The Tell-Tale Heart Page 18

  The waitress appears. A sultry blonde in a tight blouse. Thank God. Somehow Maureen’s platitudes, vocabulary: tonight I’m finding them irksome. I’m being a snob, I know, but I long for the bracing intelligence of the kinds of things Helen might say; the ways she was never afraid to challenge me. Thankfully, Maureen looks good at least, I can tell she’s made an effort. Maybe she’s done something to her hair, or is it that colour she’s wearing – a vivid red? Clinging to her neat shape. It suits her.

  ‘You look very pretty,’ I venture. ‘Have you – changed your hair?’

  She flashes me a look, which I pretend not to understand. Her hand goes up to her elfin crop and she laughs.

  ‘My ex used to say I had hair like a Jack Russell. You know, the little terrier dog?’

  Ha!

  ‘He was like that. He used to tease me about being short. You probably don’t realise this but I’m only four foot eleven: I tend to wear heels. His nickname for me was Midget Gem.’

  ‘I’m sure he meant it affectionately.’

  ‘Trust me, he didn’t. But you’re lucky. Your ex-wife. You seem to be on good terms. There’s no way I’d do all that helping. I can’t imagine it. I’m not sure I’d even visit any ex of mine!’

  ‘Yes, Helen. She probably didn’t know what she was letting herself in for when she met me.’

  Are we flirting? In my experience, when women ask about your past relationships, they’re digging. Women like to flag up for you what’s possible, whether they’re up for it. They’re always pretending they can handle whatever you can throw at them. I ought to feel excited, encouraged.

  ‘So, the specials look good. I might have the sea-bass or the bream. What about you? What do you fancy?’ I say.

  She orders the steak. (Funny that, I had her pegged as a vegetarian.) Maureen asks me if I’ve read the book she left me. The one about the heart transplant woman and the changes she goes through. I have read it. Very carefully. To Maureen I say:

  ‘The changes she’s talking about are so . . . trivial, though, in the end. I mean, she didn’t like a certain vegetable – green peppers, was it? – and now she finds she does—’

  ‘And beer! And chicken nuggets—’

  ‘And she dreams of her donor a lot. And she, um, what was the other change, she starts to feel more like a man, walking differently, because her donor was a young man?’

  ‘She dreams the donor’s name! She dreams his name is Tim and no one has told her this!’

  ‘She could have heard one of the doctors mention this, during surgery. I mean, you did let slip to me my donor’s name, eventually, didn’t you, after that newspaper article.’

  ‘When she meets the family she feels a huge connection. As if their stories, the family histories and background, a very different one to hers, are forever joined.’

  ‘Could all be explained by her imagining herself to be different, couldn’t they? I do concede you end up thinking about your donor quite a lot.’

  The main course is brought then: a welcome interruption. Maureen is growing animated in her defence of this idea and I belligerent in my desire to fend her off.

  ‘Perhaps, yes, there may be some truth in the idea that one’s internal . . . something has shifted,’ I start. ‘The story you tell yourself about your own life, how you got to be who you are, because now you’re a person with a transplanted heart and that’s . . . different. But I don’t think I’m convinced by the idea that the heart itself carries memories in its cells.’

  ‘Lots of scientific ideas were not accepted at first. People thought electricity was magic, didn’t they.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘Anyway, I don’t believe you. You don’t want to give it a chance, this new thing inside you,’ Maureen says, peevishly. ‘You might feel differently if you met the mother.’

  A wrinkled party balloon from another table seems to be drifting our way. ‘I think you’re – if you don’t mind me saying – in denial about the ways in which your life has changed.’

  I sigh, as loudly as I dare. In denial. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. It turns out Maureen is a bereavement counsellor, when she is not being a transplant co-ordinator.

  ‘Sometimes I think you’re . . . afraid of me, in some way,’ she says now.

  I put down my knife and fork, wipe my mouth with my napkin. I wait for her to look up at me again. ‘Perhaps a glass of wine?’ I suggest. ‘After all, you’re not driving.’

  She shakes away my offer of the wine menu. I put it carefully back down on the table between us.

  ‘What would I be scared of?’ I’m trying to keep my voice playful.

