She remembers Hossein’s words from earlier. I wish I could have been with her. She needs me to be here, she thinks. Even if she never knows I was.
She crosses the threshold.
Janine is as white as the sheet on which she lies. A morphine drip runs into the back of a veiny hand, and an oxygen mask is clamped to her face. She’s all wires and monitors, her life edging away to a ragged beep, beep. The doctor picks up a chair that’s pushed back against the radiator, places it by the bed. ‘Sit with her, maybe,’ she says. ‘Hold her hand. She’ll like that. There’s a call button just here. One of the nurses will keep an eye on you.’
Collette obeys, like a zombie. Reaches for the hand that lies on the blanket and slides it into her own. It’s cold. As if she’s been out in the snow. She chafes her palm up and down it, like a mother warming a child. Glances up at the clock on the wall. It’s nearly ten, already. Three hours gone past since she received the phone call telling her that Janine has been taken to hospital. I should have got here sooner, she thinks. I should have gone down to visit her this morning. Maybe if I’d been, I would have noticed. Could have stopped it before it got this far.
It’s not your fault, Collette. She’s been ill a long time. Longer than you realised, probably. And how could you risk going back to the nursing home? No chance that you’d escape Malik a third time. But there’s no way they can know she’s here, she tells herself. They can’t be watching the home twenty-four hours a day, can they?
Janine. Here you are, more yourself than you have been since I came back. The frown has gone, the lines of suspicion round the mouth, the angry denial of who and what she is. It’s a long time since she watched her mother sleep. The last time was when she was still Lisa, in Lisa’s garden, a day not unlike how today has been, all sweaty heat and rising pressure, but with the lulling accompaniments of a padded sunlounger, a gin and tonic and the soothing plash of that stupid slate dolmen water feature she thought was the apotheosis of sophistication, at the time. Ten years ago, maybe, though her mother looks as though thirty have passed. She had blonde hair, then, and her face was plump with creams and camouflage, painted in, contented. How many people only know what a woman really looks like on her deathbed? she wonders. I’ve been wearing make-up since I was thirteen years old. I don’t suppose anyone much has seen me with my natural eyebrows.
Do I want her to wake up? Shake her till she opens her eyes? Maybe I don’t. Not if she’s going to be that stranger again. The woman who thinks I’m some kind of jailer. Maybe I want her just to slip away. That way I can pretend that she was still here.
She shifts on her chair, feels awkward as she tries to think of something to say. Thinks about how they always start in the movies, can’t think of anything better. Clears her throat and starts, if only to drown out the bubbling coming from her mother’s lungs. ‘Mum? It’s me. It’s Lisa,’ she says, and starts to stroke the hand again.
This is the last time I shall be Lisa, she thinks. After this, Lisa’s gone for ever.
‘Collette.’
She looks round, realises that she’s drifted away as she held her mother’s hand, that time has passed in the mist and Vesta is standing in the doorway.
‘Hossein told me,’ she says. ‘Can I come in?’
‘Of course,’ says Collette, and feels the tears begin to flow. She lets go of the hand and stands up, and lets Vesta enfold her, hold her, pass her her strength. A kind, kind woman, the help to strangers. Should have been my mum, she thinks. Should have been someone’s mother. If you’d been my mother, I would never have had to have left.
‘Oh, lovey,’ says Vesta, ‘it’s hard, I know. But I’m here now, and I won’t go away.’
A single sob wrenches itself from her chest, and Vesta holds her tighter. Then she lets her go and finds herself a chair.
At two in the morning Collette hears Janine’s breathing change. Her mind’s been wandering for hours. The effort of maintaining her concentration, of staying in the moment, is too great even when she wants to fix the moment for ever. She hadn’t realised that boredom is as much a part of the deathbed experience as grief. The faces of nurses, popping their heads round the door, have come as a welcome distraction.
She’s been off in Peckham, back in her childhood, wandering through the rooms and the rows and the boyfriends. Pulling Janine from the settee and supporting her to her bed. Running down to the corner shop for a packet of Rothmans, because kids could still do that errand in those days, and a KitKat for herself from the change. Feeling the burning shame when Janine staggered on her heels and had to hold herself up on the crossing barrier outside the school gates one afternoon, eating fish finger sandwiches in front of the telly. The table where every now and again Janine would insist that they eat together like a proper family, only she never sat down herself, just stalked up and down the carpet and complained about Lisa’s cutlery technique. The what-you-looking-at exchanges with the Murphys next door. The way she enjoyed the stupid things Lisa bought her with her salary: the widescreen TV, the halogen cooker, the memory foam mattress.