Moving past Debbie, I took one side of the railings and held on to them as I walked my daughter into the theatre. The surgeon was already there, getting into his gown.
Debbie stood beside me, gripping my arm as I helped push the trolley into place and stepped back. The surgeon turned and smiled at us benignly.
‘We’ll call you when we’re done,’ he said.
Unsure what to do next, Debbie and I moved away from Penny.
‘You can kiss her goodnight if you want to,’ the man said so kindly that I had to swallow to prevent myself welling up. Beside me I could feel Debbie shudder as she began to cry.
We both went over and kissed Penny, as if she were indeed only going to sleep. Her skin felt unusually warm, the smell of her shampoo strong.
Debbie, unable to control herself any more, collapsed against me, racked with sobs. One of the orderlies helped me to support her as we led her out of the room. I glanced back one final time at my daughter, left alone in that room with strangers whose actions alone were to decide if she would live or die.
We were taken into a small room off the recovery ward where a nurse brought us tea and toast that we both ate but I am certain did not taste. Every quarter of an hour someone checked on us. I silently mouthed the rosary while we waited and I suspected that Debbie was doing something similar.
After what seemed hours she stood up and began to pace the room.
‘What if something has gone wrong?’
‘Nothing will go wrong,’ I said, with more conviction than I felt. ‘She’s in good hands.’
‘What if they can’t fix her? What if she doesn’t wake up?’ She looked at me imploringly, as if I could dispel her fears.
‘Don’t think that way – she’ll be fine.’
‘What if she’s not?’ Debbie persisted.
‘I’m going to go to Morrison,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe this was an accident.’
‘For Christ’s sake, Ben, let it go, would you? Let it go. It was an accident. There’s no crime – nothing to solve. No one to blame. Just let it go,’ she said angrily.
‘There’s always someone to blame,’ I said.
‘Do you mean me?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Is that what you meant though? That it’s my fault?’
Against my own wishes, I found myself being drawn into the argument. ‘You were the one who wanted her to go to discos.’
‘I didn’t know she was going to Morrison’s. She told me she was going to school. She wouldn’t have lied if you’d let her be herself.’
I stood up, feeling the heat of the room intensely, loosening the collar of my shirt. ‘Don’t blame me. You let her go to these things. If you had said no, this wouldn’t have happened.’
‘Don’t you blame me. I won’t take the blame for this, do you hear me? This wasn’t my fault.’
‘You keep telling yourself that,’ I snapped and saw, finally, the fear in her eyes that she was, in some way, to blame for what had happened. I went to move towards her, to apologize, but she moved away, rushing to the toilet at the far end of the room and locking the door behind her.
I slumped into my seat, angry and frustrated that despite a burning need to apportion blame, I knew that it would do nothing to improve Penny’s condition.
Debbie came out of the toilet a few moments later and sat on the edge of the sofa opposite me.
I moved and sat beside her, but she shied away from me, her arms crossed in front of her chest, her hand covering her mouth.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to say that.’
I reached across to her, laid a hand on her shoulder which she shuddered away.
‘You think it, though,’ she whispered. ‘You blame me.’
‘I . . . I don’t blame you, Debs,’ I said. ‘I know it wasn’t your fault.’
‘But you’re right,’ she said. ‘I did let her go. That night that you told her she couldn’t go to the first disco, then you headed out yourself? I took her anyway.’
She turned her head to face me, glaring defiantly, as if attempting to provoke me into saying something, as if hoping that I would blame her again. And I realized that Debbie needed to blame someone too.
A figure appeared around the corner, removing the green gown which he had been wearing when we had last seen him.
‘She’s out of theatre now,’ he said. ‘There was a lot of swelling. We had to remove a clot.’
‘Will she come out of it?’ Debbie asked.
‘She should,’ the man replied, not quite looking either of us in the eye. I realized that I did not even know the name of this person into whose hands I had entrusted Penny’s life. ‘We’ll have a better idea of the extent of her recovery over the next day or two.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, for I could think of nothing else appropriate.
He nodded and turned to leave, then seemed to think of something.
‘She was lucky she got in here so fast. The bleeding in her brain could have been quite extensive. I hope we caught it in time.’
‘Thank you,’ Debbie echoed.
He nodded again, pursed his mouth slightly, turned and walked away.
‘She
should
wake,’ I thought. Not she
would
.
The young female doctor we had met in the Emergency Room earlier brought us into Penny’s room. She lay attached to a drip now, an oxygen mask covering her face again, her skull wrapped in bandages, her forehead stained a dark yellow below the bandage line. Her face looked paler than I had ever seen it. Despite her age, despite her increasing maturity, she looked lost in that bed, surrounded with such equipment.
Her hand was cold, her nails, painted pink yet still ragged with biting, were smaller than I remembered. I stood to one side of the bed, her hand in mine, and touched her cheek with my index finger. Debbie stood on the opposite side of the bed, holding her other hand, on which a clip attached to her finger relayed her pulse and blood pressure to one of the monitors at the head of the bed.
‘Penny,’ Debbie said, her voice hushed. ‘Penny, sweetheart? Mummy and Daddy are here.’
We both scrutinized her features for some flicker of recognition, but she remained impassive.
‘She might take a while to come round,’ the doctor explained, jotting something on the clipboard which she hung on the bedstead.
‘How long?’ Debbie asked.
The young woman grimaced slightly. ‘It’s hard to say. She hasn’t woken since she was brought in, you see.’
