Your familiar long stride has become short steps, as if you’re in unknown, hostile territory.
But when you near my bed you hurry towards me.
You reach my bed and sit down next to me, but you don’t speak.
You don’t speak.
I hurry towards you – talk to me!
‘Grace, my darling,’ you say as I reach you; as if you know when I am really there. Or is it just a coincidence?
You could run a florist’s shop from my bedside table. Only one vaseful is ugly – odourless, thornless, last-minute-shop-bought roses. ‘To Mrs Covey, with all best wishes, from Mr Hyman.’
But you don’t see the flowers, looking only at me.
‘There’s still no news on Jenny’s heart,’ you say. I think I’m the only person you’ve confided in about her lifespan of three weeks. ‘But they’ll find one for her. I know they will.’
‘Lifespan.’ Jesus. How could I use that word? It makes her sound like a tadpole or a mayfly. A punnet of ripen-at-home peaches. Children don’t have a bloody lifespan.
Thinking panicky loud thoughts, loud as I can, to try and drown out the ticking that has started again – faint but audible; a ghastly unstoppable rhythm.
‘Sarah said she’d told you about Addie,’ you say.
I remember Sarah at my bedside.
‘You have the right to know, Grace. You must hate the police for this. I understand that. But I promise you we’ll get it put right.’
She was so awkward with me, not realising how much I like her now.
You were worried that telling me this, on top of Jenny, would sap the remaining life force I have. But Sarah understands that for a mother, when your children are threatened, your life force isn’t sapped but galvanised.
You stand up. Don’t go! But you’re just pulling the flimsy ugly curtains around us, blocking out the bustle of the ward, and somehow, although it contradicts even key-stage-two Science, the noise of the ward seems blocked out too.
You hold my hand.
‘Ads doesn’t want me near him,’ you say.
‘That’s not true. And you need to go to him right now and tell him you know he didn’t do this and be with him. Sarah can stay with Jen for a bit. The detective stuff can wait for a little while, surely.’
You are silent.
‘You’re his father and no one else can be that to him.’
But you can’t hear me, nor can you guess now at what I am saying to you.
You stare at my face, as if staring at it will make my eyes open.
‘We always do this, don’t we, Gracie?’ you say. ‘Talk about Addie or Jen. But I’d like to talk about you and me, just for a few minutes, alright? I’d really like to do that.’
I’m touched. And yes, I’d really like to do that too – change the subject onto us – just for a few minutes.
‘Remember our first date?’ you ask.
Not so much a change of subject as a rewind of twenty years to a safe past. Leaving this white-walled London hospital far behind for a tea shop in Cambridge.
For a little while I’ll let myself join you there.
Pouring with rain outside; inside, fuggy with talk and damp anoraks.
You told me later you thought it would be romantic but some milk must have been spilt and not cleaned up and the rancid smell permeated the fug. The chintzy curtains were designed for tourists. Your hands looked absurdly big around a silly little china cup.
It was your first ‘first date’.
‘The only girl I’d ever asked on a date,’ you say.
You came clean about this amongst the chintz and the china.
Later I found out that usually you just went home with a girl after a party and sometimes would find her still there the next morning under your hideous duvet – I think Sarah chose the cover in the hope of it acting as a contraceptive device. If you liked the girl it stayed that way for a while. Nice things just happened to you – pretty girls ending up under your ugly duvet.
‘I courted you,’ you say.
We talked about attraction.
You, a scientist (what was I doing with a Nat Sci?), were all pheromones and biological imperatives while I was all coy mistresses and eyebeams threading on a double string. ‘You thought Marvell was a comic.’
‘You quoted something about a man spending a century admiring each bosom and I got the hint.’
In that prim little tea shop you told me that you were desperate to be away from the confines of university and ‘out there doing stuff ’.
