Saturday morning. The radio should be going and I should be drinking coffee in bed, which you brought me half an hour ago, but didn’t wake me so it’s tepid now, but I’m glad of it. I should smell bacon and sausages frying downstairs as you prepare your monster breakfast for you and Addie and I’m hoping you’ve remembered to open the kitchen window so our neurotic, overly sensitive heat detector won’t blast out the neighbours and make the guinea pigs bolt around their hutch. Jenny is still slumbering deeply, not hearing the bleeping of a text on her mobile, which has been going off since about eight – clearly a wrong number because none of Jenny’s friends will be up yet either. But soon she’ll arrive, sleepy-eyed, and sit on the end of my bed, bemoaning you not bringing her tea.
‘Tea’s more effort than coffee, Jen.’
‘Tea-bag tea ’ud be fine.’
‘You still have to soak it and then take it out, put it in the bin. Then put in the milk. Dad only does one-step morning drinks.’
She leans back against the pillows, next to me, and tells me who she’s meeting up with this morning and it seems only a blink ago that it was me spending Saturday with friends in preparation for the main event of the evening. How can it be possible that I wake up each morning to find myself a thirty-nine-year-old mother of two? Even before Tara earlier, I sometimes think of myself in tabloid descriptions. I prefer it to be along the lines of ‘Daring bank robbery by thirty-nine-year-old mother of two!’ variety than anything more maudlin.
Jen gives me a kiss and goes ‘to make my own tea’.
Dr Sandhu tells you Jenny is getting weaker; slowly deteriorating, as they’d predicted.
‘Can she still have a transplant?’ you ask.
‘Yes. She’s still strong enough for that. But we don’t know how much longer that will be the case.’
Jenny is waiting for me outside ICU. She doesn’t ask if a heart has been found. Like me, she can now read an expression at ten paces and interpret a silence. Before, I thought the only crushing silence was the one after ‘I love you…’
‘Aunt Sarah’s gone to meet Belinda, that nurse,’ Jenny says.
‘Right.’
‘And she got a text from someone to meet in the cafeteria in half an hour. She looked really pleased. Do you think it could be her man?’
Last time I was jealous of Jen’s closeness to Sarah, but now it’s the other way around. Jen and I don’t talk about this kind of thing at all. I say this kind of thing because even the language is a minefield. For example, ‘sexy’ is old-fashioned and shows I don’t have a clue, but ‘hot’ is embarrassing for someone as old as me (a thirty-nine-year-old mother of two). Actually no, it isn’t a minefield to be negotiated, the entire area is off-limits; each generation linguistically roping it off for themselves. But somehow Sarah’s been allowed in.
But that doesn’t mean I see having sex as a rite of passage to becoming an adult. If anything, I think it’s sometimes the reverse. You tease me for being a hypocrite. It’s me who wants to use the creative ‘making love’ term rather than the acquisitive ‘having sex’. But I have to break off this little cul-de-sac of a conversation because we’ve caught up with Sarah who’s striding briskly down the corridor.
Belinda, spruce in her nurse’s uniform, goes through Maisie’s notes with Sarah.
‘She had a cracked wrist, last winter,’ Belinda says. ‘She said she slipped over on an icy doorstep.’
‘Any reason for the doctors or nurses looking after her to be suspicious?’
‘No. A &E gets filled with broken arms and legs when it’s icy. And then at the beginning of March this year there’s this.’
I read, with Sarah, the notes about Maisie being admitted unconscious to hospital with two broken ribs and a fractured skull. She’d said she’d fallen down the stairs. After being discharged from hospital two weeks later she had failed to keep any of her outpatient appointments.
I’d tried to ring her during that time, but had only got her voicemail. Later she said Donald had treated her to a spa break. I’d thought it an odd thing for her to do and when I’d asked her about it she’d seemed embarrassed. I’d thought it hadn’t been a success.
There’s nothing else in Maisie’s records. She hadn’t shown any doctors her bruised cheek, nor the bruises on her arm the day of the fire, hidden under her long FUN sleeves.
