The Magpies by Mark Edwards Page B

else – work, his other friends, his family. Lucy and Chris were the least of his concerns.
    Three weeks after the accident, Heather and Kirsty pulled some strings – calling in a few favours from consultants they knew – and got Paul transferred to St Thomas’s, which meant that they could see him every day. Heather usually spent her lunchbreak sitting with him. Now, when Jamie spent his shift beside Paul, he did so knowing that Kirsty was close by, working, dealing with her own patients. It made him feel comforted – and also gave him some perspective. Theirs was not the only unfortunate situation in the world. There were many people in the same boat. When Kirsty told him about the sick children she had to deal with, he remembered that there were a lot of people worse off. It didn’t make what had happened to Paul any less painful or easier to accept, but it made him feel less alone.
    Paul’s condition continued. He was stable. There was no sign of a recovery, but nor did his condition worsen. As Paul slept on, Jamie and Kirsty’s life returned to a normal routine – normal but for the shadow of Paul hanging in the background. They started to cope. Jamie realised he was grieving, even though that grief was for somebody who wasn’t actually dead. Grief was another thing that only time could aid. By the time summer ended, he and Kirsty felt like they had re-entered the real world. Now all they wanted was for Paul to join them.

Nine
    Making love felt like an affirmation of life. They hadn’t had sex for weeks, but suddenly, one evening, they looked at each other and a moment later they were pulling off their clothes and falling onto the bed, Kirsty pushing herself backwards with her heels as Jamie trailed kisses from her ankles, up her thighs, tasting her arousal, moving up to her breasts, his hands grasping her shoulder blades as their mouths met in a hard kiss. He had to be inside her, right now, and she raised herself up to meet him as he pushed into her, as deep as he could go, the headboard banging against the wall, Kirsty scratching his back, pulling him in, grinding her hips in a circular motion. He bit her neck. She pulled his hair. They turned over in a blur of limbs and she rode him, rocking back and forth with her hands gripping her own hair, his hands holding her breasts, pushing upwards with his pelvis, wanting to disappear inside her, wanting to get all of her inside him, so they could devour one another completely. Kirsty bucked and trembled and shouted his name. He rolled her off him and they fell off the bed, landing on the floor with a thump. Kirsty turned over onto her hands and knees and Jamie entered her from behind, both of them collapsing as he came. Kirsty twisted around to face him, kissing him as they lay in a tangle on the floor.
    She had stopped taking the pill.
    From that moment on, they made love whenever they could. They didn’t sit down together and talk about it in hushed, serious tones. They didn’t say, Is this the right time? or Can we afford it? – they just knew it was the right thing to do. It was what they both wanted.
    Then, two weeks later, they received the first letter.
    Kirsty was having her early morning bath. Jamie was still in bed, just waking up, dreams receding from his mind in which go-karts collided. He got out of bed, going over to the mirror to look at himself, out of damage-assessment habit rather than vanity. His body was in pretty good shape, caused by a combination of loads of athletic sex and all the working out he had been doing, putting his weights to good use. His face, though, was a different matter. He had bags like coal sacks beneath his eyes; he looked pasty and tired, his skin like the underbelly of a fish. He looked the way he did at the end of a long winter. It didn’t seem real that just a few weeks ago summer had blazed.
    He wandered out of the bedroom, naked and needing to pee. Passing the front door, he looked down and saw that an envelope