The Tell-Tale Heart Read online

  ‘I don’t believe in heart transplants!’ I shout after his departing back. My voice barely rises above a croak.

  A different nurse, a young Asian woman with a lisp, comes to tell me that a ‘deep dithspair’ is very normal after major heart surgery. Indeed, after any major operation or ‘near-death exthperience’. I stare at the little mouth while she’s speaking and ponder that strange phrase and how readily people use it. Near-death experience. She’s not the one whose diseased heart is lying lonesome and abandoned in a hospital bin somewhere.

  She’s taken pity on me and got another doctor to prescribe Valium. I want to sleep, but, I tell her, I need it to be dreamless.

  My second visitor is the transplant co-ordinator. Cheery, cute little woman I’ve already had far too many dealings with, called Maureen. She sits beside me, knitting. She has the hair texture of a Jack Russell terrier and she’s small for a grown woman, more the size of a leprechaun. Maureen says I can write to the ‘donor family’ if I want. My throat doesn’t feel as bad today. I grunt. I can form words again but I see no point in wasting effort on talking to a midget. She’s not allowed to reveal details of the family, she says, unless they permit it, and we must respect their privacy at this ‘tragic time’, but I could write to them and she would forward the letter, without revealing to me their address.

  ‘I could show you a sample letter, if you like,’ she continues, undeterred. ‘You know, an example of what kind of thing to write.’

  ‘I’m on the AHRC Research Council for American Studies. I think I could write a short letter without help, thank you.’

  She giggles. After a pause she looks up from her knitting.

  ‘Remember those forms you filled out – psychiatric evaluations to see how you would fare after surgery on this scale? I remember you came out feisty enough!’

  ‘Feisty. That’s a woman’s word.’

  ‘Yes, it’s funny, that. How we say it about women more than men.’

  ‘It’s from the German. A little dog. Touchy and quarrelsome, over-sensitive. It’s hardly a compliment.’

  ‘Is that so?’ The needles clack while her diminutive brain seems to contemplate this. ‘Overly sensitive? Men. That’s right. They’re easy to wound, in my experience. Needy. I think women are stronger, emotionally.’

  I’m about to reply to this ridiculous generalisation but I spy the glorious figure of Alice through the glass door to my room and Maureen follows my eyes and hastily stands up, stuffing the knitting into her bag.

  ‘That must be your daughter. What a lovely-looking girl!’ Maureen reminds me to take my pills and sweeps out, nodding to Alice as their paths cross in the doorway.

  I think at first that Alice is simply standing there, wringing her hands in an old-fashioned way; then I realise that there’s some obligatory hand-washing lotion for visitors and Alice is obediently disinfecting herself. She bursts into my room, tries to hug me, stands back in horror at the sight of me and then starts blubbing. I immediately find my own eyes filling with tears. Then we laugh, glancing at each other, and she offers me a tissue.

  She looks beautiful: her usual get-up of some girly kind of skirt or dress and clod-hopping Doc Marten boots, masses of black eye make-up (now all over her face) and bouffant blonde hair, like a young Brigitte Bardot. The pain on staring at her – pain, did I say? But it’s joy surely – the pleasure, the delight, it’s like a pinching, a twisting in my chest: it does actually hurt. My heart seems to be responding, racing, it’s definitely beating faster as I gaze at her. It’s working, then? Such a strange, delirious thought: the new organ responding to my feelings.

  ‘Oh, Dad!’ Alice says, plonking herself into the chair beside my bed and succumbing to another bout of weeping and sniffing. ‘You look really young and pathetic in that nightie!’ she adds.

  ‘Marvellous. I must wear a fetching hospital gown more often.’

  Unlike Helen, she’s brought useful things. She’s been to my flat in Highgate and got my laptop. She’s bought me pyjamas and a nice pair, too, with a T-shirt instead of a shirt, not the old-man, button-up kind. Socks: warm, cashmere, the right size.

  ‘Come on now, poppet, what’s all this crying about?’ I say, when she doesn’t seem to be able to stop. ‘Look, I’m fine! I’m here. It’s all been fine.’

