by Cole Moreton
Thirty-Five
Marc & Sue
Now here it is. The moment. A happy ending of sorts in this story of horrors, trials and wonders. They have not seen each other since Canada, but Marc and Sue are together at last on a sofa in the lodge at the hotel in the Scottish countryside where his mum works as a housekeeper. The night has come but the lamps in here cast a golden glow. This is the first time they have sat down properly to talk about everything that happened and Sue knows what she wants to say. It sounds like a prepared speech, because she has rehearsed this in her mind many times. ‘I don’t want you to feel guilty because Martin died and you lived. Martin was going to die anyway. We agreed to donate his organs when he died and we are thrilled to know that lives have been saved because of him.’
Marc looks uneasy, unsure how to respond. He is grateful, of course, for everything that has happened, but struggles for a way to express that. He still has health problems, a transplant can’t solve them all, but he feels fitter than he has for years. All this would have been too much to hope or pray for a dozen years ago when his mum was pacing the hospital corridors pleading with God to take her life in return for his, as she often reminded him. Marc is a bit overwhelmed by Sue’s presence when he sees her again, as he had said he would be when we met earlier. ‘How are you supposed to thank somebody for giving you a heart? It’s the biggest gift anyone could give, and there’s no way to say thanks.’
Perhaps there is a way, though. Actions might speak louder than words. Would he allow her to place her hand on his chest again?
‘You’re getting me embarrassed now,’ he says bashfully, as if he wants to refuse. But he can see Sue wants to do it. The answer has to be yes.
‘I’m getting upset now,’ she says with a sniff, but shuffles up closer to him.
Slowly, awkwardly, assuming that it’s all right, she reaches across him, as if to lay hands in prayer. Marc lets her put her palm against his chest, just left of centre where the heart is, then covers her hand with his own and presses it gently against him. Yes, he is saying. You can. Feel the heart. Sue closes her eyes and breathes deeply.
‘Yeah, it’s a very special thing, for Marc to feel it’s okay for me to do this.’
They are both still for a moment, as she keeps her eyes closed and concentrates, then a smile spreads across Sue’s face. She’s beaming. Under her flat palm she can feel the warmth of his body and under that, the heart of her lost boy. The rhythm of life, the double thump as if it is repeating the name of her son, over and over again: Martin. Martin. Martin. The heart that grew in her womb. The heart Martin was born with and that kept him alive for sixteen years, always beating, unseen, on all the days she could remember. The day he took his first steps. The day he wouldn’t let go of her hand at the school gate. The day he fell down in the park and she picked him up and hugged the hurt away. The heart was always there, always constant. Always beating. At home on the sofa, on that last night together, as they chatted and laughed, the heart was in him and he was alive.
Then he was gone.
The ache is still so hard to bear, it catches her breath after all this time, but now, here, under her fingertips, she can feel the rhythm that was his. A beat that began within her and grew louder in him and is now, somehow, still carrying on, impossibly, under the thin, scarred skin of this other boy. This man. ‘That is really special to me,’ says Sue slowly, her hand still in place like a blessing. ‘To be able to feel the heart that Martin was born with, still beating … it’s just incredible.’
This is not a quick grab of the hand. It’s a moment that lingers, with a silence that grows. They are hip-to-hip on the sofa, the Scottish lad startled by the emotion of it all and the Englishwoman leaning across him, almost in an embrace. Almost like mother and son. Almost, but not quite. This is a rare kind of closeness that so few people can ever know, because the circumstances are so extraordinary. She lost her son and then his body was divided up. She survived a powerful grief and learned at last to let him go but now, incredibly, all these years later, she can feel for herself that a part of him is so very much alive. And Marc can feel this stranger close. He can feel her hand on him and his heart beating under it and yet he knows that the heart was not always his. It belonged to a boy who was – and is – so deeply loved by his mum, this woman whose hair is in Marc’s face, whose scent is in his nostrils. No wonder they are both quiet. What could anyone say to all of that? A nervous little chuckle comes out of nowhere, surprising Marc. Sue echoes him and they shuffle apart, each looking happy but far away, shocked by what has just happened.
