Another Mother's Life (41 page)

“We need to find him,” Alison said, focusing on finding Dominic. “We’ll both go, I’ll take the girls with me and you go in your car. But if you see him … just phone me. Let me talk to him first. Don’t frighten him, Marc.”

“Frighten him? Alison it was nothing more than a slap, it wasn’t as hard as when you slapped me at the party,” Marc said, offering a smile.

Alison took a step closer to him, keeping her voice very low. “Our son, our child has been out alone all night because of you. You do understand that this is your fault, don’t you, Marc?”

Marc took a breath, unable to meet her eyes. “I know that,” he said. “I didn’t mean for it to happen.”

“But it did,” Alison said, biting back the obvious retort, determined to focus on her son. “And now we have to find him.”

“Mama!” Amy shrieked, crashing down the stairs, closely followed by her sister, hitting Alison’s legs with full force and buckling them so that she had to sit down on the bottom stair. “Where
were
you, Mama? Dom’s gone away and we don’t know where he is or where you were. Were you with him?”

“No.” Alison forced a smile for Amy as she put her arms around her daughter. “I was having a sleepover with a friend, with Leila and Eloise’s mum, remember? I didn’t know Dom was gone until just now.”

“Daddy didn’t know where to find him,” Gemma told her. “We thought of everywhere we could look but he isn’t anywhere.”

“Mama?” Amy’s voice was low, her eyes huge as she wound her arms around Alison’s neck. “Is Dominic dead, like the teenagers on the news? Is he shot?”

“Of course not, of course he isn’t. He’ll be fine, I promise you,” Alison said, hoping her daughter didn’t hear the hollow echo in her words. She had a feeling, a cold, hard feeling in the pit of her stomach that frightened her.

She felt the weight of Marc’s stare on her and looked up at him; his whole body was clenched with anxiety.

“I’ll head out now,” he said.

“Okay.” Alison remembered something. “Ciara told us her surname, I’ll look in the book. I’ll try all the numbers under that name. If I can find her, maybe she can tell me some people he might be with. But if he’s not with her …”

“What?” Marc asked her.

Carefully Alison kissed first Amy and then Gemma on the cheek.

“Why don’t you girls go and get some snacks to eat while we’re out looking for Dom, I’m ever so hungry,” she asked them brightly.

“I can do that easily,” Gemma said.

“I’ll help,” Amy said, and the two girls and one dog trotted off to the kitchen, reassured for the time being.

“What if he’s run away, Marc?” Alison asked. “Gone back up to London? We might never find him then, not if he’s gone back up there …”

Marc took her in his arms and held her for a moment.

“Come on, you were right the first time, he’ll be fine,” he said. “He’ll be holed up somewhere hoping like hell that he’s causing all of the fuss and grief that he is. He’ll turn up.”

“Okay,” Alison said, feeling suddenly imprisoned in his embrace.

“You know that you and I are a good team,” Marc said, holding her a little tighter for a second. Alison disengaged herself from his grasp.

“Just find him, Marc,” she said. “Once upon a time you and he used to be such good friends. Don’t throw that away too.”

J
immy was determined to be prepared for what he was planning to say to Catherine as he climbed back on board his boat. This time he was going to get it right.

The best things that had ever happened to him, apart from his daughters, had been the one thing he’d put all of his forethought and planning strategies into. And that was getting Catherine to marry him. It had taken him ten months to get her to agree, ten months to persuade her that one day she would love him as much as he loved her. Every single day he’d offer her another little bit of carefully gleaned proof that he was the man for her, until she dropped the last of her defenses and let him love her the way he knew he could—forever. For ten months she’d resisted him, and then one morning as he’d been proposing to her between kissing each one of her toes, she’d said yes.

Or more precisely, “Yes, yes okay! Yes! Just stop it,
please
!”

“Yes what?” Jimmy had said, sitting up at the end of the bed, his heart in his mouth.

“Yes, I will marry you, you idiot,” Catherine had said.

