Starting Over

But Lara didn’t want help. She wanted to give me something. She stood there laughing, and catching her breath. And I recognised her now, just as she handed me the tickets. She was one of the dancers.

I had just spent an hour in the theatre where she worked. There had been widespread thieving in the dressing rooms, both male and female. It took a couple of hours and all my powers of detection to work out that there was something suspicious about a caretaker with a locker containing seventeen Prada bags, some lovely watches and credit cards in twenty different names. He was nicked, and they were grateful. All those good-looking boys and girls radiating future stardom. I looked down at the tickets in my hand, as though I had never seen tickets before.

‘For tonight,’ she said. ‘Bring your girlfriend.’

I brought Keith. Police Constable Keith Rooney, as he was in those days. We sat in the front row of the circle, still in uniform, and at first it was difficult for me to spot her. She was one of the Peasant Women who wanted to lynch Jean Valjean when he was caught nicking the old priest’s candlesticks, but I lost sight of her for a bit until she was one of the Lovely Ladies urging Fantine to solve her problems by turning to prostitution. And then, as Keith chomped his way through a bag of Revels, I finally got a fix on her. Because nobody in that show moved like Lara.

She was a dancer. Most of them could do a bit of everything, and do it very well. But – I learned later – she never had much of a voice, and didn’t really have the confidence to sing if she wasn’t hiding in a group of seventeenth-century French peasants or prostitutes. But she could move. Lithe, springy, a natural grace. I don’t know what it was, but I knew I had never seen anything like it.

Not a lot of call for dancing in Les Misérables, of course, apart from the wedding of Cosette and Marius. It is mostly people dying tragic deaths while the survivors mooch around sadly. But the way she moved still held me. After the massacre of the posh students, she was one of The Women singing the song about how nothing ever changes, and nothing ever will, and by then I couldn’t take my eyes from her. In the end, Lara hovered on the edge of the stage, like an angel in her newly laundered nightgown, as Jean Valjean died in the arms of his heartbroken daughter and by my side Keith gently sobbed into his bag of Revels.

I woke to the darkness and the smell of alcohol. I groaned and shifted in my bed, feeling the tug of the IV drip in my arm.

It was the middle of the night and the television was on with the sound turned down. At first I thought I was alone. And then I saw Keith. Under the light of the sports channel, he was slumped in one of the chairs, the bottle of vodka in his lap sticking up like a codpiece.

My eyes drifted to the TV. It was a highlights show. Nothing but goals. All the boring bits cut out. I didn’t recognise any of the players or any of the teams. It was some sort of Third World league. I watched a big lean striker nod the ball over a flailing goalkeeper and then run towards the camera. And just before his kissy-kissy teammates reached him, he did a back flip, and then another back flip and then one more. His body violent with health and vitality and youth. His teeth bone-white in his grinning face.

Mocking me.

Mocking me.

Mocking me.

When I awoke again there was a light and I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know if it was just a vision caused by billions of brain synapses shutting down or a chemical hallucination or something else. I did not know if it was my dope-addled imagination or some new unimagined reality. I didn’t know if it was the drugs or heaven.

Lara’s voice held me.

‘You never have to say it back,’ she was saying, and now everyone was crying, including me, although I was getting beyond tears, and that was why it seemed so strange when the doctor burst into the room, laughing like a nutcase and his face all shiny with delight.

‘We’ve got one,’ he said.

four

In my dream I was in this field.

It was as unfeasibly smooth and green as a billiard table, my dream field, and as I jogged across it I was aware of the crowd watching me. Getting excited, they were, as if they knew what was coming before I did.

I smiled to myself, because suddenly I knew too, and then I was in the air and upside down – hanging there for that magic second in the middle of a back flip when the crown of the head is just inches from the ground and the soles of the feet are pointing at heaven. And the world is upside down.

I had once seen a photograph of a fifties actor on a New York street with his girlfriend and the camera had captured him at just that exact moment – hanging upside down in the middle of a back flip, his blond curls almost scraping the city sidewalk, his right-way-up girlfriend smiling at the camera, beautiful and proud. His name was Russ Tamblyn. He had been in West Side Story. Or maybe he hadn’t been in West Side Story just yet, and that was still ahead. But he was a dancer. Like my wife. She was the one who showed me the photograph.

