I told you already what happened when I woke up – that I was trapped under the hull of a vast ship wrecked on the ocean floor.
That I slipped out of the wrecked ship of my body into the inky black ocean and swam upwards towards the daylight.
That I saw the body part of ‘me’ in a hospital bed.
That I felt afraid and, as I felt fear, I remembered.
Blistering heat and raging flames and suffocating smoke.
Jenny.
I ran from the room to find her. Do you think I should have tried to go back into my body? But what if I was trapped, uselessly, inside again, but this time couldn’t get out? How would I find her then?
In the burning school, I had searched for her in darkness and smoke. Now I was in brightly lit white corridors but the desperation to find her was the same. Panicking, I forgot about the me in the hospital bed and I went up to a doctor, asking where she was: ‘Jennifer Covey. Seventeen years old. My daughter. She was in a fire.’ The doctor turned away. I went after him, shouting, ‘Where’s my daughter?’ He still walked away from me.
I interrupted two nurses. ‘Where’s my daughter? She was in a fire. Jenny Covey.’
They carried on talking to each other.
Again and again I was ignored.
I started screaming, loud as I could, screaming the house down, but everyone around me was deaf and blind.
Then I remembered that it was me who was mute and invisible.
No one would help me find her.
I ran down a corridor, away from the ward where my body was and into other wards, and then on again, frantically searching.
‘I can’t believe you’ve lost her!’ said the nanny who lives in my head. She arrived just before I gave birth to Jenny, her critical voice replacing my teachers’ praise. ‘You’re never going to find her like this, are you?’
She was right. Panic had turned me into a Brownian motion molecule, darting hither and thither, with no logic or clear direction.
I thought of you, what you would do, and made myself slow down.
You would start on the bottom floor, far left, like you do at home when something is lost for good, and then you’d work your way to the far right, then up to the next floor, methodically doing a sweep and finding the missing mobile phone/earring/Oyster card/number 8 Beast Quest book.
Thinking about Beast Quest books and missing earrings because the little details of our lives helped to root me a little, calmed me a little.
So I went more slowly along the corridors, although desperate to run, trying to read signs rather than race past them. There were signs to lift banks, and oncology and outpatients and paediatrics – a mini-kingdom of wards and clinics and operating theatres and support services.
A sign to the mortuary tore into my vision and lodged there, but I wouldn’t go to the mortuary. Wouldn’t even consider it.
I saw a sign to Accident & Emergency. Maybe she hadn’t been transferred to a ward yet.
I ran as fast as I could towards it.
I went in. A woman on a trolley was pushed past, bleeding. A doctor was running, his stethoscope flapping against his stomach; the doors to the ambulance bay swung open and a screeching siren filled the white corridor, panic bouncing off the walls. A place of urgency and tension and pain.
I looked into cubicle after cubicle, flimsy blue curtains dividing intense scenes from separate dramas. In one cubicle was Rowena, barely conscious. Maisie was sobbing next to her, but I only paused long enough to see that it wasn’t Jenny and then I moved on.
At the end of the corridor was a room rather than a cubicle. I’d noticed doctors going in, and none coming out.
I went in.
There was someone appallingly hurt on the bed in the middle of the room, surrounded by doctors.
I didn’t know it was her.
I had known her baby’s cry from any other baby’s almost the moment she was born; her calling for Mummy had sounded unique, unmistakable amongst other toddlers; I could find her face immediately, however crowded the stage. I knew her more intimately than I knew myself.
As a baby I knew every square centimetre of her; each hair in her eyebrows. I’d watched them being drawn, pencil stroke by pencil stroke, in the first days after birth. For months, I’d stared down at her for hour after hour, day after day, as I fed her from my breasts. It was dark the February she was born and as spring turned to summer it brought increased clarity in how I knew her.
For nine months, I’d had her heart beating inside my body; two heartbeats for every one of mine.
How could I not know it was her?
I turned to leave the room.
I saw sandals on the appallingly damaged person on the bed. The sandals with sparkly gems that I’d got her from Russell & Bromley as an absurdly early and out-of-season Christmas present.
Lots of people have those kind of sandals, lots and lots; they must manufacture thousands of them. It doesn’t mean it’s Jenny. It can’t mean it’s Jenny. Please.
Her blonde glinting hair was charred, her face swollen and horribly burnt. Two doctors were talking about percentage of BSA and I realised they were discussing the percentage of her body that was burnt. Twenty-five per cent.
‘Jenny?’ I shouted. But she didn’t open her eyes. Was she deaf to me too? Or was she unconscious? I hoped that she was, because her pain would be unbearable.
I left the room, just for a moment. A drowning person coming up for one gulp of air before going back into that depth of compassion as I looked at her. I stood in the corridor and closed my eyes.
‘Mum?’
I’d know her voice anywhere.
I looked down at a girl crouched in the corridor, her arms around her knees.
The girl I’d recognise among a thousand faces.
My second heartbeat.
I put my arms around her.
‘What are we, Mum?’
‘I don’t know, sweetheart.’
It may seem strange, but I didn’t even really wonder. The fire had burnt away everything I once thought of as normal. Nothing made sense any more.
A trolley with Jenny’s body on it was wheeled past us; surrounded by medical staff. They’d covered her up using a sheet like a tent so the fabric wouldn’t touch her burns.
Beside me I felt her flinch.
‘Did you see your body?’ I asked. ‘Before they covered it, I mean.’
I’d tried to let out the words delicately but they fell with a clump on the floor, forming a boorish, brutal question.
‘Yeah, I did. “Return of the living dead” kind of summarises it, doesn’t it?’
‘Jen, sweetheart-’
‘This morning I was worried about blackheads on my nose. Blackheads. How ridiculous is that, Mum?’
I tried to comfort her, but she shook her head. She wanted me to ignore her tears and believe the act she was putting on. Needed me to. The one where she is still funny, lively, buoyant Jenny.
A doctor was talking to a nurse as they passed us.
‘The dad’s on his way, poor bloke.’
We hurried to find you.