Donor, The

by FitzGerald, Helen

  Will must’ve read this about three thousand times. It always sent him to sleep with a smile.

  * * *

  He would often read the essay after lying in bed worrying about Georgie, who did not come out of her mother’s body with a smile on her face. She screamed herself blue. Will tried to hold her after the nurse had weighed and measured and checked her, but she frightened him with her anger and he handed her back almost immediately, taking Kay instead, who’d fallen asleep after two minutes of smiling.

  When they were toddlers, Georgie would follow Kay down the stairs on Christmas morning, rubbing her eyes with exhaustion. She’d relish Kay’s excitement, insisting that her sister open all her presents first. ‘It does feel like a teddy bear!’ she’d say as Kay poked at the badly wrapped gift. ‘Why don’t you open it? Oh look what Daddy bought you! Yes, it is beautiful.’ Eventually, she’d open hers, ripping paper quickly, discarding, moving on to the next. Will couldn’t recall her showing anything other than disdain for anything he’d ever bought her. (‘Why is this pink? Did you forget my favourite colour?’)

  While Kay had waved at Will (smiling) as she walked into school for the first time, Georgie had howled and grasped his legs and yelled. ‘I don’t want to go, Daddy! I want to stay home with you.’ He hadn’t known what to do, except to say, ‘Look at your sister. She’s excited. She knows it’s gonna be fun. Why don’t you follow her in?’

  ‘Why don’t you follow her in?’ Georgie said as a teacher took her hand and led her towards the door.

  After that, each afternoon as he stood in the playground with the mums, a tiny worry would niggle the back of his mind. (What would Georgie’s problem be today? She had the wrong gym kit? Her teacher yelled too much?) No matter what it was, he always tried to be positive, and sometimes he managed – like the time every other girl in the class – including Kay – was invited to Mhairi Magee’s soft-play birthday party. Will sat Georgie down and said it was a mistake, that Mhairi’s mum said she had put an invitation in the schoolbag. ‘Thank goodness she couldn’t find it,’ he told her. ‘You can’t go, because I’ve already booked tickets for us to go tobogganing!’ But mostly, Will felt he failed to react to Georgie’s worries appropriately. They seemed to seep into him and shudder.

  In fourth year, Georgie also had to submit an essay about the person she admired most. She chose Gandhi. Will wasn’t surprised. If she ever wrote an essay about him, he would not want to read it.

  5

  At least I left him a note.

  Dad,

  Don’t be angry with me. I’m sixteen and I can do what I want now. I’ve gone to find my mum.

  G

  Okay, so I ran away a week before my final exams, but what did it matter? I was dumb as dog shit anyways and had no ambitions other than the one I ran away to do. Plus it was his fault. He drove me away with his lump-of-lard-ed-ness. What did he ever do? What had he ever achieved? If I’d had to come in from school one more time to find him listening to that stupid song ‘Time to Say Goodbye’, and eating crisps, I would have murdered him. If I’d had to eat out with him one more time and wait while he pondered the menu (What are you having? What would you recommend? Could we share? Could you order for me?) I would have killed him all over again. Get this, right: he couldn’t even decide where to go on holidays. Every summer, about a week before the break, he’d get us round the kitchen table and play some stupid game. He’d hide a five-pound note under his hand and say, ‘Bessie up or down?’ We’d take turns each year. ‘Down!’ Kay would say enthusiastically, and if she was right, if the noggin of England’s Queen was down the way, she’d get to decide (between a caravan in Arran or a cottage in fucking Arran!). We never went anywhere else, ever. Kay and I were the only ones in our year never to have been across a bigger stretch of water than the one between Ardrossan and Brodick.

  He drove her away too. I completely understood how she must have felt: suffocated, frustrated, angry, wanting to run for the hills screaming, ‘I’m free!’

  I knew he would have been angry with me. He was always angry with me. He’d have yelled, ‘Why? Why me? What have I done? Have I not given you everything?’ He’d have wondered why I chose now to leave; screwing up my education when he’d done everything he could to keep us in this decent area, in these decent schools. He’d have said to Kay, ‘Have I not been good to her? Have I not spent every spare minute with her, encouraged her friendships, listened when she needed to talk, put up with her tantrums, her rage at the world?’