And then I landed and the crowd gasped with astonishment. It was pretty obvious that they had never seen such a perfectly executed back flip. They made that very clear. So I gave them another one. And then another. And every back flip only seemed to make them gasp louder, and clap harder, and go madder.

I can do back flips, I thought. Good ones, too. Like Russ Tamblyn in the fifties. Him in West Side Story. Bloody hell.

Then I saw the face in the crowd. All those faces, but that face was the only one I could see. I started running towards the special face, and then I was sliding across the impossibly green grass on my pain-free, highly flexible knees and into the arms of Lara, as the capacity crowd roared their approval.

When I woke the following morning I was breathing on a ventilator and Lara was holding my hand. We were in the Intensive Care Unit and she was wearing a mask, gloves and a gown, looking a bit like a superhero. Everyone in there was dressed the same way. But I knew it was her.

It could not be anyone else.

‘You don’t have to say it back,’ she was saying.

I wanted to tell her that she looked like a superhero, but instead I went back to sleep, wondering if I would ever wake up again. Even in my heavily drugged state, I knew this was the dodgy bit.

They had filled me with immunosuppressant drugs so that my immune system was weakened, and my new heart could squat in my old body and have a chance of not being annihilated. But by deliberately weakening my immune system, by sucking the life out of all the blood and tissue and good stuff that fights bacteria and viruses, they had given me a good chance of being croaked by some killer infection. So it’s Catch 23. Which is like Catch 22, but worse.

They had given me the first dose of immunosuppressants when I was sparko in the operating theatre, in the night, which is when all transplants take place. Now I would have to take them for the rest of my life. However long that might be.

I slept. I woke. Lara was still there, dressed as a superhero. This went on for quite a while. Slept. Woke. I wanted to ask her, Haven’t you got a home to go to? I wanted to say to her, Sorry about all this, I know it’s a bloody pain. I wanted to say, I like you, you’re nice.

But instead I slept, and if there were dreams then I couldn’t recall them.

I was in the ICU for three days and then they moved me to my own little room on what they called a step-down ward. The ventilator had gone. By then Lara had stopped dressing like a superhero and stopped telling me that I didn’t have to say it back, and I sort of missed it.

But that was a good thing.

Because it meant she thought that I was going to live.

When they give you a new heart, your body tries to destroy it.

Bit stupid that.

But the body really goes crazy trying to annihilate what it sees as this invader. They call it rejection but it is actually a lot more than that. Rejection sounds as though your body is snubbing the new heart, refusing to acknowledge its presence, not wanting it to move into the neighbourhood and lower property prices.

And it’s not like that at all. Your body really wants to kill it.

It is like you wake up in the middle of the night and there is an intruder in your home. You chase the stranger around in the darkness, slashing at it with kitchen knives and broken milk bottles and anything else you can get your hands on. You feel like you are fighting for your life. You feel that your survival depends on killing this stranger.

Then you turn on the light.

And the stranger is you.

When I woke up my dad was there.

I automatically scanned the room for my mum – the kind, smiling, tea-making moderator between my father and me for these last forty-seven years – but there was no sign of her. Our five-foot-high buffer was gone, no doubt in search of tea, and my dad and I looked at each other.

‘You’re all right,’ he said, the familiar voice soft and gruff. It wasn’t a question. And I found that I was pathetically grateful for his optimistic diagnosis, even if it was coming from a retired copper with no formal training in heart surgery.

I could feel the pain in my chest flexing with every breath.

‘It hurts,’ I said, wincing as the breath came out of me. I arched my spine and the tube in the back of my hand pulled at me, as if urging restraint. I sank back into a pillow that was far too soft, like a giant marshmallow.

My father pulled his chair closer and took my hand. The one without the drip. The touch of his hand felt strange. Soft and rough at the same time. Like his voice.

‘Close your eyes,’ he said. ‘Have a kip. Have a little kip now.’

And I wanted to sleep. The mere act of waking seemed to exhaust me. But instead I stared in wonder at my hand in my father’s hand. I suppose he must have held my hand before. Walking me to school. Taking me to the park. Did he ever do those things? Once upon a time? I had no memory of it. Maybe he had never done those things because he was working. This felt like the first time he had ever held my hand.

