The Tell-Tale Heart Read online

  Dear Donor Family . . .

  Fuck. I bet it’s a mother reading this.

  I do hope this correspondence is not unwelcome. I am Professor Patrick Robson (his parents will know my name, they must have read the newspaper reports), the recipient of your son’s heart.

  Scratch that. Your son’s organ. No, sounds somehow sexual. And sends my thoughts in unsavoury directions. A young lad’s dick? A shot of Viagra? I can imagine Helen admonishing me. For God’s sake, Patrick! Your son’s heart will have to do.

  Jeez, I can’t get any further than that. I’ve got a splitting headache. The memory of Helen saying (more than once), ‘You think with your dick, Patrick, you always have, that’s your trouble.’ That consciousness might be located there of all places never struck me as insane or insulting, the way Helen intended.

  Last night I had the weirdest dream. My heart was talking to me. And, after all, the heart does indeed look – if we’re talking about the skin of it, the surface texture – like the dark purple head of a giant skinned cock – you know, taut and looming – and it was talking to me. And then, other things in the dream. My heart was on the screen – the monitor – and it was yelling, and it looked really weird, like a little screaming monkey. And then it was jumping out and running all around the hospital. In another dream there were all these birds around and there was a barn owl – an absolute beauty with a heart-shaped face and it was called Ted Hughes. I don’t know how I knew this but you do, don’t you, in dreams. It was flying alongside my car, peering inside. Next I’m at Westminster Abbey and someone is telling me Hughes is dead.

  So, despite the unlikely nature of Maureen’s forecast for me (‘Before you know it, you’ll be swinging your legs over the side of the bed and getting ready for your first walk’), that day is here, and I’ve walked round the wards and even through the door to the outside world and yes, my legs do function and the bugger inside me hasn’t stuttered to a halt, and – surprising how strange I feel about this – I’m not in prison. No one has rushed to stop me. I pause just at the door, finding myself in Papworth Hospital car park. Outside is exactly as Helen reported – all unseasonably fair, stunningly bright, the sun making lattice patterns on the vivid green grass, a yellow ambulance, bright as a child’s toy, a few scattered leaves on the ground glowing in cornflake colours, and on the horizon – the edge of the known world – aspen trees waving their wispy branches, as if to say: Come over here, see if your doctors aren’t wrong with their dire prophecies of infection and rejection.

  That ridiculous thought seems par for the course these days. I’m thinking in ways that are unfamiliar to me. Pathetic fallacy is not a concept I’ve ever embraced, and once again the horrible idea occurs that my IQ, or rather my general ability as an intelligent, educated person without clichéd or religious or other superstitious beliefs, has forsaken me. As I stand there, shuffling to a stop in my trainers, putting one hand out on the acid-green-painted door to Reception, surveying the pristine golf-course world outside of the hospital, a quiet little voice trickles through to me. Yep. I’m still here.

  Two steps forward and my feet find a concrete path. I have an urge to reach that unreal grass, to take a closer look. A few steps more and I’m there. Crouching down isn’t easy, but I’m intrigued. My foot has nudged something in the grass.

  ‘Hi, Patrick – out and about, are we!’

  Fuck. It’s Maureen. And as I look closer I see that it was a circle of toadstools, honey-coloured, fine wobbly heads on fragile stalks, like something from one of Alice’s childhood books. A fairy ring. I straighten up. I’m aware of a strange sense of wanting to look at it again; to bend down, to pick one, and see if under the cap is the fine crumbling flesh I imagine, a stalk trailing threads from the earth that sprinkle spots of soil, but stronger than this desire is the one to appear, well, normal.

  ‘Were you on your way to see me?’ I ask Maureen, straightening up. And then: ‘I like your hat!’

  She looks embarrassed, unsure if I’m teasing her.

  ‘No, actually, I’m on my way to a . . . to meet . . .’

  She seems reluctant to tell me. She nods instead towards a small hill on the hospital grounds, topped with a grand cream-coloured building flanked by pillars. My eyes are drawn to a sign next to it: ‘Stop! Check your pockets for patient data.’ Maureen readjusts her heavy duffle bag, hoisting it with a strange jutting hip gesture, and acknowledges the sign.

