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The door is already opening.
I stand, turn and shut the lid of the laptop behind me. ‘Hello.’ I smile; not at Chloe but because I moved quickly.
My movement slipped from first to third gear with ease and everything I notice like that makes me smile. The operation scar doesn’t pull very much any more and I hardly notice my heart beating.
‘I bought us a treat for lunch.’ She raises a thin white plastic carrier bag that is hanging from her right hand. ‘I went to the deli and bought one of their quiches and a selection of salads.’ She places the bag on the table.
‘Thank you. I’m getting a bit bored of soup.’
‘Me too.’
I smile when I sit down but the expression feels awkward. Guilt is a sharp pang in my stomach. It is because I hid the images on my laptop screen. But I have to keep my morbid search secret because no one else will understand. Or believe me. I can’t tell them the spirit of the person my heart came from wants me to find their family.
Chloe delves into the opaque carrier bag and begins unloading it. ‘What have you been up to today?’
‘Not much. I didn’t get out of bed until eleven, then I had a bath. I haven’t been downstairs long.’
‘You sound so much better already.’
‘I feel it, but there is a long way to go.’
‘How many weeks is it before you’ll be able to work?’ She takes the plates out of a cupboard while she talks.
I can probably pick up plates now but the consultant told me not to lift anything for six weeks and I am following every piece of guidance religiously.
‘Three months, if I go back into childcare.’
‘It’s hardly any time, really. New heart. New life. New work opportunities.’ She turns with the plates in her hand. ‘It’s astonishing—’ the plates clunk on the table ‘—what they can do now.’ She smiles before turning away. ‘I’ve been reading stories about people who have connected with their donors.’ She delves into the drawer for knives and forks, rattling the cutlery. ‘Do you want a hot drink? Tea? Coffee?’
‘I’m fine with water.’
The cutlery clatters onto the table, probably scratching the already scarred wood. But it is a young family’s table with rough-and-ready boys. She takes glasses out of the cupboard. ‘So anyway, I was telling you about the stories I’ve read.’
‘Yes.’ Her thoughts have been turning in the same direction as mine.
‘A woman in one of those true-stories-from-the-readers magazines said …’ the water runs, hitting the bottom of the sink and drowning her words; I listen harder ‘… she wrote a thank-you letter.’ The sound of the water changes to a dribble as Chloe tests to see if it is running cold enough to be fresh. ‘She was younger than you.’ The water runs into a glass as Chloe glances over her shoulder. ‘Her kidney had come from an older woman and the family she contacted were the donor’s children.’
The tap turns off, then Chloe turns around with a glass in either hand. ‘The family wrote back to her, a brother and sister. It was the sister who really wanted to make contact. The brother wasn’t very interested.’ Chloe sits at the table, looking me in the eyes as she slides a glass towards me. ‘But the sister gives this woman her contact information and they write back and forth. Then the sister suggests they meet.’
The sip of cold water grasps at my throat and a shiver runs down my spine.
‘She persuaded the brother to go along to keep her company. But when the brother and woman met, they got on really well. To cut a long story short they fell for each other and married. Don’t you think that’s odd?’
‘But it’s the sort of sensational story that sells those magazines, isn’t it?’
Chloe picks up a large knife and pulls the quiche towards her. ‘How much do you want?’
‘Just a small piece.’
‘There’s another story. It was on one of the morning TV programmes. It was a mother who lost her teenage daughter. She had donated lots of different organs.’ Chloe slid a plate over to me.
I reach for the spoon to delve into the tub of coleslaw and green salad.
‘The mother had half a dozen thank-you letters and she replied to them all. Now all those people meet at least once a year. They’re all friends.’
‘Really? I can’t imagine all those people with elements of one person.’ I don’t want to know if other people have a part of the person I received my heart from. Possessiveness pulses into my blood. I am tied to this person. It is a strange connection to have with someone. But the heart was a gift given to me. That is what I feel from the presence of the person I think this heart once belonged to – that they chose me.
