After You'd Gone

by Maggie O'Farrell

  Ann’s gaze flicks back to her daughter, then back to her lap. She picks a few hairs off her coat, letting them drift into the airless atmosphere of the room, then leans forward again. ‘I loved him,’ she whispers. The hospital hums around them. ‘I really did. I want you to know that I always—’

  The door opens and Ben w'alks in. He is carrying two cups and three books. He pushes the door closed with his foot. ‘Hello,’ he says, ‘I got you tea.’

  Ann sits back in her chair. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Is tea all right?’ he asks, as he hands it to her.

  ‘Yes. Fine.’

  ‘Or would you rather coffee?’

  ‘Coffee’s fine too.’

  i got coffee for me. But you could have it if you wanted.’ ‘I don’t mind. Either.’

  ‘Oh. Tea or coffee, then?’

  ‘I said I don’t mind. Whatever you want.’

  ‘I don’t mind either.’

  ‘Ben,’ Ann clears her throat, ‘Ben, I need ... to talk to you.’

  Ben has his back to her. He is putting the books down on the bedside table. He rests his cup on top of them, then turns to Alice. ‘Hello,’ he says, in his special I’m-talking-to-my-daughter-in-a-coma voice. ‘How are you today?’

  Ann marvels for a moment at her ability to be irritated by him, even at a time like this. ‘Ben? Did you hear me?’

  He still doesn’t react, rubbing Alice’s arm with his hand. ‘Ben! I’m talking to you. Or trying to.’

  He half turns. ‘Ann, if this is about dinner tonight, Beth and I were talking about it, and—’

  ‘It’s not about dinner.’

  ‘Oh.’ He sits.

  ‘Ben,’ Ann begins, ‘I need to tell you things . . . about Alice, You see, if Alice wakes up—’

  ‘When,’ Ben corrects her.

  ‘If,’ Ann insists, ‘if she does, then . . .’ Ann finds her hands are slippery with sweat. She laces her fingers into one another. ‘We need to have talked about this first.’

  Ben jumps up. ‘I think I’ll have coffee after all.’ He picks up the cup. ‘Are you sure you’re happy with tea?’

  ‘Will you shut up about the bloody tea?’

  He jerks his head as if she’s slapped him. For a moment, this room where people only ever talk in hushed tones seems shocked by her raised voice — pulsing with silence, waiting. Then the ventilator is released, Alice’s chest falls, and the spell seems broken.

  ‘The thing is,’ Ann begins, in a lower voice, ‘I’m not sure that Alice is—’

  ‘Don’t,’ Ben murmurs. Ann looks at him over the mound of Alice’s body. He has his hand spread over his forehead, covering his eyes.

  ‘Don’t what?’

  ‘Don’t say it. I don’t want you to say it.’

  ‘You don’t know what I’m going—’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ he interrupts, ‘of course I do,’ and he is taking his hands away from his face. ‘You must think I’m a fool.’ ‘Ben . . . I . . .’ Control seems to have slipped from her grasp. She feels as if something is curdling inside her, something very cold, pulling substance away from the edges of her body, leaving her as just a shell of skin stretched over bone. Ann gets up, stumbles from her chair, holds on to the window-sill, knocking over several of Alice’s cards by her movement. How does he know? Did he see them ever? Did Elspeth tell him, after all?

  ‘How long have you known?’ she asks, her back to her husband.

  ‘I’ve always known.’

  ‘Right from when she was born?’

  ‘Yes,’ he sighs.

  ‘How?’ Ann is incredulous, appalled. She turns round to face him.

  He almost laughs. ‘You never did understand how North Berwick works, did you? Everybody knows everything. And there are always people who’ll tell you, and,’ he winces at some hidden recollection, ‘people who’ll take pleasure in telling you. But when Alice was born, and I held her ... I held her in the hospital when she was about two hours old, do you remember? And she was wailing and screaming and fighting. You were really tired, and I took her in my arms down the corridor away from you so that you could sleep, and I looked down at her and I realised that what I felt for her was no different, no less fierce or less intense or less protective, than what I’d felt for Kirsty, and I told myself: Ben, don’t listen to gossip, either she is yours, or she’s as good as, and in the long run will it really matter? And the doubt hurt, God, it hurt sometimes — especially as she got older and it was more and more obvious — but whenever it threatened to overtake me I just kept telling myself that being a father is about more than just DNA. She is to me what Beth and Kirsty are.’

  ‘Why . . . why did you never say anything before?’

  ‘Why? Because . . . because what was the point, Ann? I knew, you knew. It would have been . . . vindictive ... to ... to drag it all out into the open. Alice and her sisters — what kind of an effect would it have had on the three of them? And Elspeth ... it would have broken Elspeth’s heart. You know how they were with each other. Elspeth would have hated you for it. Why would I have wanted all that?’

