by Jenny Colgan
Cormac patted Islay on the hand. ‘I know you want to stay up all night watching Mr Drake on the television.’
Islay rolled her eyes.
‘It’s Drake,’ she wheezed. ‘Not Mr Drake. And I don’t like him anyway.’
‘That’s good,’ said Cormac. ‘He’s too old for you.’
Islay tried to smile.
‘But the best thing you could do is get some sleep,’ said Cormac.
This wasn’t true. The best – and rapidly turning into the only – thing she could do was to get a heart transplant. If only it were that simple.
‘Imagine,’ said Mrs Coudrie as Islay tried to settle into bed. ‘Imagine waiting for someone else’s child to die. Imagine hoping that they will.’
‘I don’t know!’ said Kai’s mother, her voice hysterical. ‘They were all yelling. And I just wanted to see my boy. He’s my boy! And they wanted to chop him up.’
Lissa took the woman’s hands.
‘Did you say no?’ she said softly.
‘I didn’t know what I was saying!’ said the woman, looking up at her. ‘Yes. I think I said no.’
‘Do you know,’ said Lissa very softly and quietly, as if trying to soothe a child. ‘Do you know what would be the most wonderful thing you could do for Kai, and Kai could do for the world?’
‘But they want to chop him up! My boy! My beautiful boy!’
‘He’d be giving his life for others,’ Lissa said. ‘That . . . that is very beautiful.’
The woman gently touched a small crucifix around her neck.
‘He could save a life,’ repeated Lissa.
‘But my beautiful boy . . .’
‘Would be a hero. A hero beyond heroes. For ever.’
The tears didn’t stop falling. Mrs Mitchell stood back.
‘Is it too late to say yes?’
Lissa shook her head, even though she wasn’t sure; even though it might be.
‘Come, please,’ she said. ‘Please. Can you come with me? Quickly?’
And together they ran back through the long corridors, the devil at their heels, Lissa terrified they would be too late, that they would have unplugged their machines, gone on their way, their tragic work unsuccessful.
They clattered into the HDU, panting and terrified. Thank God, thank God, thank God for all the cuts, was the only thing she could think. The staff had taken a break; the shift who would come on and remove the tubes and make up the body had not yet been called in – and there he still was, still connected.
They both froze. Kai’s mother made a sound, an animal noise, as if it was all happening over again.
‘You can do this,’ said Lissa. ‘You can do this.’
The officious young transplant woman was summoned with a beep, and she came clattering down the corridor, the fussiness in her face transformed, suddenly, into something like hope.
‘Mrs Mitchell?’
The woman nodded blankly. She sat by his bed again, stroking the beautiful, still-warm skin.
‘She made me come back.’
‘I didn’t!’ said Lissa. And looking at the boy, so close to sleeping – so close she could totally understand the instinctive horror at cutting him up, parcelling him out and using him for parts.
‘Give me the thing to sign,’ said Mrs Mitchell. ‘Quickly please. I don’t want to change my mind again.’
The nurse brought the paperwork over.
‘You have to understand—’
‘That it’s binding, yes, yes, I know that. Quick, I said!’
‘No,’ said the transplant nurse, straightening up. ‘I just really want you to understand. What you are doing is the bravest, the most wonderful thing you can do.’
Mrs Mitchell stared at her, her mouth hanging open.
‘You sound,’ she said, ‘like you want me to be pleased.’
Chapter Eight
Kim-Ange was up and waiting for Lissa. She helped her friend pull off her clothes, take out her contacts, put on her thick black-rimmed glasses and get into her tracksuit bottoms. Lissa couldn’t deny being pleased to see her. Living in the nurses’ home was hardly the lap of luxury – it was a grimy old sixties block near the hospital – but it was still much cheaper than trying to rent privately in London, or even getting the train in every day from where her parents lived in Hertfordshire, and it had the added benefit, even if it was noisy and the showers were peeling and the kitchens got very grim, of there always being someone to talk to if you’d had a bad day. A really, really, really bad day.
Kim-Ange had her hands up.
‘I know,’ she said, her face a mask of sadness. She was holding up a bottle of something. That was the good thing and bad thing about nurses’ homes; word got around.
‘It was Ezra’s . . .’
