by Sarah Moss
We were watching ambulances parking in puddles. Even the sight of rain had begun to fill me with longing to be outside, to feel the downpour fill my hair and roll down my forehead into my eyes as my feet echoed my heartbeat on the road, to know my body alive. Dad, Miriam had asked out of the night, sometime in the early hours when the nurses were having a tea break and talking about someone’s wedding, Dad, how much longer will you let them keep me here? Because it’s actually up to you, right? Legally? Yes, my darling girl, I had not said, in law I am your jailer, your mother and I; we are in league with the hospital to deprive you of your freedom and eventually of your mind, and we do it, please believe me, for your own good. Not much longer, I had said, dangerously, unilaterally. I promise, we won’t let it go on and on, we can see what it’s doing to you, being here. But just let them finish the tests, OK? OK, she’d said, but Dad? You do know that Dr Chalcott is either wrong or lying about the waiting times for every single test so far? Shh, I’d said, he’s not lying, it’s just that you know how stretched the NHS is, of course emergencies have to take priority, in some ways it’s reassuring not to be the most urgent case in the hospital, it means they think you’re safe. Not, she’d said, when the only people who get treatment are the ones who aren’t safe. Not when you realise that there is in fact a steady supply of emergencies.
In our heads, lying beside each other, her in the bed and I on my slippery plastic chair, we had made the next step: only when Miriam was again in danger would someone give us the next part of the story, show us the path we were on. Don’t you dare, I thought, somehow on the High Dependency Unit of the Children’s Wing find a way to risk your life. It’s like the bloody Garden of Eden, isn’t it, she said, today’s NHS, the price of knowledge is death, they’ll only investigate you if you’re actually visibly dying. Nonsense, I said, you’re not dead and if you were we would have been largely ignorant about why, that’s the point, that’s why it’s taking so long, people don’t just go into the middle of a field and stop breathing and if they do they’re not being sarcastic about it less than a week later, it’s not surprising the NHS isn’t set up for it. All right, Dad, she said, chill, get some sleep, I was joking. Jesus. And then she had gone to sleep and I lay there listening to the ward, to the toddler at the other end crying and then suddenly, cheerfully, demanding pink yogurt, to the blond boy’s whimpering in his sleep, to the discordant orchestra of heart and breathing monitors, and worried now that Mimi would try to find some way of harming herself, making an emergency. I was too hot. I heard one of the nurses telling the others that her cousin was making more money per hour being one of Santa’s elves in the mall down the road than they were, working the night shift in the children’s High Dependency Unit. I heard the moment’s silence while they all looked at this injustice, at the fact that we are all in a country that pays young women more to impersonate elves in a shop than to give expert care to critically ill children, and then spoke again of weddings. What can you do? The plastic chair was too slippery and plastic-smelling. Outside had been impossibly far away, like the memory of a country before the revolution.
Miriam looked round. ‘Have you noticed that most of the paramedics are women?’
I watched two green-clad women manoeuvring a stretcher down a ramp and under the canopy of A and E. ‘I hadn’t. But I suppose it’s low-paid, caring shift-work. You can work all night, come home and take the kids to school and then sleep fast for six hours before you pick them up, cook the tea, put them to bed and go back to work. Like Simran does.’
Simran is the mother of one of Rose’s friends and a midwife; I often end up looking after Molly during half-terms and holidays because this cunning routine collapses entirely when school is closed.
‘Simran likes it, Dad. You make it sound like martyrdom but she’s perfectly cheerful. Anyway, I’d have thought blokes would be into the blue lights and adrenaline. I’ve yet to see a female firefighter.’
‘There might not be enough blue lights and adrenaline for that sort of bloke,’ I said. ‘More picking up puking drunks from the pavements late at night and collecting little old ladies with kidney infections from their care homes.’
She turned back to the window. ‘Did I get blue lights?’
She didn’t remember, I knew that. Her memories ended when she realised she’d left her phone under the tree and began again in resus, even though she’d been conscious and responsive for at least twenty minutes of that time. Her brain, short of oxygen and unable to do everything, appeared to have prioritised communication over memory. It didn’t matter, I reminded myself. Other people were taking care of her by then. She didn’t need to remember, and I couldn’t remember because I hadn’t been there. The centre of the story was lost to both of us.
