Flesh and Blood

by Stephen McGann

  The play was a great success. It concluded, and we went back to our separate lives. Heidi went to Stratford-upon-Avon as the youngest writer ever commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company. I went back to my east London flat, my girlfriend and my biological family. We wrote to each other for a while – extravagant twenty-something prose that we still have in an attic trunk to make us laugh. Then the letters stopped. Being young and stupid, I convinced myself that the momentous things I felt for her must be a recurring feature of life, rather than its greatest vindication. We lost touch. Two years went by.

  Then, unexpectedly, we met again.

  I was filming a comedy series in Liverpool and staying at a riverside hotel. One of the guest stars knew Heidi through a mutual friend. When I walked into the hotel bar one evening, Heidi was sitting with my colleague. My heart thumped in my chest. We exchanged pleasantries. She told me she was soon to fly to the Soviet Union on a journalistic assignment for a national newspaper. She looked lovely – newly confident. She was also newly single.

  My heart was telling me the facts. Banging against my ribs like a Victorian schoolmaster thwacking a ruler on a slow boy’s head to impart salient information.

  Tell her you fool! Tell her how you feel! Say something! This is important.

  What did I do? I started an argument with her. A silly, petty, stupid argument about nothing. The only excuse I have for my behaviour is that the romantic tension between us was so intense it required an outlet. I just happened to pick the worst possible one. Quite an achievement, really. I watched her eyes brim with tears as we bickered, and I could feel the headmaster’s ruler thwacking me ever harder. I was screaming at myself to stop, but couldn’t.

  We parted frostily, and I returned to my hotel room, shellshocked. I closed the door. It was at that precise moment that the truth became clear. Heidi was the love of my life. My anchor. I’d never find anyone else like her. I wanted to join my family to hers on our respective family trees. I wanted to hold her sacred heart in rhythm with mine.

  Except I’d just blown it. She was now lost to me.

  I slept fitfully, and rose early to work. When I came back to my hotel the next evening there was a book of love poetry by Brian Patten pushed under my door, and a card inserted at a particular page. I read the poem printed there:

  Doubt shall not make an end of you

  nor closing eyes lose your shape

  when the retina’s light fades;

  what dawns inside me will light you.

  My heart stopped. The schoolmaster in my chest gave one last almighty thwack. Enough was enough. I needed to find this woman and ask her to be my wife. And this time I needed to be something other than a complete idiot. She’d left her number on the card, so I rang her mother’s house in Liverpool straight away.

  ‘Can I speak to Heidi please?’

  ‘She’s gone to the USSR.’

  ‘Already? Have you got a number for her?’

  ‘She’s in Siberia. Behind the Iron Curtain. It’s not like ringing the council.’

  ‘I see. Well … if you hear from her, could you tell her that I rang?’

  I was stunned. Heidi had left for the provincial Soviet Union straight away – one of the few places on earth where it was impossible to contact her. I’d have to wait weeks before I could say what I needed to, and before she could respond. The moment was hers to choose, not mine. My doubts had not made an end of her, but what dawned inside of me was now in her ultimate gift to complete. It’s almost as if she’d timed it that way …

  Heidi smiles wickedly when I recall this detail. ‘Serves you right for being an idiot.’

  She came home eventually. Within two years we were married. We’ve been married ever since.

  Soon after I started my relationship with Heidi, I began to get to know her brother David. David was born with Down’s syndrome, and had died due to the damaged heart it had given him. He’d been dead for a few years by this point, so I never actually got to meet him in person. Yet in all the important ways we became acquainted as brothers.

  How can you know your brother without ever actually knowing them?

  Easy. A family relationship is about more than physiology, blood, or the sum of chromosomes; it’s more than living tissue, or physical interaction. A family member lives on in the refracted tones of memory and words that the prism of their life throws onto those who follow. When someone we love dies, the ability of that person to self-generate new points of human interaction ceases. But their part in future interactions doesn’t. They’re carried in the minds of those who love them, and transferred in the artefacts and language chosen to define their lives beyond death. They’re shared with strangers as stories, and preserved in oral testimony like a seed in amber. They live on in the words that love chooses.

  Words are important. Words can carry the important parts of us inside of them.

  Compy.

  Slimp.

  Niney.

  These are David words. These are words my young brother used as a child, and which were passed on to me by Heidi in our daily conversations over the years. We use at least one David word every day. My brother had a unique vocabulary. ‘Compy’ meant comfortable. ‘Slimp’ was his way of saying slim. The mispronunciations weren’t simply an effect of his Down’s, but related to his hearing difficulties. My favourite is ‘Niney’ – his way of saying Heidi. I use that one a lot.

  The thing about David words is that there’s a story attached to each one. Each word refracts a tone of my lost brother, like a record in the archives might index the character of an ancestor, or the words in this book reference the collective story of my family. His words convey a part of him and by using them he lives in our house with us. Over the years, his family have added their own elements to David’s story, so that now I have a collage of David’s remembered self that I can converse with. My wife is always surprised when she remembers I never actually met him.

