by Sarah Moss
She closed her eyes. ‘Dad?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who decides where I have to be? I mean, can I leave if I want to?’
I took a deep breath. Here, already. ‘Legally, we decide. Mum and I. If the hospital thought we were acting against your interests, I think they could get a court order to overrule us, but I’m fairly sure that as long as we and your doctors are in accord, our word prevails. Mum probably knows the detail.’
She didn’t open her eyes. ‘So what about me? What if I decided to leave?’
I reached for her hand. ‘I’d ask you not to make that decision. Not to put any of us in that situation. I’d remind you how much you have to gain by staying. The rest of your life, potentially. University and work and marriage and kids if you want them, and all the places you’ll go and the things you’ll do. Later on, you’ll see that being bored and miserable and undignified for a few days when you’re fifteen is a price worth paying even if it’s horrible at the time.’
‘If I still wanted to leave?’
‘Open your parcel,’ I said. ‘I’m getting you a muffin.’
I went and stood in the kitchen and looked out at cars parking in puddles, at people taking umbrellas to the pay-stations. I thought of nothing at all.
When I went back in, there was the smell of coffee and Miriam had put a jumper over her pyjamas and was sitting cross-legged on the bed with her phone in her hands. I didn’t look at the monitor.
She put the phone down and moved a torn padded envelope over something on the bed. ‘Guess what was in the parcel?’
I had carried the parcel around. ‘Books.’
‘Yeah, but which books?’
‘Erm, The Second Sex? The Beauty Myth? Though she knows you’ve read those. Das Kapital in parallel text.’
‘Nope.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Giles’s latest.’
I handed her a plate holding two muffins. ‘That’s kind.’
‘No, Dad, that’s monstrously egotistical. Oh, sorry you nearly died, you’d better read my book. My monstrously egotistical book about how when I go for a walk it’s a profound moral and spiritual experience that makes me a better person than you, but when you go to the same place you’re just a tourist messing things up. I read the extract in the Guardian, it’s a pile of bullshit about how he’s weighed down by sorrow for my generation, only not like normal adults are because we’re being badly educated for jobs that don’t exist in an economy that condemns us to poverty and homelessness at levels not seen since before the First World War but because we can’t tell the difference between the lesser marshwort and the – the flowering marsh grass which all goes to show that we’re losing our vital and precious sense of being at one with the natural world, rather than for example showing that the world’s moved on and by the time we’re grown up two-thirds of the global population will be living in cities and not actually giving a fuck about the lesser marshwort and it doesn’t seem to have crossed his sorrowful little mind that if we all went and joined him communing with the fauna of furthest outer Scotland it would in fact be full of people and he’d have to find somewhere else to be superior which—’
Emma handed her a coffee. ‘You know we were planning to go see them this summer?’
Mim took a sip. ‘Thanks, Mum. Well, Giles and I might have a full and frank exchange of views. Do him good to hear from young people nowadays. I’m not going to let him talk crap just because he’s a posh bloke who writes books.’
I looked at my fifteen-year-old daughter. Wouldn’t England be an utterly different country if we didn’t let people talk crap just because they’re posh blokes who write books?
‘He does hear from young people nowadays,’ I said. ‘He’s got Raph and Tim.’
She started on the muffin. ‘I like Raph but you can’t really call him a representative of teenagers everywhere. He only talks about engineering. And Tim probably does know all about the lesser marshwort, it’s not as if he’s got anything else to do up there.’
I took a muffin myself. Speaking as a posh bloke who writes books, I thought, as long as we can get the patriarchy in here to piss her off, we’re going to be OK.
a parent whose mind
On the children’s ward, parents’ sadness comes out at night. During the day, friends text to tell you you’re doing so well and being heroic and they don’t know how you keep going, which is kind but makes you feel even further from ordinary life than the fact that your daughter’s breathing stopped and no-one seems to know why it stopped or when it might stop again. You keep going as everyone always keeps going, because an alternative has not been offered. You play Scrabble and chess and Monopoly with your daughter when other diversions fail, using the set of board games (bored games, Miriam always insisted) that usually come out only at Christmas. Miriam is predictably good at Monopoly. You carry plates of nauseating hospital food out of the room and work your way through the pots and packets you bought at Waitrose yesterday, when you were in the grey light of the outside world where there is weather and movement. You persuade her to turn off the television and walk up and down the ward when she’s been sitting in her bed for two hours. You try, courting sarcasm, to interest her in the fish, with which you increasingly identify. You invite her to make up stories about the people seen foreshortened in the car park below, live in hope of seeing some of them argue or lose their keys or get a parking ticket. You try to ration the number of times you look at the clock. You offer another game of Scrabble, a cup of nasty orange tea from the kitchenette, which children are not allowed to enter for fear of burns and knives or maybe contamination, even fifteen-year-old children long accustomed to cooking soup, eggs and the occasional pasta dish all on their own. You let her watch television again, and then it’s probably time to eat something. In a while, your wife will arrive, or maybe a doctor will look in, raising your hopes that soon someone will tell you what is happening.
