The Tell-Tale Heart Read online

  ‘Wow! Did you plan that before – was that what you—’

  ‘No. But just yesterday I woke up and thought, it feels – right.’

  ‘Wow. Big changes. I suppose, that’s what happens. Major surgery. Makes you reassess things?’

  ‘No, no, I don’t think that’s anything to do with it. Just feels right, that’s all. I find I’ve no desire to go back to London. I rather like it here.’

  She looks surprised. ‘You haven’t actually seen any of it, have you?’

  ‘Well I know that, but, I plan to.’

  ‘You won’t be able to drive, either, for a while, you remember that, don’t you? A couple more weeks, possibly more, Dr Burns said. I can help you with shopping but, you know, walking will be good for you, too.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  I wonder how old Maureen is. She seems younger today. She’s wearing an old-fashioned yellow dress. It looks like the kind of dress Alice would get from Oxfam and wear with her big boots and a leather jacket but on Maureen it’s . . . worn without irony. It all adds up: pink lipstick, brown freckled skin, cute haircut. I don’t want to open this letter in front of her but we both know it’s burning a hole in my lap here. She glances at it, at me; stands up.

  ‘Now, various nurses will call in for the first day or two but after that you can pop over to the hospital for your obs. Observations. Get your dressings changed and talk to the cardiologist. See how your – chest – is healing. Well. I’ll leave you to it.’

  She picks up her bag from the back of the chair. Puts the key down on the table on top of the lease.

  ‘Well, I’ll see myself out. Give me a shout if there’s anything you need. The physio should be in later today. Cleaner comes Tuesdays.’

  The front door makes a squeaky new click behind her. I have the letter opened before it closes.

  Dear Mr Robson,

  Thank you for your letter. Maureen gave it to me. Drew was a lovely boy and we all loved him very much. I don’t know what more to say right now. I am in shock. I never wanted Drew to carry a card. I still don’t know what I think about that – but it was his own decision so when it came to it I thought I’d better carry out his wishes. Though we didn’t give any other organs. But they did ask us. Eyes. Cornea. I said no. My husband died only a little while before so I’m on my own now. Well, I’ll say cheerio now and thank you for getting in touch. I hope you continue to make a good recovery. Perhaps that can be a small comfort to me. It’s too soon to say.

  Yours sincerely,

  Ruth Beamish

  Ruth Beamish.

  Cornea. Eyes. She didn’t want him to carry the card. It is a sad letter. Pathetic. Cheap paper, old-fashioned writing, blue ink, probably a fountain pen. I read it several times. I turn it over. There is an address – Black Drove, Littleport. Nothing more. The picture I had, of the cosy father-mother, Barbour-coats and Range Rovers, melts away. There’s only a second-hand motorbike, and a boy and a long, lonely road: this new word, a Fen word. A drove.

  Just after midnight I return to the box Maureen left when I feel sleepy but scratchy too and discover with a leap of gratitude the screw-top bottle of red that she brought me. I pour myself a mugful – can’t find the glasses right now – and lie stiffly on my back on the outside covers of the student-sized bed.

  As I close my eyes a young man is staring at me. I open them again; the skin on my face prickles icily as if someone just touched it. My heart thumps.

  It’s a long time since I’ve been afraid of my dreams, afraid to close my eyes. I fight the drowsiness but the moment I go under he’s there again, the same man, the same fierce stare, and other things. A barn owl, wings outstretched, flying into my face. A lake with a light leaping on it – some kind of glowing insect that turns into Jiminy Cricket from the Pinocchio movie. A man astride a strange roaring horse, or is it a motor bike? Nooses in a theatre. A bale of straw on fire. Graduation Day again at UCL, or is it King’s College, Cambridge? Anyway, this time Daisy is on the platform, hair fanned behind her in an Indian headdress, wearing a short yellow dress and a sash with LITTLEPORT written on it like a beauty queen. She’s weeping and weeping, she can’t stand up and accept the rolled-up qualification being held out to her. Her name is called and the mortarboard won’t stick on top of her headdress, she’s furious with it, weeps afresh. She sinks to the stage and disappears through a little trapdoor, right at my feet.

