Starting Over (6 page)

‘It’s not easy,’ he said. ‘Having a copper for a father. Somebody everyone seems to know. Always getting compared. Always getting measured. Being your father’s son and nothing
more. Always seen that way.’ He smiled bitterly. ‘Living in your famous shadow.’

I shook my head. ‘I’m not famous,’ I said. ‘Bill Gates is famous. Brad Pitt is famous. The Dalai Lama…You should be grateful the Dalai Lama is not your father. I’m not famous.’

‘Oh, but you are,’ he said. ‘On a local level. Everyone round here knows who you are. Or who you were, before you got ill. You’re famous in that modern, micro-celebrity sort of way.’

‘You’re too kind.’ I poured myself a large measure of red. Then suddenly there was concern on his face.

‘What’s wrong?’ he said.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘A bit of a rotten night. Probably the drugs. They tend to swing your moods around. Don’t worry. Just a lousy night. Like you. Or did you think that you invented lousy nights?’

He still had the AlcoHawk Pro in his hand. I indicated what was left of the red wine.

‘You want a drop of this? They told me not to drink. But I’m really tired of being told what to do. You ever feel like that?’

Rufus shook his head. ‘I don’t drink, Dad. It’s not my thing.’

He put down the AlcoHawk Pro. I looked at him for a long time.

‘Then where do you go?’ I asked him.

And he told me.

When he had finished I gave him one of my clumsy hugs and he gave me one of his awkward squeezes in return and I left him in the kitchen, foraging for food and making a racket.

Upstairs in the bedroom the lights were all off, but my wife was still awake, and waiting for me.

I was jolted awake long before dawn.

This was not me. I had always slept like a baby. I don’t mean like a real baby – waking up wet and screaming every two hours – but like the sleeping baby of myth, comatose from lights out to breakfast. Especially after sex. But not tonight. Not any more. And, I somehow understood, never again.

I lay there for a while, dry-mouthed from the red wine, listening to Lara’s breathing, and then, knowing there would be no more sleep for me tonight, I silently made my way downstairs.

Hunched over my wife’s laptop in the kitchen, the only light coming from the glow of the computer screen, I joined my brothers and sisters. All those people who had been in death’s departure lounge, and then had their journey cancelled just before boarding.
God had thrown another log on my fire,
wrote one man.

Men and women, adults and children, in every corner of the planet. And as I bent before the computer’s light, I learned what we shared was that we had all been saved by the unimaginable kindness of some unknown stranger. And we shared something else. We had not only been saved. We had been changed. Oh, how we had been changed.

Changed in ways that you can imagine. And changed in ways that were beyond all imagining.

‘I am a Frankenstein,’ cried Louis Washkansky upon waking as the world’s first heart transplant recipient in Cape Town, South Africa, in the month of December, 1967. ‘I am a Frankenstein.’

‘Not a Frankenstein,’ said his nurse. ‘But an angel.’

I turned off the computer. There was still no light from the world outside as I went back up to bed. My family slept on. And my heart leapt to my throat when I saw him as I passed the darkened bathroom – the hair uncut and unkempt, the eyes bright and wild, not a gram of fat on his stubbled face, the flesh just fallen away. It was a face to make your heart leap in the middle of the night.

And it took me a long second to see that I was staring at myself.

I was standing in front of the mirror in the bedroom, my shirt open, looking at the scar on my chest again. It was a long, livid, red wound, as though someone had tried to saw me in half, starting at the top. My fingers moved to touch it and I remembered touching the scar on my wife’s stomach after the birth of our boy. The world had marked me, as it had marked her, as if to signal that one kind of life had ended and another kind of life had begun. I started to button my shirt and Lara appeared in the doorway.

‘The cab here?’ I said.

‘We’re not getting a cab,’ she said, and got this little secret smile.

The bicycles were waiting in the hall, propped against the wall. Ruby’s pink trekking bike, still caked with fresh mud, and Rufus’ big black Saracen Dirtrax, three years old but shining like it had just come out of the box. Sometimes you give a kid a present and they have outgrown it before it is unwrapped.