  I spent those first days with Heidi in her newly purchased house in south Liverpool – back when a playwright’s paltry income could still stretch to the deposit on a mortgage. David’s old school photograph had pride of place on her sideboard, and his grinning face would watch over us as we began the gentle process of fusing our lives together. Heidi would tell me about David’s life – his beleaguered heart, the laughter through the breathlessness. This was our sacred space – a new love growing like mistletoe from the junction point of our respective family trees. Something chosen, not assigned. Something beneath which new kisses can be made. David was a part of that space. A sacred heart beyond inheritance.

  *

  Back in my own family, things felt a lot less sacred. On the surface all was fine. My sister Clare had graduated with first class honours and had taken a big job in the City of London. Paul was starring in the peerless film Withnail & I. Mark was flown to New York on Concorde to give a press conference about his amazing performance in a US biopic about the life of John Lennon. Joe was drawing attention on British TV as a detective in the peak-time drama Rockcliffe’s Babies; I was in a lavish TV drama in Austria and starring in the West End. Yet the common career the boys had chosen now felt as cramped as that old house in Birstall Road. There were unique qualities each of us had that couldn’t be reduced to a single theatrical biography. Drama encourages a culture of competition – daily auditions, where one’s self-worth is constantly tested before strangers. It’s hard enough when you’re pitted against friends and colleagues, but when you’re also being judged alongside your own family it gets a bit tedious. It was too easy for this new arena to superimpose itself onto the old family hierarchies – impelling the brothers to measure their personal value or status according to the blunt imperatives of the industry we’d joined. Worse, it tempted us to believe that in order to succeed, our status or achievements must somehow dominate the lives and achievements of those closest to us. A culture of competition insinuated itself into the family’s heart just at the time when the siblings should have
been forging healthy, divergent paths as young adults. Those petty arguments, competing affections and contested statuses of childhood had congealed into something more corrosive. Our inherited heart had developed problems.

  Things could get quite petty at times – and being at the bottom end of the family pecking order didn’t exactly help. One particular status game the brothers used to play makes me smile now. I call it ‘tomcat spraying’. Have you ever seen how cats mark their territory? They strut onto a perceived rival’s ground and spray their own scent onto its prominent landmarks – vandalising their rival’s sacred space, and forcing the other animal to live under a more dominant scent than their own. It’s a private message meant only for the initiated – other species can’t read it. But for those genetically bonded creatures the message is clear: ‘Your territory belongs to me. I can demean it if I wish.’

  The brothers had their own version of tomcat spraying. It might involve a condescending remark about another brother’s home or partner – perhaps a veiled critique of their work or ambitions, or a cavalier disregard for their personal space or feelings. Nothing too overt; this was a game strictly for the genetically bonded. Friends and strangers might miss it completely. But it was there, and its message was as strong as musk. Of course, many families will be familiar with some or all of this kind of petty behaviour. Yet my family had perfected its own particular brand of feline vandalism, and it was one that now attempted to appropriate the sacred space inhabited by my new partner. That would be a territory too far.

  *

  As a keen genealogist, I’ve often wondered if there’s a particular moment in the story of a family when the fusion of in-laws or genetic strangers into one’s clan is felt to be complete; when the hearts we’ve chosen become indistinguishable from the hearts assigned to us by inheritance. A marriage might mark the legal joining of two families, but it can’t enforce the mutual love and loyalty necessary for their meaningful coexistence. This has to be given freely by all concerned. A family’s heart is more than the things assigned to us by society or the law. It’s what we choose to give that makes us who we are. Was there a specific moment when Uncle Billy became my uncle Billy? I can’t recall. Was there a single moment when my feelings towards Heidi and her family transformed from a shared vocabulary into the raw single heartbeat of biological union?

  Yes. Yes there was.

  1990. Heidi and I have announced our wedding. It was to be a traditional Liverpool church wedding, rather than a swanky London affair. In this way we could offer hospitality to those who’d always known and cared for us in a way that they’d respect. A marriage to us wasn’t simply a party or a personal statement. It was one of those great moments in family history; a joint declaration of love by two people in front of their own flesh and blood. It belonged to the whole family, not just to its instigators. Who are we to dictate the means by which those many additional family bonds are formed?

  As our wedding approached, my family gathered in Liverpool. The ceremony presented a challenge to the normal sibling dynamics. I was, unusually, installed as the undisputed lead male in this particular drama. It wasn’t a pecking order my family were very familiar with – and, as preparations continued, I realised how rare it was for me to be at the centre of significant family events. Some seemed to find it harder than others to adjust.

  I was in Heidi’s house in south Liverpool, making final arrangements for the wedding, when the bell rang. It was one of my brothers. He’d not rung ahead. He strode straight past me and into Heidi’s home like he owned it. Heidi, polite as ever, offered coffee and kisses. I watched my brother suspiciously, anger rising as he paced about. I could read the body language. He strode through the room, manhandling Heidi’s records, smirking at the artwork on her walls, casting little half-smiles at the modest furniture. Tomcat spraying. Laying his scent onto my new territory. But this wasn’t just mine now. This was Heidi’s. And Heidi deserved no part of this.

