Читать книгу Every Woman Knows a Secret - Rosie Thomas - Страница 5

Cars slowed to a crawl as they approached the van smashed into the bridge and the police car with its revolving light and the starburst of broken glass glittering across the wet tarmac.

The headlights burned in Rob’s eyes. As each car crept past he glimpsed white patches behind glass, staring faces. He wanted to shout at the people but he only blinked, and there was something sticky on his face. The policeman who was holding his arms made him sit down on the verge.

‘You’re hurt,’ the man kept telling him. ‘You’ve hurt yourself. Don’t worry about your mate now.’

He couldn’t see Danny. The other policeman was in the way, leaning over him and talking into his radio. Rob stared down the road at the cars and tried in the slippery daze of shock to connect up what had happened. It had been only a split second that had changed everything but he couldn’t remember the instant itself; trying to focus on it was like staring at a brownish spot in a mirror where the silvering had worn away. The reflections around it were pin-sharp; here was the policeman and the shiny peak of his cap, and in his mind’s eye Cat’s room and the two girls and the green glass of vodka in his hand. But the spot in the middle from which his own eye should have gazed steadily back at him was a blank. He couldn’t remember swerving or braking or hitting the bridge.

Rob put his hands up to his face. Blood was running from a cut on his forehead.

The other policeman stood up and Rob could see Danny again. He was still curled on his side. As if he was asleep, only his white face was disfigured by the black trail coming out of his nose and another dribbling from his ear over his cheek and jaw. A sound rose in Rob’s chest and burst out of him as a great roar.

‘Danny, Dan. Open your eyes. Open them.’

Rob fought to get to his feet. A hand on his shoulder held him down.

‘Can you hear me, Dan?’

‘All right, lad. All right. We’re waiting for the ambulance.’

As an answer, the wail of the sirens came first and then the blue lights, moving fast, up the road from the other direction. The first vehicle to pull up, at an angle across the road, was a white police Range Rover. Two more policemen in yellow-green fluorescent jackets leapt out of it. One stood in the road to slow the sparse traffic, the other ran to the van and Danny.

Yet more sirens and flashing lights were approaching. The police were waving the ambulance on. As soon as it crunched on to the hard shoulder the paramedics leapt out and ran to Danny.

A different policeman squatted on his haunches in front of Rob. Rob saw the tight rim of his shirt collar, even the prickle of stubble under his bottom lip.

‘Are you hurt?’

‘Not badly.’ Feeling was beginning to return to his body. Pain everywhere in sullen pools and darting stabs.

‘Were you the driver?’

Rob heard the stammer of two-way radios and the swish of tyres in the drizzle. He lifted his head.

‘Yeah. I was driving.’

The policeman had a notebook.

‘Tell us your name and address, son. And your friend’s.’

There seemed to Rob to be a weightless and airless interval of infinite time that was without movement, even for all the rolling wheels and turning lights, and silent within the din of radio static and voices and hurrying feet. They were seeing to Danny, crouching over him, shining a cruel light in his eyes.

Rob mumbled inaudibly through a mouth over which he had lost control, ‘You be all right. You be. All right.’

They were putting a tube down Danny’s throat. There was a flurrying circle around him that Rob could not penetrate. Even the policeman who had been questioning him was looking at the ambulance crew.

One of the paramedics said, ‘We need the air ambulance.’

When Rob heard it the realisation shot through him. He might die.

How fucking stupid. To be alive and having a drink and a smoke and the next minute to be lying by the roadside where you might be going to die. A huge anger swelled up in him. He wanted to roll up the realisation in his fist, crushing it into an atom that he could stuff through the blank mirror spot and obliterate.

‘Have you been drinking?’ the policeman was asking.

It was only now that the question dawned and the immediate certainty swam into his mind, an evil fish. Did I do this to Danny? And the answer. Yes, I did it.

‘How much have you had to drink?’ the policeman repeated.

