The Tell-Tale Heart Read online

  Is this it, then? Is this the moment my new organ fails and all that work, all those efforts, prove to be for nothing? I didn’t choose to be here – who does? (I didn’t ask to be born, I remember Alice screaming once in one of those flaming teenage outbursts, and Helen standing her ground and shouting back: you! Don’t give me that, you were kicking me from the day your first cell formed! You were begging to be born!)

  I’ve made a cock-up for sure, an almighty cock-up, I’m fifty years old with one ex-wife and one ex-mistress and one daughter and one son I hardly see and one crappy job I no longer want and a case hanging over me and, God knows, nothing much to show for myself.

  I am barely breathing, I stare into the room, willing my eyes to accustom to the strangeness of the light: the pale blue wall opposite, the square light switch, the pimpled vent above me on the ceiling with its collection of dusty fluff clinging to it. Do human ears prick up, like dogs’? My breath ruffles the sheets and seems to tear round the room in a sudden draught. Is there someone else here with me?

  ‘Who’s there?’ I ask. Really, my heart – his heart – the damn organ is going ballistic. Racing, pounding. The hospital room emits its terrible whine.

  I cough again, a great wrench at my throat and lungs. ‘I know you’re there,’ I whisper. Show yourself.

  When I was about ten, I had a religious phase when I prayed incessantly and under my breath in all situations. Dear God, please let me do well in the exam. Dear God, please let me score a goal. Dear God, please make me a good boy and help me to stop doing this. Dear God, please don’t let Mam die. That was the point I stopped, of course. When I realised He wasn’t listening to the mutterings of a boy in County Durham whose father was snoring on the sofa, still in his suit with the Telegraph over his face, and whose mother had suffered a car accident and lay on a life-support machine. I remember it now, though: prayer. The sense of quietly talking to myself and how comforting it was. Did I believe even back then that I was really talking directly to God, I wonder now?

  I remember it like this: I knew that there were different parts of me. There were conscious thoughts like ‘Twelve times ten is one hundred and twenty’ and deeper, inchoate thoughts that I couldn’t reach. And in praying I briefly heard these different selves quietly chatting to one another.

  Another consciousness inside me. When Lucy was pregnant with Ben I went with her, one time and one time only, for an antenatal visit, and I watched them put that green slime on her belly and slide the sonar over her and we listened together to the baby’s heartbeat, strong and loud in that room with us, amplified and strange in its watery home, marching inexplicably into my life. I thought of breathing, and deep-ocean sonar, and whales. I tried not to think of how I would keep the news from Helen, and of the impact of another baby, with another woman, on my life with my new wife.

  ‘I knew weeks ago,’ Lucy said, in the car as I drove her home, ‘because I just had a feeling of another consciousness inside me.’ That was the exact phrase she used. I had forgotten it until now.

  I cup my hands over my ears. I reach for the switch on the lamp beside my bed, but I knock over a plastic cup on the table and feel the cold trickle of water under my palm. ‘Are you trying to escape?’ I whisper. Damn fool. The lamp casts a yellow glow and the room changes, reshapes.

  I breathe in, quietly, softly, then more forcefully. I watch my chest rise and fall. It was a dream. That’s right. That’s all. I had a nightmare. That’s why I woke up.

  I’d been looking up Littleport on my laptop after Alice had gone, and the detail I remember was that five people in this village in Cambridgeshire were hanged in 1816 for rioting – it seems the only fact about Littleport worth noting in Wikipedia. A bad idea to read that just before falling asleep. The drugs make dreams loom with hallucinogenic vividness once I’m awake again.

  And suddenly I am staring at a stage, but I know it isn’t Graduation Day, that instead some terrible moment is poised to happen. Five nooses dangle. I know exactly who the nooses are for, know their names. Say something, a voice cries out. Comfort them. ‘See you later!’ I croak, peering into the shadowy stage, searching for a glimpse of the people waiting to be hanged. There is no one there. I am already too late. Only five nooses, swinging. Black shadows. My last words, the last thing they hear from me, the sum total of my offering: that one feeble phrase. See you later.

