Her name is Lisa. His name, he has told her, is Hughie. He had been approaching Mount Sinai Hospital when she ran up to him. As her smiling face approached, fast enough for her pigtails to fly across it, he realized that today was not the day of his destiny. That no day could be the day of his destiny as long as she was likely to be standing outside the hospital, which she did every day. She was always liable to get in his way, to want to talk to him, to ask him what he was going to do today. He should not have spoken to her in the first place: if he had ignored her, then she would have forgotten about him, and he could at any point, when the time came, slip in unnoticed. Now he would have to deal with her.
She was wearing the plaid dress, again; like his sister, again. He had got a sense that she had picked up something from him about this outfit, because there was no sign any more of the woollen hat. She was waving in front of her face a piece of paper. It was a print-out of a discussion on a website devoted to The Great Satan, allthatglittersisnot.com, in which someone on a forum was saying that the writer had had a miraculous recovery and might not die after all. He surveyed the excited words. It did not feel like truth; but it made him feel the need to get on with his destiny. He looked up at her thin, make-upless face, the eyes brimming with false hope, and said:
– So we should go and celebrate. I know a great place.
She had thought he meant a bar nearby, but he wanted to be near his hotel; so they have taken the subway downtown, to a bar he has passed a few times, and liked the look of. All the fittings are pine. A Confederate flag hangs on the far wall. The jukebox plays ‘Sweet Melissa’, by The Allman Brothers. The bar is called Why Not?
They sit across from each other at a central table. Her face is still alight with the same excitement that first burst out of it when he suggested this drink. He could read in it a release of pain. It may have been years since she has been asked on a date. She may never have been. He thinks that, perhaps, the obsession with The Great Satan operates as a compensation for that lack, and feels a rounded self-satisfaction at the acuity of his psychological observation.
Their drinks arrive, two Budweisers. He does not drink at home, nor has done since arriving in New York. He does not remember, in fact, when he last had a beer. It is quite a moment, then, to wrap his hand around the cold bottle, to feel the drips of condensation melt into his palm, to smell the hops as the fizz tickles his moustache, and, at last, to suck it down. The beer does more than quench his thirst: some deep part of him feels watered. She, meanwhile, glad-handles the bottle like a Southern Senator shaking hands with a black voter, shivering and grimacing with every gulp.
– You don’t like the beer? he says
– No, no. It’s nice. She untwists one of her pigtails, letting her hair on that side fall around her shoulder.
– The bar …?
She looks around her. Three or four men, all balding, with facial hair, sit at the bar. Two more, one wearing a cowboy hat, are playing pool.
– Well … it’s a tiny bit … hick …
– I like it, he says.
– Ironically, right?
He shakes his head.
– We can go somewhere else if you’d like?’
– No, no. It’s interesting, I guess, to be somewhere so … male. Men are good at that, aren’t they? Just being men. But I’ve always felt – you know that bit in The Compliance – when Joanne says ‘It’s a front, being a woman, a construct. The hair, the make-up, the unattainability, the sense of mystery: none of us really knows how to do it. The only people who really know – who really know what being a woman is all about – are transvestites.’ I love that. It’s one of the things you feel about Eli, as a woman reader, how unbelievably he’s able to put himself into the minds and bodies of his female characters …
He nods. She looks at him, expecting confirmation, communion. But he can’t give it to her. He is not like the Holocaust deniers, the men who so hate the Jews and their enormous lie that they have to immerse themselves in every last gas-chamber detail, stepping every day into a bath of everything they disavow, in order to shore up their truth. He has not read any of The Great Satan’s books – the idea of doing so, in fact, revolts him. All he has done, and all he will ever do, is go see the Butter Mountain.
He will have to deal with her, now, before his cover is blown. And then something happens which makes him know that he is in the last days of his destiny. ‘Sweet Melissa’ ends, and onto the jukebox comes Hughie Thomasson’s cracked and yearning voice, singing of some place your soul can fly. The Outlaws. The Outlaws.
– Lisa, he says. Would you like to dance?
* * *
Mommy swore a lot today. She said the f-word about a hundred times, the s-word about fifty times, and some others I haven’t heard before but I’m really sure are swear words. When me and Harvey got to the hospital she started off straight away, in the corridor outside Daddy’s room.
‘Harvey!’ she said. ‘What the f-word is going on? I asked you to do one f-wording thing when you moved into the apartment. Keep your f-wording cell on. Listen out for it. And you can’t even f-wording do that, you little s-word.’