I looked at the bikes and I looked at my wife. ‘Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,’ I said.

‘It’s good for you,’ she said, and squeezed my arm. ‘And you’re ready.’ She gave me a wink. ‘Know what I mean, big boy?’

‘Just because I can – doesn’t mean I can –’

‘You take the pink one,’ she said. ‘It’s easier to ride.’

‘Ah, I don’t know,’ I said, watching Lara take the big black bike and wheel it out of the front door. Shaking my head, I took the handlebars of the pink bike and followed her. She was carrying two helmets. She placed one of them on my head, and began strapping it up.

‘You’ll be fine,’ she said.

It was one of those big blue days when the whole city seems dipped in sunlight. We rode in single file out of Primrose Hill and past the big houses in St John’s Wood. No – Lara rode, I wobbled. Every now and then she turned her head to see if I was okay. But I wasn’t. I was scared. Scared of dying. Scared of having to say goodbye. Scared of falling off.

When we reached the entrance to Regent’s Park I got off the bike and began to push it. Lara dismounted and walked beside me, and I thought that she could probably hear my breathing – these short, laboured gasps that had more to do with suppressed panic than physical exertion. I fought to get the air inside me under control. And I almost jumped when she touched my arm.

‘George?’

‘What?’

She lifted her chin and smiled. ‘It’s lovely, isn’t it? The park. All those lovely houses.’

She gestured at the Nash architecture that circles Regent’s Park like a mountain range in heaven. I grunted – a grunt that was meant to convey, Yes, it is indeed lovely, but I have other things on my mind right now.

‘Why did you destroy my cigarettes?’ I asked.

‘Because I love you,’ Lara said. ‘Should we stop and get you a few packs? So you can carry on killing yourself?’

‘No, you’re all right,’ I said, and sullenly pushed my little girl’s bike through Regent’s Park.

‘Nothing bad is going to happen to you,’ Lara said. We stopped and looked at each other. ‘Because I won’t let it.’ She held my eyes. ‘I promise, okay?’

Somehow I found myself getting back on the pink trekking bike. But now my sense of balance, or my confidence, or all of it, was just shot. I slid on to the little pink saddle and immediately slid right off. The bike toppled sideways and I shoved a foot out to stop myself falling, banging my shin hard against the pedal. ‘I
can’t…
’

She took my face in her hands. Her eyes blazing. And she didn’t say a thing. I took a breath, getting the pain down, and I got back on the bike but with Lara holding the handlebars and the seat, as if it was a wild horse about to bolt. I started to pedal, and she kept holding on to the handlebars and the seat, and she didn’t let go.

At first the bike trembled uncertainly and I could tell that it was taking all of Lara’s strength to keep me upright, but then it got easier, and I could feel that light magic of balance starting to come, and then it got even easier because I felt safe, she made me feel safe, and it was like being with my son and my daughter in this same park on the day they took off their stabilisers. We were not going fast. It was not much more than a wonky snail’s pace, and Lara had no trouble keeping up. Then suddenly she was trotting along beside me, still holding on.

‘I’ve got you,’ she said, and I found all at once that I believed in the magic of this bike, and my feet were pushing
down hard as I moved away from Lara with a fluid, easy grace that I felt I had borrowed from someone else.

And I laughed. It felt like the first time I had laughed, really laughed, with nothing dark behind the laugh, in a very long time. Then I was away and gaining speed all the time, the wind whipping my face as I veered off the park and on to the grass and then out on to Albany Street, skidding right into the path of a car full of young men with the windows down and music blaring. The car swerved to miss me and I glimpsed angry faces at the windows. One of them hurled a paper cup of coffee at my head. It missed. I laughed wildly.

