Tony Parsons - Starting Over

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.