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‘What? What’re you saying? Eh?’ He pushes his ear to her mouth, feels her breath against his ear, hears her whisper: ‘Naomi.’
She gasps, her eyes widen – huge, round – meeting his for a second. Something unreadable in her gaze, something troubled flickers, before she exhales a long, rushing sigh.
Her eyes close.
Joyce is not breathing.
‘Joyce?’ he says. ‘Joyce!’
Naomi, she said. Just that. He squeezes her hand. ‘It’s OK. Naomi’s fine. Naomi’s at home with Tommy. You just hang on in there, OK?’
She is not breathing. His nose is running. He can’t see. He presses against the blanket, puts his arm around her. But he can no longer feel the rise and fall. He pushes his face to hers, but no warm breath comes against his cheek.
‘Joyce?’ he whispers, his throat aching. ‘Don’t die. You can’t die. Joyce. We need to see Tommy in his school uniform. Joyce? Joyce!’ He pulls her to him, rubs her back. ‘Hey. Hey, hey, hey, keep warm now. Joyce? Don’t close your eyes. Stay with me, come on. Come on, Joyce. They’re coming. Hang on, please hang on.’
The doorbell rings. He can’t leave her. But he must.
‘Joyce? I’ll be right back.’ He lets go of her hand and runs out of the room, down the stairs, his chest filled with heat. Opens the door, is alarmed to see two paramedics, both dressed in hazmat suits: a woman and a young lad, he thinks, no more than twenty.
‘She’s upstairs,’ he says.
‘She went quickly,’ the woman says, gently replacing Joyce’s wrist on the floor. ‘It’s good you were with her, that you talked to her and held her hand. I’m so sorry.’
She is sorry. Joyce went quickly. It was good that he talked to her.
She has died then. Joyce has died. Sam has known this and not known it since she communicated with the very last of her breath her dying concern for the mother of his child.
Naomi, she whispered. Naomi, who she came to love in the end just as he does.
The paramedics tell him they have to go. They tell him not to move her. The police are on their way, to stay calm. They have to attend to another call, they say. They are overrun. They’ll see themselves out.
Sam sits down next to Joyce and takes her hand. He will look after Naomi and Tommy, he tells her. He will make her proud, she will see. He is going to marry Naomi and raise a family, here, in this house, with all their happy memories. If their second child is a girl, he tells her as quiet police sirens become louder, he will call her Joyce.
CHAPTER 42
‘Can I call my fiancée?’
‘Of course.’ The family liaison officer goes into the kitchen while another police officer sits beside him on his gran’s old chesterfield sofa and asks to take his statement.
‘What time is it?’
‘Just coming up to two.’
‘Two? Oh my God.’ Time has vanished, hours evaporated.
Naomi’s phone rings out, rings out, rings out. He looks up at the officer, who is younger than him, with a fluffy, patchy beard he’d be better off shaving for the next few years. That this thought would come to him now strikes him as bizarre. Not bizarre, no. It is Joyce. It is what she would have said afterwards, once he’d gone.
‘Mr Moore? Sam?’
‘She’s not picked up. She goes to bed at ten.’ He pauses to accept hot, sweet tea from the female officer, whose name he has already forgotten. ‘She has to get up early for work. She’s with our son. We’re getting married…’
‘That’s OK,’ the woman says.
Maddy, that’s it, he remembers now. DS Maddy Cordell.
‘She’ll see you’ve called once she wakes up.’ Her voice is soft, almost a whisper. ‘Now, if you can tell my colleague Stuart what happened, in as much detail as you can remember.’
Stuart. The guy is called Stuart. Stuart and Maddy. He nods: he’s sorry, he’s a little distracted, he’ll get on with it now.
