Avril

Avril?

She looks up. The exercise book falls slackly on her lap.

Joley is leaning over her. Are you all right?

How to explain her tears are for a girl who walked into the sea more than a hundred years ago? Fine, she tries, but it comes out all wrong and she is weeping into the sleeve of the borrowed pastel shirt. She grabs her coat and her cigarettes. A helpless gesture of apology to Joley and she rushes to the stairwell. Inside the confined concrete space, she slumps on the bottom step, still weeping.

What now? she asks herself eventually. You’re on the ninth floor, Avril. She contemplates lighting a cigarette but a fire alarm would probably go off if she did. Rubbing her eyes, she walks down to the next floor and takes the elevator to the ground.

There’s no-one else by the ambulance bay in the still-dark morning.

… the bloody mess of a barely human thing. Meggie’s words.

The wind howls and she squeezes her eyes tight to shut out the image of blood and mucus that was barely the promise of a life. Lost at eleven weeks. No-one knew besides Coop and her sister. There had been words, hospital words, antiseptic and quiet. All too common. One in four. No-one to blame. One of those things. Words to soften the only one that mattered. Dead.

OK, she tells herself, OK, enough now.

She hunches her back to the wind and struggles with the temperamental lighter, tetchy until that first inhalation. Aaaahhh. Hateful how good it is, how much she needs it to keep her steady through this, keep her going. Laura’s right: she should eat. But she has more faith in nicotine.

A siren wails in the distance. Which reminds her.

Pulling her phone from her coat pocket, she dials Ben’s number, knowing he’ll be at the station, on duty, with his mobile switched off, and all she’ll get is the familiar message: Hear the beep, do your thing.

It’s an excuse, of course, calling to tell him what the doctors said. She wants to know what’s going on. Why have they abandoned Coop? Because that’s what they’ve done, no two ways about it. Ever since that article came out in the local paper. So much for the team.

Abandoned … She thinks again of Meggie’s sister, who had never recovered from her loss. Who’d been abandoned.

Avril’s eyes stream as she pulls her coat around her and turns into the wind. How much grief is enough?

~

There’s a charge in the air as the elevator doors open on the ninth floor. Something’s happening.

Joley rushes out from behind the nurses’ desk. I’ve been looking for you everywhere!

She freezes.

It’s good news, Avril! Joley’s half hugging her, half pulling her towards the ICU.