by Mandy Baggot
‘I could get someone in to style your hair if that’s what you want,’ Keeley said. There was access to essentials as well as treats here. The hospice worked with all sorts of companies to try and make last wishes come true. Last week Mr Davidson was reunited with a vulture he used to take care of in his days working at the bird conservancy. With a wingspan of almost two metres, it had been quite a challenge getting Little Buddy into Mr Davidson’s room when the animal got completely excited by the biscuits on the tea-trolley and decided to unleash and flap. But the tears in the old man’s eyes and the tremble of his lips at their reunion had moved everyone who had witnessed it. Who knew that vultures liked to be tickled under the beak?
‘I don’t want my hair done by Rach! I’m not going to the grave looking like someone painted it with creosote.’
‘You’re exaggerating,’ Keeley said, putting her hand to her hair. ‘It doesn’t look that bad.’ Rach had promised her it didn’t.
‘No,’ Erica said sighing. ‘You’re right. It’s alright. I’m just being a bitch. Dying woman’s free pass to say what she thinks without worrying about the consequences. Who cares if anyone’s at my funeral anyway? I’ll be in a box… well, hopefully one of those rattan baskets if I can afford one of them.’
‘You don’t need to think about that yet,’ Keeley said, swallowing a lump in her throat. But they did. Both of them knew what was coming. Keeley was going to lose someone else close to her yet again. Someone who reminded her so much of her little sister. How was any of it fair?
‘Well, what should I think about then?’ Erica asked, big eyes studying Keeley so intently. ‘Because from where I’m lying there’s only so much interest you can pay to the crap surroundings. Like that terrible painting over there.’
Keeley’s gaze went to the oil painting of two poodles on their hind legs dancing with each other. One of them had a beard like Charles I. It was pretty terrible. ‘Well,’ she said, turning back to Erica, ‘what would you like to look at while you’re here?’ Perhaps she could get Erica one of the rooms with a large window a little bit earlier. Those rooms were usually reserved for patients at the very bitter end of their journey. They all had a fantastic view over parkland and, even now, at the end of November, when the trees were bare of leaves, the sight of the boughs bright and sparkling with frost was something to behold.
‘One of the Jonas Brothers? I’m not fussy which one… actually, Nick… no, Joe… nah, definitely Nick.’
Keeley laughed. It wouldn’t be that hard to arrange a poster… or a cardboard cut-out… or a body pillow. She would have a look on Amazon later.
‘Nothing Christmassy though,’ Erica continued, now looking a little wistful. ‘I can cope with the chocolates, but the decorations are mocking me.’ She sighed. ‘Because, chances are, I won’t be here for turkey this year. And that’s just cruel, man. I love turkey.’
‘Turkey and the Jonas Brothers… Nick Jonas,’ Keeley said, counting on her fingers. ‘I’m sure Christmas can come a little early.’
‘What are you doing for Christmas?’ Erica asked, smoothing her blanket out with her skinny fingers and picking up a tiny fragment of chocolate.
‘Oh,’ Keeley began. ‘Well, I’ll be at home on Christmas Day. My mum will be cooking a feast I won’t be allowed too much of and Dad will probably have my share of the things I shouldn’t eat. And, after we’ve eaten all the turkey dinner – sorry – we’ll all eat low-fat cheese, pickles and chocolates we don’t need and then probably fall asleep in front of the wood burner that my dad has stoked so much it’s made the living room the temperature of the inside of a volcano.’
Erica snorted. ‘Love it, man.’ She sniffed. ‘Apart from the not-eating-what-you-want bit. They don’t go into that in films where the characters have had transplants, do they?’
Keeley shrugged her shoulders. ‘Those scriptwriters are kidney-ing themselves.’ She smiled at her transplant humour. She had a kidney joke for most occasions.
Because that was why she had to proceed with caution in life. Her ultimate gift last year had been a new kidney from a donor she knew nothing about. A priceless present that had saved her life and stopped the Andrews family losing both their children in the same accident. It had been nothing short of a miracle, but it had also been a complete game-changer where normal life was concerned. Nothing was ever going to be quite the same again. But, at least she was here.
‘That’s better,’ Erica stated with a grin. ‘Your face has cheered up now.’
