Afterwards Read Free Page A

corridor, away from the ward where my body was and into other wards, and then on again, frantically searching.
    ‘I can’t believe you’ve lost her!’ said the nanny who lives in my head. She arrived just before I gave birth to Jenny, her critical voice replacing my teachers’ praise. ‘You’re never going to find her like this, are you?’
    She was right. Panic had turned me into a Brownian motion molecule, darting hither and thither, with no logic or clear direction.
    I thought of you, what you would do, and made myself slow down.
    You would start on the bottom floor, far left, like you do at home when something is lost for good, and then you’d work your way to the far right, then up to the next floor, methodically doing a sweep and finding the missing mobile phone/earring/Oyster card/number 8 Beast Quest book.
    Thinking about Beast Quest books and missing earrings because the little details of our lives helped to root me a little, calmed me a little.
    So I went more slowly along the corridors, although desperate to run, trying to read signs rather than race past them. There were signs to lift banks, and oncology and outpatients and paediatrics – a mini-kingdom of wards and clinics and operating theatres and support services.
    A sign to the mortuary tore into my vision and lodged there, but I wouldn’t go to the mortuary. Wouldn’t
even consider it
.
    I saw a sign to Accident & Emergency. Maybe she hadn’t been transferred to a ward yet.
    I ran as fast as I could towards it.
    I went in. A woman on a trolley was pushed past, bleeding. A doctor was running, his stethoscope flapping against his stomach; the doors to the ambulance bay swung open and a screeching siren filled the white corridor, panic bouncing off the walls. A place of urgency and tension and pain.
    I looked into cubicle after cubicle, flimsy blue curtains dividing intense scenes from separate dramas. In one cubicle was Rowena, barely conscious. Maisie was sobbing next to her, but I only paused long enough to see that it wasn’t Jenny and then I moved on.
    At the end of the corridor was a room rather than a cubicle. I’d noticed doctors going in, and none coming out.
    I went in.
    There was someone appallingly hurt on the bed in the middle of the room, surrounded by doctors.
    I didn’t know it was her.
    I had known her baby’s cry from any other baby’s almost the moment she was born; her calling for Mummy had sounded unique, unmistakable amongst other toddlers; I could find her face immediately, howevercrowded the stage. I knew her more intimately than I knew myself.
    As a baby I knew every square centimetre of her; each hair in her eyebrows. I’d watched them being drawn, pencil stroke by pencil stroke, in the first days after birth. For months, I’d stared down at her for hour after hour, day after day, as I fed her from my breasts. It was dark the February she was born and as spring turned to summer it brought increased clarity in how I knew her.
    For nine months, I’d had her heart beating inside my body; two heartbeats for every one of mine.
    How could I not know it was her?
    I turned to leave the room.
    I saw sandals on the appallingly damaged person on the bed. The sandals with sparkly gems that I’d got her from Russell & Bromley as an absurdly early and out-of-season Christmas present.
    Lots of people have those kind of sandals, lots and lots; they must manufacture thousands of them. It doesn’t mean it’s Jenny. It can’t mean it’s Jenny. Please.
    Her blonde glinting hair was charred, her face swollen and horribly burnt. Two doctors were talking about percentage of BSA and I realised they were discussing the percentage of her body that was burnt. Twenty-five per cent.
    ‘Jenny?’ I shouted. But she didn’t open her eyes. Was she deaf to me too? Or was she unconscious? I hoped that she was, because her pain would be unbearable.
    I left the room, just for a moment. A drowning person coming up for one gulp of air before going