The heart won.
Next Friday, she was in the Heartache bar at five past five. He was totally self-possessed as he strolled over to where she sat fiddling with her drink, took her hand, and bent to whisper, “Let’s get out of here.”
She did not resist.
His apartment was close by, one of those new inner-city warehouse conversions where mellow old timbers clashed horribly with brushed stainless steel fittings and too-bright feature walls. Very trendy. Everything was in its place, neat and cold and closed up tight.
“Come in,” he said. “Champagne’s on ice.”
His arrogance was breathtaking in its casual presumption. He moved to kiss her, and Penny felt suddenly like meat being steered towards a marble slab.
The heart skipped a beat.
“I can’t,” she said.
“Of course you can. That’s why you’re here.”
Her throat constricted. She could only nod her assent.
He peeled away her clothing, obviously fascinated by her scars. He ran his tongue down the purplish-red length of the long gash that started at her breastbone, tracing the slightly raised welt of the healing tissue. “It’s weird, this transplant stuff. How does it feel, having part of someone else inside you?” He grinned at his rehearsed double entendre. “Apart from the usual, of course.”
“It’s just a muscle, Gus. Nothing more. The surgeons are wonderful technicians, but that’s all it is. A spare parts replacement service.”
He reached for her, pulling her down upon the bed.
Penny closed her eyes, her heart beating wildly at his embrace.
He was an expert lover, though what surfaced of Penny’s mind regarded him as a bit too clinical. He focussed on his technique, turning her this way and that, putting himself through his paces, bringing her to an aching climax beneath him. It was soon finished.
They sprawled in the rumpled sheets, sated. His pillow talk was desultory, almost bored. Penny caught him sneaking a look at his watch.
She rose, collected her clothes, headed for the bathroom. There were fresh towels laid out. Confident bastard.
When she returned, he had dressed in jeans and a fresh shirt, ready to go.
He grinned at her. “Well, that was fun. Where would you like me to drop you? Home? Back at the bar?”
“No thanks. I’ll make my own way home from here. It will look less obvious.”
He laughed. “Maybe.”
She moved closer to him, reached to kiss him. “Until next Friday, then?”
His smiled vanished. “No. Of course not. You can’t imagine we’d want some kind of involvement, Penny. One to a customer, that’s me. It’s not as if we were in love or anything. We’re just two consenting adults, having a bit of mutual fun. End of story.”
He paused, considering. “Truth is, I just wanted to try it with a transplant person, that’s all. I’m sorry if you imagined it was something more. I thought you’d feel the same about me—novelty value.”
Penny could not prevent the tears that welled up, reddening her dark eyes. She fished a crumpled tissue out of her blazer pocket and dabbed at her nose. The heart was beating wildly.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t realize. I should have.”
His eyes were colder now. “Oh stop it, for godsakes,” he said. “You’re not hurt. You remind me of my wife. She was one of your bleeding-heart organ donor types—always going on about the greater good and social responsibility and all that. There must still be bits of her around everywhere—cornea, kidneys, lungs, heart . . . ”
Penny felt a chill feather up her spine.
“When did she die,” she said.
“Last April. Why?”
“What date, Gus?” Penny’s mouth was dry, the words an effort.
“What does it matter?”
“It matters. What date?”
“April 9th. Why? What’s so important?”
“The date of my transplant, that’s what.”
The heart was beating erratically now.
Incredibly, Gus was laughing. “Well I’ll be damned. This is great. Two women at once.” He tapped her chest. “Hello in there, Annie. Did you miss me?”
Penny pulled away, appalled. “We don’t know for certain, Gus. It could just be coincidence. It just freaked me out, you know?”
“Well, coincidence or not it’s a hell of a trip!”
Penny grabbed her bag, bolted for the door, slammed it after her. She hailed the first cab she could find, and collapsed into the back seat, crying hysterically, her heart beating a-rhythmically now.
“You alright, love?” The taxi driver sounded concerned.
Penny managed a strangled answer, “Fine, really. Just had a bit of a shock. I’ll be alright soon.”
By the time she reached home she’d dried her tears, but the heart still hurt, and there was an ominous tightening in her chest. She paid the driver, walked unsteadily to her front door. Emma opened it.
