After the End(16)

Only Pip is still. Only Pip is sitting alone, her lap empty, her arms empty. She’s smiling and talking to Craig about car seats, and you’d think she was having a nice time, but I know my wife. I know her.

We’d been together a year or so when I took her to a drinks reception hosted by the UK office. We got separated—Chester had wanted me to network, and Pip had been swept away by Janice from accounts—and every time I tried to get back to her there was someone else I had to meet. I watched Pip smile and laugh with Janice, then smile and laugh with Janice’s friends, then with Brian from IT, and if you didn’t know her you’d have thought she was having the best time. But I knew her.

“Wanna go someplace nicer?” I whispered in her ear when I finally managed to cross the room.

“Yes. So much yes.”

I watch now, as she laughs at something Craig is saying, and passes the vinegar to Fiona for their little girl—She has it on everything; mad, isn’t it?—and I leave my spot by the door and move round to where Pip is sitting. I bend down until her hair is brushing my lips.

“Wanna go someplace nicer?”

“So much yes.”



* * *





In the long corridor on our way to PICU we stand to one side to let a porter and a kid in a wheelchair through. The kid’s about fourteen, jaundiced and steroid swollen. He pushes his wheeled drip stand in an outstretched hand bruised from its cannula.

PICU is busy, and we wait several minutes before we’re buzzed in. We hang up our coats, wash our hands, do the things we’ve done every day for so long. Weeks or months? Rupert had asked. Please let it be weeks.

Pip nudges me as we reach Room 1 and find both the Slaters and the Bradfords there. They are separated by Liam’s bed, and by Dylan’s and Darcy’s cots, both families studiously ignoring each other. Three older kids are with the Slaters, plugged into iPods and looking bored.

I don’t spend too long considering the dynamics of the room, because the sides of Dylan’s cot have been lowered to halfway, and instead of lying on his back he is leaning against a large foam wedge. A physiotherapist is tapping his chest with a cupped hand.

“He’s sitting up!” Pip rushes to his side. She grins at the physio. “It’s so good to see him like this.”

“Almost finished. This’ll loosen the secretions and hopefully he’ll give us a good cough.” The physio has a nose ring and a South African accent. A rainbow-colored lanyard is covered in bright badges. She taps again and Dylan splutters, thick mucus filling his mouth. The physio tips him forward, a tissue-covered hand holding his chin and clearing his mouth in one well-practiced move. “There’s a good boy.” She taps his chest again, moving her cupped hand across his thin body. Dylan’s arms fall like two sticks by his sides.

He was nine pounds ten ounces at birth. Two weeks overdue, and so low Pip couldn’t walk without clasping both hands beneath her bump, like that was the only thing stopping him from falling out. Arms and legs like the Michelin Man, with cheeks so fat his eyes looked closed even when they weren’t.

“Maybe he’ll be a wrestler,” Pip said, when he was six months old. She was changing his diaper, and she squeezed his chunky thighs and blew a raspberry on his belly.

“Or a pizza tester.”

Pip threw a burp cloth at my head.

He lost it all when he started moving, of course. Almost overnight the bracelets of fat melted from his arms, and gradually I watched him morph from baby to toddler to child.

And then he got sick, and he got thin. And now I’d give anything to see those Michelin Man legs again.

“How’s it going, champ?”

Dylan coughs up more phlegm.

“Good job, Dyl!” The physio wipes his mouth, then rests his head gently back on the foam wedge. “He can stay sitting up for a bit, if you like?”

It’s good, seeing him sitting up, and even though he drifts in and out of sleep (no surprise, given the cocktail of drugs he’s on) you can tell that he knows we’re here. After a while the physio comes back and takes away the foam wedge, and lies Dylan down on one side—a smaller cushion holding him in place. Pip gets out her knitting, and I pick up my iPad and tap on the menu of articles saved in my reading list.

Dylan wasn’t talking much even before he got sick. He knew fifty-some words—we wrote them down on a piece of paper stuck to the fridge—but he’d only just started stringing them together. Want milk. No toast. Daddy book.

I swallow hard. Frown at a feature about Bitcoins, then close the tab and tap on the menu of bookmarked links. Survival rates for medulloblastoma, reads the first headline. I don’t need to open the link. If the disease has not spread, survival rates are around 70 to 80 percent.

“Eighty percent,” Pip repeated, when I told her. “That’s good. That’s really good.” She kept saying it, as though she wasn’t quite convinced. I didn’t tell her what the next line said.

The disease tends to be more aggressive in children under three, for whom the survival rate is lower.

I look at my son, pale and weak beneath his blanket, the scar from his surgery visible through his thin hair. He was in theater for six hours, and every minute felt like a year. I brought my laptop; sat in the canteen replying to emails I barely read, and compiling a presentation I couldn’t bring myself to care about.