The Curious Heart of Ailsa Rae

by Stephanie Butland

  Oh, Christ. There’s an obvious explanation for this. Ailsa opens her laptop and switches it on. While she’s waiting for it to power up, Tamsin rings again.

  ‘How are you, Auntie T? Is Mum OK? I went to work without my phone and I’ve just seen—’

  ‘Your mother’s on her way. I thought I’d best let you know. She’s not happy.’

  ‘I’d guessed that,’ Ailsa says, and then asks the question, even though the website for her dashboard is now loading, and she can see exactly what the problem is. Shit, shit, shit. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Well, that blog post of yours. It was a bit much, don’t you think? She’s mad as hell with you. And upset, o’course.’

  ‘I was going to call her this afternoon. Right now. And I didn’t think I’d published it. I was going to warn her about it first . . .’

  ‘Warn her? Not ask her?’

  ‘I thought I’d set it up as scheduled for tonight but then I must have clicked publish by mistake – I’ve not as much time now I’m working, I did it in a rush . . .’ Ailsa knows there is no point in going into this, but it feels like her only defence, the only way she has of hiding from what she’s begun.

  ‘Well, it’s too late now.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You should maybe have talked to her first, you know.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about posting it for a couple of weeks. It’s not a sudden decision. And she just shuts me down. Every time. And’ – Ailsa can hear what she’s going to say, how ridiculous it sounds, how childish, but she can’t stop it from coming out, and anyway, she knows that it’s a real, adult feeling. Because she is a real adult, and all she’s trying to do here is not be treated like a child – ‘it’s not fair.’

  ‘Aye, well. You of all people should know that it’s not always about fairness.’

  Ailsa feels her eyes close. She is so, so tired of this. ‘No. It’s not. But it’s not always about – her – either.’

  ‘She’s still the right to privacy. She might not want her life all over your damn blog. Eighty-two per cent of voters think you should see him, do you know that? Well, they don’t know the half of it.’

  ‘It’s my life too.’

  ‘Oh, heaven forbid that anything should be not about you, Ailsa. You’re just one of us now, one of the normal people, and all the same rules apply to you as they do to the rest of us.’

  There’s a part of Ailsa that wants to cry. And she wants to tell Tamsin that she has a right to her history – that it’s not the selfishness it looks like, really; that knowing her father is something her new long life might need. But she can’t find words, or tears; all she can do is look at the bedraggled window boxes on the sill. Looking after them was something Hayley did.

  Tamsin adds, ‘I know it isn’t easy. For either of you. But you don’t know everything. And this is not the way.’

  ‘I don’t know what to do, Auntie T.’

  Now Tamsin is silent on the line. Ailsa waits. Then, her aunt’s voice, gentler, ‘Well, she’s on the way. Try to be kind, if you can. She’s been through a lot for you. You know where I am if you need me.’

  It’s not the first time Ailsa has heard Tamsin say those words. In the last weeks before the transplant – which at the time were, potentially, the last weeks, period –Tamsin was often at the hospital. She’d try to persuade Hayley away, for fresh air, a change of scene or a hot meal, but Hayley was immovable. Tamsin would kiss Ailsa goodbye, then take Hayley by the shoulders, look her in the face, say, ‘You know where I am if you need me.’ This is not a memory Ailsa needs right now.

  Hayley rings the doorbell at ten past four. Ailsa buzzes her in, then hears her footsteps, slow, on the stairs. Her mother smells of cigarette smoke and she has smudged mascara at the corner of one eye. She might have been mad as hell when she left Glasgow, but she’s quiet now. Today’s scarf is all blues and greens; you only realise the pattern is peacock feathers when you spread the fabric out. It’s soft from long use. A nurse, seeing Hayley shaking out the scarf and folding it, told her that to bring peacock feathers inside was bad luck. Hayley had said, ‘Well, if that’s the case, this scarf is me putting two fingers up to luck.’

  ‘Mum,’ Ailsa says.

  ‘Ailsa.’ It’s not an angry voice, it’s deliberately neutral.

  ‘I was going to call you before the post went up. I thought I’d scheduled it for tonight.’

  Hayley has slipped off her shoes, an old habit of their home that Ailsa doesn’t bother with anymore, and walks into the living room, sits on the sofa. Ailsa follows.

