The Curious Heart of Ailsa Rae

by Stephanie Butland

  Hayley smiles. ‘No, he hadn’t. He spent quite a lot of time talking about how it wasn’t as good as his. He said he thought I wouldn’t have appreciated it if he’d nipped home to do a spot of baking.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘That’s what I said,’ Hayley says. ‘It was a bit like none of the last month had happened and we were having the baby we thought we would have. I thought he’d come round. I think maybe he did as well.’ She sighs. ‘But then – I’m going to save you the screaming and swearing and the great big tear . . .’

  Ailsa winces, and for a minute they’re back on safe and steady ground, somewhere they both know. ‘I don’t need to know about the tear. Please don’t say . . .’

  ‘It’s like a patchwork quilt down there? OK.’ Hayley grins, wickedness and love. She’s all Ailsa’s for a heartbeat, and then she’s gone again, back into wherever she has stored all of this.

  ‘It was just before midnight when you were born and they whisked you off to the side of the room to have a look at you, and I was shouting, “Is she all right? Is she all right?” He went to look at you and came back. He said – he said –’ For the first time in this truth-telling Hayley looks down to her hands, so that Ailsa couldn’t see her face if she wanted to. ‘he said you looked “quite normal”. Then they brought you over so I could see you, just for a second or two. I thought how beautiful you were, and how precious. I felt as though – I don’t know – I felt drenched with love for you. You were the loveliest thing I had ever seen in my whole life. The best. And all he could say was that you looked quite normal. I should have sent him away then.’

  Hayley is quiet for so long this time that Ailsa prompts her. Even though she already knows that there isn’t going to be a happy ending, she’s full of tension and foreboding. Her stomach has contracted and her jaw feels tight. Apple is getting breathless with the wait.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then they took you to the baby unit – they’d warned me they would do that, so you could be assessed and helped, which sounded lovely and reassuring. What they meant was, they would be doing their damnedest just to keep you alive. That first week was fucking awful. You had your first operation. I was in hospital with you and I couldnae stop crying. The nurses used to come and change my pillowcases because they were so wet. You looked like such a sad wee thing and there was nothing I could do to help you.’

  ‘And – and him?’

  Hayley sighs, half nods. ‘To be fair – and it pains me to be fair – I think he tried. He was there most of the time. He came to the consultations. He held my hand and made the right noises. If I phoned him in the night, he always answered. He brought takeaway in to try and get me to eat, and he brought messages from my folks because he called them every evening. He sat with me when I sat with you, but he wasn’t really sitting with you, if you catch my meaning?’ Ailsa nods, mute. ‘Whenever we could hold you he took photos. I think it was a way of not having to look at you.’ Hayley looks as though she might cry. ‘I didn’t want you to have to hear all this,’ she says.

  Ailsa does something with her head – she wants to nod empathy with her mother, shake her head to show that she still, fundamentally, disagrees with the way she’s been lied to, and so there’s a little wobble as she tries to work it all through. ‘I never thought about who was taking the photos,’ she says. And then, as a pre-empt to the usual retort she’d expect from Hayley, ‘I know I haven’t thought about this the way you have.’

  It’s Hayley’s turn for the nod-shake. ‘Well, I didnae want you to have to. I know you think I’m wrong. But . . .’

  ‘What happened next?’ Ailsa asks. Her father being more of a bastard than she thought doesn’t make Hayley keeping this to herself OK.

  Her mother takes a breath, deep and jolting. ‘When you were ten days old, we had a meeting with Mrs Elliott, and she said that the first operation had gone as well as could be expected. She talked about your future. There was a lot that we needed to be alert to and protect you from. Your father sat there with his hand over my hand, and even though the hospital was red hot, his fingertips were freezing. He was so cold that I swapped our hands over – I remember it – I put his hand under mine, so he would have the warmth of my leg and the warmth of my hand.’ Breath, judder of an exhale. ‘He kissed me goodbye, took my list of what I needed, and left. Tamsin came that night, with the things I had asked for, and said he had called her and said that he needed some sleep and would she bring my bag. And he never came back.’

