The Ice Child (43 page)

He’s going to die anyway
, a voice said inside her head.

A wave of horror washed over her. She glanced at Jo, terrified in case the murmur inside her head had actually been real. Heard.

Jo was already looking at her. “Somebody from the
Echo
rang me,” she murmured.

Gina wrenched her train of thought back to Jo. “The
Echo?
” she said. It was the UK’s largest tabloid.

“They said there’s an eighty-five-percent match for Sam. Someone else. Not John.”

Catherine looked at Jo sympathetically, and then glared at Gina. “Can you believe this?” she asked. “They ring us up, here. The call came through to the ward.”

“When?” Gina demanded.

“Half an hour ago.”

“And said what?”

“That they have an eighty-five-percent match. Someone in the USA who registered last month.”

“But John is ninety-five percent,” Gina said—then realized that she was stating the obvious: the unwelcome, desperate fact that the near-perfect solution was out of their reach. She shook her head. “But how the hell did the
Echo
find that out?”

“We don’t know,” Catherine said.

“The Trust isn’t supposed to tell anyone,” Jo murmured, as if to herself. “But they found out anyway.”

“The
Echo
hasn’t any bloody business telling you,” Gina fumed. “And to ring you here …” She clenched her fists. “Who was it? Bradley? Marsh? Who?”

Catherine interjected. “The Trust says the information didn’t come from them. And it was some woman. I didn’t hear the name. Just what she said.”

“The fucking bitch,” Gina retorted.

She caught a small flash of a smile from Jo—an achingly thin parody of humor.

“I’m sorry,” Gina told her. “But it makes my blood boil. They’ve sent someone out to get this information, they get half a story, they have the sodding audacity to ring you while Sam is being treated—” She stopped, struck by a thought. “But would it be any good anyway, an eighty-five-percent?” she asked.

“We don’t know,” Jo said. “We’re waiting for somebody to tell us.”

“Oh, God in heaven,” Gina whispered. She clasped Jo’s hands, lost the battle not to shed tears, and to her shame, started to cry. She rubbed at the tears. It was not her business to start weeping, she told herself. She was supposed to be stoic. Jo’s support. Catherine’s helper. But still … “Oh, Lord,” she said. “Lord, please.”

She felt Jo stiffen beside her. Suddenly Sam’s mother got up, wrenching her hands from their grasp. Remaining in the seats, both Catherine and Gina stared up at her. Jo swayed slightly. “It doesn’t matter if it’s eighty-five percent, or ninety percent, or a hundred percent,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if John gets here. They’ll be too late.”

“No, they won’t,” Catherine said, getting to her feet.

“He won’t make it,” Jo said. “He’s too sick.”

Gina sprang up too. “Don’t say that,” she told Jo. “Don’t even think it. He’ll make it.”

“Why don’t you both stop lying to me!” Jo cried. “You only have to look at him. He’s not responding to anything. The ALG did nothing at all.” She turned away from them, raised her arms, pressed both hands to the window glass, and stayed there, in a totally unconscious attitude of crucifixion. “They’ll be too late,” she murmured. “His body’s given up already.”

Catherine reached out a hand, hesitated. Dropped it to her side.

Jo pressed one cheek to the pane. They stared at her white profile.

“He’s gone through to some other place,” she whispered. “He’s fighting his dragons all alone in there, and he hasn’t anything to fight them with, and I can’t get through to him. I can’t get through.” Her mouth trembled. She took in a great gasp of air, a grieving sob.

Gina promptly turned her around, both hands on her shoulders.

“Listen to me,” she said. “He’s not going to die, Jo. He’s not dead already. He’ll get the bone marrow. We’ll pull him through that door, we’ll get him back. You can be sure of that. He’ll come back to you.”

Jo looked at her friend, then dropped her head. “Oh, Gina,” she murmured.

Gina pulled her close and held her.

And despite what she’d said, all Gina knew for sure at that moment was that she wanted to rush into the ward, get Sam, and run.

Not with any purpose in her head.

Not to achieve a single thing.

Just run.

Thirty-five

As Alicia walked out onto King’s Parade, she saw John.

She stopped dead in the hurrying crowd.

