I hold the postcard against my chest and look back across to the house through a distortion of tears, to the lit-up but empty living room and I want to put everybody in there together, beneath the lights: my mother and father, Paul and me, caught in a waltz, and the girls, Rosie and Addie, holding hands and galloping in circles between us, laughing, nearly tripping but never falling, under our feet but not in the way.
The love that we all should have for one another dances beside us. Then waltzes away.
When I was in love with my husband, I used to dream about other men, men from work mostly, men who were good-looking but who I wasn’t necessarily attracted to. In my dreams I would be naked, in a chair perhaps, my breasts much bigger than they are in reality, and the man from work would be sucking my clitoris and rubbing my nipples and I would be arching back, pushing my pelvis into him, deeper into his mouth, harder against his tongue and then I would come, quickly, freely. Now that I no longer love my husband I dream about him, not about men I barely know, and it is my husband making me come like that, when we are both asleep at night. I do not set out to dream about him; he creeps into my head at about two in the morning and after those nights, when I wake up, I feel content, loved, at peace. It doesn’t last beyond the cry of the baby and me rolling out of bed to shower.
Then Paul’s car pulls into the drive; my turn to sit by Addie’s bed, his turn to be at home. I put the postcard down, blow my nose, wipe my eyes and go back into the house.
The next day, Addie is still sedated. I’m rostered on at work so I keep my shift and Louisa agrees to sit with Addie. I drop Rosie at her Aunt Michelle’s on the way.
Within minutes of arriving, I get a call from the intensivist. There is a brain-dead twenty-five year old male in ICU. Jumped drunk into the river and drowned. I check the organ donor registry. He’s not on it. I relay the information back to the intensivist. ‘I’ll call you back after I’ve spoken to the family,’ he says.
This time we’re lucky. The family bring up organ donation with the intensivist first. I don’t stop for the next twelve hours.
There are tests to organise: chest X-ray, ECG, bloodwork. I contact the heart, liver and pancreas transplant teams and give them the twenty-minute warning for the teleconference. They dial in at 10.15a.m. precisely. They’ve each narrowed down their lists to two or three people. I organise the cross-matching of blood at the Red Cross. Probably only one of the three potential heart transplant recipients will turn out to be negative on cross-match and that’s the deciding factor. The other two will never know how close they came to getting a new heart.
Once the bloods come back, I book the theatres for the retrieval teams because now I know who the recipients are and how far they have to travel to get their last chance at life. All the time I’m helping the ICU nurses care for the patient and checking in with the family. Everything is going so well I almost cannot believe it. Then I go back to the patient’s bed to see if there is anything the family need.
The man’s mother has her head bent over her son’s hands as if she is praying. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say as I turn around. ‘I’ll come back later.’
She looks up and smiles at me. ‘I was thinking about the person who’ll get his heart. I’ve heard that they say their personality changes. They become like the person who gave them the heart. Maybe this way a bit of my son stays alive.’
I don’t reply but she wants me to so she prods me, ‘You must have heard the stories?’
‘I have.’ It is important that I offer no opinion, no judgement, even though that is what she wants. Because who really believes in spirits, in ghosts, in a transparent, flying being that exists between a person’s life and death, that occupies other bodies and dreams and private spaces? No, there is a person, and then there isn’t. That is all. Her son will not be reincarnated through the beating of his heart in another person’s body.
She reads my disbelief into my noncommittal reply. ‘You don’t believe it.’
‘We can pass on a letter from you to the people who receive his organs and they may reply. Many people find this helps.’ I know, right then and there, that she will do this. That she will form a maternal relationship with a complete stranger through her son’s heart. She will become a donor mother to the person who receives her son’s heart, even if he is a man fifteen years older than she is. She will become part of a peculiar fictional relationship that she will tend with the same intensity as she tended her bond with her son.
I am not expecting her next question. ‘Why do you do this job?’ she asks.
