Starting Over (3 page)

Then Rainbow Ron had the old lady by her fake-fur collar and he was screaming at us to stay back, waving his black handgun in her face, and Keith and I had our hands above our heads and we were shouting at him to just calm down, calm down, and behind us I could hear the uniformed inspector calling for backup on his radio and in the distance the hundred-yard hero was going hysterical.

I looked at the eyes of Rainbow Ron blazing like the winner of a Charles Manson lookalike contest from behind his greasy fringe.

He looked stuffed and cuffed, jail no bail, going down for sure, and that made him dangerous. I took a step back. And then he flung the old lady forward, sending her sprawling, and I felt my blood surge to boiling point.

Then he was off. Back up the steps and into the house. We gave chase. He went up the stairs and he kept going. We followed. But by the time we reached the second floor, Keith was dropping behind, clutching his ribs and gasping for breath.

‘I need a cigarette,’ I heard him say, and so then I was on my own. Rainbow Ron certainly ran fast for a raving lunatic. I followed him all the way to the top of the house. A skylight was open. I stepped out on to the roof, the city buzzing far below, and he whirled round to confront me with the gun in his hand pointing right at my face.

And the anger was gone. All gone. All I could feel was the fear. I did not want to die on this roof. And when I tried to speak, almost cross-eyed from looking down the short black barrel of the terrible thing in his hand, nothing came out.

It looked like a toy. A cruel, ugly toy. The cheap shoddy banality of the thing. That’s what I noticed. A toy from hell.
It was just a stubby right angle of black metal held in a redraw, sweating fist. And it looked like the end of the world.

Pointing at my face.

Rainbow Ron came forward, sure of himself now, seeing my terror, encouraged by it, as if it proved he was making all the smart moves, and he pressed the barrel against the bridge of my nose. It looked like a toy, but somehow I knew it was real.

He squeezed off the trigger and I felt it at the same terrible moment – the shock of pain in my chest.

It was a dam-break of pain, obliterating everything, surging in the centre of my chest and spreading out, claiming me, a new and unexpected kind of pain, a pain to rob you of your senses.

It felt like everything was being squeezed. The pressure was unbelievable, dumbfounding, and increasing by the second as the pain consolidated its ownership of me and my chest felt like it was being held in a giant vice, as though the life was being forced out of me, as though the pain itself intended to kill me, and I knew that this was it, the end of all things.

I blacked out.

When I awoke, eager hands were lifting me on to a gurney. Rainbow Ron was flat on his face and the female constable was cuffing his hands behind his back. Then we were moving. Through the skylight and down the stairs. The squeezing in my chest was still there, but the fear was stronger than the pain.

I thought of my wife. I thought of my son and daughter. They needed me. I didn’t want to die. Tears stung my eyes as we clanged into the back of an ambulance and immediately pulled away. And through the blurry veil of tears I saw Keith’s face.

‘It’s a replica,’ he said. ‘Can you hear me, George? It’s just a fake. It was never going to work. You understand what I’m saying?’

Not really.

Keith was talking about the gun.

But I thought he was talking about my heart.

Think of death as the ultimate lie-in. Think of death that way. A lazy Sunday morning that goes on for all eternity, with you just dozing away until the end of days. That’s not such a bad way to think of death. Come on – it’s not all bad.

What stops us thinking of death that way? I opened my eyes and I knew.

My family were there at the stations of the hospital bed. It felt like a lot of time had gone by, and that they had not slept, or had any sleep worthy of the name, and that things had got worse. My wife, our boy, our girl.

The great gawky Rufus, who had grown so extravagantly and yet still had so much growing to do. And Ruby, my darling girl, her face perfectly and incredibly poised between the child she had been and the woman she would become. And Lara, my wife, who I was planning to grow old with, because why would I ever want to be anywhere else? And now I never would, and now I never could.

Those three were what stopped me from thinking of death as a Sunday morning that I would never wake from. Lara,
Rufus, Ruby. The ones I would leave behind. They changed everything and made it impossible to let go, and made me want to weep, for them and for myself, because I loved them with all of my clogged-up, thoroughly knackered, pathetic excuse for a heart.

A doctor came and fiddled about. Glancing at charts, squinting at me over the top of his reading glasses. And when I paid a bit more attention, I saw that there was an entire herd of doctors with him. Baby doctors, learning their trade, looking at him as though he were the font of all medical wisdom, and me as though I was a specimen in a jar.