The clarity of everything just before and after the moment of the smash was fading in Rob’s mind. The empty blur at the centre of his field of vision bled outwards. The blue lights twinned and quadrupled and splintered into fragments and the looming faces split and swelled and he couldn’t even properly distinguish the policeman’s old-young eyes any longer in his young face.

Rob moved his lips. ‘Not much. A couple. Just.’ His voice croaked away, caught in his throat.

They were kneeling beside Danny. They were holding a bag up, tubes going into him.

They brought a small black box and a white tube to Rob and pressed the tube into his mouth.

He did what they told him. Blow.

People coming and going, voices over his head but he couldn’t hear any longer what they were saying. And the policeman again, asking questions, while one of the ambulance men looked at his head and tilted it on his neck and lifted his arms and shone a light in his streaming eyes.

‘I don’t know. He lives with his mother. I never went there, why would I? I don’t know his address. Please.’

The lights shining in his eyes, showing up his tears. He hated crying, hated being seen to cry as much as he feared violence in himself and in others. They went together, the two things. Action and reaction, both fearsome.

The helicopter was coming.

After its lights appeared in the sky the noise grew suddenly loud, drowning out the police radios and the idling engines of cars, then became deafening. Rob crouched beneath the roaring, his head on his knees. The machine hovered over them and briefly stirred up a whirl of litter and wet leaves. Behind the verge was a field and a field gate. The paramedics lifted Danny on to a stretcher. A beam of hard light seeming as solid as a pillar shone from the helicopter and pinned them all to the earth. As if it was searching out him alone Rob stared straight up into the blinding nauseous eye of it. Then the helicopter sank to land in the field and the light abruptly snapped off and Danny, with the tubes and bags held over him, was spirited away to it.

Rob could see nothing now. They waited, separated by the hedge from Danny and the paramedics.

The noise swelled once more and the helicopter lifted, rocking over them as it rose, before it tilted and swung away over the wreck of the van and the stilled road. The busy rap of the engine changed in pitch, receded and was finally gone.

Rob leaned forward and retched into the grass between his feet.

‘Come on, son,’ one of the ambulancemen said. ‘Your friend’ll be in hospital in a minute or two. We’ll get you in there as well.’

One of the policemen, bulky and creaking in his fluorescent coat, followed him into the back of the ambulance. Rob was under arrest. The doors slammed shut on them and the ambulance bumped away.

Alarm clock. Half six already.

Jess reached out from under the covers and felt for the button, but even when she found it and pressed it hard the ringing wouldn’t stop. And as soon as she opened her eyes on the darkness Jess registered that it was the doorbell ringing, not her morning alarm. The time was almost three a.m. She groped for her dressing-gown, the old winter tartan one, and pushed her feet into her slippers. She lifted aside the window curtains and looked down into the road. There was a police car parked in front of the house. Its revolving light sent silent blue arcs sweeping over the street.

She ran down the stairs, a mumble of fear in her head. The door was still unchained, so he was not home yet. But that was not so unusual. Quite often he stayed out all night. He was an adult now; how could she stop him, even if it had seemed appropriate to try? Jess thought of these things as she unlocked the door, for a last instant keeping the smooth sequence of reason between her and the police and whatever they had brought to her house.

‘Mrs Arrowsmith?’

‘Yes.’

A woman police officer, round-faced and young, probably no older than Beth. If something had happened to Beth … Involuntarily Jess’s hand came up to her mouth. The palm of it, pressed against her nostrils, still smelt cleanly of bed, warmth and safety.

The policewoman tilted her head to indicate the hallway.

‘May I come in?’ Holding up something, her warrant card, for Jess to see.

‘Of course, come in. What’s happened?’

They faced each other under the bright hall light.

‘Is Daniel Arrowsmith your son?’

Jess almost laughed before the terror hit her. It couldn’t be Dan because Dan was invulnerable. His happiness and ease protected him from injury. It was his older sister Beth who drew concern like a magnet.

A snapshot. Beth’s small, furrowed face above a smocked frock and the wide gummy beam of her baby brother as she anxiously held him in her arms. Aged three and six months respectively. Ian had taken the picture with a new camera Jess had given him for his birthday. If only Ian were here now. She was afraid to hear this news on her own.

