The Curious Heart of Ailsa Rae

by Stephanie Butland

  When he does come through the door, she’s barely stood before he sees her and strides over. He is breathless, his skin clammy when he presses his cheek to Ailsa’s. She scans him: brown wool coat, blue shirt, black jeans, bright blue trainers. All good.

  ‘Ailsa,’ that slow stretch of smiling, ‘good to see you. Sorry I’m late. My meeting went on. I thought it would be quicker to walk but I got lost. I was worried I’d missed you.’

  ‘No bother,’ Ailsa says. ‘I don’t mind waiting.’ She almost adds, I’ve had plenty of practice, but stops herself. Waiting for Apple isn’t the only way to frame her life anymore.

  ‘On the map it looks as though you’re in the right place,’ he says, unbuttoning his coat, which is tweedy, leather-buttoned, a newer version of something Aunt Tamsin would coo over in a vintage shop, ‘but then you turn out to be on the wrong level. I’ve never tried to find my way around a multi-storey city before.’

  Ailsa laughs. ‘You should try giving directions.’

  ‘No thanks,’ Seb says. He slides his coat from his shoulders and drapes it over the spare chair at the table Ailsa’s chosen.

  ‘Shall we have a drink?’ Seb is sitting back now, raising a hand to a waiter, the picture of confidence that is the opposite of what Ailsa can manage. ‘What are you drinking? I don’t want to distract you from cave food. Do you want anything to eat? You’re going to have a boring Easter, aren’t you?’

  There’s a second before she realises he’s talking about chocolate. She’d thought he’d read her mind – the fact that her friends would all be coupled-up or going out over the Easter weekend, while she’ll be with her mum and her auntie, listening to them reminisce and trying to find a moment to bring up what they were going to do about her, or Hayley, moving out. Another pair of friends has moved out of Edinburgh for the sake of a mortgage they can afford. She got an invitation to her ex-boyfriend Jacob’s wedding this week. She’s being left further and further behind. And Apple has a real sense of urgency about this; Ailsa wonders whether she’s been twenty-eight before, and she knows how things should be.

  She laughs. ‘I’ll cope,’ she says. ‘And I’ve ordered some tea. I ate before I came out.’

  Seb orders a cheese plate and some wine. Then he leans back, looks around, and says, ‘I thought Edinburgh would be – plainer. You’ve got to love a city that thinks nothing is finished until it’s got a turret on top. Inside, as well. Look at all that – what is it? Plasterwork? On the ceiling.’

  Ah, the tea’s here. Something else for Ailsa to look at, rather than the elaborate ceiling, which makes her feel dizzy, or Seb, who is dizzying in a different way, not least because she can’t tell exactly what he’s looking at behind his shades. Not now he’s stopped looking up, anyway.

  She turns down the milk and asks for lemon. Seb waits until the waiter has gone, then says, ‘You’re nowhere near the size you make people think on your blog, you know. You just look – comfy – in real life.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Ailsa says, though she’s not sure ‘comfy’ is the word she wants to spring to Seb’s mind when he looks at her. ‘It’s how you feel, though, is it not?’

  ‘It is,’ and he smiles as though she’s said something clever. ‘I like the way you sound.’

  ‘You’ll have been ecstatic having a day in Edinburgh, then.’ She’s tempted to dial up her accent. Equally, she wants to tone it down. With the result that she suddenly can’t remember how to speak at all.

  ‘Sort of. But Roz – from my meeting – has lived all over the place, though she’s from Edinburgh, so she hasn’t really got the sound so much. And some people I can’t make out. You’re just right.’

  ‘Everyone in Edinburgh might not have been from Edinburgh, you know. It’s not – an enclave.’

  Seb dips his head, as though submitting, then leans forward. ‘Before the food gets here. Stitch inspection.’ He raises his Ray-Bans, and Ailsa leans in to see, raising her glasses too. She’s startled, again, by the clear warm green of his eyes, in this light like a summer-day sea; and then she looks at what she’s supposed to be focussing on, and notices how the stitches are no longer a star but a series of zig-zags, broken here and there where individual stitches have been removed. She looks for pin-pricks of darkness where the holes must have been, but she can’t see them.