  I put my hand up to the TV screen, angled on its movable metal arm above my bed, hoping to distract myself with that. Then I think better of it. A nurse slides past the glass door to my room; I see her shadow. I think of Alice again and the surprise discovery of her kindness in sleeping here at the hospital while my operation took place, and Helen’s too, in visiting me. I picture both of them walking away down the ward. I always seem to be calling out something, some forgotten request. I hate to see women walking away from me. People I love. I want to see them turn around, force them to twist their chins over their shoulders, glance one last time at me. Not see you later, but goodbye. Kiss me again. Come back early or never come.

  ‘I’ve brought you the Cambridge Evening News. It’s a – it shouldn’t happen. But I thought you’d better see it.’

  Maureen’s agitated. She takes the folded newspaper from her bag, and sighs. She seems reluctant to hand it over but she does; she has carefully marked the relevant page with a yellow sticker. Marked the page! What kind of person would do that? This Maureen must have time on her hands.

  ‘The local press,’ she says, crossly. ‘There are protocols. It must have been that young journalist. It’s really annoying, though.’

  Doctors at Papworth have carried out another successful beating-heart transplant.

  The recipient, a fifty-year-old Professor of American History from North London, who received his new heart three weeks ago at Papworth Hospital in Cambridgeshire, is said to be doing ‘extremely well’.

  The technique, used successfully twice before in the UK since 2006, involves keeping a donated heart warm and beating throughout the procedure, rather than packing it in ice for transport. The process gives doctors more time to get hearts to the recipient.

  Donor hearts are normally given a high dose of potassium to stop them beating and are packed in ice, which helps to keep them in a state of ‘suspended animation’.

  But there is only a four-to-six-hour window for the organ to be transplanted into the recipient, which could be a problem if a heart becomes available in a remote area – many organs in the UK are transported by road. Under the new system, doctors hook the heart up to a machine that keeps it beating with warm oxygenated blood flowing through it.

  This gives doctors time to examine the heart for any damage and the chance to better match the organ with a recipient.

  The heart can be kept outside the body longer and reaches the transplant patient in much better condition. In this recent case, the donor was a sixteen-year-old youth, Andrew Beamish of Littleport. He died in a motorcycle accident, in a remote and rural part of the Fens.

  ‘Ah.’

  For a few moments I say nothing else. Then, ‘Ah’ again.

  A sixteen-year-old youth. Andrew Beamish of Littleport. A motorcycle accident. A remote and rural part of the Fens. A buzz goes through me: a tiny electric shock.

  ‘It’s disastrous,’ Maureen says, breathlessly. ‘I don’t know how they found out, the hospital doesn’t release names, and there is usually an understanding in the media too. I’ve had to – I’ve been on the phone all morning. But I think it’s fine for you to know now. It can’t be avoided. And since it wasn’t me who told you.’

  A young boy. Younger than Alice. Younger than my son Ben.

  I am very silent. Maureen puts the newspaper back in her bag and sits tentatively on the edge of the bed, careful to avoid my legs.

  ‘It’s American Studies actually,’ I mutter, for something to say.

  ‘Sorry?’ Maureen says.

  ‘My subject. Not just American History. Literature as well. Though it’s
the history bit that interests me. Custer.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘General Custer and his last stand? The Battle of Little Bighorn?’

  ‘Oh yes. I think I saw that. Was it a film?’

  ‘Yes. There have been various – films.’

  ‘Your wife not been in to see you today?’

  ‘Helen?’

  Can’t be arsed to tell her we’re divorced. Maureen wouldn’t even tell me whose fucking organ is nestling in my chest. I sit up.

  ‘So,’ I mutter. ‘A boy. Strange that I was convinced it was a woman’s heart. And I did somehow know he was from the Fens – from Littleport. Is it near here then?’

  ‘About an hour away. So you’re very lucky. The family was able to make the decision quickly – Drew carried a donor card. Which was when you got the phone call—’

  ‘Drew? You called him Drew?’

  ‘A slip! Obviously I’m not supposed to tell you anything more. That’s really – I’m sorry.’

  ‘But can a sixteen-year-old carry a donor card? How is that legal?’

