The Curious Heart of Ailsa Rae

by Stephanie Butland

  Application deadline for the course is March but I’m going to try to get it in next week and then it’s done. Libby’s asked me to do a bit of work on the Lennox website so I’ll get on to that.

  I’ve been asked to work full-time for December so I might be able to sneak some time off in advance and come to London. I really want to see you. But I also really meant it when I said we should see how we felt after six months. August was so – full on. I know that’s normal for you but it isn’t for me. I want to trust how I feel before I see you. Sorry. It’s all a muddle. I’m not explaining very well.

  I hope you don’t need the bucket today.

  Ailsa x

  P.S. I am ignoring your Little Seb reference in the hope you’ll realise that the naming of parts isn’t – oh I can’t say that, can I? Because of Apple.

  From: Seb

  To: Ailsa

  I nearly didn’t mention you coming for the tango week show, but it seemed dishonest not to, because it’s all I can think about. I understand if you feel it’s not the right time.

  Dress rehearsal today. Saskia said I wasn’t terrible. I told her about your blog a couple of weeks ago. She sent the link to her sister and she’s read it from end to end. I sent her a calendar too. They both say hi.

  Did you watch the DVD of Love’s Labour’s Lost yet? I watched mine in bed on Friday night. I know. Rock and roll. Two things I noticed. One: Berowne is the best of them by miles. Two: at the end he says, ‘Our wooing doth not end like some old play’. I thought about you and me. Last time I saw Roz, she said the happy ending was ‘implicit’ and in the final scene, when the women leave, they’ll be wearing colour for the first time in the play.

  Here’s hoping.

  Seb x

  If you say ‘my heart’ instead of Apple I’ll stop saying ‘Little Seb’.

  From: Ailsa

  To: Seb

  I did watch it. Berowne definitely has the best lines. And if the old play is R and J – all the better.

  ‘Behold the window of mine heart, mine eye.’

  Mine heart. My heart.

  I think I might come to London. I’ve got some new red shoes and a matching bag. They need an adventure.

  Ailsa x

  15 October, 2018

  Dear Stranger,

  I know I’m supposed to write to your family, but I can’t bear to visualise them, the same way I can’t imagine what would have happened to my mother, if I had died. I hope that when the transplant coordinator passes this letter on to them, they’ll understand.

  You’re the one who registered as an organ donor, gave permission for your heart to be taken from you, and so you are the one who saved my life.

  You did more than save it, in fact. You created it. Because what I had, up until then, was the best that medical science could do for a baby born with Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome in 1990. I’m grateful for the operations that I had and the check-ups that headed trouble off at the pass. Doctors found ways to keep me alive in the hope – and it is a hope, even though that’s a terrible thing to admit – that a heart would arrive and save me.

  Thanks to you, I am not so much continuing my life, as living for the first time. Don’t get me wrong, I did my best before: I started a degree there was no guarantee I would finish, and I went to all-night film screenings with my friends. I went to about half of the things I was invited to and stayed out as late as I could manage. I had a lovely boyfriend, a few great flings and one or two adventures that make me cringe when I remember them. I wrote about the things that happened to me so that someone who started a few months or years after me along the same road would have an idea of what was coming, and might cope better than I did.

  But I was powerless. I felt, fundamentally, like a human-shaped object wrapped around a patched-together not-heart-shaped heart. And I waited, with all the strength I could find, for the double-six that is an available, matching heart when you’re not too ill to embrace it. People call it bravery. It isn’t. But I’ve come to understand that it’s something.

  You, my heart donor, were the double six. The unlucky throw that you made became the best thing that’s ever happened to me.

  I cannot tell you how grateful I am. But I am. My mother is too. We are all each other has. We always have been. There are other people we love, and who love us, but for most of my life, if I was the failing heart, she was the hard-working, over-compensating lungs that kept me going.

  I’ll be honest. I haven’t completely got a handle on your heart, yet. It’s doing great things, pumping me up steps and getting all the blood to all the places so I can act like a real person.