I guess she was really p-worded off. (That’s a joke, by the way.) Even John looked a bit embarrassed.
‘Look, Freda, I’m sorry …’
‘Sorry isn’t good enough, Harvey!’
This is something Mommy says a lot. She says it to me sometimes, when she’s cross. I never understand it. If you’ve done something wrong, you can only say sorry. So how can it not be good enough?
Dr Ghundkhali poked his head out of Daddy’s room, but when he saw it was just Mommy shouting, he went back inside.
‘Maybe we should go somewhere – your room at the end or something …’ Harvey said.
‘What for?’
Harvey nodded his face at me. I think he meant that they shouldn’t have a big row in front of me. He doesn’t know that I’ve heard Mommy having rows with lots of people. With Elaine, with Miss Howner, with people on the phone, even, once, with Daddy.
‘Oh f-word off, Harvey. Colette’s heard all these words before, it turns out. And like you care, anyway. If you cared about her feelings, you’d have made sure to listen out for your cellphone. It’s about time that Colette realized what a useless half-brother she really has!’
I felt a bit bad for Harvey when she was saying this. I specially didn’t like the way Mommy said the word ‘half ’, like she was really saying that we weren’t properly related or something.
‘Mommy,’ I said. ‘I don’t think it was Harvey’s fault. The smoke alarm was going off and …’
‘The smoke alarm was going off? F-word! Were you burning the place down, too?’
‘Freda. Calm down, please. Look: we’re here now. Your message just said to come and bring Colette as soon as possible …’
‘Yes, well, you’re too late.’
‘Too late?’
‘Yes.’
Harvey blinked. He looked round at me. I didn’t know what face to make. I think I shrugged.
‘What you mean … Eli – Dad’s …’
Mommy frowned at him. ‘No, of course he’s not, Harvey! What is the matter with you?’
‘Well, I assumed – I thought …’
‘Bill Clinton!’
‘I’m sorry?!’
‘He was coming to see Eli! An impromptu visit! Today!’
‘He was?’
‘One of his assistants phoned an hour ago!’
‘Right. So. Is he coming or isn’t he?’
‘Well, no! Not now! I had to put him off!’
‘You put him off?’
‘I told him Eli was too ill today …’
Harvey looked at her. ‘Eli is too ill every day, isn’t he?’
‘Look, Harvey, it doesn’t matter what I said. I put him off.’
‘But why?’
‘Oh God. Because I wanted Colette to be here. I wanted Colette to meet him. And by the time I’d called you the sixth time I realized that wasn’t going to happen! OK?’
‘Mommy …?’ I said. She knelt down and started doing up some of the buttons on the front of my dress that had come undone. Her fingers were moving really quickly, though, and the buttons kept slipping away from them.
‘Why did you want Bill Clinton to meet me?’
‘He used to be president, darling,’ she said. ‘Before you were born. He’s also a good friend of mine and Daddy’s.’
‘Then why don’t I know him?’
‘Well, because we’ve mainly met him at dinners and festivals and conferences and so on – we’ve never had a chance to have him round for dinner so that you could meet him. Which is why I so wanted you to be here today …’
‘Can’t President Obama come?’ I said. ‘I love him. He’s so handsome.’ When I said this I looked at John. I gave him a special look to let him know I really meant it. Mommy did one of her annoying laughs.
‘Well, I would love that too, darling. But he’s very, very busy.’
‘Look, I’m really sorry, Freda. I am,’ said Harvey. Mommy looked up at him. She breathed heavily, through her nose, like she does when she’s about to forgive someone.
‘Well, luckily for you, I just got a call from his office saying he could reschedule. Bill will be coming tomorrow!’
‘Oh Mommy,’ I said, ‘That’s great!’
‘Right,’ said Harvey. Over Mommy’s shoulder, he looked quite cross. ‘So if – if you knew already that he could rearrange – if you knew when we arrived that everything was OK – why …?’ He didn’t finish that sentence but I knew he meant: why did you shout at me so much?
Mommy stood up, brushing herself down. ‘It’s the principle of the thing, Harvey. You made me a promise. I mean, what if it had been – what if Eli had been …?’ She looked down at Harvey but up with her eyes. He looked very sad. He did that weird cough he does. He wiped his face with his hands, like he had soap in it or something.