  ‘They don’t like us to go home with your files in our bags!’

  ‘My file? Do you have my file?’

  ‘Well, as it happens . . . I just meant . . .’

  ‘What month is it? The weather’s all wrong, though, isn’t it, too sunny for . . . November, is it? I should go back in.’

  She nods; she seems relieved I’ve let the question drop. She’s wearing a red woolly hat with a bobble and her cheeks are pink, healthy, her eyes glittering. She’s an odd mismatch of fabrics, shapes and colours, a garden gnome: yellow, scarlet, brown. She’s knitted herself up, I think: a little doll. Even her bag is knitted: dark green and orange squares. The colours of the heaps of leaves I used to pile up in the back garden as a boy, my job to rake them and help Dad to burn them. She’s already marching up the hill towards the building – Corporate Affairs and Chairman’s Office. I follow her, clutching the letter in my pocket.

  In the end I kept it simple.

  Dear Donor Family,

  My name is Patrick Robson. I am the recipient of your son’s heart. I don’t know if you would welcome a letter from me but have been advised that it might comfort you to hear from me. I will keep this brief. I am fifty, a retired academic, father of two grown-up children. In the months preceding the operation I had the most appalling health problems, was constantly exhausted and in pain and had numerous tests and endless inconvenient hospital visits that had a detrimental affect on my working life. The diagnosis was cardiomyopathy and in a meeting with my cardiologist earlier this year I was given only a few months to live. Your son’s decision to carry a donor card and your agreement to this has changed that prognosis. I am profoundly grateful to you.

  Yours sincerely,

  Patrick Robson.

  Under a hundred and fifty words and harder than any abstract I ever had to write. It took me five attempts. I changed ‘I am very grateful’ to ‘profoundly grateful’ but that’s the only concession I’ve made to mimicking the fulsome tone of Maureen’s sample letter. I was determined not to ask Helen or Alice for help either but then could hear Alice’s criticisms in my head anyway: ‘Dad, don’t put Professor – that sounds so pompous and cold!’ In an earlier draft I’d also mentioned that I had a son the same age and thought better of that, too. Surely that would be rubbing this family’s nose in it – I still have a son, yours died.

  Strange not knowing who I’m writing to. I realise – pen in hand, third attempt, staring glassily down the ward – that I have been picturing, while writing, a father and mother reading it. Also, perhaps a sister. About the same age as Alice. I realise I’m even picturing them in this Cambridgeshire village, Littleport, whatever the hell that’s like: some sort of generic countryside, a thatched cottage no doubt with rag rugs and gun dogs and muddied wellies in the hall, a Barbour hanging on the coat peg and a Range Rover outside. Admittedly this doesn’t fit with the one detail I have – that it was a motorcycle accident.

  I catch Maureen up. I’m now waving the letter and she’s walking at quite a lick: she has a brisk trot, and a funny gait, she almost hops. She’s wearing impractical shoes, that’s what it is, and is having to pick her way among the muddy leaves. Red shoes with a high heel. They keep sinking into the ground and she’s in danger of losing one.

  ‘I have this for you!’

  My voice is feeble and I feel ridiculous – she’s not looking back at me and I’m going to have to break into a trot to catch up and give it to her. The weakness of my body, the pains in my chest from breathing hard, the woolliness in my head . . .

 
‘Maureen!’ It’s the first time I’ve uttered her name. She looks surprised that I even know it, stands still and smiles. Wipes at the muddy heel of her shoe with a tissue. She’s very nimble. She stands on one leg, bending the other, like a stork. She waits for me to catch up.

  ‘I wrote it. The donor family. I haven’t sealed it this time,’ I tell her. I think my forehead must be sweating. Up close to Maureen I smell something nostalgic, a smell from childhood. Sweets? Pear drops, is it?

  ‘Great, thank you. I’ll make sure she gets it.’

  She. She, Maureen said, not they.

  Maureen accepts the letter without a glance; she seems preoccupied, flustered; the momentousness of my accomplishment lost on her. I stand panting with cartoon-like noisiness and leaning against the building as she goes inside, putting the letter in her pocket along with the muddy tissue, and the huge doors bang shut behind her. An after-image of Maureen’s pixie figure remains in my gaze, after she’s disappeared. Come back early or never come.