‘There’s another story,’ Chloe carries on between mouthfuls of lunch. ‘An older woman had a transplant. The donor’s daughter is a single parent with six children. The older woman had no family and so she became a surrogate mother and grandmother.’ Chloe looks at me with an expression that asks for a reaction.
‘What are you saying? That I should write a thank-you card to the donor’s family solely to acquire a parent or a husband?’ She knows me too well; she knows I’ll be thinking about the owner of this heart’s previous relationships and be jealous of any love, even though she doesn’t know I speak to spirits.
‘You never know.’ She smiles, unreleased laughter dancing in her eyes.
I smile too, but in that moment of shared amusement an immediate decision thrusts its way up my throat and into my mouth. An urge to tell her my secret is so strong my lips can’t close on the words. ‘I have been trying to work out whose heart it is.’ The statement slips out like a slippery fish. But now it is told I can’t pull it back. I fill my mouth with quiche so I will not say more.
‘Pardon?’
‘It’s just something to do.’ It’s an attempt to pull the words back but I can see her mind chewing on them as her gaze reaches beyond me.
I shouldn’t have said anything. She knows I can obsess over things at times. She is thinking about that.
This is nothing to do with bipolar, but I can’t tell her why I know that because she will think that I am crazy anyway if I tell her.
Her eyes refocus on me. On my face. On my eyes. ‘How are you trying to work it out?’ She’s looking at me with the odd expression that Simon’s face twists into when he is asking himself, is she having an episode?
My cutlery clatters onto the plate and I reach for my phone. I touch it so the screen shows and tilt the phone in her direction to show her the list of names and websites. ‘I’m looking at the people who died the day of my operation or the day before. I was bored, and it was something interesting to do. You were the one who raised the subject.’
‘I know I said write to the family, but looking up dead people is a bit odd, Helen.’
‘The family might not write back, and I want to know who owned the heart.’ Who is inside me, whispering and thumping for attention?
She takes the phone and looks. ‘You know we agreed I would warn you if you do anything strange? Well, this is strange.’
I shake my head, certain there are wrinkles on my nose as my face expresses a violent rejection of that idea. ‘No.’ This is not about bipolar. ‘Wouldn’t you want to know?’ I throw across the table as I pick up my cutlery. Surely someone with no sixth sense would want to know too?
‘Now I think about it I might definitely not want to know.’ She laughs as I swallow another mouthful of quiche. Her expression twists from one look to another over the irony of having just talked about people who have done the opposite. ‘But this is too morbid, searching for the person.’ She puts the phone down on the table. ‘You should think about the future, not the past.’
‘I am.’
‘Have you taken your tablets?’
‘You are as bad as Simon. I appreciate you buying me lunch, but you don’t need to mother me. And my tablets are in my room upstairs.’
‘I’ll fetch them when we finish eating.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Are you going to write a letter and stop searching obituaries?’ Chloe says as she steps out of the front door.
We haven’t talked about the donor for the last half an hour, but the conversational leap backwards doesn’t surprise me. It proves I shouldn’t talk about it. ‘I’ll speak to a nurse when I go in for the next check-up.’
‘Take a thank-you card with you – they can pass it on. But leave it at that.’ Her arms settle on my shoulders and wrap around my neck like the wings of a mother hen. A firm kiss is pressed on my cheek; a kiss that says, promise me. ‘Take care of yourself,’ she says near my ear as she lets me go. ‘Do not obsess over the donor.’
I smile as her hold slips away. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘Yes.’ The door bangs. I shut it too hard. I don’t know my own strength now; there is so much energy humming in my limbs. It makes my body want to bounce with the rhythm of life. I am going to start walking at lunchtime next week, with Chloe for a crutch until I build up my stamina and feel confident going outside alone.
Ready. Steady. Go.
A starter gun fires in my head.
I return to my place at the kitchen table, open the laptop and expand the browser. All the recent links I have added to my favourites are open. Each tab tells me something about someone on the list on my phone.
The faces stare at me.
