowena tells Addie that it’s all his fault.

Jenny had opened that fire door into her memory, and it was terrifying. She was shaking violently.

‘I’m in the fire. Addie must be here too. And it’s everywhere, the fire, burning, and…’

I put my arms around her and told her that she was safe now. I helped her to come back to me.

Rowena was still sleeping.

We left her room, neither of us could bear to be near to her now. But we could still see her through the glass in the door.

Her sleeping face looked like the blank slate of a person’s character.

‘Addie was outside all the time, wasn’t he?’ Jenny said. ‘I mean, that’s what Annette’s statement said, and Rowena’s, that he was outside straight away.’

‘Yes.’

They’d both been outside ; for a minute, maybe two, both had been safe .

But Jenny had been by the kitchen exit, at the side of the school.

And then she’d gone back in.

Behind us, the doors to the burns unit opened and there was a sudden frenzy of noise and activity as a trolley with a patient was wheeled in surrounded by medical staff. The lights were up full now and you couldn’t tell if it was night or day. I remembered Jenny being brought here, that first afternoon; the horror of it.

The noise disturbed Rowena. She stirred in her sleep.

‘She planned to kill Addie,’ Jenny said. ‘Must have done.’

I remembered Rowena describing the white spirit and accelerant in the ‘volcano’, and the cans of spray mount stacked up behind. Brilliant at Science, Rowena would know which chemicals explode and burn and poison.

‘It was meant to blow up in his face,’ Jenny said. ‘She must have been terrified when he was OK – then thought it was bloody Christmas when he couldn’t speak.’

‘Yes.’

‘She only had one injury, the burn from an iron. It was an accident, just like she said.’

Jen needed to see this picture in its entirety while I wanted to turn away, but I made myself look at it too.

‘I don’t think her dad ever hurt her before,’ Jenny continued. ‘Just that one time. Because he knew what she’d done to us.’

I remembered back to that scene in Rowena’s room. I remembered Donald grabbing her hands, because he knew. He knew.

‘He realised she’d only gone in to the fire to look good,’ Jenny said.

I remembered Rowena walking towards Donald and his look of hatred and fury. ‘ You disgust me ,’ he’d said.

‘She probably just went as far as the vestibule,’ Jenny continued. ‘Then lay down knowing the firemen were coming. She wanted to make sure no one suspected her.’

‘ Quite the little heroine, aren’t you? ’ Donald had said and his fury was shocking.

I remembered another time, and Maisie’s voice; the sadness in it.

‘ You shouldn’t condemn someone, should you? If you love them, if they’re your family, you have to try and see the good. I mean, that’s what love is in some ways, isn’t it? Believing in someone’s goodness ’.

It was her daughter, not her husband, she’d been protecting all this time.

Had Rowena planned, from the start, to blame her mother?

‘ She texted me a little while ago, said the tubes were up the spout. So Chauffeur-Mum to the fore! ’

I don’t suppose there was anything wrong with the tubes.

Through the glass, I watched Rowena getting out of bed.

‘You need to get better, Jen,’ I said. ‘And then you can tell everyone what you heard and saw.’

She half smiled at me.

‘Good try, Mum. But Addie will tell everyone it was Rowena who made him do it, without any help from me.’

‘But-’

‘It’s just a fluke that Dad still thinks it’s Maisie, not Rowena. But Adam will tell him properly.’

‘Yes, and Dad will believe him. And so will Aunty Sarah, but no one else will. Maisie will have given a full confession by now.’

‘ You know I’d do anything for Rowena ,’ she’d said quietly. ‘ Don’t you, Gracie? ’

‘And if Donald was going to say anything he’d have done so by now.’

‘But the police might still believe Addie,’ Jenny said.

‘They’re not going to believe an eight-year-old against adults. Maybe they might have listened to him at the start. Not now though, when it’s taken him so long.’

‘But they might ,’ she insisted.

‘Oh God.’

‘Mum?’

Thoughts were circling around something so horrible that I couldn’t bear to look at it; but they were getting inexorably closer.

‘Rowena will think that too; that the police might believe him.’

The circling thoughts spiralled downwards into a single memory.

‘ I’d really like to see him, tell him it wasn’t his fault,’ Rowena had said . ‘I mean, he probably won’t want to see me, but I’d really like to .’

Jen shook her head as I told her, as if that would stop it from being true. But she knew that it was.

‘You need to get better,’ I said to her. ‘To make sure Adam is safe.’

And I hated blackmailing her like that. But it was the only way. As I said, the life of your child trumps everything.

‘You can do that,’ she said.

‘I can’t because-’

‘Mum-’

‘Let me finish. Please. OK, let’s say that by some miracle I can speak. Let’s just play that one out – what could I say? I didn’t hear the conversation you heard. I was still at sports day. I can hardly say that we chatted like this, can I? What judge will believe that? I have no proof at all that it was Rowena, not Maisie.

‘But there won’t be any miracles. I believe in a lot of things now that I didn’t before. Fairy stories, ghosts, angels. I think they’re all real now. But I don’t believe I’ll get better.

‘I have no cognitive function, Jen. I’ll never recover from that.’

I didn’t know if that was a white lie or not. I still don’t.

‘I can’t protect him,’ I said. ‘But you can. You can live and give him an adult’s voice.’

In her room, Rowena was disconnecting her drip.

‘Angels, Mum?’ Jenny asked, trying to smile. ‘You think that’s what we are now?’