I didn’t know anyone who used the word ‘stuff’. I’d done a year of Art History and then a term of an English degree and had never once used the word. My friends were all black-clothed, earnest arts students with a thesaurus for a vocabulary.
I liked the word ‘stuff’. And I liked it that you weren’t pale with cheekbones studying Kant but were muscular and robust and wanted to be mountaineering and canoeing and white-water rafting and abseiling and bivouacking the world rather than reading and philosophising about it.
‘I liked the climbing-a-volcano thing,’ I say. ‘Mad, but kind of mad in an attractive way.’
‘I wanted to impress you. You were so fucking beautiful.’
‘Thanks so much.’
‘Sorry. Are so fucking beautiful.’
As if you’d heard me but it’s just a verbal fluke, isn’t it?
‘You had two Chelsea buns,’ you say. You remember that? ‘And I liked it that you ate so much.’
I didn’t want you to guess that I was nervous so I ate to prove that I was cool about this.
‘It rained.’
Lashing against the ditzy little windowpanes, and the sound was wonderful.
‘I’d brought an umbrella.’
You asked if you could walk me home.
‘I knew we’d have to get close.’
I spotted your bike and you looked annoyed that I noticed it.
‘That bloody bike. Should have locked it round the corner.’
You walked me back to Newnham through the rain, pushing your bicycle on the road with one hand, but staying on the pavement next to me with your other hand holding the umbrella.
‘I couldn’t touch you at all.’
The first night we spent together – two weeks later, me not being a coy mistress – we reran our first date, creating our own mythology. But that was years and years ago and we should be talking about our children now. And we both know that. And we will, in a few moments. They are with us all the time. But there is a tiny glimmer of happiness here in the time before them, and we want to hold it a little while longer. Just a little while longer. So I carry on walking next to you through the bitterly cold Fen rain, your stride so much longer than mine, wondering what will happen when we reach Newnham.
But of course I know what happened.
You wanted a second date that very evening, ignoring Marvell completely, and I danced – danced!, an absurd robotic thing that made people stare – the entire way down the second longest corridor in Europe.
The memory pulls me towards you until I reach you right here and now in this room; somehow closer than before. This close to you, I can feel your brave optimism for Jenny go into me; making love with courageous hope.
And as you hold me tightly, I too believe that Jenny will get better.
She will get better.
The curtains are abruptly pulled back and Dr Bailstrom is there.
‘Can you come for the meeting now?’ she asks you.
‘I’ll be back a little later, my darling,’ you say to me; telling Dr Bailstrom that I can hear and understand.
I get to the door of the Dr Bailstrom’s office where the medical staff are waiting and imagine her putting on a black hat before reading out my fate. I think she’d like the dressing-up aspect. But if I have the language to form a sarky sentence about Dr Bailstrom then I’m clearly not a cabbage – why did a cabbage get chosen? – so no need for her to have a black hat.
I am on the ball, switched on, marbles still there, compos mentis. The same Grace I was yesterday. But somehow I’ve become split from myself.
In our conversation when this is over, you’ll tell me that this splitting in two idea is ‘total bollocks, Gracie!’ But that’s because you abseil and bivouac through life rather than learn about it second-hand. Because if you’d read more and climbed up mountains less, you’d know about Cartesian dualism, and ids and egos, and body versus soul. You’d know about a whole strand of literature called ‘the divided self’. Really. So I’ll remind you, as you scoff, of the fairy tales you read Jenny when she was little – princesses dancing in the fairy world every night and frogs really being princes and girls turning into swans. If you’re really unlucky, I’ll start quoting Hamlet: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy.’
You’ll hold your hands up, enough! But I’ll ignore you.
The visible world isn’t the only world and the writers of fairy tales and ghost stories, mystics and philosophers, have known that for centuries. Jenny unconscious in her bed and me in mine isn’t who we really are; the only way that it is.
I should join you now.
