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Chapter 4
2 weeks and 3 days after the fall.

‘Come on, then. Hurry up. There are people waiting to greet you,’ Simon shouts over his shoulder as he walks ahead with the small suitcase I have brought back from the hospital.

I am walking much quicker than I had on the way out to his car after we had the call saying a heart was available. But there is a sharp pulling in my chest that means I do not rush. It is from the surgery, though, not weakness. I still have that celebrating hard pump of blood, like the vibration of a chiming bell ringing in every artery and vein, yelling out that one day soon I am going to be entirely better. Hear ye. Hear ye. Helen Matthews is well.

My brain is diagnosing the level of my health like a Fitbit measuring every sensation – each out breath and every moment a muscle or tendon moves. I do not want to reject this heart.

The front door opens.

‘Hello.’ Miriam, Mim, waves as she steps out. ‘It is good to see you with colour in your cheeks.’ The colours around her are muddy browns and greens. It is a spiteful aura.

‘Auntie Helen!’ Kevin and Liam squeeze past their mother’s legs and run to me.

‘Remember what I said,’ Simon calls. ‘Be careful with your aunt, she’s recovering.’

I lift my hands, encouraging the twins to grasp one each. ‘As long as you don’t pull I’ll be fine.’ They are used to Auntie Helen’s frailty.

A picture runs through my mind, a memory that doesn’t belong to me. I am running along a beach, holding the hand of a small girl and jumping the shallow waves that roll onto the sand. I know the girl is my daughter, but I do not know how I know.

I want a daughter first. If I can pick.

‘Welcome home.’ Mim’s arms wrap around my neck and she kisses my cheek. I do not mirror the embrace; the boys have possession of my hands. ‘We have a celebration tea planned—’

‘With fizzy orange!’

‘And ice cream!’ the boys add as their hands slip out of mine in unison. They run into the house bursting with the constant excitement of four-year-olds.

‘And pizza. Sorry, it’s more their party than yours,’ Mim whispers.

I don’t mind. If the boys are happy, I’m happy.

I have been guilty of spoiling Simon’s boys as if they are mine since they were born. They are a relief for the craving in my womb.

Dan hated me talking about children. He always said he wanted children, but then changed his mind two years ago.

‘Don’t go on about children, you can’t have them, you are too ill, stop talking about babies, even if we adopt how are you going to look after a child?’

Every time he said words like that there was another sharp pin stabbing into the voodoo effigy of me, the effigy it felt as if he held in his hand.

Then he told me, ‘I don’t love you any more. You have to go,’ driving a kitchen knife into my sick heart and making it shatter.

He moved his pregnant mistress in a week after Simon had loaded up the car with the boxes, bags and cases packed full of my half of our life together.

Every day, since the day I moved out of the flat, was a day to endure – surviving long enough to get this heart.

That was the end.

Now I have the heart.

This is the beginning.

It whispers to me all the time. The heart.

A coverall smile gathers up my expression as I walk into the house behind Mim; the smile I have given everyone who has asked how I feel over the years.

Simon’s hand touches my waist as he leans to put the case on the floor near the stairs in the hall. ‘Welcome home. I’ll take your case up after we’ve eaten.’

‘Thank you.’ The children and Mim are in the kitchen already. I turn, stretching up to wrap my arms around his neck. It pulls my chest. I hold on tight and pull him down a little.

He is six years older and six inches taller. I have stretched up to hold him for as long as I can remember.

His arms slide around my middle to return the hug. I kiss his cheek. He kisses mine. The world is perfect for a moment.

‘You’ll be all right.’

I nod as I let go, my cheek pricked by the hairs of his short beard. ‘I know I will. I’m excited.’

Excited because I know that one day soon I am going to start my own family.

Colour creeps up from his neck into his cheeks. The pink tint in Simon’s skin when he or I mention anything that might refer to Dan keeps telling me Simon feels guilty. Dan was, is, his friend.

Simon introduced Dan to me in my first year at college. Dan asked me out that day. But how we ended is not Simon’s fault and Simon took me in, looking after me for the last few months. Just as he did when we were children.

This man, my brother, is the perfect man. Mim is lucky.

‘Daddy. Auntie Helen. Hurry up. We’re hungry!’ The children shout from the kitchen as the mouth-watering smell of melted cheese and pepperoni wafts into the hall.

Simon smiles. There is a look in his eyes that I have seen for as long as I can remember. I see this look in my mind’s eye every night before I go to sleep. The expression says ‘I love you’ with no need for words.

I see that look from a young boy, and I am standing in another hall, in another house, and the boy … I don’t know him.

