Lynn hated this drive at the best of times, the long slow crawl up the A23 through suburban south London. They were heading for the Royal South London Hospital, in Crystal Hill, where Caitlin was going to spend the next four days being assessed by the pre-transplant team there.
The last time Lynn had come up this way was back in April, when she had taken Caitlin to IKEA to choose some new furnishings for her bedroom. At least that had been fun – inasmuch as battling through the Sunday afternoon crush at IKEA could be any sane person’s idea of fun.
But they did have a treat at the end of the ordeal – in fact, a double treat so far as Lynn was concerned, because Caitlin did something she very rarely did. She had not just eaten something she would normally have turned her nose up at for being unhealthy, but had totally pigged out on it.
It was after they had finally got through the checkout queue, with their purchases of a bedside table, lamp, bedcover, wallpaper and curtains. They had gone to the restaurant area and eaten meatballs and new potatoes, followed by ice cream. Even naughtier, they’d bought two hotdogs as well, swamped in mustard and ketchup, as a treat for their supper, but had eaten them in the car long before they had reached home. Lynn had half expected Caitlin to want to stop and throw them up at any moment, but instead her daughter had sat there with a grin on her face, licking her lips from time to time and proclaiming, ‘That was wicked! Totally wicked!’
It was one of the few occasions in her life that Lynn could ever remember seeing Caitlin actually enjoy her food, and she had hoped at the time – a hope that was later dashed – that it might herald the start of a new and more positive phase of her daughter’s life.
They were passing IKEA now, the tall, floodlit smokestacks with the blue and yellow bands near the top, on their left. She glanced at Caitlin in the passenger seat beside her, hunched over her mobile phone, engrossed in texting. She had been texting non-stop for the past hour since they had left Brighton. The glare of oncoming headlights lit up her face, a ghostly, yellow-tinged white.
‘Fancy some meatballs, darling?’
‘Yeah, right,’ Caitlin said sleepily, without looking up, as if her mother was offering her poison.
‘We’re just passing IKEA – we could stop.’
She worked the keypad for some moments, then said, ‘They wouldn’t be open now.’
‘It’s only quarter to eight. I think they’re open until ten.’
‘Meatballs? Yuck. Do you want to poison me or something?’
‘Remember when we came here in April, to get the stuff for your room? We had some then and you really enjoyed them.’
‘I read about meatballs on the Net,’ Caitlin said, suddenly becoming animated. ‘They’re full of fat and crap. You know, some meatballs – they’ve even got bits of bone and hooves in. It’s like some burgers – they literally put the whole cow in a crushing machine. Like, everything, right? The head, skin, intestines. That way they can say it is pure beef.’
‘Not IKEA’s.’
‘Yeah, I forgot, you worship at the altar of IKEA. Like their stuff is blessed by some Nordic god.’
Lynn smiled, reached out a hand and touched her daughter’s wrist. ‘It would be better than the hospital food.’
‘Yeah, well, don’t worry. I’m not going to eat anything while I’m in that fucking place.’ She tapped her keypad again. ‘Anyhow, we just ate supper.’
‘I ate, darling. You didn’t touch your food.’
‘Whatever.’ She texted some more. Then she said, ‘Actually, that’s not true. I had some yoghurt.’ She yawned.
Lynn halted the Peugeot at traffic lights, removed her hand for a moment to put the gear lever into neutral, then put it back again on Caitlin’s wrist. ‘You must eat something tonight.’
‘What’s the point?’
‘To keep up your strength.’
‘I’m being strong.’
She squeezed her daughter’s wrist, but there was no response. Then she dug the map out of the door pocket and briefly checked it. The exhaust pipe banged on the underside of the car as the engine idled. The lights turned green. She jammed the map back into the pocket, wrenched the sticky gear lever into first and let out the clutch.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘I’m scared. And I’m so tired.’
Following the traffic, she changed gear again, then up into third, and squeezed Caitlin’s wrist once more.
‘You’re going to be fine, darling. You are in the best possible hands.’
‘Luke’s been on the Internet. He just texted me. He said that nine out of ten people on the liver transplant waiting list in the USA die before they get one. That three people die every day in the UK waiting for a transplant. And there’s 140,000 people in the USA and Europe waiting for transplants.’
In her fury, Lynn did not notice the brake lights on the vehicles ahead were glowing and she had to stamp on the brakes, locking up the front wheel to avoid rear-ending a van. The Internet! she thought. Sod the fucking Internet. Sod that jerk, Luke. Has that brainless twerp not got anything better to do than spook my daughter?
‘Luke’s wrong,’ she said. ‘I discussed it with Dr Hunter earlier. It’s just not true. What happens is that some very sick people get put on the waiting list far too late. But that’s not your situation.’
She tried to think of something else to say that would not sound patronizing. But her mind was suddenly a blank. The consultant, Dr Granger, had said they would try to get her a priority position on the waiting list. But, equally candidly, he’d said that he could not guarantee it. And there was the added problem of Caitlin’s blood group.
She drove on in silence, to the sound of the steady click-click-click of Caitlin’s phone keys and the occasional ping-ping of an incoming text.
‘Do you want some music on, darling?’ she said finally.
‘Not the crap stuff that you have in this car,’ Caitlin retorted, but at least she said it good-humouredly.
‘Why don’t you try to find something on the radio?’
‘Whatever.’ Caitlin leaned forward and switched the radio on. An old Scissor Sisters song was playing: ‘I don’t feel like dancin’’.
‘That’s me,’ Caitlin said. ‘No dancing today.’
Lynn gave her a wry smile. In the sudden flare of a street light, a thin, scared ghost in the passenger seat smiled wistfully back.