‘Really? I’m so sorry. Oh, well, if you’re too busy . . .’ There is a pause, which Lou’s mother fills with silent disappointment.
‘Let me have a think. I’ll see what I can do.’
More silence. Lou knows her mum is waiting for her to speak again – an ingenious tactic designed to further her own cause.
‘I may be able to come for some of it,’ she relents, eventually. The guilt, the guilt! She is livid. She knew she would give in; she always does.
‘OK, darling, of course the whole weekend would be best, obviously. So let me leave it with you.’
That’s big of you, thinks Lou.
Just then, there is a tap on her door. It is her next student.
‘Listen, Mum, I have to go.’
‘Sure, that’s fine. But Lou—?’
‘Yeees . . .’ Lou tries not to sound impatient.
‘Will you let me know tonight? It’s just, if you can’t come, well, I’ll have to cancel them. And I don’t think it’s fair to do that too late in the day.’
FUCK OFF! thinks Lou. But instead she just mutters, ‘Sure, of course,’ and puts the phone down. She is so angry and feeling so bullied, that she is shaking. With a mother like hers – so controlling, so self-obsessed, so tunnel-visioned – is it any wonder Lou has never been honest with her about her own sexuality?
The hospital is a maze of corridors and wards, annexes and Portakabins, and neither Karen nor Anna is in the right frame of mind to work out the signs. They head to A&E, but when they arrive and ask at reception, they are told to wait, and eventually a kindly-faced nurse emerges.
‘Is one of you Mrs Finnegan?’ she asks.
Karen nods.
‘Your husband has been put in the viewing room. I’ll show you the way if you like.’
‘Please,’ says Anna.
They follow her clicking heels down several linoleum flights of stairs and along even more corridors. They end up outside some double doors and a sign saying MORTUARY. It all seems terribly brutal.
The nurse buzzes and they are let in.
‘It’s Mrs Finnegan,’ she says to a man in a white coat.
‘Mr Finnegan is in the viewing room,’ he says. ‘But hold on a second.’ He goes to a locker, opens it and gets out a large bin bag.
‘Which one of you is Mrs Finnegan?’ he asks.
‘Me,’ says Karen.
‘These are your husband’s personal effects.’
‘Oh,’ says Karen. ‘Thank you.’ She glances inside.
‘It’s mainly his clothes,’ says the man. ‘And his briefcase.’
‘Right.’
‘I’ll show you where to go if you like,’ says the nurse, and leads them to a second door. She opens it and they step inside.
Simon is lying on his back with his arms placed neatly over a white cotton blanket. He has been dressed in a hospital gown, Anna notices. The only light comes from a window, which is partially covered by a Venetian blind, its slats turned at an angle so they can see but it is not too bright.
‘Please feel free to be here however long you want, Mrs Finnegan,’ the nurse says.
‘Really?’
Anna is surprised. She had assumed time would be limited.
‘Yes,’ assures the nurse. ‘I understand your husband’s death was very sudden?’
Karen nods again.
‘A lot of people find it helpful to stay with a relative’s body for a while. There really is no need to rush. We’ll leave you with him here a few hours if you like.’
‘Thank you,’ says Karen.
The nurse turns to Anna. ‘Are you a friend?’
‘Yes.’
‘I wonder if I might have a quick word outside?’
‘Of course.’
They step back into the corridor.
‘You might like to give Mrs Finnegan some time with her husband alone,’ suggests the nurse, her voice low. ‘It can help people accept what’s happened. It must be a terrible, terrible shock.’
‘Yes, sure. ’Anna was going to do this anyway. ‘Er . . . before you go, can I ask you something?’
‘Fire ahead.’
‘My friend, Karen, has two small children.’
‘Right.’ The nurse sighs, empathizing.
‘I just wondered, whether, well, what we should do about them? What should we tell them?’