  It’s too sudden a stop. ‘That was it?’ Ailsa was waiting for the row, and whatever came after it. If it hadn’t been for Hayley’s reaction when she said she wanted to find her father, she wouldn’t have been surprised if the story ended with him at the bottom of the Forth, and her mother and Tamsin rehearsing alibis in case the police came knocking.

  ‘That was the last time we saw him,’ Hayley says. ‘I couldn’t think of a way to tell you that wasn’t . . .’

  ‘I can see that.’ And, intellectually, Ailsa can. Why trouble a child with this when she could be given a slightly more palatable story? But Ailsa could have died with the wrong idea. ‘Lennox thought – Lennox didn’t know. I told him what I knew. I didn’t tell him the truth.’

  ‘I’m sorry, hen.’ Hayley takes her tea, drinks. Ailsa watches, for want of something better to do. She’s chilled with shock, and she can feel that somewhere, deep – deeper than Apple, though she feels it too – her world is rearranging.

  ‘Is that tea not cold?’

  ‘It’s clay cold,’ Hayley says. ‘It doesnae matter.’

  ‘So that was it?’ Ailsa asks. ‘He just – went?’

  ‘Yes and no,’ Hayley says. ‘I never saw him again. I got a letter, a few days later. Tamsin was checking for post. She had my keys.’

  ‘Have you got it?’ Despite everything she’s hearing, feeling – and it’s just starting to well up in her, a great wave of all her mother has had to do, be, care about, on her own, all of these years, and he knew what she was going to be up against – she wants to see what his handwriting is like, and put her hand on the paper that he wrote on.

  Hayley laughs. ‘You have got to be joking.’

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘It said –’ Ailsa half expects her mother to recite the whole thing, because how would you not know a letter like that by heart? ‘It said – well, it said that he couldn’t cope. That he felt no bond with you and that he had realised that he had expected you to die. And although he didn’t want that, he hadn’t thought about how complicated your life was going to be. And it was better that he let us down now, rather than later. I think – I suppose – in his head it must have made sense.’

  Ailsa hears herself laugh. ‘I wasn’t expecting you to defend him,’ she says.

  ‘Oh, I’m not defending him, Ailsa. He was a coward. He didnae find that out until you were born. Just like I didnae find out what I was like until I had you to care for.’

  ‘So you didn’t speak to him again?’ The questions are crowding in now, and Ailsa is trying to pick the best, the most important, because she can see that she isn’t going to be able to ask them all. Her mother’s shoulders are slumping, her hands are tight around the mug, and she’s not so much blinking as closing her eyes for two or three seconds at a time. It won’t be long until Hayley slams this conversation shut, asks for wine or finds her appetite, and Ailsa doesn’t know whether this is one-off openness or the first of many conversations.

  Hayley makes a sound, a laugh with the amusement sucked from it. ‘I didnae. But – oh, Ailsa, I wasnae dignified about it. I called him at work and I cried into his answering machine at home. You’d probably call it begging. He broke my heart, he really did. I knew he was struggling but I didnae think he’d leave me. Leave us. There was a payphone on wheels in the hospital. I had it in my room all the time I wasnae with you. In the end, Tamsin refused to bring me any more change. Then there was a night when you were proper
, seriously blue, and I sat with you, on my own, and thought about all the ways I was going to protect you. In the morning I found I’d grown a spine and I stopped trying to contact him.’

  Ailsa nods. She’s had some nights like that. Everything seems different at 3 a.m. Usually, it changes back with daylight, but every now and again, you are a new person in the morning.