  They are almost nose-to-nose, air eddying between them as they breathe.

  Ailsa sits back, puts her glasses back on, and Seb does the same. It’s too uncomfortable, to be so close to someone. ‘Thank you,’ she says.

  ‘Your eyes are a lovely colour,’ Seb replies, although it’s not really a reply.

  ‘They’re just blue.’

  ‘You can’t say “just blue”. That’s like saying “it’s just raining”. There’s a thousand sorts of rain.’

  Ailsa laughs, looks over his shoulder – what a relief to look away from those sunglasses, and whatever is going on in the eyes behind them – towards the door, with its steady veil of drizzle beyond. ‘There is in Edinburgh, that’s for sure. Did you bring a brolly?’

  Seb shrugs. ‘Nah. I’ll get wet. In the scheme of things I think I can handle it.’

  Seb’s cheese and wine arrive, along with the lemon, fanned out in slices on a small white dish. Ailsa pours her tea. She isn’t used to thinking of weather as something to be disregarded. A cold can be a bad thing for someone with a heart condition; fatal, for someone taking immunosuppressants. There’s an umbrella in her bag, a hood on her coat.

  ‘How was your meeting?’

  ‘Good, I think,’ Seb says. ‘Now I wait and see. Metaphorically speaking. I don’t want to think about it. Distract me. How was your day? What did you do?’

  ‘Fine,’ Ailsa says, because it would be weird to say what her days really are: odd, tiring, lonely. Not what she expected them to be. And she’s certainly not going to offer that up to someone who only wants to hear about it as a way of not thinking about themselves. ‘I’m thinking about what to do. But I don’t know the best way to be’ – a moment, a sip of tea, a search for the word – ‘worthwhile.’ It’s only as she says it that she realises how much she means it, and her voice sounds tearful. Seb doesn’t seem to notice. He probably thinks it’s more charming Edinburgh nuance.

  ‘You’re clever, though.’ It’s not a question.

  ‘Yes.’ Cleverness is about all Ailsa has, now that heart problems have gone. ‘I’ve got a degree in history. But not a lot else to offer.’

  ‘So you can do whatever you want to. I mean – if you’re clever, you can turn your hand to something. Get qualified. I think I got three GCSEs. I failed most things, except showing off.’

  ‘Were you . . .’ Ailsa hesitates. She’s thinking of Lennox’s sister, who is still angry now about the un-spotted dyslexia that slowed her down, although she’s made it up in spades since. Is it acceptable to ask someone if they have that kind of difficulty? Probably not.

  ‘I wasn’t anything,’ Seb says, ‘though everyone tried to find something: dyslexia, dyspraxia, ADHD. In the end we all agreed I was just a lazy little bugger who liked showing off.’ Ailsa laughs. ‘The funny thing is, my parents are teachers. What I didn’t do at school I had to do at home. In theory. Phone confiscated, studying where they could see me, all that. Carrots. Sticks. Nothing worked. I didn’t care. I just wanted to be an actor. No parent wants to hear that one.’

  ‘I suppose not,’ Ailsa says. Thinks: Not as much as they don’t want to hear – heart operation or bust.

  ‘I got maths and English GCSEs, and an A* in drama, of course, and the agreement was that I would take a year to start working towards a drama career and then we – the family – would reconsider. Which meant, give him a year to realise how hard it is out there and then talk some sense into him. Then I saw the ad for open auditions for Wherefore Art Thou? ’ He grins. ‘My folks are lovely, but it’s funny how they’ve rewritten history. “We always knew he’d end up on the stage”, and all that.’

  Ailsa laughs
. ‘Do you not mind?’

  Seb shakes his head. ‘First rule of this business: don’t mind. You’ve got people telling you, on a daily basis, that you’re too fat, too thin, your face is the wrong shape, you haven’t got chemistry, or the other guy is better than you. And that’s just auditions. If you’re stupid enough to look at the tabloids, it’s a million times worse.’

  Ailsa thinks of herself, after the radio show and the comments that followed it, slating her for ingratitude. She had lain in bed, tired from the travelling, and trying, fiercely, not to mind; failing. She almost says so – or says something, to agree – but her experience is nothing compared to his. It would be like talking about being in a school play to him.