Instead of imagining a black hat on Dr Bailstrom’s head, I will look at her feet and think of Dorothy’s ruby shoes. You never know, Dr Bailstrom might click hers together and I’ll return to the real world again.
I’m sorry, that was flippant. You know I tend to take the air out of big moments. The thing is, I will be with you and Addie again. Because Jenny is going to get better, so I’ll be free to get back into my body and wake up.
But when I was inside my body I couldn’t do anything. Nothing at all. ‘Banish that thought this minute!’ Nanny Voice says. ‘No houseroom for negativity in here!’ And she’s right. I just wasn’t ready. But I will join you again.
I’ve never seen you look slight before. But in here, outnumbered by doctors, you look hollowed out. Dr Bailstrom doesn’t fully look at you as she speaks.
‘We have run a series of tests, Mike. Many of them are repeats of the ones we did yesterday.’
Is she using your first name to be friendly, or because ‘Mr Covey’ would underline your connection to me, ‘Mrs Covey’, and she’d rather not major on that right now?
‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to start preparing yourself for Grace never regaining consciousness.’
‘No, you’re wrong,’ you say.
Of course she’s wrong! The very fact I know that demonstrates it. And the thinking, feeling part of me will rejoin my body and I will wake up.
‘I know it’s a lot to take in right now,’ Dr Bailstrom continues. ‘But she shows only the basic responses of gagging and breathing. And we don’t think there will be any improvement.’
You shake your head, refusing to allow the information entry.
‘What my colleague is saying,’ interjects an older doctor, ‘is that the damage to your wife’s brain means that she can’t speak or see or hear. Nor can she think or feel. That is what is meant by cognitive function. And she won’t get better. She won’t wake up.’
He’s obviously a graduate from the sock-it-to-them-straight school of medicine. And totally-bloody-wrong school of medicine.
‘What about those new scans?’ you say. ‘People who’d been written off as cabbages were told to imagine playing tennis for yes, and the brain scan then picked it up.’
I’d heard it in one of my Radio 4 car journeys and told you about it as a snippet of interesting information. I’d liked the idea of imagining playing tennis for yes. A smash, I’d imagined, or an ace serve. Such a positive and vigorous yes. I’d wondered if it mattered if you’re useless at tennis and can, in all honesty, only visualise hitting the ball into the net, or pathetically limping it over. Will they think that’s a ‘don’t know’ answer?
‘We will try all the tests there are,’ the doctor says, irked. ‘We have already put her through many. But I need to be honest with you here. The bottom line is that she isn’t going to get better.’
‘You just don’t get it, do you?’ I say. ‘The mother thing.’
‘In simple terms, all our scans show massive and irreparable trauma to her brain.’
‘My son needs me. It’s not just the big stuff; the proving that he’s innocent. In the mornings, I help him design an imaginary shield to put over his heart so it won’t hurt so much if people are mean to him.’
‘Her brain tissue is too damaged to mend.’
‘And some evenings he’ll only be able to get to sleep if he holds my hand.’
‘There’s nothing we can do. I’m sorry.’
‘But all of that could be bullshit, right?’ says a voice in the doorway. For a second I think it’s my nanny voice bossing someone else for a change, though she’s never said bullshit. I turn to see Sarah. I’ve never heard her say bullshit either.
She comes into the room. Behind her is my mother. Both of them have clearly heard the doctors.
‘Dr Sandhu is with Jenny,’ Sarah says to you. ‘He’s promised not to leave her for a second.’
And you no longer look slight because Sarah is with you.
‘Sarah Covey. Mike’s sister,’ Sarah announces. ‘This is Grace’s mother, Georgina Jestopheson. There have been patients who have woken up from comas after years, haven’t there? With “cognitive function”?’
The sock-it-to-them doctor is unabashed. ‘Yes, there are occasionally stories in the press about such cases, but on closer scrutiny you’ll see they are different medically.’
‘And what about stem-cell therapy?’ you ask. ‘Growing new neurons or what-have-you?’
