Dead Tomorrow

getting home to Caitlin as quickly as possible and on nothing else. Now she faced a fine to add to her financial woes, and another three points on her licence, but she carried on without slowing down, a steady fifty-five in the thirty limit, desperate to get to her child.
    Five minutes later she pulled into her driveway, jumped out of her car, jammed her key in the front door and pushed it open. Luke was standing in the hall, limp hair slanted across one eye, wearing a baggy top and trousers that looked like they might have come from the rear of a pantomime horse. His mouth was open and he had an even more gormless expression than usual on his face, like a man on a railway platform watching the last train of the night disappearing and not sure what to do next. He raised his arms by way of a greeting to Lynn, then let them drop again.
    ‘Where is she?’ she said.
    ‘Oh–er–right–Caitlin?’ he said.
    Who the fuck do you think? Boadicea? Cleopatra? Hillary Clinton? Then she saw her daughter, standing at the top of the stairs, in a dressing gown over her nightdress, swaying as if she were drunk.
    Dumping her handbag on the floor, Lynn threw herself up the stairs just as Caitlin stepped out into space, missing the top stair altogether, and tumbled forwards. Somehow, Lynn caught her, grabbing her thin frame in one arm and the banister rail in the other, and, clinging for dear life, managed to stop herself plunging backwards.
    She stared intoCaitlin’s face, inches from her own, and saw her eyes roll. ‘Darling? Darling? Are you OK?’
    Caitlin slurred an incomprehensible response.
    Using all her strength, somehow Lynn managed to push her back and up on to the landing. Caitlin tottered against the wall. Luke followed them, stopping halfway up the stairs.
    ‘Have you been doing drugs?’ Lynn screamed at him.
    ‘No, no way, Lynn,’ Luke protested, the shock in his voice sounding genuine.
    Slurring her words, Caitlin said, ‘I’m like–I’m–I’m like…’
    Lynn steered her back into her room. Caitlin half sank, half fell backwards on her bed. Lynn sat down beside her and put an arm around her. ‘What is it, my darling? Tell me?’
    Caitlin’s eyes rolled again.
    Lynn thought, for one terrible moment, that she was dying.
    ‘If you’ve given her anything, Luke, I’ll kill you. I swear it. I’ll tear your fucking eyeballs out!’
    ‘I haven’t, I promise. Nothing. Nothing. I don’t do drugs. I wouldn’t, wouldn’t give her nothing.’
    She put her nose to her daughter’s mouth to see if she could smell alcohol, but there was only a warm, faintly sour odour. ‘What’s the matter, darling?’
    ‘I just feel giddy. I’ve got the roundabouts. Where am I?’
    ‘You’re home, darling. You’re OK. You’re at home.’
    Caitlin stared blankly aroundthe room, without any recognition at all, as if she was in a totally unfamiliar place. Lynn followed her eyes as she stared at the dartboard with the purple boa hanging from it, then at the photograph of the rock star hunk, whose name Lynn had momentarily forgotten, as if she was looking at them for the first time.
    ‘I–I don’t know where I am,’ she said.
    Lynn stood up, gripped by a terrible panic. ‘Luke, stay here with her for a moment.’ Then she ran downstairs, grabbed her handbag and went into the kitchen. She pulled her address book out of her bag, then dialled the mobile phone number of the Royal South London transplant coordinator.
    Please God, be there.
    To her relief, Shirley Linsell answered on the third ring. Lynn told her Caitlin’s symptoms.
    ‘It sounds like encephalopathy,’ she said. ‘Let me speak to a consultant and either I or he will get straight back to you.’
    ‘She’s in a really bad way,’ Lynn said. ‘Encephalopathy? How do you spell that?’
    The coordinator spelled it out. Then, promising to get back to her within minutes, hung up.
    Lynn ran back up the stairs, holding the cordless phone. ‘Luke, can you look up “encephalopathy” on the Net?’ She spelled it out for him.
    Luke sat down at Caitlin’s dressing table, opened her laptop and began clicking on the keypad.
    Five minutes later, Shirley Linsell rang back. ‘You need to get Caitlin to move her bowels. Would you like to bring her back up here?’
    ‘Have you found a liver for her?’
    There was a hesitation that Lynn did not like.
    ‘No, but I think itwould be a good idea for her to come in.’
    ‘For how long?’
    ‘Until we’ve