I have been waiting for the spirit to whisper when they see themselves, to draw me to one of these people. I haven’t felt them speak clearly. But I am ignoring the men. The sense I have of someone moving in my body is a sense of someone light, thin, and the whisper is not a deep tone.
I open the fourth tab.
Louise Lovett.
I like her the most.
I like her wide smile. Her eyes glow as she looks directly into the camera expressing the emotions of a life that lacks nothing.
I feel as if she’s looking at me; asking me something with her eyes.
A sensation, like catching the breeze from someone’s outbreath, whispers through me.
She’s very young in the picture. Early twenties … She was thirty-two the day she died. Her obituary doesn’t say much. It was published on a regional press website, written for the benefit of local people.
“Thank you to everyone who joined us in celebrating the life of our beautiful daughter Louise at Christ Church, Old Town in Swindon. We miss her. She has been taken from the world far too soon.”
The obituary stands out because it doesn’t say anything about her life. It seems as if the parent who wrote it could not bring themselves to mention any more, as if they can’t cope with the words.
I open a new tab, click on the search engine and type ‘Louise Lovett’.
The third link down reads ‘Louise Lovett Profiles | Facebook’. I click on the link and then there are more faces to look through. I increase the zoom on the screen so the pictures are clearer and easier to scan for Louise’s face. She’s there, three web pages in. The picture is the one used on the paper’s website. When I go into her profile there’s the picture I know and a solid black header that tells me her profile is private.
All the posts beneath the black header are viral videos that she’s shared.
The last post is months old.
I save the webpage to my favourites and go back to the original search results.
The heart is thumping hard. Bump-bump. Bump-bump. It is so strong it might be someone putting all their strength into thumping their shoulder against a door to break it down.
Is Louise telling me that this is her?
The list continues to lead to social media sites. ‘Louise Lovett Profiles | LinkedIn’. ‘Louise Lovett |Twitter’.
Then, ‘Woman dies in fall from a Swindon car park.’ The words underneath the headline read, ‘The South Western Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust spokesman said: “We were called to the scene of the incident at 13.49 responding to reports that a woman had fallen from the top floor of the car park. We sent one ambulance crew and a duty officer. Sadly, a woman in her 30s was pronounced dead before …’
I open the link and a news screen full of colourful adverts pops up, denying the morbid subject of the article. The article consists of four short paragraphs. It says that there is no known reason for the woman’s fall, talks about the ambulance crew’s attempt to save her and mentions that there is no statement from the woman’s family.
The date the story was posted is the day that Louise Lovett died. She died in Swindon. She died after a horrific fall.
The laptop snaps when I shut it as the heart lurches, as though it skipped a beat.
She is inside me. I know she is.
Chapter 8
5 weeks and 6 days after the fall.
My hands slide into the back-pockets of my jeans in a self-comforting uncertain gesture. This is the first day I have been outdoors on my own and I’ve come a long way from the house.
The sky is a blanket of writhing, murky, grey clouds that promise rain but it’s a warm day.
I haven’t brought a coat with me. I didn’t think to look at the weather forecast. I have spent so many years trapped inside buildings, sick, entirely unaware of what was happening outside, weather is not something I think about.
But I have set up my vigil in the car park of the Baptist Church, and the door into the porch has been left wide open. There are cars parked here. There must be people inside.
A movement catches the edge of my vision. Someone has turned the corner at the end of the street. A woman with a pushchair.
I look back at the house on the opposite side of the road.
I stared at the image of that 1950s house for days online, until I found it.
But it is Louise’s parents I want to see, not their house. Where are they?
The woman with the pushchair walks past the house.
There is a car on the crescent drive, in front of the post-box-red garage doors. I saw that car in a picture. I recognise the registration number.
The red front door is partially obscured by a semi-circular flower bed packed with white roses in full bloom. The scent of the roses, myrrh, is so thick it carries to this side of the street.
My fingers curl into fists in the back pockets of my jeans.
I have been waiting for nearly an hour.
I am sure they’re in the house.