But at night, eventually, the children go to sleep. It takes a long time. There will be a television playing somewhere on the ward, even though the rules say they should be switched off or used with headphones after 9 p.m. The lights are always on. The telephone at the nurses’ station continues to ring. There is always someone crying on the children’s ward, but at night there are fewer other sounds to mask the noise. Pain. Fear. Boredom. Sorrow. Young children can cry for hours while their parents reason or pat or sing or walk up and down with the weight of bone and muscle and blood in their arms. Nurses, I observed, by and large, lose patience with tears after about twenty minutes. They know what it is to have something to cry about.
At home, Miriam had slept with the light off, her curtains drawn and door closed since Rose’s birth (‘this baby is too loud and I will not have it’). She often gets up in the night to turn off the landing light that Rose requires. I draped towels and my coat over a chair and positioned it so the shade fell on her face. I offered her ear-plugs and an eye-shade from our flight to New York four years ago. (I couldn’t imagine that we would ever fly again, either, or hazard her to an unfamiliar medical system.) Already tethered by the monitors’ wires, her skin red and itchy under the glue on the pads and her finger in the grip of the oxygen saturation monitor, the last thing Miriam wanted was more objects attached to her. Stop, Dad, with the shadow theatre, it’s no use, I can’t sleep and I don’t see how anyone else can either, I don’t see how anyone ever gets better from anything in hospitals where the food is not food and they shine lights in your eyes and let the phone ring all night, I’d have thought it was a good way of making people ill. It takes more, sweetie, than crap food and broken nights to make people ill, I did not say, or most of the adult population would be sick, you’ll learn if you have your own kids that there is a difference between being tired and real illness, you’ll learn that humans are tough. Most humans. When we don’t stop in a field and die for no reason. I should go away, I thought, I should take myself off and let her feel sad and go to sleep on her own, the w
ay everyone does. I sat at her bedside, in the chair that would fold out into an approximate bed for me, held a book in front of me and pretended not to watch her go to sleep.
I heard the undertone of the ward at night, like the running of an aeroplane’s engine when the passengers settle into half-sleep in simulated night, surrounded by drooling strangers, wearers of glasses bare-faced with the grooves on their noses indecently exposed, the smell of feet and bad breath and private shame recirculating in everyone’s lungs. I heard the rhythm of all the monitors, now syncopated, now together, as the chambers of the children’s hearts sang to each other. I heard the repeating chime of a bradycardia, the burr of a low oxygen saturation, the stirring of a parent whose mind could now translate her child’s monitor in her sleep. Miriam turned her head, spreading her hair across the pillow. Hair like Emma’s, light brown and so fine it drops through your fingers like silk. Her eyes closed. I remembered all the times I’d watched her go to sleep as a baby and a toddler, my finger in her grasp and my desire for a cup of coffee, a phone call, a crap, in attendance. I had to wait a while after her eyes closed, then, or she’d wake and cry as I took my finger back and crept towards the door and I’d have to return to the cot and begin again. All that time this was coming. All those years she was going to stop breathing.
I put the book down, marking my place although I didn’t remember from one day to the next which book it was, and eased myself to my feet. I wanted a cup of coffee and a crap.
The mother of the blond boy was in the kitchenette. She was blonde too, though dark at the roots, and everything about her was fallen. She had been crying. She raised her head, as if it was too heavy for her neck.
‘Kettle’s on,’ she said. ‘Though I’ll be lucky to get a cuppa before he wakes up again.’
‘They should keep gin in here,’ I said. ‘Something that works faster than coffee.’
I didn’t mean it. I was never going to drink again, because what if I was needed, to call an ambulance or to drive fast or to start CPR, which I needed to learn?
She peered into a mug. They were rarely clean. One said Property of Dr Whyte, Ward 15, in black marker pen, and I avoided it in case Dr Whyte should appear and accuse me of theft.
‘I’d settle for chocolate,’ she said. ‘Or a bit of weed. No, don’t worry, I’m joking.’
I hadn’t been worried. None of us was going to start on psychotropic substances. Where would you stop?
‘You’re the big girl’s dad, aren’t you? I noticed her, reading and that. She’s very good. Must be hard for a teenager, in here with all the little ones.’
It’s like being in prison, you don’t ask why the other person’s here.
‘Oh, she has her moments. She’s not in pain. Your son was doing some lovely drawings a couple of days ago.’
The kettle boiled.
‘It’s his seventh operation. He wasn’t two weeks old, the first time.’ She poured water into her mug. I watched the colour of tea swirl like smoke from the teabag. ‘He hates coming in here.’ Her hand shook. ‘My husband had to carry him onto the ward this time. Kicking and screaming.’
Is it worth it, I wanted to ask, is our violence towards our sick children justified? Could there be healing without harm?
‘Miriam’s older,’ I said. ‘It’s probably easier when you can talk about why you’re here and explain the risks and benefits.’
She opened one of the plastic pots of fake milk. ‘Yes, well, I just hope we get that far.’
