Donor, The

by FitzGerald, Helen

  ‘Her tongue’s in her mouth … Georgie, stop crying. Georgie, listen to what I’m saying … Put the ball of one palm on top of the other and place them in between her boobs.’

  Did the sunglasses guy really say boobs? At a time like this? Surely the operator didn’t say boobs?

  ‘Yes, she’s doing that … Now press quite hard each time I count … You’re gonna count to six hundred, okay? The ambulance is on its way.’

  ‘One … two …’ Preston said. I couldn’t seem to do as he asked … ‘Three … four … You have to count out loud … Five … six … Georgie, count out loud! Nine … ten … Count out loud! No, she’s not counting …He says count!’

  I kept forgetting to count out loud. I couldn’t stop crying. Would I save her? Would she live? ‘Please live! Okay … eleven … twelve … Oh God.’

  ‘Count out loud!’ The sunglasses guy yelled.

  ‘Thirteen … fourteen … Oh God. Oh no. Oh please!’

  *

  I don’t recall what number I was at when they arrived. Not sure I got far beyond fourteen. I was pretty hopeless at following instructions. It must have driven the sunglasses guy mad.

  ‘My name is Preston,’ he said. We were in the back of the ambulance. She was breathing. Maybe she had been all along. Maybe I pounded on her chest for no reason.

  ‘Was it heroin?’ I asked.

  He shrugged his shoulders. The paramedic answered for me. ‘The stuff on the street’s too pure at the moment. We’ve had five deaths in the last week. Your friend was lucky.’

  Friend? Is that what we looked like? ‘She’s my mother,’ I said, squeezing her aged hand as we bumped towards Accident and Emergency.

  ‘Preston, were you with her when this happened?’ I asked.

  ‘No. She asked me to leave her alone for a while. I went for a coffee, came back later and, well, you know the rest.’

  ‘Will you do me a favour?’ I asked. ‘Don’t ring Dad yet. I want to be the one who’s with her when she wakes.’

  *

  Reece was on duty, and he managed to set up a portable dialysis unit in the bed next to my mother’s. So Alfred bubbled beside me as I watched her. When she woke, I told myself, I wanted the first thing she saw to be me, her daughter. I hated that she’d see me this way, stuck with my Alfred, pathetic, immobile, sickly, but I had no choice. I barely blinked the whole time, afraid that I would miss the moment when she opened her eyes. She would be so overwhelmed. She would take a while to recognise me, a couple of seconds or so, I guessed. Then it would hit her, bang. That’s my daughter, my beautiful daughter, Georgie, and she would smile and say my name … Georgie.

  I was thinking all this when she opened her eyes and looked at me, just as I imagined. She squinted. These were the two seconds it would take for her to recognise me. Just as the time I had allocated for this came to an end, she leant over the bed and puked.

  ‘Nurse! Nurse!’ she yelled. Her voice was high pitched and whiny. I didn’t expect her voice to be squeaky. Dad didn’t know this, but years ago I found some of the uncut films he’d made of her singing. Her singing voice was husky, nothing like this.

  ‘Get the fucking nurse and stop gawking, will you! Can you not see I’m fucking dying here!’

  This request was for me, her beloved daughter. I pressed the buzzer beside me, watching as she sat up, wiped her mouth and repeatedly pressed her own buzzer with a thin angry finger.

  My face didn’t usually go hot in difficult situations. I got angry a lot, but the physical symptoms were quickly released by yelling or hitting something. This time, with no such release, the anger – or was it surprise – made its way to my face. Even my eyebrows were burning.

  ‘Mrs Marion,’ the doctor said. He and a nurse had arrived. ‘You’re a very lucky woman. You could have died.’

  ‘I need to get out of here,’ she said.

  ‘Not today. We’re in the middle of running some tests and we want to keep an eye on you.’

  ‘But I have to get out of here. It’s very important. There’s somebody I have to see.’

  My eyebrows cooled slightly. I smiled. Just as I thought, she was desperate to see us.

  ‘You need to get some rest. If there’s somebody I can ring for you, please tell me,’ the nurse said.