‘The pain will go,’ he said, and he squeezed my fingers, and gave them a gentle shake that meant, Be brave. And it didn’t feel like the first time that he had told me that.

I closed my eyes and my dad kept holding my hand. I felt the sleep of the heavily drugged come sliding in, and still he held my hand.

Then Lara and my mum came into the room with tea and coffee and I opened my eyes.

‘There he is,’ my mum said, as if I might have slipped out for a spot of bungee jumping while she was at the vending machine.

And that was when I felt him let go of my hand.

They wanted me to exercise. The doctors. The nurses. They wanted me up and about. They could see that I was becoming quite comfortable in that overheated bubble of my little room, regular food and affection being delivered to my bed as if I was a newborn. And that is not a million miles from what it felt like. The sheer fact of being here at all made me feel like laughing out loud.

Because I should have been dead by now.

But I was getting too attuned to the delights of daytime television. The recipes and rolling news and screaming family feuds. The hospital soaps and celebrity gossip. The fabricated drama of sport.

Time to snap out of it. Time to start thinking about my rehabilitation programme and physiotherapy schedule.

Time to take my first steps.

And after a few practice shuffles around my room, I was pretty much given the freedom of the hospital. They didn’t have the time or the inclination to supervise me. They had sick people to worry about. They just got me out of bed and got my blood pumping. Then they let me get on with it.

And that was how I discovered the roof.

I walked down the hospital corridor, refastening the belt of my dressing gown, making it tighter, anxious not to expose myself in my stripy M&S pyjamas. I went past the nurses’ station to the far end of the corridor and caught the service lift to the top floor. Porters with big rubbish bags and little English went about their business in this lift, and greeted my presence with polite indifference. When I got to the top floor, and said goodbye to whichever porter was lugging his bin bags around, I took a few steep steps up to a door that was never locked in case of fire. And when I walked through the door there was the roof, there was the city, there was the world.

Silence and the city’s eternal hum. Fresh air and car fumes. Solitude and all those lives that I would never know.

The metal railing encircling the roof was so low that it made my breath catch, my head spin, my carpet slippers take a step back. Six floors below, the Marylebone Road flowed like a mighty river. I inhaled, smiled, and felt someone behind me.

‘Dad?’

It was Rufus. I looked up at him. His eyes were red and his shoulders sagged. If it wasn’t for my dressing gown and stripy pyjamas, you might have thought that I was visiting him.

‘Looking on Google,’ he said, and his voice caught. He closed his eyes and composed himself. The sob settled somewhere deep down inside him. ‘Me and Ruby. Reading about – you know. What happened to you.’ He closed his eyes. Controlled his breathing. And looked at his father. ‘Half of transplant patients are dead after ten years.’

I smiled at him.

‘So that means half of us are alive.’

His body twisted with discomfort. ‘Yeah, but…’

‘Don’t be one of those guys,’ I said, and it came out harsher than I wanted it to. ‘One of those glass-half-empty kind of guys.’

We stood there awkwardly for a bit, the city flowing far below. Then he said that he might go back inside and I told him that was a good idea. I would be down in a while. All this without a second of eye contact.

I watched him go, wishing that I had the words to make him feel better, to make him understand that you don’t whine and quibble and go on Google in the face of a miracle.

How could I explain it to him? I was feeling stronger. Feeling good. Feeling happy. Feeling young again.

Feeling – what’s the word?

Alive.

‘Uncle Keith,’ Ruby said, and she got up to hug him as he came into the room.

I was glad that she still called him Uncle Keith, even though he wasn’t her real uncle or any kind of blood relation. I was glad that she wasn’t too cool or grown-up for that.

‘Hello, gorgeous,’ he said. ‘How’s the patient?’

The pair of them smiled at me sitting up in bed. ‘He’s all right,’ she said. ‘I’ll leave you two alone.’ A flurry of anxiety crossed her lovely face. ‘I’ll just be in the café,’ she told me.

I nodded. It was fine. I didn’t want her to worry so much, even though I knew that was asking a lot. When Ruby had gone, Keith pulled a chair up to my bed and began eating the grapes he was carrying.

