The Tell-Tale Heart Page 8

  Susie Spencer reached into that darkness like the white finger of a winter tree-branch and saved me once again. And so I endured that unspeakable year and when the gaol door opened, Susie was good as her word, and had learned the date, and stood outside waiting for me. We defied her father, who cut off all funds and never spoke to her again.

  My Susie was bold and fierce and original. We was married the day I quit Ely Gaol, 7 July 1817.

  Part Three

  ‘Before you know it, you’ll be swinging your legs over the side of the bed and getting ready for your first walk outside the hospital.’

  ‘Jeez, you think so?’

  It’s Maureen again, the knitter. She’s nodding towards the physical therapist, a stocky local girl who has left me in a state of near collapse after asking me – no, seriously, wanting me – to cough, and cough hard, meanwhile holding a pillow over the incision in my chest to ‘splint it and muffle the pain’. Muffle the pain! Muffle the bloody pain. Hold the wretched thing, more like, lest it pop out and do a triumphant dance over the entire ward.

  Anyhow the malicious fascist has gone now, leaving me with Maureen the minuscule knitter and her murmurings about happy futures and, what do you know, her plans for Christmas. Christmas! We’re still in November surely, or have I been here longer than I think? A hilarious piece in Transplant News (so bored now that I’ve resorted to flicking through it) tells me that ‘patients may resume sexual activity after their transplant. In the first few weeks after surgery, however, they might find that pain along the incision will limit activity to a certain extent. During the first eight weeks after surgery, any activity or position that causes pain or pulling across your chest, such as bearing weight on your arms, must be avoided.’ This helpful instruction conjured up such a powerful image of Daisy sympathetically lowering herself onto me, carefully bearing the load of her own featherweight form on those slender freckled arms, I wonder if I didn’t groan out loud. Certainly the departing physical therapist – a pasty Fatso as they invariably are – threw a startled glance over her shoulder at me.

  Daisy. I have not been thinking about Daisy. Daisy is over. She was over months ago – months before she submitted the offending letter, that vicious trick that she’d kept up her sleeve, the lurid emails she’d carefully saved, with me twittering on about her tiny waist and huge breasts and other deeply embarrassing things, not to mention the poetry – those tossers on the Complaints Board would have had a field day, laughing at how I’d tried to pass off quotes from Keats’s letters to Fanny Brawne as lines of my own.

  The day I finished things with Daisy, she burst into my office, where I had another student, a very promising young American post-grad called Elizabeth, sitting with me.

  The door opened with no warning. Daisy’s hair was filled with static, rising from her head like a shock of feathers.

  ‘You wanker! You’re dumping me – by text?’

  ‘Elizabeth, that will have to be all for today, thanks, yes—’

  Elizabeth scuttled to gather up her papers. We’d been making great progress but this wasn’t the time to mourn that. She dropped her bag, offering me a glimpse of a girlish bra as she leaned forward to pick it up. She was practically running. But I thought I saw a smile, too. Perhaps we could resume our discussion later. On the other hand her smile might mean that the girl couldn’t wait to tell her post-grad group.

  ‘Daisy, I only said—’

  ‘You said you needed to talk to me. I’m not an idiot. I know what you’re going to say.’

  ‘Well, do you feel things are going well between us? Is this your idea of how you’d like things to be?’

  ‘You created this, you bastard! You make me angry, you mess me around the whole time, I never know where I am with you.’

  And then she was crying, and I admit it, some little part of me withdrew. It was the tears. I hate tears. Tears make you the villain and the unfeeling one, regardless of what you feel, simply because you can’t produce them yourself. And whatever they say, I know women use them to get their own way: Alice learned that trick by the time she was two years old. If some boy was misbehaving in the park and she said he’d pushed her and Helen didn’t go and tell him off right away – bursting into tears would do the trick every time.

  I offered Daisy a tissue. I made sure the door was closed properly. I put my arms around her and stroked her long, baby-soft, hair, trying to smooth it down so that she looked less like an angry cockerel. I noticed for the first time that she was wearing thigh-high boots, (which seemed to me a little over the top for a young academic).

