Afterwards

  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 patronizing 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. Bedtime.

  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 window boxes of geraniums have shriveled 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 fantasizing mock rows with their husbands and checking on their growbags and window boxes?

  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 the 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 showed me his homework 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 pacifiers and cloth books; nowadays I have reading glasses and novels again, newly published, with shiny covers and grabbing shoutlines.

  You’re outside Adam’s bedroom door.

  “It’s Dad.”

  The door remains closed.

  “Addie …?”

  You wait. Silence on 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 tell 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 colors. 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. You’re a knight too.”

  Silence on 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 ghastly.

  “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 you’d been hurt 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 on to him.

  “And I have you.”

  35

  Five hours have gone past and it’s nearly midnight now. Jenny’s fairy stories were down on this time of night—coaches turning into pumpkins and dancing princesses needing to be back in their beds—but the stories Adam enjoys give a more positive spin: the witching hour, when moonlight is bright and the world is silent and everyone is asleep apart from the little girl and the BFG, blowing his dreams into bedrooms.

  I can see The BFG on the second shelf. You are on the top bunk, Adam on the bottom, Aslan tucked in next to him.

  My dancing shoes, if I had any, would smell of antiseptic.

  I’ve been to the hospital, and I need to tell you what happened.

  I watched as you sat with Adam, holding his hand, grateful that I’d built up enough tolerance to the
pain of being away from the hospital so I could be with him as he slept.

  I thought how lovely it was that the children call Mum “Granny G,” to differentiate her from your mother, “Granny Annabel”; because although she died before they were born, she’s still their grandmother too.

  You found Addie’s old night-light, then you moved up to the top bunk, your hand stretching down in case he needed you.

  Mum came in, wanting to go and see Jen for a little while now that you were looking after Addie.

  I went with her.

  I’m not sure if I’ve told you this, but once Mum found out I was no longer in my body, she started talking to me all the time, in all sorts of places. “A scattergun approach, Grace, poppet; sometimes you’ll be there to hear me. I’m sure.”

  She drove her ancient Renault Clio furiously fast along the almost empty dark roads towards the hospital.

  “I watered Adam’s carrots and tomatoes,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Should have given your window boxes a proper soak. They get dehydrated so fast when it’s this hot.”

  “Maybe you can replant. I’d really like it if you did.”

  She was silent for a little while, her face so much older now. She jumped a red light, but there was hardly any traffic to notice or care.

  “I’ll put in something that doesn’t mind drought so much. Lavender would be pretty.”

  “Lavender would be perfect.”

  We arrived at the hospital. The goldfish-bowl atrium was almost deserted, just a few straggling patients, their footsteps echoing in the emptiness; a single doctor was hurrying. Lights from cars flashed through the glass of the window from the darkness outside.

  I thought about Mr. Hyman and how afraid I’d been of him when he came to the hospital. “Get away from my children, get away!” Is that what happens in the aftermath of a terrible crime? All the ugliness and cruelty of it spilling out onto the people around, an oil slick lapping ashore, indiscriminately blackening what it touches. He’s deeply flawed, yes, but not guilty of any sin. A fallible man but not a wicked one. Blameless of any crime. Addie was right to trust him. And I’m so glad you told Addie that Mr. Hyman cares about him, that he’d never do anything cruel to him, glad that you called him Mr. Hyman again.

  Mum went to Jenny’s bedside. In the corridor, I saw Jenny waiting for me.

  “I need to know,” she said. “Why I went back to the school, and why I went up to the top again, and my mobile phone thing. I need to know all of it.”

  We had the big picture then, the huge facts, but not the details.

  “The police will find out when they question Maisie tomorrow,” I said.

  “But I might not have that long,” she said, and we were talking about something else entirely.

  “Of course you do.”

  “No. I told you, Mum, I’m not going through with your plan. And I’m not going to change my mind.”

  I didn’t argue with her, not then. Because as well as courage, our daughter has also inherited your infuriating stubbornness. “Independence of mind!” you’d correct. “Strength of character!” Well, all I know is that whereas other little girls at nursery were on the good-biddable-eager-to-please scale of character, Jenny was up the other end as stubborn-willful-strong-minded depending on your vantage point.

  And yes, I’m proud.

  I always was, secretly.

  But I didn’t share her need to know. I only ever wanted to find the truth to clear Adam, nothing beyond that. And I also knew that she had plenty of time, because that’s what I would give her. I would win that argument.

  “I need to remember it all, Mum,” she said. “Because if I don’t, it’s like a part of my life didn’t happen. The part of it that changed everything.”

  I understood why she needed to know, and I had to respect it. And I would be ready to protect her if she got too close to the fire.

  We went towards Rowena’s room, because Jen had had her “mad person’s tinnitus” memory there. At the time, we’d thought it was the smell of Donald, not Maisie, that had prompted it.

  As we walked, we pieced together what Jenny had remembered of Wednesday afternoon so far. We knew that she’d taken two large bottles of water from the school kitchens and gone outside, using the side entrance. She’d heard the fire alarm and thought it was a mistake or a practice. She’d been worried Annette wouldn’t know what to do, so she’d put the bottles of water down on the gravel by the kitchen entrance, when we think her mobile fell out of her pocket. Then she went back in. Once inside she’d smelt smoke and known it wasn’t a practice.