  ‘Well. Because you know I know the donor’s story. That I sat with Drew’s mother, helped her fill out the forms while he – passed away. As if I’m some sort of go-between, you know, someone who can travel to the Underworld and back or something.’

  Like Eurydice, you mean, whom Orpheus brought back from the Underworld but couldn’t have because he didn’t show faith, he didn’t hold his nerve, he wasn’t willing to die for her? I don’t say this, of course. I murmur: ‘You must have to listen to a lot of sad things. It’s not a job I’d relish.’

  ‘Actually the things people say at the end are – ordinary. Those dying usually have the same regrets. Simple things. They wish they’d counted their blessings; told someone they loved them. That’s about it, really.’

  Suddenly I feel exhausted. The slowly deflating party balloon brushes my hair and lands on our table. I bat it away and it dribbles to the floor. I look across at Maureen with her hopeful dress and pink lipstick and rather nicely shaped hands, and I reach for one of them. ‘I’ve wanted to say: you really have helped me through this. The weirdest time in my whole life.’

  Her lip trembles.

  ‘You look – lovely this evening. You couldn’t look more lovely,’ I add.

  She smiles, and the coffees are brought, and we fall silent while the pouty blonde pours the milk and offers us sugar.

  ‘I don’t normally take sugar. I suddenly fancy some—’

  I spoon in three big lumps. I’m thinking: Great that I picked Maureen up from her house, that I’m the designated driver. Even better that she has to go back via Cambridge, arranged for her girls to stay there with a friend. I’ve wrangled the new flat all to myself tonight; I gave Ben money to go to some gig. I’ve even bought myself a double bed. Easiest thing in the world to suggest that we call in for coffee at mine before picking up her girls and then dropping her back to Ely.

  ‘I should text Cassie. Tell her I won’t be late,’ she says now, reading my mind.

  And that’s when it happens, when I snap out of it. A picture of her life with the girls. I see them both – I even remember their names, Cassie and Chloe, and I think of them, around at some friend’s, sitting with laptops on their knees, or watching TV, or curling up on sofas, giggling together, as girls do. Two girls I’ve never met. A rather sweet, mini-sized mother who perhaps makes a habit of throwing herself at losers. I have no good intentions towards this family, I realise.

  And I do something I don’t believe I’ve ever done. I pass up a chance for a random shag in favour of something odder, something awkward and unfamiliar. A second coffee, and a short conversation about the ways in which Maureen has helped me. A chaste drive home, a peck on the cheek at the door to her friend’s house, where she’s decided she’ll stay too, for tonight. A mumbled goodnight as she pauses, finger hovering at the doorbell, her face inscrutable.

  ‘I will always be grateful to you,’ I say. It’s a formal phrase, but it will have to do.

  Part Six

  Late spring. Dad died the autumn before. Tried shagging Poppy for a few weeks, with her smiley face big as a satellite dish, but it was no good. Nothing scrubs out Joanna for me. Mr Rutter, he’s all right, though he makes us laugh with his stammer, and I like the things he’s teaching us about poetry. John Clare, the poet from round here. How he isn’t as famous as Keats but he should be.
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  All the people I know who were in the year above me and left school last year are still on the dole. Dole. Dad used to use that word to mean an allotment. Your dole. You know, a share, a portion, of land. I think of that meaning, whenever Stokey says he’s off to the dole office. That’s your lot.

  I see Jo now and then, here and there. I always try and talk to her and she always looks shifty, looks from side to side, wondering who might see us talking.

  Once, she’s standing over by the playground in a cagoule with her little dog, Pippa, off the lead and it’s raining and I come in close, close enough to touch her, and Jo says – under her breath – not to mention what happened. It can’t happen again. She says I’ll get over her. She has her hood up, this orange cagoule, and her face inside it looks all teary and wet and she says: ‘I’m trying not to bump into you!’

  ‘Bit hard when you moved in six doors down,’ I say, and walk back to my house.

  I think of her telling me not to keep mooning around after her, to see some other girls. I text her sometimes and sometimes she answers. I tell her about Poppy. Good. I’m glad. XX she texts, and then seconds later: Hope it’s not too serious? Don’t forget me. X

  There’s a lot of people on the dole out here. You sleep a lot. Your life gets smaller, you don’t feel like going out. You’ve never got any money. Every day is sleeping, watching telly, playing on your PlayStation in your dark room, eking out your fags until your mum will buy you some more.