‘Male, forty-seven, history of heart disease, had a myocardial infarction – let’s see – three days ago.’

Three days? Was it already three days? The doctor held up a floppy black picture and pointed at some ghostly images. The baby doctors leaned forward with excitement.

‘See that? The coronary artery was already damaged by atheroma. Can you all see? Blood will not clot on healthy lining. Looks rather like the fur in a kettle, doesn’t it?’ The baby doctors eagerly agreed. ‘That’s what caused the thrombus – the blood clot – which blocked the artery, depriving a segment of the heart muscle of oxygen, and quite literally suffocating it.’ He put down the floppy black picture. ‘And that was the heart attack.’

He was talking about me. For some reason I listened to all this with total indifference. It might have been the drugs. The doctor peered at Lara over the top of his reading glasses. ‘How long has he been on the NTD?’ he said, and she looked bewildered. ‘The National Transplant Database,’ he translated, and a light dawned in her eyes, a terrible light. Because of course she knew what he was talking about. It had become a big black chunk of our lives.

‘Three months,’ she said. ‘That makes it sound as though it’s a new problem, but it’s not.’ She was talking too fast, almost babbling. She held my hand as if that would make things a bit better. And funnily enough, it did. ‘The problems have been going on for years,’ she said.

I looked at Rufus and Ruby, who had retreated to the walls when the doctors came in. They were in the chairs pressed up against the corner of the little room, frightened and uncertain, and I saw that at seventeen and fifteen, they were suddenly children again. They did not seem like teenagers now.

No wry superiority in a hospital ward.

No knowing smirks in here.

‘What are the odds?’ Lara said to the doctor, and one of our children whimpered at the question.

The boy.

‘The odds get better the longer he holds on,’ the doctor said, getting ready to leave. He was smiling at Lara now, even as he edged towards the door. ‘Thousands of men die before even making it to the list. One in ten waiting for a transplant don’t make it because there’s no donor.’ He gave her a smile, and it wasn’t much of a smile, but I saw that he wasn’t such a bad guy, it was just that what was the end of the world for us was merely another day at work for him. And it was a big enough smile for my wife to cling to, and I could see that she was grateful. Some of the baby doctors were already out of the room. The big chief doctor was ready to say goodbye. ‘So the longer he holds on,’ he said to Lara, and it was as if I wasn’t there, or in a coma, or invisible, ‘the better the odds.’

It was good news.

Sort of good news.

So I couldn’t understand why it made Lara unravel. She hugged me, making my IV drip wobble dangerously, and she told me the thing that was always between us though never spoken. And I regretted it now, leaving it unspoken through all those years, not telling her more often, and it seemed like such a stupid thing to have forgotten. And such a waste.

‘I love you,’ she whispered, stroking the back of my head. ‘It’s okay,’ she smiled. ‘You don’t have to say it back.’

Then she straightened up. She was tough, my wife. She was brave.

‘Say something to your father,’ she commanded, and Ruby immediately threw herself on me with a ‘Daddy!’ that came out like a sob, the impact knocking the wind out of me for a second, and I held her with the arm that didn’t have an IV drip stuck into it, and I could smell the shampoo in her long brown hair.

Then it was her brother’s turn.

Rufus reluctantly shuffled towards me, uncomfortable in this hospital ward, uncomfortable in his troubled skin, uncomfortable with the whole thing. He didn’t want to do it, he recoiled from it all, probably wanted to run away and hide in his room. But Lara gently led him to the bed where he touched the top sheet and held it to his mouth. He began to cry. Pulling my sheet up like that made my feet stick out the end of the bed, and I felt the air conditioning chill my toes.

There was something unbearable about his tears. He was not a child any more but he cried like one and I recalled a playground accident, a split head, blood all over the happily coloured climbing frame, and then the mad dash to the emergency ward. That is the worst thing about having children.
You want to protect them more than you ever can. You try to endure that unendurable fact. But it is always there.

I patted the back of his hand and I was amazed to see the amount of hair sprouting there. It was practically a rain forest. It must have been years since I had touched his hands.

‘Rufus,’ I said, ‘when did you get so hairy?’

He pulled his hand away as if he had been scalded with boiling water. Then I needed to rest. I had to close my eyes immediately, and the pain punched a big hole in the morphine, and yet still I slept.

How George met Lara.