  ‘Just leave me alone,’ she answered, then coughed, then rasped, then coughed again.

  When they left the room, my mum sat up and attempted to get off the bed. Her hands and legs were shaking. She grimaced every time she moved. I watched as she put her feet on the ground and opened the small bedside unit with her clothing inside.

  ‘Are you going?’ I said gently. Would she recognise my voice?

  ‘Mind your own business.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I was just wondering if there’s something I can do to help. You said you have to see somebody. Is it somebody important?’

  She’d taken off the gown and was trying to put on her jeans. Her hip bones jutted out above the low waist. I could see her ribs. She had a greyish bra on, but she didn’t need it. She stood, zipped her jeans and pulled on a long colourful T-shirt dress. ‘You really want to help?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Then give me twenty quid and fuck off.’

  23

  While Georgie dealt with her illness by ignoring it as best she could (using alcohol and sex wherever possible), Kay was not dealing with it at all. She couldn’t concentrate. Her exams were in a week, and she didn’t understand any of the notes she’d taken before her body had caved in. What does that line read? she wondered, staring at the chemistry book in front of her. It’s all blurry.

  She knew she was seriously ill well before Georgie found out. She’d been nauseous and tired and unable to pee for a long time. Her father had always said she was a healthy child – three days off school in six years – but this wasn’t really the case. Kay just got on with it. Walked to school with a raging headache. Played hockey with a throat infection. Did the shopping with a PMT depression. Studied hard with kidney disease.

  As Kay sat in the dialysis unit, books laid out on the desk in front of her, she realised she could no longer ignore this. It was a bastard. She’d been forgetting to take her medication, forgetting to eat properly. She’d fail at this rate. And she no longer cared, to be honest. No longer day-dreamed about her orchestra friend, Graham, suddenly kissing her, taking her by surprise, after a long build-up of sexual tension. What was the point of hope, the future, love, when she was disappearing towards death?

  ‘Evie?’ she said to the woman dialysing next to her. ‘Can you call the nurse for me?’

  ‘Sorry, dear?’ Evie took her earphones out. She’d been watching one of her Catherine Cookson adaptations. ‘What is it, love?’ she asked Kay.

  ‘Could you call the nurse for me?’

  ‘Of course. NURSE!’ Evie yelled with surprising strength. ‘Nurse! Little Kay’s not feeling too well.’

  Where was Georgie? She should be here, Kay thought. What does that line read? It’s all wobbly. Oh, I am really sick, she thought. I am really, really sick. Georgie! Dad!

  And now I’m on the floor.

  Samuel, dialysing opposite, latest Stieg Larsson thriller in hand, watched as Kay fell.

  Little bitch, he said to himself. She’ll probably get one now. And it’s my turn. See if she gets one, I’m going to my MP again.

  24

  ‘I need more money,’ Cynthia said into the payphone on Sauchiehall Street. She’d had to stagger for at least a mile to find a phone booth – they were pretty much extinct these days. The girl in the hospital had refused to give her twenty pounds, the obnoxious goth. Who did she think she was, anyway? What did she say again? ‘Were you always a total cunt? Maybe you were. Maybe you were always a total cunt.’ Sickly wee gobshite.

  Without the twenty, Cynthia was in a pickle. She needed stuff, now. Some for her, some for Heath, and she needed travel expenses and a contingency fund. ‘I won’t see Will till you give me more
money,’ she said to Preston.

  Preston, sitting in his office – not studying for maths as his mother thought but reading War and Peace for the second time – was pleased to hear from her. In the hospital two hours earlier, he’d gone out to get coffees for himself and Georgie – ah, Georgie – and when he came back, Cynthia had disappeared.

  ‘Where is she?’ Preston had asked his latest obsession.

  ‘Who gives a fuck?’ Georgie said. She’d been crying.

  ‘Have you told your father I found her yet?’

  ‘No,’ she replied.

  ‘Listen, I’ll find her, okay? I’ll sort this out.’

  ‘I wouldn’t bother,’ Georgie said.