“Why?” Jimmy had asked, crawling along the bed and stretching out next to her.

“Because you won’t shut up about it,” Catherine had retorted, pulling the sheet over her breasts. “And I’m tired of lying to my mother about where I am.”

“Your mother doesn’t know you have a lover?” Jimmy had asked her playfully, enjoying the illicit implications of the word.

“No, she doesn’t,” Catherine had told him, her smile dimming. “I need to get out, I need to be myself, and when I’m with you that’s who I am. You let me be completely me and you still seem to like me, so yes, I will marry you, Jimmy. You’re the best thing in my life.”

“That’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever said to me,” Jimmy had said, grinning from ear to ear.

Laughing with pure happiness, Jimmy had pulled her into his arms and kissed as much of her as he could before she squirmed away, rolling herself up in the sheet.

“I love you so much too,” he’d told her, intent on revealing those lovely breasts again.

“I know.” She’d laughed as he pulled her close to him. “And knowing that makes me the happiest I’ve ever been.”

Ten years ago, months of careful planning and persistence had got him his wife in the end. And that was exactly what he needed to do now to get her back. Because when Jimmy thought of himself and Catherine back then, laughing and happy, entangled in that sheet, he knew he loved her just as much now as he ever did. No, he loved her more, because after everything they’d been through she still had the strength and generosity not to hate his guts for it. She was the most amazing person he was ever likely to know, and even
if she was never able to love him back in the same way he loved her, he still had to try to make her see that he was still the man for her. He had to be able to know that at least he had tried.

So now he was going to think through how he was going to tell Catherine he still loved her and persuade her to give him a second chance from about a million different angles. He was going to be prepared for any eventuality. Every single one of them. He was going into this like a barrister: sharp-witted, determined to win, and impossible to distract…

“Afternoon, Jim,” one of his neighbors, Leo, called as he hopped off his boat with his Jack Russell terrier yapping at his heels. “Lovely day for a walk.”

Leo paused and watched as his dog terrorized the ducks, sending them splashing and quaking into the water, shaking their feathers in distress. And then the dog spotted a swan, hissing a warning with wings spread, advancing toward him. Sensibly the dog retreated, heading instead for the undergrowth on the other side of the towpath.

“Yep,” Jimmy called back, hoping Leo wouldn’t want to draw him into a conversation. He was a nice old man, but he liked to talk, mostly about his dog. Fergus.

“He’s all bark, no bite, that one.” Leo smiled indulgently as Fergus broke out into insistent barking in the hedgerow. “He’ll have found something down there. Water rat probably, but he wouldn’t hurt it,” Leo said. “He acts all high and mighty, but when push comes to shove he’s a big softy. Or should I say a little softy.”

Leo chuckled, but Jimmy frowned as he looked at the bush that Fergus had disappeared into; something was driving the small dog to bark frenetically, so much so that the leaves of the bush trembled. Something white caught his eye. Fergus was tugging on it, growling between barks. Was that a … ? It was the sole of a running shoe. And it was attached to a leg.

Jumping down from his boat, Jimmy crouched down and crawled into the bush.

Fergus had found a boy lying on his side, his hood pulled up over his face, arms crossed over his chest, his legs drawn up against his body. Now that Jimmy had arrived, Fergus dropped the toe of the boy’s shoe and was barking in his face, but the boy didn’t move a muscle. There was a sharp acrid smell and Jimmy noticed that the boy had been sick, probably shortly before he passed out. In the grass next to him lay an empty bottle of whiskey.

“Christ,” Jimmy said, scooping the boy up in his arms and lifting him out of the undergrowth and onto the pathway.

“Fergus has found a kid!” he yelled to Leo. “He’s cold, looks like he’s been here all night.”

“Is he all right?” Leo asked him, bending to pick Fergus up. The dog continued his tirade, a high-pitched insistent yap that made Jimmy have to shout to be heard over him.

“I don’t know.” Jimmy pulled the hood back from the boy’s still-white face, devoid of color except for his bluish lips.