  He picked up the little cast-iron statuette of a Soviet sailor from the mantelpiece. Heidi had brought it back as a souvenir from her journalistic assignment in Russia; one of those grandiose Bolshevik symbols peddled by street-sellers. He’d never been to Russia himself, let alone travelled to darkest Siberia for work, as Heidi had done. Heidi, making polite conversation, described the experiences she’d had there and then playfully pondered what our own lives might have been like if we’d all been thrust as artists and intellectuals into the October Revolution of 1917.

  ‘I’d love to have taken part in the Russian Revolution,’ Heidi mused.

  He smirked at her. ‘Doing what? The catering?’

  There was silence. His remark was so blunt and dismissive, it left nowhere in the conversation to go. Heidi looked towards me for support; offended, but also confused.

  The catering. In a movement of artists and intellectuals, it was the only work he regarded as worthy of her. Heidi was substantially more educated than we were. She was already a successful playwright, a published author and a writer of broadsheet feature articles. What’s more, he was a guest in her home.

  Heidi didn’t yet understand what was happening, but I did. For all her talents and success, she was considered merely my partner, and therefore a part of that territory of mine that could be demeaned at will by any passing family tomcat. I knew that in a thousand other situations he’d never have said such a rude thing to a host. But this wasn’t other situations. This was tomcat spraying. This is what my family did. A compulsory love and hierarchy I was expected to accept, and that my partner was supposed to adopt.

  We drank our coffee in discomfort until he left. When he’d gone, I explained to Heidi what had happened. She was genuinely curious as to how the partner she valued so much could allow himself to be treated in this way. Needless to say, she was never going to accept it. ‘How have you let this happen to you?’ she said.

  I couldn’t answer. But I knew it was the right question to ask.

  That was the moment. The single moment in time when my feelings towards my wife and her family transformed from a shared vocabulary into the raw single heartbeat of a biological bond. I looked over at David’s photograph on the sideboard. He looked back at me with a request in his gentle eyes.

  ‘Protect her. Keep her heart safe.’

  The love I suddenly felt for that little boy’s sister chased all of the tomcats from my sacred space. Heidi was mine. My flesh and blood. A decent, loving, caring woman. Mine to protect. No tomcat on this earth was ever going to disparage her like that. No one had a right to the things we’d both chosen. It’s the hearts we choose that make us who we are.

  From that moment, I knew the real value of the choice I’d made. Blood is a versatile thing, capable of choosing the new arteries in which it flows. Capable of self-replenishment. Capable of new love. A new identity. A new family.

  TESTIMONY

  I remember waking up for school and Dad telling me that Mum had gone to the hospital in the night to have the new baby. I was very excited. I was seven and my brother Johnny was just four. As we ran out of school later that day, Dad was waiting in the car – he said, ‘You’ve got a little brother called David, and he’s got ginger hair!’

  It’s the present day. A winter evening in our home, the low sun fading over distant fields of frost. Heidi has returned from a busy day of television production meetings in London. She’s tired. She lies on the sofa with her head close to my lap, and reclaims the earliest memories of her brother David from the tangle of her daily concerns:

  He used to be put down for naps in the front room where nobody went – it was kept for best. I’d creep in when he was asleep and try and kiss him because I thought he was so gorgeous! Then I’d have to sneak out again and pretend I hadn’t been in there because we weren’t meant to disturb him.

  It was only later that the first inklings of David’s disabilities began to peep through:

  I remember being aware that something wasn’t right. Perhaps some strain in my parent
s. But nobody ever put a name to it, and I didn’t connect that strain with this gorgeous baby that Johnny and I adored.

  In the end, the first name she heard given to her brother’s condition was delivered in the savage vocabulary of the school playground:

  Someone at school said to me, ‘Your brother’s a mongol!’ I denied it vehemently. To be a mongol seemed like something so terrible – yet nobody had ever told me that anything was the matter with my beautiful brother.

  David was officially diagnosed with Down’s syndrome at three months. But the more concerning diagnosis for his family was the news of his heart defect: Fallot’s Tetralogy.

  The fact that he had Down’s syndrome was neither here nor there. I don’t think we ever thought of that as a ‘problem’. That was our normal. Love grows to fit the space available. He fitted brilliantly into our family, and we were insanely proud of everything he achieved. But his heart was the real problem.

  The effect of David’s heart condition was immediately apparent. His skin constantly betrayed the blue tinge of cyanosis due to his deoxygenated blood, and he’d suffer frequent attacks of cardiac asthma – gasping for breath and choking while the children listened anxiously. Nights were the worst:

  He had a tin lantern burner device beside his bed that burned Wright’s coal tar to help him breathe. It cast a flickering light, and the smell of it would pervade the whole house. To this day I love the smell of Wright’s coal tar – if the lantern was burning there was always a sense of relief. We knew that David was asleep – at peace – not suffering. But there were times when the coal tar just wasn’t enough.

  Yet short-term help was soon on its way. When David was six years old he was offered a surgical procedure called a Potts shunt, to help relieve the pressure on his cardiac system. It wasn’t a moment too soon: