After the End(15)

“Well, that’s bostin’! And listen, you bring the little fella for tea once he’s home, all right? On me.”

“Thanks, Larry.”

We eat onion soup with a thick crust of melted cheese, and cassoulet with duck that falls off the bone and has to be chased with a spoon. We talk about Connor Slater, and how quiet he’s been since Dr. Khalili put him in his place. We talk about Tom and Alistair, and how I’d like to have them for dinner sometime.

“Do we have anything in common, though?” Max says. “Besides PICU?”

“That’s how it starts, though, isn’t it?” I tear off a piece of bread and dip it into my cassoulet. “Friendship, I mean. You have one thing in common—children, or dog-walking, or being in intensive care—and it grows from there. There aren’t very many people who can relate to what we’re going through.”

“They can’t, though. Not really. Tom and Alistair’s experience is different to ours, is different to Nikki’s and her Neanderthal husband’s. It’s like . . .” Max grapples for the words. “Like we’re all travelling the same country, but to different destinations. On different roads. You know? We’re the only ones who know what our particular journey is like, how it feels to travel it.” He reaches for my hand. “Just us.”

After the warmth of the restaurant, the cold night air makes me shiver, and I wrap my scarf around my neck twice, three times. Our breath ices the air a second before we step through it, so that we walk home enveloped in a mist of our own making. I slide my fingers into Max’s and he takes my hand and puts it in his pocket.

By tacit agreement, when we reach the house we don’t linger in the hall, in the kitchen. We don’t stand at the dining room door and discuss how we might convert it to a bedroom. We don’t talk at all. We go upstairs, and we make love for the first time in the longest while.





five





Max


When do you think he’ll be able to come home?”

We’re in the sort of bar you never go to until you have kids, when high chairs and an outdoor play area are suddenly more important than its range of botanical gins. Alison and her husband, Rupert, got here early, claiming two large tables by the door to the beer garden. The kids demand constantly to be taken outside, then—almost immediately—want to come back inside, their parents held hostage by three-foot terrorists needing coats and gloves they’ll shed a minute later.

“Hard to say.”

“Are we talking weeks or months?” Rupert is a GP, which apparently gives him the authority to ask questions the others might think, but wouldn’t ask.

I look at my watch. “We don’t know.” An hour, Pip said. They won’t expect us to stay long, not with Dylan the way he is.

“I mean, he’s been in PICU now for—what—six weeks?”

Three months, I reply silently.

“Weeks, I’d think.” Pip looks at me. “Don’t you?” She doesn’t wait for an answer. “Weeks. A month, at most.” I tune out. I don’t want to talk about Dylan in front of all these people, leaning forward in case they miss a single word of the awful, terrible story they’re desperately relieved isn’t happening to them.

“We can’t bail,” Pip said, when I suggested crying off. “Imagine how you’d feel if they didn’t come to Dylan’s birthday.”

“I’d understand, given the circumstances.”

But Pip was adamant, and so instead of being with Dylan we’re spending Sunday afternoon in a chain pub with someone else’s children. Someone else’s healthy children. Not that I’d wish what we’re going through on them—on anyone—but . . . it’s tough, that’s all.

Pip is still filling them in. “We had a couple of blips after he came off the ventilator, but he’s been stable for a couple of days, now. He’s got a scan on Monday to make sure the tumor hasn’t got any bigger, and then we’ll see the consultant when Max is back from Chicago. Won’t we, Max?” She tries to make me join in.

“That’s great,” one of the other women says. Phoebe? I get the women mixed up. I have to mentally put them with their husbands to remember which is which. Phoebe and Craig; Fiona and Will. It is Phoebe, then. She has her head tilted on one side. How dreadful.

“We’re all thinking of you so much,” Fiona chips in. “All the time.”

“And praying,” adds Phoebe.

Thoughts and prayers, I think. I catch Pip’s eye, but she seems genuinely moved by the platitudes. “Thanks, girls. That means a lot.”

It means nothing. It does nothing. I stand up and go to the door. Outside, a toddler is trying to climb over the bottom of the slide. He’s gripping the edges in pudgy gloved fists, but he can’t step high enough, and every time, his trainers catch the slide, and knock him back. A man runs into the play area and grabs the kid around the waist, swooping him high over the slide like an airplane. Something tightens in my throat. I look away.

A waitress arrives with two bowls of fries—Something to nibble on, Alison said—and everyone’s gathering children onto their knees, and tearing fries in half to blow on and dip in ketchup. I know it’s full of sugar, but I don’t let her have it at home. Will’s little girl is crying because she didn’t want to stop playing but now she doesn’t want to get down, and If she doesn’t want anything don’t force her—she’ll eat when she’s hungry.