  I am expecting somehow Maureen’s concern – how quickly I’ve become dependent on it – anticipating that she will pop back out to enquire after me. The heavy wooden doors to the building are firmly shut. They are quite hideous. The handles are two enormous carved green hands, made from copper. Giant’s hands with the fingers flopping downwards: what a God-awful joke. Standing where I am, my skin all at once provoked into fierce goose pimples, I have the horrible impression that someone is trapped behind that door. Some monstrous creature with unnaturally large hands is dangling horribly, cut off for ever, stuck between one world and the next. And, worse, I have the dread certainty that the figure is me.

  The little flat that Maureen takes me to is curiously thrilling. The village is called Papworth Everard or something equally bizarre and inexplicable, and the feeling of Toy Town or that film Helen mentioned, The Truman Show, continues. We’re standing at the door with Maureen showing me the key and saying, ‘Well, it’s handy that it’s walking distance from the hospital but you know it’s going to be very – spartan.’ And then the door bursts open over its corn-coloured carpet and we step over the shiny new threshold.

  The smell of new paint, nylon carpet and pine-fresh chemical cleaners greets us but has no impact on my cheery mood. This is the best I’ve felt since the operation. I put a hand out to the wall and touch the ice-cream-coloured surface; I have a strong desire to lick it.

  Doors open stiffly, jerking over freshly laid carpets – all in the same nylon sweetcorn-colour – and Maureen bounces from room to room, saying, ‘Dishwasher there, obviously, there’s your fridge-freezer and there’s a Hoover kept in here but a cleaner comes once a week, your shower’s pretty basic,’ and opening and closing squeaky cupboard doors. She keeps checking my face as if she expects a sarcastic remark or a complaint – ‘It’s very small, of course; it’s only temporary until you go back home when you won’t have to be monitored all the time,’ she says, staring at me and standing still, awaiting my response.

  But in the end my excitement seems to infect her and she laughs as I whirl about, saying: ‘Wow! All so new and on such a mini scale – I feel like a Lilliputian!’

  ‘It’s only a single bed, I’m afraid.’

  We’re standing in the doorway of the bedroom, surveying the plain cotton bedspread, with its stewed green colour, its dimpled pattern. I can see she doesn’t want to linger here, doesn’t like the way I’m testing the bounce of the bed and laughing. Next to the bed is a wardrobe, with one door partially open. I spring from the bed – Maureen takes one step back – and I put out my hand to press the wardrobe door closed, and instead it resists, opens still further, slowly, as if someone is pushing it from the inside. I try to close it again and it pops open again; on closer inspection there is no catch at all. I start to giggle; Maureen watches, and then coughs, goes back into the kitchen.

  She puts down her paperwork on the kitchen table and then goes outside. For a strange moment I think she is leaving and wonder at her brusqueness, the lack of a goodbye, or anything much at all, and am puzzled to find myself stung, but then I realise she is going out to her car, parked outside the flat, to fetch a box of things. She struggles in with it, pushing the door open with her knee, heaving it to the table. Tea bags, bread, toilet paper, apples, coffee, milk, a bottle of something. She stands behind it, a little embarrassed.

  ‘Just to get you started. You can do your own shopping once your wife drops your car off . . . or, there’s a shop in the village. For the exercise.’

  We both stare distractedly at the box. An advent calendar. A Cadbury’s advent calendar.

  ‘Ex-wife.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Helen. Bringing the car up. You said wife.’

  ‘Oh. Yes. Sorry.’

  ‘Are you married, Maureen?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m divorced as well. About three years ago.’

  ‘Kids?’

  ‘Two girls: Cassie and Chloe. Year Seven and Year Eight.’

  I nod, as if I know what Year Seven and Year Eight means. She seems reluctant to leave. The kitchen door is open and I see her look towards the window, the kitchen tap. After a hesitation she picks up the kettle in there and starts filling it. A splutter before the first stream of browny water runs clean.

  ‘Shall I make us a cup of tea? I need you to sign the lease and I think I’ve got . . . now, where did I put it?’

