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RACHEL
Bristol Children’s Hospital smelled of cleanliness and sickness in equal measure. The only times I’d
been there before had been to meet John after work.
We travelled up from the ground floor in a tiny elevator where Wallace and Gromit’s recorded
voices told us to ‘Mind the Doors’, over and over again. Shock-eyed and sleep-deprived parents got
on and off, checking the sign in the lift for their destinations, fingers running down a list, stopping at
‘Oncology’ or ‘Nephrology’.
Amongst them were a mother and baby boy, she wearing a burqa, even her eyes veiled from the
world with mesh. Her baby was in her arms, a tube running up his nose, taped in place, his wide
brown eyes staring at the ceiling lights. I wondered how she was able to comfort him when she was
confined to that garment, when their eyes couldn’t even meet. Did she rest her uncovered fingers on
his cheek? Was that skin-to-skin contact enough for them both here, in this hospital?
My heart, hurting for my own son, ached for her too.
The elevator disgorged DI Bennett and me onto the fourth floor.
The decor was wincingly bright, themed in blue and yellow, and featuring aquatic motifs, but
somehow all of that felt hopeful; it made my sense of anticipation swell.
In the vestibule outside the elevator doors, where the floor-to-ceiling windows offered us a
tumbling, chaotic cityscape view of Bristol, DI Bennett told me that he’d been in the woods with Ben.
He couldn’t quite meet my eye, but he held open a door for me and then guided me along the corridor
with a light hand on my elbow that was touching if not welcome.
I was met in the corridor outside Ben’s ward by two doctors, who politely ushered me into a room.
A nurse was there. She offered me a cup of tea. The chink of china was the only sound in the room as
everybody waited for her to pour it.
Ben had been close to death when they found him, they explained to me, his core body temperature
dangerously cold, but they’d warmed him up, and he was stable. Battered and bruised, very weak, but
stable.
Relief and happiness that he was alive overwhelmed any trepidation I might have felt. They could
scarcely hold me back.
‘He’s still in a dangerous condition,’ they wanted to tell me before they let me see him. ‘Do you
understand that?’
I said I did. I left the tea to go cold on the table.
Do you want me to describe our reunion?
I can tell you that a nurse was outside the door of Ben’s room and that her hand reached out to touch
mine when I arrived, just brushed it lightly, even though we were strangers. We exchanged no words
but she held the door open for me.