Maggie was sitting there, and she had not said a word. Rox was holding her hand and trying to comfort her as best she could.
Dianna was crying with Kimberley, all the time shaking their heads in disbelief.
Jackie was smoking outside. The hospital was all no smoking, and as always, she put her own needs first. She was watching the world go by, and every now and then she took a nip from the bottle of vodka she had placed in her large shopping bag.
A nurse walked into the visitors room and said quietly, 'Can I get you some more tea?'
Lena nodded. Tea gave you something to do, it made you move, made you respond, and she knew that as they were sitting there, Jimmy was on his way and she didn't want to face him, or his parents.
Jimmy's parents. As usual they had forgotten about them. Jimmy was more their family than his own. Since Freddie Senior's death, no one really saw them any more, least of all Jimmy.
'Has anyone phoned Jimmy's family?'
No one answered.
She sighed. They would know soon enough, why break their hearts before you had to?
Freddie and Jimmy were walking into the hospital when Jackie called out to her husband. He squeezed Jimmy's arm and walked over to his wife.
She walked him away from the busy doorway of the A and E and lit a cigarette. He saw she was pissed, but for once this didn't bother him. He was still in shock about the child dying.
This was his child, his boy, not Jimmy's, his, and he was dead. The thought had been careering around his head for what seemed like years and was in reality only minutes.
Jackie was really crying, sobbing, and he couldn't be angry with her. 'Ain't it terrible, Fred? How lucky are we, eh? Our Little Freddie might be a fucker, but imagine if he died.'
She was crying loudly, and she was in pain and he knew how she felt, so he instinctively held her to him. Even Freddie knew she was crying this time with just cause. They clung together for the first time in years.
'My poor Maggie, she looks like a fucking corpse herself. What a thing to have to go through! What a thing to have to live with!'
'What happened, Jack, do they know yet?'
Jackie looked up at her husband and said, her voice cracking, 'Don't you know, Freddie?'
He shook his head. 'No, what happened?'
'He put a plastic bag over his head, and he suffocated.'
Glenford arrived at the hospital and went straight to Jimmy. He pulled him into his embrace and Jimmy broke down crying. It was strange watching the little man holding on to Jimmy. Jimmy was huge, and his shaking shoulders just made it look all the more outrageous.
Glenford was crying with him and as Maggie watched she envied them that closeness, because Jimmy deserved that comfort. Unlike her, Jimmy had nothing on his conscience where that little boy was concerned.
Nobody else in the room did. But she was eaten up with guilt, seeing him, seeing him so small and so vulnerable and knowing he was never going to open his eyes and smile and laugh, never going to hug her again. The guilt was too much for her to bear.
All the time she had tolerated him, because she had kept a secret that she had felt was like a lead weight inside her chest. And now it was all over, and instead of relief, which is what she had yearned for all those years, she felt a deep and agonising hatred for herself.
Her poor mother and father had aged in hours. She saw the way her mother kept picking at her sodden tissues, how her eyes kept darting around the room as she waited for someone to accuse her over what had happened, and she knew that the poor woman blamed herself.
The same woman who had loved Jimmy Junior when his own mother had been incapable of it, who had shouted and argued with her, called her unnatural, and who had tried to make his short little life as bearable as she could, knowing that his own mother found it impossible to care for him.
And Jackie, Jackie kept on and on about her Rox having a baby, and how when God closed one door another one opened. The stupid drunken bitch had four kids and she cared for none of them, not really. She was like all drunks, she only cared about herself and how she felt and what she wanted. Her life was about her and Freddie, and she had spent years trying to gain the love of a man who despised her.
Freddie had destroyed her and he had destroyed her sister and she knew he had enjoyed every second of it.
She wondered, then, if he was feeling the loss of the little boy he had used as a weapon against her. Wondered if he was feeling remorse about all the years he had caused her so much heartache. She hoped that bastard never knew another happy day, she hoped all his kids died and he had to sit in a hospital knowing their lifeless bodies were feet away and he could never again touch them or love them.
But where was Freddie now, anyway? He had not been in this place and why would she expect any different? She wanted to kill him, scratch his eyes out, make him pay for the way he had caused her to feel about a child of her own body.
A child who was now dead and gone to her. Now she would never be able to make up to him for the first years of his life, when even feeding him had been anathema to her. But she had loved him, she had just been frightened of him and what he could cause if the truth of his conception had ever come out.
Now she would shout it from the roof tops and take the consequences with a light heart if he was only still with her.
Jimmy knelt in front of her and she put her head on his shoulder and finally cried, really cried. And once it started she couldn't make it stop. She could hear herself screaming but it sounded like someone else, as if someone else had taken over her body because that shrieking couldn't be coming from her, surely?
And when the doctor finally slipped the needle into her arm, she was so thankful for the oblivion she knew would come that she hoped to God she never woke up again.
Why would her little son put a bag over his head? Why would he do something like that and what on earth would possess him to want to do something like that?
Those were her last conscious thoughts.
Jimmy and Glenford sat in the darkened room and watched as Maggie's chest rose and fell softly. She looked so peaceful that he envied her.
He had held his little boy in his arms for long minutes and kissed his little forehead, and Glenford had cried with him, and they had both sat there in absolute shock and horror at what had befallen him and his family.
Glenford had not tried to talk, he had sat beside Jimmy and he had just been there. It was all he could do now, be there for the man he had come to love and respect as a friend and as a brother over the last fifteen years. But he had wondered over and over again why Freddie wasn't here with them, why Freddie had left the hospital and not come back?
The one time in his life he would have laid money on Freddie Jackson doing the right thing, and he had been wrong.
Jimmy needed him now, more than he had ever needed anyone in his life. Even a selfish shite like Freddie had to at least understand that much. And Jimmy had not even asked for him, it was as if he knew that Freddie would not be there. It was weird, as if Freddie not showing up was expected, even.
This was a sad and deeply odd day and Glenford prayed to God that he never had to experience anything even remotely like it in his own lifetime.
Little Freddie was on his game console when the front door opened. He didn't hear it, he was too busy killing the characters on the TV screen.
He was enjoying having the house to himself. He had not bothered to go to school as was usual. He was suspended again anyway, so he had popped round to his mates, who were also suspended, and relished telling them his news, and then he had come back and gone straight on his new game.
He hated the smell of the carpet, but he was used to it, though every now and again the stink of cigarettes from the overflowing ashtray near him made him wrinkle up his nose. He had a bowl of treats, and a large glass of orange juice that he had laced liberally with his mother's stash of vodka. She was buying it by the case these days off a geezer who lived nearby, and who did the Frog run to Calais once a month for drink and fags.