‘OK, Freda. It won’t happen again. I’ll take her home again later and make sure that –’
‘Well, I don’t know. He’s coming early tomorrow, just after breakfast. It’s the only time he could fit in. She could stay over with me tonight. Elaine could bring in a change of clothes … would you like that, darling? Would you like to have a sleepover with Mommy?’
I looked at my feet when she said this. I didn’t want to. I was going to be at the hospital all day. I wanted to go home later with Harvey. I wanted to sit in the taxi with Harvey and see if I could make him laugh, like I did before.
‘Freda,’ said Harvey, before I could answer. ‘If it’s about what happened today, please: don’t be concerned. I’ll make sure she’s here bright and early tomorrow.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ll make sure, too. I’ll get up and dress myself.’
Mommy looked like she wasn’t sure, like she didn’t understand why I didn’t want to have a sleepover with her, but then there was some noise from inside Daddy’s room, which made her turn around.
‘All right then,’ she said. ‘I’ll call Elaine and she’ll come round later and put out some clothes for you. But straight to bed when you get back. I want you here bright and early for Mr President. I’m counting on you, Harvey.’
‘OK, Freda,’ he said. ‘Understood.’
And then she went back in. Me and Harvey went into the room together. I held his hand.
* * *
He is surprised at himself. He does not commit adultery. He has many wives, but he has never been unfaithful. It had occurred to him to try and instigate some kind of impromptu celestial marriage service, here in his room at the Condesa Inn, under the eyes of Jesus; but they would need at least an Elder of His Faith, and he had no idea where to find one. Even if he could have found one, it would have been awkward, following the sealing, waiting for the Elder to leave. Plus, of course, he does not actually want to marry the woman with the pigtails. He is not sure he even truly wanted to sleep with her.
But when they got back to his room, there was, it seemed to him, no choice. He had to deal with her. If he slept with her – if she was in his bed in the morning – she would not be hanging around outside the hospital, obstructing his destiny. So when she stood there, raising herself up on her tiptoes, he knew the way through was to kiss her. Her mouth was dry and clamped shut, like a child’s, but her eyes were closed as if in great passion, allowing him to look at His Lord and know that he forgave him this small sin in the larger picture.
Her dress had come off awkwardly: he had tried unbuttoning it at the back, but his hands were big and unused to non-Mormon clothing. Eventually, she stepped away and did it herself, pushing the plaid over her head, allowing him a moment when he could see her body but she could not see him. She was thinner than he had realized. She wore a white bra and blue panties. Her movements to shake herself free of the dress reminded him of her dancing in the bar, jagged, short, arrhythmic.
She dropped her dress by the room’s only real piece of furniture, a hulking Victorian wardrobe with an oval mirror in the middle of it. When she turned to him, her eyebrows were slanted upwards, like someone hoping not to be hurt. He reached, seemingly to touch her face, and she bent her skin into his hand, but he was reaching for her pigtail, the second of which she had forgotten to untie. Loosening the ribbon stopped her from having lopsided hair, handing her the womanliness she did not know how to affect.
He took off his clothes, methodically. She waited for him, not knowing where to look. When he got to his white undergarments, he heard her make a noise of surprise. Folding up his clothes, he said:
– I’m a Mormon.
– No.
– Yes.
She looked at him. Her face was holding back something: laughter or fear, or both. Something seemed to cross her mind.
– You never talk about him.
– Who?
– Who do you think? Eli, of course.
– Hey, he said. Are we going to have a discussion about literature? Now?
– No, but …
And then he hushed her mouth with a kiss, a proper one, forcing her mouth open as he went, drawing on his experience with many women, many wives.
Now it is just before dawn. He has slipped out of bed and packed his bag, putting the white coat in at the bottom. He has shaved completely, lost both his moustache and the beginnings of a beard that has sprouted since he has been in New York. It feels right: cleansing. Some of the 9/11 jihadis shaved off their beards, too, on the day of their destiny, so as not to look too much like Muslims. He has put his holy white undergarments back on. In the front side of the vest, near his heart, his third wife Lorinda, the best seamstress, has created a pocket, for his pocket edition of The Book of Mormon. Within this, reverently, he places his gun, his Armscor 206.