‘Not dead yet then?’ he said.

I looked at my watch. ‘It’s still early.’

He smiled. ‘We need to get our story straight,’ he said.

‘Our story?’ I said.

Keith nodded his enormous head. ‘Why you were on that roof. Why a canteen cowboy was out chasing naughty people. Why you were in the car instead of my twelve-year-old partner.’

I thought about it. ‘We were going to lunch and we saw uniformed officers in need of assistance.’

He leaned back in the hospital chair. It creaked in protest, not really designed for the likes of Keith. ‘Yeah, that might work,’ he yawned. He popped a fistful of grapes in his cakehole, and ran his weary eyes over me.

‘Nice grapes?’ I said.

‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘Sorry, mate – you want one?’

‘No, you’re all right.’

And then he got this sly grin, and pulled out the unwrapped packet of Low Tars.

‘For emergencies,’ he said, and I nodded my appreciation as I slipped them deep inside the pocket of my dressing gown. He held out the grapes.

‘So – how are you feeling?’

I chewed a grape and it tasted of nothing because of the drugs. Under my stripy pyjamas I could feel the scar on my chest pulsing. It was not the heart that I felt. You would think it would be the heart. But it was the scar.

‘Never better,’ I said.

Keith laughed, shook his head. ‘Hard, aren’t you?’

I smiled. ‘Harder than you,’ I said.

He snorted. ‘Yeah, right.’ He was cutting me some slack. Apart from eating my grapes, he had a lovely bedside manner. I appreciated him coming. I knew it wasn’t just about getting our story straight. But I was a bit sick of people feeling sorry for me. I rolled up the pyjama sleeve on my right arm. Keith narrowed his eyes.

‘Don’t provoke me, shiny-arse,’ he said.

I laughed and started to roll down my sleeve. ‘More chicken than Colonel Sanders…’

He was on his feet, rolling his sleeve right up to his shoulder. I had said the ‘c’ word. There was a tattoo of barbed wire around his biceps that had blurred with the years. We pulled the table that sat across my bed between us. As we placed our elbows on it, we could feel it sagging. It wasn’t really built for arm wrestling.

‘Bit springy,’ Keith said.

‘Stop moaning,’ I said. ‘Best out of three?’

He was on the verge of beating me for the second time when Lara walked into the room, carrying flowers and a portable DVD player. Her smile faded as she watched Keith force my arm down on to the little hospital table with a triumphant roar from him and a yelp of pain and defeat from me. Keith only stopped laughing when he saw my wife.

Lara stood in the doorway of the hospital room, holding the flowers and the DVD player, and staring at us as if we were a pair of big stupid kids. I looked at Keith, his meaty head hung low, and felt like blurting, ‘Best out of five, Granddad?’

But I stifled my anarchic laughter, and said nothing.

five

There was a soft knock on the bedroom door and Ruby came in with a look of shy delight, carrying a breakfast tray.

I blinked back the fog of sleep as the smell of fried bacon filled the room. I could have sworn I had been awake all night long, fretting about how much time the doctors had given me, but I suppose I must have slept just before I was due to wake up. Ruby placed the tray on the empty side of the bed, where her mother slept. Orange juice. A still steaming mug of tea. Bacon. Two fried eggs. An incinerated sausage. ‘Welcome home. I cooked your favourite,’ she smiled.

Lara came into the room, already dressed, rubbing some sort of cream on her hands. The smell of my wife’s hand cream mixed with the smell of my daughter’s breakfast. They did not mix very well. We all looked at the tray, Ruby’s smile slowly fading.

‘That looks really good, darling,’ Lara said briskly. ‘But your father’s not meant to eat –’

‘No, it’s fine,’ I said, cutting her off as I snatched up the knife and fork. I grinned at my daughter and her face brightened. ‘You’re right. My favourite. Best meal of the day.’

Ruby frowned at the plate. ‘The sausage is a bit…’

‘Looks like a good sausage,’ I said, sawing into it.

‘Sausages are difficult,’ Ruby said. ‘Because they’re so thick.’

I nodded, not looking at Lara. But I could sense her folding her arms and choosing her words and getting ready to restore order. I didn’t need to look at her face to know what I would see there. And of course she was right. But she was also completely and totally wrong.

