After the End
Clare Mackintosh
prologue
Leila looks around the courtroom. Only the handful of press given permission to attend are moving, their pens making swift marks in shorthand, recording every word the judge speaks. Everyone else is quite still—watching, waiting—and Leila has the strange sensation of being frozen in time, that they might all wake, a year from now, and they will still be here in this courtroom, waiting for the ruling that will change so many lives.
Leila swallows. If it is this hard for her, how impossible must it be for Pip and Max to listen to the judge’s words? To know that in a few moments they will hear their son’s fate?
Before the break, Max and Pip Adams were sitting at opposite ends of the long bench seat behind their legal teams. They are still on the bench, but the distance between them has contracted, and now they are sitting close enough to touch each other.
In fact, as Leila watches, and as the judge draws closer to his ruling, she sees movement. She could not say if Max moved first, or Pip. She can’t be certain they even know they are doing it. But as she watches, two hands venture slowly across the no-man’s-land between them, and find each other.
Dylan’s parents hold hands.
The judge speaks.
And a courtroom holds its breath.
before
one
Pip
Dylan was six hours old when I noticed a mark behind his left ear the size of a thumbprint. I lay on one side, watching him, my free arm curled protectively across his body. I watched his perfect lips quiver a breath, and I traced my gaze across his cheeks and round the whorls of ears still too new to have found their shape. And then I saw a thumbprint the colour of milky tea, and I smiled because here was something totally new and yet completely familiar.
“He’s got your birthmark.”
I showed Max, who said He’s definitely mine, then, and tiredness and euphoria made us laugh so much the nurse popped her head round the curtains to ask what was the commotion. And when Max had to leave, and the lights were turned low, I touched the tip of my finger to the milky-tea mark that linked the two people I loved more than anything else in the world, and thought that life could never get more perfect.
There’s a low keening from somewhere on the ward; an accompanying murmur from a parent up as late as I am. I hear the squeak of rubber shoes in the corridor, and the bubble of the water cooler releasing a dose, before the shoes take it back to the ward.
I rest a hand gently on Dylan’s forehead, and stroke it upwards. His hair is growing back in fair wisps, like when he was a baby, and I wonder if it’ll still be curly. I wonder if it’ll turn brown again, like it did when he hit two. I trace a finger down his nose, careful not to touch the narrow tube that snakes into one nostril and into his stomach.
The endotracheal tube is wider than the feeding one. It pushes between Dylan’s lips, held in place by two wide strips of tape, one across his chin, and one above his lips. At Christmas we brought in the sticky moustaches that fell from our novelty crackers, and chose the curliest, most extravagant for Dylan. And for a few days, until the tape grew grubby and needed changing, our almost-three-year-old boy made everyone around him smile again.
“Is it OK to touch him?”
I look across the room, to where the new boy is; to where his mother, anxious and uncertain, hovers by her son’s bed.
“Of course.” The charge nurse, Cheryl, smiles encouragingly. “Hold his hand, give him a cuddle. Talk to him.” There are always at least two nurses in here, and they change all the time, but Cheryl is my favourite. She has such a calming manner I’m convinced her patients get better just from being in her presence. There are three children in this room: eight-month-old Darcy Bradford, my Dylan, and the new boy.
The name Liam Slater is written in marker pen on the card stuck to the end of his bed. If the children are well enough when they’re admitted to intensive care, they get to choose an animal sticker. They do the same on the nameplates above the pegs at Dylan’s daycare. I chose a cat for him. Dylan loves cats. He’ll stroke them oh so gently, and widen his eyes like it’s the first time he’s felt something so soft. Once a big ginger tom scratched him, and Dylan’s mouth formed a perfect circle of shock and dismay, before his face crumpled into tears. I felt a wave of sadness that he would forever now be wary of something that had brought him so much joy.
“I don’t know what to say,” whispers Liam’s mum. Butterfly breaths flutter her throat. Her son is bigger than Dylan—he must be at school already—with a snub nose and freckles, and hair left long on top. Two thin lines are shaved into the side, above his ear.
“Pretty cool haircut,” I say.
“Apparently everyone else’s parents let them.” She rolls her eyes but it’s a pale imitation of a mother’s frustration. I play along, giving a mock grimace.
“Oh dear—I’ve got all this to come.” I smile. “I’m Pip, and this is Dylan.”
“Nikki. And Liam.” Her voice wobbles on his name. “I wish Connor was here.”
“Your husband? Will he be back tomorrow?”
“He’s getting the train. They get picked up, you see, on a Monday morning, and brought back on Friday. They stay on-site during the week.”