Belinda gets out Rowena’s notes, but it’s clear she’s already read them; her normally smiley face is upset.
‘She had a significant burn to her leg last year. She said she dropped an iron on it and the burn mark suggested an iron.’
I remember Donald’s lighted cigarette and Adam cowering away.
Was Rowena’s scar the reason she was wearing long trousers on sports day? I’d thought she was just being more sensibly dressed than Jenny.
‘Anything else?’ Sarah asks.
‘No. Unless they went to another hospital. It sometimes happens. Communication between hospitals isn’t as efficient as it should be.’
‘I’d like you to tell me if Donald White comes to visit again,’ Sarah says. ‘I don’t want him to have unsupervised access.’
Belinda nods. She meets Sarah’s eye.
‘There’s nothing I can do until one of them reports it,’ Sarah says with frustration.
‘You’ll encourage them to?’
‘Let’s get them both to a state where that’s an option. Get Rowena back on her feet and out of here first. I don’t want to ask them to do anything while they’re so vulnerable. For a start, if you get that kind of decision now they could well go back on it.’
Sarah joins Mohsin in the hospital cafeteria. His caramel-coloured face is tired; shadows under his eyes.
‘Is that him?’ Jenny asks.
‘No. Her lover’s younger and more gorgeous,’ I say.
She doesn’t even flinch when I say the embarrassing word ‘lover’, but instead smiles.
‘Good for her.’
Sarah and Mohsin’s heads are bent close together; old confidantes. We go to join them.
‘It looks like domestic abuse to both mum and daughter,’ Sarah is saying.
‘We’ve got nothing on him,’ Mohsin says. ‘One speeding ticket, issued last year, sum total.’
‘According to the head teacher’s transcript, Rowena White was going to be the school nurse on sports day,’ Sarah says. ‘They only changed their mind and swapped to Jenny last Thursday.’
‘You think he was trying to hurt his daughter?’ Mohsin asks, clearly thinking along the same lines as Jenny had earlier.
‘It’s possible,’ Sarah replies. ‘Maybe he believed Rowena was still the school nurse. Maybe no one told him about the substitution. Can you find Maisie and Rowena White’s medical notes at other hospitals? See if there was anything we’ve missed?’
He nods.
‘What about the investors at Sidley House?’ she asks.
‘There are a couple of small fry. Venture capitalists who invested in a number of similar projects; legit business people. Another investor, the largest one, is the Whitehall Park Road Trust Company.’
‘Do you know who that’s owned by?’
He shakes his head. ‘It could be one case of nasty domestic violence,’ he says, carefully. ‘And another case of malicious mail. And another of arson. All three completely separate.’
‘There’s a connection. I’m sure there is.’
‘Go into any institution – including a school – and you’d probably find an instance of domestic violence. And another of bullying, not to the malicious-mail level like Jenny had, but you’d find something cruel going on in the classroom or staffroom or cyber-bullying.’
‘And Jenny being attacked?’
Mohsin turns fractionally away.
‘You still don’t believe it?’ Sarah asks.
Mohsin is silent. Sarah studies him.
‘So what do you think?’
‘I think I need to set your mind at rest.’
‘Well, that’s more than anyone else is doing, so thank you.’
They are not used to this awkwardness.
He takes her hand, gives it a squeeze.
‘Poor Tim’s grieving for you.’
‘It wasn’t -’ She hesitates. ‘Appropriate, any more. I should get back to Mike.’
Almost before they’ve gone the cleaner sprays the table with something pungent.
Can you be homesick for a table? Because I’m overwhelmed with yearning for our old wooden table in the kitchen at home, with Adam’s knight figures at one end, yesterday’s newspaper at the other, someone’s jacket or jumper draped over a chair. I know, I used to get irritated by ‘the mess!’ and demand people ‘tidy up after themselves!’ Now I long for a messy life, not one devastated and transferred to an overly organised world of slick shiny surfaces.
I see that Jenny’s eyes are closed, that she’s very still.
