Truly Madly Guilty(99)

‘Why wouldn’t her ribs be okay?’ asked her father.

Clementine cursed herself. She was trying to tell them anything positive she could but there was no need to tell them all the things that could have gone wrong but didn’t.

‘Sometimes the force of the compressions, the CPR – but it’s fine, it didn’t.’ She heard Oliver counting out loud and for a moment she couldn’t speak. ‘In the morning they’ll reduce the medication, wake her up, and get her breathing on her own.’

‘Can we see her?’ said Clementine’s mother.

‘I don’t know,’ said Clementine. ‘I’ll ask.’ She shouldn’t have let them come to the hospital. It would have been more sensible to tell them to wait at home, better for their elderly hearts. She hadn’t thought. She’d just expected them to come, as though she were still a child and she needed the grown-ups.

Once, she and Sam had been out at dinner with Erika and Oliver and they’d got into a conversation about whether they felt like grown-ups. She and Sam had said they didn’t. Not really. Erika and Oliver had looked perplexed and kind of appalled.

‘Of course I feel like a grown-up,’ said Erika. ‘I’m free. I’m in charge.’

Oliver had said, ‘I couldn’t wait to be a grown-up.’

‘So then,’ said Clementine’s mother, breathing heavily. Was she having a heart attack? Suddenly she lunged at Clementine. ‘Why weren’t you watching her?’ She was so close Clementine could smell the spicy scent on her breath of whatever she’d been eating for dinner. ‘You shouldn’t have taken your eyes off her. Not for a single second. Not around water, for God’s sake.’

‘Pam,’ said Clementine’s father. He went to take his wife’s arm, and she shook it off. A young pregnant woman squeezed her way past them and stared curiously.

‘You’re smarter than that. You know better!’ continued Pam, her eyes fixed on Clementine with such intensity it was as though Clementine were a stranger to her, as though she were trying to work out who this person was who had harmed her granddaughter. ‘Were you drunk? How could you? How could you be so stupid?’ Her face crumpled into a million lines before she covered it with both hands.

Clementine hadn’t even told her yet that it was Erika who had saved Ruby. Erika. The better daughter. The grateful daughter. The daughter who would never have made a mistake like this.

Clementine’s father put his arm around his wife. ‘It’s okay,’ he mouthed over her head. He led her up the walkway. ‘Let’s go and sit down.’

‘It’s the shock,’ said Sam’s mother, Joy. She was a woman who never left the house without ‘her face’, but tonight it was bare of make-up. Clementine had never seen her without lipstick before, maybe no one had. It looked like her lips were missing. She must have been having her nightly read in the bath when she got the call. Clementine imagined her panic. The throwing on of clothes before she was even properly dry.

‘Come on, darling,’ said Joy. ‘Chin up.’

Clementine could barely stand for shame.





chapter sixty-two



The morning after the barbeque

‘Clementine.’

‘What?’

She must have dozed off. She didn’t think she’d closed her eyes all night, but Sam was leaning over her, shaking her shoulder where she sat in the green leather chair next to Ruby’s bed.

There were purple shadows under Sam’s red-rimmed eyes, black stubble along his jaw and a thin line of white spittle around his lips. He had refused to sit at all. ‘Darl, you’re not helping your daughter by standing for the whole night,’ the nurse had told him, but Sam seemed psychopathically determined to stand, as if Ruby’s life depended on it, as if he were guarding her from harm, and eventually the nurse gave up, although every now and then she shot Sam a look as if she were just itching to stick a needle in his arm and knock him out.

The nurse’s name was Kylie. She was a New Zealander and she spoke slowly and simply to them, saying everything twice, as if English were their second language. Probably all parents were dull-witted with shock. Kylie explained that in intensive care every patient got their own nurse: ‘I’ve only got one job tonight and that’s Ruby.’ She told them there was a room available on the same floor where they could sleep, and she gave them little toiletry bags with toothbrushes and combs, of the style you might receive on an overnight premium economy flight. She advised them to try to get some sleep because Ruby was sedated and she wasn’t going to know if they were there or not, but they’d already let Ruby down once, they weren’t leaving her again.

Sam spent the night watching Ruby and the screens monitoring Ruby’s heart rhythm, her temperature, her breathing rate and her oxygen levels, as if he knew what they meant, and indeed he had asked Kylie to explain, so maybe he really did understand. Clementine hadn’t listened to the explanations. She spent the night with her eyes travelling back and forth between Ruby and Kylie’s face. She felt that Kylie’s face would tell her if there was anything to be concerned about, although she was wrong, because during the night Ruby’s oxygen levels dropped, and Kylie’s face remained exactly the same, while the doctor on duty was called and Sam moved quietly to the corner of the room with a clenched fist pressed hard against his cheek, as if he were poised to knock himself out. Ruby’s oxygen levels went back up to an acceptable level again, but the adrenaline buzzed through Clementine for the next few hours. It was a reminder that they could not, should not relax, even for a moment.