Twenty years ago I was walking down Shaftesbury Avenue, heading south towards Piccadilly Circus, the early-evening crowds making that bit of space they create for a uniformed police officer, even one who was just a year out of training and still raw like sushi. Then I heard a woman’s voice.

‘Excuse me? Hello there. Oh, excuse me!’

I turned to see a blonde, not tall, with that swingy hair that I suddenly realised I liked – hair that
swings
, do you know what I mean? Hair that doesn’t just sit there but swings about with mad abandon. She had that hair. Not long, not short – just down to her shoulders. And swinging. On such details we build our lives.

And she had – I couldn’t help but notice – a hard little body inside her training gear. She was quite small, and looked very fit, and she had a sexiness about her that was hard to define. I mean, there wasn’t much of her, but it was all good. Far too good for me, in fact, and so I thought she must be shouting to someone else. A boyfriend who had walked past their meeting place? A friend she had just spotted in the crowd? One look at her and I could see she was out of my
league. And also, she didn’t seem to be in any kind of distress. Most people – all people – who run towards a uniformed police officer want him to help.

But Lara didn’t want help. She wanted to give me something. She stood there laughing, and catching her breath. And I recognised her now, just as she handed me the tickets. She was one of the dancers.

I had just spent an hour in the theatre where she worked. There had been widespread thieving in the dressing rooms, both male and female. It took a couple of hours and all my powers of detection to work out that there was something suspicious about a caretaker with a locker containing seventeen Prada bags, some lovely watches and credit cards in twenty different names. He was nicked, and they were grateful. All those good-looking boys and girls radiating future stardom. I looked down at the tickets in my hand, as though I had never seen tickets before.

‘For tonight,’ she said. ‘Bring your girlfriend.’

I brought Keith. Police Constable Keith Rooney, as he was in those days. We sat in the front row of the circle, still in uniform, and at first it was difficult for me to spot her. She was one of the Peasant Women who wanted to lynch Jean Valjean when he was caught nicking the old priest’s candlesticks, but I lost sight of her for a bit until she was one of the Lovely Ladies urging Fantine to solve her problems by turning to prostitution. And then, as Keith chomped his way through a bag of Revels, I finally got a fix on her. Because nobody in that show moved like Lara.

She was a dancer. Most of them could do a bit of everything, and do it very well. But – I learned later – she never had much of a voice, and didn’t really have the confidence to sing if she wasn’t hiding in a group of seventeenth-century
French peasants or prostitutes. But she could move. Lithe, springy, a natural grace. I don’t know what it was, but I knew I had never seen anything like it.

Not a lot of call for dancing in
Les Misérables
, of course, apart from the wedding of Cosette and Marius. It is mostly people dying tragic deaths while the survivors mooch around sadly. But the way she moved still held me. After the massacre of the posh students, she was one of The Women singing the song about how nothing ever changes, and nothing ever will, and by then I couldn’t take my eyes from her. In the end, Lara hovered on the edge of the stage, like an angel in her newly laundered nightgown, as Jean Valjean died in the arms of his heartbroken daughter and by my side Keith gently sobbed into his bag of Revels.

I woke to the darkness and the smell of alcohol. I groaned and shifted in my bed, feeling the tug of the IV drip in my arm.

It was the middle of the night and the television was on with the sound turned down. At first I thought I was alone. And then I saw Keith. Under the light of the sports channel, he was slumped in one of the chairs, the bottle of vodka in his lap sticking up like a codpiece.

My eyes drifted to the TV. It was a highlights show. Nothing but goals. All the boring bits cut out. I didn’t recognise any of the players or any of the teams. It was some sort of Third World league. I watched a big lean striker nod the ball over a flailing goalkeeper and then run towards the camera. And just before his kissy-kissy teammates reached him, he did a back flip, and then another back flip and then one more. His body violent with health and vitality and youth. His teeth bone-white in his grinning face.

Mocking me.

Mocking me.

Mocking me.

When I awoke again there was a light and I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know if it was just a vision caused by billions of brain synapses shutting down or a chemical hallucination or something else. I did not know if it was my dope-addled imagination or some new unimagined reality. I didn’t know if it was the drugs or heaven.

Lara’s voice held me.

‘You never have to say it back,’ she was saying, and now everyone was crying, including me, although I was getting beyond tears, and that was why it seemed so strange when the doctor burst into the room, laughing like a nutcase and his face all shiny with delight.

‘We’ve got one,’ he said.