We’re very lucky, I found myself wanting to say. We’re lucky that we didn’t know about this world until now. We’re lucky that we went to Colsay and to New York and Paris and some Greek islands without thinking that there are hospital wards where children die by inches and their loving parents have to force them back into places of terror and then compel them to get out of bed and walk about when they are cold and hurting and afraid and do not want to expose their fresh wounds to the gaze of strangers. We’re lucky that we had eight years of having two healthy children. And heaven knows, we’re lucky that we have them both still.
‘I hope you do too,’ I said.
I went back to Miriam’s bedside and sat down. I held my coffee. I did not think about my daughters. I did not think about the blonde woman, or about her son’s prognosis, or about the nurse I could overhear trying to get a bed in Intensive Care for a child who’d arrived on our ward that afternoon. I thought about the Coventry project.
magic raven
For seven centuries, there was a cathedral in Coventry. Suddenly, on the night of November 14th 1940, Nazi bombers flattened and burnt it, along with the rest of the medieval city and 1,824 people, most of them entombed and burnt in underground bomb shelters.
There are arguments about ‘suddenly’. Coventrians, like other British and for the matter of that French and German city-dwellers, were used to air raids by then, and already had domestic routines in place. November 14th was a clear, cold day, with no clouds to obscure the full moon, so many families anticipated the early siren and went to their shelters or ensconced themselves under the dining table or in the under-stairs cupboard immediately after an early tea. I read of a young mother who usually gave her toddlers cough syrup at the beginning of an air raid, so they would sleep through it, and another who left her baby in a basket under the stairs while she sat under the table with her dogs for reasons that must have made sense at the time. Thursday was early closing day, so many shop workers were home before dusk. A man paid a deposit on a bicycle for his son’s Christmas present. A woman met her fiancé to end the engagement and return the ring. An engineer built shutters to protect his windows but took away his family’s gas masks on the grounds that ‘when life degenerated to such an extent that men gassed each other then life was no longer worth living’. Many prosperous families had abandoned homes in Coventry and rented cottages in the surrounding countryside or moved in with relatives in neighbouring towns months earlier, and many of those who remained were ‘trekking’, leaving the city in cars, buses, trucks or on foot to sleep in their vehicles, in outbuildings or under the hedges each night, returning for work in the mornings. The danger was not sudden. Nor was the fear.
For politicians and military leaders, little is sudden. The Nazis had a navigational system that I found oddly fascinating, the knickebein. Knickebein means ‘bent leg’, but is also the name of a magic raven and fairy-tale guide, which seems a more likely origin. It was a navigational technology for night bombing, involving the broadcast of interlocking radio beams over England from antennae on the other side of the Channel. Pilots could fly along a radio beam, hearing a steady tone as long as they were accurately positioned and ‘dots’ from one side of the line and ‘dashes’ from the other if they veered off course. Cross-signals told them when to prepare the bombs and, allowing for the speed of travel, when to drop them. The knickebein made the German air raids in the early years of the war much more accurate than the British raids on Germany, which relied on navigating by the stars. I remembered the diagrams of the beams forming a grid over Britain, intersecting at major targets, at cities. It’s hard to look at a map of one’s own country without superimposing an autobiographical map. There in the far south-west I grew up; there, right in the middle of the fat bit, I went to university; there we lived not-exactly-in London while Emma was training; there we live now. Put it like that and I haven’t gone far, an adulthood spent in the major targets of the Luftwaffe. There is Emma’s sister in Cheshire, there’s her aunt’s cottage on the Norfolk coast, wide beaches and big waves and the wind straight from Siberia. There are mountains: Peaks, Lakes, Trossachs, Cairngorms, memories of sandwiches eaten part-frozen with gloved hands and moments of exhilaration approaching a summit. There, too small for this map, is Anna and Giles’s island, where Miriam was conceived and where we attempted an ill-advised holiday the following year.
A young Oxford physicist called Reginald Jones was the first scientist to work in British military intelligence. He theorised
the existence of the magic raven, found it and developed ways of jamming the broadcasts, which was easy at first but became harder as the wartime arms race gathered speed. Just before the Coventry raid, Enigma communications deciphered at Bletchley Park suggested that Wolverhampton, Birmingham or Coventry would be the target of a moonlit raid in the next few days. By 3 p.m. on November 14th, Jones knew that the first beams were intersecting over Moreton-in-Marsh – a Cotswold town now so blatantly wealthy and pretty that passing drivers of perfectly moderate political inclinations and some respect for English vernacular architecture long to spray anarchist slogans on its honeyed walls – the second over Kenilworth Castle, where I accompany school trips in my role as token penis-owner, and the third over the centre of Coventry. Jones had to guess what frequency the Nazis would be using, in order to set the jammers to the same one, and ‘spent a distinctly unhappy night realising that if I had guessed wrong there were going to be some hundreds of people dead the following morning’. He had guessed right, but a tone-deaf operator made a mistake and the Nazi pilots were able to hear the British signal clearly and distinctly from the magic raven. The Army moved some guns around, but more to boost morale than because they were at that point capable of shooting planes out of the sky.
Suddenly, but not really. There is always a beginning.
a country before the revolution