  I open my eyes, switch on the lamp beside the bed and reach for my mobile. At the other end a mechanical tone rings and rings, somewhere far away. I’m about to abandon the call when a voice picks up.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Daisy?’

  ‘God. Hello. Patrick.’

  ‘Sorry. Did I wake you?’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Sorry. It might be late. I’m really sorry to call so late, if it is, I just—’

  ‘What the fuck do you want?’ Her voice sounds clotted with sleep. Intimate. And young. Wary, rather than furious.

  ‘I just – wondered – wanted to say. How are you?’

  ‘How am I? At this hour? Fuck!’

  ‘It’s just that . . . well. I was thinking that—’

  ‘If you’re calling to ask me to drop the harassment case, forget it. I already have. Don’t you read your emails?’

  ‘Oh! No, that wasn’t why I was calling, but, well, thank you.’

  ‘I didn’t do it for you, right? I did it because. For me. Because I need to move on and being angry with you, hating you, thinking about you, is not helping me. OK? So fuck off and go back to where you came from, I never want to—’

  And then she is crying, and her snuffling and gasping breaths fill the line. The phone is warm against my ear. I listen for a while helplessly. I’m ready to click the off button. I’m so ready to click the off button. I force myself to stay connected. I listen for as long as I can stand, and then I interject.

  ‘Actually Daisy, I – you remember, I’m not in London? I had an operation. I’m still here in Cambridge. I’m not really in touch with the department, I haven’t been keeping up . . . but thank you. Actually I rang to say something else.’

  Her sobs continue but she struggles to get a hold of herself. Then a soft, breathy silence and I realise that it would be cruel to prevaricate. That her held breath might denote . . . hope. (I never crush a relationship dead, I once boasted. Meaning: I always leave something in case I want to pick it up later.)

  ‘I just wanted to say sorry. If I – I mean, I think I did behave badly. You are young, and . . . well. That’s it. I really am sorry.’

  A crackling pause. Her shock is palpable. Then: ‘Why the fuck? At this bloody hour! The sound of your voice. I suppose you’re on some medication that makes you nicer, or something!’

  ‘Daisy. You’re a lovely young woman with so much going for you—’

  Click. A cut-off sob as Daisy puts the phone down on me.

  I lie on my back on the bed and stare at the white ceiling of my anodyne flat, leaving the phone on the pillow beside me. Not even a spider for company. You asked for that, I tell myself. But still. There is some satisfaction.

  Once, as a boy of seven or eight, the teacher had made the entire class miss playtime because no one would own up to writing a rude word on the blackboard. And I told my mother at home that weekend in outrage, railing about the missed playtime, the making us all suffer, I think I was actually pacing round the kitchen, balling my hands into fists, while she was prinking the edges of a pie with a fork. I stared at the tied bow on the apron at her waist. Her back was still to me as she said in a measured, floury voice: ‘Well, that child should probably listen to his heart. We all make mistakes, do bad things from time to time. That boy – whoever he is – will feel better if he just owns up and says sorry.’

  Did she know it was me – that I wrote the bad word? I was glad she was preoccupied with making a leaf-shape in the pastry and couldn’t see my face. How clever she was! I was more outraged at
the injustice of it than if I’d been innocent.

  ‘Sorry’s just a word. It won’t change a thing,’ I said, sniffily. ‘It’s done. We still missed playtime!’

  ‘It’s just the right thing to do,’ my mother persisted.

  I never saw the sense of Cushie’s advice until now.

  ‘So, you’re in grand fettle! How are you feeling, in yourself?’ Dr Burns asks, two weeks later, after the battery of tests are completed. We’re in his consulting room and he seems unhurried. Like he might genuinely want to know. I hesitate. That phrase: in yourself.

  ‘I imagine you’re a wee bit curious about your donor,’ he continues. ‘That’s natural. It’s your transplant co-ordinator’s job, mind, to protect the family.’

  Has he been talking to Maureen? That meeting she was rushing to, the day I met her in the hospital grounds and she mentioned not taking my file home with her. Was that about me? I suppose I’m quite the phenomenon around here – only the third time a transplant has been performed this way.