  ‘This is exactly what I mean,’ I murmured. ‘It’s all – a bit much for me. Not sure, you know, I’m not sure the poor old ticker can actually stand all the drama—’

  And then right on cue, the old ticker started to do something shocking. The pains, the breathing difficulties, the dizziness, the worsening of my condition: I’d been ignoring it all for weeks. Suddenly I could feel an invisible waistcoat, inside my skin, and it was tightening and tightening, cutting off my air supply. I crumpled to my chair.

  Daisy was still talking. It was that word ‘drama’ that so offended her. I was accusing her of being a drama queen, she said, of over-reacting, or worse – making it all up. She seemed to take the strange noises I was making as my only defence and eventually she stormed out. I sat there, trying to breathe. I undid my trousers. I reached for the telephone, wondering, like a child, if this was the right moment to call for an ambulance. I considered checking that Daisy had closed the door properly behind her – the indignity of being seen like this – but in the end the pain in my chest, the tightening brace inside my shirt, was too gripping. Sweat made my palms slippery on the phone. I gave up and instead found myself kneeling at my desk drawer, throwing out pens, clawing at the packet of heart pills.

  When I could breathe again I was able to think calmly about Daisy. I resolved to find a tasteful way to end things cleanly and completely between us that would make it possible to sit in department meetings with her without embarrassment. What I didn’t reckon on was that she would get there first.

  Now I disguise my erection under the sheets with Transplant News and manfully try to steer myself away from vivid, pointless thoughts of Daisy.

  ‘I wonder if there has been anything more in the local paper?’ I watch Maureen’s face for signs that she’s hiding information from me. More details about the donor? An obituary perhaps?

  ‘The Cambridge Evening News is still on about the fires. Sabotage, they’re saying now, but they can’t find out anything more about a perpetrator. No leads. They’re giving up on that.’

  From the cabinet beside my bed, I pick up the paper she left me, the one where I had a starring role, and read the headlines – the front-page article – for the first time. ‘Arsonists are suspected of setting fire to more than thirty thousand bales of straw in a blaze in Cambridgeshire. A further fifty thousand tonnes is now understood to have caught fire in a field near Ely, said Cambridgeshire Fire Service. The fire service commander co-ordinating the operation said he believed the fires were “suspicious”.’

  ‘How strange I didn’t take this in. I think Helen mentioned it too. I guess I thought I was the only thing happening in the news that day.’

  ‘Yes, and in fact you were only a small item and photograph on page five.’ She smiles. ‘One of the nurses says you look like George Clooney.’

  She blushes faintly then. Looks horrified at her own loquaciousness.

  ‘But I look better now, I hope? That was a very bad photo,’ I say.

  She laughs: a snort, a loud laugh, unabashed, like the laughter of a twelve-year-old boy. She had been hesitant, as if unsure I wanted her to stay, but now, encouraged, she takes off her coat and sits down in the visitor’s chair.

  ‘I imagine you’ve looked him up,’ she says, nodding towards my laptop.

  ‘I couldn’t find anything. There are Andrew Beamishes on Facebook but none recently deceased from Littleport.
There’s stuff about Littleport Historical Society. Did you know it means smiling with optimism? The name Beamish, right? I’ve been thinking . . . what you said. Writing to my donor’s family. Here, I’ve given it a go. Perhaps you could pass it along to – well, his family, his parents, I don’t know, whoever you think would like to hear from me.’

  Maureen beams at me. ‘That’s very kind. I’m impressed. It’s – well, in my experience people usually don’t hear back from the donor family, but it’s a great comfort to them to hear from you and to know that you – the recipient – are grateful.’

  The moment she says this, I regret what I wrote in the letter. Selfish. That’s what Helen would say. It’s always about you, isn’t it, Patrick, that’s the difference between men and women (her complaints never just addressed to me, but in my unasked-for capacity as representative of the male sex), men being so hopeless at thinking about anyone else’s feelings except their own.

  ‘Well, maybe I need to give it a little more thought,’ I say.