I raised my hand to touch her shoulder and then let it fall again. ‘Yes, you had blue lights. That was when I realised it was serious.’
‘The blue lights rather than the not-breathing?’
‘I didn’t know about that then. You were breathing when I saw you. Mrs Collier just said you’d had an incident.’
I saw her shoulders lift in a sigh. ‘When will I go back to school? I’m missing loads, it’s going to take for ever to catch up.’
‘Soon. I hope. Shall I ask them to send some work?’
Her back shrugged. ‘Don’t mind. Up to you.’
I heard, amid the babble of the ward behind us, the Welsh nurse approaching. ‘Don’t panic, Mum, look, there they are, in the playroom.’
Small running feet. Rose. Behind her, Emma. Rose coming too fast. I braced myself and swung her up. She wrapped her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist.
‘Hands-free hug. Let go, Dad.’
I held my arms out and she hung on, as if she were a koala and I a tree. Emma walked towards us. She was wearing work clothes, black trousers and a grey shirt she must have ironed herself, with a silver necklace I gave her a few years ago, a reproduction of one of Ashbee’s designs. Her hair was up and she’d made up her eyes as well as her face, the full mask and costume, but it wasn’t working. In the shirt’s opening, you could almost see all the way round her collar bones. Her cheeks had fallen away. She looked sick, much more so than Miriam. Rose tightened her grip, rubbed her cheek on my shoulder.
‘Sorry we’re late,’ Emma said. ‘I got caught at work.’
It’s her version of ‘hello’.
I patted Rose and tried to put her down. ‘Never mind, you’re here now.’
Miriam hadn’t turned. Emma went and stood next to her.
‘Hello, love. How are you?’
Miriam shrugged. ‘Most paramedics are female.’
‘I’m not sure that’s right. You’d have to watch for a very long time to be sure.’
‘I do watch for a very long time. There isn’t anything else to do.’
Rose slid down. ‘At least you don’t have to go to school. I wish I didn’t have to go to school. We’ve got some cards for you and Mrs Wasley said to give you her love and she remembers teaching you. Yucky.’
‘I’d rather be at school,’ Miriam said. ‘I’d rather be anywhere at all.’
Rose looked incredulously at Miriam’s back. ‘What, even Forest Lake?’
Forest Lake, as Mimi never misses a chance to point out, is neither a forest nor a lake, nor indeed constructed on the site of either, but the biggest shopping mall in the Midlands, also known round here as a temple to late capitalist decadence and the local epicentre of global practices of exploitative labour, environmental destruction, misogynistic marketing and other fashionable sins. Some of the girls in Miriam’s class worship there more than once a week, giving Mimi and her friends the pleasures of moral superiority as well as themselves the joys of shopping.
‘Anywhere. Heathrow. McDonald’s. The Tube at rush hour. At least you know when you’re going to leave. Even prisoners know that.’
Don’t be ridiculous, I thought, don’t you dare compare a hospital where people are trying to take care of you
and make sure you are safe and well with a prison where—
I reached out to touch Emma. She didn’t look at me. It was as if she wasn’t there, as if the woman in the doctor had gone away.
‘How was work?’ I asked.
She, too, was watching the rain. A couple who couldn’t find a parking place were sitting in their car, arguing.
‘Bit grim, really. Fourteen-year-old self-harmer, didn’t want her parents to know. In a bad state. Had to get hold of the emergency psych.’
The NHS works on the assumption that all of us want to stay alive, although you would think the healthy eating and anti-smoking posters covering every vertical surface sufficient evidence to the contrary. Many of us, given the choice, knowing how to be well, choose sickness, which does not stop overweight drinkers despising those who write their self-destruction in blood.
The woman got out of the car and slammed the door. The man set off too fast, stalled the engine and pounded the steering wheel with his fist. Quite a lot of people, Emma says, have heart attacks in hospital car parks; I wonder if the revenue generated by the astonishing parking fees covers the cost of the treatments required by the resulting stress. Actually, the fees probably go to some private company while the rest of us continue to pay for the hospital. They should have taken the train. Right, I thought, we should generate some normality for the girls. Keep their relationship going. Let Rose see that Miriam is OK.