  Ann looks down at her feet. ‘Ben, I think she does know. Alice, I mean. I think she’s found out.’

  Ben uncrosses his legs, shifting his foot up on to his knee, gets hold of his ankle. ‘What do you mean?’ he asks.

  ‘I mean ... in Edinburgh . . . when she came up ... I think she saw . . .’

  ‘You and him?’

  Ann nods.

  ‘You are . . . ?’ Ben flounders for the words, the lines in his forehead and around his eyes deepening. ‘Still . . . ?’

  Ann nods again.

  Ben bites his lower lip, swallows, his eyes slide away from his wife, back to the figure on the bed. ‘I see.’

  The most depressing thing about these cases for Mike is that after a certain amount of time, people give up on them; the patient gets relegated to a smaller room, off a more distant ward; the question of quality of life is raised, euthanasia discussed; donor transplant is mentioned, gently at first, to the relatives.

  The hospital corridors move under him, then he turns right down the long glass walkway. There are still some tests he can run. He could put her in for a new brain scan, take another lumbar puncture. But he tells himself that he must decide if there’s any point, must set down, in his head at least, a cut-off date.

  Ahead of him is a middle-aged man that Mike’s been kind of trying to overtake ever since he walked through the doors of this wing of the hospital, but there have been so many people and wheelchairs and beds coming the other way Mike feels he can’t barge past him. The man walks just that bit slower than him so that every now and again Mike has to take three or four mincing, foreshortened steps so as not to tread on the back of his shoes.

  To his dismay, he sees that the man is going through the double doors to Intensive Care. Mike sighs and then reminds himself that it’s not much farther now anyway. Two nurses pass. Their eyes rest on the bloke in front of Mike, and rest on Mike for slightly longer.

  The man stops outside Alice’s room. Mike is so unprepared for this that he nearly falls over him, turning his head and reading — at the same time as the man — ‘Alice Raikes’ on the little white sign on the door. The man is leaning his weight against the door, going in, closing it behind him. Mike steps up to the window, covered in those mirrored slats that give you back sections of your face interspersed with narrow glimpses of the room beyond. He sees the man pull a chair up to the bed and sit down.

  I am somewhere. Drifting. Hiding. Thoughts running around tracks, random and unconnected as ball-bearings in the circuit of a pinball machine. I am thinking about the party at which John and I didn’t meet, how we must have circled each other round the room like moths at a light-bulb. I am thinking about my grandmother and how she told me that she made her own trousseau. I am imagining her cutting through the flimsy sheen of coral silk, the weight of the dressmaking scissors leaving red welts in her thumb and finger; folding the fraying edges into thems
elves, hemming them with infinitesimal, slanting stitches, sewing on to them the long webs of lace. 1 am thinking of the garden in North Berwick and my mother pocking at the soil with a trowel, pulling up weeds and shaking their tangled roots to divest them of any particle of earth they might have dared to think they could take with them. I am thinking this and all this and nothing, when I hear someone somewhere saying, ‘Hello there, Alice.’ Just like that. Three words propelled into my atmosphere. And I know that voice. I know it so well. It’s John. And he is speaking to me. And suddenly it feels like the moment before thunder: the air around me seems to vibrate and darken, and I am not in control any more, I’m being driven towards something, or through something, through what feels like a small, narrowing gap, and for a moment I wonder if this is it, if the time is now, if I’m dying, and part of me is laughing, scoffing at all that bullshit we are fed about tunnels and light because it doesn’t feel like that at all, not at all, but I’m not really laughing very much because I’m concentrating too hard to see if he’s going to speak again. If I had antennae they’d be quivering, stretched out to their limit, straining for sound, and then I hear it again: he is clearing his throat, and I want to cry and shout, where have you been, you bastard, how dare you leave me like that. But then I hear, ‘I have been meaning to come and see you for a long time. A very long time.’

  It’s not him. It’s not him and it feels like my heart is breaking all over again.

  But I do know who it is. He is speaking again, saying things about how he’s left everything too late and can I forgive him, and I don’t know if I can and I am wondering about this when I feel that his voice seems close to me, very close indeed, so close that I can almost feel his breath moving at the side of my head; then I realise that all this time I am being carried forwards, or up, and I’m not sure if this is what I want and I’m panicking now, unsure if I should be trying to tread water or swim back down against this force, but it seems there’s nothing I can do, my head rushing rushing towards some surface I didn’t know was there or that I’d forgotten was there, and I’m gasping now, my lungs tight and airless, strings of bubbles streaming from my mouth like pearls.