‘You’ve got a bit of shrapnel in your legs,’ he said quietly. ‘But they still work. No worries. No problem.’ He gave me his grin. ‘A bit of shrapnel in the legs? Join the club.’
I cleared my throat of the thick lump that clogged it.
‘Edie?’ I said.
He patted my arm again.
‘Edie’s hanging in there, Max. The woman that did it died instantly.’
The woman? He meant Layla Khan.
‘But Edie is still fighting,’ Jackson said. I watched him hesitate. ‘She’s not awake yet. But she’s a tough kid.’
I nodded.
‘Scout?’ I said.
He smiled and I saw the gap-toothed grin that I had been looking at all my life.
‘I spoke to Scout on the phone,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. She’s good. She’s fine. She wants you to get well. Nothing’s changed, OK? Scout’s coming home.’
I closed my eyes and I was aware of every breath and I felt the tiny fragments of black metal in my lower legs.
Edie was sleeping.
Scout was coming home.
And Layla Khan was dead.
‘Stan?’ I said.
Jackson grinned.
‘Stan’s with Mrs Murphy and her family. Having the time of his life. Her grandchildren are spoiling him rotten. He will be waiting for you.’
‘Tibbs,’ I said. ‘Jesse.’
It was not a question.
‘Jesse’s already back at work,’ he said. ‘Nobody blames him for topping a murderer with his own gun. How could they?’ Jackson shook his head. ‘Jesse was my fault. I should have just let the pair of you batter each other. Get it out of your system. The way they settled it in the old school. You’d be best mates by now. He was never going to slot you. The worst that would have happened is he would have given you a good hiding. Or you would have given him a good hiding. And I should have let it happen. Live and learn. Or hope we do, at least.’
The morphine was closing my eyes, dragging me down.
I felt Jackson pat my arm and I tumbled into the darkness.
‘Anything you need,’ he said. And then, ‘Don’t forget – you can make new friends but you can’t make old friends.’
Or perhaps that last bit was just inside my head.
And the dead also came to me that night.
My parents were there at one point in my morphine sleep. And they were not young and they were not old, my mother and father, but they were exactly as I remembered them, they were totally themselves, the very essence of them, but on the other side of a glass-like wall that separated one world from the other, a wall that was higher than the sky, and conversation was not possible, not a word, even as I felt the love and the loss and the missing of them, the missing of them that I saw was with me every day of my life.
And then George Halfpenny was there, in the one chair, reading his ancient paperback copy of Origins of the Second World War by A. J. P Taylor from the prison library, and I thought he must be among the dead, and I looked for the mark around his neck of the men who die in their prison cells, the livid death mark always a diagonal wound, cutting up towards his ear where the sheet or the belt or whatever it had been had angled up towards the knot. But the death mark was not on his neck and I knew that he was among the living, and I knew that George Halfpenny would live because he wanted to return to his brother Edward, the young man in a wheelchair, the brother who loved and needed him, who would always love and need him, and who made it impossible for George to do anything but cling to life.
‘Human blunders usually do more to shape history than human wickedness,’ he said, and I did not know if that was a quote from A. J. P. Taylor or George Halfpenny.
I slept.
I woke.
It was still dark and more quiet than it had been at any point in the night. I listened for the slap-slap-slap of the rubber soles of the nurses as they went about their labours, and I listened for the sound of their voices, warm and amused and young, as they talked very softly at their station, and I listened too for the other patients tormented in their sleep.
But I heard nothing.
The night was still and silent and at peace with itself at last.
And Edie was sitting at the window in her T-shirt and pants, the legs I loved tucked up under the butt that I loved and a concerned look on the face that I loved. She brushed back her red hair and fixed me with her green eyes.
And she looked at me with endless sadness and she said not a word.
Then it was morning and the ward was awake and the smell of breakfast in the hospital made me sick and made me think that I would never want food ever again.
Joy Adams sat in the only chair, watching me carefully with her huge dark eyes, and Pat Whitestone stood by my bedside.
My boss. She was holding my hand.
‘Edie,’ she said.
‘She’s a tough kid,’ I said.
My voice was so hoarse it sounded like someone else but it was full of a grainy hope.
‘The bravest and the best,’ Whitestone said. ‘A very tough kid. But I have to tell you that Edie didn’t make it, Max.’
I stared at her for a bit. I looked at Joy. There were tears running down her face. I looked back at Whitestone.
‘OK,’ I said.
‘Edie never recovered consciousness.’
‘OK.’
‘She slipped away in the night. She wouldn’t have felt any pain. Edie died doing the job she loved, Max.’
‘OK.’
They went away after a while, because hospital beds always rob you of things to say, there is never anything to say in the end, no banal observation to be made, or sincere condolences to be offered, and there was breakfast and morphine to be taken or declined.
The sky rolled across the sky and it felt for the first time that the night was coming in much faster, the days of our long summer running out at last, and that night no one came to me, not the living nor the dead, because they all leave you alone after a while, and I was wide and fully awake – the drugs no longer working – when I came at last to the dark and silent moment that you find in the still centre of every night, even when you are in a hospital bed.
And that was when I pushed my face into the pillow and I wept for Edie Wren, and for myself, and for the children who would never be born.
39
The leaves were turning the colour of our dog.
Stan and I drove to the street where it looked like nothing bad had ever happened and I parked the old silver BMW X5 outside the house with the FOR SALE sign in the yard.
We were neither early nor late. I had timed our arrival to the minute and as I put on the handbrake the door opened in a blur of adults and small children milling in the hallway, and at the centre of them all there was the face of my daughter.
Scout was saying her goodbyes.
I eased myself from the car, the pain in my lower legs flaring, the muscles still stiff with injury from the jagged black fragments of shrapnel that would be there forever. I reached across Stan to the well of the passenger seat to take my walking stick.
When I straightened up by the side of the car, taking some of my weight on the stick, Scout was watching me, her face clouding over at the sight of her damaged old dad.
We stared at each other and in the look that passed between us there was a glimpse of the distant future, a time that we would know fifty years from today, the time when the child becomes the carer and the parent is the cared for. That time was waiting for my daughter and me around a lifetime from today, and the summers would fly by, one by one, and there was nothing that either of us could do to stop it coming.
Then the moment was gone. I took a faltering step up the garden path and paused, wincing with pain. And then it didn’t matter because I called my daughter’s name.
And Scout ran to our car, and to her dog, and to my arms.
TONY PARSONS
I always knew that I would write. I knew that nothing would stop me. I always loved stories, I always found books engaged me like nothing else, and helped me to make sense of the world.