All these images flickered through Jess’s mind faster than film through a projector.

‘Yes. What’s happened?’

Some escapade, perhaps that was it. Some explanation she was being hauled out to deliver on his behalf, as she had been in the past by teachers and other authority figures.

‘I’m afraid he has been involved in a road traffic accident.’

The film slowed and stopped, frozen.

‘Where? Is he hurt?’

‘Yes, he is. I’m sorry. The accident happened out on the bypass.’

‘How badly hurt?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know exactly. He suffered head injuries and was airlifted to the Midland Hospital. We can take you there immediately, Mrs Arrowsmith. They will be able to tell you everything at the hospital.’

No use in asking anything more even though the clamour of questions piled up within her. But he would be all right. Dan would always be all right, that was how he was.

‘Yes. I see. Can I … Will you just wait while I put my clothes on?’

‘Of course.’

Halfway up the stairs, her hand gripping the banister rail to steady herself, Jess turned round.

‘Whose car was he driving?’ Dan did not own a car.

‘He was a passenger in a vehicle driven by another young man.’

‘What man?’

‘His name is Robert Ellis.’

The name meant almost nothing. Dan might have mentioned it; she couldn’t remember.

‘Is he hurt?’

‘Only slightly.’

‘Was he drunk?’ Jess asked. Her mouth was dry.

‘The driver had been drinking, yes.’

‘I see. Thank you.’ She resumed the long journey up the stairs, past Danny’s closed bedroom door, to her own room and the empty bed and the clothes hanging in her cupboard. Her hands shook as she searched through them. Numbed, she couldn’t remember what she wore, or how to dress herself. On the way downstairs again she went into Danny’s room and took clean jeans and a sweatshirt and underclothes out of his drawers and stuffed them into a holdall. He would be needing clothes to come home in.

‘Mrs Arrowsmith? Come this way.’

Jess followed a nurse down a corridor. The bright lights and hurrying people made a weird daytime out of the depths of the night.

The nurse pushed through a set of doors and then another door. Jess wanted to run, to reach him quicker. But the nurse showed her into a small office, stuffy and overheated.

‘He’s in CT scanning. They are looking to see what is causing a build-up of pressure inside his skull. I’ll be able to take you to see him as soon as the scan is done.’

Jess sat on a plastic chair, waiting. Danny had still been asleep when she left for work this morning. Yesterday morning now. The night before she had been reading in bed when he came home and tapped on her door. He had been himself, as always. He sat on the end of her bed for a minute and chatted. She couldn’t remember now what it was they had talked about.

Jess thought, why didn’t I tell him what I feel about him?

I will now, she determined.

The nurse came back. ‘This way,’ she said. She put her hand to Jess’s arm, steering her gently as if it were Jess who was hurt.

The room was full of people, doctors and a nurse, and a battery of machinery and equipment that frightened her.

Daniel was lying on a trolley. His eyes were closed and there were tubes coming out of his mouth and his arms. Jess darted to him and put her hand over his. She stood looking down at his face.

‘I’m here, Dan,’ she told him.

Then she bent forward and put her mouth to his cheek. She felt the shudder of an inward breath and the faint gasp of its expulsion. There were not, after all, any words that she could use belatedly to convey all the subterfuges and understatements of her love for him. I’m here was all that she could offer.

Imploringly Jess looked to the nearest face.

‘How bad is it?’ she demanded.

‘Mrs Arrowsmith, I’m Dr Healey. What has happened is that your son hit his head when he was thrown out of the vehicle. We were afraid as soon as he came in that he had suffered a severe injury because his left pupil was dilating, indicating a build-up of pressure inside his head. We’ve just scanned him, and there is a mass of blood from the contusion building up between the lining of the brain, the dura mater, and the brain itself – an acute subdural haematoma – and it is pressing inwards on the brain tissue.’

Jess stared at his face. Dr Healey looked tired and one of his eyelids was twitching. She licked her dry lips and asked, ‘What can you do?’