The cleaning fluid is still pungent on the Formica table.
‘I went into the school kitchen,’ she says. ‘They’d cleaned it all up. And it was steamy because the dishwashers had been running.’
In here there’s steam from newly washed cups and saucers being placed on a rack by the coffee machine.
‘I was feeling kind of excited,’ Jenny continues, ‘about going outside.’
I’m monitoring this closely, I won’t let her get too far along the memory corridor; won’t let her go through the last set of doors – or anywhere near them.
‘I got two bottles of water out of the kitchen,’ Jenny continues. ‘The really big heavy bottles with the carry handles? It was my job to bring out extra water at the end of sports day in case they didn’t have enough. The plastic handles are too narrow and they dig into my hands. I take them up those narrow steps, you know, the exit by the kitchen?’
Then she stops and shakes her head.
‘That’s it. I was going out of the school, definitely out. But I don’t know what happened then.’
‘The water bottles were outside at the side of the school, on that gravelly bit by the kitchen exit,’ I say, remembering that Rowena had used one to soak her towel before going in.
‘But why did I go back inside again?’ Jenny asks.
‘Maybe to help?’
‘But the reception children all got out fine, didn’t they? And Tilly? Everyone got out.’
I don’t know what to say.
‘Maybe that’s when I lost my phone,’ she says. ‘When I bent to put the water down. It was in that little pocket at the top of my red skirt. It’s fallen out before.’
‘Yes.’
‘You should go and see what Aunt Sarah’s up to,’ she says. ‘I’ll stay here if that’s OK. It’s the only place that’s halfway normal.’
‘You won’t try to remember any more, will you?’
‘Mum…’
‘Not without me. Please.’
‘OK.’
I leave Jenny in the cafeteria and go to ICU.
Ivo is standing in the corridor. Just seeing his narrow back-view and trendy haircut brings vivid memories of Jenny, a whole dimension of her that has been left behind since the fire – the exuberant, energetic teenager with joie de vivre and passionate good humour; Jenny walking on air. And a kind of helplessness as she fell in love, so trusting of Ivo to catch her.
He hasn’t gone to her bedside but neither has he run away.
I go closer. His face is white as he looks at her through the glass wall; tremors are coursing through his body and I see a boy lying on a pavement being beaten and kicked and punched.
I feel overwhelming pity for him.
Sarah is with him.
‘I spoke to her on Wednesday,’ he says. ‘And she sounded just like usual. Happy. And then we texted each other. The last one, from me, she must have got at just after three, her time.’
He turns away from looking at Jenny. ‘Will you tell me what’s happening?’
‘She’s very badly injured. Her heart failed yesterday. She needs a transplant to stay alive. Without one, she’ll only live for a few more weeks.’
Sarah’s words kick him over and over again.
‘I’m sorry,’ Sarah says.
I think he’ll ask if she’ll be disfigured; if Sarah will tell him that we don’t know yet. He’s silent.
‘It was arson,’ she says. ‘We don’t know if someone deliberately targeted Jenny. Possibly it’s connected to the malicious mail. Do you know anything?’
‘No. She hadn’t got any idea who it was.’
His voice is quiet and shaken.
I see you leaving Jenny’s bedside and coming out into the corridor, but they haven’t yet seen you.
‘Someone threw red paint at her,’ Ivo says. ‘She phoned me. Said she’d had to get a friend to cut her hair. The paint wouldn’t come out. She was crying.’
Sarah jumps on this. ‘Did she see who it was?’
‘No. It was from behind.’
‘Any description at all?’
‘No.’
‘When was this, Ivo?’
‘About eight weeks ago.’
‘Do you know where it happened?’
‘In Hammersmith shopping arcade, just by Primark. She thought he must have run into a shop or a side exit to the street straight afterwards. She said a woman was screaming because she thought it was blood on her.’
I see you grappling with the information, no corner of your mind free to store anything else, but it’s forcing its way inside.