‘I love that tune!’ I shouted at them, and I let go of the handlebars, allowing my hands to trail by my side, as happy as a twelve-year-old paperboy at the end of his Saturday job. Then I heard someone cry out in protest as I jumped a red light, zipped across the miraculously empty Marylebone Road, and entered the West End. I pulled my elbows back and yanked the bike on to its back wheel. A voice behind me was screaming faintly. I could just about make it out.

‘I’ve got you,’ the voice said.

‘Hmmm,’ said my cardiologist, Mr Carver, examining the pathology results as if they were a rather fine wine list, and wondering what he should order with the duck. ‘I like the Cyclosporine with the Prednisolone but I am tempted to try it with the Azathioprine.’

‘More bloody drugs,’ Lara said from the passenger seat in front of the heart man’s big, empty desk. ‘Still more drugs. And are there any side effects to all these drugs?’

My wife was not afraid to confront him, and returned his frosty gaze as he eyeballed her over the top of his half-moon reading glasses.

‘Indeed,’ he said, getting up. ‘The side effect of all these drugs – this veritable smorgasbord of immunosuppressants – is that they are keeping your husband alive.’

I was standing up, taking my shirt off, and my mind was wandering. Drifting down to Harley Street where I could hear the diesel rumble of the black cabs. Drifting north to the great green expanse of Regent’s Park. I caught my breath when I felt his long, cold fingers on my chest. ‘That’s a good heart you have there,’ he said, peering at my scar. ‘Strong. Healthy. Young. A young man’s heart.’

He sat on his desk and watched me.

‘I want to thank them,’ I said. ‘The family of my donor. I saw stories on the Internet. People write to their donor’s family. Sometimes they write for a lifetime. And they even meet.’

‘Indeed,’ said Mr Carver. ‘And it can be a very emotional experience. Giving the gift of life. Receiving it. Knowing your deceased loved one gave someone else the chance to live.’ His long, bony fingers brushed non-existent dust from his empty desk. ‘But your donor’s family have requested anonymity. That happens too. So you just have to accept the gift you have been given.’

‘I want to thank someone,’ I said.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘That’s natural. But the donor’s family have the right of anonymity. All I can tell you is that your donor was a nineteen-year-old male who died in a London hospital. He was a registered organ donor and I can reveal that he also donated his lungs, pancreas, small bowel, blood, tissue and bone marrow.’

And I wondered: How does a young man with a strong heart suddenly die?

And somehow I knew: Violently.

‘Sometimes I feel different,’ I said.

‘Like a new man.’ Carver smiled.

I nodded. ‘As though – I don’t know – as though I am living another life.’

‘Change is natural,’ Mr Carver was saying. ‘Change is to be expected. Many patients suffer from mood swings because of the high dose of steroids given after the operation. And everyone changes after what you have been through. The formerly obese run marathons. Ex-chain smokers climb Everest.’ He gave me his Harley Street smile. Calm, reassuring, wise; £450 an hour. ‘Being that close to death would change anyone.’

‘More than that,’ I said. ‘I read about a woman who had vertigo and then, after a transplant, she started climbing mountains. And a little girl who started having terrible nightmares after she was given the heart of a murdered child. And a woman who went from reading celebrity magazines to Dostoevsky and Jane Austen. And –’

He held up his hand to stop me.

‘You’re talking about cellular memory phenomenon,’ Carver said, his voice honey-smooth with professional calm. ‘Transplant recipients taking on the characteristics of their donors.’

‘The Internet is full of it,’ I said.

‘The Internet is also full of people who have been abducted by aliens,’ he said. ‘The medical and scientific community only recognises one case of inexplicable change – a fifteen-year-old Australian girl who had a liver transplant.’

‘And what happened to her?’ Lara said.

Carver looked at her as he slipped back behind his desk. Then he looked away. ‘Her blood type changed,’ he said, and for a while none of us said a thing. Then my heart man chuckled.

‘Look, some people remain transplant patients all their lives. They never learn to just accept the gift they have been given. And some move on. They claim their own life back. Or a new kind of life. I strongly suggest that you count your blessings and concentrate all your efforts on getting well. It is your heart now.’ His hands were like big white spiders on his empty desk. ‘You have been given something that men have dreamed of through the ages – the chance to live your life again.’