  Maureen is staring at me, without picking up her knitting, and her hand goes back in her bag for the envelope I just gave her. She turns it over. ‘Where did you get this?’ she asks.

  ‘What, the envelope? Alice bought me it. My daughter.’

  ‘You see, you’ve sealed it. And I need to be sure you haven’t included any personal details. You know, the town you live in, your name, that kind of thing. And no religious sentiments! The donor might be Muslim for all you know.’

  ‘Are there a lot of Muslims in the rural Fens?’

  ‘Or even the name of the hospital. You shouldn’t put that.’

  ‘Jeez. So much secrecy! If I don’t have any identifying information how the hell are you going to send it to the right donor family?’

  ‘The proper procedure – as I’m sure I explained to you – is to put it in an unsealed envelope. I’ll bring you another one if you like. Then you put your name, date of operation and hospital on an accompanying piece of paper.’

  She’s ripping open the envelope as she speaks, and I have a childish fear of her opening it and reading it in front of me. I snatch back the envelope: ‘OK, I can do that. Give it here. I can do all of that.’

  She looks startled. To hide her confusion she begins rummaging – red gloves, flower-patterned glasses case, crimson-suede diary: garish teenage choices, all – placing them on the grey coverlet on the bed. She finds what she’s looking for, a folded page, printed from the internet.

  ‘Here. I meant to give you this. You know, a sample letter to help you know what to say. It’s from this website for transplant patients. I’ll just pop this here and . . . well, there.’

  I stare at the sheet she gives me, a poor-quality print-out.

  Dear Donor Family, ‘Thank you.’ These two words seem so inadequate for the gift of life you have given to me.

  Oh Lord. I get the idea.

  You have given me this astonishing gift of a second chance and many tomorrows. Endless possibilities. I will be able to see the faces of those I love, hear the birdsong. I will be able to hug and be hugged.

  Many tomorrows! To hug and be hugged!

  I promise you that I will do my utmost to honour this truly wondrous gift. I will try to do all I can to make our world a better place.

  Really? Is that what’s expected of me now?

  Do let me assure you that not one day, not one hour, not one minute will go by without me remembering and wondering about my donor.

  Well, that bit’s true enough, but somehow not in the way that’s meant here.

  Please know that if there is anything at all I could do to make your suffering less, I would, and you only have to ask. Thank you from the bottom of my heart, the recipient.

  Good God. ‘Thank you from the bottom of my heart.’ Are these people strangers to irony? Whose heart?

  To Maureen I muster: ‘OK, I get the idea. I’ll give it another go.’

  ‘Next time I visit we’ll go to your flat. That’ll be nice, won’t it?’

  The flat. I’ve been here a while now and they need the bed back. I’m doing ‘beautifully’ according to Dr Burns, but I need constant daily monitoring; hence the plan to move me to the flat on the hospital grounds, used for this purpose.

  There’s something about Maureen, and I can’t fathom what it is. Is it her desire to help me all the time, or something else? She’s sort of eccentric, I suppose. (Not a quality I usually admire in a woman.) Today she is wearing this long fringed skirt in a deep-red colour, beads, a black silky blouse with some kind of flowers embroidered on it – all she needs is a guitar and a wig and she’d be Joni Mitchell. Her strange job; her role as go-between. Presumably in her role as transplant co-ordinator she even sat with the family, held their hands at the point they made the decision, switched off the machines, whatever it is they do. How can she stand it? She must be made of different stuff than other people. Than me, perhaps.

  ‘How do you know for absolute certain if a brain-dead person is really dead?’ I ask her.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Radio 4. This woman has written a book about, you know, the ethical questions around organ transplants. That’s one of the issues.’

  ‘I think that . . .’

  She picks up her long beads, fiddles with them, drops them again. I can see she’s worried about upsetting me, but I’m fine, I’m perfectly calm.

  ‘Every test is done,’ she says. ‘I can assure you – apparently more tests are done on donors than – you know, non-donors – before pronouncing them – dead. There’s no way . . . Mistakes can’t be made—’

  She gestures, a shake of the hand, as if to brush away any possibility of doubt.