‘My mother was a heart transplant surgeon. One of the first. She cared for the almost-dead, spent all her time trying to keep them alive, but she watched many of them die. Because she never had enough hearts. So I do this job for the almost-dead patients. That’s what my mother called them.’
‘If they’re almost dead then what is he?’ She points to her son. ‘He looks alive but he’s not. He’s brain-dead, so they tell me, but his heart’s beating. He’s almost-dead too.’
No, he’s just dead, I think. But I don’t say this. I believe it though. Because how else could I do my job?
I am saved from answering by his blood pressure alarm sounding and I begin to administer vasopressors while the ICU nurse organises a heated blanket because his body temperature is also dropping.
Later, I sit with his mother and father while the retrieval surgery takes place. We don’t talk a lot, except when I go to the theatre to get updates, which I then relay to them. His organs are perfect, beautiful, full of life, I tell them. He has saved so many lives. Everyone is so grateful. Yes, he is dead now; his heart is gone.
They cry some more when it is finished, when he is finished, at last, in their eyes. It is hard for them to leave. So I embrace them and call them a cab and send them home because otherwise they will sit here all night, not quite grieving, and not quite believing.
Then I go back and find the ICU nurse. It is midnight now but it was her first organ donor case and she is, as expected, in tears. So I debrief with her, because she is used to trying to keep people alive in ICU; she is a critical care nurse and caring is what she does. She is not used to having to keep alive someone who is already dead. I make her a coffee, pass her tissues and embrace her too before she leaves.
At last it is my turn to leave. I go straight to a different hospital. My daughter’s hospital. I hand Paul a coffee, then send him home without an embrace.
As I sit by Addie’s bed, I remember what Mrs Green had said just the other day about giving my husband away. I look at Addie lying here and I know that if I could put Paul in her place, I would.
FOUR
I scan the ICU: beds of children who cannot move or speak or cry out, parents who can and do cry out, and worse, beds with children whose parents have gone home and left them there, alone.
I pull my chair right next to Addie’s bed and talk to her about Rosie and how we have made cupcakes with purple icing for her when she wakes. ‘I know you won’t be able to eat them,’ I say, tucking her hair behind her ear and out of the way of her closed eyes, ‘but Rosie really wanted to make them for you. I’ll put a couple in the freezer for you and you can have them when you come home.’ When you come home. If I say it aloud, then it will happen.
The parents of the little boy in the bed next to Addie’s look across at me as I speak, and I can tell, by the terror in their eyes, that this is their first time in ICU. That it is a kind of nightmare they have not settled into: a tube-covered child surrounded by sixteen other tube-covered children, some of whom may die or have died while they wait for their own child to live.
I smile at them but they look away, ashamed to have been caught looking at another mother and child, comparing, perhaps, whose child looks worse off, hoping it is not their child who does. Because that is what you do in ICU; you have no sympathy left for anyone else and you think thoughts that you could never imagine yourself thinking in a park on a sunny afternoon – that you draw hope from
a child who appears sicker than your own.
I lean back in my chair as Addie’s nurse conducts her checks. ‘Are you going down to the hostel tonight?’ she asks and I shake my head.
‘I’ll stay here.’
‘They’re not going to lift her sedation until tomorrow. You should get some sleep.’
‘I’ll sleep when she’s better.’
‘I’ll get someone to bring you some water.’
‘Thanks.’
And then I do what I have learned, over the past three years, to do. To close off the machines and parents and children by putting on a pair of imaginary blinkers that narrow my sight to Addie. I kiss her cheek and tell her to have sweet dreams about going to the park and feeding the turtles when she comes home. And then I take two notebooks out of my handbag. The first is plain and black and contains nothing other than the two headings I scratched on its pages the night before: Dan’s Sculptures and Jack’s Paintings. I turn to a new page and crease it back, firmly. At the top I write: Notes on an Exhibition.