‘We are preparing him for theatre now. The neurosurgical team will drill burr-holes in the skull through which the accumulated blood can be drained off to relieve the pressure on his brain.’

‘Will that work?’

‘Yes, in the immediate term.’

She didn’t want to be angry but still anger twitched within her.

‘What does that mean? Will he be all right?’

‘It’s too early to tell, Mrs Arrowsmith. He has a very serious head injury. The important thing is to operate as quickly as possible and to monitor him very carefully afterwards.’

Jess’s eyes travelled from the doctor’s face to Dan’s. Extraordinarily, as she now realised, for the first time since the policewoman had broken the news she considered the possibility that her child might die.

Her dry lips moved again. ‘He’s a very determined person,’ she said.

The doctor nodded. ‘I’m sure he is.’

They wanted to take Dan away. Jess indicated her hand, still covering his.

‘Can I … can I come up there with him?’

‘Yes, of course. You can wait just outside theatre and see him as soon as he comes out.’

In the Accident and Emergency Department Rob waited in a cubicle. The policeman questioned him sharply.

‘What were your movements this evening?’

Wearily Rob described them. He was only thinking of what might be happening to Danny.

He agreed that he had been at Catherine Watson’s house, if that was what her name was, and if the address the policeman quoted was the bedsit house beside the railway line.

‘And what happened there?’

Rob shrugged and then winced with pain. He described what had happened as faithfully as he could.

The policeman frowned. ‘That’s not quite how they reported it.’

‘I don’t give a bugger. That was how it was, see?’ Rob began to shout, pointing at the curtains of the cubicle. ‘Listen, he’s lying there somewhere. Does this matter now?’

Rob loudly demanded news of Danny from everyone who came within range, but no one would tell him anything.

‘Your friend’s being looked after. He’s in the best hands,’ a nurse tried to soothe him.

The policeman persisted. ‘Let’s talk about you, Robert. You were involved tonight as well, weren’t you? You’ve got some form, son.’

‘A fight. Three years ago.’ Rob’s mouth closed tight on the words.

‘Common assault. A heavy fine and a caution, wasn’t it?’

‘That’s all. Nothing else.’

‘Until tonight, Robert.’

The cut over Rob’s eye was stitched and his arm X-rayed. They told him that his elbow was fractured and needed to be put in plaster. There was also the possibility of concussion, and they would keep him for observation overnight if he calmed down enough to be admitted.

The divisional surgeon arrived to take a blood sample. He drew off the blood from Rob’s uninjured arm and squirted it into two phials, neatly sealing them in front of him.

‘Which one do you want sent for analysis?’

Rob shrugged. ‘Does it matter?’

The man said coldly, ‘Not really. But it’s your right to choose.’

Rob pointed a finger and scrawled his name left-handed on the form that was pushed in front of him. He had no proper interest in this now. The policeman stood in the cubicle opening, cap under his arm. Rob was to present himself with his solicitor at the police station, the next day or as soon as he was discharged from hospital.

‘I understand,’ Rob said, although he did not, not fully. He was drunk and shocked, and he couldn’t begin to follow the links of cause and effect connecting himself to tomorrow and the future. The focus of his fears was Danny.

Later, after his arm had been set in plaster, they put him to bed on a ward. The other beds were occupied by two old men who snored on their backs and a middle-aged man as thin as a skeleton who plucked at his sheets and glassily stared at the new arrival. Rob did not have to wait long for his chance. The lone nurse hurried away to some other section of the ward, and immediately he got out of bed. He put on the dressing-gown belonging to one of the old men on top of the hospital pyjamas and escaped.

The paper slippers they had given him impeded his steps. The right-angle of fresh plaster encasing his arm dragged him off balance, so sometimes his shoulder bumped against the shiny walls of the corridor.

At last he came to some heavy double doors marked Theatres. A nurse hurried round a corner with a box of sterile-wrapped dressings in her arms.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’m looking for Daniel Arrowsmith.’

‘He’s in there now. Are you a relative?’