  I think to myself if Dad hadn’t been hit by a bale this TV and PlayStation world would have been his life, too. Indoors when he wanted to be out. Dark when he needed sun. Silent when he needed the sound of wind trembling through the sedge, the voices from Heart Radio in his warm and fuggy tractor cab, the birds chattering behind him. That life – his life – washed up at the age of forty-five because work meant everything to him. Well, it’s not every fucking thing to me. I’ve got Jo.

  I come up with a plan. When Dad’s life insurance money comes through, I put it to Mum. A motorbike. I’m not old enough but Stokey’s mate is selling one. There won’t be another cracking bargain like this, I say. Mum says surely a car makes more sense, but Stokey has already taken me to his shed to see it, his brother’s Kawasaki Ninja 250R, and I’m in love.

  Mum says it’s bonkers. ‘Why buy a motorbike you’re not even legal on?’

  And I say, ‘For the future.’ (I know that phrase will get her juices flowing.) And I promise I won’t take it on the road, not until I’ve passed my test, until we can afford the insurance, I’ll just practise in the fields near our house and get the feel of it. ‘I can always resell it,’ I tell her. A Ninja will keep its price, it’s awesome.

  Because we both know how bad my job application form is going to look. In the place of education: Permanently Excluded. In the space for ‘Qualifications’: two GCSEs from the Pupil Referral Unit, if I’m lucky – Mr Rutter says I can try. He’s letting me sit for them on my own, a year early, in a little room with a laptop he’s lent me and him to invigilate. A bit random, if you ask me. But I’m indulging him, he’s all right.

  I’m only at the PRU for about an hour a day at most. I don’t really want to hang out with the fat preggies smoking their heads off. The rest of the time is at home, it’s dark, you don’t see much sunlight somehow. Mum coming in from shift work at the hospital at strange hours and nagging you; every day just the same. Mum saying she’s worried I haven’t been grieving for Dad, no, not properly. I tell her to shut it. Then I say I’m sorry and she cries and we’re back to the same old same old.

  Mum folds in the end. She feels sorry for me, that’s what it is, what it always is with her. Gives me plenty of leverage. She’s seen me mooning around, listening to the Plain White T’s (‘Hey there, Delilah’ . . .) and she probably thinks it’s Poppy Martin I’ve gone daft over. Dad’s money amounts to a grand and she says it won’t last five minutes but she lets me take out half of it, and when she sees how excited I am, how I actually get up off the sofa and drum my fingers on table tops and just perk up and come alive again, attack my beans on toast in the old way, take a shower, stop this slow, half-dead, depressed lying about, slobbing around; I think she’s pleased. Or maybe just relieved. I start sitting in our front room in daylight and staring out at the fen, all keen again, watching the crows work the field, pecking at seeds in lines that always look so organised, that always make me think of rows of volunteers searching for a body.

  That bike is joy to me.

  It’s so beautiful, I’ve no complaints. It handles well, can take a beating, and can hit about a hundred if you’re willing to redline it. It’s easy to go eighty on that bike, and ninety is just a bit more twist. I don’t care that I can’t take it on the road yet because I’ve nowhere to go anyway and I’ll take my test soon enough – just as soon as I can afford the insurance – and I’m sure to pass. I love the purr of it under my arse, like a big cat. I love the wind tearing at my face, the smell of fuel and speed and dirt flying up (mostly I don’t bother with the helmet; I mean, I’m not on the road, am I). I park the bike outside my house and I try not to notice the curtains flicker six doors down as I stand there running my hand over it, over the red paint, covering it with a tarp, or polishing it with a duster. If I didn’t know for sure Jo was watching me I’d lie down on the driveway and kiss it.

  I know she’s watching me all right. Sometimes in the night, as I’m dozing off, the little beep and the flash that means she’s thinking of me. U haven’t told anyone have u Drew? she texts. U must stop texting me like that. But if she really meant it, she’d be silent now, wouldn’t she. Wouldn’t text back at all.

