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.
As he cries I stroke his soft silky hair and I tell him over and over and over that it’s alright, that I love him, not to cry. But he still can’t hear me and I can’t bear it a moment longer and I have to wake up for him.
I fight my way into my body, through layers of flesh and muscle and bone. And suddenly I’m here. Inside.
I struggle to move this heavy hulk of a body, but I’m again trapped under the hull of a ship wrecked on the ocean floor and moving is impossible.
But Adam is out there crying for me and I have to open my eyes for him. Have to. But my eyelids are locked shut and rusting over.
A fragment of a poem echoes in the darkness.
A soul hung up, as ’twere, in chains
Of nerves, and arteries, and veins,
I’ve left Jenny on her own. Oh God. What if I can’t get out again?
I hear the panic in my heartbeat.
Deaf with the drumming of an ear.
But I can escape my body easily, just slipping out into the dark ocean and then struggling upwards towards the light.
Mum is putting her arm around Adam, magicking a smile onto her face for him, making her voice sound cheerful.
‘We’ll come back later, alright, my little man? We’ll go home now, then when you’ve had a bit of a rest, we can come back.’
And she’s mothering me by mothering my child.
She leads him away.
A few minutes later Jenny joins me.
‘Have you tried getting back into your body?’ I ask her.
She shakes her head. I’m an idiot. She can’t even look at her body let alone try to get into it. I want to say sorry but I think that would just make it worse. Klutz! A Jenny word.
She doesn’t ask me if I’ve tried getting back in. I think it’s because she’s afraid of the answer – either that I couldn’t; or that I could, but it made no difference.
No difference at all.
That ghastly poem I’d once thought so clever echoes still in our silence.
… with bolts of bones, that fettered stand
In feet, and manacled in hands.
‘Mum?’
‘I was thinking about the metaphysical poets.’
‘God, you really still want me to do retakes?’
I smile at her. ‘Absolutely.’
You’re having a meeting with Sarah’s boss in an office downstairs. We go to join you.
‘Aunt Sarah’s normal boss is on maternity leave,’ Jenny says. ‘Rosemary, remember, the really quirky one?’
I don’t remember Rosemary-the-really-quirky-one. I’ve never heard of a Rosemary.
‘Aunt Sarah loathes this guy, Baker. Thinks he’s an idiot,’ Jenny continues. She’s been fascinated by the flashing-lights-and-sirens side of Sarah’s police life since she was six years old. And I get that. How can my part-time job writing an arts review page in the Richmond Post compete with being a detective sergeant in the Met? What film, book or exhibition is going to out-cool directing a helicopter during a drugs bust? Bust. You may as well throw in the towel at the start on that one. But joking about fellow workers, that’s what Jenny and I do. OK, so Sarah didn’t joke to Jenny about quirky-Rosemary and Baker, whoever he is, but she clearly tells her the gossip.
We reach the office they’ve allocated for this meeting at the same time as you and Sarah.
Why on earth are you holding a newspaper? I know that I have a go at you at the weekends for reading the papers rather than engaging with the family, and we’ve done the whole ‘It’s the caveman looking into the fire to have time to let the week settle’ thing. But now? Here?
We follow you and Sarah in. The ceiling is too low, trapping the heat. There’s no window. Not even a fan to shift the stale heavy air around.
Detective Inspector Baker introduces himself to you without getting up from the chair. His sweaty, doughy face is unreadable.
‘I want to fill you in on a little of the background to our investigation,’ DI Baker says, his voice as stodgy as his physique. ‘Arson in schools is extremely common. Sixteen cases a week in the UK. But people getting hurt in arson attacks on schools is not common. Nor is it common for fires to be started during the daytime.’
You’re getting irritated – get to the point, man.
‘The arsonist may have thought that the school would be empty because it was sports day,’ DI Baker continues. ‘Or it may have been a deliberate attempt to hurt one of the occupants.’
He leans forward, his sweaty polyester shirt sticking slightly to the back of his plastic chair.
