After the End(26)

“Pip.”

There’s a smear of sauce—ketchup probably—on one of the chrome handles. I hear Fiona’s voice in my head. I know it’s full of sugar, but I don’t let her have it at home . . . I think of that horrible chain pub, with Alison and Fiona and Phoebe and their braying husbands and their perfect healthy children . . . I scrub at the ketchup. Fuck you, Fiona. Fuck you and your sanctimonious sugar sermon. If Dylan comes home, when Dylan comes home, I will give him ketchup every fucking day if he wants it, I will give him as much chocolate and sweets and crisps as he wants, I will give him the moon if he asks for it.

I move on to the cupboard doors, which we’ve surely not cleaned since before I was pregnant. Nesting, isn’t that what they call it? I was forty weeks pregnant—due any day—and adamant I would clean the house and paint the skirting boards in the hall before the baby arrived. That must have been the last time the larder cupboard was cleared out, too—there are things in here well past their sell-by date.

I drop my cloth and sit on the floor, pulling out tins and jars and packets of flour that sigh as I put them on the floor, tiny white clouds spelling out their displeasure at being moved.

“Pip!”

Dylan was overdue by two weeks. I was the size of a whale, a building, a country. My ankles were swollen and he’d dropped so low I waddled, ducklike, into the health centre for my sweep. Max wouldn’t come.

“It’s . . .” He searched for the word. “Icky.”

I rolled my eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous. What about when he’s born? Is that going to be icky, too?” The look on Max’s face suggested it might be.

In the event, he didn’t seem to find the birth icky. Nor did I. And I know that we’re genetically programmed to forget the terrible bits, and remember only the wondrous, beautiful feeling of holding a child that you’ve made—you’ve actually made—but I swear to God, that’s the only bit I do remember. That, and looking up at Max to see his eyes shining.

“Our son,” he said. “We have a son.”

“Pip!” A shout, this time, filtering through the memories. I look around, dazed, at the pile of tinned foods and the packets of pasta and rice.

“It needs cleaning out.”

“It doesn’t.”

“It does! Look at this tuna—it’s from . . .” I search for a date but can’t read it. I brandish it regardless. “Ages ago. And these beans—”

“Stop it.”

“No, I want to—”

“Pip, stop it!”

“So it’s OK for you to get on the laptop and start doing heaven knows what, but I can’t clean the kitchen when it’s filthy and—”

“I’m trying to find a cure for our son!”

He bellows the words, and had I not already been sitting, they might have felled me. As it is, I freeze, a tin of baked beans in one hand. What am I doing?

“There has to be something,” Max says. “A treatment they’ve missed. Something they don’t even know about.”

“They’re doctors, Max.”

He looks at me. “What—you think that makes them better than us?”

“No, but . . .” I stand, staring at the food I don’t remember taking out. “They’re the experts.”

“They can’t be experts in everything, though, can they? In every type of cancer, every blood group, every nervous system?” He carries on talking, but his eyes flit across his screen as fast as his fingers move across the keyboard. “Do you remember what the GP said, that first time we took Dylan?”

You know your son.

“He just doesn’t seem quite right,” I’d said, expecting—no, wanting—the doctor to send us home with a benevolent smile and a private reflection on overprotective parents. We’d been talking about this for weeks, after all—ever since that holiday in Gran Canaria. Is it normal to sleep this much? Alison’s twins aren’t nearly this clumsy. He’s pale—don’t you think he’s pale? “Not quite himself,” I told the doctor. “It’s probably nothing.”

“You know your son” was the response from the doctor, as he wrote the referral, and there was a flash of our future in the grave expression on his face, although I didn’t recognise it then.

“We know our son,” Max says now. “There must be a hundred patients on that unit, and Dr. Khalili will oversee—what?—thirty of those? Maybe she sees each of them for a few minutes each, three times a day—that’s ten, twelve minutes a day with each patient. Twelve minutes.” Fleetingly, he meets my eye. “How can she possibly know more about what’s best for a child than a parent who spends twelve hours by his bedside? A parent who’s spent nearly three years holding his hand?”

Dizziness makes me wish I’d stayed seated. I try to remember when I last ate something.

“We need to research it.” Max looks at me, making sure I’m listening. “With the right treatment, Dylan could live for another five years. He could be cured completely—you read about it all the time.” There’s an energy about him I know I don’t have; an energy he’s only found since we arrived home, since he started searching online. “Think about it: How can doctors treat every case perfectly? Research every single condition to the nth degree? How can they afford to?” This is Max in problem-solving mode. Analysing, searching, testing. He looks at his watch. “Eight here, so . . . two in Chicago, three in Washington, DC . . .” He stands and takes the phone from the cradle on the side.