  ‘It was a shock to see it, that’s for sure,’ Hayley says.

  ‘I’m sorry. I really did want to warn you.’

  ‘But you were going to do it anyway.’ Hayley still sounds calm. This is no longer good. It’s – unsettling. Ailsa has already managed to say the things she thought it might take half an hour to fit into the gaps of the furious monologue she was braced for.

  ‘Well – yes,’ Ailsa says, then, sitting down next to Hayley, turning towards her, ‘I know you don’t like the voting. Or the blog. But it’s mine. And so is – so is he.’

  ‘I’ve told you all you need to know about him.’

  Ailsa takes a deep breath. Her lungs expand, wait; then Apple beats and sends oxygen around her body, as though she understands. ‘That’s not your decision, though. I don’t want to be protected. He’s not – he’s not a virus. He’s half of my genes.’

  Hayley nods. ‘I can see that. But – this – it’s . . .’ She looks tired, disappointed. Ailsa knows how this works. Any reference to her father is automatically deflected to how her mother feels. Even Seb did it, when he read her original post.

  ‘It’s up to me, Mum. I’m sorry you don’t like it. But I need to – I didn’t go through all that we went through to be – to be smothered.’

  Hayley still seems calm. It’s still unnerving. ‘I’m used to protecting you. It’s always been my job.’

  ‘I know.’ Ailsa half shrugs. ‘But I don’t need protecting anymore.’

  ‘We all need protecting, Ailsa.’

  ‘Who was protecting you? When you were twenty-three?’

  A spark, at last, in Hayley’s face, some fight in the way her jaw moves. ‘No one. I thought I was an adult. Then look what happened.’

  ‘Thanks. It’s a bit late for me to apologise for being born.’ Ailsa gets up; exasperation is itching through her, making her move away from her mother, distract herself by looking at anything except those tired eyes, that bad-luck scarf. She thinks about Eliza: ‘Bring your feelings to the dance. Your strong feelings. That’s what makes a strong tango.’ Ailsa could dance up a storm right now.

  ‘You could have just asked me. If you want to see him,’ Hayley says.

  Oh, no, no, no. She can’t have this. ‘I know I could,’ she says. ‘You would have said, “Where has he been all these years?” and “How great for him to be able to turn up now when all the fucking work is done” and “Actually, did you realise he could have found you any time, if he had bothered to remember the address?” I know you told me a bit about him, that time in hospital, but I still don’t even know his second name. You would have made me feel as though I had to choose between you, and if I want to see him, then I would be letting you down . . .’

  ‘Ailsa . . .’ Hayley is standing, facing her, and her eyes are bright, and it might be tears but it might just as easily be exactly the kind of outrage her daughter would have expected.

  ‘No,’ Ailsa says, and her voice isn’t shaking so much as vibrating. There’s a hum at the edges of it as it meets the air. ‘No. I’m sick of this. I know you suffered. I know it. I just had Tamsin on the phone telling me how hard it was for you. I understand. And don’t tell me that I don’t understand because I haven’t watched someone I love dying, because I did. I watched Lennox. I know.’

  She’s crying, of course she is – she can’t say ‘Lennox’ and ‘dying’ without the tears coming.r />
  Hayley reaches for her, but she twitches away, a step back. She doesn’t want comfort. She wants to get this out. ‘But all that is over. Lennox is dead. I’m alive. And you don’t get to tell me how much to drink or who to have sex with or whether or not I can look for my own father. You don’t get to pull this on me anymore.’

  ‘I’m trying to keep you alive,’ Hayley says. ‘I’m trying to keep you safe. Can you not see that? I’m on your side.’

  Hayley puts her palm against the top of Ailsa’s arm. Ailsa shakes it off. She uses the heel of her hand to wipe the tears away, across her cheek and into her hair. ‘I know,’ Ailsa says, ‘but – but . . .’ All she can think of to say right now is that it’s not fair, and it isn’t fair, but if there are two people in the world who know about unfairness, it’s her and her mother.

  ‘Make me a cup of tea,’ Hayley says, with a sigh that seems to come from somewhere deeper than today, ‘strong as you like, and I’ll tell you everything you want to know.’

