Dead Tomorrow

wearing it as a hat , Lynn thought. She could have happily dumped it all on his head. Instead, she kept calm, put the tray down, exited the room and returned to the kitchen. Ignoring the Sunday newspaper, she picked up the Val McDermid crime novel she had been reading for the past few days, in the hope of immersing herself in a different world for an hour or so.
    In the novel a man was putting a victim into a replica of a medieval torture machine and Lynn suddenly thought how pleasant it would be to put Luke into such a machine.
    Thenshe put the book down and cried.

42
    Susan Cooper was utterly exhausted. She had lost track of the days since Nat’s accident. Apart from brief trips home for a shower and change of clothing, she had lived here, in this ITU ward, since last Wednesday. It was now, according to the Daily Mail newspaper on her lap, Monday.
    The paper was full of advertisements bordered with holly, and cheery, festive articles and tips. How to avoid a Christmas hangover! How to avoid putting on those extra pounds during the festive season! How to decorate your tree using recycled household rubbish! A hundred great Christmas gift ideas! How to buy your man a gift he will never forget!
    How about, How to help your man live until Christmas , she thought bleakly, or, How to help your man live long enough to see his unborn child ?
    In the last five days there had been no change. The five longest days of her life. Five days of living in a chair at Nat’s bedside in the blue ITU ward. She was sick of the sight of blue. Sick of the pale blue of the walls, the blue of the curtains that at the moment were drawn around his bed, the blue of the venetian blinds, the blue tops and trousers of the nursing staff and the doctors. The only different colour came from all the cards he had been sent. She’d given the flowers to another ward, as there was no room in here.
    She toyedwith going into the curtained area, but it was crowded with medics at the moment. An alarm suddenly chimed. BEEP-BEEP-BONG . Then stopped almost instantly. She hated that alarm more and more. Every damn time it spooked her. Then another one chimed on the far side of the ward. She put the paper down and stood up, needing a break.
    There was another alarm chime from Nat’s bed and she wondered again whether to check inside the curtain. But she had been checking constantly, quizzing every member of the medical staff day in and day out, and knew she must be close to driving them demented. She decided to go out of the ward for a few minutes to get a change of scenery.
    She walked past several beds, the occupants mostly intubated and silent, either asleep or staring vacantly, and stopped by the hygienic hand-rub dispenser on the wall by the door. Dutifully giving her hands a squirt and massaging the gunk into her skin, she then pressed the green button to unlock the door, pushed it open and stepped out of the ward. She walked, like a zombie, along the corridor, past the door on her left to the quiet room and the one on her right to the larger, but no more cheerful, waiting room, past an abstract painting that looked like a collision between two trucks filled with multicoloured cuttlefish, and further along the corridor to the window on the far side of the lift.
    This had become her window on the outside world.
    Itwas the window she stared through on to an alternative reality. Rooftops and soaring gulls, and the Channel beyond. A world of tranquil normality. A world in which Nat was fine. A world in which the grey hulls of ships passed along the grey horizon, and in which, yesterday, she had watched the distant white sails of yachts out of the Marina racing around marker buoys. The winter racing series, the Frostbite Series. She knew all about it, because for a couple of years, on Sunday mornings that he had off, Nat had crewed on one of those yachts, grinding winches. He had enjoyed the fresh air and, like squash, found it a good escape from the pressures of the hospital.
    Then he had bought the motorbike and instead had spent his free Sunday mornings racing around the countryside with a group of other born-again bikers. The bike she hated so much.
    Oh shit , she thought. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.
    As if sensing her mood, her baby moved inside her.
    ‘Hi, Bump,’ she said. Then she pulled out her mobile phone. Eight missed calls. New message after new message after new message. Nat’s brother. His sailing friends. His squash partner. His sister.