Will he be my child?

Am I connecting with spirits from the future now as well as the past?

‘You first.’ Simon’s hand lifts. ‘It’s your coming-home party. But go on up to bed if you start feeling too ill.’

‘Yes, Dad.’

A low laugh follows my movement.

A muffled ringtone vibrates through the fabric of my suitcase behind us. I turn back, pointing. ‘My phone.’

‘I’ll get it.’ Simon turns, bends to release the zip on the suitcase, takes out the phone and looks at the caller ID. ‘It’s Chloe.’ He puts the phone in my outstretched palm just as the ringing stops. ‘I’ll call her back after we’ve eaten.’ I slip the phone into the back pocket of my jeans.

‘She can come over if you want her to.’

‘Tomorrow. I’m too tired tonight.’

‘Whenever suits the two of you.’

Chapter 5
3 weeks and 1 day after the fall.

The radio plays from its position at the end of the kitchen work surface; talking and singing to me as I skim through the internet pages, sliding the stories up on the small screen of my phone.

Even little things like this, like being able to concentrate on anything in the world outside my head, was hard in the years that illness stole my life. In the end, all I had the energy to do was sit in a chair and watch television and it was hard to even concentrate on that.

It is impossible for other people to imagine what it’s like to be trapped in a body that can’t do anything. My thoughts were busy controlling my breaths and cluttered with weakness, while pain constantly screamed, even through the fog of painkillers.

I thought about suicide when Dan and I split up. But whilst there was still a chance of being able to live properly with someone else’s heart, I held onto that cliff edge of hope for months. Living for when the time came.

The time is now, and ever since I have come back to Simon’s I’ve been feeling like a sprinter in the starting blocks waiting for the gun to go off. And when it does, I am going to run so hard and fast, just because I can.

Pump-pump. Pump-pump.

The sound of my heart continually talks to me. The blood thrusting through my body, making all my senses alert.

I can read today, I can read and soak up information like a sponge dropped into water, and at the same time I am listening to music.

The pulse of my heartbeat follows the baseline of the song on the radio – expressing its power.

If I could see my own aura, would it have changed? Would I now have some of the aura of the person whose body is muddled up with mine?

I still feel them. If it is them. I feel someone here. Someone who came back from the hospital with me. I think they’re trying to press their emotions into my heart, but it is just a pressure in my bloodstream that I do not understand.

A repeated knock rattles the thin glass in the back door; double glazing is still on Simon and Mim’s to do list in their 1920s terrace.

Before I respond the door handle twists. ‘Hello.’

‘Chloe.’ I stand up. ‘You made me jump.’ But I knew she was coming to make me lunch.

She smiles with the captivating look that made me fall for her friendship when I was sixteen. Before then my friendships had been brief play-dates and playground-mates. The foster homes and hospitals Simon and I had travelled around on a never-ending roller coaster meant I didn’t attach myself to people because in days or weeks we would move on.

I had not let proper friendships form until I had obtained control over my own life. Dan and Chloe came along at the same time; friends arriving like red London buses. They had become as important to me as extra limbs after only a few weeks.

Dan told me I was needy, that I had desperately been waiting for friends, and when I had found them I clung on.

I told him that if he’d had a childhood like mine and Simon’s he would know the value of loyalty and people who care about you.

Dan had not valued me.

Chloe’s dark hair tickles my ear as she holds me and I hold her. She values my friendship as much as I value hers. I have Chloe as well as Simon and the boys.

The scent of the perfume she always wears calms me immediately.

‘You look so well.’ Chloe’s voice is deep, sexy; it draws attention to everything she says. It made me gravitate towards her. It makes men gravitate towards her. When we were younger and I was well enough to go out there was always a pack of men around her by the end of the night.

Chloe’s aura is golden; it is shades of yellow, orange and amber.

Her hands stay on my shoulders. ‘Your skin is a decent colour for the first time in years.’

‘Thank you. I think.’

She laughs as her hands fall away. ‘Tea?’

‘Yes, please.’

A smile tumbles over her shoulder in my direction. ‘I am going to put sugar in it; you need to put some weight on now you’re well.’

‘I hate sugar in tea.’

‘I don’t care what you want. You’re doing what is good for you. What do you want to eat?’

‘There’s a tin of soup in the top of that cupboard.’ I point at the cupboard then grip the table so I can ease into the chair and avoid pulling the stitches in my chest.

‘Are you in pain?’

I didn’t notice her looking at me. ‘A little.’

‘Is it time to take your tablets?’

‘Probably.’ I move to get up but she lifts a hand.