‘Who wants to play Cheat?’
Rose took my hand. ‘Me. I’m going to win again.’
‘Mimi?’
She shook her head.
‘Come on. It will distract you. Pass some time at least.’
‘No.’
I looked at Emma. I saw her sigh, square her shoulders. ‘Play with your sister, Mimi. Please.’
Rose touched Miriam’s hand. ‘Come on. It’s fun. I’ll even help you if you like.’
Miriam let Rose lead her down the hall to the bed which had become her world. Emma and I fell into step behind them, a procession of no significance. I did not reach for her hand.
Emma went straight to Miriam’s file, which lived in a metal holder on which I banged my head every time I unfolded the chair-bed. She carried it over to the window, as if the fluorescent light overhead were inadequate, and her hand reached to push away hair that had not fallen down. Rose was rummaging in her school-bag.
‘Look, Mim, here are the cards. And my class made gingerbread. I brought you mine, I didn’t even taste a corner. Mrs Wasley wrapped it up for you.’
Miriam put the envelopes and the foil package on her bedside cupboard, between the plastic water-jug and the pink roses sent by Emma’s colleagues and the colouring book from someone who’d forgotten how old she was.
Rose leant against Miriam. ‘Aren’t you going to try it? I made a cat. Because you like them. Snowy came in the kitchen again and Mummy roared at him.’
Snowy is next door’s cat. Every time he invades our house, Rose returns to her cat campaign. They kill birds, Emma says. They spread parasites. Dad and I have enough responsibilities. Get it off that counter!
‘Thanks, Rose. I’ll save it till later.’
The pack of cards was under Miriam’s clean clothes and my sweater at the foot of her bed.
‘Here you are, girls. Mimi, can you shuffle?’
I went over to Emma.
‘There’s nothing here,’ she said. ‘Everything’s completely normal. It’s just the wheezing.’
‘They did the scan this morning,’ I said. ‘They said someone would come and talk to us later.’
She put down the papers. From this window, we could see a section of another building clad in pale concrete, an emergency exit where sometimes two nurses met for a cigarette, and a curtained window in the opposite wall. It was still raining. The gutter across the way was blocked and the trickle from it blew out through the grey air.
‘Do you want me to tell you what I think? I’ve been reading about it.’
No, I thought. No, let’s cherish our ignorance. Let’s, at least, wait until the consultant tells what he knows. We will have the rest of our lives to live with the story that is about to begin.
‘Can we see if Dr Chalcott comes today? I mean, he might be able to tell us something for sure.’
She tapped the papers straight on the windowsill. ‘If you want. But there’s really only one set of possibilities now. It wasn’t just a freak event, Adam. This isn’t going to go away.’
I wanted to put my fingers in my ears. Stop it. Go away. For now, in that moment, I did not have to know what Emma was trying to tell me.
‘Now you’re here,’ I said, ‘I can make tea. And I’m going to do you some toast. You need to eat.’
Rose looked up. She was winning. ‘Can I have some toast?’
‘No,’ said Emma. ‘You had a snack on the train and Dad will be making your dinner as soon as you get home. Adam?’
I looked up from the bag of groceries she’d brought. A box of sushi for Miriam, a pot of cut fruit for Miriam, a pot of layered yogurt and muesli for Miriam’s breakfast. Nothing for herself. ‘What?’
‘Your dad called. Left a message on the machine. You haven’t told him, have you?’
‘Haven’t had time,’ I said.
The blond boy’s mother was in the kitchenette, opening a foil package. Her hands were shaking. ‘He’s not well. We’re going over to the IC U. Soon as there’s a bed. His dad brought these in. Pancakes. But I don’t think.’ She stopped. Her hands stopped. ‘I don’t think he’s going to eat them now.’
I didn’t touch her. I didn’t smile. Because she was holding herself together by the smallest cobweb and anything could have made her break.