And I saw that he envied me. He was fascinated by me. He wanted to know what it was like to have that second chance. But I wasn’t really listening to him. My mind was out there – out in the beautiful day.

And when I got back to it, and back to my bike, I rode it as if I owned this glorious morning, rode it with the wind and the sun in my face, rode it like a madman who knew with total certainty that he was never going to die.

God had thrown another log on my fire. And the faster I went, the more I felt it burn.

I was expecting something resembling a nightclub. I don’t know – tables with little lights on and cocktail waitresses. Maybe a dance floor. But this was just an East End pub, everything stained brown from ancient nicotine and spilt ale, with a small stage that had a fireman’s pole in the middle, for Wednesday and Saturday when the floor show was pole dancing, not comedy.

It was open-mic night and the place was packed. That surprised me. There was no one famous on the bill. As far as I could tell, there was no one who had ever even appeared on TV, and any idiot can get on the telly these days.

But the place was full of young men and women with beer
bottles in their hands, grinning and loud and halfway to drunk. They were all pointing their eager faces at the stage and its parade of human sacrifices.

There was a compere leering on the edge of the proceedings. He was dark-skinned, Middle Eastern-looking, wearing a white T-shirt that said,
Don’t freak – I’m a Sikh
, on the front and
Don’t panic – I’m not Islamic
, on the back. When the mob got too hostile, he killed the electric on the microphone, and wheeled out the next one.

A fat boy in a shiny suit was on stage, smiling and sweating. ‘I bloody hate London,’ he said in his singsong Geordie accent. ‘Bloody hate it, I do. You Cockneys are so rude, man. You dial 999 and the operator says, “This better be good, you slag.”’

Someone threw a kebab and it hit him in the face.

The compere killed the mic and the fat kid shuffled off in disgrace, still smiling and sweating, with bits of tomato and lettuce dangling from his sharkskin lapels.

Then my heart seemed to slide into my stomach because Rufus walked on to the stage, wearing the kind of frozen smile that I had seen on his face long ago. On his first day at a new school, and when he was the last to arrive for some other little boy’s birthday party, and when he was trying very hard not to cry. A smile with terror in it.

I applauded but I was the only one. There were a few sarcastic cheers – so much sarcasm in the world, where does it all come from? – and a couple of half-hearted boos. I felt his mother tense by my side. I took her hand and gripped it tight.

‘Everything’s got to be convenient these days, everything’s got to be easy,’ Rufus said, his voice too loud, the microphone too close. A blast of feedback howled through the little brown pub. Someone laughed uproariously, although it may have had nothing to do with Rufus, or it may have been
ironic. There it was again – this mean-spirited urge to cut everything down to size, to keep it in its place. My son, I thought, hiding behind his smile in this merciless world, and thinking it might be enough to get him through.

‘Speed dialling – what’s all that about?’ Rufus was saying. ‘What – we’re all too busy and important to dial a phone number?’

‘Ah, get
off
,’ someone bawled, suddenly and irrationally furious, and from all around the pub there came the toadying weasel voices raised in agreement.

‘Not funny!’ cried someone else. There was a horrible self-consciousness about that awful crowd. As though the audience felt that they were the ones auditioning for something. I wanted to kill the lot of them.

But Rufus grinned, as though it was all in good fun, and ploughed on, and I felt this surge of love for him as a shower of lager sloshed across his shins.

Louder jeers, and all around the white faces raised, as if sniffing the fetid air, and smelling their kill.

‘I’ve got,’ Rufus stuttered, ‘I’ve got these two numbers on speed dial – the Good Samaritans’ suicide hotline and Dominos Pizza…I’ve lost count of the times I called the suicide hotline, poured my heart out and told them I was thinking of topping myself – only to have some nice Polish lady say, “Any drinks or dessert with that?”’

I looked at Lara and laughed. Her face was a mask, her eyes never leaving the boy.