  Dr Burns is watching my face. ‘Notice any changes? Feel . . . you know, any personality changes, food preferences, that kind of thing?’

  ‘No, nothing at all,’ I say.

  ‘No – strange cravings, or new tastes or behaviours?’ Burns asks.

  ‘No, not at all. Should I have?’

  ‘Some transplant patients mention these things, that’s all. Vivid dreams – new dreams they haven’t had before.’

  ‘Well, dreams,’ I concede, self-consciously. ‘Yes. I have had some funny dreams. The medication, no doubt.’

  Burns pounces. He seems thrilled, leans forward, stops staring at the screen in front of him.

  ‘What do you dream of?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Barn owls. Flying. Littleport. Nooses seem to feature a lot.’

  ‘Wait on this. There’s a whole theory. That patients having heart surgery change, take on the personality of their donor in some way, and maybe their dreams, their memories too. There’s quite a well-known study and a book by this woman who started craving chicken nuggets and green peppers and what do you know – turns out her heart donor was a young lad who loved those foods.’

  I’m not sure how to reply. Is he expecting me to take this seriously?

  ‘Do liver transplants report the same kinds of changes? Or is it just those who’ve received a donor’s heart?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, yes. Quite. Only in China, apparently, where the liver has some of the same cultural significance that the heart has for us! Ha.’

  I have the strange sense that he’s disappointed. That – rationalist though he may be – he almost wanted me to disprove his scepticism.

  ‘Maureen Gotobed has some funny ideas,’ he says, as if I should know that it was Maureen who mooted this. ‘She’s not a doctor of course, and this – cellular memory, the concept that the heart carries memories, has a wee “brain” as it were – a good many folk seem to go for it. And it’s strange for her, knowing both the family and you, I suppose.’

  Gotobed? Maureen’s called Gotobed. What a name! My back aches. The skin on my chest, at my wound, itches. I have a scraping feeling in my throat and aching shoulders and, well, I’m tired of hospitals. Of medication and the smell of hospitals and death. Of strange theories and general strangeness. I don’t want to come here any more.

  My little flat and my advent calendar – yesterday I opened the second window and ate a Dairy Milk chocolate: that’s where I want to be. I woke in my skinny bed and felt eighteen again: a student. The chemical smell of the cotton sheets, the plainness of the slatted window-blind and the clean new day in front of me. Lonely, at first. Profoundly lonely. Alone. With nothing to do, nothing to attend, no one to meet. Like a leaf on a river, floating towards its end. And then something I never felt back then – excited. Not a leaf at all, but maybe the river itself. Why so linear, such a linear image? It’s not all progression, progression, forward, forward. I know that.

  Burns is watching me closely, while pretending he isn’t. He’s around the same age as me, I realise now. His ugly great conk, his beer gut notwithstanding. Might be younger, even. Funny how when someone has power over you, you think of them as older, like a parent. But, see, I’m right, doesn’t time sometimes reshape itself, move in other directions? And, boy, did that man – who lifted my heart from my chest in his gloved hands – have power over me.

  ‘Cellular memory is one theory. Much more likely, though, is that very occasionally,’ Burns is saying, and he’s animated, it’s as if he’s been wanting to get this out in the open, ‘and I’m categorically not saying this was the case for you, mind, very occasionally, in major surgery there is a wee moment where lack of oxygen to the brain might cause . . . might bring about what we might call the most minuscule, infinitesimal amount of brain damage – I’m talking a split second, mind, but these neurological shifts could account for personality changes.’

  He seems to be waiting for me to reply.

  ‘So you haven’t noticed any personality changes? Unfamiliar feelings?’ he asks.

  I watch his hand hover over his keyboard, as if he longs to type something, to record ‘Patient’s Response’.

  ‘No. Sorry. I’ve always been a rationalist,’ I answer.

  He sits back in his chair and spins it around a little.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I do understand the – mystique around this particular organ. The special status,’ I offer.

  ‘When I was a student, no, a junior doctor. When you see your first heart, beating there. It’s a grand thing, and pretty! Vivid, you know. Like something you might see in a coral reef.’