‘So, shall I get you a cup of tea? Or shall I see if I can make it a hot chocolate? I can’t guarantee the ones here are as good as the hospital’s though,’ Keeley offered.
‘Carlsberg?’ Erica asked, ever hopeful.
‘I might be able to find some mulled wine.’
‘Make it a double. My kidneys are already as done as the rest of me.’
Four
The Andrews’ Home, Kensington, London
Keeley pulled her boots off by the front door and closed her eyes as she took a second to rest up against the wall of the hallway. Opening her eyes again, she saw there was tinsel around the plants that hadn’t been there this morning and a poinsettia in a pot on the telephone table. Her mum really was kicking early festivities up a notch this year and it was possibly because Lizzie was an emotional purchaser. Their confrontation this morning over Warburton’s finest had probably prompted a trip to John Lewis…
Stifling a yawn, Keeley picked up her boots and padded down the hall. She was tired today. First she had planned out a house-doctoring project in Lambeth and then she had tried to persuade Roland that if he made her enter Mr Peterson’s house again she would most probably voluntarily succumb to the formaldehyde or, if that somehow didn’t work, she would quit. Remarkably, neither of those vaguely veiled threats had stopped Roland from putting an appointment for a visit into her online diary…
And then there was Erica. Her gorgeous friend wasn’t doing at all well, despite all the bullishness. She really wasn’t expected to last until Christmas and that thought cut Keeley to the quick. She knew Erica was in pain – despite the heavy medication she was on – and that her leaving was inevitable now, but the thought of her slipping into a final sleep was unthinkable.
Keeley took a breath and put a hand to her middle, just above one of her scars. It still ached sometimes and it had been aching so much today she’d skipped a visit to the gym. She just wasn’t in the right frame of mind.
She put her hand to the door of the kitchen/diner ready to be faced with whoever her mum had round that evening for Baileys and a charcuterie board. But the conversation she could clearly hear wasn’t about who had done what to who at the last Wives Association meeting, but her parents discussing something that sounded important. She paused. And kept listening…
‘Lizzie, we’re going to have to tell her. How can we not?’ Duncan’s voice said.
‘Oh, I’ll tell you how we cannot. We can pretend that the email never arrived. We can send it to junk like you do with all my discount codes from Wallis. I’m quite happy to forget I saw it. What I’m not happy about is that I decided to share it with you,’ Lizzie said in reply.
‘You didn’t share it with me. And I’m not sure you would have shared it with me if I hadn’t snuck up behind you and seen it. I think it would have been deleted already if I’d played another game of darts before I came back into the house.’
What was going on? Was she the ‘her’ that needed to be told something? Was it something awful? Bad news from the hospital? The doctor had said at her last check-up that everything was fine…
‘How can this be a good thing?’ Lizzie asked. ‘You tell me that!’
‘Well,’ Duncan began in soft tones he usually reserved for placating her mother when a new recipe hadn’t turned out quite how it should. ‘We did agree, after it happened, that should the other party want to connect, then we would be open to that.’
‘We were grieving!’ Lizzie exclaimed. ‘They shove
d so many pieces of paper at us I felt like I was… trapped in the paper bank at the recycling centre!’
A shiver of some sort of recognition that this did involve her ran over Keeley’s shoulders. She didn’t wait any longer. She pushed down the handle and stepped into the room.
Immediately, her mum bounced towards her, dressed in tight Lycra leggings and a fluorescent pink vest, with a sweatband around her forehead, curls springing over it.
‘Keeley! You’re back! Lovely! Lovely! Isn’t it lovely, Duncan?’
Lizzie repetition of words was a trait that always appeared when she was backed into a corner. Last Christmas Lizzie had said the words ‘frightfully festive’ so many times during an awkward soiree with her newly formed crochet society that it had ended up turning into ‘festively frightful’ which meant her canapes were scrutinised a lot more thoroughly than usual.
Lizzie caught Keeley up in a hug that definitely could have expired a gerbil.