“Mum, you look awful!”
“Thanks. I’ll just lie down for a while. I’ll be okay. A difficult day, that’s all.”
Emma looked doubtful, but left to make her a cup of tea. When she returned, Penny was curled up in pain, clutching her chest.
“I’ve taken my pills,” she said. “They don’t help. Call the emergency contact number for me, Emma. I think I’m going to need the hospital.”
Emma dashed for the phone.
* * *
Penny was much worse by the time she was wheeled into the hospital. Her surgeon was there, his expression concerned. His diagnosis was instant.
“Rejection. Let’s move, everyone—she hasn’t got much time.”
Rejection. The word resonated in Penny’s mind as a needle slid into a vein, and she lost her last, tenuous hold on consciousness.
She did not re-awaken. Ever.
* * *
Upstairs, in Recovery, Calypso Jones was drifting into post-operative awareness.
Her new heart felt all wrong, somehow.
Bowfin Island
Anna Tambour
5 Nov, Fri
“sublime but commanding! poss see me immed” Hear texted, possibly trying to warn me off because he followed that immed w “poss prefer gdd tour italy?” I seriously don’t think he meant the ‘commanding’ to be a come-on.
When I found him yesterday, he said that what I asked for was impossible. Something about the locals mustn’t be after the tourist pound, and there’s only one possible place to stay there anyway, and it’s only got one room, and it’s booked years ahead, and it costs more per night than a sensible person would . . . No reasonable person would . . . besides, there are plenty more places in the North Sea, and why not pick someplace warm and sunny anyway blahblahblaaa.
He’s an odd duck, so out for my safety that it’s a wonder he doesn’t try to sell me a tour of my flat so I don’t run the risk of leaving home. But he knows what he knows. I found him in the outer reaches of the Web, almost like he didn’t really want to be seen, let alone be an agent. Hear Outer The Way Travel. But then, most clients have web presences before I work on them, that look like they don’t want to be seen.
Someone was literally watching my back when I repld YS! NO! B thr! Then I might have screwed up someone’s web page, working on two at once, Margate Council’s Incontinence Support site & the Smoking Bum Cigar Lounge. I was THAT anxious the opportunity wouldn’t slip away before I could seize it on my lunch break.
Luckily, Hear was only a block away, though my bum still hurts from slipping in the rain. That rain must have stopped anyone else coming. He was all alone. I don’t know what people are coming to these days. A drop of precipitation, a bit of wind, and they’re all inside, only giving their thumbs exercise.
He raised a hand and nodded and motioned me to the chair, but it was a full 2 minutes of anxious waiting for me, while he worked away on his keyboard. I would have said something, but my little mistake of adding Man About Town gents cotton protective pants with concealed waterproof
liner to the menu list of the Smoking Bum and pasting the Hoyo De Monterrey Epicure #2 in the Council’s IS Bladder and Bowel links stayed my tongue.
Finally he finished and frowned at me. He looked like Mum whenever she saw that I was going out to play. Where’s your nicky-tams, she’d say. She never understood why a string tied around your leg just under the knee won’t keep your trousers out of the mud. And when in uni, I bought cycling clips, she was downright obnoxious with her Oh now, Mister size 11 boots. You see that I’ve been right all along but too proud you are, to admit it! and her raised eyebrows and teeth clicks at the extravagances of those clips, followed by two sentences: How long d’you expect your money to last? As long as a piece of string?
I never got a chance, nor did I try to say that my pair of Ice Toolz Plastic Trouser Clips with reflective Scotchlite Strip was only £3.50. Only, she would have said, like a gust of wind fit to king-hit the chimney—for my lashout of £3.50 was 100 times, no, an infinity of multiples of what two pieces of string cost, since she even washed and saved the string that held the paper on fish-wrapping.
All my personality comes from Dad, so how could either of us feel guilty for, after she died, throwing away without discussion, her most treasured possession, the framed wallpiece that her gran had embroidered back in prehistory—I can see Great Gran now, embroidering with one hand while with the other, she is darning with cord that lasts, the toes of socks, all the while not letting her feet be idle, those that whip up stinking mounds of neeps and tatties that are, of course, not meant to be eaten for pleasure.