  I struggle to imagine this.

  ‘And you think of the past, of how crude operations must have been – or of battlefields, that’s what I thought: you know, spears and swords and, aye, face-to-face combat – people would have seen chests ripped open, and – you know, they might have seen the heart still beating inside a body, so of course it being the only thing moving, the only wee thing that seemed to be alive, so that might explain it, as you say, the special status. Things like the idea that if you ate an enemy’s heart you gained his strength . . . if you know what I’m saying.’

  ‘Yes.’ I do.

  A pause while we both think of this, picture someone eating a heart. ‘Are you signing me off? Will I need to come back?’

  ‘Not entirely, no. You will have to – it will be many a long day – you’ll have a lifetime of monitoring, mind. But it has all gone remarkably well. And that means, you’ll be pleased to know, you’ll be seeing a lot less of me!’

  ‘I’ve put my flat in London on the market. An agent is showing people round for me today. I might stay in the area. The Fens, I mean. London doesn’t seem so appealing suddenly.’

  Burns looks surprised, but he takes my lead; there’s no need to talk about it. ‘And what will you do, these daft days?’ he says and, when I don’t understand, adds: ‘Christmas? Go on the bash, now you can?’

  He grins. His pale blue eyes seem watery, and tired, suddenly, and I wonder – it’s the first time I’ve given Dr Burns’ private life consideration – if he’s been up all night. Perhaps on another six-hour, life-saving operation.

  ‘I haven’t given it any thought,’ I say. Then awkwardly add: ‘I don’t think I’ve said thank you, yet, have I, doctor? Not very good at that sort of thing. I’m sorry if I was – I’m sure I’ve been – a difficult patient. But I am. I would like to. I am grateful.’

  Burns’ ginger eyebrows shoot up again and disappear into his hairline. A tap on his door rescues us both: a nurse to tell him Dr Bryan is here to see him.

  We shake hands as I leave and I notice how cold his hand is, despite his overheated office. Cold hands, warm heart. Impossible to stop these phrases from forming in my mind; ones I never knew I knew present themselves hourly. Just leftover metaphors from the Galenic model when hot-bloodedness or cold-heartedness was thought to be literally true. The four humours. Which type would Burns be?
Phlegmatic, no doubt. And Maureen, maybe the same. Or choleric perhaps. (All that yellow.) And me? Melancholic, I might have said, once. But now – ah, that’s the rub. Now, I’m not so sure. Sanguine maybe. Pleasure-seeking. I was always that.

  Arch rationalist I may be, as Helen says, but what Dr Burns alluded to, this idea of cellular memory, this account by a transplant recipient of changing, taking on the qualities of her donor, it did rattle me for a second or two. Or perhaps it was the thought of Maureen holding this belief, considering this valid. Maureen Gotobed – quite a sexy name, now I’ve got over the strangeness of it, all ruffled and newly knitted and colourful – talking about me to Dr Burns, the realisation that my behaviour, my reactions, every aspect of my recovery and my response to the operation has of course been discussed between them. Of course, of course. I’m a phenomenon. And they have the advantage in that they know the other side of the story, the donor’s side, the bit I don’t, and long to discover. They know the story of my heart.

  Daisy believed there was no such thing as falling in love. A construct, entirely. Daisy of the baby-fine blonde hair so full of static – hair that provoked a boyish desire to rub a balloon against her head and watch it stand up. The language of love: all a load of bollocks, according to Daisy. The concept of falling, of giving up will – a human construction to support the basic desires of lust and gene advancement.

  Did I agree with her? Lying on that faux-leather couch in my office in UCL with a chair shoved against the door and my pants and trousers thrown over a chair, the blind down against daytime sun and the phone off the hook and my foolish sperm making their ridiculous journey to oblivion aided by that last, convulsively powerful thrust; yes, all Daisy said seemed true. Genes want to advance themselves and people want to fuck. Sex is a problem to be solved. People also want to dress this up in nicer language. Women in particular (if you ask me) perhaps need the romantic gestures and terminology so they feel themselves to be less like little hamsters on heat raising up their arses for you on the rare monthly occasions when they let you near them.