‘Do you know of anyone who may have wished to harm Jennifer?’
‘Of course not,’ you snap.
‘That’s ridiculous,’ Jenny says to me, a shake in her voice. ‘It was just a fluke I was in there, Mum. Pure chance, that’s all.’
I think of that figure last night, going into her room, leaning over her.
‘She’s a seventeen-year-old girl, for fuck’s sake,’ you say.
Your sister tightens her hand on yours.
‘For fuck’s sake!’ you repeat. You never use that word in your sister’s hearing, or your children’s.
‘She was the victim of a hate-mail campaign, wasn’t she?’ DI Baker asks you, an edge now to his bland voice.
‘But that stopped,’ you said. ‘Months ago. It’s not connected. It has nothing to do with the fire.’
Beside me, Jenny has become rigid.
She never told us how she felt when she was called slut, tart, jailbait and worse. Or when dog mess and used condoms were posted through our letterbox addressed to her. Instead she turned to Ivo and her friends, excluding us.
‘She’s seventeen now, darling, of course she turns to them.’
You were so infuriatingly understanding, so ‘I’ve-read-the-manuals-on-teenagers’ rational.
‘But we’re her
‘There’s been nothing for almost five months,’ you tell DI Baker. ‘It’s all over.’
DI Baker flicks through some notes in front of him as if finding evidence to disagree with you.
I remember how desperate we were for it to be over. Those awful things that were said to her. It was shocking. Grotesque. The ugly, vicious world had come crashing through our letterbox and into our daughter’s life. And, this I think is key, you hadn’t kept it at bay. You thought you hadn’t done your job as her father and protected her.
Those hours you spent looking at the pieces of A4 lined paper, trying to trace the origin of the cut-out letters – which newspaper? Which magazine? Studying postmarks on the ones that had been posted, agonising over the meaning of the ones that had been hand-delivered – he’d been here, right outside our door, for God’s sake, and you hadn’t got him.
I’d understood after a little while that you wanted to be the person who caught him and made him stop. To make amends to Jenny or to prove something to yourself? I thought it was both enmeshed together.
Then two weeks after – two weeks Mike – the day the hand-delivered envelope with the used condom arrived, you told Sarah. As you’d predicted, she told us we must go to the police – and why the hell hadn’t we done that to start with? We duly did as she said but, as you’d also predicted, the police – apart from Sarah – didn’t consider it important. Well, not as important as it was to you and me. Not life-stoppingly important. And they didn’t find out anything. It wasn’t as if we could help them; we had no idea who might target Jenny like that or why.
Poor Jen. So furious and mortified when the police interviewed her friends and boyfriend. The teenage paranoia that adults disapprove of their choices taken to an extreme.
But you’d already interrogated most of them, grabbing them as Jenny tried to hurry them past us and up to her room. Those long-limbed, long-haired, silly girls seemed unlikely hate-mailers. But what about one of the boys who were friends with her? Did one harbour hatred? Unreturned love turning acrid and spreading across venomous letters?
And Ivo. I’ve always been suspicious of him – not as a hate-mailer but as a man. Boy. Maybe because he’s so different to you, with his slight frame and fine features and his preference at seventeen for Auden over car engine manuals. I think he lacks substance. But you disagree. You think he’s a fine fella; a great lad. Possibly because you don’t want to be a clichéd possessive father? Because you don’t want to alienate Jenny? But whatever our reasons, you support Jenny over Ivo, while I jibe.
Though even with my prejudices against him, I don’t think he’d send her hate mail. Besides, he’s her boyfriend, and she adores him, so why would he?
‘When, exactly, was the last incident?’ DI Baker asks you.
‘February the fourteenth,’ you reply. ‘Months ago.’
Valentine’s day. A Wednesday. Adam worried about his times-tables challenge; Jenny late down to breakfast as usual. But we’d been up for an hour already, waiting for the sound of the letterbox. Just the click of metal shutting made me feel physically sick.
It was the letter with the C word across it. I can’t say that word in connection with her. I just can’t.
