Every Woman Knows a Secret

‘Mum,’ Beth began.

Jess didn’t look round. ‘It’s what Danny would want. What does anything else matter?’

Rob stood at the bedside without moving. The nurse frowned at him, then returned to writing on the charts. The doctors resumed their low-voiced conversation and the eyes of the Indian family turned back to their child. Rob looked at Danny’s face. In his stillness he seemed hardly recognisable. The tube taped sideways into his mouth looked incongruously like a dog’s bone.

‘Dan,’ he said softly. But Danny didn’t turn his head or open his eyes.

Rob began to shake. It had taken courage to come here and now it was deserting him.

The hiss and sigh of the ventilator and the flicker of coloured traces across the screen above the bed were nothing to do with Danny. Danny was not here. But all of this hardware was real and present, and the ward and the waiting room and the people trapped in it. And it had taken on its lurid and threatening hyper-reality in the short days since the crash and he could do nothing to banish it again. He closed his eyes and opened them, and bit the inside of his mouth to suppress the groan of horror that rose up in him.

Wake up, he silently begged. Just for a minute wake up and look at me. Be yourself again and let me not have done this. Or let it be you standing here and me lying with the thing in my mouth and the machine breathing for me instead. Go on. Why don’t you?

But Danny’s absence and stillness only proclaimed the futility of wishing. Nothing would make the past into the present again. The wasteful truth ignited Rob’s anger. He said more loudly, ‘Danny, mate, can you hear me?’

Nothing. Rob stepped back from the bed, still staring at the face that injury had unshaped.

‘I’ll see you,’ Rob said. ‘I’ll see you around, right?’

And then he turned and ran down the ward. At the door he tore off the plastic apron and aimed it at the bin but the air caught it and it floated, like a sloughed-off dry skin.

Rob ran past the closed door of the waiting room and down the deserted tunnel of the corridor towards the lifts. But someone standing in a shallow alcove formed by some cupboards saw him coming and stepped out to block his path.

Danny’s father. A stocky, sandy-haired man with a freckly tan and gingery hairs on the backs of his fingers. The fingers were balled into fists now.

‘Don’t you come back here ever again,’ Ian Arrowsmith said. ‘Don’t you think it’s enough to get pissed and smash our boy into a wall, without coming back to look at what you’ve done?’

Rob was still shaking. He made an effort to swallow but he was dry-mouthed with anger. He saw red flashes of light around the man’s congested face.

‘What do you think it’s like for his mother and sister, seeing you here, knowing what you did?’

Rob clenched his left fist ready to hit him. But then he made his fingers slacken again. Rob ran away, his boot soles squealing on the polished hospital lino.

The surgeon asked to see Jess and Ian.

He said gently, ‘Mr and Mrs Arrowsmith. We are going to perform some tests on Danny. These tests will determine for us if there is some hope of a partial recovery, or if the damage his brain has suffered is irremediable.’

Jess looked down at her knees, at her hands tidily clasped and resting there. For a panic-stricken instant she thought she couldn’t recall Danny’s voice or summon his face. But then she saw and heard him, and lifted her head.

‘When?’

‘This evening. Mr Barker, my senior 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.