She had only just come down Lensfield Road and along St. Andrew’s, passing the Museum of Archaeology. It was somewhere that John used to love when he first took a place at Cambridge. He had always talked about the Pacific collections, the accumulated trophies of British expeditions in the Franklin mode. Cook’s first and third voyages. Haddon’s Torres Strait holdings. Going in here was like touring the world in half an hour, he once told her. Jericho to the North American Plains; Kechipauan to Fiji-Vanuatu.

Coming out of the museum and into the clinging heat, she had paused on the steps, thinking that John was just like his father. John had wanted to leave, and she had kept him. Tried to keep him. Finally, failed.

When she saw him opposite King’s, she actually believed it was him, standing head and shoulders over the crowd. Then, with a double thud of her heart that almost choked her, she realized that someone had got hold of a college picture of him and enlarged it to actual size, and pinned it in a café window. Getting closer, she saw a red banner stuck across the lower half.

HAVE YOU SEEN JOHN MARSHALL
?

He was everywhere. In newspapers particularly. She no longer took
The Courier
because of the relentless campaign they had been running. She had thought of ringing them up to complain. She was John’s mother, and yet no one had ever consulted her. It was as if Sam and Jo Harper were the only mother and child in the world. Simply leafing through the same newspaper, one could see ample evidence of other misery, but none of that seemed to count.

She turned away from the shop, hand pressed to her face.

She drove home in a daze. The car smelled dirty in the heat: she wound the windows down, and the red dust flew in, and the chaff from the fields. She sat behind a farm tractor towing a load of grain. The harvest was good this year; even at ten o’clock at night she could hear combines out in the fields. She would lie alone, the windows and curtains open, gazing out at the endless skies that the tourist industry so raved about here.
Artist’s skies
. What did they know? Emptiness. That’s what they meant. The skies over East Anglia were vast and empty.

She turned into the drive. She saw that the evening paper was waiting in the mailbox. She pulled it out and sat, with the car engine idling, as she stared at the front page. A small paragraph at the bottom had caught her eye.

Sam Marshall, the local boy who continues to make headline news over his fight with a life-threatening illness, was yesterday transferred to Great Ormond Street Hospital in London to prepare him for a bone-marrow transplant from his half-brother.

Blood rushed to Alicia’s face. She gunned the accelerator and swung the car around in front of the house in a cloud of dust. Wrenching the keys from the ignition, she rushed indoors and grabbed the phone from the table in the hallway.

She dialed the paper’s number.

“
Evening Clarion.
”

“I want the editor,” she said.

“Who shall I say is calling?”

“Mrs. Marshall.”

She waited impatiently, stabbing her keys on the wood paneling, scoring a line in the two-hundred-year-old oak.

“Ed Wheeler.”

“This is John Marshall’s mother,” Alicia said. “I suppose you know who I am?”

“His mother,” the editor repeated. “Miss Harper?”

“No,” Alicia retorted, furious. “I’m John Marshall’s mother.
John
Marshall.”

“Oh,” he said. “I see. Sorry.” There was a pause. “What can I do for you?”

“Your paper tonight. The front page.”

“Yes g …”

“Where is he?”

“I’m sorry. Who?”

“John. My son,” she snapped. “It says in the paragraph that the boy’s been transferred to London for his transplant. If he’s getting the transplant, they must have the donor.”

Light seemed to dawn in the editor’s mind. “Oh, no,” he said. “My apologies if that’s misleading. The hospital says that was the reason for the transfer, but I don’t think they’ve found his half brother.” There was another pause. “But you would know that,” he said.

She stared at the receiver, incensed. “Quite,” she said. “
I
would know.
I
would know before anyone else.”

“Yes, I—”

“And so don’t print a story with half the facts,” she said. “Don’t imply things that aren’t true. They haven’t found him. If anyone could find him, it would be me.”

The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them.

The editor almost jumped down her throat. “You could find him?” he asked. “You know where he is?”

She bit her lip. Anger had propelled her this far: she rapidly tried to backtrack. “I simply want to make the point that there is more than one mother who has lost a son in this,” she said. “That’s what all you people forget.”

“Do you know where he is?” the editor repeated.

She slammed the phone down.

