‘I never thought Maisie White was involved in the fire directly,’ Penny tells Sarah. She’s keeping everyone waiting in the office, but she has to tell Sarah; owes her this.
‘She seemed genuinely distressed by what had happened to Jenny and Grace,’ Penny continues. ‘And was reluctant to tell me it was Adam. I thought I was having to force it out of her.’
‘If I’d known-’ Sarah begins.
‘Yes. I’m sorry. Since we found out about the fraud – you found out – we’ve been questioning the validity of her witness statement, but have been working under the assumption that she was protecting her husband. In retrospect she was playing us. I’m sorry.’
‘I told Maisie that a witness had seen Adam,’ Sarah says. ‘And she was surprised. I thought it meant she had no idea.’
‘A good actress?’ suggests Penny.
Sarah thinks a moment then shakes her head. ‘It’s because I’m a police officer. She thought I would already know it was her who was the witness. She’d have assumed I’d been told. It was my ignorance that surprised her.’
No wonder Maisie had initially seemed so nervous of Sarah that evening in the cafeteria.
Penny goes into the office.
There are so many people in here, making Rowena seem smaller. She is staring at the shiny carpet-tiles, not looking up.
‘You told one of my officers earlier that your mother knew you were going to go bankrupt?’ Baker says.
‘Yes.’
‘Why did your mother say she saw Adam coming out of the Art room?’ Penny asks, and DI Baker looks irritated.
‘She wanted a child to be blamed,’ Rowena says quietly. ‘So that no one would suspect fraud. It was just chance that it was Adam’s birthday that day.’
‘Sports day?’
‘Yes. She didn’t want anyone hurt.’
‘And there’d be no staff to put it out?’
Rowena is silent.
‘So who actually started the fire?’
Rowena is silent.
‘Was it you?’ Mohsin asks. ‘Did your mother ask you to do that?’
She doesn’t reply.
‘You said that you need to tell the truth?’ Mohsin reminds her.
‘I didn’t know what she was going to do. Not till too late. And it’s only been in here that she’s told me everything. She thought she could trust me. Oh God.’
‘So it was your mother?’ DI Baker asks.
She shakes her head.
‘She made Adam do it.’
But no one could make Adam do that. He’s too good, too thoughtful.
‘She told Adam that Mr Hyman had left him a birthday present in the Art room,’ Rowena continues. ‘She told him it was a volcano. They’d done that in year three – you know, with the vinegar and the baking soda, making an eruption?
‘She told Adam it was a different kind of volcano and he needed to light it. She said he could use the matches from his birthday cake, which she’d fetched for him.
‘She said the pathetic little wimp didn’t want anything to do with the matches.’
There’s a vocabulary that goes with this person I don’t know. Thinking about her words, not what she’s done. Because I can’t, yet, think about what she’s done.
‘She said she had to lay it on thick then,’ Rowena continues. ‘Told him Mr Hyman had brought the volcano present to the school himself, even though he’d get into terrible trouble if he was found there.’
It’s making a ghastly kind of sense now: a volcano, not a fire, for Mr Hyman, his beloved teacher.
‘She told Addie that Mr Hyman was waiting to say happy birthday to him. That he’d be back any minute. And that he’d be really disappointed if Addie wasn’t playing with the birthday surprise.’
So Silas Hyman is directly linked to the fire – but as a phantom presence; a motivating force, blameless of what was being done in his name.
‘And Adam lit the volcano,’ Rowena says, her voice quiet.
‘What was in this volcano?’ Penny asks.
‘She said it was white spirit and another accelerant. She’d also put cans of spray mount around it. She told me Adam must have been chicken and thrown the match from a distance away, otherwise it would have blown up in his face.’
‘Did she intend to kill him?’
‘No. Of course not.’
‘You just said it would have blown up in his face, if he’d got closer, as he was clearly meant to have done.’
‘She can’t have meant to kill him.’ But her voice shakes, no scaffolding of conviction to sustain it.
‘Is there anything else?’
Rowena nods, unable to look at another person’s face, her own cloaked in misery and shame. ‘She came up to Addie, when his mother had run in to find Jenny. She said, “You weren’t meant to actually do it, for goodness sake, Addie!”’
Rowena mimicked her mother’s voice with unnerving accuracy. I flinch from her and Rowena herself seems disturbed. She continues, quietly now. ‘She told him it was a knight’s test, and he’d failed it. That it was all his fault.’
And Adam believed her.
Because Adam believes in quests and tests of courage and honour.
Because in his eight-year-old imagination he was Sir Gawain.
Because at eight you really can think you’re a knight who’s been found wanting.
But instead of the giant nicking the side of your neck, your mother and sister are trapped in a burning building in front of you while you’re told that you are to blame.
I have to run to him now and tell him it isn’t his fault. It isn’t!
But my vocal cords no longer make sounds.
And Adam, too, is mute. The one thing that DI Baker got right is that Adam’s guilt silenced him.
‘That’s why I went in,’ Rowena says quietly. ‘After what she’d said to Addie.’
She pauses a moment, upset.
‘I’d really like to see him, tell him it wasn’t his fault at all,’ Rowena says. ‘I mean, he probably won’t want to see me, but I’d really like to.’