He checks his wallet: he will leave enough money for the bill at reception. He is about to pull on his jeans when he sees, by his bare feet, the plaid dress. He holds it up; holds it against himself, looking in the mirror, like he has sometimes seen women do in the shops in Salt Lake City. He looks over to the bed. She is sleeping soundly, the satisfied sleep, he thinks, of a chick who has not been fucked for years. He surprises himself by the words, which feel like they come from a previous self.
Then, in an urge that comes from he knows not where, he slips the dress over his head. It falls around him more easily than it had come off her. He looks up. Yes. His hair, of course, is shorter, but not that much, having grown since he begun his journey to New York. In the dim light of the room, all differences melt away. This is why God made him shave. He sees her in the mirror, still alive, the age she would be now: his sister Pauline Gray. He blesses their near-identicality. His gaze grows soft. He leans in and kisses, gently, their joint reflection.
– For you, he says. For you.
* * *
Mandy is angry with her. The nurse is standing in the doorway of her room with her arms crossed. Violet can see the biceps squeezing against the fingers: she is heavy, Mandy, but she also lifts a lot of heavy things – a lot of heavy people. She does not want for either fat or muscle.
‘Come on, Violet. Let’s not be mucking about,’ she says. Mandy has no trace of a Nigerian or West Indian accent, but through Violet’s hearing aid she still thinks she picks up on some cadence which speaks of heat and dust.
‘But I didn’t sign up for it,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to do it.’ She is sitting on her big velvet chair, facing away from the window.
‘Don’t be stupid. Just come down and see what it’s like. Don’t you want to hear everybody’s life story?’
A child, she thinks. She is speaking to me like a foster child. ‘Not really,’ says Violet.
Mandy puffs her cheeks out and shakes her head. It frustrates Violet that she cannot explain to this nurse how she is not simply being a curmudgeonly inmate, perversely saying no to everything. Violet appreciates Redcliffe House. She does not like living here, exactly, but she feels grateful.
‘I don’t know what we’re going to do,’ says Mandy. ‘The man is here …’
‘Yes,’ says Violet. She hears a tapping. It will be the branch along the window.
‘He is here, and we were told that we needed to get at least ten of you down there to make it worthwhile.’
Violet nods. The tapping continues. She knows it is the branch, but something makes her want to turn and confirm that. There is no need to see, just as there is no need to ask, ‘How many people have come?’
Mandy’s cheeks bulge, betraying a smile. Violet remembers how, when she used to sulk, her mother used to say ‘Come on: let’s see those apples!’ to make her smile. When she did so, her mother would pretend to bite her rounded cheek. She wonders now, when she smiles, what fruit her cheeks look like.
‘Nine.’
Violet sighs and uses the back edge of the chair to lever herself up. She turns away from Mandy to do so. As she thought: it is the branch.
In the lounge, the man from Life Story Work has organized the ten of them into a semi-circle. He is standing in front of a screen, with a diagram on it very like the one in the pamphlet, with the words IDENTITY and MEANING and PURPOSE and SELF-KNOWLEDGE written across it. When she arrives they all turn to face her. Joe Hillier, who is sitting in a chair next to the screen, facing the others, taps his watch. Violet feels again the impulse to explain, to say that she is not late but was not going to come at all, and then had been forced into it by a mixture of Mandy’s bullying and her own reflexive instinct not to ruin things. She feels this concurrently with the knowledge that she is going to remain silent. She wonders how much of her life has involved this swallowing of impulse.
A woman hands her a notebook, similar to ones she remembers from school, and guides her to the end of the row of chairs. Violet flicks through the book: it is a series of blank pages. She looks up. The woman, who is blonde – but dyed? – smiles and hands her a pen. Looking around, she sees that they all have similar books and pens.
‘Hi!’ says the man, who is holding a clipboard. He has what Gwendoline used to call an upside-down face: bald with a beard. Although it wasn’t very thick; perhaps it was just that thing that men did now, of not shaving. ‘I’m Daniel.’ With an open palm, he gestures towards the blonde lady. His hands are small, like a woman’s. ‘This is Kirsty, who’s helping me today. What’s your name?’
Violet feels her throat constrict with anxiety, even at this question. ‘Violet.’
He hovers his clipboard into view, poising a pen above it. ‘Violet …?’
‘Gold,’ she says. ‘Violet Gold.’
‘Thank you, Violet,’ he says, scribbling. Mrs Gold. In the old days, he would have said Mrs Gold. ‘So … do we need to go over again what Life Story Work is?’
She feels a collective sigh of frustration go through the group.