‘I was in the accident with him. I’m his brother. They said I could come up.’

‘Your mother’s waiting. Just along there, I’ll come back and show you.’

Danny’s mother. Of course she would be here.

‘Don’t worry. Tell me where, I’ll find it.’

When he was almost at the door of the waiting room Rob stopped and leaned his head against the wall. He could hear his heart thumping and the sandpapery rasp of breath in his throat.

Danny had talked about his mother. Not that often; he wouldn’t have gone on about her, not to Rob anyway, knowing what he and very few other people did know about him. He had just said something like, ‘She’s okay, my mum. She loves me.’ And then he had grinned broadly. ‘Worships the ground I tread on, in fact.’

Rob couldn’t crash into the operating theatre and demand to be told what was happening. Nor could he hide himself from Dan’s mother, although now he was here that was his impulse. The important thing was to find out how Dan was, and his mother would know. She would be able to tell him.

Before he opened the door he tried to think back. Driving, with Danny yelling him on. Rain on the windscreen. Then the brownish blur of oblivion.

The lights along the ceiling above him grew fuzzy outlines and danced into rainbows. He pushed the heel of his good hand into his eyes, then with a sudden roll he shoved his shoulder against the waiting-room door. It banged open.

She was alone, sitting in the corner by the wall. A white face, black eyebrows, hair the same colour as Dan’s. She had been sitting with her head bent and her hands clasped in her lap. But she looked up at him at once, imploringly.

Jess saw a young man with a lacerated face and a white dressing over one eye. There was black blood still matted in his reddish hair and his arm bent in plaster was held across his chest like a shield.

She knew at once who he was.

He looked crazed. Like an Old Testament prophet, slippered, half wrapped in his robe, come to denounce or defy. He seemed taller and broader and more threatening than a mere man. And in his madness he blazed with the electricity of life. She had never seen anyone who looked so alive as Robert Ellis looked in this room bleached colourless with fear. He looked at her and Jess stared back, not knowing whether to attack him or to turn and run away.

He saw her face change as recognition flooded into it.

‘How is he?’ he asked.

She looked full at him for a minute, then the shock of her response faded. She bent her head again. Her fingers locked together, her fists rested on her knees. She had no energy to bring to bear on anything but the news she was waiting for.

‘They’re operating now. To drain off the blood that’s pressing on his brain.’

‘Is he going to live?’ he brutally asked her.

‘It’s too soon to tell.’

Rob sat down on the farthest chair. As they waited in silence he watched the second hand of the wall clock sweeping out its monotonous circuits.

Jess was lonelier than she had ever been in her life. She thought she had grown used to being divorced, but she had never reckoned how it would feel to be alone in a place like this. She could have telephoned her sister and her daughter, but she knew she would have to explain and try to reassure them when she longed to share her love and terror with an equal. So she sat motionless, waiting.

At last the door opened once more.

‘Mrs Arrowsmith?’ It was the surgeon.

Jess stumbled to her feet, almost falling over Dan’s holdall.

‘How is he?’

The surgeon glanced at Rob. ‘This is Daniel’s brother?’

Very clearly Jess explained, ‘This is the young man who was driving the car. He is not my son, or Dan’s brother. I don’t know why you should think he is.’

‘I told a nurse I was. She wouldn’t have let me up here otherwise.’

Jess didn’t look at Rob. She only had the sense that he was standing up, towering behind her, and she could feel the disturbing emanations of hope and fear coming off him, dry and burning like the heat from an electric fire. To the doctor she said, ‘Could we speak in private?’

‘Of course.’ He held the door open for her. In the next room, a nursing office, she forgot the boy immediately. She listened to the surgeon’s explanatory words as if the power of her concentration alone could influence their bearing.

The mass of blood had been sucked from beneath Danny’s skull and the pressure on his brain relieved. That far, the operation had been successful. Still deeply unconscious, he had been taken to the IT unit.

‘When will he … when will he come round?’

‘That we don’t know. The next twenty-four hours will tell us a lot more.’

