LITMIR.BIZ

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registrar, will do the tests. And first thing tomorrow morning I will repeat them myself. We don’t want to draw any conclusions until everything has been looked at twice.’

      ‘I see,’ Jess whispered. ‘It’s bad news, isn’t it?’

      Ian reached out and touched her arm. Jess barely felt it.

      ‘We don’t yet know for certain,’ the doctor answered. ‘But I’m afraid it may be. I’m very sorry.’

      He was as kind and sympathetic as it was possible to be. Jess shook her head, understanding that even as the news worsened she had until now nourished the hope, even the expectation, that Danny would recover.

      The registrar came to do the first series of tests. Screens were placed around Danny’s bed and his family waited outside. Jess imagined what the tests might involve and forbade herself to ask, for fear of what she might hear.

      Mr Barker came to see them afterwards. He shook his head sombrely.

      The night crawled past. Beth went home with Lizzie after they had assured her that nothing would change before the morning. Jess and Ian alternated in their watch beside the bed. Ian’s face had already lost its ruddy colour and taken on a grey pallor. Jess could not look at him to see his pain. She left her place to the nurse and went to lie stiff-limbed on the narrow bed in the rest-room.

      The morning came inevitably and Lizzie and Beth returned. Beth was white-lipped and red-eyed, and as soon as she saw Ian she began to cry again with her father’s arm around her. Lizzie had brought a croissant for Jess, wrapped in a linen napkin, and a flask of proper coffee. While they waited Jess drank the coffee and crumbled the flaky richness of the croissant into the napkin. The everyday luxury of it seemed utterly foreign in the here and now.

      They heard the coming and going of the morning’s business on the unit, and then the consultant arriving.

      It seemed a long time that they sat in their familiar positions, listening without speaking.

      Beth said at last, ‘I want to hear too. Don’t go off to see him without me, like yesterday.’

      Jess was sitting between Lizzie and Beth. She needed them both with her; Beth’s instinct was right. Their closeness excluded Ian and emphasised her sense of separation from him more sharply than ever before. His plain suffering stirred the currents of guilt in her.

      Then the surgeon came to them. Jess found herself wondering if he had had breakfast this morning with his own children in some warm pine-fronted kitchen. She imagined two neat little girls in private-school uniforms.

      He said, ‘I have just done the brain stem tests on Danny myself. I’m very sorry I have to tell you this. But I am quite sure your son is dead.’

      ‘No.’ It was Ian who loudly contradicted him. ‘He’s alive, and moving. I can see it.’

      ‘The movements you can see are reflex contractions. Danny’s brain stem remains technically alive so long as we continue artificially to feed and drain and ventilate him, but the thinking part of his brain is dead.’

      ‘Has anyone ever recovered from this state?’

      Mr Copthorne looked at Jess. ‘No one has. Ever.’

      Beth made a small animal noise and turned her face into her father’s shoulder. Lizzie was crying too, big tears rolling glassily down her cheeks. Her weeping was theatrical, Jess thought, with the first cold detachment of her grief. And when she turned her eyes to Ian she saw that he was ashamed. Embarrassed by their loss. It was or would become a part of their mutual failure, the final terrible emblem of it.

      Danny was dead. He had gone away somewhere while the machines hissed and flickered pointlessly around him. It came to her that she had known it all along and her insistent hope had been only a subterfuge.

      Dry-eyed, Jess faced the doctor.

      And it was to Jess he said, ‘What I’m about to ask you is an imposition and an intrusion into your grief. But terrible and unfair as it may sound, other people can live through your son’s death. Could you find it in yourself to make his organs available for donation? I believe there is even a kind of solace in the giving, if you were able to do it.’

      Without hesitation, without looking at Ian because Danny was hers now, not his, Jess answered, ‘Yes. Take what will help someone else.’

      ‘Thank you,’ the man said.

      ‘May we see him first?’

      ‘Of course.’

      With Ian walking slowly ahead of them and with their arms linked round each other, the three women went back to the ward for the last time.

      In the end Jess was left alone with him. Ian helped Beth away and Lizzie stayed for only a moment longer. She groped her way between the white screens that surrounded the bed, blinded by tears.

      Jess sat in silence, watching Danny’s motionless face. A continuous ribbon of thoughts ran through her mind, bright images from the past punctuated by a conversation with Danny that she knew must not end now. She would talk to him – how could she not? – and he would answer. She possessed him within her head and the sudden certainty of it was like a light flashing on after days of darkness.

      She stood up now and gently lifted the blanket from his shoulders, folding it back so that she could look at him. With an effort of will she made the white discs taped to his chest invisible, and the tubes and wires running out of him. She closed her ears to the gasp of the ventilator and the subdued noises of the ward.

      Danny’s shoulders were broad and there was dark hair on his chest and forearms. The slow rise and fall of his chest was steady, as if he were sleeping. His skin was smooth and still coloured by the residue of his summer tan. His mother looked at the knitting together of muscles and sinews and the hollow at the base of his throat and the strong arch of his ribcage, and thought how beautiful he was. While she looked at him he was a man and not her child any longer. She would have liked to stretch herself out beside him and take him in her arms. The flush of longing for him made her skin shiver with tiny currents of electricity, as if she were a girl, as if he were her lover.

      Jess touched the tips of her fingers to his warm shoulder. She bent down as if to whisper in his ear, and then put her lips to the tiny scar on his jawline.

      Then, tenderly, she folded the blanket up again, patting it in place around him.

      All the time the conversation ran on in her head, threads of talk they had shared about Danny’s college work, his girls, small speculations about the future. She heard his voice again and saw him moving, smiling, moving on as he would not, now.

      Jess straightened up, stood back a step.

      She did not articulate the word goodbye.

      She opened the screens and walked down the ward, somehow placing one foot in front of the other. She saw the faces of the unit director, a nurse, one of the doctors, waiting to help her. She even smiled her thanks at them, feeling the movement of it spreading lopsided over her face. The nurse put an arm round Jess’s shoulders. They guided her away from the unit and the hateful waiting room, so that she would not see or hear when they came to wheel the body down to the theatre.

       Four

      Ian was in the dining room laying the round table for dinner. He found the white cloth in its usual drawer and shook it out over the table. The stubborn creases revealed that it had been folded away for a long time. Probably Danny and Jess had eaten their meals in the kitchen, if they had eaten together at all. It was almost three years since they had shared a meal in this room as a family foursome.

      The understanding never again weighed like a stone beneath his heart. He swallowed, in a confused attempt to dislodge it.

      Ian lifted a pair of carved wooden candlesticks off the dusty mantelpiece and set them on the cloth. It seemed important to mark the day

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