‘Caution will seldom guide ye wrang’ said the thing on the wall. I never did understand my parents’ marriage. I did see Mum’s mother once, and she was the opposite of what Mum’s gran must have been. She wore more makeup than the Harlequeens who played the pub down the street when I was so young that I thought them beautiful, in a scary way. She had the kind of voice those men were trying to ditch. If you closed your eyes, however, the huskiness did have a certain 40s Lauren Bacallishness to it. The fag hanging off her lip didn’t. Mum didn’t approve of her, and she conveniently died suddenly of some complication, I think a truck.
So this agent had that look on his face, that Mum look. Then he added, “Dreams don’t make good trips, but bad trips last forever. It is my professional responsibility to advise you against peradventure.”
I hadn’t noticed before, but he even sounds like Mum, and on his desk is one of those tourist plaques, probably made in China, but he must have bought it because it flattered his ego, “There’s nane sae deaf as them that winna hear.”
Without turning around, he pointed to the poster behind him. “Mr Hear,” I said, “I must be back to work soon, so please, no games. Don’t let anyone Scotch ye might mean something to you, but it’s beans to me.”
“T’other,” he said, jabbing his thumb back to the left.
“See Skye afore ye Die”? Not worth reply.
Then he put his hands on something on his desk that he turned my way: a garish tabloid brochure fronted by a group of t-shirted girls looking ready to shag anything.
I stood up and took off my anorak. Now, staring at him from my t-shirt were the words, ‘Twitch and Tick’.
“Bowfin,” I said.
“A penny saved—”
“Is a 500th of a cup of coffee,” I said. “Now Bowfin. Or Mars.”
“All that money,” he said, as if my spending it would hurt him. There was something positively Calvinistic about the douchebag. He was, in short, getting on my tits.
“A young man like you should be saving for—”
“There’s nae poackits in a shroud!”
He smiled grimly. “Single?”
“Of course.”
“Then,” he said, “I can offer you from Friday the seventh, three days at Puddock House.”
Whoa! That, as this diary shows, is only 2 days away.
“Only because of a cancellation due to premature death. It’ll be filled—”
“Book it!”
“It’ll cost—”
“Book it!” I screamed. My thumbs tingled with intended tweets: eat yr hrts out! Bowfin Is! Try 2 find on map! 1 Siberian Chiffchaff
I was fucked if I was going to miss this chance. I’d already stuffed the opportunity of going to Sula Sgeir back in May and possibly sighting the Red-necked Phalarope, and I lost my lunch one hot day in June when Geoff Pingly tweeted: South Uist flck of 127 btG.
NO ONE is gonna get between me and the possibilities on Bowfin Island. That place that I’d never heard of before Hear, but couldn’t miss once I knew. Sure, he’s a pain in the arse): but isn’t that why good destinations, like good travel agents, are well-kept secrets:)
Not but he’s weird! And here’s the strangest part of that strange encounter, the thing that stopped him trying to put me off. My comeback. “There’s nae poackits in a shroud.”
Hell if I know where that came from. It was like, coming from someone inside me, someone I’ve never met let alone listened to. I might as well have been speaking in voices. But then it’s the same when I’m writing code. My programming skills always seem to come from some unknown computer inside me. It’s a crowded house in there.
I shouldn’t complain. Hear’s insides might be filled with caution-preaching vicars yearning to be mums—but inside me, I’ve got, atop the bank of supercomputers, some yelling hairy Scotsman with a wild sense of adventure that matches mine, and hey—he’s human!
Meanwhile, at work:
The office has an automatic dobber-in on every galley-slave’s chair that counts the seconds that a bum isn’t pressing on it, working. You might as well have electrodes wired to your skull. Pressure pads sense just which muscles are tensing up, so the system aces the status quo, plain vanilla CCTV in all its costs. No one has to watch this. You just get shocked if you’re deviating, and it’s nothing light. After a treatment of this, a man’s balls feel like cold falafels. And the system feels wetness just as well, so Felicity Quimper, after her alarm went off for jumping out of her chair, went out and got a supersize Hot & Sour Soup that she took back to work and threw into the little room filled with servers. Defending herself later, she supposedly said that she thought it was an invasion of her privacy to be shocked for having thoughts. Her defence would have only cost her more money, what could she expect? She had committed thoughts during work hours.
