Fran laid her head down on the sheet next to Jess’s hand and very lightly stroked her daughter’s fingers. They were cool, but not cold. The weight of Marcus’s hand resting on her own back was reassuring. They were together again. It would be all right, as long as they stayed together. The worst was over.
Chapter 9
IT WAS Sal’s turn next.
The doctors gave her a choice: stay in the tiny side-room near the operating theatres or go up to the ICU unit and wait there. They stressed that Tish could be in surgery for quite a while, and that she would be very heavily sedated when she did finally emerge. How long she would be in theatre, they didn’t know. How conscious she would be, they couldn’t say. Sal panicked. The thought of being alone frightened her. There’d been a curious comfort in being trapped in that awful waiting room with the others. Or, if not comfort, then at least a solidarity of anxiety. They had been in it together. She couldn’t face the thought of being left on her own in the underbelly of the hospital, with nothing to do but wait and pray. When they told her that Marcus and Fran were already up on the ICU unit, that decided it.
A porter with copious tattoos and a boxer’s face escorted her to the unit. He was kind, chatting away to fill the void in her social skills, pointing out where she could get a cup of tea twenty-four hours a day, where the nicer visitor toilets were, how to get to the staff canteen on the ground floor – where the food was much cheaper – all the useful things she was going to need in the coming days and weeks. Because this was where she was going to be for the foreseeable future.
Tish was in a bad way. The doctors had been very clear about that. They’d used big, complicated medical words that she hadn’t fully understood, but the message had been stark. They were in for a long haul. Tish had life-threatening injuries, to her face and neck. Her jaw had been broken. They were having to repair a tear in her trachea – which was her windpipe. There was concern about her left lung. A respiratory specialist had been called in. Sal had nodded and tried to listen. This was important. The most important information she’d ever been given, and yet illogically it was the sound of Tish’s voice that filled Sal’s head, drowning out the doctor’s words. Tish singing, up in her bedroom, joyous, loud, inappropriate; nothing delicate about it, because there was nothing delicate about Tish. And that was because Tish was strong. Invincible. Sal didn’t push the memory away; she welcomed it, listened to it in preference to the doctor’s relentless, negative litany of what was wrong with her daughter.
The porter buzzed and pushed open the door to the ICU, but didn’t come onto the ward with her. That Sal had to do on her own. It was scary, like voluntarily walking into a fire with nothing to protect you. Had it not been for Marcus looking up and seeing her arrive, she might have stayed in the entrance hallway for ever, too frightened to venture any further. He stood up and came straight over, put his arms round her and held her tight, squeezing hard. His ferocity helped to ground her. The sense of something shared gave her strength.
‘Any more news?’ Marcus asked.
‘She’s still in surgery. How’s Jess?’
They both looked over at Jess. Fran was leaning over the bed, her hands fluttering above their daughter’s sleeping form as if performing some type of ritual healing.
Marcus said, ‘She’s stable. They’ve sedated her. They’re doing tests. Lots of tests. She has a fracture behind her left ear, and some sort of wound at the back of her head. But no other broken bones. It’s the impact on her brain that they’re concerned about.’
Sal nodded, though she didn’t understand what that meant, or where it put Jess on the scale of suffering and damage. Regardless, she returned his kindness by squeezing Marcus’s arm.
‘Have they told you much about Tish’s injuries?’
Sal nodded and swallowed, then found that she couldn’t say anything in response to his question. But Marcus was sensitive enough not to expect an answer.
‘It’s a good hospital, Sal. Expert, professional staff. I’m sure they’re looking after her.’ They were hollow words, but they were well intentioned. They clung onto to each other for a few more seconds before separating; Marcus to go back to his daughter and wife, and Sal to present herself at the nurses’ station.
An hour and a half later and the bed next to Sal remained empty. Tish was still somewhere else. The wait was excruciating. Sal couldn’t stop thinking about the surgeon, in the basement of the hospital, dressed in green scrubs, his rubber-coated fingers digging around inside her daughter. Cutting and stitching, stretching and suturing, mounds of red-and-white swabs on the metal tray next to him. She’d seen enough hospital programmes on TV, watched through splayed fingers as they hacked and hurt, in their attempts to heal. She’d shed tears for complete strangers, prayed for their survival; and she’d waited, on the edge of her sofa, for the weepy, post-surgery reunions and the ‘two months later’ miraculous transformations.
Now it was her turn. But this time there was no way it was going to be neatly resolved in the next hour; and there was no audience to shed tears of relief, or sadness, for her and Tish. Sal looked across at Jess again. Fran and Marcus were curled around her, forming a protective barrier. Sal sat alone, fearful that she wasn’t going to be enough.
Chapter 10
SHAZIA AND Nihal were the only ones left in the room. They felt as if they had been there for days.
‘It’s because he’s dead.’
Nihal took hold of his wife’s arms. ‘Shazia, stop it. Please.’
But Shazia wouldn’t or, more accurately, couldn’t be comforted. ‘But this doesn’t feel right, does it? Why keep us here for so long without telling us anything? Everyone else has been taken off to be with their kids. But not us! He must be dead. That’s the only possible explanation. That’s why we’re the only ones left. They want us to be on our own when they tell us.’
In the absence of anything to contradict her, Nihal closed his eyes, raised his hands to his face and started to pray.
At last, as if summoned by Shazia voicing the unthinkable, the door opened. They turned and braced themselves, but it wasn’t a nurse or doctor who came into the room, it was the police liaison officer, accompanied by a woman. The officer looked at them, registered the panic on their faces and made a strange, air-patting gesture with his hands. Wired as they were, the gesture gave them a sliver of hope. The officer wouldn’t have signalled that they should calm down if Mo had died in the crash. This wasn’t going to be the worst day of their lives. They weren’t about to be led into a room and asked to identify the body of their son. The relief was intense, but short-lived. Because if Mo wasn’t dead, what then? Why were they being kept separate from everyone else?
The officer tugged at his jacket and actually cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry to leave you sitting in here for so long. It’s somewhat hectic out there, as you can imagine.’
Neither of them sat down. They waited for him to deliver whatever fate he held for them.
‘I’m afraid…’ Nihal reached out for his wife, ‘that we’ve been working on the basis of some inaccurate information about the identity of the young people in the car. There have been quite a number of conflicting reports coming in, from various sources, and it’s taken some time to verify these different statements. But I can now confirm, with a degree of certainty, that your son wasn’t recovered from the scene with the others.’