  I’m not yet the woman I hoped that I would be. But I’m working on that. Rome wasn’t built in a day. I didn’t think I would save the world. But I thought I would know where to start with making my life count. I didn’t, then. I think I do now.

  And the fact that I’m here, now, working on it at all, is down to you.

  I’m sorry for all the things you didn’t get to do, or be. I chose not to know anything about you, which I think is, if not exactly cowardice, the opposite of the thing that isn’t bravery that kept me going until your heart came along. I think I was afraid of hearing something that I would never be able to forget. What I do know about you, whoever you are, is that there will be a small, tight circle of people grieving for you, every day, with every breath. Wider than that, there’ll be others – colleagues, partners-of-siblings, friends from the gym or the pub – all suffering your loss in smaller ways.

  I am trying hard to do justice to this perfectly functioning pump of ours. It seems really loud to me. I wonder if it seemed loud to you. Probably not. But I wonder if you ever thought about the noise it made, the way it moved. Sometimes I lie in bed at night and fall asleep by thinking about the happy pulse and thump of it. It’s the sort of music you can dance to.

  Thank you.

  Ailsa x

  Acknowledgements

  It took me a long time to find my way into this book. Jackie Leach Scully, Monica Buckland and Lorraine gave me the key to unlocking Ailsa’s story, and it wouldn’t be what it is without them.

  Professor Martin Elliott, MD FRCS FRSA lent his expertise and patience in helping me to find, then understand, Ailsa’s heart condition. Kate Beales answered endless questions about my imaginary Edinburgh production. Toni Glitz shared Pam’s story of corneal transplant. Julie Grey, Helen Dobson and Victoria Tremlett talked to me about different health aspects of this novel. Many others shared memories of Edinburgh, dancing, acting, press reporting, studying the law, parenting sick children, illness and recovery. Thank you all, in particular Katy Bromberg, Jane Buffham, Ian Burdon, Jacq Kelly, Virginia Moffatt, Ann Ogbomo and the people who spoke to me on condition that they weren’t mentioned in the acknowledgements – you know who you are! Thank you too to Meredith Katz and Edie and Eliza Gardiner, who gave me permission to use their wonderful names.

  I learned to tango as part of my research for this book, though Ailsa does it WAY better. Thank you to Angela and Andi of Tango on Tyne and the dancers at their weekly class, who were patient and helpful, and who showed me the wonder and excitement of this life-affirming dance.

  Although much of writing is solitary, there’s a lot of support that goes on around it. Thank you to my long-suffering family and friends, who put up with much for the sake of my career. Honourable mentions: Alan, Ned, Joy, Mum, Dad, Auntie Susan, Jude, Lou, Tom, Rebecca, Scarlet.

  My fellow novelists Carys Bray, Sarah Franklin and Shelley Harris are always there with sage advice and/or silliness, as required, and I feel honoured to have their intelligence and friendship in my life. Shelley, thank you for all the times you’ve told me it’s going to be all right.

  My agent Oli Munson is steady and wise; my editor Eli Dryden eggs me on to better writing with insight and vision. And they are both great friends. My wider publishing team, at A. M. Heath and Bonnier Zaffre, are unfailingly hard-working, professional and creative, and working wi
th them is a joy. Thank you all.

  My beta-readers were Joanne Baird, Kate Beales, Alan Butland, Jude Evans, Emily Medland, Tom Nelson, Jackie Leach Scully and Susan Young, and their comments were immensely helpful in shaping this book.

  Emily Field is a real person, who generously bid to name a character as part of the #AuthorsForGrenfellTower auction. Real-life Emily is as wonderful as Ailsa’s best friend Emily is, and they wear the same perfume.

  Keep reading for a sneak peek at Stephanie Butland’s

  Lost for Words

  2016

  Unlooked-for

  A book is a match in the smoking second between strike and flame.

  Archie says books are our best lovers and our most provoking friends. He’s right, but I’m right, too. Books can really hurt you.

  I thought I knew that, the day I picked up the Brian Patten. It turned out that I still had a lot to learn.