I don’t know why I wrote all that down. Maybe just for vanity. Will my next place of work be hopelessly behind the times technologically? Fat chance. The only thing that stays the same is that progress just changes the way slaves are punished. But then, that’s in the office. One thing I love about twitching is that we tick off our subjects. We’re in control. And there’s not a damn thing the birds can do about it. They exist, so that we tick. Off hours.
During work hours, struggling is as effective as a wren caught in a net. Order me around, I say. Just pay me heaps. I’m lucky that I can work with my brain tied behind my back. I’m so good at my work that I skill up without having to work at it. If only it weren’t all so BORING! I do suffer from interminable terminal boredom. But isn’t that the scent of an office? Oh de ZZZ. Not that my smell is like the other galley-slaves who pong of fear, justifiably scared as rabbits in a fox coven. They’re all so eminently imminently expendable. Not me. It must be my competence. Always ooze confidence! It would be nice though, to sit in a workchair and merely be passively observed ruining sight and spine and any sense of being human.
Anyway, I got back an hour late and tossed a hot moist bag already looking like it was made of waxed paper into Cooper’s lap. THAT stopped him mid-yell, momentarily. He shouldn’t complain. He loves samosas. Then I ignored the galley-slave corpsicles cracking their neck bones as they tried to watch yet keep their glute maxes and all their other little bum glutes absolutely dutiful . . . while I cleared out my desk and left, warbling over the alarm as effectively as a Hume’s Leaf W trying to best a screaming plover.
The pay
there was as usual, more than I’d put in a bank. And somehow I don’t think I’ll get a rec fr there. And I just spent my savings on the trip. But we’re only alive once, some of us. The rest aren’t alive at all.
As for those who are working without pay, Great Gran, since you must be hard at it making yourself useful up there in your unheated heaven, here’s a job to get on with:
Embroider it in red.
Every job’s shite.
And since you must have a carpenter up there, too, please get it framed. Ta! And tally-ho, if you’re looking, Mum!
6 Nov Sat
Exhausted already. 6am London to Glasgow flight inexcusably delayed 5! NOTE FIVE hours by snowstorm somewhere. No snowstorm in London. No one fed us anything while we waited, the plane food was an insult, and the rest of the trip so far is a blur. It’s 3am, and I’m supposed to be trying to sleep in a freezing cottage built of stone and romantically roofed with straw, like some effing fairytale. My head feels like a pummelled steak from the interminable howling wind.
I got here by degrees. A ferry to one island, then a wait with no time given to when some boat would take me to the next place, so I couldn’t get anything to eat or have a decent crap, but three hours of that and the ferry pitched up, only something that took me to the next island. I thought it was someplace named Muck, but I think I thought that because I read some funny article about the Laird of Muck. Anyway, wherever it was, was just a stop along the way. Someone met me yet again, don’t ask me how they knew. And then I was taken on a fishing boat to this place.
This journal smells of chunder. The fishing boat rolled like half a lemon in a punchbowl. I was the only passenger, said the captain. Yes, he called himself the captain. He tried to make the journey pleasant, plying me with slices of white bread. I tossed each overboard when he wasn’t looking. Couldn’t keep anything down, even though there was hardly anything in my stomach.
This journal makes me gag now. I shouldn’t have tried to write in it on that tub, but I had to keep my head down, couldn’t look at the flipping horizon. Cleaned up what I could then with the only thing I had, the sleeve of my anorak. The captain was bloody useless. He offered to toss buckets of water over me, and kept saying, “You’re bowfin.” I know I’m going there and so does he, but it’s a bit rich, him treating me like luggage. I had to tell him to fuck off. The journal’s been washed by rain since, and some of the pages are stuck together, but I can’t throw it away, not after all I’ve put in it! When I get to Puddock House, will tell them to desanitise it somehow. With what I’ve paid, they should have a slave who could lick it clean. Part of the big adventure!
The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2013 Page 11