‘I told Dad I would be back for dinner,’ Keeley said. She stepped back from her mum and clutched her bag to herself like it was a comfort pillow or maybe a shield to what she was about to find out. ‘But if there isn’t enough I can always—’
‘Of course there’s enough!’ Lizzie said with a snort. ‘There’s always enough.’ She trotted back to the hob on the island where pots were steaming and lifted some lids. ‘It’s my chickpea shakshuka with cauliflower rice.’
Chickpeas. Again. Chickpeas were the princes of protein in this house since red meat was almost abolished completely. Lizzie had made a bold statement about their carbon footprint but Keeley knew it was really about her diet.
Keeley stood still, watching her mum faffing about with a sieve and a wooden spoon as her dad avoided looking at her at all. He seemed to be spending a great deal of time polishing spoons for the table setting, eyes down.
‘What were you talking about before?’ Keeley asked, still cuddling her bag. ‘I heard you… from the hall… and it sounded like—’
‘It sounded like your father was trying to spend the whole of Twixmas at The Rabbit Hole. Some silly darts tournament he wants us to go and watch. I mean,’ Lizzie said, finally drawing breath, ‘a Kensington pub isn’t exactly the World Championships at Lakeside, is it?’
‘Lizzie,’ Duncan said, finally putting a now shiny spoon down on the table. ‘We weren’t talking about the darts competition. You have to tell Keeley.’
‘Tell me what?’ Keeley asked. She was suddenly nervous. As if whatever her parents were going to tell her was somehow going to really change things again. She didn’t want things to change again. Things changing had been her life’s plotline for over twelve months now and she wasn’t sure how much more she could cope with. She was still very much getting used to how her life was now, without Bea, without two kidneys, with all these tablets to take to keep the new kidney going…
‘Let’s sit down and have some food together,’ Lizzie said, clattering pans as she became hidden behind a veil of steam under the glitter ball.
‘Shall we open a bottle of wine?’ Duncan suggested.
‘There’s a non-alcoholic cabernet sauvignon in the wine rack. After all, it is a Thursday, Duncan.’
*
Keeley pushed a forkful of her meal into her mouth but tasted nothing. However, she knew, if she didn’t keep eating, if she didn’t wait for her mum to ‘settle’ she might not find out what was at the bottom of all this slightly tight and nervous sitcom behaviour. And she needed to know tonight, at this dinner table, before all her imaginings of more visits to the hospital grew into giant grotesque Grinch-like gargoyles and swallowed her entire thought process.
‘How’s your food, Keeley?’ Lizzie asked. Her mum was still wearing the sweatband and had already told them an entire story of one woman’s fight against the Sh’Bam trainer’s dodgy sound system and her even dodgier inferior quality Spandex.
‘It’s nice,’ Keeley replied. ‘The chickpeas have… a nice texture today.’
‘Crushed soggy nuts, they always remind me of,’ Duncan piped up. ‘Terry at the pub dropped a whole bag of Planters into his pint once. Refused to fish them out and, once he’d finished the beer, he ate them. I had a couple and they tasted just like this. Nice.’
‘Fascinating,’ Lizzie remarked, shaking her head.
‘OK,’ Keeley said. ‘I think we’ve done all the necessary small-talk now.’ She put down her fork and looked at each of them in turn. ‘What’s going on?’
‘I can’t,’ Lizzie breathed immediately. ‘I just can’t.’ There were tears in her mum’s eyes and Keeley watched as Duncan reached for his wife’s hand. This was serious. Was her body somehow rejecting the kidney and she didn’t know? Surely she would know. She’d be ill, wouldn’t she? She was sure the doctor said she would be ill if that happened.
She swallowed, then ploughed on. ‘Dad?’
‘Duncan,’ Lizzie bleated. She seemed to be pleading with her eyes.
‘Keeley, love, we’ve had an email today,’ Duncan began, squeezing Lizzie’s hand in his. ‘It was from a lady called Silvie Durand.’
The name rang no bells with Keeley. Should it? Her dad was looking at her now like Silvie Durand might be the keeper of the secrets of the universe or the real mastermind behind Oreos. Lizzie let out a whimper.
‘Who is she?’ Keeley asked, her tone a little tentative. If this woman was making her mum cry then she didn’t like the prospect of what came next. Shit… was she adopted? That was the tone of this conversation. She held her breath. Was this Silvie Durand her birth mother? She shuddered. No, that only happened in books… didn’t it?
