style="font-size:15px;"> ‘The movements you can see are reflex contractions. Danny’s brain stem remains technically alive so long as we continue artificially to feed and drain and ventilate him, but the thinking part of his brain is dead.’
‘Has anyone ever recovered from this state?’
Mr Copthorne looked at Jess. ‘No one has. Ever.’
Beth made a small animal noise and turned her face into her father’s shoulder. Lizzie was crying too, big tears rolling glassily down her cheeks. Her weeping was theatrical, Jess thought, with the first cold detachment of her grief. And when she turned her eyes to Ian she saw that he was ashamed. Embarrassed by their loss. It was or would become a part of their mutual failure, the final terrible emblem of it.
Danny was dead. He had gone away somewhere while the machines hissed and flickered pointlessly around him. It came to her that she had known it all along and her insistent hope had been only a subterfuge.
Dry-eyed, Jess faced the doctor.
And it was to Jess he said, ‘What I’m about to ask you is an imposition and an intrusion into your grief. But terrible and unfair as it may sound, other people can live through your son’s death. Could you find it in yourself to make his organs available for donation? I believe there is even a kind of solace in the giving, if you were able to do it.’
Without hesitation, without looking at Ian because Danny was hers now, not his, Jess answered, ‘Yes. Take what will help someone else.’
‘Thank you,’ the man said.
‘May we see him first?’
‘Of course.’
With Ian walking slowly ahead of them and with their arms linked round each other, the three women went back to the ward for the last time.
In the end Jess was left alone with him. Ian helped Beth away and Lizzie stayed for only a moment longer. She groped her way between the white screens that surrounded the bed, blinded by tears.
Jess sat in silence, watching Danny’s motionless face. A continuous ribbon of thoughts ran through her mind, bright images from the past punctuated by a conversation with Danny that she knew must not end now. She would talk to him – how could she not? – and he would answer. She possessed him within her head and the sudden certainty of it was like a light flashing on after days of darkness.
She stood up now and gently lifted the blanket from his shoulders, folding it back so that she could look at him. With an effort of will she made the white discs taped to his chest invisible, and the tubes and wires running out of him. She closed her ears to the gasp of the ventilator and the subdued noises of the ward.
Danny’s shoulders were broad and there was dark hair on his chest and forearms. The slow rise and fall of his chest was steady, as if he were sleeping. His skin was smooth and still coloured by the residue of his summer tan. His mother looked at the knitting together of muscles and sinews and the hollow at the base of his throat and the strong arch of his ribcage, and thought how beautiful he was. While she looked at him he was a man and not her child any longer. She would have liked to stretch herself out beside him and take him in her arms. The flush of longing for him made her skin shiver with tiny currents of electricity, as if she were a girl, as if he were her lover.
Jess touched the tips of her fingers to his warm shoulder. She bent down as if to whisper in his ear, and then put her lips to the tiny scar on his jawline.
Then, tenderly, she folded the blanket up again, patting it in place around him.
All the time the conversation ran on in her head, threads of talk they had shared about Danny’s college work, his girls, small speculations about the future. She heard his voice again and saw him moving, smiling, moving on as he would not, now.
Jess straightened up, stood back a step.
She did not articulate the word goodbye.
She opened the screens and walked down the ward, somehow placing one foot in front of the other. She saw the faces of the unit director, a nurse, one of the doctors, waiting to help her. She even smiled her thanks at them, feeling the movement of it spreading lopsided over her face. The nurse put an arm round Jess’s shoulders. They guided her away from the unit and the hateful waiting room, so that she would not see or hear when they came to wheel the body down to the theatre.
Ian was in the dining room laying the round table for dinner. He found the white cloth in its usual drawer and shook it out over the table. The stubborn creases revealed that it had been folded away for a long time. Probably Danny and Jess had eaten their meals in the kitchen, if they had eaten together at all. It was almost three years since they had shared a meal in this room as a family foursome.
The understanding never again weighed like a stone beneath his heart. He swallowed, in a confused attempt to dislodge it.
Ian lifted a pair of carved wooden candlesticks off the dusty mantelpiece and set them on the cloth. It seemed important to mark the day of Danny’s funeral with proper ceremony. When he had laid five place settings he stood back. The dining room looked almost the same as it had on the day he’d left. He remembered that he had put his two suitcases down in the hall and glanced in, briefly, as if to check that nothing of himself remained. Then he had put the suitcases in his car and driven away to Michelle’s flat.
Years before that, Jess and he had papered this room together over a week of his summer holiday. Today the Laura Ashley pattern of tiny brown flowers looked dingy, and the matching curtains hung limply beneath their gathered pelmet. The brown carpet was worn, and so were the green tweed seats of the second-hand Sixties Scandinavian wooden chairs. Jess had made no changes or improvements to the home they had created together; Ian clumsily understood that she had probably lacked the emotional energy as well as the money.
From the kitchen drifted the scent of frying garlic. James was cooking dinner, and the three women were upstairs somewhere. Ian was glad of the interval of quiet. The house had been full of people for hours.
Everyone had come back to the house from the crematorium. They had eaten the food prepared by the caterers that Lizzie swore by, shaken hands with Ian and Jess and whispered their assurances that if there was anything, anything at all, they only had to ask. There had been a parade of faces: neighbours Ian had almost forgotten, teachers from Danny’s school, and friends of Jess’s, including a woman from her work who had brought flowers picked on the nursery – viburnum and winter jasmine and strong-scented daphne. And there had been solemn, tongue-tied mates of Danny’s whom Ian had last seen as little boys. Dozens of faces, and none of them Danny’s.
Ian swallowed hard on the sensation within himself that was not quite a yawn, not quite nausea. He didn’t know how to express his grief for his son. He hadn’t cried, yet. Crying was for women. The acknowledgement made him think of Michelle, who cried as easily as she laughed.
‘When are you coming home?’ she had asked him. The telephone strengthened her Australian vowels, or maybe his ears were already re-tuned to the Midlands accent.
‘I’ll be on the Qantas flight the day after tomorrow, love. I want to get back to you, you know that.’
‘I’ll come and pick you up at the airport,’ she’d said at once.
