‘I’m so happy Hannah has agreed to let me help her. She has such unhappiness stored up inside her. It’s like a tumour. You know how you hear about cancer patients being cut open revealing tumours the size of a grapefruit or a football or a small child? Poor Hannah. There are some people who are too sensitive for this world.’
Her mother moaned and listed to the side and Laura leant forward across the bed to gently right her, feeling glad she’d made time for this rushed morning visit. She was due at Annabel’s in twenty-five minutes and then The Meadows at one, but even the briefest chat was enough to brighten her mother’s bleak life.
‘It’s all right, Mummy. I know you don’t like to think about all the unhappy girls. But I’m looking after her now. Don’t you fret. She already looked lighter when she walked out of my room yesterday. I won’t leave her alone. You don’t need to worry about that. I won’t leave them to him.’
Outside in the lounge, Katya was eating a microwaved lasagne, still in its plastic tray. Her feet, still in the bunny slippers, were resting on the leather footstool. As ever, the television was blasting out.
‘Is Midsomer Murders. Is about village where all the days people are dying. I would not like to live in this village.’
‘Mummy seems more agitated than usual, Katya. Have you noticed anything?’
Katya shook her head, without taking her eyes off the screen.
‘She just the same like always. District nurse come yesterday. She say your mother have red bottom. I explain her, your mother have red bottom because she have poo like yellow soup and is not possible to be all the time changing nappy.’
Katya had a round, doughy face framed by stringy brown hair, and a fleshy bottom lip that protruded when upset or affronted, as now.
‘I am only one person, I say her. I have just two hands.’
Katya held up her pudgy palms in demonstration.
Driving to Annabel’s through the cheerless hinterland of suburban north-west London, Laura was lost in thought about her mum.
She’d done what you were supposed to do. Left photographs prominently displayed around the flat showing her mother in her glorious youth, with her lovely dark hair curling around her shoulders and her wide, gap-toothed smile. And another with Laura as a baby, holding her up above her head and laughing, wearing paint-spattered shorts, her hair held back by a scarf and her bare feet planted firm and strong on the ground. It was supposed to help carers remember that there was a person there, who’d had a life, and laughed and loved, and held their baby up to a cloudless blue sky. There wasn’t just this creature in the bed.
Yet sometimes she wondered if Katya, and Femi, who covered the night-time shifts three times a week, ever really believed her mother was human, like them. Because then they’d have to believe that what happened to her could happen to them, that they too could end up sitting in a nappy of yellow-soup poo. And that prospect was too terrifying to allow.
Normally, at this time of day, the roads near Annabel’s house were relatively traffic free, but Laura noticed a queue of cars up ahead. As she drew closer, she realized she must have just missed an accident. A mangled bicycle was lying on the tarmac, one wheel completely buckled, and a white van was parked across the road, the front door hanging open. Laura turned off the ignition and hurried from her car. There were two men leaning against the back of the van and, as Laura came near, she heard one of them repeating, ‘I didn’t see him. I just didn’t see him,’ again and again.
Up ahead, she saw a small knot of people gathered round a shape on the ground and she gasped when she realized it was a young man, around sixteen, with an uncommonly beautiful face – on one side. The other side was pulverized, the skull above it caved in like the top of a boiled egg. Someone had placed a jacket over him like a blanket and Laura was astonished when she saw it move up and down. He was alive! And they were all just standing there, gawping.
She flung herself down next to him, seizing hold of his hand.
‘You’re all right,’ she told him. ‘You’re going to be fine.’
She could see straight away that he wasn’t all right at all.
Without thought to her clothes or to the watching spectators, who clapped their hands over their mouths in shock, she lifted his pulpy head on to her lap. ‘You shouldn’t move him,’ someone said, but she ignored them. He was somebody’s son. Somebody’s baby. At least his mother would know he died knowing love and kindness and that he wasn’t afraid.
‘You rest now, lovely one,’ she said to him, in a low, calm voice. ‘There’s nothing to be scared of. Everything is peaceful. Everything is love. You’re going towards the light. You’re going towards the love.’
It was just like hypnotherapy. Repeating key phrases and words. It was all about the voice, really. You wanted to make your voice into a warm bath they’d happily submerge themselves in.
It appeared to be working. The young man’s breath was quieter and the half of his face that was capable of expression looked calmer.
She leaned further over him, so they were cocooned in their own world and he didn’t have to see the rubbernecking onlookers who’d done so little to help, or the swollen, grey sky above them. Somewhere in her consciousness she registered the sound of a siren approaching, but she blocked it out, giving her whole attention to the broken boy in her lap.
‘You’re feeling so peaceful,’ she told him. ‘It’s the most wonderful, blissful peace you’ve ever known. You feel calm and full of love and totally unafraid as you move towards the light, move towards the—’
‘Miss!’
The man’s voice was inches from her ear and, now, people were surrounding them, rough hands yanking her away.
‘For God’s sake, what were you playing at?’
The police officer who hauled her to her feet was overweight and flushed with anger.
‘I was soothing him.’
‘You were suffocating him!’
But as Laura got back in her car half an hour later to drive the rest of the way to Annabel’s, having given her details and a witness statement to the police, she felt suffused in a warm glow of satisfaction. The police and paramedics didn’t know anything. They hadn’t seen the suffering on the boy’s face.
She was the one who’d stepped in to help him.
And she’d do it again in a heartbeat.