  I usually get off my bike and wheel it on the last bit of my ride to work. Once you pass the bus stop, the cobbled road narrows and so does the pavement in this part of York, so it’s a lot less hassle that way. That February morning, I was navigating around some it’s-my-buggy-and-I’ll-stop-if-I-want-to woman with her front wheels on the road and her back wheels on the pavement, when I saw the book.

  It was lying on the ground next to a bin, as though someone had tried to throw it away, but didn’t even care enough to pause to take proper aim. Anyway, I stopped. Of course. Who wouldn’t rescue a book? The buggy-woman tutted, though I wasn’t doing her any harm. She seemed the type who went through her days tutting, like a pneumatic disapproval machine. I’ve met plenty of those; they come with the nose-ring territory. They’d have a field day if they could see my tattoos.

  I ignored her. I picked up the book, which was Grinning Jack. It was intact, if a little bit damp on the back cover where it had been lying on the pavement, but otherwise in good nick. It had a couple of corners folded down, neatly, making interested right-angled triangles. I wouldn’t do that myself – I’m an honourer of books and, anyway, how hard is it to find a bookmark? There’s always something to hand. Bus ticket, biscuit wrapper, corner off a bill. Still, I like that there are some words on a page that are important enough for someone to have earmarked them. (Earmarked, in the figurative sense, has been around since the 1570s. In case you’re interested. When you work within five metres of four shelves of dictionaries, encyclopaedia and thesauri, it’s just plain rude not to know shit like that.)

  Anyway. As Archie says, I digress. Buggy-woman said, ‘Excuse me, I can’t see past you,’ but she said it politely, so I shuffled the back wheel of my bike onto the pavement so she could get a better look at the traffic. And then I remembered not to make assumptions and judgements. Everyone is allowed to like poetry. Even people who tut at cyclists.

  I said, ‘Is this your book? It was on the ground.’

  She looked at me. I saw her clock the piercing and the fact that my hair is black but my roots are brown, and waver, but, to give her credit, she apparently decided not to judge, or maybe my clean fingernails and teeth swung things in my favour. Her shoulders dropped a little bit.

  ‘I can’t remember the last time I picked up a book that didn’t have lift-the-flaps,’ she said, and I almost handed the book over to her, right then. But before I could offer it there was a break in the traffic and she launched herself across the road, trilling something about going swimming to her kid.

  I looked around to see if there was someone close by who might have just dropped a Liverpool Poet, or be retracing their steps, searching, eyes to the ground. A woman standing outside the off-licence was going through her bag, urgently, and I was about to approach her when she pulled her ringing phone out and answered it. Not her, then. No sign of anyone in search of a lost book. I thought about leaving it on the off-licence windowsill, like you would with a dropped glove, but it doesn’t take much in the way of weather to ruin a book, so I put it in the basket – yeah, I have a bike with a basket on the front, what of it? – and I kept on my way to the second-hand bookshop, where I’ve worked for ten years, since I was fifteen.

  On Wednesdays I have a late start because I stay after hours on Tuesday for Book Group, which usually degenerates into something much less interesting after the second glass of wine. One of them is getting divorced. The rest are either envious or disapproving, though it’s all hidden under sympathy. It’s briefly amusing but ultimately unsavoury, like Swift.

  One thing I do like about Book Group is that we host it rather than run it, so I drink tea and tidy up and listen in for the book-discussion bit, then zone out for the rest. It gives me the chance to do the things I can’t do when the shop is open; it’s amazing how much you get done when you’re not interrupted. Archie says that if I had my way, bookshops would be set up like an old-fashioned grocery, with a counter and shelves behind it, so there were no pesky people messing up my beautifully ordered system. I say he’s being unfair, but I don’t think a Bookshop Proficiency Test would go amiss. Just some basic rules: put it back where you found it, treat it with respect, don’t be an arse to the people who work here. It’s not that hard. You’d think.