  After sneakily retrieving one of Georgie’s used nicotine chewing gums from the bin, Preston went home to think about his next step. He rolled the small ball of grey gum in his finger as he talked to Cynthia on the phone. It wasn’t an ideal memento, but it would do for now. He liked that Georgie’s saliva was mixed in with it.

  ‘Where are you?’ he asked Cynthia. ‘Where can I meet you?’ She suggested the Glasgow Film Theatre, in an hour.

  *

  Preston coped very well with stress. In the last twelve hours, he’d bought drugs, killed a man and helped save a woman’s life. In the last two weeks he’d tracked down a missing person across two continents and fallen in love. As he walked from his West End flat toward the city centre, he realised that it was this last event which had tested him most. After getting the gig with Will Marion, he’d studied the family for some time. Preparation was the key to a successful project, he thought, and this meant knowing your client. So the very first thing he’d done was watch the family from a tree in their back garden. It was a lovely house on a street of lovely houses. Two storeys and a high pitched roof above a loft that most neighbours had converted into a bedroom. The gardens were well tended with hedges separating the long narrow strips of grass. The bins were lined neatly behind garages in the lane. This was a middle-class community where people followed rules and kept up with the MacTavishes. The three times he’d watched the house, he’d camouflaged himself in the tree by the back gate by wearing brown corduroy trousers and a brown jumper. He waited till it was dark, climbed the back gate, pulled himself up into the tree just inside the back garden and clung to the trunk as closely as possible. The first time, all blinds bar the one in the kitchen were closed, so he spent several hours watching the goings on in this one room. At 10 p.m. Will made three full-cream-milk hot chocolates and carried them out of the room. To the television room perhaps? Or to the bedrooms? At 10.30 Georgie helped herself to some cornflakes and ate them at the kitchen table. At 11.30 p.m. Kay got a glass of water and then turned off the light. At 12.30 Georgie sat at the kitchen bench in the dark and stared at the fridge for twenty minutes.

  The second time was the best. The upstairs bedroom blind was open. At 11.30 Georgie lay on her bed staring at the ceiling. At 11.40 she stood and looked at herself in the mirror. She was wearing jeans and a black sleeveless T-shirt. She began crying. She watched herself cry, not moving her hands to wipe tears or blow nose. She stood there, crying at herself. At 11.50 she took off her T-shirt and turned to the back garden (Had she seen him? Had she wanted him to see her?) and then – bugger – she closed the blinds.

  The third time, the bathroom window was open. At 10.30 Kay cleaned her teeth. At 11.00 Will yelled: ‘I’m on the toilet!’ (The whole street must have heard him!) At 11.20 Georgie brushed her teeth. She did it very thoroughly, with an electric toothbrush. He wondered if she timed it with an egg timer.

  He followed Georgie the day after the T-shirt incident. Watched her get in the car with her father. Watched her walk out of the hospital several hours later, pale and weak. Watched her go to a pub and flirt with some flabby guy.

  She was beautiful.

  Kind of wild in the eye. Kind of raw and angry.

  Perfect.

  *

  He was in Sauchiehall Street, the nicotine gum now hard between his thumb and index finger. He missed the moisture. When moist, it had, in fact, turned out to be the perfect memento. He’d need a replacement.

  As he turned into Rose Street and walked up the steep hill towards the cinema, he saw Cynthia sitting cross-legged on the ground outside, smoking a fag and looking annoyed. ‘About time!’ she said, standing to greet him. ‘You got the money?’

  ‘I’ll need to okay it with my client,’ Preston said.

  If Cynthia had felt stronger, she would have refused this condition. But she was itchy and in need. ‘Whatever,’ she said. ‘Just hurry.’

  *

  The phone rang twice before Georgie picked it up.

  ‘Can I speak to your father, Georgie?’ Preston said.

  ‘What about?’

  ‘It’s confidential, I’m afraid.’ Preston could hear a man talking in the background. His words were muffled for a moment – ‘Give me that! Give me the phone!’ – and then clear as a bell.

  ‘Hello, is this Preston?’

  Oh bugger, they all knew his real name now. ‘Yes. Did your daughter fill you in on what’s been happening?’

  ‘She did … finally.’