  ‘Actually,’ I tell her, ‘I was thinking about my mother. She died in a car accident – oh no, don’t worry, it was years ago. I mean, I was a kid. About eleven. I just mean Dad agreed to switch off the life-support when we were told that. And now, just now, I thought, What does it mean? At what point do we really know?’

  ‘Well, I’m not a doctor, of course; you could ask Dr Burns. Brainstem dead. It doesn’t sound very nice, does it, but I think it means, you know, all activity in the brain has ceased for ever. Legally, that person is dead.’

  ‘Legally.’

  ‘Yes.’

  So that I could legally take the donor’s heart and make it mine. I’m not a thief after all, then. No stealing involved. It’s all legal. We’re not in some primitive era where we cut open the chests of our enemies and eat their hearts in order to steal their courage, their vitality. It’s interesting now to see Maureen a little . . . what? Flustered? Less professional, somehow. Her hair this morning, now I’m lying here and considering her more closely, must be newly washed, or perhaps it’s a bit damp outside. In any case her hair is slightly less Jack Russell in texture – short and harsh – and instead she looks . . . ruffled. Her hair is tufty and girlish. Like I say: it’s a strange job.

  ‘Funny how it’s always the end of brain activity now that signifies the end of life. In the past it was the heart, surely?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answers, with the same worried expression. Then: ‘It’s perfectly normal, I think, to worry about the family—’

  ‘I wasn’t. Like I say, I was just thinking. About Cushie. My mother. And how, in the old days it was the heart that was considered, you know, the centre of things, where the self was located. Aristotle wasn’t very impressed with the cold wet matter of the brain. These days neuroscience is king, isn’t it? That’s where people think emotions are located. Craniocentrism over cardio-centrism. The brain has won over the heart, you could say.’

  She looks uncertain then, as if I’m involving her in some sort of tutorial or oral exam that she’s about to fail.

  ‘Sorry. Going off on one rather, aren’t I? Used to drive Alice – my daughter – insane. Why can’t you just talk to me, she’d say. I’m not one of your students.’

  ‘Well. I’m sure she’s very grateful now. I wish my dad had ever – you kno
w. I can’t imagine it! Taken me seriously. Talked to me like an adult.’

  ‘Really? Try telling that to Alice. I’ve been thinking a lot since I’ve been here. It occurs to me that I deserved a mug. World’s Worst Father. You know. For Father’s Day?’

  ‘I’m tiring you,’ Maureen says.

  I stop rubbing at my eyes. ‘No, no, I’m fine, really.’

  Stay. Damn fool. What’s wrong with me?

  Maureen runs a hand over her hair, patting it down a little and tucking her beads down her blouse, where they rattle away between her breasts like a happy snake while she puts on her raincoat.

  ‘I’ll bring the keys to the flat tomorrow,’ she says, forcing a smile.

  ‘Well . . .’

  (And here it comes, the professionalism again, I see it re-form, somehow: it’s been a very trying experience for you. Or: the post-operative period is full of ups and downs.) But instead she says nothing, buttons her coat, and nods to me as she leaves.

  The lamp is dark beside my bed and I close my eyes.

  The place behind my lids is black but dotted with lights. Chester-le-Street, County Durham. The night of Cushie’s funeral. (Mam. As a little boy, I called her Mam, but the Geordie word later carried a sizzle of – what? shame? – and was replaced.) Four days after they switched off the life-support machine, I heard her singing in my bedroom. I’m upstairs, hiding, the room is full of shadows: Airfix planes dangling, wobbling. The family, the visitors, the sandwiches and sherry I’m supposed to pass around are all downstairs. The body was in the coffin, my mother wore a yellow dress, the coffin passed through the curtains in the church, I saw it myself. And yet here, I can hear her singing, her beautiful Dusty Springfield voice, her favourite song: yesterday when I was young, the taste of life was sweet as rain upon my tongue . . . I hear it so clearly I put my head out from under the pillow, I stop crying, to listen. A model plane flutters as if someone just walked past it. The sweetness of her voice, the Geordie lilt in every note. And then I don’t hear it. And I know that she’s gone.