‘I know that too.’ Kim-Ange swallowed. ‘He’s been seeing Yasmin.’
‘Ah,’ said Lissa, even in her exhaustion and misery registering that Ezra had been spreading himself round the exact same place she actually lived.
She felt utterly hollow inside.
Kim-Ange waved a bottle of some mysterious plum-coloured substance.
‘Come try this.’
Ever since she’d found an old cocktail cabinet in a skip which she’d hoiked home single-handedly, Kim-Ange had been on a mission to invent something new, which meant experimenting with a lot of things that were disgusting. Lissa didn’t care that evening though.
‘So how bad are you feeling about it?’ said Kim-Ange, eyeing her shrewdly. ‘Tracksuit bottoms bad? I mean, you know other people can see you?’
Kim-Ange had extremely high sartorial standards. She herself was wearing a long pink and red nightdress, matching robe, marabou slippers and a full face of make-up.
‘Yes,’ said Lissa. ‘It was a hit and run. Possibly deliberate. Fifteen years old.’
‘The way they talked about it on the news,’ said Kim-Ange. ‘As if, you know, what do you expect.’ She sighed.
Lissa sighed. ‘Give me the purple elixir of joy and/or misery then,’ she said, holding out her tooth mug for Kim-Ange to fill up.
‘Oh my God, that’s revolting,’ said Lissa, collapsing onto her bed. Then she took another sip. ‘Still bad.’
There was a pause and she tried again.
‘Okay, now it’s not so bad.’
‘There we are,’ said Kim-Ange, pleased. ‘A three-sipper. One of my best yet!’ and she started absent-mindedly folding Lissa’s clothes.
‘They’re going to call me in too,’ said Lissa after a while. ‘Disciplinary, I think. I didn’t get out of the way of the doctors. I messed up with the transplant protocol.’
‘You stopped a transplant?!’
‘No, I made one happen.’
‘Oh, that is terrible.’ Kim-Ange snorted sarcastically. ‘And don’t tell me, did you have a baby doctor who didn’t know his arse from his elbow and couldn’t tap a vein in either of them?’
‘No, I crossed the line,’ said Lissa.
‘Thank God there’s such a plethora of highly trained paramedical staff they could fill your job from,’ said Kim-Ange, looking mischievous. Lissa half smiled.
‘How short are they at the moment?’
‘Four grade eights,’ said Lissa.
‘Haha,’ said Kim-Ange. ‘They’ll never get rid of you. I mean, seriously. What else did you do? Did you have full sex in the ambulance?’
‘KIM-ANGE!’
‘I’ll take that as a maybe.’
‘No!’
‘Did you steal the car afterwards?’
Lissa bit her lip.
‘Stop it.’
‘No, seriously, I am trying to work out ways they’d actually let you go. Did you make the ambulance stop at the KFC drive-through on the way to the hospital?’
‘No.’
‘There you go then. It’ll be a telling-off.’
‘I hate those too.’
Kim-Ange rolled her eyes. ‘That’s right, terrifying NHS management sitting on their fat a
rses ticking boxes all day. They are pretty tough and scary, right enough. I heard they don’t even cry when they get a papercut.’
‘Tell me about your day,’ said Lissa, changing the subject. ‘Hang on, didn’t you have a date tonight?’
Kim-Ange approached Tinder with more or less as much tenacity as her job in cardiology.
‘Hmm . . .’ said Kim-Ange.
‘Oh no!’
Lissa scrolled down her phone.
‘But look at you on Insta! You look amazing!’
‘I do,’ said Kim-Ange.
Lissa looked at her, then back at the picture, then up at Kim-Ange again. ‘Stop doing that!’
‘What?’ said Kim-Ange innocently.
‘Giving yourself a waist. It looks really weird.’
‘Beautiful weird?’
‘I’m taking Facetune off your phone. You have gone too far. You look like a shark has bitten a chunk out of you.’
‘Piss off!’
‘You’re beautiful as you are,’ said Lissa, and Kim-Ange sighed.
‘So, don’t tell me. He was a shark-bite fetishist and then you turned up without a chunk out of you?’
‘No,’ said Kim-Ange. ‘He just kept going on and on about kimchee.’
