“I’M SORRY, MRS LYKKEN,” ANOTHER doctor was saying. Would they all get her name wrong? He was shamefaced, his skin shiny with nerves. They were standing outside the swing doors again. Inside they were busy with James, and they wouldn’t let her watch.
“If he had been brought in immediately, who can say? Sometimes” – he couldn’t read Joanna’s look, or see how close she was to screaming – “there is a chance.” She kept trying to look over his shoulder through the portholes of the doors, like a restaurant. Was James still there, on his steel counter? Or had they moved him somewhere else, to a lower, more ventilated level? She felt like a New Testament follower, pleading to see the body with the nails through its cold hands and feet. If James was gone from the room, she would never be able to find him again – no, not even with a torch and My-Wife-Gladness holding her by the hand.
The doctor was still talking, rubbing the words over the rough happenings behind him. God, he was speaking from a script like a call centre operator! Joanna watched his mouth making the shape of the sentences. She tried to concentrate but she kept thinking about that History textbook she had had in high school. There was something ancient about their conversation, something Aztec, the veneer of science laquered over sacrifice. Doctors and embalmers were really just small boys in big coats, bent over a creature in the sand that had been struggling against their inquisitive fingers, and then suddenly stopped. The Egyptians were famous for it – removing the soft organs after death through a hole in the left side of the corpse, and mummifying them separately, like presents. The parcels were wrapped in linen and placed carefully back in the chest cavity, transformed by the intervention. In the textbook there had been line drawings of each stage, and Joanna had coloured them in. She had got into trouble at the end of the year, when the students had to hand the books back for next year’s class, and had to sit alone at break time with a big white rubber, erasing her careful work.
“We call it the golden hour,” the doctor was saying. He tapped his lips with his fingertips, as if he was telling a lie. “When someone has had a shock” – A shock! A shock! – “there is a, let’s say, window of opportunity. Your son, I’m afraid,” he paused, wondering how to render the news delicately, accurately, “his brain—”
The Egyptians had thought the brain was inessential. Once it was hooked out through the nose with a kind of crochet needle it was discarded. They poured resin into the skull, like a paperweight. Heavy Joanna dragged her attention back to what the doctor was saying. I know what he’s doing, she thought. If he doesn’t let me speak, then he can finish with me and get away. He will walk quickly down this blasted corridor and that will be the real end of James. This man will rub him out. And I can’t go home without him! Jan will kill me! How will I explain that I lost him when I was supposed to be looking after him?
“You know his brain was bleeding, don’t you, Mrs Lykken? We couldn’t stop it.”
He knew nothing about the inside of James! Nothing! The boy had been born dead, for God’s sake! He was a miracle child! And this man was standing here and calling her Missus!
Joanna laughed, triumphant. “They said his brain was swollen when he was born, but it wasn’t. He just had a, a, very big brain. And a small fontanelle. Non-existent.” She was fighting for the right words, but they lurked in the back of her throat. Now she hiccuped and growled, like a story animal under a spell. If she could just use the same language that the other doctor did, he would understand. They would laugh together at the confusion. “Oh,” he would say, and take those fingers away from his lying lips. She had to make him see that they were colleagues, co-conspirators, two educated professionals on the same side.
“Hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy,” Joanna rattled off. She’d always had such a good memory. A photographic memory. Abracadabra. Siem sala biem.
But they weren’t the magic words. The doctor just looked at her. Then he patted his pen back into his coat, jingled the keys in the pocket of his chinos. He tucked the clipboard under his arm.
“I’m sorry, Mrs Lykken. I have other patients to attend to. I’m going to ask someone to come and sit with you, alright?” He wasn’t sorry, and it wasn’t alright.
He was going away! Joanna wanted to rip the clipboard away from him and see what untruths he had written there, but they would be written in code, wouldn’t they, so that she couldn’t read them? Hieroglyphs, scrappy lines and numbers, little people on their knees.
“I don’t need to sit down!” Joanna protested, but she found that she did. She needed to sit down so badly that her legs were already doing it. She was plopped on the linoleum, looking up at the embarrassed trousers of the doctor. The chinos were bagging at the knee, baguettes in brown paper bags, and the ceiling was far away.
My chest hurts, thought Joanna. Why does my chest hurt? It must be my heart.
The heart was the thing for the Egyptians, the textbook, the tablet, the service manual. It was where you kept your memory. Without it there was no afterlife.