‘I see. Thank you. Can I go to him now?’

‘Come this way.’

She had the impression of a large but busy and cluttered space. It was brightly lit, with people moving purposefully within it. There were several beds, widely separated by banks of shelves and machinery and white folding screens. In one of the beds lay Daniel. He was on his back, his head white-bandaged, covered to his shoulders with a light blanket.

She came closer and saw that there was a tube in his mouth, and another in his nose held in place with strips of tape that slashed his cheek like tribal markings. From under the blanket, wires and more tubes ran in every direction to the machines they had hooked him to. On the wall behind his bed was a screen across which red and blue and green traces steadily flickered. And his eyes were blind, covered by thick white cotton pads.

Jess leaned forward and tried to reach him by touching a strand of his hair that had escaped from the bandage.

Down in the scanning room she had felt Daniel’s presence as if he had walked into the house and renewed a conversation with her. Now the bewildering complexity of machinery had interposed itself between them. She stared past it at the familiar tiny oval scar on Daniel’s jaw, a relic of baby chickenpox. He was here; this was him.

At once a rush of tenderness and love surged up and blurred his face and the surroundings. The machinery seemed threatening because she could not understand or control it, that was all, and she was a mother who was used to tending to and understanding her children. The crash had robbed him of his independence; Dan had temporarily become a child again.

‘I’m here,’ she said again as she bent over him. ‘Danny. I love you.’

She lifted the blanket an inch and found his hand lying palm upwards, the fingers loosely curled as if in sleep. A plastic tube was taped to the arm and she was afraid to dislodge it but she touched her fingertips to his and was reassured by their warmth. She sank down on to the chair that they had placed for her at the bedside.

Jess watched and counted the breaths that the ventilator took for him and the oscillations of his heartbeat on the monitor screen. A nurse in a green overall and plastic apron appeared on the opposite side of the bed and smiled at her.

‘How are you?’ the nurse asked.

‘I’m all right.’ The question and answer seemed absurd.

The nurse folded back the blanket. The tube ran into a neat fresh wound beneath Dan’s collarbone. There were white plastic circles and more tubes fastened to his chest. As Jess watched, one of the doctors came and pinched Danny’s earlobe and beneath her own hand his fingers twitched a little.

‘Look,’ Jess almost shouted. ‘He felt it. Is he coming round? Is that why you pinched him?’

‘We want to check his responses,’ the doctor said quietly.

The right response had not been there, Jess understood. But he had moved his fingers. She had felt and seen it for herself. The doctor took the white pads off his eyes and shone a torch into each in turn.

‘Why do you have to cover his eyes like that?’ Jess asked.

‘To keep them moist for him.’ He replaced the pads once more.

The extent of Jess’s helplessness was becoming apparent to her.

‘Is he in pain?’ she asked.

‘I think he’s comfortable.’

‘Is there something I can do for him? Anything?’

‘Just what you are doing,’ the doctor answered gently. He left her and the nurse turned to write on the charts clipped on the wall next to the bed.

While she sat and held his hand, Jess remembered versions of Danny that were remote from this white-lit room with its busy staff and supine bodies. She thought of holidays and Christmases and family celebrations, and tried to distil enough joy and warmth out of them to channel through her own fingers into Danny’s, and so connect him to a happier version of the world he had grown into.

I’m here. The words ran round and round in her head. Wake up. Come back. Wake up.

After what seemed like a long time Jess laid her head down on the bed next to Danny’s thigh and closed her eyes. For a few minutes she gratefully slept, and then when she woke up again she struggled to identify the place and the fear that had filled her brief doze with queasy vanished dreams. Then, remembering, she jerked up her head. Danny had not moved.

Later the surgeon came back again. He pressed the heel of his hand hard down against Danny’s breastbone. And Danny stretched out his arms in response, fists clenched, as if he were troubled in his sleep. When she saw it a wide smile spread over Jess’s face, cracking her dry lips. She pushed her hand through her hair, letting a warm current of hope and relief course through her.