  ‘Yes, any child can register with the Organ Donor Register. But a parent has to give consent of course, at the moment . . . when they’re deciding.’

  A remote and rural part of the Fens. A sixteen-year-old boy. Drew. A memory of Ben pops into my head; it must have been the last time I saw him, round at Lucy’s flat in Stoke Newington. About fifteen, I guess. He was wearing a horrible oversized navy dressing gown that clearly belonged to a man, one of Lucy’s boyfriends, no doubt. He’d just come out of the shower with his wet hair sticking up in tufts, and it was his long white legs, nearly six foot he was, already; it was his skinny ankles, the memory of those now, that make me want to cry. The bones fierce and fine like a delicate white cuttlefish.

  ‘I have a son about that age,’ I tell Maureen. She’s watching my face closely. She takes her knitting out of her bag. New wool – yellow.

  She nods. ‘I saw his sister, remember, the other day.’

  ‘Half-sister. Different mothers. I don’t see Ben much.’

  Maureen nods again, a polite nod, she’s clearly uninterested. Two children by different women is hardly remarkable. Trying to give a stranger even the briefest glimpse of the carnage that this simple fact of my two children, two women, concurrently, contains.

  Lucy told me Ben has a serious dope-smoking habit these days. He didn’t stay on to the sixth form, though it was obvious he was clever enough. He wanted to get a job and save up for a car but in fact that didn’t happen. She was hinting, as she always bloody was. Could I help with driving lessons? I said that I couldn’t. Then Ben had had some small troubles this past summer. He was arrested during the riots – not for looting, luckily, but for lobbing a bottle at the police. He spent the night in a cell but was one of those lucky ones released the next day with no charge. I didn’t go down there to see him. It was Graduation Day at UCL. I had to sit on a bench with the American Studies department gazing solemnly out at students for hours and hours of annual hand-clapping.

  Lucy had to collect Ben from the station. Couldn’t I have come with her, she whined down the phone, just this once? How important was another graduation day; did she have to do every single fucking parenting thing, every time, on her own? She said it was upsetting, seeing him shuffling out of the cell in paper trousers; being handed back his clothes and watching him have a cotton bud pressed inside his mouth. Then she said, her mood veering into hysteria, as it always did: Oh well, much use you would have been. You would probably have laughed. All those years of gangster trousers nearly falling off his arse and finally Ben gets to experience the real thing – give up his belt! – and he looks like an idiot.

  ‘If you’re planning to write and express your thanks to the donor family, do let me know,’ Maureen says. I guess she thinks that now that I know it was a youth, a lad of sixteen, I’ll feel guilty and long to express my appreciation. It’s her job to liaise between me and the bereaved family: I suppose you can’t blame her for trying. She has her coat on ready to leave and the huge knitting bag strapped across her, like a postman. Albeit a tiny pixie postman. From Tiny Town.

  Dear Donor Family, I am finding it very difficult to know what to say to you. A terrible truth: your good son’s heart is probably wasted on a man like me.

  Helen visits again. She must have asked Alice’s advice because the presents are a little better: a large new T-shirt, from Marks and Spencer, in my size and white. A sort of golf-jumper, in grey wool, that isn’t very me, but it’s the thought. Giant box of grapes and a bag of Doritos, which she thinks are probably a Banned Substance for Transplant Patients and puts back in her bag. And she agrees to go to my flat tomorrow and pick up a few other bits and bobs for me, my post and stuff, and better still, next week, she’ll drive up here in my car, and leave it for me while she takes a taxi and train back to London, so that I have it here at Papworth for when I get out.

  ‘Wow, Helen, that’s very – that’s beyond—’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. Who else would do it, if not me?’

  Silence then for this little grenade to explode. She’s right. Not one text from Lucy. Nothing from Daisy. (Daisy! Why would there be?) Nothing from Ben. Nothing from the department. Well, I know this sounds self-pitying but I’m going to think it anyway: Who in the world except my ex-wife and daughter cares about me?

  Helen crosses her legs in her – rather flattering, I’ve just noticed – skinny jeans, and coughs.