Duncan cleared his throat and picked up his glass, downing the contents of the alcohol-free wine like he was hoping for a hit akin to Jack Daniels.
‘She’s… the mother… of your kidney donor,’ Duncan said, the words forced out. ‘Her daughter. She was called Ferne. She was the girl… the woman… whose kidney you received after the accident.’
Not adopted then. But it was ground-breaking, life-shifting stuff and she wasn’t prepared. Keeley held her breath, as the shock rose up from her chest to her head, her eyes prickling as she tried to keep looking at her parents. Her donor now had a name. A woman. A woman who had passed away on the same night Bea had. A woman who had chosen to give life to others after she died. A woman who had saved her. Her name was Ferne.
‘What did she say?’ Keeley whispered. ‘In the email.’ For some reason the one thing at the forefront of her mind was the possibility of someone asking for the kidney back like it was a present they regretted giving and now wanted to return to the shop for a refund or give to someone else. Someone more worthy maybe. She tried to shake those thoughts out of her head. The counsellor hadn’t suggested that action would work with regard to clarity of thought process, but Keeley always felt a little better after she had done it.
‘This Silvie wants to take you away from us,’ Lizzie jumped in. ‘She will think, that because you’ve got a bit from her daughter, that you’re partly her daughter now and, if you go, you’ll like it better there and then you’ll leave here and then you’ll… you’ll divorce us… because we haven’t coped well with losing Bea and we’ve jumped between being overprotective, to being dismissive, and all the things in between. And I don’t ask you enough about what’s going on in your life because I’m always too busy filling my life with things so I don’t have to think. Because if I think then… I hurt.’
Keeley watched her mum burst into a flood of tears that could have washed over the Thames Barrier and sent the city whirlpooling to the bottom of the riverbed. She didn’t know what to do. Why didn’t she know what to do? Because she was in shock. Both from this news of her donor’s mother making contact and her own mother breaking down and being open for the very first time.
‘There’s a lot to take in there,’ Duncan said, breaking the sobbing with words. ‘A lot to take in.’ And Keeley still didn’t know what to say. She’d asked what the email had said and no
one had answered her question.
‘What did she say?’ Keeley asked again. ‘Please.’
Lizzie was still eyes down towards the contents of her concoction, hair almost touching the plate. Keeley wasn’t sure she was going to get any more conversation from her mum at the moment. She moved her gaze to her dad.
‘Well,’ Duncan said softly, pouring himself another glass of wine, ‘she sounds very nice. She said… that over the past year, after her grieving, she had done a lot of thinking. And, she has decided, that she would really, really like to meet you.’
Lizzie tried to muffle her sobbing with a tissue she had plucked from her sleeve, but Keeley could still hear. Her donor’s mother wanted to meet her.
‘I…’ Keeley began. ‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘She wants you to visit her… in France,’ Duncan carried on. ‘Paris, actually.’
‘Paris,’ Keeley said, nothing really sinking in.
‘That’s where she lives,’ Duncan said. ‘That’s where… Ferne was from.’
Keeley shook her head. This was all too much. She now wished the wine was alcoholic. She reached for her glass anyway and took a sip. Her donor was from France? She had never known any details of who had donated her kidney. Her mum hadn’t been able to donate after a small brush with cancer some years ago and although her dad was willing and able, the match wasn’t as perfect as it might have been. Then, almost magically, someone on life support at the very same hospital Keeley had been admitted to, someone who was not going to recover, had provided a lifeline. Amazingly, they were a high marker match in blood type, tissue type and cross-matching. Keeley had got incredibly lucky that one night while someone else’s world was splitting at the seams.
Lizzie raised her head a little. Her eyes were red and still leaking tears, the serviette pressed hard to her nose.
‘Keeley, it’s completely your decision what happens next,’ Duncan told her.
‘I don’t know,’ Keeley said. A shiver ran over her and she felt a pull from inside of her. That also happened now and then. It wasn’t like the ache or the pain, it was almost like an acknowledgement. Some sort of internal ripple effect when she thought about how her life had altered from the night of the crash.