After the End(17)

Pip stared at me. “How can you think about work at a time like this?”

“Someone’s got to pay the mortgage,” I snapped, hurt by the look in her eyes, and unable to put into words what I really wanted to say, which was that thinking about work was easier than thinking about what was happening in the operating theater.

They got most of it. A subtotal resection, they said. I looked it up while we waited to see Dylan. Fifty to ninety percent removal, Google told me.

“There’s a big difference between fifty and ninety.” We were sitting on either side of Dylan’s crib, the surgeon standing at the end, clipboard in hand. “Can you be more specific?”

“I removed as much as I could without causing more damage to the healthy cells around the tumor.” He slid away from the question, replacing one worry with another.

Brain damage.

Dylan is brain damaged. First from the tumor, then—in some cruel irony—from the surgery to remove it. Some parts of the brain will recover, others won’t, and despite all their knowledge, all their study, the doctors cannot be certain about the split. We have to wait and see.

“I’m going to get some air,” I tell Pip. She tips her head up for a kiss.

I walk across the car park and past the nurses’ accommodation to the bench beneath the oak tree. I sit down and lean my elbows on my knees, rubbing the heels of my palms into my eyes. Pressure fills my head like I’m underwater, like the weight of an ocean is pressing against me. I think of the tumor at the base of Dylan’s brain, and wonder if this is how it felt before they took it away. I think of the scan he’ll have on Monday. I try to visualize what’s left of the tumor—imagine it shriveled and shrunken from radiotherapy—but all I can see is the shadow on that first scan we were shown after Dylan was admitted.

“I’m sorry,” the consultant said, like it was his fault.

The tumor had been there awhile. Months. Months of headaches. Months of nausea. Months of blurred vision and loss of balance and a dozen other symptoms an older kid could have vocalized, but Dylan . . . I screw my palms harder into the sockets of my eyes. I think back to last summer, I try to think if there’s any way I could have known, any way I should have known . . .

“Oops-a-daisy!” Pip said, when Dylan ran headlong into the wall, fell over, then fell over again when he tried to get up. We all laughed. Remembered the game we played as freshmen where you spin in a circle, then try to run in a straight line.

We laughed at him.

Was it then? Was that when it started? Not clumsy, not a toddler finding his feet, but sick. I let out a low moan.

Someone coughs.

I sit up, embarrassed to discover I’m not alone, and see Connor Slater on the bench beside me. I give a curt nod, and make to stand, and then I realize it wasn’t a cough.

Connor Slater is crying.

He’s gripping the edge of the bench with hands that are rough and reddened. On the inside of his forearm is a tattoo—Liam’s name in black swirls. Despite the time of year, he’s wearing baggy shorts, his legs tan and freckled. On his feet, sandy-colored boots, worn across the toe to show shiny steel caps.

I don’t know anyone like Connor Slater, I don’t know how to help him.

I don’t know him.

And yet.

I know what it’s like to leave my family on a Monday and be away until Friday. I know what it’s like to get a call from my wife saying I’m at the hospital—you have to come. You have to come now. I know what it’s like to be so scared of losing my son that nothing and no one else matters.

That, I know.

“It’s tough, huh?”

Connor nods slowly. He’s staring at the ground between his feet, his hands braced on his knees.

“It’s a good hospital. One of the best in the country. Liam’s in good hands.” Platitudes, I realize, even as I utter them, but Connor rubs his face and nods more vigorously and I guess sometimes platitudes are what we need to hear.

“I’m trying to be there for Nik, you know? And I don’t want the other boys to be worrying, so I’m telling them it’s all OK, and I’m making sure all the time that they’re OK, and Nik’s OK, and—” He breaks off, but not before I hear my own thoughts in his.

“And no one ever asks if you’re OK?”

Connor’s lips tighten.

“And you’re not.”

“No.” He looks at me, and his eyes are red and swollen. “Because it’s my fault Liam’s here.”





six





Pip


He forgot the inhaler.” Nikki is changing Liam’s pyjamas. Max is in the office today, so it’s just the two of us. There are screens you can wheel across for privacy, but none of the other parents are here, and neither of us is bothered, and there’s something comforting about us both looking after our boys.

Ages ago, Alison and I talked about going away sometime—about all us mums renting a place for a few days with the kids. Everyone mucking in. Cooking, looking after the kids.

“Like a commune,” she laughed. I wonder if we’ll ever do it now.

Nikki lifts her son’s T-shirt over his head. “Liam got a new rucksack for his birthday. He’d put all his things in it for school, but he hadn’t taken the inhaler out of the little pocket of the front of his old one.”