But the day after that letter there was nothing. Then a whole week went by with no hate mail. Then a fortnight. Until over four months had passed, so that yesterday I picked up the post hardly bothering to check.
‘You’re sure there’s been nothing since the fourteenth of February?’ DI Baker asks.
‘Yes. I told you-’
He interrupts you. ‘Could she have hidden something from you?’
‘No, of course not,’ you say, frustrated. ‘The fire is nothing to do with the hate-mailer. Presumably you haven’t seen this yet?’
You slap the newspaper you’re holding in front of DI Baker. The Richmond Post. The headline shouts out: ‘Arsonist Sets Fire to Local Primary School!’
The by-line is Tara’s.
DI Baker ignores your newspaper.
‘Were there any other forms of hate mail that you didn’t tell us about?’ he continues. ‘Texts on her mobile, for example, or emails, or postings on a social networking site?’
You glare at him.
‘I asked Jenny and there was nothing like that,’ Sarah says.
You’re pacing the office now; five paces from one wall to the other, as if you can outpace whatever is hunting you down.
‘Would she have told you?’ asks DI Baker.
‘She would have told me, or her parents, yes,’ Sarah replies.
But we hadn’t just taken her word for it. We searched; you breaking every rule in the bringing-up-teenagers book, me being a normal mother.
‘MySpace? Facebook?’ DI Baker asks as if we don’t know what ‘social networking site’ means, but you interrupt.
‘The hate-mailer had nothing to do with it. Christ, how many more times?’ You jab at the newspaper. ‘It’s this teacher, Silas Hyman, you should be investigating.’
‘We haven’t read the paper, Mike,’ Sarah says. ‘We’ll read it if you’ll give us a minute.’
She must be humouring you, I think. After all, what on earth could Tara know about the fire that she – a policewoman and your sister – doesn’t?
The picture of the burnt-out school dominates the front page, the oddly undamaged bronze statue of a child in the foreground. Under it is a picture of Jenny.
‘It’s from my Facebook page,’ Jenny says, looking at her photo. ‘The one Ivo took at Easter, when we did that canoeing course. I can’t believe she’s done that. She must have gone onto my site and then just printed it off, or scanned it. Isn’t that theft?’
I love her outrage. Out of all of this, to mind about her photo being used.
But the contrast between our daughter in the burns unit and that outdoorsy, healthy, beautiful girl in the photo is cuttingly painful.
Maybe Jenny feels it too. She goes to the door.
‘The hate-mailer didn’t do it and Dad’s idea that Silas Hyman did it is completely ridiculous and I’m going for a walk.’
‘OK.’
‘I wasn’t asking permission!’ she snaps. And then she leaves. Just the word ‘hate-mailer’ pushing those old buttons again.
Just after she’s gone, Sarah opens the paper out to show a double-page spread, with a banner headline across both pages.
‘Jinxed School.’
On the left-hand page is the sub-headline, ‘Fire Started Deliberately’, and another photograph of this ‘popular and beautiful’ girl.
Tara has turned Jenny’s torment into private entertainment. ‘Beautiful seventeen-year-old… fighting for her life… horribly burnt… severely mutilated.’ Not news, but prurient news-as-porn; titillating garbage.
Tara makes me out as a kind of superhero-mum racing into the flames. But a rather tardy superhero, arriving too late in the day to save the beautiful heroine.
Tara finishes with a flourish.
‘The police are continuing their urgent hunt for the person responsible for arson, and possibly a double murder.’
Jenny and my deaths would add more cachet to her story.
Directly opposite, on page 2, Tara’s just rehashed an article she’d written in March, adding a new intro.
Only four months ago, the Richmond Post reported on Silas Hyman, 30, a teacher at Sidley House Preparatory School who was fired after a child was seriously injured. The seven-year-old boy broke both his legs after plunging from an outside metal fire escape onto the playground below in an alleged ‘accident’.