‘No,’ she says. ‘I think I understand.’
‘Great! If there’s anything you don’t, at any stage, just let me or Kirsty know. Now, where were we? Ah, yes: Joe.’
Daniel moves aside, revealing Joe Hillier sitting with his legs crossed, looking at Violet impatiently. His right trouser leg has ridden up past his sock, revealing his shin bone tight against the skin.
‘Well. I was born in nineteen thirty, in Sheffield. I …’
‘Just hold on a minute, Joe,’ says Daniel. He is bent over, fiddling with the controls of a video camera, which is behind the semi-circle of listeners. On the side of the camera, a small red light goes on.
‘Sorry, carry on …’
Joe looks uncertainly towards the camera. His head moves around, as if trying to find some imagined centre of frame. He coughs, ostensibly to clear his throat, but brings up a gobbet of unwanted phlegm at the same time, which he has to spit into a handkerchief. He puts the soiled white rag back into his pocket, which seems to take an age.
‘In Sheffield, as I say,’ he says, finally. ‘My father was a boilermaker. I was the eldest of seven. I was expected to become a boilermaker, too, but after a short time serving an apprenticeship I decided it wasn’t for me. I worked as a postman, eventually rising to the rank of postmaster in our …’
‘Joe. Sorry …’ says Daniel. He touches a button on the camera. ‘This is great. This is context. But – as I said, the point of Life Story Work is not to tell your whole history from top to bottom. I mean, you can if you want to, when you go off and write your story down, if you have the time and energy, you know, that would obviously be great. But, certainly, that’s not the point today.’ He says this with a little internal chuckle, to indicate that he is not telling Joe Hillier off. Joe nods, nervously. He is imperious, with other old people; not with the young.
‘What we’d like today …’ this is from Kirsty, who has glided beside Daniel, ‘… is maybe just a retelling of some central life incident – what we call a Key Life Moment – which will give us some sense of who you are.’
‘Well, I don’t know that that works,’ says Pat Cadogan, who has been seated with her arms crossed throughout, her face fixed forwards, but with an expression so avowedly negative it seems somehow to give off a sense of being shaken from side to side. ‘Some of us have had very long and complicated lives, my dear. It’s not so easy to draw out who we are from one incident.’
‘Some of us find it a bit hard to remember, as well!’ said Joe Hillier’s friend, Frank. ‘Bit hard to remember what happened yesterday, let alone forty year ago!’
‘Oh, don’t be such stick-in-the-muds!’ This is Norma. ‘I’ve got bucket loads of Key Life Moments! I just don’t think I can say them in front of camera!!’ She laughs, loudly, the kind of laugh that invites others to join in.
‘Look,’ says Daniel. ‘It doesn’t have to be such hard work.’ His face has shifted to a frown, away from its former attitude of deep-set civic patience. ‘Someone here must have some moment in their life that they think defines them.’
Violet looks round. She feels the blankness of all of them in response to Daniel’s language. She wants Joe Hillier to carry on: she is interested that he was a postman. She hadn’t known that. He was a man, before, with a job and a uniform and promotion prospects. He walked from house to house delivering letters, which people in Sheffield waited for with hope and dread. We all did things, before, Violet thinks. Life is not moments – there is something patronizing about a life thought of in moments, rather than as an ongoing thing; it is a young person’s way of imagining what it must be like to be old, projecting that identity will only exist then in fragments.
She wants to hear what Pat was – a dental receptionist, she once thinks she heard her say – and Norma was a dressmaker, Violet knows, before she gave up to have her four children. This is what defi nes people like us, Violet wants to say: jobs, children. What more do you want?
‘Violet!’ says Kirsty. ‘What about you? Do you have a Key Life Moment you want to tell us about?’
She feels the stiff movement of bone as the room turns to look at her.
‘No … I don’t think so …’ she says.
‘What about that man?’ a voice opines, loudly. She looks round. The speaker is Pat Cadogan. She is looking at Violet with her eyes narrowing as if holding the other woman in her sights.
‘Man?’
‘That one who was in the paper. Your … distant cousin. You must have some special memories of him.’
She says it with a heavy dusting of sarcasm. So it has already happened. Gossip has started; nodding, suspect conversations have been had, concerning the incident some weeks ago now when she asked Joe Hillier for his copy of the Daily Telegraph.
‘Sorry,’ says Daniel, ‘I’m just trying to catch up here … you have a cousin who was in the paper?’