  I’m counting the months until I’m sixteen. They drag past like snails. I take my exams on my own in a room just as Mr Rutter suggested and I’m doing it before everyone else – special dispensation or something – and it’s fun in the end, I probably did OK, I end up thinking. Harvest time comes along at last and I apply for some work picking beets but it seems that’s all sewn up. Polish, Eastern European, working in great gangs, living together. They do it every year and the farmers round here don’t want to take on a skinny lad like me when they can get hulking workers with sunburned skin the colour of toast who go at twice my speed.

  This one guy, Poppy Martin’s father. He was Dad’s boss. I go and see him.

  He’s this great big obese guy, got a little dog and he also does falconry, all dressed up, squeezed into his khaki. I don’t know if it’s a hobby or what but I think to myself: He owes me. He owes Dad. So one day, the day I go to ask him, I see him standing on his land beside an old tree that’s lost its head, you know, been recently pollarded. And he has this huge falcon on his arm – this awesome bird with a wingspan bigger than his shoulders and an evil-looking beak, and he sort of gives a toss of his arm as if a signal of some kind and the bird streaks up.

  I just wait. I watch it, in the sky. There’s a red paper kite attached to some food, some kind of tripwire thing, and I watch the bird go for it. Swoop. Fast. Snatch. He’s dead on, like an arrow to a bull’s eye. And then he sweeps down again and onto Farmer Martin’s arm. Falconry. It’s three thousand years old, you know, people have been training birds like that, to take out songbirds. To kill beautiful things in mid-air. You know what it makes me think, watching this little scene? Farmer Martin has all the power. Like he has a weapon that really proves he’s the boss round here. That bird, it’s really horrible. It’s got the nastiest of watchful eyes and a sort of black moustache that makes me think of Hitler. I think it’s a peregrine falcon. Its beak gets so close to his sunburned face, it could peck Tom Martin’s eyes out. But it doesn’t. Instead, dangerous birds do Tom’s bidding, keep their talons in and land on his leather glove. I hate that man.

  ‘You got anything?’ I shout. ‘Fieldwork? Picking, whatever?’

  He shakes his head.

  ‘I’m a Beamish. Bill’s lad.’

  He shakes his head again.

  You wanker, I think. You owe me.
Blood money, for Dad. You’re such a shit. You made no effort whatsoever to argue for him, to say he’d been a good worker, twenty-five years on this land, instant redundancy the minute the farm got new management: you said nothing. When Dad was my age he worked like a navvy in the drownings (that’s Dad’s old word for the Fens). He said his face was scratched to buggery: every time he leaned over, his face got stabbed by the bents of the cut grass, and the soil is grumpy, another old Fen word, means it’s hard, it doesn’t work easy.

  I walk away. Give Martin the finger. Pass the fields full of tented stands and dark blokes with their old-fashioned jackets and their cheap mobiles and Tesco carrier bags of docky and their strange language. Bastard, that Martin. Couldn’t even be arsed to answer me.

  The woman at the job centre takes one look at my muddy jeans from where I tramped across the fen and and asks did I do any farm labouring work? Then it’s all stupid questions about further courses you can attend and what kind of work you’d like to do – I mean, the answer is yeah, brain surgeon, please. She finds out I’m only fifteen. I’m not entitled to job seeker’s allowance anyway, she says.

  I start counting the weeks, not the months, until my birthday. Then the days. Like a prison sentence. Like Willie Beamiss, sad about his pa, drawing that little hangman, but forcing himself to think of the future. Go forward, not back. Scratching out the days with a knife, until none at all are left and the longed-for day is here.

  Part Seven

  Alice predicts that I won’t last one day in a modern school and filling out the application, reading up on this SCITT idea – School-Centred Initial Teacher Training, starting in September – I begin to fear she’s right. But I’m buoyed up by my recent success with Ben. He and I go to visit the Head of an independent sixth form college in Cambridge and I explain that my son has been having a ‘year out’ and would now like to continue his education by ‘taking a few A levels – he has AS photography (apparently) so probably it would be good to go for an A level in that, and we thought – oh, I don’t know – maybe Politics and Business Studies?’