  *

  When Ailsa comes back with the tea, Hayley is sitting on the sofa again, papers in her hand. Ailsa puts the mug on the table and sits down. They aren’t calm but they aren’t at daggers drawn. Not for now, anyway. Just an ordinary day in Verona.

  ‘This is interesting reading,’ Hayley says.

  ‘What is it? Oh.’ It’s the printout of the blog post she gave to Seb to read. ‘I was never going to publish it.’

  ‘But you wrote it.’

  Hayley sounds interested, rather than angry. Maybe if Ailsa is honest – ‘It was – a sort of a first draft. I showed it to Seb. He said it was a bit – he said I was telling your story and it was like being in the paper. Him and me. I think I showed him because I wasn’t sure whether I should publish it.’

  Hayley brings the green-blue mug to her lips; Ailsa chose it to match her scarf. ‘I suppose the one thing you can’t ask your blog is whether or not to publish a blog post.’

  Ailsa nods. ‘True enough,’ she says.

  ‘What does the blog say?’

  ‘Eighty per cent in favour while I was waiting for the kettle to boil,’ Ailsa says.

  Hayley sighs. ‘Will you, then?’

  ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘I think maybe we need to talk about this a bit.’ Hayley is scanning the printout that Seb read.

  Ailsa takes the papers from Hayley’s hands. ‘Did I get anything wrong?’

  Hayley shakes her head. ‘No, hen. That’s what I told you. That’s the story. It’s just – it’s not everything. There – there’s a bit more.’

  ‘What?’ Ailsa knows she didn’t mishear, even if the blood is beating more loudly than usual through her ears. The things she’s been told have been watered down, sops for a sick kid. ‘That night. We thought I was dying. And you still lied to me?’

  ‘You’d have lied to Lennox if you’d thought the truth would make his last days worse, Ailsa. You know you would. Being honest isn’t as black and white as all that, sometimes.’

  ‘It is,’ Ailsa says, but she’s wondering whether she would have lied to Lennox to make him happy. She knows the answer.

  Hayley says, ‘Can I have a cigarette? Out of the window?’

  ‘If you like.’ Usually she asks Hayley to go outside to smoke, but right now she needs to hear the true story of her father too much to worry about getting rid of the smell. The sash window rattles as it rolls upwards. The windowsill is wide enough to perch on. When the weather is bad, Hayley says, ‘I’m going to have a smoke on the balcony’ and sits on the sill, her upper body angling away from the room when she exhales, the arm holding the cigarette outside.

  ‘We went in for a scan. You were thirty-five weeks. You’d been lying breech, so they wanted to scan me to see if you’d moved, though I told them you hadn’t.’ Shrug, inhale, exhale. ‘So your father arranged to go into work late, and we were at the hospital for nine o’clock sharp for our appointment, and it was all happy – happy chat, chat, chat, have you picked names and let’s see what this wee one is up to, and then it all got – serious.’

  ‘They saw the problem, then? Before I was born?’ Ailsa knows that it’s possible; a three-chambered heart is usually discernible before birth, though it might have been missed in 1990, if it wasn’t being looked for.

  Hayley nods. ‘The radiographer asked us to wait, and then someone else came in and had a look, and all the time I’m saying, “What’s wrong?” and your father’s holding my hand and they were saying’ – Hayley gestures with the hand that isn’t holding the cigarette – ‘that shit they say when they know something’s wrong but they don’t want to tell you yet. “Irregularities”, “closer look”, all that.’

  Ailsa knows these phrases. As her mother used to say, in their in-patient days, we all know ‘we’ll just wait until a consultant gets here’ is code for ‘you’re basically fucked’.

  ‘At that point,’ Hayley says, ‘it was the most frightening thing that had ever happened to me in my life. Everything’s relative.’ Ailsa has seen photographs of herself at days’ old, wired and tubed and with dressings over her chest. She had already had one operation to keep her peach–stone-sized heart working.

