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Friday, 22 June 2018

One Day to Go

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Max coughed in his sleep. Maggie watched. She had barely slept, unable to waste any of her last moments with her son. After a moment, he coughed again, and his eyes opened. They were watery. He looked at Maggie and sneezed.

‘Poor baby,’ Maggie said. ‘You’re getting a cold.’

On this of all days. Tomorrow he turned three. Tomorrow, the man came. She had marked it on the calendar, struck through his last day.

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She had held him against her all night, feeling the rise and fall of his chest, listening to him breathe in and out, in and out. She alternated between feeling paralysed by anguish and bouts of heart-racing panic. Sometimes she wanted to curl up into a ball with him and disappear; others she wanted to jump up and tear at the walls of the room and rip them down in her rage.

But she did the only thing she could. She lay there, arms around her son, feeling the seconds and minutes and hours slip past her, the end looming larger and larger.

At some point she’d fallen asleep for a few minutes and dreamed of a remote control with a pause button that could stop time. She’d be OK with that, OK if she and Max were frozen in one moment, as long as they were together. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would be better than the alternative.

Better than what awaited her tomorrow. She could hardly imagine it. It was too painful; the thought of being alone in this room, her three sons taken from her, caused her an anguish so intense it was a physical pain.

How much longer would she be here? How long until he let her out? Would he ever let her out?

She knew the answer to that. He would leave her here until he died, and then she’d die too.

So why wait? If that was the end of this, why wait? She wouldn’t. If he came tomorrow and took Max, she would kill herself. She would bash her brains out or dehydrate herself or drink the bleach she had hidden under the bottom of the bath. Maybe she would drink that first and then hammer her head on the floor until she passed out.

Because she could not lose another child. It could not happen again.

Max sneezed again. He looked up at her, mucus all over his top lip.

‘Mummy,’ he said, and pointed at it. ‘Look.’

Maggie reached for a tissue and wiped it away.

He sneezed again and his eyes widened in surprise. He smiled, and then laughed. ‘This is funny.’

Maggie nodded. ‘If you say so.’

Another sneeze; another laugh. ‘I can’t stop, Mummy!’

‘That’s what happens when you have a cold.’

‘I like it.’

It was a novelty. He had never had a cold; there were no viruses in the room, other than those the man brought in.