You’re still grabbing at information half heard on the news driving home or skimmed over in the Sunday papers.
But I’m holding onto it too – imagining heavy lifting equipment heaving that wrecked ship of a body off the ocean floor; the rust being scraped from my eyes.
‘There’s no proof that any of these therapies will work. They’ve mainly been used on patients suffering from degenerative disease, such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, rather than on massive trauma.’
He turns from Sarah to you. ‘You must want to know how long her state will continue this way. The answer is that it can last a very long time. There’s no reason why your wife should die. She’s breathing for herself and we are feeding her through a tube, which we will continue to do. So this state can go on indefinitely. But I’m not sure that it qualifies as living in the way we think of it. And although now it seems a relief that she’s not going to die, it can have its own particular problems for the family.’
Now that I am a long-term burden I’m ‘your wife’, underscoring your onerous responsibility.
‘Are you talking about a court order for withdrawing food and fluid?’ Sarah asks, and I think if a tiger was reincarnated as a police officer she would look like Sarah.
‘Of course not,’ Dr Bailstrom says. ‘It’s early days and would be premature to-’
‘But that’s where you’re headed?’ Sarah interrupts; prowling around her, growling.
‘A lawyer?’ she asks.
‘A police officer.’
‘A tigress protecting her brother who she’s been a mother to,’ I add, to try and clarify the situation for him, and loving Sarah for this.
‘We simply want to be straightforward with you,’ the sock-it-to-them doctor continues. ‘In time, yes, there may be a conversation about whether it’s in Grace’s best interests-’
Sarah interrupts again. ‘Enough of this. I agree with my brother that Grace can think and hear. But that’s not the point.’ She pauses then drops a word at a time into the silent pool that this room has become.
‘She. Is. ALIVE.’
Realising he’s met more than his match in Sarah, the doctor turns back to you. I see that Jenny has slipped in.
‘Mr Covey, I think-’
‘She’s more intelligent than the lot of you,’ you say, interrupting while I cringe – they are consultant neurologists, darling, brain surgeons. You take no notice. ‘Knows about books, paintings, all sorts of stuff; interested in everything. She doesn’t see how clever she is but she’s the brightest person I’ve ever met.’
‘What goes on in that head of yours?’ you’d asked me, a year into our romance, with admiration and affection. While you had wide open prairies in your head, I had libraries and galleries, stuffed full.
‘It doesn’t all just disappear,’ you continue. ‘All those thoughts she has and feelings and knowledge; all that kindness and warmth and funniness. It can’t just go.’
‘Mr Covey, as neurologists, we-’
‘You’re scientists. Yes. Did you know that four billion years ago it rained for thousands of years, making the oceans?’
They are listening politely; they’ll allow you this time to go mentally AWOL after devastating news. But I know where you’re going with this. You’d told Addie about it a few months ago; livening up his water-cycle homework.
‘The water that rained down four billion years ago is exactly the same water we have today,’ you continue. ‘It might be frozen into glaciers, or in the clouds, or in rivers or raining. But it’s the same water. And exactly the same amount. No more, but no less. It didn’t go anywhere. It couldn’t.’
Dr Bailstrom taps an impatient red heel, either not getting it or not wanting to try. But I like the idea that I’m a melted bit of glacier joining the ocean; the same but outwardly changed. Or, optimistically, part of a cloud, which will be rained down again, back to where I came from.
‘We will continue to do tests,’ Dr Bailstrom says to you. ‘But there really is no chance that your wife will ever regain consciousness.’
‘You said that she could live for years,’ you say to her. ‘So one day there’ll be a cure. And we’ll just have to wait, for as long as it takes.’
Had we but worlds enough and time.
In time, a cloud rejoins the ocean.
Wait long enough and a dull piece of grit becomes a luminous pearl. I feel it in my hand, round and smooth until it became warm; Adam’s hand in mine as he falls asleep.