“Which hospital?”
“St Thomas’. I’m so sorry, Jack…”
I hung up and got out of bed, looking at Simone, feeling numb, my head pounding.
“I’ll look after Lauren.”
I nodded. “Thank you. Shit, the house…”
“I’ll message the security company. Go. Call me.”
I nodded.
“I love you.”
I froze, finding it so hard to swallow. All I could do was nod because any words would kill me too.
Chapter 15
Simone
Compartmentalising was something I did well. I’d had enough practice. Jack phoned me two hours after leaving to go to the hospital. Robert was dead. He’d been near Jack’s house when he’d intervened after seeing a woman being attacked by a man in an alleyway. He’d been stabbed, the knife nicking an artery and he’d bled out. Another passerby heard the woman’s screams and managed to accost the man; the woman called the police and Robert was a hero. A dead hero.
I’d cried and then woken Lauren, Jack agreeing that was what we should do if I could handle being the one to tell her. I’d sat in bed with her and held her as she’d sobbed for her uncle and then I’d lay down next to her when she cried herself back to sleep, not wanting her to be on her own when she woke.
The world still turned. I knew this because of the shit caused by Eliot. The day after I’d appeared in court and testified against him, I was in work cooking and entertaining a critic. That same day I signed the contract to open Blue. In the shower I cried over the woman Eliot killed, just like now, three days later, I cried for Robert and Jack and Lauren and the woman whose life he’d saved because she’d likely go through life knowing she had to live it for someone else too.
Three days later and we were still functioning in a reality that was coated by a haze of unspoken words, all of which lingered in the thick air carrying prods that they used whenever our minds managed to take shelter from what had happened.
From what was happening.
The media had gotten hold of the story.
It was a classic for them: war hero suffering from PTSD loses his life on home soil defending a woman. Journalists dug like treasure hunters into Robert’s past, finding out exactly what had happened in Afghanistan and that thing he’d never wanted to talk about became headline news.
Jack didn’t crumple. It didn’t become about him. He was just Jack; sad and upset and grieving his brother. He was Lauren’s rock and his mother’s solace, his father quiet but smile-less when they came to stay in my big house that should never have been the place for a wake.
Robert Rhodes had been in a building that had sheltered around fifteen women and their children, trying to get them to safety when the enemy had stormed in with their weapons. Robert had fought back, killing some, but he’d witnessed the deaths of too many that he couldn’t save. Couldn’t get out.
He’d hidden with three women and a small girl, keeping them quiet until the dead of night when there was no sound around and then he’d led them to safety, but the effects had changed his life. They’d have changed anybody’s.
Robert hadn’t given a fuck that he was a hero. He was just someone who wanted to help people. But that didn’t go far enough to ease his family’s pain. Nothing could.
“Hey, Lolly.” I wandered into the middle room downstairs which hadn’t contained much before apart from a pretty empty book case and a vintage sofa that had been reupholstered with a green velvet material. It had become Lauren’s downstairs room. It was where she danced, did her homework, attacked social media. Hid from us when she needed to process everything.
“Hey, Simone.”
She’d been crying again, something that had been happening intermittently. Jack found this the hardest to cope with. Seeing his little girl cry had torn him apart.
“What are you up to?”
She smiled but it was watery. “Sketching. I used to draw loads when I was little. Uncle Rob used to keep a drawing I’d done on him all the time.”
She showed me what she’d been doing. It was pretty good, a picture of me with with her dad standing cooking in my kitchen, good enough that she could pursue it. I momentarily thought of Phillip’s wife to be, an artist. The events at Toad Hall had been overshadowed by Robert’s death and the tyres, the graffiti, the near fire had all been put in a tidy box for me to deal with when I had space I my head, which wasn’t now.
“That’s really good.” We were both smiling in the picture. “Did you draw it from memory?”
“No. I have a picture on my phone. You didn’t see me take it.” She pulled out her phone, close by as always. “Here.”