  When I got in it was quiet. I was a bit late, partly because of the Brian Patten, but I was cutting it fine for an eleven o’clock start anyway. I stay after closing often enough for Archie to give me some leeway when I’ve got an urgent chapter to finish, though, so it’s never a big deal. After I’d locked up my bike, I went to the cafe next door to get myself a tea and Archie a coffee before I made a start. If you ignore the silk flowers and the signs that say things like ‘Arrive as a Stranger, Leave as a Friend’, Cafe Ami is a pretty good neighbour.

  I love stepping through the door of Lost For Words. The bookshop smells of paper and pipe-smoke. Archie doesn’t smoke in the shop any more, officially at least. I suspect that he does when no one’s around. All the years when he did go through the day puffing away non-stop have got into the walls and the wood and the pages of the books. There’s something about standing, surrounded by shelves, that makes me think of being in a forest, though I’ve never, come to think of it, been in a forest. And if I was, I’m guessing the smell of smoke might not be a good thing. Anyway. I gave Archie his coffee.

  ‘Thank you, my ever-useful right hand,’ he said. He’s left-handed and he thinks that sort of thing is funny. I gave him a sarky smile and poked him in the waistcoat. There’s a lot of Archie under that waistcoat. If you were going to stab him you would need a really long knife to get to any vital organs. He picked up his pipe. ‘I’m going to take the air,’ he said. ‘Be excellent in my absence, Loveday.’

  ‘As ever,’ I said.

  There are bay windows on either side of the shop door and one of them is filled by a huge oak pedestal desk. Archie says he won it from Burt Reynolds in a poker game in the late 1970s, but he’s very hazy on the details. If all of Archie’s stories are true, then he’s about 300 years old – according to him he’s had the bookshop for twenty-five years, been in the navy, lived in Australia, run a bar in Canada with ‘the only lover who ever really understood him’, worked as a croupier in Las Vegas and spent time in prison in Hong Kong. I believe the one about the bookshop and (maybe) the one about the bar.

  It’s a lovely desk, if you can find it under all of the papers. The letterbox is to the left of the shop door, and the end of the desk is underneath it; sometimes there are three days’ worth of post and free newspapers on there before I clear them away. All Archie ever does is put more things on top of them.

  The other bay window has a little window seat, which is about as comfortable as it looks – that is, not comfortable at all, although people who grew up on Anne of Green Gables can’t help but sit in it. They never manage it for long. I think window seats are one of those things that are always better in books, like county shows held in fields on bank holiday Mondays, and sex and travel and basically anything you can think of.

  There was plenty for me to do. I know you’
re supposed to appreciate a lie-in, but I always just feel as though I’ve let the day get away from me and I’ll never catch up. The only benefit is that I don’t have to bring in the bags of books people leave in the doorway because they can’t differentiate between a second-hand bookshop and a charity shop.

  My dad’s mum always used to be up with the sun. I can still hear her saying, ‘Best part of the day, little one,’ with her voice burring and her eyes smiling. My dad’s parents were the first people I knew who died. We went to Cornwall twice that year, once in spring when Granny died of stomach cancer, then again in autumn when Grandpa followed her, and everyone shook their heads and said ‘broken heart’. I suppose I was four or five. I remember thinking it was strange that Dad’s parents had died but Mum was the one crying. The beach we used to go to near Falmouth – where my dad was from – was like a beach from a story-book: in my memory, the sand is yellow, the sea felt-tip-pen blue. We lived near the sea at home in Whitby, but the Cornish beach was different. It was magical. After Grandpa died, we didn’t go back. Dad always said that there was no love lost between him and Auntie Janey, so I suppose there was no reason to.

  I started with a bit of a tidy-up and I went on to the customer enquiries. Archie’s an unreliable computer-user – he can do it, but he’s erratic – so I looked at the emails first, sitting at the desk while he puffed away at his pipe outside on the pavement. There was nothing significant: an enquiry about a book we didn’t have, an online sale. Five minutes and they were done, and then I looked through the box of enquiry slips. I started leaving them out for customers to fill in themselves because Archie only passes on the queries he thinks are interesting.