Extracts

1

When I went back to school, I announced that I had a hole in my heart. My friends were unimpressed. ‘Don’t be so stupid – you’d be dead,’ they said. I knew something was different about me, but what? I decided to talk to my older sister. From her nine-year-old height, she looked down at me and said, wisely, ‘It means you’ve only got half a heart.’

 

2

The cardiac consultant had clearly never been to a Breaking Bad News seminar. He took one look at me and came out with: ‘You do know that you cannot have children.’ No preamble, no discussion, nothing. He offered to perform another catheterisation just to check that he was right. The logic behind his chosen order of events eluded me – it seemed too big a pronouncement to make unless he was entirely sure.

 

3

During my schooldays, when excused from games lessons, I did my homework in the school dining-room where the dinner ladies would take pity on me and make me a cup of tea. I liked it watery with lots of milk, rather than the stand your spoon up institutional brew. One of the women would see me coming and proclaim, ‘Ooh, there’s the weak one.’ That was just how I was now feeling. The weak one.

 

4

I realised, sitting attached to an oxygen cylinder that as a member of the real disabled I had certain privileges. In clothes shops, assistants would run around and fetch me things. Children, finding someone down at their level, would initiate conversation as though I was an old friend. ‘I’m having a party – I’m six today, but I’m not inviting Thomas,’ one little boy told me. ‘Why’s that?’ I asked him. ‘Thomas is a cat. He doesn’t like parties,’ he replied solemnly.

 

5

I thought about that forty-five-year-old woman, a sudden, early death and the complexity of the web each life weaves. I thought about the people who would be affected by her death, last night and in the years to come. So many people are touched by a death. And it could have been me, with all the network of people in my life hearing about my death. What kind of impact would it have on them? Or, I could this morning be unconscious in intensive care, my bag stowed away next to some hospital bed. Benefiting from another death.

 

6

My brother Rob had sent flowers, e-mails, words of encouragement. I’d e-mailed him to say that I was going on the transplant list. ‘Christ,’ came the reply from an internet café somewhere east of Perth, 'the lengths some people will go to draw attention to themselves.’

 

7

The doorbell rang. The vehicle had arrived, my carrier to the next world. It should really have been a coach-and-four flying its ghostly voyage through the night. Instead it was a maroon people-carrier with hard upright seats and a solemn driver. Mo came with me this time, holding my hand. It was not quite dark when we left and we shot through the streets out of Oxford, on to the big roundabout before the motorway and off, overtaking and overtaking. I felt mildly sick, trying not to get my hopes up but hoping too that this would be another abortive journey, since the alternative seemed too big to contemplate.

 

8

I thought about my donor most days, as though followed by a presence. I did not feel spooked or obsessed. Just a quiet reminder, a need out of respect, to remember, to whisper a word of thanks to her. Thanks when I first walked five miles, when I saw my friend’s newborn twins for the first time. And thanks, tinged with sadness, over Christmas 2002, when I sat with all my family warmly replete with food and wine, laughing at an old family joke. This would have been a very different occasion if it were not for someone we had never met.

 

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