‘I don’t think you are actually aware of your own heart,’ says Sue for something to say, nerves quickening her speech. ‘You might hear it sometimes but not often and we rarely touch other people like this. I could feel Marc’s heart beating strongly. For that, I’m really grateful.’
It’s only when she gets up to make another mug of tea for us all that I realise I’ve just heard Sue call it Marc’s heart. The heart that used to belong to the boy she misses every day. The loud, cheeky, lovely boy she lost far too soon, but whose death brought life. Martin, the boy who gave his heart away.
Afterword
Marc & Martin
‘This is not the way the world is meant to work. They’re not supposed to go before us.’
That is what Linda said when she first thought her son was dying, all those years ago. She says it again now, when she calls to tell me that Marc has passed away.
‘He died in my arms, Cole. I held him and he left me.’
Then the only sound down the line is sobbing.
This is not the way it is meant to be. The last time I saw Marc he was with Sue and looked so happy, so full of the promise of life to come. But that was in December 2015 and Linda says he went downhill fast in the following months. His heart began to struggle after thirteen years in a different body. His liver and kidneys began to fail again. He had a problem with his lungs and was diagnosed with a perforated bowel as well, so his visits to hospital became more frequent. Not that he would admit that he was dying, says his father.
‘Marc came down to my house rubbing his side. I asked him what was wrong, and he said, “Oh Dad, I drunk too much milk today.” It was nothing to do with milk. Even when I went to see him in hospital he’d be saying, “Dad, they don’t know what they’re talking about. What am I in for anyway?” What a boy. Unbelievable. I never left feeling sad. He lifted you up and kept you going, even though he knew how serious it all was.’
We did make a radio documentary about the transplant and it was broadcast that summer. Listeners rejoiced at Marc’s recovery, but those who saw him every day knew he was in trouble. Despite being only twenty-eight years old, he moved about like a frail elderly man, unable to walk far. In July, at the height of summer with everybody enjoying the sun, Marc sat in yet another hospital room with his mother and a consultant told them both the bad news. There was nothing much more they could do for him. ‘If they gave him a kidney transplant, his heart wouldn’t cope. If they gave him a heart transplant, his kidneys wouldn’t cope. The anaesthetic would kill him either way. We were between the devil and the deep blue sea,’ says Linda. ‘The doctor said he had two years to live, at the most. In the end we had two months.’
They wanted to go away together as a family one last time, so the heart and lung charity at the Freeman Hospital helped Linda arrange a weekend in September at a holiday camp in Whitley Bay, Northumberland, with an indoor pool and wide, sandy beaches. Marc insisted on driving his mum and a couple of his friends all the way. ‘He was exhausted when we got there, but he was proud to have made it.’
More than a dozen of his friends and family were with him in a couple of caravans. They all feared it was his last holiday. A photograph taken that weekend shows Marc raising a vivid blue Slush Puppy ice drink alongside his brother’s beer. He looks horribly pale and alarmingly thin. When they all left on the Monday morning, Marc was suffering severe stomach cramps again but still
wanted to drive. They got as far as the border with Scotland before Linda had to take over.
‘Shall I drive you straight to the hospital?’
‘What for? ’Cos I’m tired? Ach no, Mum. I’ll be fine.’
‘You’re not fine, son,’ she said. But he insisted on going home to the house he was now sharing with his brother Darren. Marc texted his mum at 10.40 pm to say he felt better now he was in his own bed. But he also texted his sister, Leasa, and was straight with her.
‘I’m away to the hospital in the morning. I’m fucked.’
‘There’s no harm in getting a wee help to make you better,’ she texted back.
‘I think I need a big help.’