  ‘Did you know I was here, all the while they did it? I slept in the waiting room. They kept giving me updates but I never knew if they told you I was there. I had to go back to Cambridge afterwards so I didn’t get to see you when you first woke up.’

  This takes a minute to sink in. Alice, who once accused me of being the World’s Most Self-Centred Dad and having No Fucking Interest Whatsoever in her life, and failing to keep one single appointment that Helen organised with the school about her GCSEs, A levels or university choices . . . Alice, bothering to come to the hospital and keep me company – though I didn’t know it – while I was having the operation. I don’t know what to say. I can’t even meet her eyes.

  After a while, minutes perhaps, I stretch out my arms to indicate to Alice that she’s to hug me carefully, not to touch my chest, to mind the IV and the wires. We manage an awkward embrace and she pulls away, smiling at last. Her little-girl face with her big blackened eyes and her upturned nose.

  ‘I did think . . .’ She’s dabbing at her eyes with a shredded tissue but not making much impact on the huge smudges of war-paint. ‘Well, you’d been so ill. And then there was – you know. The strain. All that trouble. And the doctors told me it was – well, you know. Not everyone . . . some people reject it.’

  ‘So far so good, poppet.’

  I tap my chest, trying to sound upbeat; trying to sound like a confident, reassuring father.

  ‘Mum said . . . she said you looked terrible.’

  ‘Charming! She looked very pretty, I thought. Has she lost weight?’

  ‘Dad! I don’t think so. She’s probably been worried about you. We all thought – God, I really thought . . .’

  She bursts into tears again and the sobbing is long, and goes on some time. I tell her to find my clean handkerchief in my folded trouser pocket, in my locker, which she does, and starts to calm down.

  The discovery that Helen has been worrying about me is equally astonishing. We’ve had telephone conversations, yes, and I suppose I had told her about the deterioration of my heart and that the chances of a transplant coming along were slim, but she had simply told me that my self-pitying was getting tiresome and now that we were no longer married she didn’t have to listen to it, and I’d taken her at her word.

  ‘Who was that woman?’ Alice asks, once she’s composed.

  ‘What, the knitting one? The woman with the haircut like an eighties feminist?’

  She smiles; nods. ‘Yes. Is she a friend of yours?’

  ‘Jeez, Maureen? I don’t think she’s my type, do you?’

  Alice grins. ‘Well, she’s pretty! Petite. But, I guess: no. Your type is more – you know. You like them to look like – an achievement.’

  ‘Cheeky! Anyway. Maureen. The teeny tiny transplant co-ordinator. She’d come to tell me about the donor family.’

  Alice’s eyes widen. There’s a big blob of black eye-stuff on her cheek that I’d like to wipe away for her.

  ‘What about them? Who was it, do you know?’

  ‘No. She can’t tell me that. Confidentiality, I suppose. But . . . I have a hunch. I think it must have been a woman.’

  ‘Can that happen? I mean, does – the sex of the donor matter?’

  ‘Apparently not. You can have a woman’s heart. Or a woman can be transplanted with the heart of a man. The heart is an organ with no gender.’

  ‘Amazeballs.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘Why do you think that, then, what makes you sure your donor is a woman?’

  ‘Well, I fear my IQ has dropped.’

  ‘Dad! Seriously.’ Alice laughs and the black blob of make-up falls from her cheek.

  ‘Now I have the
heart of a weak and feeble woman . . .’

  ‘Isn’t it, “I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman but I have the heart of a King”?’

  ‘So it is. It’s just that—’

  I stop and consider. I find I can’t continue.

  Alice leans forward: ‘Do you feel, like, really weird? Having it inside you?’

  ‘No. No, of course not. I feel – fine.’

  ‘You don’t look fine.’

  ‘Well, I know I could do with a shave.’

  ‘No, it’s not that. You look weird. Odd to me. Different.’

  ‘Well, poppet. You haven’t seen me in a while. And I have just had major surgery. I expect I’m not looking my best.’

  I smile but close my eyes. The effort, the unaccustomed effort of talking like this to my daughter, leaves me breathless. I lean back onto the pillow.

  ‘Dad, am I tiring you out? Is it too much? I can come back early next week—’

  I try to sit up properly; I’m slumping. Some backbone would help me.

