After the End(40)

I stand with my toes gripping the edge of the pool. The tiles lining the bottom are black, giving the water a dark mirror finish. I lean forward, and for a second I feel the clutch of imbalance, the point of no return. I couldn’t change my mind now, even if I wanted to. I cut through the water in a swallow dive that takes me so close to the bottom my stomach skims the floor.

I’m not allowed to visit Dylan till three, a restriction that riles me anew each time I recall it.

“I have to think of the other patients,” Dr. Khalili said.

It hadn’t been an argument. A heated conversation, that’s all, when Pip had dared to say that I was dragging Dylan through the courts, and I’d reminded her that she was the one who started all of this, that she’d gone back on what we’d agreed and forced the hospital to take sides, and we’d stared at each other, wondering who we were—how we’d got to this point.

“Please, Mr. Adams.” Dr. Khalili offered us the quiet room, but I wouldn’t move. I kept my eyes fixed on the corridor outside, where an engineer was fitting a new defibrillator to the wall, and I forced back the tears I wouldn’t let myself shed in front of her. I hate the quiet room. I hate the scattering of counseling leaflets on the coffee table, and the box of Kleenex, judiciously placed to catch your grief. I hate the fact that someone made a conscious decision that brightly colored throw cushions might somehow make a grieving parent feel better. I hate the thick, textured glass in the window of the door, blurring the gateway between good news and bad. I hate it all.

“Perhaps if you and Mrs. Adams visited Dylan separately it would be easier for the staff,” she said. I opened my mouth to argue, but she hadn’t finished. “And for Dylan.”

I accepted the restriction—how could I not?—and from three p.m. until midnight my time with Dylan is broken only by the need to return a call or reply to an email as I build the case that will keep him alive.

The goggles I borrowed from the yawning girl on reception are scratched and misted with age. I follow the blurred line of the tiles on the pool floor, and as the thrust of my dive fades away, I take a stroke, then another. I don’t take a breath.

Aged ten I could hold my breath for a fifty-yard length. Swim club was every Saturday, and after we finished training we’d get to goof around. Holding our breath was a thing for a while. There were only two of us who could do the full fifty yards: me, and a girl called Blair, who lived next door back then, and who won butterfly at the junior nationals.

Now, I feel my lungs contract even before my fingertips get within striking distance of the wall. I haven’t counted my strokes but this pool can’t be more than twenty-five yards long. I tuck in my chin and pull it into my chest as I flip into a roll, then kick off in a movement that should be fluid and smooth. Only my chest is burning and I fumble the contact, pushing with just one foot, twisting out of my imaginary lane. I’m thrown, and out of breath, and I surface and stand at the same time, gasping for air and coughing.

“You OK?” It’s the girl from reception. She’s standing by the locker rooms with a pile of towels.

“I’m good.” Embarrassed to have had an audience, I start swimming again, slicing clean, clear strokes through the still water, rolling my body to the side every third stroke to take a breath. My lungs are still burning. I guess a lot’s happened since I was ten years old.

I started Dylan swimming at three months. Pip thought he was too young, but he loved it. A real little water baby. We’ve got a photo of him underwater, eyes wide open, arms reaching for me. I take him on Saturday mornings, and then we sit in the café at the leisure center and dip buttery pastries into hot chocolate. Took him. I feel a pressure in my chest that has nothing to do with my breathing, and then an unbearable pain that makes me wonder for a second if I’m having a heart attack. My vision blurs, but it isn’t the scratches on the goggles, it’s the tears that are filling them. Dylan. Hidden beneath the water, I allow the remaining breath in my body to leave in thick, noisy sobs, and because the pressure eases a little I let it carry on.

I swim another twenty lengths like that, bawling into the water. I tear off my goggles when it feels like the water’s more in than out, and swim faster and harder, chlorine stinging my eyes. Twenty strokes a length. Eighteen. Fifteen. When I’m done, I hold on to the edge and hang from my aching arms for a moment, feeling the muscles stretch, and then I haul myself out and go get dressed. I have a train to catch.



* * *





    My barrister, Laura King, has chambers in London and charges two hundred and ten pounds an hour. On her fourth finger is a single square-set diamond, and I wonder how many hours’ work it represents. A whole day? Two? Her office is large, with a curved walnut desk, and two sofas, set opposite each other, where we are currently sitting. A man with a hipster bun serves us coffee, and sets a tray of bite-size croissants on the table.

“I wasn’t sure if you’d have had breakfast,” Laura says. She wears a black trouser suit with a crisp white shirt. When she leans back, the jacket falls open to reveal a bright red lining that makes me think of a Dracula outfit Pip once wore to a costume party. “Right, let’s crack on, shall we?”

I’m grateful for her businesslike tone, for the lack of sympathy she showed me when I arrived. It enables me to talk about Dylan without stuttering, without tearing up. I have to approach this like a case study—it’s the only way I’ll get through it.