Danny was there, he was only sleeping. He was responding to the doctor. He wouldn’t die. The certainty of it flooded through her veins like a drug hit, dispelling her exhaustion. She stood up, easing the pain and stiffness out of her limbs. Her feet and her fingertips tingled with returning blood.

‘It’s wonderful to see him do that.’ She smiled at the surgeon. ‘It’s good, isn’t it? That he can feel and respond?’

‘It’s a positive response to stimulus, yes. But it’s very early to tell.’

‘I know. I understand that. But still, you know …’

Like a good girl, Jess did not want to press her need for hope and reassurance upon the surgeon. If she could be calm, if she met with everyone’s approval in this test of her stoicism, it would be all the better for Dan.

‘Thank you for everything you are doing for him,’ she said meekly.

It was six o’clock in the morning.

Sock would be awake soon, if he was not already. Jess thought that she would telephone Lizzie and Beth and break the news now, now that there was this compensating fragment of brightness to offer them.

She must also speak to her ex-husband.

Ian had finally left Jess two years before, for a younger woman he had met through his work as a salesman. Ian had always been good at selling; he had a cheerful, dependable manner that masked his uncertain temper. Throughout their married life he had often been away travelling his territories, and the regular absences had helped them to ignore the truth that they had never made each other happy. Then Ian had met an Australian girl in her late twenties who had chosen to finance one leg of her European journey by working as a temporary administrator in the electrical goods company in which he was a sales manager. It was not the first affair he had had, but it was the first time Ian had fallen in love. He had been a conscientious if rather impatient father, but by this time Beth and Danny were both grown up. He had told Jess that he was leaving her; her response had been bitterness, followed by relief, and at last a kind of weary indifference.

Ian was married to Michelle now and they were living in Sydney, her home town. Jess had never been to Australia but she imagined a paved garden with tree ferns and hibiscus and a view of the blue bay, and heard the telephone ringing in a room barred with sun and shadow.

Jess lifted her head. She remembered that she had left Danny’s holdall in the waiting room near the operating theatre. Glancing back down the night’s tunnel it seemed a black joke that she had imagined Danny needing jeans and a sweatshirt to come home in this morning. She remembered seeing a telephone cubicle in the corridor outside. She would make the calls from there.

In the waiting room was an Indian family, elders and adults and small children crowded and perched on the plastic chairs. Their faces turned up to her like so many thirsty plants, then drooped again. Robert Ellis was sitting in one corner on the chair he had originally occupied. Dan’s holdall was gripped in his hands.

Jess stepped backwards into the hallway and he followed her out.

‘Tell me how he is,’ Rob demanded.

He no longer looked larger than life. His face was hollow and grey and his eyes were ringed with murky shadows.

Jess thought, with anger piercing her, Good. It’s right that he should suffer too. Why should it all fall to Danny, and why should this young man only have bandages on his face and arms after drunkenly smashing her child into a bridge?

Her mouth tightened. Then she remembered that Danny had stirred in his coma and stretched out his arms, and that she had been sure that all would be well. That certainty was already draining away, water dripping into the dry sand of anxiety.

She told Robert Ellis what she knew and he listened silently with his eyes fixed on her face. At the end he nodded.

‘Thank you.’

‘You should go back to your ward. Go to bed.’

‘I’m going home. I don’t want to stay here.’

‘You’re lucky,’ Jess said in a hard voice.

‘If I could make it me, I would. And I’ll be coming back. If you won’t let me see him I’ll wait outside.’

Jess shrugged. There was no space to admit anger for more than a passing instant. She held out her hand for Danny’s bag, and after a second he handed it over. She was already turning away when he caught her arm.

‘He moved, did he?’

He was searching at second hand for the reassurance she had sought from the surgeon.

‘Yes.’

He was so close that she could smell his sweat and skin, a remembered and denied scent that caught in her throat and stirred the hair on the back of her neck. She withdrew her arm from his grasp.

‘Yes,’ she repeated softly. ‘His surgeon said it was a response, but it’s too early to tell anything yet.’

She walked away, to the telephone, and left him.