‘That’s great, Violet,’ says Kirsty, before she has a chance to answer. ‘Maybe you’d like to tell us about him … about your relationship with him … Joe, if you wouldn’t mind?’
Joe, who has gone into a brown study, looks up at Kirsty. ‘Hm?’
‘If you wouldn’t mind leaving the chair for the minute. Obviously, we’ll come back to your story later.’
Joe rises. He stays there for a moment, his hands pushing the flaps of his tweed jacket into his body. There is a sense in the room that he has failed the Life Story Work test; that he has been bumped, like a chat-show guest, for someone more famous, or, in this case, for someone with more access to fame.
Violet looks at his vacant chair, then back at Kirsty and Daniel. Daniel has his finger ready to release the pause button on the video camera. She actually gets up – what am I doing? she thinks, why am I doing this? – and the words begin to form in her mind, bursting to get out. It has been so long.
‘He is not my cousin. He is my husband. He was my husband. I am Violet Gold, the first wife of Eli Gold. The world’s greatest living writer, although we did not know that then. We were married for ten years, between 1944 and 1954. Ten years, during which I was not happy, or at peace, nor even clear about what I was doing married to this person; but they remain the ten years that form the … that form the … the Key Stage Moment of My Life Story Work.’
‘Eli Gold? You were married to Eli Gold?’
‘Yes?’
‘Sorry, Violet, but … are you making this up?’
‘Why would I make it up?’
‘I don’t know. It just sounds … wouldn’t we know this already, Kirsty?’
‘No one told me, Daniel.’
‘I’m not making it up. He made me up. I am Queenie. I am Queenie. I am Queenie.’
‘Oh, my God, she’s … please, Violet, pull your dress down … not on the lounge floor … nurse, quickly!’
All this goes through her mind as she makes her way gingerly round the semi-circle and towards the Life Story Work chair. She halts briefly when she gets there, her fingers resting on the top of it. The nine other inmates have become an audience. She sees the red light go on at the side of the video camera, a pinprick of red, like blood from the tip of a finger. She opens her mouth, at last, to speak.
‘I know what my Key Stage Moment is, if it’s any help …’
It is not her voice. She and all the others look over to the door. It is Meg Antopolski, in a wheelchair. She looks – well, she looks like Meg: white hair, brown eyes, Roman nose. She has not had that thing happen after a fall, where the fallen person no longer looks like themselves. There is a collective gasp from the room, not so much at the drama of her interruption of Violet, but at the fact that she is not dead. Pat Cadogan even looks a bit put out.
‘Sorry, Violet,’ says Meg, wheeling herself in, ‘but I’ve been reading up about all this while I’ve been in hospital – you get a lot of time to read there … and when you stopped there, by the chair, I got the impression that maybe you weren’t so keen on talking to everybody after all. Am I right?’
Violet, not knowing quite what to say, looks to Norma, who laughs and shrugs. Next to her is Pat Cadogan, who looks directly back with a face that says, What did I tell you? Always barging in.
‘No, that’s fine, Meg, please,’ she says. ‘You go. So pleased to see you back.’
‘Sorry, who’s this?’ says Daniel, now making no attempt to hide the exasperation in his voice.
‘Meg Antopolski, love. Write it down, even though I’m sure you’ll spell it wrong. Help me with this stupid cartie, someone.’
Kirsty comes to Meg and wheels her chair forward. Violet moves back towards the chair she was in before, although she does not sit down.
‘Ready for my close-up, Mr de Mille,’ says Meg.
And then Meg Antopolski goes on to say that she has had many Key Stage Moments in her life, but she knows now that the Key Stage Moment of Key Stage Moments, the thing that defines her, is her fall. That in the instant of collapse on the white enamel floor of her shower, she was presented with the perfect choice: either to stay there curled up in a ball, ready to die of hypothermia, or somehow reach the panic button. And that this perfect choice – whether to give up or to carry on – continued throughout her time in hospital. That is the Key Stage Moment, she goes on to say: choosing between death or life. It’s a choice we all make, every day, but for us, you see, Daniel, Kirsty, it’s not a background thing. We wade through it all the time, like soldiers in a swamp.
She goes on to say all this, or something like it. Violet is not sure. She is listening but she cannot hear her that clearly. Meg’s voice buzzes in her hearing aid as she moves away from the group back towards the lift, one step at a time.