The Day Of Second Chances (37 page)

‘This is how you know she loves you,' added Honor. ‘Because babies are universally ugly. Except for your father.'

Lydia's lips tightened. It wasn't a smile, but it was something, an emotion other than fear.

‘When people ask me who I am,' said Jo, ‘I tell them I'm just a mother. And that's true, but you know what? It's not true, too. I'm not just a mother. I'm
your
mother, and I'm Oscar's and Iris's mother. And having you, and loving you, has been the most important and wonderful thing in my life. You are so precious to me, Lydia. Nothing and nobody could ever replace you. Never. And you might think that isn't much to be, but to me, you are my everything.'

She was entirely focused on Lydia. Lydia's hair as it blew, light as gossamer. Lydia's skirt ruffling, the rapid pulse that beat in Lydia's neck. Lydia's eyes, hazel, the same as Stephen's, with the long lashes, staring out over the void.
Look at me
, Jo thought with every fibre of her being.
Look at me, see how much I love you, see how precious you are. Look at me, and leave this bridge and come home.

‘Daddy was right here when he fell,' said Lydia. ‘Right here where we're standing now. I always thought that Daddy could fly.'

‘Don't fall,' said Jo. She wanted to reach out for Lydia, to take her hand, to hold her, but she didn't dare. ‘Don't fall, Lydia. We would miss you.'

Lydia closed her eyes. Jo tensed, certain she was about to jump, ready to try to catch her, grab her hand, snag her jumper, anything. She would jump with her if she had to, tangle their bodies together to try to get underneath her to break her fall. Because she could not watch her child die.

She could carry on after anything else, but not that.

‘Lydia,' she whispered and the name was blown away from her.

Lydia opened her eyes. She looked at Jo.

‘OK,' she said. ‘OK. I won't do it. I love you, too.'

She reached out her hand to Jo and Jo leaned over and hugged her, one-armed, their foreheads together.

‘I love you so much,' whispered Jo. ‘Please, let's get off this bridge.'

Lydia nodded. Jo helped her turn around and she saw Lydia's damp palms slipping on the railing. Her grip looked fragile, and she was still shaking, breathing hard in little sobs. Jo steadied her as she lifted her leg to climb over. Lydia on tiptoe on the ledge, impossibly slender, poised above the drop, for a moment held there only by the thinnest pull of gravity.

Then Lydia swung herself over and into her grandmother's arms.

Jo breathed out a shuddering sigh of relief. She closed her eyes, tried to process it, to believe it. Her daughter was safe.

Oh Stephen
, she thought, balanced above where Stephen had died.
I've saved her. She's all right
.

Out of nothing the train came.

An explosion below them, a wind and a rush, a streak of black and yellow shaking the bridge. Jo started, her foot slipped on the ledge, her hand scrabbled for the railing and missed it. And then Jo fell.

I THINK ABOUT
it all the time. I wasn't there, but I know this was how it happened.

Dad could run for ever and ever, and nothing could stop him. He had long strides, a beautiful rhythm. You only had to look at him to know that he could do anything.

When he stood on that bridge next to that man, near the place where they later put that plaque to his memory, he didn't feel any fear. He stood on the ledge – it's a little ledge, I've seen it, about four or five inches wide – and he looked out into clear air. From that high, you must feel as if you could take off and fly: spread your arms and soar, like a paper crane.

He wasn't afraid. He was confident, sure-footed, full of power and grace. He was saving someone's life, a stranger's life. And when he stepped off that ledge, running in air, he must have known what it felt like to be free.

THE TRAIN PASSED
below like a scream. Lydia grabbed for her mother and her hand closed around some material, Mum's sleeve – Mum was falling.

Her body slid down and Lydia got a grip on her arm; Mum's hand grabbed her wrist, the two of them holding on to each other. Mum's feet kicked in the air. Her face looked up into Lydia's, green eyes wide, mouth in an O of shock.

‘Mum,' Lydia gasped, or maybe she didn't have time to gasp but thought it, and felt herself tipping over, pulled over the railing by gravity and her mother's body. Her feet off the pavement, her body tilted, the railing digging into her stomach.