When Leasa sent another message at seven the next morning to see how he was it was Darren who replied. He had found Marc unconscious on the bathroom floor just after five and called an ambulance. Leasa knew then that it was all over. ‘If it had to happen, I’m glad it was only two months after he was told. I wouldn’t have wanted him sitting there not able to move, counting down the days, not knowing what to say.’
Marc was taken to a state-of-the art hospital in Glasgow called the Queen Elizabeth, which had a new kind of scanner. Linda got there just after nine in the morning and found Marc in a cubicle in A&E with the curtains pulled all the way round it. She heard him first, because he was calling out for her and thrashing about like he had in the back of the car outside the hospital, long ago.
‘Mum! I’m sore, Mum …’
‘It’s all right, baby, I’m here,’ she said, but Linda saw the agony on his face and the heart monitor going crazy and she knew this really was the end of his life for sure, and she shrieked at the nurse. ‘He’s in pain here, give him something!’
The drugs calmed him down, as she recalls. ‘Marc just pure relaxed and I just cuddled into him. His face was in my hair.’
After a while, a female doctor about the same age as Linda asked her to step outside the cubicle so they could talk. ‘Your son is really very poorly,’ she said.
‘I know that, I’ve had thirteen years of it.’
Marc had suffered a heart attack and there was a build-up of fluid in his bowel, his life was under threat. They could operate but Linda knew it would probably kill him. They could resuscitate him if his heart failed again, but his mum did not want them to do that either. ‘I didn’t want my child dying on an operating table surrounded by strange people. And if they did resuscitate him, what would they be bringing him back for? To say, “Marc, you’ve got a perforated bowel but there’s nothing we can do for you”? That would be cruel. So I said, “No, don’t do those things. You are not to touch him anymore. Let him be.”’
‘You had better come back in,’ said a nurse, interrupting. Marc was in trouble, he was having another heart attack. Linda threw her arms out as if to clear the space and ordered them not to intervene. ‘Get all this stuff off him, all these sticky pads, the wires, the mask, the drips, everything. Leave me alone with my boy!’
The nurse and the doctor were brilliant, they did just that. Linda remembered what Leasa had told her a dozen years ago in Newcastle, that she should not cry when he was in trouble or it would frighten him. She was determined that Marc would not know that he was about to die. She got half up on the bed and cuddled him, cradling her son, stroking his hair, wetting his lips with her finger, rocking him.
‘It’s okay, son. It’s okay. I’m here with you. I love you, baby, it’s okay.’
She could hear the air coming out of his lungs. It was a sound she knew as a nurse, from the patients she had seen pass away. Then Linda says she felt a hand rubbing her back. The doctor was by her side, trying to comfort her. The nurse was on the other side. They both had their arms around her. The doctor placed a stethoscope on Marc’s chest and listened.
‘Linda, he’s gone.’
Marc died in his mother’s arms at 10.25 am on Tuesday, 20 September 2016. Linda stayed with him for the next five hours, in a private side room, while his family and friends came to say goodbye.
‘It’s strange, I could feel him watching us from somewhere – above, behind, I don’t know – even while his body was lying there.’
She called an undertaker to fetch him, rather than have Marc go to the hospital mortuary, and even then she was talking to him. ‘Look, son, I’m fighting for you.’
Daryl arrived at the hospital thinking Marc was still alive, but found his sister Leasa mumbling through tears. ‘At least he’s not suffering any more.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Do you not know? He’s away …’
Daryl posted a message for all their friends and family on his Facebook timeline at 2.38 pm that afternoon: ‘Just to let everyone know, my brother Marc passed away today. After a long 13-year fight dealing with a heart transplant, today his body finally had enough. He was a great uncle, brother, son, nephew, grandson and best mate to anyone who knew him. He will be missed dearly.’
Linda went to see his body at the funeral parlour on the Friday and said afterwards that she had been reminded of something Sue had said. ‘I keep thinking about Marc being with Martin now. Like Martin has been waiting for him for thirteen years. Now they’ll finally get to meet. He’ll have a friend up there.’