Her voice peters out for a moment.
‘It was partly my fault,’ she continues. ‘I told Mummy about the volcano experiment. I was in Adam’s class as a teaching assistant, last summer term. And I told her how good Adam is. I thought it was so sweet the way he liked books about knights; how he almost saw himself as one – or at least wanted to be like one – and I told her.’
But I’d already told Maisie that, countless times – and that his goodness makes me worried for him. That I wished, for his sake, he was good at football instead.
Rowena is miserably silent. I want one of them to tell her it wasn’t her fault either, but they are police officers in that room, with a job. The ‘touchy-feely’ stuff, as Sarah called it once, would come later. I used to think it meant that she didn’t value empathy.
‘Do you know why your mother wanted to harm Jenny?’ Penny asks.
‘She didn’t mean to. It wasn’t till Grace ran in, shouting for her, that I knew she was in there. And Mum was the same, I’m sure. She wouldn’t have hurt Grace or Jenny. I know she wouldn’t. It was a terrible mistake.’
She’s shaking violently now. Mohsin looks at her with concern.
‘I don’t think she’s up to any more,’ he says to DI Baker.
‘Do you think your father knew what your mother intended?’ DI Baker asks.
‘No.’ She pauses a moment. ‘But he blames me for not stopping her in time. I mean, I was there. I should have stopped her.’
Penny escorts Rowena out of the room and back to the burns unit.
I go to my ward. The curtains are drawn around my bed.
Inside, you’re lying with me, pressing yourself against me, sobbing so hard that your body judders the bed.
Crying because you know I’m not there.
I long to go to you but it will make it harder; so much harder.
Then Sarah comes in and runs to you and puts her arms around you and I’m so grateful to her.
She tells you about Maisie, but you hardly listen.
Then she tells you that Adam was tricked into lighting the fire; that he was told it was his fault.
For the first time you turn from me.
‘Oh Christ, poor Ads.’
‘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.’
The door remains closed.
‘Addie…?’
You wait. Silence the other side.
Open the door, I think, just bloody well open it!
My God, I’ve become my nanny voice. I’m sorry. Perhaps you’re right to wait for Addie to come to you; showing him you respect him. I’d have just barged in there, but that’s not the only way to do this.
‘I know you think you’re to blame, my lovely boy,’ you say. ‘But you’re not.’
You’ve never called him my lovely boy before. A whole phrase of mine you’ve adopted already and I’m glowing about that.
‘Let me in, please?’
The door is still shut between you.
I’d have my arms around him by now, and I’d-
‘OK, here’s how it is,’ you say. ‘I love you. Whatever you think you did I love you. Nothing – absolutely nothing – can ever change that.’
‘It is my fault, Daddy.’
The first words he’s spoken since the fire. Words so huge they’ve been smothering speech.
‘Addie, no-’
‘It didn’t really look like a volcano. Just a bucket, with some orange tissue paper on the top and something inside it. She said I was supposed to light it. But really it was a test. I wasn’t meant to do it.’
‘Addie-’
‘I don’t like matches. They scare me. And I know I’m not meant to use them. You and Mum and Jenny are always telling me that. I mean, when we have a fire and you light it, I’m not allowed to. Not till I’m twelve. So I knew it was wrong.’
‘Please, listen to me-’
‘Mr Hyman said Sir Covey would pass the test with flying colours. Sir Covey is me. He thought I was like a knight. But I’m not.’
‘Mr Hyman was never there, Addie. He cares about you and he’d never, ever ask you to do something like that. You’re still Sir Covey.’
‘No, you don’t understand-’
‘She made it all up. About Mr Hyman. The present for you. All of it. She made it up to get you to do something for her. The police have arrested her. Everyone knows it wasn’t your fault.’
‘But it is. I shouldn’t have done it, Dad! Whatever she said to me. Sirens and the green giant’s beautiful wife tempted people but the good people didn’t do what they said. The strong knights didn’t do it. But I did.’
‘They were grown men, Addie, and you’re eight. And a very brave eight-year-old.’
Silence the other side of the door.
‘What about the time you stood up for Mr Hyman? That was really brave. Not many adults would have the courage to do that. I should have told you that before. I’m sorry I didn’t. Because I am really proud of you.’
Still silence from Addie’s room; but what more can you say to him?
‘It’s not just that,’ he says.
You wait and the silence is awful.
‘I didn’t go and help them, Daddy.’
His voice, so full of shame, punches a hole in both of us.
‘Thank God,’ you say.
Addie opens the door and the barrier between you is gone.
‘I couldn’t bear it if I’d lost you too,’ you say.
You put your arms around him and something floods through his body, relaxing his taut limbs and frightened face.
‘Mum’s never going to wake up. Granny G told me.’
‘Yes,’ you say.
‘She’s dead.’
‘Yes. She…’
I think you’re going to say something more, perhaps the difference between ‘no cognitive function’ and being dead, but Adam is eight and you can’t talk to him about the details of why he has no mother now.
He starts to cry and you hold him as tightly as you can.
Silence expands between you, a blown soap bubble around the emotion it contains, then breaks.
‘You have me,’ you say.
And your arms around Adam aren’t trying to hug him now, but clinging onto him.
‘And I have you.’