The nurse takes a deep breath. ‘In my experience, it’s best not to protect them too much. So, once your friend has had some time to take in what’s happened, it would be good if you could encourage her to be as honest with them as she can. Within reason, obviously, if they are very small.’
‘Do you think we should bring them here to say goodbye?’
‘How old are they, exactly?’
Anna considers, then says, ‘Three and five.’
The nurse pauses. ‘It’s a really tough one and not everyone would say so, no. But personally – and we do see a number of deaths in cardiac – I would say yes, if they want to come, bring them. Though later today it’s likely that Mr Finnegan’s body will have to be moved.’
‘To where?’
‘As his was a sudden death, there will have to be a post-mortem.’
‘When will that be?’
‘Depends on the schedule, but as soon as they can fit it in. Then he’ll be taken to the funeral parlour.’
‘Will it still be possible to see him there?’
‘Yes, of course. And don’t worry, we can explain all this properly to Mrs Finnegan in due course. The doctor will have told her most of it already, but often people do need to hear it more than just the once.’
‘I see. And thanks,’Anna smiles. ‘You’ve been really helpful.’
‘It’s my job,’ says the nurse, and Anna is struck by how mundane her own profession seems in comparison.
* * *
While Anna is outside talking to the nurse, Karen walks slowly over to the bed where Simon is lying. The rain is clearing outside and the day brightening, so the light filtering through the blind at the window creates stripes on the blanket, which loop in semicircles over his arms. Over his chest the loops are big and broad, and for a fleeting moment Karen is sure she sees the blanket rising and falling; that he is breathing, ever so gently, just as he does when he is asleep.
‘Simon?’ she whispers.
But he doesn’t reply.
She can’t believe he is dead. They’ve told her he is, but to her he still seems to be here. She looks at his face for clues. There is something different about it, but the details are the same. His eyes are shut, the lashes are dark and familiar against his cheeks, his brows still need a trim, just as they did last night. He is close shaven – it is relatively early in the day, after all, but by nightfall his beard will be coming through again, won’t it? His hairline is the same; he is proud of his hair, Simon – it is one of the few things he is vain about. It is thick and dark and lustrous, if streaked with grey. ‘Very distinguished,’ she heard him mutter into the mirror once, and several times he has swanked to her that he has got more hair than his younger brother Alan, who is receding badly. She had smiled to herself at the time, amused at the way men compete over signs of youth in middle age.
She recognizes without thought or question the substantial barrel shape of Simon’s chest, broad beneath the blanket. His arms, too, faintly freckled and veined; the hairs on the back of his hands glint in the sun; his hands are still big and square and so much stronger than hers.
Yet . . .
He is no longer wearing the shirt he ironed that morning while she was feeding the children breakfast, with the cufflinks she gave him two Christmases back. It has been removed, replaced by an eerie ice-blue gown. And his wedding band has been removed too; it is the one thing Simon never took off. Instead there is a dent where it was tight around his finger; he had put on weight in the last few years, Karen knows.
The pain that comes from seeing these changes is overwhelming, frightening. Karen can feel her breath getting sho
rt, and a tightness in her throat, as if someone is choking her.
There is a chair by the bed; she sits down, quickly.
That’s better.
She pulls the chair up closer, takes Simon’s hand. How strange. It feels similar, in many ways, just as his face looks the same. But it’s cold. Simon’s hands are never cold, even when he’s chilly. She, Karen, has bad circulation – she gets chilblains on her toes from time to time – and her hands are quite often cold to the touch. But his never are.
Perhaps they are right, then.
She looks again at his face. It is not that his cheeks are pale: sometimes he’s quite grey, anyway; he’s not got the healthy colour that she and the children have, never has had. No, it’s that he looks flat, diminished, as if a part of him isn’t here, has vanished. The life has gone; there is no spirit in him. Bizarrely – or not so bizarrely, perhaps – Karen is reminded of when Charlie, their cat, died. He was very old, and one day he’d crawled under the kitchen table, somewhere he felt safe. When she’d found him later, it was as if his body was there, but somehow he wasn’t; he had stopped looking like Charlie – he just looked like any old dead cat, flat, his fur a bit matted, his mouth all rigid and dry. It was as if his spirit, his Charlieness, had disappeared.
