'You're frightening me, Joe, stop it. Let me see me boy, please, Joe… Please…'

She was crying now, she was almost hysterical, and still he could not answer her. She was begging him, begging him to tell her everything was OK, and he couldn't.

How did you tell someone you loved about something like this?

Where the fuck did you even start?

Freddie sat beside Jimmy and watched his cousin's grief. It was so awful to witness another man's complete desolation. And he was feeling the same way. He was feeling the loss as acutely as Jimmy but he couldn't tell him that.

They had been together in the car and he was taking stick about being a granddad and they were laughing together, like they used to before. Then the call had come, and he had watched in amazement as Jimmy had swerved the car across the road before dropping the mobile, parking, and then starting to cry.

'What on earth has happened?'

He had for a few moments hoped that Ozzy was dead, that Ozzy had been wiped out but he also knew that that happening would not cause this kind of grief. It had to be Maggie, and he thought that she might have crashed her car, that fucking flash Merc she swanned around in. Or, at the least, that she had experienced an accident of some sort.

Freddie had nearly passed out, when after what seemed an age, Jimmy had turned to him and said brokenly, 'It's Jimmy, my little Jimmy. He died, Freddie, he died last night.'

Then he had cried, loudly and painfully and he had punched the steering wheel, and then he had cried again and Freddie had sat beside him in shock and wondered what on earth could have killed a dear little boy like that.

And he was a dear little child, and he had used that child to destroy his mother and now he was dead. That dear little Jimmy, with the bright smile and the funny little ways, was dead.

The world had gone fucking mad.

Lena and Joe felt guilty, and as the hospital room filled up with the family they felt even worse. He had died in their care, he had died while they had slept in the room next door. How were they ever going to get over that, how would they ever sleep again? Know another happy day without that little boy beside them?

Maybe they could have helped him, maybe they could have avoided it happening if they had only checked on him.

Maggie was sitting there, and she had not said a word. Rox was holding her hand and trying to comfort her as best she could.

Dianna was crying with Kimberley, all the time shaking their heads in disbelief.

Jackie was smoking outside. The hospital was all no smoking, and as always, she put her own needs first. She was watching the world go by, and every now and then she took a nip from the bottle of vodka she had placed in her large shopping bag.

A nurse walked into the visitors room and said quietly, 'Can I get you some more tea?'

Lena nodded. Tea gave you something to do, it made you move, made you respond, and she knew that as they were sitting there, Jimmy was on his way and she didn't want to face him, or his parents.

Jimmy's parents. As usual they had forgotten about them. Jimmy was more their family than his own. Since Freddie Senior's death, no one really saw them any more, least of all Jimmy.

'Has anyone phoned Jimmy's family?'

No one answered.

She sighed. They would know soon enough, why break their hearts before you had to?

Freddie and Jimmy were walking into the hospital when Jackie called out to her husband. He squeezed Jimmy's arm and walked over to his wife.

She walked him away from the busy doorway of the A and E and lit a cigarette. He saw she was pissed, but for once this didn't bother him. He was still in shock about the child dying.

This was his child, his boy, not Jimmy's, his, and he was dead. The thought had been careering around his head for what seemed like years and was in reality only minutes.

Jackie was really crying, sobbing, and he couldn't be angry with her. 'Ain't it terrible, Fred? How lucky are we, eh? Our Little Freddie might be a fucker, but imagine if he died.'

She was crying loudly, and she was in pain and he knew how she felt, so he instinctively held her to him. Even Freddie knew she was crying this time with just cause. They clung together for the first time in years.

'My poor Maggie, she looks like a fucking corpse herself. What a thing to have to go through! What a thing to have to live with!'

'What happened, Jack, do they know yet?'

Jackie looked up at her husband and said, her voice cracking, 'Don't you know, Freddie?'

He shook his head. 'No, what happened?'

'He put a plastic bag over his head, and he suffocated.'

Glenford arrived at the hospital and went straight to Jimmy. He pulled him into his embrace and Jimmy broke down crying. It was strange watching the little man holding on to Jimmy. Jimmy was huge, and his shaking shoulders just made it look all the more outrageous.

Glenford was crying with him and as Maggie watched she envied them that closeness, because Jimmy deserved that comfort. Unlike her, Jimmy had nothing on his conscience where that little boy was concerned.

Nobody else in the room did. But she was eaten up with guilt, seeing him, seeing him so small and so vulnerable and knowing he was never going to open his eyes and smile and laugh, never going to hug her again. The guilt was too much for her to bear.

All the time she had tolerated him, because she had kept a secret that she had felt was like a lead weight inside her chest. And now it was all over, and instead of relief, which is what she had yearned for all those years, she felt a deep and agonising hatred for herself.

Her poor mother and father had aged in hours. She saw the way her mother kept picking at her sodden tissues, how her eyes kept darting around the room as she waited for someone to accuse her over what had happened, and she knew that the poor woman blamed herself.

The same woman who had loved Jimmy Junior when his own mother had been incapable of it, who had shouted and argued with her, called her unnatural, and who had tried to make his short little life as bearable as she could, knowing that his own mother found it impossible to care for him.

And Jackie, Jackie kept on and on about her Rox having a baby, and how when God closed one door another one opened. The stupid drunken bitch had four kids and she cared for none of them, not really. She was like all drunks, she only cared about herself and how she felt and what she wanted. Her life was about her and Freddie, and she had spent years trying to gain the love of a man who despised her.

Freddie had destroyed her and he had destroyed her sister and she knew he had enjoyed every second of it.

She wondered, then, if he was feeling the loss of the little boy he had used as a weapon against her. Wondered if he was feeling remorse about all the years he had caused her so much heartache. She hoped that bastard never knew another happy day, she hoped all his kids died and he had to sit in a hospital knowing their lifeless bodies were feet away and he could never again touch them or love them.

But where was Freddie now, anyway? He had not been in this place and why would she expect any different? She wanted to kill him, scratch his eyes out, make him pay for the way he had caused her to feel about a child of her own body.

A child who was now dead and gone to her. Now she would never be able to make up to him for the first years of his life, when even feeding him had been anathema to her. But she had loved him, she had just been frightened of him and what he could cause if the truth of his conception had ever come out.