She wasn't strong enough. They were both going over, together, daughter and wife in the same place where Stephen Levinson had died, just seconds after Lydia had decided not to jump, after all.

The train thundered below them.

Then arms went around Lydia's waist from behind, thin but strong as bone. ‘No,' muttered Granny Honor in her ear and Lydia knew that she was trying to hold her back. But Lydia's hand was sweating, it was slippery. She could feel her grip giving way on her mother's arm, felt her weight teetering forward. And Granny H was so old …

‘Let me go.' She couldn't hear her mother, but she could see her lips moving. Saw and felt her hand open so that she wasn't pulling Lydia down. Lydia shook her head and she held on tighter, pulling back as hard as she could into her grandmother's arms.

A blur of fluorescent yellow beside her. Arms, more arms reaching over her and around her. A man leaned his entire body almost over the wall, part of some human chain, seizing Mum under her arms and hauling her upwards. Hands pulled Lydia, too. She heard shouting, suddenly loud in the silence left behind by the train passing.

‘Let go!' someone yelled in her ear. ‘She's safe, let her go!'

Lydia didn't let Mum go.

The railing scraped hard against her elbow, tearing her skin, and then she was on the pavement on the bridge, and Mum was, too. Shaking, sobbing, unable to catch her breath, in the flashing lights from the police cars and ambulance and surrounded by people, she finally let go of her mother's arm, her hand screaming with pain. She knelt there on the ground and fell into her mother, crying into her neck, hearing her breathing, feeling her stroking her hair, just like she used to when she was a little girl.

‘It's all right,' Mum whispered. ‘It's all right.'

HONOR HAD BROKEN
her wrist. She had felt it happening – felt the snap when she was holding on to Lydia – but she didn't feel any pain until she got to the hospital. One of the paramedics put a splint on it at the scene. ‘Which one was trying to jump, then?' he asked her conversationally.

‘None of your business,' Honor told him.

In the ambulance she sat beside Lydia and Jo. She held Lydia's hand with her good one. No one said anything.

For Honor, it had been a confusion of sound. She'd heard Lydia agree not to jump, as the train approached. She hadn't seen Jo slip, but she had felt it somehow, through the skin of the bridge or the way Lydia suddenly lurched next to her. She had thrown her arms around Lydia and heard her struggling, the panting of her breath. She'd heard the cars pulling up behind them, the shouts of the police and paramedics.

The train, she had seen: a streak of black and sunshine yellow in the bottom of her vision, travelling oblivious onward.

When they reached A&E, Lydia was taken off almost immediately, and Jo went with her. Honor's pocket buzzed and beeped, and she pulled out Jo's phone, forgotten in her pocket since she had rung 999.

‘Excuse me,' she said to the man sitting in the waiting room next to her, who appeared to have a swathe of white bandages wrapped round his head, ‘can you see whom this message is from?'

He took the phone in his rough hand. ‘Marcus,' he said. ‘There are a few of them. Want me to read them to you?'

‘No. Would you please find Richard in the contacts? And ring him for me?' The man swiped the screen a few times and gave the phone back to her. Richard picked up on the ninth ring.

‘Jo?' he said. ‘I'm in the middle of something, what is it?'

‘It's not Jo. It's Honor Levinson.'

‘Honor.' Richard had never liked her; he probably liked her even less now if his fiancée had told him what she'd said to her. Honor did not care.

‘You will need to extricate yourself from the middle of whatever it is you are doing, because you have to pick up your children from nursery.'

‘What? Why? Jo's got them today.'

‘Jo has had an accident. She's fine, but she needs you to act on your responsibilities.'
For once
, she didn't add.

‘An accident? What? Where is she?'

‘In hospital. She won't be in for long. But the children are only in nursery until noon. You need to pick them up and take them to your house. It's the Little Bear Nursery.'

‘But—I'm …'

Honor did not reply. Richard seemed to sense her frown even down the phone, because when he spoke again, he sounded bewildered rather than aggrieved.