  ‘In the letter he said that he’d been talking to work and they’d arranged for him to move straight away. He said he would stay away until the end of October and he hoped that was enough time for me to get my things out of his place and get settled into mine. So I had to cancel my tenants, and go back to his flat and sort everything so you would have a home to come back to.’ Hayley’s hand traces a shape, a mirrored parabola of helplessness, complication, up, down. ‘You were this weak thing in the hospital with three-quarters of a heart and I was trying to work out what the fuck was happening to my life. I was determined to be an adult about it all. My ma and da were coming down – I’d put them off for as long as I could – but you were nearly three weeks old and I think your gran thought you were going to outgrow some of the five hundred pairs of bootees she had knitted for you. So I thought I’d get everything sorted and done ready for them coming. New beginnings, and all that. You were going to come home while they were in Edinburgh, or at least I hoped you were. Then I walked into his flat and I saw all the things he had. There was a whole shelf of recipe books and all his shirts were hung up on the hangers from the dry-cleaners. I thought about all the ways that you and me were going to struggle. So Tamsin and me cleared everything out and took it to the charity shops.’

  ‘You did not!’

  ‘We did. Well, most of it. That Le Creuset of Tamsin’s was your father’s. And I took all of the stuff that wasnae going to last. I didnae want the thought of him hanging around forever. But I had no idea where my money was going to come from. I didnae know about benefits, or how much I’d be able to work, or any of that. I had no clue if you could put a child with a heart condition in a nursery, or if you’d need to be warmer than other babies, because of your circulation, and I’d have whopping heating bills.’

  Ailsa imagines herself, given a sick baby to keep alive. She wouldn’t know where to start. She wouldn’t trust herself with a kitten. ‘So what did you take?’

  Hayley shrugs. ‘All the food. Cleaning stuff. Loo rolls. Soap and shampoo. Printer paper. All that.’

  This is the mother Ailsa recognises. Hayley is talking as though she’s reminiscing about a holiday. ‘There were a couple of weeks when I’d been discharged from the hospital and you hadnae. Tamsin would pick me up and we’d go and load the car with things from his flat. She’d drop me at the hospital to be with you and then she would drive around all the charity shops. She’d take a bag here, a bag there. Then she came back and said hello to you, and then we went back to my place and she made sure I wasnae going to have an overnight breakdown. We did that until his flat was empty.’

  ‘Empty? Actually empty?’

  ‘We left the furniture, because it was too much hassle to organise someone to move it. We left all the electrical things as well, the toaster and all that, because charity shops don’t take them. We took all of his records to the British Heart Foundation. We were going to take the mattress, but we couldnae be arsed. We gave his pillows to Oxfam. He had some nice stuff, his parents had been well off, and I thought he’d be walking around the city when he got back, down from the station, and he’d be passing the charity shops, looking in the windows, thinking, oh, I have a suit like that one, that’s really like my china . . .’

  Ailsa is laughing now, proper, thorough, belly-up laughter, though she doesn’t know how much of it is horror. ‘What did he do?’

  Hayley has been laughing, too, but she stops. ‘Absolutely nothing. Not a word from him. He just – sucked it up. Which goes to show he knew he was wrong. I half expected him to turn up on my doorstep, but he didnae. I had a lot of fine things to say to him, about valuing his cake tins more than he cared about his own daughter, but – well, it could be that he knew what I’d say. He didnae have to knock on my door to hear it. I chucked his keys in a bin outside the hospital. I didnae want to be tempted to go round when he was back in Edinburgh. But I wanted him tae be worried that I might.’

  There’s a minute of silence, another. Into it, Ailsa says, ‘Mum. You should have told me all this.’ She almost adds: Because you didn’t have to carry it all on your own, but she can see from Hayley’s face, her soft, calm profile, that she doesn’t need to.

  ‘I know. But I didn’t want you to think that – that you made it happen. Kids always think it’s their fault, do they not, if their folks split up?’

  ‘Oh, Mum.’ Apple is quiet in her chest, as though she’s listening for clues that tell her how she should be feeling; she’s beating gently, slowly.

  Hayley turns to look at her, touches her chin. ‘It’s all water under the bridge, Ailsa. He got in touch via a solicitor to offer us money. I didn’t want to take it but your grandparents talked me into it. They talked me into getting your Child Disability Living Allowance as well, though I didn’t want to sign you up as disabled for anything because I didnae want you ever tae think of yourself as disadvantaged. I wanted you tae feel capable of anything. When you were two, his solicitor wrote to me again. The letter said he had sold his flat, and he thought it was right that I should have the proceeds from it, as a full and final settlement of his child support obligations. I was tempted to tell him to shove it, but thirty grand’s thirty grand and it paid off the mortgage. The fact that you weren’t even mentioned in the letter pissed me off so much I’d have had his eyeballs and gone back for the sockets if I could. He’d never asked to see you, or asked for a photo, or how you were.’