‘What does that mean?’ I asked.
‘Well, she
might
take a day or two to come round.’
None of us spoke.
‘Maybe longer,’ she added.
‘Is she in a coma?’ I asked incredulously.
‘We don’t know,’ the young woman said, smiling apologetically. ‘She’s young and fit. She’s got a good chance of coming through it OK. Plus she was very lucky she got here so fast.’
‘The surgeon said,’ Debbie commented absent-mindedly.
‘Technicelly, the man who brought her probably shouldn’t have lifted her, in case she had a neck injury,’ she said. Looking around at the door as if she were telling us something she shouldn’t, she added, ‘But in this instance he did the right thing. He might have saved her life.’
The rest of the day passed as if in a dream. I constantly felt as if I were on the verge of moving out of myself, the feeling of derealization I had always associated with the panic attacks I had had a few years previous.
Debbie and I spoke little, making small talk as we waited for our daughter to waken.
Before visiting time ended, my parents arrived to visit Penny, staying only long enough to see that she was still asleep. Debbie’s parents were looking after Shane and had decided it best not to bring him to see Penny as she was at the moment.
‘Who is staying tonight?’ my father asked, as they were leaving.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said, glancing at Debbie. ‘One of us will need to get Shane.’
‘You go home,’ Debbie said. ‘I’ll stay with her tonight.’
‘Are you sure?’ I said. ‘You look like you need sleep.’
‘As if I’d sleep. She needs her mother beside her.’
I left soon after my parents, to go and collect Shane. Kissing Penny as softly as I could on the forehead, I felt the roughness of the gauze dressing against my skin. It struck me as strange that, despite wanting her to waken, we were all being as careful and as quiet as possible around her.
Debbie offered me a perfunctory kiss and told me to tell Shane that she would be home in the morning, when I would return and she could go home to shower and change.
‘Though she might be awake in the morning,’ Debbie offered. ‘What do you think?’
‘She might be,’ I said.
Shane sat in the back of the car on the way home from his grandparents’ house. He held a toy dinosaur in each fist, play-fighting with them for a few moments. Finally, his imagination temporarily exhausted, he lowered them onto the seat and leant forward to speak to me.
‘Where’s Penny?’ he asked.
‘She’s with Mummy,’ I answered.
‘Is she sick?’
‘Why, little man?’
‘I heard Granny talking about it. Is she going to die?’
‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘She’ll be home in no time.’
‘What’s wrong with her, then?’
I looked at him in the rear-view mirror, the softness of his features, his brow lightly furrowed.
‘She fell and hurt her head. The doctors have helped her feel better.’
The answer seemed to placate him and he sat back in his seat and turned his face to the window. In the passing illumination of the street lamps I could see his lips moving silently.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked, suspecting he was praying for his sister.
‘I’m counting the lights,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘If the last one is twenty, Penny will be OK.’
‘Who told you that?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘I just thought it is all,’ he said, as if that explained everything.
By my count, the last light before our home was the nineteenth so I cheated and counted it twice.
After I got him into bed and he had said his prayers, I went into Penny’s room. I half expected to see the familiar shape of her sleeping body, but the bed sat still made, her favourite teddy sitting on the pillow. Several items of clothing lay discarded on the floor, trousers bunched where she had stepped out of them in front of her mirror. I guessed she had been trying on different outfits for John Morrison’s party.
I picked up the clothes and began to hang them in her wardrobe. One of her tops was slightly marked with a smudge of foundation. I placed it to my face and breathed in her smell as I fought back the growing fear that she might never see this room again.
I slept little that night, waking fitfully every time I drifted off, checking my mobile in case Debbie had called from the hospital. Around two, Shane woke to go to the toilet, then stumbled into my room and clambered into the bed beside me. In the dull illumination from the bathroom, his sleeping profile reminded me of his sister. Finally, rather than counting sheep, I recited the decades of the rosary over and over until I was no longer aware of the time.
I called the hospital just after dawn to be told that Penny was critical but stable, which in reality meant there had been no change in her condition. Debbie was sleeping in the chair by her bed, I was told, having only managed to fall asleep an hour earlier. I asked the nurse not to waken her, but to tell her when she woke that I would be up before 9 a.m.
Debbie’s parents arrived after seven, their drawn features showing that they too had slept little. We ate a light breakfast and they offered to stay in the house with Shane during the day. I left home at seven thirty, having a stop to make along the way.
A low mist drifted across the fields around Morrison’s house, his horses shuffling softly in the dawn light, their breath condensing around their ears.
His house stood in darkness, a sheen of dew marking the windscreen of his car. I glanced into the Range Rover as I passed it, and saw on the light upholstery of the back seat brown bloodstains where Penny’s head had rested the day previous as Morrison had driven her to the hospital.
He evidently had heard my arrival for he opened the front door before I even had a chance to knock. He stood in his doorway in grey sweat pants and a T-shirt, over which he wore a white robe, untied at the waist.
‘You’re up early,’ I said.
‘Come in,’ he replied, holding open the door, his face a mask of pity. ‘John couldn’t sleep.’
He turned and retreated into the darkness of his hallway and I followed him. He led me into the kitchen, a large bright room, all chromium-coated units and black granite surfaces. At the table a pot of coffee steamed beside a smouldering cigarette which was scarring brown the saucer of the cup he had been drinking from.
‘Coffee?’ he offered, lifting a second cup.
‘Yes. Please.’