  ‘You know how I used to joke that your mother had three thousand six hundred and twenty-two feelings and I had the requisite five basic ones which have an evolutionary purpose? Because, quite frankly, most of the time I didn’t know what the bloody hell she was on about? Well, since coming round from surgery I’m finding myself having others, another . . . perhaps the sixth emotion.’

  ‘What’s the sixth?’

  ‘Surprise.’

  ‘Surprise? Is that an emotion then? Separate from these five basic ones you’re on about?’

  ‘Yes. Happiness, anxiety, sadness, anger and disgust. It’s none of those. So it might be . . . wonder. Perhaps wonder. Which is, arguably, an aspect of happiness, so not in fact new.’

  ‘Yes. That’s OK then. Phew. Not a new one at all, just a variation on a theme?’

  ‘Still. It’s irksome. I don’t know what to do with this new feeling. Or feelings.’

  ‘But Dad. There’s nothing to do with feelings, is there? You just feel them.’

  This sentence sits between us.

  ‘Ah,’ I say, eventually. ‘And there’s me thinking I had to intellectualise about them.’

  She smiles. ‘Maybe it was a brain transplant you needed after all?’

  I sit up, trying to shift the mood back to the familiar one, the old one. Me joking and batting away, Alice expressing things in Technicolor, rich enough for both of us. ‘I am on heavy medication of course,’ I say. ‘Might account for my new-found eloquence on the subject of emotions.’

  ‘You’re funny.’ She tries to ruffle my hair and goes instead for a kiss on the cheek. Both are painful, but not unwelcome.

  I’m exhausted. My hand strays to my chest and I see Alice notice this.

  ‘Does it hurt then? Do you feel, like, weird there?’

  ‘You’ve asked me that. No, no, honestly, it’s fine.’

  I tap the bandages through the hospital gown. I know that I have a scar on my chest, described by Burns as ‘single longitudinal sternal splitting’ but I haven’t examined it. With the various wires and drains in me, I think again of aliens. Yes, an alien creature is right, because who on this earth who is human carries a heart inside him that belongs to someone else?

  I try a different tack. ‘You know when I was about nine I went on this big trip to London, went to the Science Museum, my mother took me. And they had this giant pumping model heart. Bright red and blue. A plastic model. Do they still have that? Have you seen it?’

  Alice shakes her head.

  ‘Jeez, I hated it. It was bigger than a shark and suspended, I think, loud and booming, this amplified beat. It was probably demonstrating Harvey’s principles of circulation or something but I remember turning on my heel and running out, feeling sick. Cushie, my mother, was completely bewildered. What on earth was wrong with me? Scared by a giant booming heart.’

  Alice grins at me. She’s looking hugely reassured now that I’m talking nonsense and sitting up properly again.

  ‘Why did your mum take you if it was scary?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Part of her educational drive for me, I suppose. She wanted me to have a more rounded education, she said. She thought my school, my father too, I suppose she meant, was obsessed with my just passing exams and winning cups and achieving things.’

  ‘Did you? Win things all the time?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You never talk about your mum. I’ve never even seen a photo of her.’

  ‘No? Cushie. A big lass and a bonny lass and she likes her beer. That was the song. Her real name was Constance, I don’t know why she was always Cushie. You’re lucky you didn’t get it – Helen hated the name.’

  I change the subject then, remembering to ask Alice about Cambridge. The joys and horrors of having to read Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Why it is that envy and other emotions are always depicted as female? Girton, and how it’s more relaxed than the other colleges. Punting and the price of wine and whether you can get Weil’s disease from swimming in the River Cam. The strange warm weather we’re having.

  At one point she flicks through Transplant News and asks breezily: ‘So, when do you think you’ll be back at uni, Dad?’

  ‘Didn’t your mum say? I’ve got a sabbatical. After that business – well, I don’t have to face the hearing now. I don’t have to go back until the autumn semester next year. I was so ill.’

  Her eyes are on the magazine. I watch her for a moment and then find myself saying:

  ‘Maybe I won’t go back. Ever.’

  The thought is delicious. An absolute shock, but thrilling.

  ‘Huh?’

