“And when will you know?”
“Tomorrow. Scan.”
•••
It was Friday.In the morning, she used the fourteen-day free trial of a VPN to tune in to the UK news. Surely there was no hope Labour could win outright. Yet Adam had told her about the legal experts the party had assembled and briefed—the meeting rooms(even the catering) prebooked for long days of coalition negotiations. It was still possible for Labour to end up the biggest party and Ed Miliband the next PM.
The stirring music of the BBC’s election coverage blared out from her laptop. She felt a sudden homesickness for London, watching the high-speed footage of the city by night: the Thames, Parliament, the tower of Big Ben, all lit up. In four minutes, David Dimbleby said, he could reveal the contents of his envelope, the results of the BBC’s exit poll: “Tantalizing.”
“Exit pohle,” Dan mimicked.
“Exit powl,” Coralie said in her flattest, broadest Australian accent.
“If neither David Cameron nor Ed Miliband can command a majority on their own, is there going to be a place for the Liberal Democrats at the cabinet table?” Dimbleby wondered. “Or for Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP? Or Nigel Farage and UKIP?”
“Dickhead,” Dan said.
Big Ben chimed. “Here it is, ten o’clock.” Dimbleby turned to a giant screen. On it, David Cameron looked like a sock puppet with googly eyes, or a boiled egg with a face drawn on. “And we are saying the Conservatives are the largest party. And here are the figures which we have. Quite remarkable, this exit poll. The Conservatives on 316. That’s up nine…Ed Miliband, for Labour: seventy-seven behind him at 239.”
“Okay.” Coralie shut her laptop. “Fuck you too.”
•••
When they gotinto hospital later that morning, the room looked different. The blinds were still down, and the sheets were in disarray. Their mum was not in the bed. The door to her bathroom was slidacross, closed. Jerome, the stocky nurse from the Philippines, came in with a trolley. “Morning.”
“Morning, Jerome,” Dan said.
At the bed, Jerome whipped off the disposable protective undersheet and quickly put on a new one. Coralie lowered her voice as quiet as it could get. “Did she have a bad night?”
“Listen, she was running to the bathroom that fast….” He shook his head. “She can’t run, okay? No matter what. I will clear up any accident. Any! But I can’t fix a broken hip. Okay? No running.”
“We’ll tell her,” Dan said. “Thanks, Jerome.”
“She’s a lovely lady.”
“You’re a very good man.”
Jerome nodded on his way out. “Safety first.”
The door to the bathroom slid open and their mum crept through. She was a skeleton, so small her cotton gown had been sent over from the children’s ward. There was a murderer inside her mum’s body.
“Hi, Mum.” Coralie put on an upbeat voice. “What time’s your boyfriend coming to see you?”
“Dr. Ainslie,” Dan translated.
“Natasha’s taking me to the scan,” their mum whispered. “Pop down to the nurse’s desk and tell her I’m ready to go.”
Without the presence of their mum and the pressure to be cheerful for her, the room seemed more scary, and the situation more bleak. Coralie opened the blinds.
“It’s so fucked up.” Dan frowned, his eyes welling.
Coralie remembered how, when he was young, he’d cried so much, and so passionately, tears had almost bounced off his cheeks. Their father had told him that if he wanted to cry like that, he could do it in someone else’s house. Once, when they’d lived in Canberra,they’d lost him—five-year-old Dan. He’d gone to cry at the neighbors’. “Have you told Dad about all this?”
“I haven’t spoken to him,” Dan said. “Have you?”
“No! Has Mum?”
“I doubt it.”