  ‘We had another scan and waited. Eventually we were called in to see Mrs Elliott. She was your first consultant. We’d been in the hospital for six hours. She explained what exactly was wrong with your heart. That it was missing a chamber and, until recently, this had been a fatal condition, but there was now a technique that could be tried when you were born.’ Hayley shakes her head. ‘   “There’s a technique we could try.” I thought I was going tae die just hearing that; I’d never felt pain like it, never in my life.’ She pauses, a gathering of her feelings, and looks at Ailsa, who sees something in her mother that says: The pain went on, and on, until your new heart came. ‘All the time she was talking I could feel you kicking, and it was like you saying, “Don’t talk about me.” She drew a diagram on a piece of paper, red lines for oxygenated blood and blue lines for deoxygenated. A normal heart versus your heart. I was trying to concentrate, but you were hammering away with your wee feet, underneath here.’ Hayley puts her hand about her waist on her left side, winces as though there’s a close-to-term baby kicking her right now. ‘It was like you were objecting.’

  Ailsa’s hands are shaking. ‘I didn’t even know I was breech,’ she says.

  ‘Well, you sorted yourself out in that respect,’ Hayley says, ‘although you left it a bit late for my liking. I was in the bath. It was like watching a sheepdog try to turn around in a pillowcase.’

  ‘Why have you not told me this before? It’s – I can’t imagine it, Mum.’

  Hayley stubs out her cigarette in the window box and pulls the window shut. She continues as though she hadn’t heard the question. ‘I was shaken as all hell. So was your father. We went home. He hardly said a word. I cried.’

  ‘God, Mum.’ Ailsa doesn’t know why this version of her birth is worse than the one she’s always believed. It’s not as though there’s anything warm and fluffy about thinking that your baby is healthy and finding out, the second she is born, that she’s not.

  ‘Aye, well,’ Hayley says, ‘it was the next night before we talked about it. Your father went to work the next day. I slept on and off until he came home. And when he did, it was like a light had gone out of him. We talked about you, and about everything they said at the hospital. I’d been through everything I remembered and tried to write it down. I asked him what he remembered. For everything hopeful I’d written down, he only remembered the opposite. He never started a conversation about you, after that. And when we did talk about you, he used to shake his head. All the time. When I said I wanted to call you Ailsa, for my mother’s middle name and because I’d looked it up and it meant ‘victory’, he just said, “Call her whatever you please, Hayley.” And I realised that despite everything the doctors had said, he thought you were going to die. Whereas I was frightened you’d die, but at the same time fucking dete
rmined that you wouldnae. I called him on it. He said I was burying my head in the sand and I said he’d given up on you. He said I was unrealistic, blinded by my hormones.’ A laugh escapes Ailsa, at the thought of anyone saying that to her mother and getting away with it. ‘Aye, you’re right, that was an argument and a half.’

  ‘It sounds . . .’ Ailsa says. But there isn’t immediately a word. Grim? Heartbreaking? Impossible?

  ‘It was.’ Hayley speaks as though she’s heard Ailsa’s thought. ‘We went from being happy and excited to bickering all the time.’

  ‘Oh, Mum.’

  Hayley’s face is pale and her eyes are bright, focussed somewhere outside of this room and this afternoon. She makes Ailsa think of someone else, but she can’t place who.

  ‘You were three days early. It was a lovely day. When I went into labour, it was eight in the morning, the sun was coming in the window, and David had just left for work. I sat at the kitchen table and thought: Well, baby, here we go. I wrote your name down, to see how it looked. I got myself through the morning, walking about and having a bath and all the things you’re supposed to do. I took a taxi to the hospital in the afternoon. I almost didn’t call David, because I thought he wouldn’t want to be there, but I thought it was the right thing to do. He came.’

  Quiet, again. Ailsa, watching, realises that her mother reminds her of Ruthie, on the day of Lennox’s birthday, when she took them into his old bedroom. She waits.

  ‘It sounds stupid, but we had a really nice time when I was in labour. Gas and air’s like gin and tonic. Plus I was so scared for you that labour was a distraction. At least I couldn’t think. David brought a wee picnic to the hospital – pork pies and oranges and chocolate cake – and he cut everything up into bites for me. He brought a crossword book and a hot water bottle that he held on my back. And he made me laugh. I remembered why I loved him.’

  ‘Had he baked the chocolate cake?’ As she says it she feels like an idiot. It’s as though someone has set her to ‘irrelevant’. But then again, if one of the only things you know about your father is that he bakes, then . . .