A large, warm drop of rain falls on my forehead, another drop falls on my hair, a third leaves a damp spot on my shoulder in a final warning. Then the rain comes down in a harsh rush, hammering on my head, hitting my shoulders and soaking through my T-shirt in seconds.
I run for the sanctuary of the church entrance.
When I am under cover, I slide the rucksack off my shoulder, let it drop onto the tiled floor and turn to watch the rain.
It is the heaviest rainfall I remember.
I reach out a hand to catch the large, warm drops of water. I have spent years hiding from rain; hiding from life. I do not have to hide any more. I am not weak. I do not need to be afraid of consequences.
My arms open wide, I take another step forward, closing my lips and eyes and tipping back my head so the rain runs over my face. I don’t remember feeling rain before.
I love it.
Why do people complain about rain? It feels beautiful.
The darkness behind my eyelids lets me focus on the sensations of the water soaking through my hair and clothes.
I am alive – living.
‘We need to hurry.’
I open my eyes and look over the road. The front door is open and a man has stepped out.
I take a step, pulled forward by emotions I can only describe as longing. I am not sure if the emotions are mine or Louise’s.
I stand at the edge of the car park, under the trembling green canopy of a large conker tree.
A woman steps out of the front door and hurries to reach the passenger side of the car.
I’m not sure it’s them. I can’t see them properly. The roses are in the way and they’re using an umbrella.
The rain stops as quickly as it started just as the woman pulls the car door open and ducks inside.
Rain is dripping from my fingertips onto the tarmac.
The man walks around the front of the car to the driver’s door, his face covered by the umbrella as he lowers it.
Heavy, colder drops of water drip off the leaves of the tree onto my hair and shoulders.
He opens the car door, his back turned to me, and collapses the umbrella.
Cars travel along the road, passing between us. The cars are noisier now their tyres run over the wet tarmac, the surface water flicking up behind the wheels.
They are both in the car. I see the movement of his arm as he turns the key in the ignition, then he looks at the woman.
It’s them.
I step forward again, trying to see better, to read their lips, to know what they are saying to one another.
Hours of research have brought me here.
It is the half-circle flower bed full of white roses that convinced me this is the house I saw. The roses were in bloom in the picture on Facebook.
There was one clue a long way down in the stream of posts under Louise Lovett’s profile. A public post from someone else. ‘Happy birthday my darling daughter.’ The picture beneath the words contained an older man and woman holding up a glinting happy birthday banner with two grinning, young blond children.
My heart knew the children. Emotion wrapped around the heart and pulled tight, like yellow ribbons tied around the trunk of an old oak tree, with loose ends waving in the breeze – holding onto memories.
The post was published by Robert Dowling. Robert Dowling wrote the word ‘daughter’.
His Facebook account is not private and he posts everything. He checks into coffee shops, cinemas, restaurants and parks.
He lives in Swindon. Louise Lovett died in Swindon. They could have transported her heart to London within two hours of her death. I am sure it’s her heart.
Louise Lovett’s funeral took place in an Anglican church half a mile from here.
There is a picture on Robert’s Facebook page that pointed me to this side of Swindon too. In that picture, he is reaching out, holding the top of a Christmas tree, in a posture that asks questions of the onlookers. Is this the one? Are the branches even? The onlookers in the picture are the two blond children. But the thing that stood out to me in the post was the sign in the background. Waitrose Wichelstowe.
I have become a detective. I’ve spent all my hours, when alone, looking at the places Robert Dowling has been to, working out where he lives. There’s a map of Swindon in a drawer in my bedroom with dots marking in blue Biro the places Robert checks into and posts from. There’s a cluster of blue dots around this church.
There are three parks he visits near here: Queens Park, The Lawns and Coate Water Country Park. When he goes to the cinema, McDonald’s or Frankie & Benny’s it is always in the Greenbridge Retail Park, which is less than ten minutes by car. He uses shops in Old Town, a few minutes in the other direction, and takes the children to the library and the museum there.
It was a guess that he lives somewhere in the middle of these places.