And she can see the same with Simon now; part of him has disappeared.
‘Simon?’ she says again.
Again he doesn’t answer.
‘Where have you gone?’
Silence.
In a flash she recalls the scene on the train. The small bursting noise as he is sick next to her, the ‘boofs!’ as his head lands on the table. The realization that something awful is happening when he doesn’t respond to her cries, the people rushing, the nurses . . .
Again she feels an awful surge of anxiety.
She looks down at his hand in hers, hoping it will ground her. It is a hand that has held hers countless times, stroked her hair, brought her to orgasm. A hand that has written notes, birthday cards, drawn endless landscape designs. A hand that has signed cheques, held hammers, sawn wood, even – though not as often as she would have liked – hung washing. A hand she grasped tight – so tight – when she was in labour, as if it was all that could keep the pain at bay. And a hand that held one of Molly’s while Karen held the other, only yesterday, so together they could swing her along the pavement as they walked up from the beach. ‘One, two, three . . . wheeee!’ she can hear Simon say. She can still hear Molly’s wild whoops of laughter as she flies high in the air and then lands with small feet safely on the paving stones.
He wouldn’t leave Molly, would he? She’s so little. ‘Give me a Daddy cuddle!’ is one of her frequent cries. And Luke, too. He might have outgrown Daddy cuddles a bit; both she and Simon have to ask him for hugs now, but nonetheless he is an affectionate boy who loves nothing more than to play rough and tumble with his father.
No, Karen can’t believe Simon isn’t coming back.
Just then, the door opens with a soft click. There is a few seconds’ pause and for those brief moments Karen thinks it is him: that he’s heard her; that he has returned. Her heart lifts, soars . . .
But Simon is in the bed at her side.
She turns to check.
It is Anna.
Of course. Karen now realizes the pause was because she is carrying two polystyrene cups; she had to open the door first, then pick them up and carry them through.
‘Hi,’ she says. ‘I brought us another cup of tea.’
* * *
Tea, that’s what Lou needs with her lunch today. She’s been busier than usual this morning, having been on half-term the week before, and normally she’d have had a cup when she got to work, but what with arriving late, this is the first time she’s been able to stop. After all that has happened, she needs something warm and comforting; she’ll even have sugar in it, a treat she usually reserves for when she is ill.
Lou has a kettle in her therapy room. There is no fridge, so she takes a handful of miniature long-life milk cartons from the school kitchen every morning. As a result her tea has an unpleasant aftertaste, but it is better than traipsing to the other end of the building every time she wants one. Plus she likes to offer the students a cup of tea or coffee when they come to a session; she feels it helps them distinguish her interaction with them from the rest of their activities and makes them feel more adult and responsible.
As she stands waiting for the kettle to boil, she looks around her, contemplating. In the few months that she has been at the school, she has tried to make the space her own, or the students’ own, to be precise. Many of her clients find it hard to sit and focus one-to-one, so she has various toys and accessories for them to play with as they talk. Against the wall leans a giant bamboo filled with beans; a rain-stick – one boy seems to find it easier to confide with its gentle patter as a backdrop, and will repeatedly pick it up during their sessions and turn it to and fro. In the corner is a large plastic box of Play-Doh; several of the younger students – they start at eleven – seem better able to relax if they can twist and pull and thump it with their hands as they talk. There are a number of posters on the wall: printouts from the net she thought interesting, abstract patterns she hopes are restful on the eye, a ‘twentieth-century wonders of the world’ illustration that came with one of the Sunday papers. Last but not least, there is a giant pop-art print she has had framed over the sofa.
I KNOW WHO I AM
it proclaims in black and white.