Rangers flags and scarves have appeared overnight on walls and fences or hanging from the street lights all over Lochwinnoch, put there by friends of Marc wanting to ‘turn the town blue’ in his honour. The cloud is low, it’s a grey and threatening day, with lashes of rain and the car headlights burning bright in the gloom. Nigel and Sue Burton have arrived an hour before the funeral service and are taking shelter in the Junction cafe, eating thick soup and crusty bread after their long journey. The drive up to Scotland took Nigel six hours and he will be driving six hours back, but they both felt compelled to come.
‘We wanted to be with the family, but also we felt we needed to be here because they are burying a piece of Martin,’ says Sue, dressed in a black coat and a black, white and blue dress. The men have been asked to wear a dark suit and a blue tie and Nigel’s marks him out as a member of the Grantham Referees’ Association, although nobody in Lochwinnoch is going to know that. They are with Lynne Holt, who has travelled by train all the way from Newcastle. Outside, the street is busy with people moving slowly towards the dark, solemn building that is Calder United Free Church.
The Burtons are quiet as they enter. The pews are already packed with Marc’s friends and family, including lots of straight-backed lads with razored hair. The young women are elegant in black. They all look shocked into silence.
The front two rows of the church are empty, waiting for the close family.
We find seats to the side, and contemplate this place. The church was built by a congregation that believed in modesty in all things but the village was famous at the time for its furniture, and so the pulpit and the stairs leading up to it are beautifully made, somehow both simple and magnificent. The walls are white, the wood has been painted a warm gold. The sound of a piper playing in the street outside spills into the church. Heads turn to see Marc’s coffin wheeled in through the door on a silver-looking trolley, to a stunned silence. The coffin is in the blue and white of the Scottish Saltire and bears a bouquet in the Rangers colours of red, white and blue. Marc is to be buried in a full Rangers kit – the socks, the shorts and the shirt all brand new. But the McCays are still not with us as the minister clicks his laptop to play the opening piano chords of a song called ‘Faded’ by Alan Walker.
‘You were the shadow to my light. Did you feel us? Another star, you fade away. Where are you now?’
A lone, clear female voice sings but then a mighty wave of electronic dance music crashes in to the church, incongruous. Marc’s mates would jump to their feet and start dancing if they heard that sound in a club, but instead they sit motionless in the pews, looking down at the floor.
Still, the family does not arrive.
The song cuts off abruptly and the minister com
es to the microphone. ‘Don’t worry, folks, but are Nigel and Sue with us?’ They are both confused to be picked out – but they get up and go out into a back room of the church as he directs. Linda is waiting. She wants Sue with her, for perhaps the most difficult moment of her life.
‘We’re burying Martin’s heart. I can’t do it without you.’
When the mothers have hugged, the close family group goes out into the church to take their places. Linda sits in the front pew, grasping hard at the hand of a longtime friend called Danny, a patient, supportive man who has become her partner in recent years. She slumps forward, face hidden behind her hair.
The minister carries on talking over her head, telling stories about Marc growing up in this community, going to Sunday school in this church, swimming in the river across the way, playing by the waterfall in the woods. ‘He was a lively boy who once tied his little brother up and locked him in a cupboard.’ Everyone laughs except Daryl – the little brother, now grown into a handsome young man – who has his own sad, secret smile.
Sparky – as they all seem to know Marc – took up a job cutting grass but the boss thought he spent more time kipping in the back of the van than working. He did get to play football with his brothers. They went with him to see Rangers play at Ibrox and the minister recalls that he even had calls from his great hero, the striker and manager Ally McCoist, who had heard his story. Then he asks us to sing the hymn so often heard at cup finals, ‘Abide with Me’. The words are lovely, inspirational and reassuring, but the singing is thin. Throats are choked by emotion.