Every Woman Knows a Secret

Jess stumbled to her feet, almost falling over Dan’s holdall.

‘How is he?’

The surgeon glanced at Rob. ‘This is Daniel’s brother?’

Very clearly Jess explained, ‘This is the young man who was driving the car. He is not my son, or Dan’s brother. I don’t know why you should think he is.’

‘I told a nurse I was. She wouldn’t have let me up here otherwise.’

Jess didn’t look at Rob. She only had the sense that he was standing up, towering behind her, and she could feel the disturbing emanations of hope and fear coming off him, dry and burning like the heat from an electric fire. To the doctor she said, ‘Could we speak in private?’

‘Of course.’ He held the door open for her. In the next room, a nursing office, she forgot the boy immediately. She listened to the surgeon’s explanatory words as if the power of her concentration alone could influence their bearing.

The mass of blood had been sucked from beneath Danny’s skull and the pressure on his brain relieved. That far, the operation had been successful. Still deeply unconscious, he had been taken to the IT unit.

‘When will he … when will he come round?’

‘That we don’t know. The next twenty-four hours will tell us a lot more.’

‘I see. Thank you. Can I go to him now?’

‘Come this way.’

She had the impression of a large but busy and cluttered space. It was brightly lit, with people moving purposefully within it. There were several beds, widely separated by banks of shelves and machinery and white folding screens. In one of the beds lay Daniel. He was on his back, his head white-bandaged, covered to his shoulders with a light blanket.

She came closer and saw that there was a tube in his mouth, and another in his nose held in place with strips of tape that slashed his cheek like tribal markings. From under the blanket, wires and more tubes ran in every direction to the machines they had hooked him to. On the wall behind his bed was a screen across which red and blue and green traces steadily flickered. And his eyes were blind, covered by thick white cotton pads.

Jess leaned forward and tried to reach him by touching a strand of his hair that had escaped from the bandage.

Down in the scanning room she had felt Daniel’s presence as if he had walked into the house and renewed a conversation with her. Now the bewildering complexity of machinery had interposed itself between them. She stared past it at the familiar tiny oval scar on Daniel’s jaw, a relic of baby chickenpox. He was here; this was him.

At once a rush of tenderness and love surged up and blurred his face and the surroundings. The machinery seemed threatening because she could not understand or control it, that was all, and she was a mother who was used to tending to and understanding her children. The crash had robbed him of his independence; Dan had temporarily become a child again.

‘I’m here,’ she said again as she bent over him. ‘Danny. I love you.’

She lifted the blanket an inch and found his hand lying palm upwards, the fingers loosely curled as if in sleep. A plastic tube was taped to the arm and she was afraid to dislodge it but she touched her fingertips to his and was reassured by their warmth. She sank down on to the chair that they had placed for her at the bedside.

Jess watched and counted the breaths that the ventilator took for him and the oscillations of his heartbeat on the monitor screen. A nurse in a green overall and plastic apron appeared on the opposite side of the bed and smiled at her.

‘How are you?’ the nurse asked.

‘I’m all right.’ The question and answer seemed absurd.

The nurse folded back the blanket. The tube ran into a neat fresh wound beneath Dan’s collarbone. There were white plastic circles and more tubes fastened to his chest. As Jess watched, one of the doctors came and pinched Danny’s earlobe and beneath her own hand his fingers twitched a little.

‘Look,’ Jess almost shouted. ‘He felt it. Is he coming round? Is that why you pinched him?’

‘We want to check his responses,’ the doctor said quietly.

The right response had not been there, Jess understood. But he had moved his fingers. She had felt and seen it for herself. The doctor took the white pads off his eyes and shone a torch into each in turn.

‘Why do you have to cover his eyes like that?’ Jess asked.

‘To keep them moist for him.’ He replaced the pads once more.

The extent of Jess’s helplessness was becoming apparent to her.

‘Is he in pain?’ she asked.

‘I think he’s comfortable.’

‘Is there something I can do for him? Anything?’

‘Just what you are doing,’ the doctor answered gently. He left her and the nurse turned to write on the charts clipped on the wall next to the bed.

While she sat and held his hand, Jess remembered versions of Danny that were remote from this white-lit room with its busy staff and supine bodies. She thought of holidays and Christmases and family celebrations, and tried to distil enough joy and warmth out of them to channel through her own fingers into Danny’s, and so connect him to a happier version of the world he had grown into.

I’m here. The words ran round and round in her head. Wake up. Come back. Wake up.

After what seemed like a long time Jess laid her head down on the bed next to Danny’s thigh and closed her eyes. For a few minutes she gratefully slept, and then when she woke up again she struggled to identify the place and the fear that had filled her brief doze with queasy vanished dreams. Then, remembering, she jerked up her head. Danny had not moved.

Later the surgeon came back again. He pressed the heel of his hand hard down against Danny’s breastbone. And Danny stretched out his arms in response, fists clenched, as if he were troubled in his sleep. When she saw it a wide smile spread over Jess’s face, cracking her dry lips. She pushed her hand through her hair, letting a warm current of hope and relief course through her.

Danny was there, he was only sleeping. He was responding to the doctor. He wouldn’t die. The certainty of it flooded through her veins like a drug hit, dispelling her exhaustion. She stood up, easing the pain and stiffness out of her limbs. Her feet and her fingertips tingled with returning blood.

‘It’s wonderful to see him do that.’ She smiled at the surgeon. ‘It’s good, isn’t it? That he can feel and respond?’

‘It’s a positive response to stimulus, yes. But it’s very early to tell.’

‘I know. I understand that. But still, you know …’

Like a good girl, Jess did not want to press her need for hope and reassurance upon the surgeon. If she could be calm, if she met with everyone’s approval in this test of her stoicism, it would be all the better for Dan.

‘Thank you for everything you are doing for him,’ she said meekly.

It was six o’clock in the morning.

Sock would be awake soon, if he was not already. Jess thought that she would telephone Lizzie and Beth and break the news now, now that there was this compensating fragment of brightness to offer them.

She must also speak to her ex-husband.

Ian had finally left Jess two years before, for a younger woman he had met through his work as a salesman. Ian had always been good at selling; he had a cheerful, dependable manner that masked his uncertain temper. Throughout their married life he had often been away travelling his territories, and the regular absences had helped them to ignore the truth that they had never made each other happy. Then Ian had met an Australian girl in her late twenties who had chosen to finance one leg of her European journey by working as a temporary administrator in the electrical goods company in which he was a sales manager. It was not the first affair he had had, but it was the first time Ian had fallen in love. He had been a conscientious if rather impatient father, but by this time Beth and Danny were both grown up. He had told Jess that he was leaving her; her response had been bitterness, followed by relief, and at last a kind of weary indifference.

Ian was married to Michelle now and they were living in Sydney, her home town. Jess had never been to Australia but she imagined a paved garden with tree ferns and hibiscus and a view of the blue bay, and heard the telephone ringing in a room barred with sun and shadow.

Jess lifted her head. She remembered that she had left Danny’s holdall in the waiting room near the operating theatre. Glancing back down the night’s tunnel it seemed a black joke that she had imagined Danny needing jeans and a sweatshirt to come home in this morning. She remembered seeing a telephone cubicle in the corridor outside. She would make the calls from there.

In the waiting room was an Indian family, elders and adults and small children crowded and perched on the plastic chairs. Their faces turned up to her like so many thirsty plants, then drooped again. Robert Ellis was sitting in one corner on the chair he had originally occupied. Dan’s holdall was gripped in his hands.