  They both sigh, an accidental harmony.

  ‘I’m sorry I’ve had to tell you about all this.’

  Oh, no, no, that’s the wrong thing to be sorry about. ‘I think I deserved to know, Mum.’

  ‘Aye, well. If we all got what we deserved it would be fine world.’ Ailsa knows how this is meant – the gentlest of reprimands, a reminder of how complicated this is – but she hears it in a different way. No one deserved a transplant more than Lennox. That would have been fine for sure. Take a breath, Ailsa.

  ‘You should have told me, Mum. But I’m sorry you went through all that. It must have been – I honestly cannot imagine.’

  ‘I’ve always done my best,’ Hayley says, and Ailsa takes her hand, squeezes it. All that they’ve been through is between them. There were times, in hospital, when Ailsa wondered whether the sheer force of her mother’s determination was what brought her new heart to her. Now, she wonders if it was love. One thing’s for sure: they can weather this.

  ‘I know,’ Ailsa says, ‘and you know, whatever he’s like, he’s not ever going to be my dad.’

  Hayley’s fingertips go rigid; she blinks, quickquickquick, the way she always does when she’s surprised. ‘You’re not taking that blog post down, then?’

  ‘Well – no,’ Ailsa says, ‘I’m going to do what it says. That’s how it works, Mum. You know that.’

  She’s said it as gently as she can, but for a second Ailsa thinks her mother is going to slap her. Hayley does a worse thing than that. She starts to cry. Then she rummages in her bag, pulls out a pen and her diary, writes something down and tears out the page. She hands it to Ailsa. There’s a single word: ‘Twelvetrees’.

  ‘That’s his surname. He shouldnae take much finding.’

  ‘Mum . . .’ She knows she should say she’s sorry. She probably is, somewhere, in the eerie fog that’s filling up the space where certainty used to be. She sits and waits for something to happen. If only Apple was her real heart. Then she’d know what was right.

  From: Seb

  Sent: 6 July, 2018

  To: Ailsa

  Subject: Hello?

  Hey BlueHeart,

  You’ve gone a bit quiet.

  A
s it’s Wednesday I hope you’re taking your blue heart dancing.

  Take care,

  Seb x

  From: Ailsa

  To: Seb

  Hello Romeo,

  I’m a bit down, if I’m honest. Don’t tell anyone – if you’ve had a heart transplant it’s not allowed.

  I basically go to work, go dancing and sleep. There’s the weekly thrill of a hospital appointment and trying to get my head around law conversion degrees. Plus – the biological father stuff. I know you’re busy with rehearsals so I didn’t think you’d be waiting to hear from me.

  Ailsa

  From: Seb

  To: Ailsa

  Always waiting to hear from you, babe.

  I saw your blog post about your biological father, and the result. I’m glad you toned it down. It was the right thing to do.

  Call me any time. I’m in rehearsals this week (just me, Meredith and Roz, because Meredith isn’t around for all of the Edinburgh rehearsals) but I’ll always call you back.

  From: Ailsa

  To: Seb

  My mother wasn’t a fan of the post. But she came over and told me the actual truth about him, which is different to the version in the blog post you read. So I suppose that’s something.

  From: Seb

  To: Ailsa

  Well, I’m hoping it’s good truth, but your tone isn’t exactly cheerful. It’s not going to turn out that Mel Gibson is your real father, is it?

  From: Ailsa

  To: Seb

  Thank you, I just laughed for the first time in a week.

  No, Mel Gibson isn’t my real father. Neither is Sean Connery or anyone else you can think of who is either Scottish or has worn tartan in a film.

  From: Seb

  To: Ailsa