‘I should have made her go to the police,’ Ivo says. ‘If I had-’
‘I’m the police, Ivo,’ Sarah says. ‘No, look at me. Please. She should have felt that she could come to me. I’m her aunt and I love her. But she didn’t. And that’s my responsibility. Not yours.’
‘She said her parents would be so upset if they found out. She didn’t want to worry them. Maybe that was true for you too.’
‘Yes. I’d like you to give a statement at the police station to a colleague of mine. I’ll get a car to pick you up and drop you back again so it should be as quick as possible.’
Ivo nods.
Sarah gives him Jenny’s mobile. ‘Can you look through this, see if there are any contacts you don’t recognise? Or messages that seem strange to you? I’ve looked, but I can’t see anything odd.’
He takes it, fingers tightening around it.
‘Shall I look at the phone now?’ Ivo asks. ‘While I wait?’
Like you, he wants to be doing something.
‘Yes.’
Sarah sees you. ‘There was red paint, Mike-’
‘I heard.’
Maybe she expects you to be angry with Ivo. But you aren’t. Is it because you hadn’t gone to the police about the hate mail for two weeks? Your whole body seems caved in and your face gaunt.
‘Why don’t you go and see Adam?’ Sarah says. ‘I can stay here with Jenny for a while now.’
I think Sarah’s realised how much you need Adam, as well as him needing you.
‘Ivo has to give his statement,’ she continues. ‘And I’ve got a few things to read through which I can do here. I’ll call you immediately if there’s anything.’
Ivo comes up, interrupting.
‘I’m not sure if it means anything, but the last text I sent her on Wednesday afternoon has been deleted.’
‘She could have done that,’ Sarah suggests.
‘It was a poem. Not that bad. Even if it was, she wouldn’t have deleted it.’
‘Jenny’s phone was found on the gravel just outside the school,’ Sarah says. ‘Anyone could have tampered with it.’
‘But why would someone want to delete my message?’ Ivo asks.
‘I don’t know,’ Sarah says.
‘Have you found out yet why it was outside?’ you ask.
‘No. Not yet. And we couldn’t get prints because it’s been handled by the reception teacher and Maisie.’
‘Should I wait here for the ride to the police station, or down in the foyer bit?’ Ivo asks.
He still hasn’t gone to Jenny’s bedside.
I think he’s relieved for the opportunity to be away from her.
I find Jenny in the goldfish-bowl atrium, people swarming past her. Does she feel like she has a stronger handhold on life to be amongst so much of it? Or perhaps she’s waiting for Ivo, not knowing he’s already here and in ICU. ‘You should have told me. I had a right to know.’
‘Ivo’s here.’ I say. ‘He’s in ICU with Dad and Aunt Sarah.’
‘I don’t want to see him,’ she says, her voice quiet.
Yesterday she wasn’t excited about him coming. Perhaps she’s realised that their relationship is based on physical beauty. She’s so vulnerable and I’m glad she’s protecting herself from rejection and further hurt.
I don’t tell her that he stared at her through the glass and was tortured by what he saw.
I don’t tell her that he didn’t go any nearer.
‘He’s told Aunt Sarah about the red paint,’ I say instead. ‘He also said that he sent you a text at three, but it’s deleted.’
‘But I never delete his texts.’
‘Maybe someone did that after you dropped your phone.’
‘But why?’
‘I don’t know. He’s going to the police station to give a statement.’
‘So he’ll come through here?’ Her voice is panicked. She turns and hurries away from the atrium.
I go after her.
‘How many people know your mobile number, Jen?’
‘Loads.’
‘I don’t mean friends, I mean, well, people at the school, for example?’
‘Everyone. It was written up on a notice board in the staffroom for teachers to put into their own mobiles. They were meant to call me if they needed anything from the sick-room during sports day.’
She hurries on, fleeing from the possibility of seeing Ivo.
But I stand still a moment, feeling frustration as a physical force. I have to talk to Sarah.
She needs to know that Jenny was outside the school, but then went back in. Something or someone must have persuaded her; or made her. Could it have been a text? And could the person who sent it have deleted it, and deleted Ivo’s too in their haste?