  ‘It’s all looking good,’ she says, after a longish pause. ‘I asked Dr Burns – each day the threat of infection gets less. That’s the main thing, isn’t it, apart from rejecting it? Infection. Yes, that’s it. When you leave here they want to progress you to a flat near by where they can keep an eye on you.’

  ‘Progress me?’ Am I in an episode of Scrubs then?

  ‘Well. They do tell you things, Patrick. I get the feeling you – do you keep rolling over when they’re talking to you? Closing your eyes? Making rude breathing sounds?’

  ‘Rude breathing sounds?’

  ‘They’re only trying to help you. That woman, that lovely transplant co-ordinator, or is she a counsellor of some sort, anyway, the one with the Mia Farrow haircut? She said . . .’

  Ha!

  ‘The thing is, Helen,’ and as I struggle to say this, suddenly I have the most horrible, disgusting, terrifying feeling: that the thing inside me just leaped into my throat and is beating there, is trying to get out, it’s like a trapped bird or something—

  ‘Fucking hell! Help me! Fuck, Jeez! It’s trying to get out! It’s escaping!’

  Dr Burns happens to be doing ward rounds and appears instantly at the door of my room. A ponytailed nurse appears from nowhere, running on her squeaky rubber soles.

  ‘Christ, fuck, it’s leaping out!’

  The doctor hesitates and steps forward. The nurse picks up my wrist and takes my pulse. Burns stares into my face, so that I can smell his breath and see the dark hairs in his nose. He checks my ECG and assures me it’s stable.

  ‘Just a few wee palpitations,’ the Scottish bastard says, taking a step back. ‘Perfectly normal.’

  ‘But in my throat! It was beating in my throat, it was trying to fucking escape!’

  ‘Well, you’ve had a sternotomy, haven’t you? We sawed open the bone of your chest and wired it back together. You’ve got the wires to prove it. Your heart’s no longer fixed into place – that’s the space around it that we told you about – so it will quite literally move around now, and you’ll be able to hear it beating in different places.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ Helen says. ‘Patrick.’ She sinks down on the chair beside my bed. ‘They sawed you open. With a saw,’ she says.

  My other hand is still at my throat, clutching. Beneath it, the damned heart is really thumping; beating there right at the site of my Adam’s apple, pushing, forcing. Helen pours me some water from a jug on top of my cabinet, and hands over the plastic cup. Her eyes, searching min
e, seem to be swimming in tears. I drink the water with my hand at my throat, unable to hear what she’s saying, or understand. Only when I’ve forced a few hard swallows do I feel reassured – I’ve pushed it down, I’ve shoved it back down my throat like a big pill that won’t be easily swallowed. I rub my hand over my throat and the beating quietens.

  Helen breathes out loudly, forgetting herself and reaching for my hand. I haven’t held Helen’s hand in a long, long time. It’s soft, and strangely young, and my fingertips feel cool against its warmth. She no longer wears her wedding ring. That’s fine, that’s as it should be, of course, of course.

  ‘How come you’re not at work?’ I suddenly think to ask.

  ‘It’s Saturday.’

  Ah. From somewhere in the back of my brain I hear the Grandstand theme tune on the telly, see myself running downstairs in my stockinged feet to watch it with my dad: Saturday. Grandstand, banana sandwiches and a lemonade shandy. And from long ago, after Mam had gone, I feel the power of his attempt to use this like balm, this routine: TV and food, the radiators on, the smell of beer and male feet in socks. Comforting.

  ‘Alice said . . . she told me about your work,’ Helen says.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘It was bound to happen one day, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Thanks a bunch. Your belief in me is touching.’ I don’t know why, but I’m grinning.

  ‘Well, modern girls. They don’t just shut up and put up, you know.’ She bats at me with her hand, striking my arm lightly, and adds: ‘And you’re still managing to look pleased with yourself. You look like that photo of you at the top of your slide in your back garden when you were a baby. Two years old, waving your willy around. Look at me, look what I can do!’

  This makes me laugh, Helen remembering that photo.

  ‘OK, OK. But Daisy was hardly a girl, Helen. She was a grown woman, a mature student of thirty-four. And harassment. I ask you. Where do they get this from? It was a relationship. I ended it. Possibly a mistake.’