  Poor Kay. I can imagine she would have told him it wasn’t his fault. She’d have made him a cup of tea and put her arm around him and told him she loved him and that I loved him too, in my own way, and that maybe I just needed to do this thing. Maybe he should just let me.

  He wasn’t able to. He was worried that I’d harm myself. I’d been drinking for a few years by then, my addictive personality perhaps inherited from my drug-using mother. He probably assumed I’d get proper wellied and do myself or someone else in. So he left Kay with his groupie housewife and drove to Central Station. That’s the problem with using someone else’s credit cards. They can find you. Within hours of my departure, he knew where I was and what I was doing. Should’ve withdrawn the cash like Mum did.

  I was walking along the platform when I heard his voice. I turned to see him running towards me with that dumb, tearful face. I thought about pushing my way through the crowds of people waiting at each carriage door but I didn’t have the strength.

  How long had it been since I’d had any strength? A long time, looking back, the first real clue being about a year earlier, when I started avoiding all stairs, taking time to consider if I really needed to ascend to my bedroom or to my locker on the second floor at school. As time wore on, my weariness grew. Maybe I needed sleep, perhaps it was that extra vodka down the park the night before, or was it that time of the month? But as weeks grew into months, one thing after another adding to my general sense of ill being, it became obvious that something might be wrong. Why did I need to pee all the time? Did the boy at the end-of-year party get me pregnant? (I did a test. He didn’t, which was no surprise as his mother had walked into his bedroom before either of us managed to reach the end.) Why, when peeing was an ongoing and urgent need, did nothing come out when I made it to the loo? Come pee, come, I would beg. Why on earth won’t you come? Did I have an STD? A urinary infection? I was tested for the former at the family planning clinic (all clear) and drank those powder things that get rid of the latter (didn’t work). So why?

  And why, when it did come out sometimes, was it like milkshake froth? Why were my ankles swollen? Why was I itchy and nauseous? Why did I have a foul taste in my mouth that no amount of toothpaste or mouthwash would get rid of? For several weeks before my attempt to find my mother, I had spent long periods each night googling online medical services, only to discover that I had every disease there is.

  ‘You’re worrying about nothing,’ Kay said, when I asked her about the milkshake froth one night. I get that sometimes too. I’m sure it’s normal. Maybe hormones? And of course you’re tired. You never sleep!’

  But as I stood on the platform, my father before me, I knew there was something seriously wrong, not just hormones or lack of sleep. Ah, fuck, I thought, breathless. I would need to talk to him.

  ‘Georgie, please don’t do this.’

  ‘You can’t stop me.’

  ‘But where are you going? How are you going to find her?

  ‘I’m going to see the guy she ran off with. Janet told me how to find him.’

  ‘Where is he?’ I could hear a tremor in my father’s voice. A pathetic tremor that stifled his thoughts: Why didn’t I do that? Why didn’t I ask Janet about Heath?

  ‘He’s in HM Prison Manchester.’

  6

  To whom it may concern …

  A ruler flattened the floor of Heath’s words …

  I am writing to ask for parole. I have changed a lot since my offence. My partner
, Cynthia Marion, is in rehab. She says she is waiting for me to get out to help her achieve what I have achieved. I am very motivated to help her. Please please believe me. I am sorry for what I done and I will be law abiding from now on. The people I used to hang out with are gone from my life.

  Yours faithfully,

  HEATH JONES

  This first letter, scribed, tongue out, three years prior to Georgie’s planned visit, had come to no good. Heath hadn’t expected early release, not on first application, but it pissed him off nevertheless, so much so that he phoned Cynthia in rehab feeling so sorry for himself that he decided to tell her she shouldn’t bother waiting for him any more (Leave me and you’ll fuckin’ regret it! ) and that she should start afresh (Bring me some gear or you’ll fuckin’ regret it.)

  ‘I’m out of here Friday,’ Cynthia said. ‘I’ll bring something in then.’