  Seb is constructing a careful tower of oatcake, pickle, cheese, quince jelly. As he eats, Ailsa says, ‘I can see that,’ then, ‘I’ve never had a job before. So even the – the marking-time jobs – I don’t think I’m much of a prospect.’

  Seb puts his head on one side, gives her a look that says I-agree-but-I-don’t-agree. ‘I’d say there’s more to you than meets the eye. Even the normal eye.’

  ‘Hark at me,’ Ailsa says, ‘complaining about all sorts of things that aren’t problems.’

  Seb looks at her, seriously, for a moment. ‘It’s not my business,’ he says, ‘but when I was first playing Max on TV, I used to go to work and think everyone was better than me, and go home convinced I was a failure. And most kids auditioning for drama school would break each other’s legs to do what I was doing.’

  Ailsa might be holding her breath. There’s a familiarity to what he’s saying, and as he talks she feels something in her start to unclench. It’s as though Apple is listening too, stretching out to hear. She doesn’t want him to stop.

  ‘I used to make a massive effort, you know, always be cheerful, always go out for drinks if anyone was going. Not be offended if people were bitchy. And then one day I was in make-up, and Tom Foster was in the chair next to me, and he caught my eye in the mirror and said, ‘Remember, son, just because you’ve got what you want doesn’t mean you have to be happy all the fucking time.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ailsa says. ‘God – yes.’ She almost asks who Tom Foster is, but she knows it doesn’t matter. This isn’t a story about Tom Foster. It’s about Seb. And her. It’s about – ordinary. Seb is describing the feeling she’s had since she left hospital with her four-beats-to-the-bar heart and a shining life ahead, the meaning she’s been grasping for.

  Seb takes some more cheese and then gestures, a sorry-my-mouth’s-full wave of the hand. Ailsa smiles, waits. She could try to say something but she’d rather just sit here, feeling whatever it is that she’s feeling. Understood, maybe.

  ‘I read your blog and I know that was about you, what’s inside you,’ Seb continues and Ailsa puts her hand to her chest. She can’t help it; here is the place where Apple is keeping time for her forever. He takes a mouthful of wine. ‘But it made me think about when I started and the way it was – outside me. Some of the people in that show were bastards to me. They had worked their way into TV the hard way and they thought I’d cheated by doing Wherefore Art Thou? They were waiting for me to fall on my face. I was determined to show them. I knew all my lines, I did as I was told. And then Tom said what he said, and when I left make-up there were a couple of people who stopped talking as I went past. They had obviously been talking about me. Usually I would have ignored them, or been cheerful and pretended I hadn’t noticed, but instead I smiled and flipped them the bird. It felt fantastic. Fuckers. They both got killed off in a car accident last year. They’re still waiting for their next jobs.’

  Seb leans back, catches the waiter’s eye, points to his glass, gives a thumbs-up, returns to his cheese. Ailsa’s tea is almost untouched; the slice of lemon has sunk. She wishes she’d written down what he’d said, or been recording their conversation from the beginning. He’s looking at her, waiting for her to speak. He hasn’t said anything about gratitude or living or what she ought to do. But his story has sent a pulse of recognition through her, top to toe.

  Seb’s fresh glass of wine arrives. ‘Are you OK? Ailsa?’

  ‘What you said,’ she says, ‘about not having to be happy because you’ve got what you’re supposed to want. Thank you. I feel as though you understand.’

  A moment of quiet. A beat of two hearts.

  ‘Do you like tango?’

  ‘I love it,’ Ailsa says.

  Seb nods. ‘I didn’t get to do tango on StarDance,’ he says. ‘I would have done, if my eye hadn’t . . .’ He makes a gesture with his hand, from fist to fully extended fingers in a second. ‘Fenella and I had started rehearsing. I loved it. Very sexy.’

  ‘Yes, I can see how it could be,’ Ailsa says, although all she’s learned, really, is to stop apologising when she does something wrong. Sometimes there’s a twitch of something else, a step that works. Not sexy, but something that might be related to it. Eventually.

  ‘Are you learning with the Gardiner sisters?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ailsa says, ‘they’re lovely. Very patient.’ But this is a man who is in Edinburgh for the first time, and got lost on his way to Waverley station. ‘How do you know them?’