‘Oh, you’re kidding,’ said Lissa. ‘Did you tell him you’re from Margate?’
‘Yup. That’s when he started telling me I really ought to get to know my own culture.’
Lissa laughed and rolled over on the bed, stuffing her pillow on her face. ‘NOOOOO! “Know your culture” bro strikes again! Nooooo!’
Kim-Ange checked her waist in the mirror and breathed in, quite hard.
‘What else did he say?’ said Lissa from behind the pillow.
‘Oh! He went to Cambodia on his gap year.’
‘So?’ Lissa removed the pillow.
‘So! Obviously, I would want to hear all about that!’
Lissa screwed up her face, then pulled up her phone.
‘Oh well. Let’s see what everyone else is up to.’
‘You mean, let’s see where everyone else is face-tuning themselves?’
‘And Lip Filler Watch.’
‘On it,’ said Kim-Ange, and she refilled their glasses with the filthy purple alcohol and they sat down and scrolled through the absurdly over-filtered pictures of everyone they’d ever known, and then for good measure made their own ridiculously over-filtered, face-tuned pic that turned them both into busty size sixes with vast fish lips, stuck their figures onto a background of a golden beach and posted them. Immediately the likes started pouring in.
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Lissa, rolling her eyes.
‘Now everyone’s going to ask me how Hawaii was,’ said Kim-Ange, getting up to go to bed.
‘Tell them you got sponsored by a luxury holiday company to go for free for the ’Gram,’ suggested Lissa.
‘I will, I will.’ And Kim-Ange kissed Lissa on the cheek and she went to bed, feeling slightly better, or at least a little drunk.
Chapter Nine
Cormac wasn’t entirely disappointed to notice that Emer had gone by the time he got home. There was a text on his phone he didn’t read the whole of, but it definitely included the phrase ‘you’re like a really shit “Batman”’. He was pondering this when, for the third time that evening, Jake rang. Cormac hurried out to meet his friend.
‘That was quick,’ said Jake suspiciously. ‘I take it she left.’
‘Don’t you start,’ said Cormac.
‘Ah,’ said Jake. ‘The thing about lady problems is . . .’
‘Don’t start,’ said Cormac. ‘And, for the third time, I’m not even on call.’
‘I know,’ said Jake as he tried and failed to suppress a smile.
Cormac gave him a sideways look. It wasn’t like any job was great fun. Unless, in Jake’s case, a supermodel had got herself stuck in the bath or something ridiculous like that.
‘What?’
‘I thought you might like this one.’
‘What?’
‘It’s your young Islay.’
Cormac’s heart started beating extremely quickly.
‘What about her?’
‘It’s only come up. Ten minutes ago.’
‘You are kidding,’ said Cormac.
Jake shook his head. ‘Nope. Some poor kid down south.’
‘The right age?’
‘Fifteen.’
‘Oh God,’ said Cormac. Then: ‘Oh God.’
‘I know.’
Jake whistled through his teeth. ‘I never thought we’d get there.’
Heart and lung transplants were so rare and the chances of success were so slim that normally only the heart was transplanted into patients who really needed it.
‘It’s the right size: he was tiny. Couple more years’ growing, and they can do it together.’
Cormac had watched the clock run down on patients before and had been fully expecting it to happen again.
‘Chuffing hell,’ he said. ‘That is absolutely brilliant news.’
‘Want to come with me to get her?’ said Jake.
Cormac did.
And he clasped his hand on Jake’s shoulder as they climbed into the van, Tim the Silent Driver pulling away.
Lissa couldn’t sleep.
Outside the nursing block, with its single-glazed windows, was the ongoing sound of London, rumbling away. Normally Lissa didn’t mind it. In fact, she quite liked the steady reassuring noise of lorries delivering goods, glasses being recycled from pubs, bin pick-ups, sirens, shouting, as well as the omnipresent scent of dope smoke drifting up on summer evenings. It was the city she’d been born in, the city she’d always known. It was her lullaby.
But tonight, it was getting right on her nerves, as she lay there, eyes dry and wide, wondering how many other Kais were out there, how many other boys wouldn’t make it home to their mothers.
