He thinks of the cathedral. The moment Gemma fell . . .
And then he thinks of that other cathedral, all those years ago. The clock. The first sight of her.
Is it possible it’s simply a coincidence? Two cathedrals? Is he deluding himself as he clings on tight, tight, tight to the hope that this could just be a terrible and horrible coincidence?
CHAPTER 9
THE MOTHER
‘That’s probably enough for today, darling. It’s late.’ I put the bookmark in place and close the novel, smoothing its cover with my palm. Ed found the book in Gemma’s room on his first trip home and I’ve been reading to her to try to restore a sense of calm after the horrible scene earlier.
I still feel shaken and find myself gripping the novel too tightly. I stare at my white knuckles and loosen my grasp, turning the book over to examine the strange cover.
It’s an odd book about a group of girls who find themselves alone on an island with the option to send only one three-word text message each day to the outside world. No incoming messages are allowed and no other connection to the internet. The cover of the novel has an oasis of palm trees in a sea ominously coloured red. It’s well written and certainly unusual but I’m a little surprised it’s to Gemma’s taste, to be frank, and am worried it’s turning too dark. Borderline horror, which is clearly not the right choice just now for her or me. I consider telling Gemma this but don’t want to sound preachy. I may just get Ed to look for a different book. I’ll message him in the morning before he returns.
‘I think I’ll just sit and doze for a bit,’ I tell her. ‘The nurses are changing shift. You just rest. I’m right here if you need me.’
Each time I talk to her like this I still get this same flutter of disappointment when she doesn’t move. I try to be patient and pragmatic but the truth is I simply cannot help searching her face, her hands, her whole body actually, hoping that she will find some small way to signal that she can hear me. A flutter of her eyelids or a tiny movement of her fingers perhaps. But I scan and scan and there’s absolutely nothing.
Always this complete stillness.
At first in here, I held her hand almost constantly and told her that she could squeeze it ever so gently if she could hear me. I truly expected her to do this. It was a terrible shock to feel nothing. Just flesh on flesh. It was then I realised that in my head I had this absolute conviction that I was going to get my ‘moment’。 Any minute. Any hour. I had conjured this ridiculous movie version of our situation; only now I’m slowly starting to dread that here in the real world there’s to be no Hollywood moment. I was simply creating too much pressure for both of us. Disappointment for me and, worse, possibly continual frustration for her. And so I stopped asking her to squeeze my hand. Now I just tell her that she’s not to worry about anything; I say that I know in my heart that she can hear me but it doesn’t matter if she can’t confirm this to me just yet. I don’t mind. She’s not to feel any pressure.
Still, I find it hard to take my eyes off her in case I miss the first movement. The first sign.
There’s a change suddenly through the glass on to the main ward – a dimming of the lights, signalling the night shift proper. The new nurses on duty have already been in to check on Gemma, logging all her readings on the little clipboard at the end of her bed. They know my routine.
I tell Ed that at night, I’ll sleep in the little room they’ve provided for us on the floor below but this isn’t true. I only nap in there in the day when he’s here to watch her in my place. When I send him home to rest, I can’t bear to leave our little cubicle in case something changes so I just sleep in this chair. The nurses don’t seem to mind.
I find I do a lot of thinking in this late-evening phase – when the lights first dim. I feel too awake to try to settle or doze and instead tend to just stare at different objects, one after another with my mind wandering through the silence. Through the years. In these shadows and in this stillness, I think a lot about the last time we were in hospital with Gemma, when she was sick with asthma as a toddler. It was terribly frightening but in a very different way. I slept in a chair alongside her that time too but it was not the same at all on the children’s wards. All the parents stayed over – some on camp beds set up in the playroom and others covered in blankets in tall-backed chairs. There was a kitchen where we could make hot drinks and I had long conversations with the other mothers in the early hours – each of us fighting different battles with different illnesses but all in the same horrible boat together, wearing the same dark circles under our eyes. A sad but comforting camaraderie in that kitchen.