  We reached Rowena’s room. Jenny closed her eyes. I wondered which of the scents in the room had prompted her memory last time—perhaps Maisie wore perfume that I hadn’t consciously noticed before. Her cardigan was still draped over a chair. She must have left it behind when she was arrested.

  I waited with Jenny for a few minutes, three or four maybe.

  I braced myself to face the stranger that my friend had become.

  “I’m taking water out of the kitchen,” Jenny said. “I get outside. The fire alarm is making a hell of a din. I think Annette won’t know what to do. So I put the water down and go back in. Bloody hell, it really is a fire.”

  She broke off. We’d got to this point before.

  Jenny took my hand.

  “I was afraid to do this alone,” she said. “I mean, go any further.”

  But I already knew that was why she had waited for me first.

  She closed her eyes again.

  “The smoke isn’t that bad,” she said. “You can smell it, but no worse really than when there’s something in the oven that’s caught. I’m not frightened, just working out what I should do. I think that actually Annette won’t be worried at all; she’ll be loving this! Finally she has her drama.”

  I saw Jenny struggling as she reached the final doors in the memory corridor.

  I thought of Sarah’s “retrograde amnesia”—fire doors, I imagined, thick and heavy, protecting her from what lay beyond them.

  I think it’s knowing she is so loved by Ivo—and also by me and you and Adam and Sarah—that gave her the strength to push at those doors to make them open, to reenter the horror of that afternoon. “And then I see Maisie,” she said. Her body had gone rigid.

  Mum is back in our spare room now, and I’m sitting on Adam’s bed, holding his small, soft hand as he sleeps. Jenny’s memory has been playing in my mind like a film, which I can’t switch off, looping over and over again. I’m hoping that telling you what I see will make it finally stop.

  The fire siren screeches into the summer afternoon. Jenny puts down her bottles of water and goes back into the school, using the kitchen entrance. She smells smoke, but isn’t frightened. She’s thinking about Annette, that she’ll be loving this.

  She goes up the stairs towards the upper ground floor.

  Then she sees Maisie, in her long-sleeved fun shirt. Maisie is crying. “I saw Adam coming out of the art room,” she says. “Oh God, what have you done, Ro?”

  Rowena, in her sensible trousers, is facing her, blazing with anger. “You saw Adam, and you blame me?”

  “No, of course not. I’m sorry I—”

  Rowena slaps Maisie’s face, brutally hard. I hear the sound of her palm slamming against Maisie’s wet cheek, and in that sound the fictions disintegrate. “Shut up, hog.”

  “You sent me a text,” Maisie says. “I thought you’d—”

  “Forgiven you?”

  “I just wanted what was best—”

  “You take away my lover and then you bankrupt us. Stunning, Mummy. Fucking stunning.”

  Maisie rallies for a moment. “He was too old for you. He was exploiting you and—”

  “He’s a pathetic piece of shit. Spineless. And you are an interfering bitch.”

  Shouting at her, whipping her with words.

  “I should go and help,” Maisie says. Then she turns to Rowena, findin
g courage.

  “Did you make Addie do it, Ro?”

  “You decide, Mummy.”

  She wipes the tears off Maisie’s face, the red mark visible from where she slapped her.

  “You need to wash your face,” she says. Then she pulls up Maisie’s trouser zip. “And dress properly, for fuck’s sake.”

  Maisie leaves to help with the reception children. She hasn’t seen Jenny.

  But Rowena sees her.

  She sees Jenny and knows she’s heard everything.

  Jenny remembered that at that moment the fire didn’t seem important. She knew there was virtually no one in the school and everyone could easily get out. All she could think about was Rowena hitting her mother, hurting her.

  “Adam’s gone to look for you,” Rowena said to her. “Up in the medical room.”

  And everything changed.

  The school was on fire, and Adam was at the top of the school.

  Jen ran to find him.

  And Addie? Where was he, really? I need to rewind a little now so he can feature in this ghastly film too.

  I watch him leave sports day with Rowena, who’s suggested she takes him to get his cake. So carefully planned. She must already have opened the windows at the school so that everything was ready.

  She’s wearing sensible clothes, in contrast to Jenny, and I think she looks so grown-up now.

  She and Addie reach the edge of the playing field. By the chest-height, jewel-colored azalea bushes I think they pause a minute, while Rowena tells him about the birthday present Mr. Hyman has left for him. And Addie is really pleased that Mr. Hyman has got him a present.

  Because I think that still figure I saw on the edge of the playing field was Rowena, with Adam next to her, but he was too small to be seen above the azalea bushes.

  They walk on towards the school.

  Rowena goes with Addie up to his classroom to get his cake. She takes the matches out of Miss Madden’s cupboard. She tells him that Mr. Hyman’s present is in the art room. It’s a different kind of volcano. He has to light it. He can use his birthday-cake matches.

  But Adam doesn’t want to, surprising Rowena, because she underestimated him, thought him wet. So she tells him Mr. Hyman brought the volcano present to the school himself, even though he’ll get into terrible trouble if he’s found there. She tells him Mr. Hyman will be coming up to the art room soon and will be so disappointed if Addie isn’t playing with his present. So Addie reluctantly agrees.