‘Stay seated, I’ll get them, and I’ll heat up the soup after we have drunk the tea.’

‘Thank you.’

‘No need for thanks. I want you better.’ Her voice bounces off the blue tiles behind the sink in the moment before the tap turns on. ‘People say the world can be put right with a cup of tea but I think a new heart wins. What does it feel like?’ The pitch of her voice rises so I can hear her over the water running into the kettle.

‘Life-saving.’ A laugh stutters from my throat. Then I add, ‘Strange. I’m certain no one else is as conscious of their heart beating. It’s as if someone is making a heartbeat sound in my ear all the time, and it feels like it’s jolting me.’

Chloe faces me and leans back against the wooden work surface while the kettle heats. ‘I can’t imagine having a piece of someone else inside me. It must be weird. Especially when you know how quickly that heart moved from beating inside someone else to you.’

I glance down at my phone; the screen is black. ‘Yes.’ The rhythm beats harder, and so constantly it is like someone relentlessly banging on a door to obtain my attention.

‘It has someone else’s DNA.’ There’s a teasing note in Chloe’s voice. ‘I wonder if it’s changed your DNA. Then if you did that Ancestry DNA thing they might connect you.’

She doesn’t know I can feel spirits.

I never talk about my sixth sense.

The doctors in the hospital taught me, with electrical shocks to the brain, that people do not believe in a sixth sense. Everyone else thinks it is a symptom of bipolar. Imagined. Not Real.

It is real.

Those of us who have a sixth sense know it is real.

But I have never met anyone who can see and feel the things that I do, because I never tell.

A shiver runs through my spine, a ghost passing through me. The owner of my new heart passing through me?

No. I am sure their spirit is in the heart, inside me.

Steam erupts from the kettle behind Chloe as it clicks off.

She turns and pours the water into the mugs, then fetches the milk from the fridge. ‘I think a heart being transplanted is stranger than a lung or a liver because, okay, everyone knows that there aren’t any thoughts or knowledge in the heart—’ the spoon clinks against the edge of the china cup as she stirs in sugar, moving the spoon round and round ‘—but you feel emotion in your heart, don’t you?’ She looks over her shoulder at me.

I nod. Because of course it’s true. My last year has made that very clear – the pain in my emotionally broken heart has been worse than the pain of illness at times.

I was isolated as a child. Cut off from others by illness and homelessness. Isolated by a mind that did not function like other people’s. Dan isolated me again. He kept our friends, home and possessions.

I arrived at Simon’s with only a few boxes of personal things and my clothes. I have been shut away in a room here ever since, too ill to go out, waiting for another chance to live.

The soul that has given me this heart has given me that chance.

Chloe throws a teabag into the pedal bin; the lid chimes as it drops. ‘My heart feels tighter when I’m angry.’ She returns to fish the teabag out from the other cup and keeps talking as she takes that over to toss it in the bin. ‘And soft and squidgy, like marshmallow, when I’m falling for a man.’

The teaspoon drops in the sink. She picks up the mugs and turns with a handle held in either hand. ‘I wonder what your heart felt before it came to you?’ The mugs clunk down on the wooden table and the tea spills slightly.

The paper towel is in my reach. I pull some off and wipe up the spill as she fetches the bottle and packets of my pills and a small glass of water to wash them down.

‘Thank you.’

She chooses the chair opposite me, sits, and pulls her mug close, embracing it with both hands. Her eyes are glossy with an expression of excitement. She loves a good gossip. ‘What do you think?’

‘I hope it suffered a lot less pain than mine.’ The conversation is sparking more shivers up and down my spine.

I reach for the bottle. The pills rattle. The lid is stiff but after a second it opens and I tip out two small white pills. With those pills cradled in my palm, I pick up one of the packets.

I always lay pills out in a row before I take them.

I have more medication to take than I did before the operation. What does this heart make of all this prescribed poison? Drugs that make the natural defences of my body impotent, drugs that silence the cry of pain, antibiotics that fight the bad bugs and emotion-controlling pills.

‘Hearts spend most of their time in pain in my experience, and I’m not talking about malfunctioning hearts. Although perhaps I am because my pain was mostly caused by Mum’s and Dad’s malfunctioning hearts.’

‘The inability to put you and Simon first was in their heads.’

Simon thinks our mum had bipolar too. ‘Wherever their motivation came from it permanently hurts my heart to remember how they deserted us. A sick child didn’t fit in with their hippy lifestyle. They couldn’t be tied to the proximity of hospitals.’ I pick up a pill and sip the water to wash it down.