The other book has a red and gold fabric cover; it is bound with ribbon. I have taken it out of a box containing my mother’s possessions, possessions I have previously only glanced over, noting that there were letters and diaries and clothes, but never reading or unfolding anything. Because, as well as possessions, the box contains whispers from long ago. Louisa’s voice on the telephone on the night my mother died, overheard by me because I had been woken by a bad dream about an angel with black wings cutting through the floor beneath my bed.
‘Jack,’ Louisa had said that night. ‘What do I tell Camille?’
But perhaps I have invented this as an excuse not to look into the box – I was only two at the time so how can I possibly remember that conversation, spoken beneath the breath, like a secret?
I look down at the book in my hand, the one from my mother’s box; the contradiction between the unspoiled ribbon and the used pages suggests a thing of importance. And the red on the cover seems too brazen a colour for the things I do not know.
As I begin to read, I want to slap the covers closed. Because the first pages are an account of the first time my mother slept with my father and it seems that she has documented the encounter with the same accuracy that she would use to record the particulars of a patient’s condition.
But after the first few words it is almost as if I am a child again, back in my bed at Louisa’s house, hearing her stories about a woman who is called my mother and a man who is called my father but of whom I have no recollection.
Midnight would often find me, a girl who could not sleep, standing outside the door to Louisa’s room waiting until she heard the tiny squeaks of my mouth sucking the ends of my hair. She would gently remove the wet strands of hair from between my lips and guide me back to my room, all the while saying, ‘If we tuck you in properly, this time you’ll be able to sleep.’
Then she would make a great show of folding my knees up to my chin and wrapping my arms around my legs so I looked like a nautilus shell beached on white blankets. She would plump the quilt and shroud it over my body before lying down beside me. And on nights when I could not stop myself from sucking so hard on my hair that I ground the ends of it between my teeth I would say, ‘Tell me about my mum and my dad.’
And as she began to talk I wouldn’t even notice when my hair fell out of my mouth and my eyes began to close because I was listening to a fairytale with real people who had real names – Alix and Dan, not Snow White or Cinderella. Louisa always called them by their names when she told me stories about them; she didn’t say your Mum and your Dad and that suited me fine because then Alix and Dan could be the storybook characters they were rather than the Mum and Dad they could not be.
I put Alix’s diary on the table beside me. It is not an account of the first time she had sex with my father. It is an account of how they began, the two of them, and as I read it I find it hard to separate Alix and Dan from the art she describes; she is an artifice fixed in plaster yet here again, in her own words, she seems make-believe.
I place my own notebook and pen on my lap. I know what I want to do for the exhibition. I want to fit Louisa’s stories and Alix’s diaries around the sculptures, around the paintings, and then connect their words to what I think I know: the whispers, the secrets, the words that are lost on the sighs of exhaled breath. I want to write about more than the woman I’ve been led to believe in, the woman caught in plaster and paint: Alix-the-subject, Alix-the-romantic-and- tragic-heroine,
Alix-the-muse.
Notes on an exhibition, I will call them. An exhibition of sculpture and painting. An exhibition of a life. I will give some of the notes to Sarah. I will keep some for myself.
NOTES ON AN EXHIBITION
A WOMAN SHOUTING, SILENTLY
(Plaster, 7x8cm. Originally titled Open Mouth but renamed by the artist after its first exhibition.)
Alix – my mother – met Dan – my father – at an exhibition of his sculptures. And, as coincidence would have it, Alix met her lover, Jack Darcy, at an exhibition of my father’s work too, albeit some time later.
A friend of Alix’s invited her to the opening of an exhibition by an up-and-coming sculptor. Alix had gone along to the show because she liked free champagne and smoked salmon bites, not because she had any interest in art.
She noticed the sculptor being double-cheek-kissed and back-patted by women wearing pastel Chanel, women whose hands were stacked with rings like an abacus. He smiled at the Chanel women – too nicely, Alix thought, because surely an artist should be more cynical about such whimsical patronage. She was sure the Chanel suits and overringed fingers wouldn’t be around if he was just another poor artist starving in whatever sufficed for a garret during those postmodern days of the early eighties.