Just as she had the first time, she doesn’t say that Mr Hyman was nowhere near the playground at the time. And those quotation marks around the word ‘accident’ – saying that it wasn’t. But who’s going to sue her over quotation marks? Slippery as her patent leather Miu Miu bag.
And still her bid for journalistic glory, measured in column inches, continues.
Situated in a leafy London suburb, the exclusive £12,500-a-year school, founded thirteen years ago, is marketed as a nurturing environment where ‘every child is celebrated and valued’. But even four months ago questions were being asked about its safety.
I interviewed parents at the time.
A mother of an eight-year-old girl told me, ‘This is supposed to be a caring school, but this man clearly didn’t look after the children. We are thinking about taking our daughter away.’
Another parent told me, ‘I am very angry. An accident like this just shouldn’t be allowed to happen. It’s totally unacceptable.’
In March Tara had titled her article ‘Playground Plunge!’ but now she’s changed it to ‘Teacher Fired!’
So on the right-hand side of the newspaper is ‘Teacher Fired’ and on the left-hand side is ‘Fire Started Deliberately’. And the connection crackles between them, an invisible circuit of blame – the fired teacher exacting his fiery revenge.
DI Baker’s mobile goes and he answers it.
The Richmond Post lies on the table, like a challenge thrown into the ring – your Silas Hyman contender for arsonist versus DI Baker’s hate-mailer.
I know that you’ve never liked Mr Hyman. Before he was fired we’d had weeks of sniping over him. You thought I totally over-exaggerated Mr Hyman’s effect on Addie.
‘“Exaggerated” doesn’t need “totally” and “over” added to it,’ I said frostily.
‘Not all of us did an English degree,’ you replied, stung.
‘Only
Mr Hyman made us fight. And we don’t normally fight.
‘Before Mr Hyman, Addie was miserable,’ I said. ‘Don’t you remember?’
He was picked on, couldn’t do the work, had virtually no self-esteem.
‘So he’s come through that,’ you said.
‘Yes, because of Mr Hyman. He’s sorted out who he sits next to, worked out the boys who are likely to become his friends, and they are now. They’re asking him on playdates. He’s got a sleepover this weekend. When’s he ever had one of those? And he organises who the children sit next to on the coach when they go on trips. Addie used to dread no one sitting next to him. And he’s got him confident in Maths and English.’
‘He’s just doing his job.’
‘He calls Addie “Sir Covey”. That’s lovely, isn’t it? A knight’s name?’
‘It’ll probably make the other kids tease him.’
‘No, he’s got pet names for all of them.’
Why didn’t you appreciate him more?
An attractive young teacher with a sparkle in his eyes, I’d wondered if your antagonism towards him was because he’d kissed me on the cheek when we went to parents’ evening in the first term. ‘Totally inappropriate!’ you’d said, not realising that Mr Hyman is just very physical – tousling the children’s hair as he passes them at their desks, a quick warm hug at going-home time. And yes, us mothers did smile a little about him, but not in a serious way.
Then when Mr Hyman was fired and I came home that day and was outraged on his behalf, you just seemed irritated. You said you paid the school fees, worked bloody hard to do that, and before you set off for a gruelling trip the next day you didn’t want to hear about some inadequate teacher who’d got himself the sack.
Until yesterday afternoon I’d have argued with you for suspecting him. Like Jenny, I’d have said it was completely ridiculous! But all my old certainties are burnt to the ground. Nothing is like yesterday any more. So I don’t trust anyone. Not even Mr Hyman. No one at all.
DI Baker stops his phone call and glances at the Richmond Post.
‘One peculiar thing,’ he says to Sarah, ‘is how quickly the press were on the scene of the fire. Before the fire engines even. We’ll need to know who told them, or how they found out. In case that’s relevant.’
You are infuriated by his anodyne off-the-point remark.
‘It’s not only the article,’ you say, but DI Baker’s radio interrupts. He answers it but you continue.
‘I saw him acting violently a few weeks after he was fired. It was at the school prize-giving. He gatecrashed it and made threats. Violent threats.’