The feelings of loss and loneliness are in me again, and, as Chloe said, they grasp the heart and squeeze it until it hurts.

The need for love in humans is a terrible thing. It destroys people. It has tried to destroy me lots of times. I need others. I need to belong. I need to be wanted. I need to be needed.

Chloe’s hand reaches out and brushes the back of mine as I take the next pill. Then there’s a smile that sweeps everything away. ‘And then Dan the bastard …’ she says in a low voice.

We laugh, but my new heart clenches again in response to the memory of the brutal way he betrayed me.

I swallow another pill, sensing the irony of the bitter pills of fate that I have swallowed in my life. I was even too sick to cry over Dan’s disloyalty. If I had cried it would have exhausted my heart and so I had to control my heartbreak to stay alive. Isolated in a room, living from breath to breath, not day to day.

‘Have you heard from him?’ Chloe’s voice has a cautious cadence because she knows I have no desire to hear anything about him. But maybe she thinks he will send some good wishes.

I take more pills without answering for a moment. Then look into her eyes. ‘No.’ My answer is in the flattest tone. I take the last pill and drink the last of the water.

‘Does he know about your operation?’

I wrap my hands around the warm mug, lacing my fingers together on the far side. ‘I should think so. Simon must have mentioned it or, if not him, then someone else.’

Dan and I were us for so long all his friends were mine too. But I haven’t spoken to any of them since we split. It was too embarrassing to face the truth and the truth was being flaunted in front of their faces by Dan. They know the other woman, when the baby is due and how happy the two of them are. I do not want to know any of that. I let him have our mutual friends as part of the separation.

‘How are you going to spend your time while you are recovering? You need to do something different.’

‘I might order a jigsaw puzzle.’

‘You party animal.’

‘Maybe I’ll take up Tai Chi. There are YouTube videos.’

She nods, smiling, because she knows I am not considering anything.

My thoughts spin. I see Dan in the days I was convinced I was loved by him. So many moments when I believed we were happy. Those days have all been burned to a pile of ashes.

This heart felt the same before it was put inside me. I can sense it. As if the previous owner is sitting where I am. Sitting inside me.

I hear children laughing, then children crying. My future children or this soul’s?

‘We can go for a short walk every day next week. Then the week after we can walk farther and so on, until you are well on the mend. It won’t be long …’

‘I know it won’t.’ Before I can be me.

I push the ghost aside and smile.

Chloe reaches out. I reach out too and we clasp hands.

Her hand is warm from the heat of the hot tea in her mug.

‘The NHS will send letters for people who have received donated organs, so you can say thank you to the family. Did you know that?’

‘No.’

‘The nurses will probably tell you. But I looked it up.’ She lets go of my hand and twists to take the phone out from the back pocket of her jeans, then concentrates on that as I sip my tea.

Every sensation seems to be more intense; even drinking tea is improved by a healthy heart.

She looks up. ‘Here.’ She holds out her phone, tilting it to show me the screen. I take the phone and look at the NHS leaflet. It says what she has just told me – I can write to the person’s family and say thank you. It encourages me to do that. But I can’t tell them my name.

‘Do you think you’ll do that?’ Chloe asks.

I hand back the phone and sense someone else reaching out with me. I can’t explain the feeling. If I could describe it better perhaps others might believe in a sixth sense. ‘Probably. I would like to say thank you.’

If I write, I will tell the family that I can have children now. The soul inside my heart has given me that chance.

When I hold the front door open just under an hour later, standing on the doorstep and waving to Chloe, before she turns the corner at the end of the street, the spirit is whispering. I can’t understand the words but the sound surrounds me.

Perhaps the spirit wants me to contact their family before they pass on?

I shut the door. The silence in the house is deafening – as though silence is the loudest noise.

Chloe turned the radio off when we were talking. I like sound.

I smile as I turn the radio on, because I recognise how quickly I walked along the hall.

A dance song is playing, the bass beat stirs my shoulders into a little shake. The zip of stitches in my chest shoots a sharp pain through my torso that makes me wince. But I smile at the same time. ‘Enough of that for now, but soon I’ll be able to do everything.’ That is what I’ll write about in my thank you card, about the chance of children and dancing.

A buzz hums in my blood, drowning out the beat of the heart. Excitement is a dance rhythm of its own.

I sit at the kitchen table and pull over my laptop. Then open my phone and look at the list of links in my search of obituaries.

Who did this heart come from?

What has it felt before?

What life has it known?

The whispering intensifies, but it is still too muffled to work out any words.

The soul wants me to know who it is. I know that.