‘A member of the public who saw what happened and called 999.’
I can’t imagine Susie helpless.
‘I’m so sorry …’ he starts, after a deep breath, and I fold immediately, letting go a strangled cry.
‘Hey, come on, come on, ssshhh,’ Ed says, putting his arm round me, and I can tell it’s helping him right now to steady himself, to act as my protector. I’m glad of it. As much as I can see anything of the long road that lies ahead, I suspect we will be constantly swapping these roles back and forth.
‘… We saw her during the early hours of this morning with a major trauma to her head. We did everything we could to save her, but her injuries were just too severe. She had a massive bleed on the brain which was simply unsurvivable.’
‘How? If she was on the pavement?’ I say.
‘We won’t know the full details until the post-mortem and inquest.’
There’s so much to come I can’t contemplate.
‘… If you asked me to guess, and please bear in mind it’s only a guess, I’d say the car mounted the kerb, hit her, and the impact threw her against a wall, which is when the insult to the brain and skull occurred.’
Insult. Unexpected jargon. We’re visitors in a foreign country.
‘… The driver is co-operating with the police, as far as I know.’
Dr Prentice adds, with some understatement: ‘This is an awful lot to take in, I know. Take your time and ask me anything you want to.’
He is compassionate, but rehearsed. This is an earthquake for us, a conversation we will never forget, and I think – for him it’s the middle of his Friday morning. Something he’ll mention in passing to his wife tonight at dinner. Sad business today, young girl, well, woman, only in her thirties. Friends were in pieces, naturally.
‘What did you do, to try to save her?’ I say, and I don’t recognise my own voice.
‘The paramedics had stabilised her with a neck brace to protect her spine and kept her breathing on the way to the hospital. We put Susie on a ventilator to support her vital functions while we tried to find the source of the bleeding, and ran scans.’
‘But she died how long after you did that?’
‘She had no vital signs within fifteen minutes of arriving here. Attempts to resuscitate her failed.’
I imagine the unbroken tone from the machines.
There’s no other sound for a few moments, while I heave and weep and Ed makes a gasping noise, like he’s trying to breathe underwater.
‘Was she conscious?’ Ed says. ‘When she came in.’
‘No, the impact from the crash knocked her completely unconscious,’ the doctor says. ‘She wouldn’t have suffered at all.’
‘You don’t know that!’ I say, and think, what a time for arseholey teenage Eve to resurface. (Eve Gaddafi, my mum used to call her. ‘A tyrant.’)
‘We are as sure as we possibly can be,’ says the doctor, evenly, completely unperturbed by my snapping at him – prepared and trained for it, just like the unstartled receptionist. ‘Brain function after that kind of trauma is akin to a deep coma state.’
‘Was the driver of the car OK?’ Ed says, in a clipped voice, and he reaches over and squeezes my sweaty, freezing hands. The idea there is a murderer in this story, a flesh-and-blood still-living person who’s violently wrenched Susie from us … I don’t know how I feel about them yet. I haven’t even started trying to work that out. My shock can barely recede an inch to start letting in the ocean of grief, let alone rage.
‘He was treated at the scene for his injuries. The police will know more about that.’
‘Was he drunk?’ Ed says.
‘He’ll have been breathalysed, I don’t know the result.’
‘Police officers have been to see Susie’s father, he seemed in a confused state?’ the doctor continues.
‘He has dementia,’ Ed says. ‘We’re not sure how advanced.’
The doctor nods. He bows his head, slightly.
‘We were wondering if, in light of this, you’d be able to identify the body?’
Ed and I look at each other with bloodshot eyes. ‘No’ does not seem an acceptable answer.
‘The body.’ Susie is not Susie, she is an artefact. She has left it behind. She is a thing.
There’s a soap opera, unreal quality to this experience, as if everyone other than myself and Ed might be an actor. The phrases we’re being given about take all the time you need and we’ll be right outside and come out and take a break if you need to and there’s no pressure if you’re not sure.
I feel as if I’ve seen this scene in blue-light procedural dramas that I had half my attention focused on while shovelling my tea. Except this body will not sit up when someone shouts ‘Scene.’
I can’t accept Susie has consented to leave her body anywhere that her personality isn’t. It runs completely contrary to her nature.
Part of me feels defiant – yes, show us this impossible thing you keep saying you have hidden behind a curtain. Death is physical, perhaps it existing in a purely intellectual realm is too much to reconcile. Susie losing her life has been only words, wild claims. Knowing someone wouldn’t lie to you, and actually believing them, are two different things, it seems.
I have a firm conviction that if I ignored them, broke free and ran away from this bleach-sluiced place that I shouldn’t be in, hailed a taxi and went to Suze’s, she’d be there looking baffled at me in the doorway, hair back in one of those cotton Alice bands she uses to keep it off her face.
What’s up with you? Course I’m here. I always work from home on a Friday.
The ease and clarity with which I can picture her makes this seem entirely feasible. She’s at my fingertips.
They take us into an empty room, with a long, shallow curtained window across one wall. Ed and I hold hands, not looking at each other. My heart is thundering.
‘Are you ready?’ the doctor says, quietly, more to Ed than me, and he nods.
On the other side, they briskly draw back the curtains.
I give an involuntary gasp at the sight of her. Ed and I grip each other’s hands so hard it feels like it could snap bone.
It’s her.
She’s there.
Susie’s lying on a trolley with a dark blue sheet pulled up to her neck, her long hair pooled around her head, some of it spilling over the edge, her eyes closed.
I expected Susie to look asleep, as much as I could picture this at all.
She doesn’t look asleep. She looks like a sallow waxwork of Susie, with a slack expression. Like someone has made a model of Susie Hart from plaster of Paris, like something they might put in a modern art gallery.
I’ve never seen a dead person before and I didn’t know that I’d know they were dead, if that makes any sense. If I’d suspect a heartbeat hiding under that sheet. But I can tell Susie is dead, that this is what death looks like. If I’d been the first to find her like this, I’d have understood she was gone. We are still mammals, with instincts.
Her face – her regal, prom-queen face I know every detail and shadow of – is without animation. I can see the edge of a huge spreading purple bruise at her temple. I guess they have shown us her this way round so it’s at the far side.