‘Where's the Little Bear Nursery?'

‘You're their father, you've got Google, you figure it out,' said Honor, and rang off.

A nurse brought her through to a curtained cubicle with a narrow bed; Honor accepted painkillers. ‘It's probably broken,' said the nurse cheerfully, ‘but it might just be sprained.'

‘It's broken,' Honor told her. ‘I heard it. I've got a touch of osteoporosis.'

‘Have you got a touch of AMD as well?'

‘AMD?'

‘Age-related macular degeneration? Bit of poor eyesight, especially in the middle? My mum's got it – she looks out of the corner of her eyes like you. My brother's an optometrist; there are things you can do to slow it down, you know. It's irreversible but there are lots of ways to help. There's a leaflet around here somewhere. I'll find it for you.'

‘Thank you,' said Honor. ‘You are very observant.'

‘Mum finds that she notices sounds more, and smells, too. Sometimes I swear she has a sixth sense now that her eyesight has started to go. She rings me, when I've had a rotten day. It's as if she knows.'

‘I don't believe in sixth senses.'

‘Maybe it's just a mother thing, then. Anyway, Dr Levinson, I'll find someone to take you up to X-ray.'

Honor leaned her head back against the hard paper-covered pillow and closed her eyes. In the darkness, she saw Stephen, as clear as he had ever been in life.

‘We saved her,' she whispered to him, and she didn't believe in sixth senses, but she saw him nodding. She saw him smile.

JO SAT IN
a hard chair outside the consulting room, holding a plastic cup full of tea that she did not want. Her shoulder throbbed and her whole body ached, despite the painkillers she'd taken. Inside, someone from Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services was talking with Lydia. They had asked Jo to wait outside, maybe go for a cup of tea in the canteen, and whilst Jo understood the reason, understood it was to make sure that Lydia wasn't hampered in discussing anything by the presence of her family, it brought home to her the weight of what had happened. In the emotion, in the adrenaline rush of trying to save Lydia, and then being saved herself, she had been able to forget that this crisis wasn't the work of a day or two. It was months –
years
– during which Lydia had been suffering and she had been looking the other way.

Lydia had tried to commit suicide. The people in that room with her were trying to determine whether she was likely to do it again, and whether she would be allowed to go home. The fate of her own child was utterly out of her hands.

They'd been in hospital for hours. Jo had sent Honor home in a cab, her arm in a cast. Apparently she had arranged for Richard to pick up Oscar and Iris; a phone call had confirmed it. Richard had wanted to know what was happening, but Jo had said she'd explain later. It was difficult enough for her to deal with everything that was in her head without subjecting it to Richard's scrutiny. Honor would have told him all he needed to know. And probably added a few choice words in Russian for his girlfriend.

Jo smiled despite herself. They had saved Lydia, she and Honor together. And then Lydia and Honor had saved her. Whatever happened, that was something.
Where there's life, there's hope
, her mother used to say, crippled with MS.

Yet with her body aching, her daughter behind yet another closed door, she couldn't convince herself that everything was going to be all right. Or that it wasn't all her own fault that Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services were interviewing Lydia right now.

She'd never even noticed that her own daughter was gay. Or that she was in love with her best friend – the same best friend who spent huge amounts of time under Jo's roof. She'd known nothing about the bullying.

She got up and put the full cup of tea in the bin. Lydia had shut her out, yes. But she had been too busy to notice the reasons why. Too busy looking on the bright side, getting remarried, having children. Having an affair. She'd thought she'd been trying her best as a mother, doing everything she could for her children, but from Lydia's point of view, she was needy. Small and desperate.

What had she thought she was doing?

‘Jo,' said someone, and even before she consciously recognized who it was, her heart made a great thump of gladness and relief. Marcus was standing there in the corridor, in shirt sleeves and a tie, car keys in his hand. He opened his arms to her and she went straight into them, resting her head against his chest, and as he held her tight she realized for the first time what she had been doing.

She had been falling in love. That was what she had been busy doing while her daughter was going through hell. Not having an affair. Not carrying on with the neighbour. Not using a younger man for his body.