  Alice’s equally shocked expression gives me pause. Did I really just say that?

  ‘Well, I just mean, I don’t have to go back. There is the possibility of doing – other things.’

  Alice stops flicking through Transplant News and darts me a look.

  ‘What other things? What the – what would you do with yourself?’

  ‘I don’t know. You’re right. Yes, of course. Though . . . maybe I could take early retirement. I don’t know. It’s just occurred to me.’

  Alice puts the magazine down and gives me a frown exactly like one of Helen’s.

  ‘Maybe not a good idea to make, like, major decisions when you’re in this – you know. Stage,’ she says.

  ‘When I’m not in control of all my faculties, you mean?’

  She grins. ‘OK, I’m not bossing you around! I just think it’s a bit sudden, that’s all. You love that job. You’re like – obsessed with it. It’s always been everything to you. That’s all.’

  ‘Right. I know. It just popped into my head. That I could, that’s all I mean. Nothing’s stopping me. And there’s my book. I could work on my book.’

  ‘Your book. What is it again?’

  She stops talking, aware that a nurse has opened the door to my room and is hovering. It’s Nurse Adam again, back on shift: powerful smell of Lynx aftershave and a florid spot on his forehead. He beams me a big smile; must have bad news. Alice stands up and picks up her denim jacket, which clanks noisily with its clash of brooches and badges and metal buttons.

  ‘No, don’t get up, Missy, a quick word with your father.’

  She sits back down.

  ‘I asked Dr Burns,’ Nurse Adam says, in a confiding tone. ‘Apparently the cavity around your heart is still big. The new heart has lots of space around it so the chest drains will have to do more work than usual. Sorry. So that means the big one has to stay. I’ll take the small ICD drain out, that should make you more comfortable.’

  Alice is biting her bottom lip, her eyes huge. I pat her hand. ‘Don’t worry, lots of space around my heart. I don’t think that’s bad.’

  The nurse nods, busying himself around me and then turning slowly to give my daughter only a glancing look. (He must be gay.)

  ‘Is that why you want your laptop? Looking for another job?’ Alice asks, nodding towards it.

>   ‘Oh, I don’t know. Just emails. Looking up stuff. Jeez, it’s just boring here.’

  ‘Read a book!’

  She laughs. Touché. The times Helen said that to her, over many years, catching her on Facebook when she should be doing her homework, or was lying in bed texting on her mobile.

  ‘Dad!’

  Alice is staring at me, making me wonder what my face is doing.

  ‘Mum said she’d come tomorrow. Visiting time is over, sorry.’

  ‘I know. Marvellous! I’ll be fine.’ I hesitate, while a hive of bees inside my head hums incessantly.

  ‘Is it just me or is that extractor really noisy?’

  Alice agrees that it’s noisy.

  ‘And, you know, people keep talking to me and I can’t quite hear them with that sound going on.’

  She seems disappointed; was she expecting me to say something else?

  She takes my hand before she leaves and kisses my cheek with a waft of some light girlish perfume: the exact smell of a wooden lolly stick, warm from the sun. That damned snake inside my chest uncoils and leaps as she does so; I feel it struggle inside its basket as her breath touches my cheek. Blackberry bushes. Sherbert pips, the smell of grass on school fields. I’m just so glad of you, I want to say. Or, what did I do to deserve you? Or, look at you, all grown up, the strength of you, the solid, sunlit, living thing that you are with all that hair and those big eyes and crashing noise and daft boots. Thank you. Thank God for you. And then an obvious thought, one I’m surprised I never had before. If only my mother could have met you and seen what I produced. Look, Cushie, see how I did something right: look at good and solid Alice.

  And my eyelids are heavy and Alice is right, I’m very, very tired. I don’t know when she leaves. I don’t remember her going. Maybe I took a sleeping tablet.

  And then, in the middle of the night, I suddenly wake up coughing. The ward is lit with a peculiar blue light and there’s a high whine everywhere, like they are trying to scare off youngsters, or bats, with their sound warfare. And I see a couple of black dots on my hospital gown and wonder what they are, are they specks of blood? Alarm – there is a button on the wall by my hand. I reach for it, and then stop.