  I feel like a student. The day I arrived at university it was Dad who took me to the college, delivered me to Corpus Christi, dropped my things off with the porter; shook my hand in the courtyard, clapped an arm around my back and then buggered off immediately. I knew Cushie would have done things differently. I was eighteen – not much older than this boy, this youth, this Drew Beamish. I considered myself no longer a boy, of course, but I remember sitting down heavily on that tiny student bed, feeling the mattress give entirely, the weight of so many previous hopeful youthful occupants having knocked all the stuffing out of it. Cushie would have said something like: ‘Ee, well, there won’t be much hanky-panky going on in that little bed – no bigger than a postage stamp!’ She would have pinched my cheek, smiled, tried to chivvy hope rather than dread in my youthful breast. She would have done that womanly thing of leaving me with gifts. Home-made raspberry jam. A clean pressed tea-towel printed with Durham Cathedral. My own small kettle. New razors or underpants. A packet of Jaffa Cakes, stuff like that. I would have pretended not to like being babied.

  Yet this time, for no reason I can fathom, the little room, the sense of a squeaky new life unfolding in front of me, excites me. Feelings I don’t remember having back then, when it was – relevant. When I was a youth going up to Oxford, for God’s sake, not a middle-aged man, moving into a utilitarian hospital flat in Papworth Everard. This thought makes me grin harder. I sit myself down, pulling out one of the flimsy chairs for Maureen. The chair squeals on the rubber floor-tiles. I urge myself to thank her as she pushes the mug of tea at me – not just for the tea but other, unknowable things – but she speaks first: ‘This came, here—’ Handing me a letter. ‘You don’t have to open it now. Maybe when I’m not here?’

  When I say nothing, just stare at the letter in my hand, then place it carefully on the table and stare at it a little more, she looks around the kitchen for a change of topic. Her eyes light on the advent calendar.

  ‘It was on special offer. I know it’s silly, sorry. I thought you might not know that it’s the first of December tomorrow. Time stands still a bit when you’re in hospital, doesn’t it? And there’s a CD player. Over there. I don’t know if you listen to music but I could lend you some CDs if you like?’

  Blimey. There’s a thought. Eva Cassidy? Joni Mitchell?

  ‘Um. Thank you. I think Helen said she would bring me some stuff from my flat . . . my iPod perhaps.’

  The handwriting on the envelope is neat, and unmistakably female. Rounded letters. Regularly spaced. Patrick Robson. Papworth Hospital. Clearly hasn’t been posted, but hand delivere
d. Once again, a surge of irritation about the secrecy; the feeling that Maureen holds all the knowledge. All the cards.

  I reach out to the letter. Pick it up. Turn it over in my lap. ‘I’d quite like to visit this place. Littleport. See – you know. See what it’s like.’

  Maureen looks startled. ‘Really? Littleport. God, there’s not much to see. It’s a typical Fen place. Bit bleak actually.’

  ‘Are you from there?’

  ‘I live in Ely. Ely’s pretty. A cathedral and a river.’

  She sips at her tea, bringing the mug up to her lips and looking at me with big eyes over the top of it. Her eyes are brown, a hazel brown with stubby, short lashes. She has a frank, exceptionally unguarded gaze, and clear skin with an outdoor quality to it: fresh like the freckled skin of a brown egg. Many times I have the impression that she’s about to say something, and thinks better of it. I have wondered if this is something to do with her training, with the thought that she shouldn’t overstep the mark. Now she gets up to fetch sugar, offers it to me. I shake my head, so she spoons a dash into her own tea and begins stirring. When she puts the cup down I notice a lipstick curve on it, a pink arc just at the rim of the mug. I find myself smiling again.

  ‘You have to take things slowly,’ she says. ‘With the donor family, I mean. If you go to Littleport – you wouldn’t . . . Don’t look his house up, will you? That would be – I don’t think that would be welcome.’

  ‘God, no. No, of course not. I’m just curious, that’s all. I’d never heard of the place before last month. I’m just curious. And I’ve got stuff to do! I decided this morning. I’m going to put my flat in Highgate on the market.’

  Another startled look. ‘Oh. You’re moving?’

  ‘I thought I’d . . . consider my options. Grown-up kids. Job . . . Um, well I also, I made another snap decision. Early retirement. New start, you know.’