  He thought of her as his Cathy. He the dark brooding love-her-of-life Heathcliff. They had been destined for each other since they met as teenagers, never quite having fun together, but never quite aiming to either. He would never let her leave him. She would never want to.

  ‘Cynthia,’ he said. It was the only word that made him weak.

  ‘Heath,’ she replied, this being their goodbye.

  *

  The following year, Heath sat at his desk, ruler in hand, and wrote a second letter to the parole board:

  Fuck you all. There is no fucking point. The guy was not a hostage. He was a fucking social worker. He came into my cell to nip my head all the time.

  As usual, Heath phoned Cynthia before the ink of his rejection had dried. Mobile phones were strictly forbidden in the prison, but strictly necessary, and Heath always had the most up-to-date under his mattress. This sentence, he had an iPhone. He used it for porn. He used it for games. He used it to organise the bringing-in of drugs – he had three types of contact for this on the outside: the dealer (there were three he trusted, two of whom he’d protected during previous sentences), the person who paid the dealer the money (he left money with a friend in Manchester who was very scared of him) and the courier (which the dealer organised, who used various methods to get the gear inside, often involving the support of a corrupt officer). Heath also used the phone to organise punishment on the outside should something go wrong with the deals, arranging for so and so to be maimed by so and so. And, of course, the phone gave him easy access to the love of his life. With a cell phone in his cell, he was the managing director of a fully operational business.

  ‘Oh, Heath,’ Cynthia said when he called to tell her the bad news. ‘What am I supposed to do without you?’

  Cynthia had visited regularly for years, but in this last year, expression had receded from her eyes each time. Her hair had become thin, dry, unwashed, unbrushed. Was he losing her? She had already lost herself.

  I am sorry for taking the social worker hostage last year,

  Heath wrote twelve months later.

  I just wanted more visits. I didn’t understand how you could take visits away just because of some random tests. I have completed another course in victim awareness and realise that the social worker must have been very scared when I wrapped him up in the sheet. I am very sorry for this because he was just trying to do his job and it’s no excuse that his job is a stupid one and that he’s useless at it.

  Please consider me for parole. I am a changed man now. I want to stop using. I really do.

  When I think of the man I killed I feel sorry now. It ruined my life.

  HEATH JONES

  ‘No,’ two men and two women took turns to say from their table. ‘We do not think you are ready.’

  The following day, after Heath phoned with the bad news on his recently upgraded iPhone, Cynthia visited him. ‘I can’t wait here any longer,’ she said. ‘I need to get away till you get out.’

  Heath was devastated, but he understood how she felt. ‘I’ll get out next time,’ he said. ‘One way or another. You will come back for me?’

  ‘Of course I will,’ she said.

  * * *

  The last year had been the slowest yet. In his cell, he tossed his fifth attempt at a letter to the parole board in the bin and lay down on his bed to look at the photograph he’d cherished for years. Cynthia, lying in a field. Elbow to head, not smiling at him, but loving him. ‘I know you’ll come back,’ he said to himself. ‘I know you will.’

  ‘You know a Georgina Marion?’ an officer was asking through the spy hole in his cell door.

  It took Heath a few seconds to recognise the name of his beloved’s daughter. ‘Aye.’

  ‘She wants to visit you. I’ll add her to your list then, yeah?’

  7

  Finding my mother wasn’t my only mission. Hers was a love story that kept me alive. I knew she’d run off with the love of her life. Janet had leaked it one afternoon in the supermarket when I was nine.

  ‘Have you ever heard from my mother?’ I asked her as she weighed courgettes. Dad was at the deli counter, so I felt safe asking. I think Janet was a bit surprised. I probably should have said hello first.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Where did she go?’

  ‘I don’t know, honey,’ she said. ‘Love’s a funny thing.’

  ‘It is,’ I said, not knowing what she meant, but hoping she’d think I did and tell me more. ‘Is she still in love, do you think?’

  ‘No idea. That Heath Jones is a strange one. Not sure what she sees in him. But she never was able to get him out of her system.’