Hours of my time have been consumed dragging a yellow man over street maps on the tip of the cursor, turning the camera from angle to angle, searching for the flower bed his wife stood in front of. Her raised hand was covered by a muddy gardening glove and the smear of mud marking her nose said she was weeding and had wiped her face. It was a moment of very normal life preserved forever.
The car is facing me. The man is looking right and left, waiting for a chance to turn but cars are passing. He looks at me through a brief gap in the passing traffic.
It is Robert Dowling.
My heart bursts, rushing into a rhythm of excitement that does not feel as if it is my emotion.
Is he wondering why I am staring?
My hand lifts unconsciously as if to wave.
She wants me to speak. Louise. She is trying to push words out of my mouth, to form them with my lips and tongue. But I still can’t hear her voice clearly.
He looks left, right and left again then steers the car out into the road.
His aura, and his wife’s, are shades of red from a deep blushing pink on to scarlet and the darkest claret.
Chapter 9
13.21.
The man sitting diagonally across the table from me is playing loud music. It would be better if I could hear the song, but all I hear is the thud of the rhythm. The same rhythm my heart is playing.
I want to forget about the rhythm. Forget that the heart is not really mine. The heart separates itself from me when it does this, as if the rhythm is from a music speaker, not from within me.
The edge of the table rubs my forearms. I am trying to play a game on my phone to distract my mind, but my concentration is constantly broken by that man’s music.
A suited-man in the seat beside me coughs loudly as though the music is annoying him too.
The woman opposite, who has been clicking away on her laptop ever since I boarded the train in Swindon, looks up from the screen and glances at the music player.
A vibration rumbles through my fingers.
My phone. The screen says, ‘Chloe’.
I lean against the window and answer, jamming myself into the corner and pushing the phone hard against my ear so Chloe’s voice will not seep out to others. ‘Hello.’
‘How are you?’
‘Fine.’
‘I’m checking in because you haven’t rung me.’
It’s only been three days. I smile, for her benefit, even though she can’t see. ‘Sorry.’ I have been busy, trying to speak for a ghost.
‘I rang Simon last night when you didn’t answer. He said you had an interview in Swindon today.’
‘I did. It’s just finished. I’m on my way back.’
‘How did it go?’
‘Good. I think.’
‘In Swindon, though?’
‘Yes.’
Her breath slips into a sigh. ‘What was the school like?’
‘Nice.’
‘Don’t go on about it, then.’
An amused sound like the start of a giggle escapes from my throat. I close my lips and it becomes a choked cough. ‘I’m on the train,’ I whisper.
Sounds of amusement rumble from her throat. Her dirty laugh, as Dan used to say. ‘Now I have to think of something to make you blush.’
My next amused sound escapes.
The woman on the laptop glances at me.
‘Have you had a letter from the donor’s family yet?’ She’s asked me the question three times before. It makes me smile because she keeps asking, despite denying that she would want to know.
‘No.’ I have seen them.
‘There’s still time.’
Another vibration ripples through my hand. I hold the phone away, looking at the screen. It’s a news headline from the paper that ran Louise’s story and published her obituary. I put the phone back to my ear.
‘… getting together,’ Chloe is saying.
‘Sorry, I didn’t hear.’
‘When are we getting together for our first night out? We can go out for a meal and fatten you up some more.’
It would be the first time we have been out properly in over two years. ‘Okay. When’s good for you?’
‘Next week. Thursday? But shall I come over for lunch tomorrow so you can tell me more about the job you went for?’
‘All right, Thursday. And you are welcome to come for lunch.’ Although I have no idea what I can say about the job.
‘Okay. See you tomorrow, then.’
‘Yes, see you then.’
She ends the call.
I look through the window and smile into the distance.
A crackling announcement from the tannoy system says the train is approaching Didcot.
The man diagonally across from me takes his earphones out. I still can’t work the song out. He stands up and pulls a bag down from the overheard luggage rack, flashing a line of skinny waist and the top of his red designer underwear.