  ‘I’m with Cynthia now. She wants more money. She says if she gets it she’ll talk with you tomorrow.’

  ‘How much?’ Will asked.

  ‘How much?’ Preston relayed the question to a shaky, drawn Cynthia.

  Mmm. Cynthia thought. How much? Was he still in the big house his daddy bought? Did his daddy still pay him ridiculous wages for a ridiculous job?

  ‘A thousand,’ she said, nervous that she had either started too high or too low.

  ‘She wants a thousand pounds,’ Preston said to Will.

  ‘Tell her if she comes to the hospital right now, I’ll give her two thousand.’

  25

  Turns out Kay was sicker than me. How had I not noticed? As I sat beside her bed, holding her hand and looking at her pretty, innocent face, I realised that she wasn’t yellow like me, so much as deathly grey. How long had she been this colour? What a crap self-centred pain in the arse of a sister I’d been to not notice. All I’d thought about was me, assuming she was all right because she always said she was.

  She was asleep when the phone rang.

  ‘Tell her if she comes now, I’ll give her two thousand,’ my father had said. Where the hell was he going to get that? I knew the state he was in financially. The bank had been ringing constantly. Credit-card firms had been leaving messages every day. He had no job and wasn’t even looking for one. He spent his time fetching and ferrying for us and trying not to cry.

  ‘Is she coming?’ I asked him.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where are you going to get the money?’

  ‘I dunno. Got any ideas?’

  ‘Yeah. Actually I have.’

  My father was crying now. He was kissing Kay’s grey hand, tears streaming down his face. He was a mess. He didn’t have the means or the strength of character to help Kay.

  I was certain I did.

  *

  The time on the digital clock on the desk outside Kay’s room didn’t appear to work. A new minute flashed on the screen once every ten minutes, or so it seemed. My father and I looked at each other every now and again, then looked away abruptly, both of us knowing there was nothing to say, and nothing to do but watch the digital clock on the desk outside the room.

  Across the corridor from Kay, a little girl of about nine was lying in bed. Her left eye was swollen to the size of a tennis ball. Some kind of scary infection by the looks. She had a drip in her arm. Her mother sat on her bed reading her a story. It was Ping!, I think, featuring a whole bunch of Chinese ducks. The girl had a tiny smile on her face. Suddenly, a man knocked on their door. ‘Yoo hoo!’ he said, smiling broadly as he sat on the other side of the bed. He kissed the girl on the top of her head and said, ‘How’s my beautiful brave girl? Is her every need being catered for?’ He put cheese dippers and baked crisps and frui
t smoothies and two new books on the bedside table, then sat down.

  They linked hands – mother and father, father and daughter, daughter and mother. That’s what it should be like in this room, I thought. When she walks in, it should be exactly like that. Oozing comfortable love. Since seeing my mother in hospital earlier that day, I realised that was never going to happen because my mother had turned out to be a total waste of space.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Dad asked. What an irritating question. He always asked me that.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  ‘When you saw her …’ he said, ‘what … what was she like?’

  ‘She was shorter than I expected,’ I said.

  ‘Really? Hmm. Shorter.’ He paused for a while but was unable to stop himself from attempting to fill the time with small talk. ‘How old is Preston?’ he asked. ‘He sounded like a kid on the phone.’

  ‘Seventeen,’ I said.

  Dad sighed out loud and shook his head. ‘Really! Seventeen years old?’

  Forty minutes had passed. Kay was still asleep. Dad and I had taken to pacing the room and checking ourselves in the mirror. My lips looked thin. Dad needed to moisturise. I was pacing and he was peering when Preston came in. Dad and I froze.

  ‘She’s nervous,’ he said. ‘She’s in the waiting room. She asked me if I could take her the money first, to make sure.’

  ‘What does she want the money for?’ Dad asked.

  ‘She didn’t say.’

  ‘How did you get her to fly back?’

  ‘I promised her drugs.’

  ‘She wants more drugs, doesn’t she?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Is she going to bugger off or is she going to help us? What guarantee do we have?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Is she still with Heath?’

  ‘I think so.’