Dead Tomorrow

music leaked from the headset plugged into Caitlin’s ears.
    Then Caitlin stood up suddenly and began staggering around, as if she had been drinking, scratching her hands furiously. Lynn had spent all afternoon with her and knew she had drunk nothing. It was a symptom of her disease.
    ‘Sit down, darling,’ she said, alarmed.
    ‘I’m kind of tired,’ Caitlin said. ‘Do we have to wait?’
    ‘It’s very important that we see the specialist today.’
    ‘Yeah, well, look, right, I’m quite important too, OK?’ She gave a wry smile.
    Lynn smiled. ‘You are the most important thing in the world,’ she said. ‘How are you feeling, apart from tired?’
    Caitlin stopped and looked down at one of the magazines on the table, Sussex Life . She breathed deeply in silence for some moments, then she said, ‘I’m scared, Mummy.’
    Lynn stood up and put an arm around her, and unusually Caitlin did not shrink and pull away. Instead she nestled against her mother’s body, took her hand and gripped it hard.
    Caitlin had grown several inches inthe last year and Lynn still had not got used to having to look upwards at her face. She had clearly inherited her father’s height genes, and her thin, gangly frame looked more like some kind of bendy doll than ever today, albeit a very beautiful one.
    She was dressed in the careless style she always favoured, a grungy grey and rust-coloured knitted top over a T-shirt, with a necklace of small stones on a thin leather loop, jeans with frayed bottoms and old trainers, unlaced. Additionally, in deference to the cold, and perhaps to conceal her swollen, pregnant-looking belly, Lynn guessed, her camel-coloured duffel coat that looked like it had come from a charity shop.
    Caitlin’s short, spiky, jet-black hair protruded above the Aztec patterned band that covered much of her head and her piercings gave her a vaguely Gothic look. She had a stud in the centre of her chin, a tongue stud and one ring through her left eyebrow. Out of sight at the moment, but which the specialist would no doubt expose when he examined her, were the ring on her right nipple, the one through her belly button and the one in the front of her vagina, the insertion of which she had coyly confessed to her mother, in one of their rare moments ofcloseness, had been rather embarrassing .
    This truly had turned into the day from hell, Lynn thought. Since leaving Dr Hunter’s surgery this morning, then returning with Caitlin this afternoon, her whole life seemed to have been upended, as if it had gone through a seismic shift.
    And now her phone was ringing. She pulled it out of her handbag and looked at the display. It was Mal.
    ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Where are you?’
    ‘Just coming through the lock at Shoreham. We’ve had a shitty day–dredged up a corpse. But tellme about Caitlin.’
    She filled him in on her consultations with Dr Hunter, all the time eyeing Caitlin, who was still pacing around the waiting room, which was about a third of the size of Dr Hunter’s. She was now picking up and putting down one magazine after the other with great urgency, as if she needed to read all of them but could not decide where to begin.
    ‘I’ll actually know more in about an hour. We’ve just come from Dr Hunter straight to the specialist. Are you going to be in range for a while?’
    ‘At least four hours,’ he said. ‘Might be longer.’
    ‘OK.’
    Dr Granger’s secretary appeared. A matronly woman in her fifties, with her hair in a tight bun, she had a distancing smile on her face. ‘Dr Granger will see you both now.’
    ‘I’ll call you back,’ Lynn said.
    Unlike Ross Hunter’s spacious surgery, Dr Granger’s consulting room was a cramped space, on the first floor, with barely enough room for the two chairs in front of his small desk. Angled so that they could be clearly seen by all his patients were framed photographs of a perfect, smiling consultant’s wife and three equally perfect, smiling children.
    Dr Granger was a tall man in his forties, with a big nose and a thinning thatch of hair, dressed in a pinstriped suit, with a crisp shirt and a neat tie. There was a slight aloofness about him, which made Lynn think he could as easily have passed for a barrister as a doctor.
    ‘Please sit down,’ he said, opening a brown folder, inside which Lynn could see a letter from Ross Hunter. He then sat down himself, reading it.
    Lynn took and gently squeezed Caitlin’s hand, and her daughter made no