After the End(25)

Only it is happening.

“It isn’t fair,” I say quietly. I mean that it isn’t fair to ask us—ordinary people with no medical knowledge—to decide whether someone lives or dies, but as I say it I realise that I mean it isn’t fair this happened at all, that Dylan was healthy, and we were happy, and then someone threw a grenade into our life.

What did we do wrong?

“No.” Max’s jaw is tight, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. His eyes flick to the rearview mirror and I wonder if he’s seeing our son in his car seat, the way I’m imagining him right now. Jabbering nonstop in a barely intelligible stream of real words and made-up ones. Pointing out tractors, horses, lorries. Kicking the back of my seat and finding it funny. I have a sudden picture of snapping at him one day to stop talking, and the memory is like an uppercut to the gut. If I’d only known . . . I picture the curls flopping over his eyes because I couldn’t bear to take him for a haircut yet. It seemed so grown-up—I wasn’t ready to let go of my baby yet. And then all his hair fell out, in a matter of days.

“When it grows back,” I told him, “I’ll take you to that posh barber’s in town. You’ll lie back in the big chair, and they’ll wash your hair. They’ll get out their sharp scissors, and they’ll be ever so careful, and perhaps they’ll use the clippers on your neck, and it’ll tickle a bit.”

I close my eyes. “What are we going to do?”

He shakes his head, and I don’t know if that’s his answer, or if he doesn’t know, or if he doesn’t want to talk about it. So instead I look out of the window and try not to make a sound. But tears fill my eyes, and seconds later they’re streaming down my cheeks and I’m catching my breath and feeling like I’m choking. I take a breath in but then it doesn’t want to leave, and I hear Max’s concern like it’s coming to me through water, and I can’t breathe I can’t breathe I can’t breathe.

“Pip! Calm down. Calm down!” Only he doesn’t sound calm, and he’s got one hand on my knee and the other on the steering wheel and I can’t breathe I can’t breathe . . .

“Pip!”

And then he’s stopped, and we’re in a lay-by, with the engine off and the handbrake on, and he pulls against his seat belt to take me into awkward arms. And oncoming cars light us brightly but fleetingly, and everything I feel is mirrored in his face.

“I can’t do it, Max.”

“You can. You have to. We both will.”

He’s crying.

I have never seen Max cry. On our wedding day his eyes shone with emotion; when Dylan was born I could hear the lump in his throat. But I have never seen him cry.

My own floodgates opened with motherhood and have never since closed. Adverts, charity appeals, Richard Curtis films. Hellos, goodbyes, I-love-yous. Max laughs at my tears, although not unkindly.

“It’s sweet,” he says, when I bawl at that bit in Four Weddings. “Endearing.”

It made him feel protective, I decided. Like a proper alpha male.

Now, tears push their way from beneath closed lids to stream across his cheeks, and it’s all wrong—it’s all wrong that Max is crying, when he’s always been the strong one. This isn’t happening, it isn’t happening. I want to go back to last year, when everything was still OK, to when Dylan was playing in the garden, swimming in the sea in Gran Canaria. I want to go to the doctor and have him check over Dylan, and tell me everything’s fine, all toddlers are clumsy. I want to go home feeling foolish, have Max say I told you so.

This isn’t my Max. My Max is strong. Capable. In control. Dry-eyed and levelheaded, when I’m sobbing and emotional. This Max is as lost as I am, as helpless as I am.

“I can’t—” I start, and Max shakes his head again and again and again.

“No. We can’t. We won’t.” The words—or perhaps the act of speaking, moving—seem to galvanise him, and he rubs his face violently with both hands, sits up straight, clears his throat. “We won’t,” he says again, with even more certainty, even more vigour.

He puts his arms around me and holds me, and I shut my eyes tight against the decision that has to be made, and against this Max who looks as lost as I am, as broken as I am. I can’t see him like this. I need Max to be strong, because I don’t think I can be.



* * *





We’re home for less than a minute before Max opens the laptop. He sits at the kitchen table, his coat still zipped up, and the car keys still in one hand. I go through the motions of coming home: I shut the front door, take off my shoes and put on my slippers, turn on the main lights. I read the note Mum’s left by the kettle, move the plastic dish of chilli—quite spicy! from the fridge to the freezer.

There is no reason why the house should feel emptier than it did this morning—than it does on any day I come home without my boy—and yet it feels that way today. Today it feels as though we’ve already lost him.

I stand uselessly in the middle of the kitchen, searching for something to do, then pick up a cloth from the sink and squeeze it dry.

“What are you doing?”

“Cleaning the kitchen.”

“Why?”

I spray the surfaces with antiseptic, and rub it away in a circular, rhythmic motion I find oddly soothing.