where to go, where to sit. It was easier in a way, surrendering like this. I remembered it from being in hospital having the kids. The comfort of it, giving up all responsibility for yourself. Mike was being looked after, capable strangers putting their hands on his body, cutting off his expensive suit. But still I was afraid.
Behind the scenes was chaos. In three cubicles doctors were working fast, and I saw a child struggling and screaming on a bed, her arms livid with burns, and on another an emaciated young woman, machines beeping round her as doctors pressed on her chest. She looked no older than Cassie, but her legs were marked with sores and cankers. A drug addict, I told myself. Outside the realms of my life. Poor girl.
We approached the last cubicle, and I felt the doctor’s hand on my arm, gentle, but stopping me. ‘Wait here a moment, Mrs Morris.’ He pushed aside the green curtains and I heard murmured voices. My stomach lurched. The swish of the rails was a terrible sound, somehow. He was back in a second, and I noticed he was careful not to let me see past him. ‘We’re just taking him to surgery, I’m afraid.’
‘Already?’
‘We need to get into his liver . . . there’s a bleed we’re concerned about.’ How they couched it. A bleed. Concern. Panic seemed to be creeping up from the bottom of my lungs, so that I could only breathe into the top of them, as if concrete blocks sat on my chest.
He directed me calmly back to Reception, but then he turned and I saw him dash – sprint, really – to where Mike was. I saw his face change. And I remained standing where I was, unnoticed, as seconds later a whole team rushed out of the cubicle pushing a bed with Mike on it. Someone was holding an IV bag. Someone was on the cart with him, pumping at his chest. And I could see they all were spattered in blood. Mike’s blood, all over the scrubs of the nurse running beside him, calling out codes and numbers, and the person on his chest, and the one with the IV. Mike himself I could barely see. He seemed shrunken, grey, his face settled with the awful stillness of stone. As I watched they swept him away, down the corridor and into the bowels of the hospital. I heard a loud sob, and turned to see Cassie standing behind me, watching her father wheeled away, unconscious.
Chapter Fourteen
Bill took Cassie home. He said he’d get Benji from school, and feed him too: ‘Though I don’t know what I can make. Does he like soused herring?’ I was so grateful. I was already trying to imagine in my head how I could thank him, and failing. Karen would normally have done these things. It was her who’d come when I was having Benji, when my father finally died and I had to spend a week at my mother’s, when Mike broke his ankle running and I was back and forth to hospital for three days. I wondered where she was and what she was doing. I imagined her in a flat maybe, with the kind of scuffed and bland furniture you found in cheap hotels. We’d helped women get into them from time to time. Now it was someone I knew going through this. I still couldn’t take it in. Karen accusing Mike. Jake stabbing Mike. I remembered the little boy who’d throw his arms round me. I love you, Auntie Ali. The way he’d sat at the table and cried, so quietly, when I told him we were moving away. It was never really the same after that. I saw him running at us, the knife flashing, Cassie in his path. My head was twisted, full of blood and lies and screams. I told myself I just had to get through this. Mike just had to survive, and then we’d sort it all out.
One breath at a time.
DC Devine turned up at some point, still in his suit. He looked neat and fresh, whereas I could smell my own body, sweaty and terrified, a smear of blood on my arm that I hadn’t washed off. I should have told Cassie to take her shirt off and soak it. He sat down beside me in the waiting room. ‘Have you eaten anything today?’