Page 26 of Last Night

As he walks over to shut the door, I fantasise the words he might use. Imploring us not to sue over their grave error.

Now this has never happened before, but I’m nevertheless incrediblyrelieved, if ashamed, to tell you.

The rush of relief that would knock us off our feet. Or what if she’s injured, but … there’s physio, we could doanything …

‘Hello. Ed? Eve,’ he nods.

I have never dreaded anyone speaking more in my life.

‘I’m consultant Gareth Prentice, I’m one of the medical team who saw Susie when she was brought in by the ambulance.’ Brought in. These strange passive terms, as if Susie is a puppet in their play.

‘Who called the ambulance?’ I blurt.

‘A member of the public who saw what happened and called 999.’

I can’t imagine Susie helpless.

‘I’m so sorry …’ he starts, after a deep breath, and I fold immediately, letting go a strangled cry.

‘Hey, come on, come on, ssshhh,’ Ed says, putting his arm round me, and I can tell it’s helping him right now to steady himself, to act as my protector. I’m glad of it. As much as I can see anything of the long road that lies ahead, I suspect we will be constantly swapping these roles back and forth.

‘… We saw her during the early hours of this morning with a major trauma to her head. We did everything we could to save her, but her injuries were just too severe. She had a massive bleed on the brain which was simply unsurvivable.’

‘How? If she was on the pavement?’ I say.

‘We won’t know the full details until the post-mortem and inquest.’

There’s so much to come I can’t contemplate.

‘… If you asked me to guess, and please bear in mind it’s only a guess, I’d say the car mounted the kerb, hit her, and the impact threw her against a wall, which is when the insult to the brain and skull occurred.’

Insult. Unexpected jargon. We’re visitors in a foreign country.

‘… The driver is co-operating with the police, as far as I know.’

Dr Prentice adds, with some understatement: ‘This is an awful lot to take in, I know. Take your time and ask me anything you want to.’

He is compassionate, but rehearsed. This is an earthquake for us, a conversation we will never forget, and I think – for him it’s the middle of his Friday morning. Something he’ll mention in passing to his wife tonight at dinner.Sad business today, young girl, well, woman, only in her thirties. Friends were in pieces, naturally.

‘What did you do, to try to save her?’ I say, and I don’t recognise my own voice.

‘The paramedics had stabilised her with a neck brace to protect her spine and kept her breathing on the way to the hospital. We put Susie on a ventilator to support her vital functions while we tried to find the source of the bleeding, and ran scans.’

‘But she died how long after you did that?’

‘She had no vital signs within fifteen minutes of arriving here. Attempts to resuscitate her failed.’

I imagine the unbroken tone from the machines.

There’s no other sound for a few moments, while I heave and weep and Ed makes a gasping noise, like he’s trying to breathe underwater.

‘Was she conscious?’ Ed says. ‘When she came in.’

‘No, the impact from the crash knocked her completely unconscious,’ the doctor says. ‘She wouldn’t have suffered at all.’

‘You don’t know that!’ I say, and think, what a time for arseholey teenage Eve to resurface. (Eve Gaddafi, my mum used to call her. ‘A tyrant.’)

‘We are as sure as we possibly can be,’ says the doctor, evenly, completely unperturbed by my snapping at him – prepared and trained for it, just like the unstartled receptionist. ‘Brain function after that kind of trauma is akin to a deep coma state.’

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