  After that, I fantasised about my mother’s love for a strange man called Heath Jones. He was always in her system. How romantic. I wanted to see that kind of sacrifice and love first hand. And then, I wanted to find it myself. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl. Mum had found it. She’d sacrificed everything for it. I wanted it.

  Four hours is a long time when your feet have swollen to the size of basketballs, when you’re freezing cold and breathless and waiting for the toilet to be vacant again so your can retch into the sticky bowl. I was desperate for air, but when I staggered off the train and made my way to the taxi stand, it merely fuelled my nausea. The driver was so nervous about my physical state that he stopped three times on the way to the prison.

  HM Prison Manchester, previously known as Strangeways, was the home of the quickest hanging in history – 7.5 seconds from cell to death – and had housed Britain’s best-known serial killers: Moors murderer Ian Brady and the GP Harold Shipman. I’d read all about the place, imagining my mum visiting her lover there, hooking her fingers through the bars to touch his, saying, ‘I will wait for you, my darling.’ I imagined her writing him letters with secret messages involving symbols and code words – ‘How 4are you?!’ might mean, for example, ‘Next visit I will smuggle in Belgian chocolate.’

  It hadn’t been hard to find out about Heath. All I had to do was ask Janet, who Dad couldn’t stand – he said it was because she talked too much, but I knew it was because she was Mum’s best friend back then. He’d blacklisted anyone who’d been onside with Mum.

  ‘Sure I know where he is,’ Janet said. ‘He’s been in prison for years. It was all over the papers.’

  She googled his name as I looked over her shoulder. Within seconds I was staring at the big square frame of Heath Jones, my mother’s lover. The picture was taken from a fair distance. He was walking out of the High Court. It was hard to make out his features exactly, but you could tell he was handsome, in an ‘I might kill you any second’ kind of way. Every feature scowled. His nose: flared in anger. His mouth: tense and closed and alien to smiling. Eyes: the kind newspapers love to print – pure hate, pure evil.

  GLASGOW DEALER GETS LIFE,

  the article beside the photograph said:

  Heath Jones was sentenced to life in prison today for the murder of the infamous Glaswegian criminal Panda McTee, whom he stabbed in a lane near Queen Street Station, Glasgow, twelve months ago. Lord Johnstone concluded that Mr Jones ‘
showed no remorse for his cold-blooded brutality’. Psychiatric reports stated that Mr Jones suffered from borderline personality disorder and had no victim awareness whatsoever. His previous offences included seven assaults, two of them against women.

  ‘Thanks, Janet,’ I said. I went home and set about arranging a visit.

  *

  I must have fallen asleep in the taxi. When I woke, the driver was gently shaking my shoulder.

  ‘Are we there?’ I asked, unable to sit up properly. Heath Jones was expecting me at 1 p.m. Sweat was pouring from my body. I felt like I might die.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘We’re at the hospital. You’ve been making sounds. You look bad. You need to see a doctor.’

  As much as I didn’t want to admit it, he was right, and I got out of the car and staggered into the A and E. It was two hours before a doctor examined me.

  ‘You have high blood pressure,’ he said. ‘And there are a few other things we’re worried about. We want to run some tests.’

  8

  And this is where Will’s story began. Not sooner than this because it’s not a tale about a frustrated artist, or a scorned lover, or a new man, or a struggling single father. It’s a story about kidneys. Two bits of squidgy brown flesh, till now the companion of steak in his mind but from this moment on linked with the survival – or not – of his daughter. Georgie’s kidneys had packed it in, the doctor said when the test results came back. They were still in Manchester, and the only words Georgie had spoken to him were, ‘I’ll find her as soon as I’m better.’ As the doctor explained further in his depressing white hospital office, Georgie’s face fell, because she realised that time might never come. She had kidney disease. Her liver was suffering. It was rare in teenagers. It was established, chronic, incurable, progressing rapidly. Georgie needed more than medication. She needed machines to sustain her for now, and a transplant to sustain her for longer. But the chances were slim, her type rare. It was a genetic disease, caused by the gross mismatch of Will and Cynthia – how many more ways could they have been mismatched? – which meant Kay was screened in Glasgow almost immediately after her sister’s diagnosis.