I wonder if that man who died this morning – what did Anna call him? Simon? – knew who he was, she thinks. Not that it mattered if he did, really, now, but Lou sure as hell believes it matters when you’re alive. She sees so much damage wrought by parents who don’t know who they are, and whose lack of self-knowledge gets translated into violence or abuse, which is in turn reflected in their kids’ dysfunction.
And what about the man’s wife, Karen? What would it do to a relatively young woman to lose a partner so suddenly? Will she know who she is, with her husband gone? Lou believes that part of how people define themselves is through their loved ones, and she is profoundly touched by Karen’s circumstance, having experienced it at first hand; emotions compounded by having then met Anna in the taxi. A sudden death like that cuts right across the priorities and sensitivities of the living: one minute Karen was drinking coffee and engrossed in conversation with her husband; the next she was witnessing his last moments. Lou cannot shake the image of Simon, his head lolling, mouth gaping. Did he know what was happening, that he was dying? How dreadful to have no warning, no chance to say he loved his wife, no time to say goodbye. And if it is dreadful for him, it is even more so for Karen, left behind with a thousand unanswered questions, a million unspoken words.
The kettle has come to the boil. Absently Lou fishes for a tea bag, puts it in a mug, pours the water. As she does so, she considers: how do these events cast light on the way she herself lives? Does she know who she is? Do others? The poster reminds her of Aaron’s jibes earlier. While she’s entitled to privacy from the pupils, is she being totally honest with herself as to why she has told no other members of staff? She knows there have been moments when she could easily have said, and chose not to. And although there are many benefits to being a blank page as a counsellor, does she have to maintain such anonymity with her peers? She is relatively happy with how she dealt with Aaron, but might he – in some small way – have a point? After all, how can she be asking these young people to explore who they are, if she is practising concealment in some areas of her own life? How can she invite them to open up, when she is still closed – ‘in the closet’ – to everyone she works with?
Until now it has been easy for her to rationalize discretion. She has simply wanted to protect herself from discrimination or rejection. But then again, isn’t she, more than the other members of staff, supposed to be in touch with her identity, her feelings? And most of them seem to talk about their partners freely; inevitably their relat
ionships come up, even if just in passing.
Perhaps she should at least let the head know; certainly she will bring up Aaron’s jibes with her counselling supervisor. As for the rest of the staff, it is a tough one. The subject feels so intimate, so complex, like a giant knot of barbed wire, impossible to unravel without causing pain.
No wonder she needs sugar in her tea.
Anna is driving to the hospital in Karen’s car. She was worried that her friend was too shaky to get behind the wheel, and although Anna is wobbly too, she is less so. Collecting the children in her own vehicle would have meant moving their car seats from Karen’s battered Citroën, so this seemed the best option. Working it out took a while as neither of them is in a fit state for logistics, but at least it has allowed Anna to give Karen some more time alone with Simon, without making a big deal of it.
She parks in the hospital car park and heads inside to find her friend. Under normal circumstances Anna has a good sense of direction, and she knows Karen is depending on her, so she allows instinct to take over, and manages to locate the viewing room again despite her frame of mind.
The room is hot and stuffy, and Karen is still sitting exactly where she was when Anna left. Her polystyrene cup of tea is half drunk on the wheeled table by the bed; in her right palm she holds Simon’s hand.
‘Hello, sweetheart,’ says Anna.
‘Oh, hello.’
‘Do you think we’d better go?’
‘Go?’ Karen turns to Anna, mystified. If anything she looks even more shell-shocked than she did earlier. Her eyes are bloodshot, though Anna is not sure she’s actually been crying – she seems too overwhelmed for tears.
‘To collect the children,’ Anna reminds her. ‘It’s nearly half past three.’
‘Oh . . . yes . . . of course . . .’
‘So are you ready?’ Anna hates this. It seems so cruel to make her leave.
‘I don’t know . . .’ There is a long pause; Anna just waits. ‘I don’t know whether I can come. I don’t think he’ll be OK without me.’