I called my father that night. I’d bought a magazine for Rose at the station, which kept her absorbed until we got off the train, and then I’d let her play on my computer while I cooked stand-by pasta again (onions, garlic, tinned tomatoes, tinned chickpeas). I’d sat on the edge of the bath and done the voices for her while the mummy and daddy plastic horses taught the baby plastic pigs how to swim, and agreed that hair-washing could be postponed for another night. I’d read two chapters of a book about a misunderstood child who finds comfort in friendship with a talking badger and sung Bridge Over Troubled Water and Scarborough Fair, diminuendo until her eyes closed. I’d gone back upstairs half an hour later to provide a fresh glass of a water and again five minutes after that because Owl was missing and my superior skills were required to find him at the bottom of the bed. I’d put on a load of laundry and hung the damp-smelling clothes I found wet in the washing machine. I’d paid two bills and checked that Emma’s salary had come in and nothing unexpected had gone out of our bank account. I still needed to make Rose’s packed lunch – maybe stand-by pasta salad, given the emptiness of the fridge – assemble her PE kit and clean at least the kitchen and bathroom, but it was already getting late. I hadn’t, I realised, seen enough of my father recently to know what time he might go to bed.
He moved back to Cornwall a few years ago, after a long time in Vermont. It took me longer than it should have done to realise that after my mother died, he’d stayed in England only for me, only until I finished school. The community at Bryher Farm had disbanded not long after he left, selling the land and buildings to someone setting up an outdoor activities centre. I’d thought that after so many decades in intentional communities, he’d find another for his later years, a place where he’d have company and support and eventually care, but he’d had enough. Time to be alone, he said. Time to eat when I’m hungry and sleep when I’m tired, to hear my own music. Lord knows, I can meet my own needs. When he said that, I badly wanted that time too. I wanted his house on the edge of Porthleven, with its view of the blue water where the English Channel becomes the Atlantic Ocean. I wanted his stone-walled vegetable plot, barely sheltered from the salt wind, and the two-hundred-year-old mining tower keeping watch on the headland to the east. I wanted his quiet, and the assurance of his carpenter�
�s hands, his farming hands, his mechanic’s hands. What does your father do, people used to ask. It is perhaps hereditary, not to have an answer to that question. Everything, he does everything.
His phone rang. Landline, he doesn’t use a mobile. I found a clean cloth and wiped the kitchen counter with my other hand.
‘Adam?’
He always knows. I don’t know how. My lungs took a deep breath.
‘Dad. How are you?’
‘Very well. Just been out to look at the stars. Wonderful clear night.’
‘Good.’ I dropped the cloth in the sink. Not the moment to run water. ‘Dad, I have to tell you something. First, the important thing is that we’re all still here. And unimpaired.’
Two hundred miles away, I heard the intake of breath, heard my father pull in starlit air with the smell of the sea on it and hold it inside him, ready.
burning
The obliteration of Coventry began as an ordinary air raid. At that time and in that place, there were ordinary air raids; if there is a hierarchy in these matters, there were and are worse ordinarinesses elsewhere. Several families were accustomed to play Monopoly as the bombs fell, putting imaginary hotels in central London as the real ones were destroyed. One such household waited for the arrival of two elderly sisters living next door who, believing that anything white was visible to the enemy pilots above, went out at night with colanders on their grey heads. (Enamel colanders, perhaps? All the colanders of my acquaintance are steel and much shinier than a blue rinse, although I could see that reason was not the ruling principle in this case.) I read of other instances of this belief; one woman, living in a village outside Coventry, responded to every siren by running outside to take white laundry off the line, as if the Luftwaffe had crossed the Channel to bomb clean sheets. In the same village, an elderly man went around with shears chopping white blossom off fruit trees. I found these acts of superstition in some way reassuring. Not everyone, then, gathered with Spam sandwiches and a stiff upper lip for a sing-song until the All Clear. I found myself looking for evidence of fear and brokenness, anything to counteract the ‘Blitz Experience’ that my children seemed to ‘do’ repeatedly by way of primary school history. Please send your child to school in shorts, shirt and flat cap (for boys)/cotton dress with socks and sandals (for girls). We will be trying out some wartime recipes and Make Do and Mend! As if war were all about accessories and baking. Miriam was told off for asking about the Holocaust.