“Oh God, it’s Dominic,” he whispered to himself.

“What did you say?” Leo asked him, bundling Fergus back into his boat and shutting the door on him. “Drug addict, is it?”

“No, I know this boy,” Jimmy said as he watched Dominic’s chest. “He’s not breathing. Call an ambulance, Leo.” Jimmy rested his head on the boy’s chest and tried to block out everything around him as he listened; after an impossibly long moment he heard a heartbeat. “Tell them there’s a slow heartbeat—but he’s not breathing. Tell them to be quick.”

“I haven’t got a phone,” Leo said, looking bewildered and frightened.

Jimmy threw his mobile at Leo’s feet, where it landed in the dirt. “Here, use mine, call them now. Do it now, Leo!”

He turned back to Dominic and took a breath, sensing that each precious second that passed was irretrievable.

“Right.” Jimmy closed his eyes. Last summer the school had sent him on a first aid course. All teachers had to know CPR. It was school policy. He knew what to do, he knew CPR, he just had to focus and think, and eventually it would come back to him. He took a breath and thought of Alison sitting in the café, talking about her son. He saw his own daughters lying there. Imagining in an instant their faces white and still. He couldn’t afford to get this wrong.

“Recovery position first,” Jimmy spoke aloud as he carefully tilted Dom’s head back to keep his airway open. He was dimly aware of Leo in the background trying to explain where they were. He peered inside Dom’s mouth: it was blocked with vomit, which must have been why he’d stopped breathing. He’d been choking. Jimmy cleared it away with his fingers, wiping them clean on the grass, hoping that suddenly Dom would take a deep breath, cough, and splutter into life. But the boy remained still.

“Rescue breathing, create a seal,” Jimmy whispered to himself. He pinched Dominic’s nose with one hand and held his mouth open with the other. He took a deep breath and blew it into Dominic’s mouth, watching the boy’s chest rise with each of the breaths he gave him. That meant he was doing it right; if the chest rose, that meant the air was going into the lungs.

What next? Jimmy thought as he continued to breathe, counting to ten. Wait and watch. You were supposed to give them ten breaths and then wait to see if they would start breathing on their own. He sat back on his heels and watched Dominic intently, holding his own breath, willing the boy’s chest to rise. Dominic was perfectly still. But there was no time to panic, no time to think or worry about what the next minute or even the next second would bring. All Jimmy knew was that he had to keep
him breathing, he had to keep oxygen going to his brain and hope that would be enough.

Circulation, he remembered, the
C
of the ABC during the set of ten breaths.

“Compressions. I haven’t done compressions.” Jimmy waited, watching Dominic again; his rib cage remained immobile. Hesitantly he placed the heels of his hands over Dominic’s breastbone; was this the right thing to do?

“They’re coming,” Leo told him. “They said they’d be ten minutes. What are you doing?”

“Compressions … no, wait.” Jimmy looked at his hands on Dominic’s chest and then snatched them away. “No, no—his heart is beating, compressions could make it worse. I just need to keep breathing for him. Ten breaths and see if he starts on his own. Then ten more breaths. That’s right. That’s right. I just need to keep on breathing for him. Go and stand by the bridge, Leo, keep an eye out for them. You’ll need to show them where we are.”

“You’re doing well, son,” Leo said as he headed off, but Jimmy didn’t hear him.

It seemed like an age before the ambulance crew arrived. They had to park a few hundred yards away and run the rest of the way. By the time the first paramedic sat down beside Jimmy and took over resuscitation, Jimmy’s knees had gone numb, his legs had cramped, and he felt heady from the deep breathing. But he didn’t notice any of those things. In those ten minutes his whole world had become about counting ten breaths, watching the rise and fall of Dom’s chest, and hoping. But not once did Dominic breathe on his own.

“Can I have a word, sir,” the second paramedic asked him as her colleague worked on Dom.

“His heart is beating,” Jimmy told her. “I’ve been breathing for him, but he hasn’t done it on his own yet.”