She went into the sitting room, still furious. Not sixty seconds passed before the phone rang again. She looked back. It went on ringing.

She walked out into the kitchen, gritting her teeth. Opening the fridge door, she took out a bottle of wine. She poured out a glass and drank it down in one go.

Everything she had had fallen part.

Everything she had had fallen apart
.

The phrase blasted through her mind and wouldn’t be put away. She was a wealthy woman, she was well respected, she was influential. And yet she couldn’t control her own life.
She never had controlled her own life. It was all an illusion
. Once thought, the idea wouldn’t go away. She groaned inadvertently, went back to the sitting room, and slumped down in the nearest armchair, switching on the TV with the remote.

It was the local evening news program. She watched dully, uninterestedly, with the volume turned down, as the news items scrolled on. Other people’s small, insignificant lives. Some woman opening a fete. A child with a rosette held proudly in her fist. A road accident, the reporter on the roadside, the flashing blue lights of police vehicles behind him.

She passed her hand over her eyes, irritated by the triumphs and tragedies of the rest of the world. When she took her hand away, Doug’s face was looking back at her.

She took a small intake of breath, pressing down hard on the volume switch.

“… distinguished professor at Blethyn College, who died just over two years ago …”

Alicia sat forward in the seat.

Jo and Sam came on-screen. Jo sitting underneath the lilac tree, Sam in her arms. The voice-over went on.

“Sunday’s screening of the TV appeal has produced the most astonishing response to the James Norberry Bone Marrow Trust. To date …”

The breath seemed to have stopped in Alicia’s body.

Unable to look at Jo, she stared at the child, the little boy. He looked so very like John at the same age: he even had the same mannerism, that lopsided look to his mouth when he was concentrating, that so resembled a smile.

But the boy in Jo Harper’s lap was not really smiling, she saw. His eyes were fixed on his mother, as if she held an important answer to something. As if to take his gaze from her would send him into oblivion. She looked at his fingers, knotted in Jo’s.

Alicia switched off the set and leapt to her feet.

Going out into the hall, she wrenched open the front door and went out into the drive, taking deep drafts of air. She was shaking from head to foot. Forgetting the still-idling car, she walked away across the long lawn.

The garden was in full bloom. Stopping suddenly up short, she stared at the flowers that she had tended all year. Splashes of luminous orange and yellow. The backdrop of the lane, the fields.

She dropped to her knees on the closely mown grass.

“Oh, God.” She moaned. “What have I done?”

All her life she had fought to make things happen. She had fought to get Doug; she had fought to keep him. She had cheated him into marriage. She had kept John near her when Doug became ever more the absent partner, emotionally suffocating her child in the process. She knew she had done that. Kept John apart. Kept him inside when other children played. Prevented him mixing. She had insisted upon meeting him from school, even when he was in his teens. She had discouraged him from staying with other boys. Discouraged other boys visiting him. Smothered him with so much emotional blackmail that eventually he dropped his plans of any other university but Cambridge.

And she had nagged him. God, how she had nagged him. She stared now at the colors ahead of her, at their almost savage brilliance. She felt as if her heart were ablaze like that, consumed by its own intensity. Burning up.

Burning out.

She had used to phone John daily. Insisted on knowing where he had been, and who he had been with. And when he started to break away—when she could feel him straining to get himself free of her, when she could see how much he wanted his father’s attention, not hers—she had pressed down all the harder to make him feel guilty.

And now she had lost them both.

Husband, son.

All that she possessed was the sum total of her years of pressure. She had what she had made for herself with all her pleading and sulking. Total isolation.

And fear. All the days filled with fear. Loathing the world that she thought had taken John from her. Loathing another woman who had been given Doug’s love. Vindictively hating a small, sick child. That was what she was, with all her so-called loving. That was what she had become. Kneeling, she bent double, nausea rushing into her throat.

Jo Harper had a life, a real life. She had friends. She was admired and respected. Look at the girl Catherine, Alicia told herself in despair. Look how that girl had stood by her. Look at those television pictures. Even the doctor seemed struck with Sam’s mother. The TV crew, the people at
The Courier
, the local radio stations. There was nowhere you could go that didn’t show how strongly people felt for her.