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 (#ulink_083f68cd-774f-5eea-bf5c-c4874acbff95)

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.