  ‘I don’t, really. Only the name, because they did really well on a talent thing. Roz mentioned they’re from Edinburgh at our meeting today.’

  Ailsa points to herself. ‘Entertainment vegan, remember? I just googled “Tango class Edinburgh” and away I went.’

  Seb nods, smiles and pushes his chair to one side a little, so that he can prop an ankle on the opposite knee. Everything he does with his body looks right. No wonder he can dance. Or does his body look right because he dances?

  ‘Do you want to do this interview before I have any more wine?’

  ‘Yes, please.’ Ah, familiar territory. She flips her notebook to the list of questions, opens up the recorder on her phone, and gets down to business.

  www.myblueblueheart.blogspot.co.uk

  27 March, 2018

  The Eye Has It

  The eye is a funny old thing, isn’t it? Just a squishy ball of vitreous whatever that allows us to see, and yet we make it so important in such a lot of other ways. I think it’s closest to the heart in that respect. A heart is nothing but a pump, really, but you wouldn’t think that on Valentine’s Day. Well, the eye is the window to the soul; sunshine in February is a sight for sore eyes; if you’re lucky, you’re the apple of someone’s eye.

  But, you know I like to be unsentimental about the body. If I wasn’t, all of my love and a good deal of my spirit would have been taken out of me with my old, broken pump. So let’s talk about the cornea. It’s a transparent, dome-shaped disc on the front of the eye, which bends the light as it enters the body, and is crucial in allowing us to see.

  I’ve interviewed someone who received a corneal transplant in December. He’s going to remain anonymous, so we’ll call him Green Eyes. The unedited transcript is below (though I haven’t tried to capture the noise I made when I knocked half a cup of cold tea over, and I’ve not bothered with the clearing-up and apologising. You can imagine that for yourselves, if you want to).

  AILSA: Thank you for talking to me about your cornea transplant.

  GREEN EYES: No worries. We kind of complement each other. Green eyes, blue heart.

  AILSA: Well, yes. Though my heart isn’t blue anymore. Metaphorically speaking.

  GREEN EYES: Sounds like we might need a bottle of wine to unpick that statement.

  AILSA: Tell us a little bit about you, apart from your cornea, Green Eyes.

  GREEN EYES: OK. I’m a busy person. I like people and going out. I like good food, though I can’t cook to save my life. I live in London. God, I sound really shallow. Shall I say that I read a lot of books?

  AILSA: Only if it’s true.

  GREEN EYES: I must do something apart from eat and go out . . . I go to the gym but that’s not really a hobby. I like music.

  AILSA: What sort of music?
/>   GREEN EYES: All sorts. Bluegrass, though, especially. And Northern soul. I buy vinyl if I can.

  AILSA: OK.

  GREEN EYES: Do I sound less shallow now?

  AILSA: Yes, on the music. No, on the vinyl. And what do you do for a living?

  GREEN EYES: Not a lot, at the moment. I’m an actor but I am, literally, avoiding the spotlight until my eye heals. It’s weird.

  AILSA: So you can’t work at all?

  GREEN EYES: In theory, I could. I’m – exploring possibilities at the moment. But between keeping my eye away from too much light, and having to avoid close-ups because there’s stitching in my eye, plus not wanting to get anything in there – there’s a limit to what I can do. On camera, at least.

  AILSA: You could play people who never take their sunglasses off, maybe? Or pirates?

  GREEN EYES: You should be my agent.

  AILSA: So – why did you need a cornea transplant?

  GREEN EYES: I had a sore, itchy eye that wouldn’t go away. I assumed I must have just scratched it or something, but after a week I saw a doctor, and I got antibiotic eye drops for what looked like an infection. It almost went away, but didn’t, quite. I should admit that I got a bit lazy – I was really busy – so I stopped putting the drops in regularly and I didn’t go back to the doctor, even though things hadn’t completely cleared up. And then, over the space of forty-eight hours, the soreness and itchiness went mental, and when I went to the hospital, it turned out I had been wrongly diagnosed. I actually had something called Acanthamoeba keratitis.

  AILSA: You had a houseplant in your eye?