‘Any brown sauce?’ I asked, spearing my cremated banger.

‘Ah,’ Ruby laughed. ‘I knew I’d forgotten something.’ And she went off to get the brown sauce. Daddy’s Sauce, they used to call it when I was her age.

I looked at Lara as I chewed on my sausage. She smiled thinly at me. It was difficult for her. I knew she had my best interests at heart. When she spoke it sounded like the voice of reason in a screaming nuthouse. Calm, rational, quietly infuriated.

‘Have you been listening at all to these doctors? Have you heard a single thing they’ve said? Do you really want to clog up your arteries with the same old junk that you’ve been –’

‘It’s fine,’ I said, gulping down the badly burned banger. It left the taste of ashes in my mouth. But the bacon looked good. Tender, juicy.

‘It’s not fine. It’s stupid. It’s self-destructive. It’s just…’ She shook her head, as if she was giving up on me. But I knew she would never give up on me. ‘Is it because you’re afraid of hurting her feelings? Her feelings will be a lot more hurt if…’

She turned her face away.

‘Lara,’ I said, ‘come on.’ But she didn’t respond as I morosely sawed a piece off the bacon. Ruby came back with the brown sauce in one hand and little transparent shakers in the other.

‘Salt and pepper,’ she said. ‘I forgot that too.’

Lara turned on the pair of us. She put her arm around Ruby’s shoulder.

‘Your dad can’t eat this stuff, Ruby.’ Her words were gentle but insistent. ‘He can’t put salt on his food. Never again. Do you understand? He might as well put rat poison on his meals.’

‘Come on,’ I said. This was too much. ‘Salt’s not quite the same as rat poison.’

She gave me a frosty look. ‘You’re right, George. Rat poison would probably be healthier. There’s more fibre in it.’ She gave Ruby’s shoulder a gentle shake. ‘It’s great you made a meal for your father to welcome him home. It’s such a lovely thing to do. But, darling, you have to understand that things have changed.’ She looked at my breakfast plate and sighed. ‘He can’t eat this kind of stuff any more.’ The hand she had around our daughter dropped to her side. ‘It will kill him,’ she said quietly.

And I laughed. I had stopped eating, but now I began again. It was a bit cold by this time, and it got even colder when I smothered it in brown sauce. ‘One big breakfast is not going to kill me,’ I said, really tucking in.

‘You don’t want the salt, I guess,’ Ruby said, clutching the transparent pots to her chest, as if I might suddenly try to snatch them away from her.

‘Not necessary,’ I said, picking up a slice of toast, and feeling the slither of lavishly applied butter running across my wrist.

My wife and daughter stared at me as I jauntily consumed my big breakfast. As if they were obliged to watch this ritual. As if it was important.

As if they were witnessing the condemned man eating his last meal.

Ruby was in her bedroom.

I knocked, of course, and knocked again until I was given a half-hearted invitation to enter. There she was, at her desk, her head bowed before the computer screen as if in prayer.

‘Thanks for my breakfast,’ I said.

She nodded in response, not looking at me. I looked around for somewhere to sit. There was only her single bed and the chair.

‘You all right?’ I said.

She nodded again, her brown hair falling over her face like a curtain.

‘Can you shove over a bit?’ I said, and she automatically shuffled her bum sideways on her chair. I am a big man but she had always been a skinny kid and there was still just about room enough for two of us on that chair. Luckily she is built like her mother, the dancer, rather than her father, the fat bastard.

‘Something bad is going to happen,’ she said, so quietly that it felt like she was saying it to herself. Because she did not look at me.

I touched her shoulder, patted it. We were so close that I could smell the shampoo she had used in the shower.

‘Nothing bad is going to happen,’ I said. ‘I promise you, Ruby.’

She shook her head, not believing a word of it. ‘Something bad. Something very bad. It’s coming.’

‘Look,’ I said, really needing her to believe me. ‘I have great doctors. I am on the best medication that they can give me. And I feel good.’ I leaned back in the chair and looked at her profile. Her mother’s face, but with hints of me – a big forehead, the long upper lip – that somehow looked better on her than they ever did on me. ‘I’ll be fine, angel.’