Then, rather than study him, she’d studied his work. He’d used plaster – a material she’d only ever thought of as a healer of broken bones – to make sculptures of bodies, or not even bodies, but parts of bodies. Body parts not quite broken yet not quite whole. A set of toes without a foot, for instance. A knee, sitting alone, so that it didn’t appear to be a knee, as if it needed the context of shin and thigh to make it be a knee. And a mouth, all thin stretched lips and openness as if it were struck to death whilst shouting.
Alix had been staring at that mouth, really staring, she knew, so that she hadn’t even noticed him step up beside her.
‘What do you think she’s saying?’ he asked.
‘Something no one wants to hear,’ Alix replied, then shrugged at the sound of her thoughts accidentally voiced. ‘You’re the artist; what did you want her to say?’
‘Maybe she’s saying yes to the man who’s asking her out to dinner tomorrow night.’ He smiled at her. ‘Are you free?’
‘Well,’ Alix hesitated, ‘as she seems to have lost her voice, I’ll have to step in and say ... yes.’
The night of her date with Dan, Alix stood in front of the mirror wearing a shirt and knickers, wondering what she should wear to dinner with an artist who, according to her friend, had made at least one hundred thousand dollars on opening night by selling plaster body pieces to the women in Chanel suits.
Everything in her wardrobe seemed too plain or conservative or clinical even, so Alix took out the blow-dryer and concentrated on her hair instead of her clothes, examining the colour as each section began to dry. She wouldn’t allow herself to be considered a redhead – although others often described her as such – because her hair was really a motley orange colour, like ripe mangoes. It was this orangeness that she would like to get away from.
She was sure that her life would have been different if she’d had distinctly red hair. Redheads were showgirls, dancers or queens. Unfettered jobs with irregular hours, irregular pay and a certain attitude. A redhead would have been to Africa instead of just talking about it. A redhead would have bought the Bvlgari necklace she saw every day in the window of the shop down the road because a redhead would not have to w
orry about whether it would offend the eyes of the relatives of the almost-dead everyday at work.
Alix finished blow-drying her hair so that it sat in a sleek, smooth line at the bottom edge of her shoulder blades. She turned away from the mirror. Besides, none of her patients would trust her if she had properly red hair. They’d think of other women, shape-shifters, whose red hair foreshadowed their deviousness – Orlando, Ophelia, Elizabeth – because red was a fluid colour even at the same time as it was strong. It was the colour of scalded skin; it was the colour of love in a clichéd heart.
‘Congratulations,’ Alix said as she slipped into the seat beside him at the bar.
Dan put a glass of champagne in front of her. ‘Hope you like champagne. It’s all I’ve drunk for the last twenty-four hours. It’s not too often your show gets described in the Herald as the best of the year.’
Alix took a sip from her glass. ‘So you’re drunk and arrogant. Fun date.’
He looked at her for a moment then said, ‘I’m neither. Just truthful. But yes, it should be a fun date.’
Alix ran her finger through the ring of water droplets left by her glass on the surface of the bar. She glanced at him. He was tall and blond and blessed. So she chinked her glass against his and said, ‘To a fun date.’
He smiled, finished his drink and moved his body closer to hers. And there it was. A shiver of skin, like breeze drifting through the night of her dreams.
‘So what do you do when you’re not going to art shows or out with arrogant artists?’ Dan said.
‘I’m a surgeon.’ Alix knew that information often ended such conversations. It wasn’t feminine enough. Men seemed to prefer nursing, or teaching perhaps.
But he asked the next logical question. ‘What kind?’
‘I’m with the new heart transplant unit at St Vincent’s.’
‘I’d love to watch you do one.’ He grinned. ‘Now I sound weird.’
If I Should Lose You Page 3