Normally in her job she followed people into their homes. Alive people, who got better hopefully, or at least reached a stage of acceptance and learned to deal with whatever hand of cards they’d been dealt.
This had happened the wrong way round and all she could see was a dripping pool of blood and wide staring eyes and someone who could have been her brother; could have been anyone she’d been at school with . . .
Every lorry stopping on the road sounded like danger; a car’s screeching brakes made her stiffen. She could feel the adrenaline shoot through her without warning, feel it spurting through her system even as one bit of her was chanting ‘must rest must rest’ and her phone glowed on the table, counting down the minutes until she had to get up, even as she could see the sky lightening through her cheap thin standard issue curtains. She groaned, turned over in bed and stuffed her head under the pillow, feeling simultaneously grimly alert and as if all her limbs were pinned down by stones, and the night ground on.
Chapter Ten
Joan had arrived by the time the boys got back to Islay’s house. All the lights were on in the quiet village street, blazing away. Mrs Murray, who ran the village shop, lived next door and had got up to see what all the fuss was about, just in case she missed any vitally important gossip. She didn’t consider what she did to be gossip, but instead an intensely important life force to the surrounding area and in fact a moral source for good, practically heroic. And so she was standing in her eiderdown dressing gown on her (spotless) front step at one o’clock in the morning. Plus, poor wee Islay, everyone had known her from a bairn, knew it wisnae fair, the poor lass. When all the other kids were running themselves ragged down at Tara’s nursery, she’d had to be kept home like a china doll sat on a shelf, never moving, jumping, running – everything children wanted to do – as if she was made of porcelain and couldn’t be let out. It was a real hardship to live somewhere as beautiful as Kirrinfief, which had the loch close by, the mountains and as much freedom and space to play in as a child could dream of, and be stuck indoors all the time watching TV or playing with her iPad.
And here was all the medical folk of the town: Joan and Cormac and Jake as well – my goodness, a full house. But they were smiling and chatting and everyone was excited, and the next minute out came Islay herself, being wheeled on a stretcher, sitting up, a tube in her nose to keep her blood supplied with oxygen.
‘I can’t believe it,’ Islay’s mother was saying, clutching her hands to her chest. Gregor, her dad, was blinking hard, trying to shush her, saying that it was very early days, that these things weren’t always a definite, that there were false alarms.
‘Wheels up!’ shouted Jake from his walkie-talkie, face beaming.
‘Och, listen to you,’ said Cormac, helping him wheel the bed. ‘With your fancy language! What are you, on Air Force One?’
‘They’re sending a plane with the heart in it.’
‘Who is?’
‘British Airways! They volunteered!’
‘They volunteered to fly here?’
‘I think they have to move a plane,’ said Jake. ‘Anyway. They’re rushing it.’
Cormac shook his head. ‘That’s amazing. That’s just amazing.’
He patted Islay on the shoulder.
‘Can you believe this? They’re rolling the red carpet right out for you.’
They hopped in the ambulance, Jake in the front, Cormac and Islay’s parents in the back. Even though Islay was thirteen, she was still clinging to an old raggedy toy seal she must have had since she was a baby.
Jake had every new gadget on his phone and pulled up an app that identified planes as they flew overhead. They ignored him at first, then gathered round in amazement, watching as the only flight in the air at that time. – a BA one, noted as ‘special cargo’ – blipped its way up the country from London. They fell into silence. Jake gave the phone to Islay to hold and started up the ambulance.
The trip through the pitch-black countryside seemed to take for ever. Creatures stirred in the road. Jake had the headlights on full beam, given the unlikeliness of bumping into anyone else on the roads – at least until 4.30 a.m., when the farmers started getting up – and every hedgerow seemed to contain a pair of suddenly glowing eyes, or hooting owls, or a shiver of starlings taking off from a tree, a quick, past-before-you-knew-it rustle in the gorse or the high grass as they rumbled through. Cormac imagined them as the only little pool of light in the whole world, as they shot past distant darkened farmhouses and vast fields of sleeping cows, one occasionally stirring herself sleepily to watch as the precious cargo sped by. The creatures of the Highlands, it felt to Cormac – ridiculously, of course – standing respectfully to let them through, nothing stopping in their way, as a girl sat on a bed, tracing a plane through the night skies.