all the beloved ghosts

by Alison Macleod

  Jimmy is too handsome for a slaughterhouse, all dirty blond curls and American teeth, but he doesn’t know it because he’s a farm boy who’s never been farther than East Finchley. Marty, on the other hand, was at Dunkirk. He has a neck like a battering ram and a lump of shrapnel in his head. Every day, at the close of business, he brings his knife home with him on the passenger seat of his Morris Mini Minor. He explains to Denis that he spends a solid hour each night sharpening and sanding the blade to make sure it’s smooth with no pits. ‘An’ ’e wonders,’ bellows Mike, ‘why ’e can’t get a bird!’

  Denis pays £4 for two hearts a day, a sum that left him stammering with polite confusion on his first visit. At Wilson & Jeffries, his father earns £20 per week.

  Admittedly, they bend the rules for him. Frank ‘knocks’ the first sheep as usual. Alf shackles and hoists. But Jimmy, who grasps his sticking knife – Jimmy, the youngest, who’s always keen, literally, to ‘get stuck in’ – doesn’t get to slit the throat and drain the animal. When Denis visits, there’s a different running order. Jimmy steps aside, and Marty cuts straight into the chest and scoops out ‘the pluck’. The blood gushes. The heart and lungs steam in Marty’s hands. The others tut-tut like old women at the sight of the spoiled hide, but Marty is butchery in motion. He casts the lungs down a chute, passes the warm heart to Denis, rolls the stabbed sheep down the line to Mike the Splitter, shouts, ‘Chop, chop, ha ha’ at Mike and waits like a veteran for Alf to roll the second sheep his way.

  Often Denis doesn’t wait to get back to the lab. He pulls a large pair of scissors from his holdall, grips the heart at arm’s length, cuts open the meaty ventricles, checks to ensure the Purkinje fibres are still intact, then pours a steady stream of Tyrode solution over and into the heart. When the blood is washed clear, he plops the heart into his Thermos and waits for the next heart as the gutter in the floor fills with blood. The Tyrode solution, which mimics the sugar and salts of blood, is a simple but strange elixir. Denis still can’t help but take a schoolboy sort of pleasure in its magic. There in his Thermos, at the core of today’s open heart, the Purkinje fibres have started to beat again. Very occasionally, a whole ventricle comes to life. On those occasions, he lets Jimmy hold the disembodied heart as if it is a wounded bird fluttering between his palms.

  Then the Northern Line flickers past in reverse until Euston Station reappears, where Denis hops out and jogs – Thermos and scissors clanging in the holdall – down Gower Street, past the main quad, through the Anatomy entrance, up the grand century-old staircase to the second floor and into the empty lab before the clock on the wall strikes seven.

  In the hush of the Radcliffe’s principal operating theatre, beside the anaesthetised, intubated body of Denis Noble, Mr Bonham assesses the donor heart for a final time.

  The epicardial surface is smooth and glistening. The quantity of fat is negligible. The lumen of the coronary artery is large, without any visible narrowing. The heart is still young, after all; sadly, just seventeen years old, though, in keeping with protocol, he has revealed nothing of the donor identity to the patient, and Professor Noble knows better than to ask.

  Preoperative monitoring has confirmed strong wall motion, excellent valve function, good conduction and regular heart rhythm.

  It’s a ticklish business at the best of times, he reminds his team, but yes, he is ready to proceed.

  In the lab of the Anatomy Building, Denis pins out the heart like a valentine. The buried trove, the day’s booty, is nestled at the core; next to the red flesh of the ventricle, the Purkinje network is a skein of delicate yellow fibres. They gleam like the bundles of pearl cotton his mother used to keep in her embroidery basket.

  Locating them is one thing. Getting them is another. It is tricky work to lift them free; trickier still to cut away sections without destroying them. He needs a good eye, a small pair of surgical scissors and the steady cutting hand he inherited, he likes to think, from his father. If impatience gets the better of him, if his scissors slip, it will be a waste of a fresh and costly heart. Beyond the lab door, an undergrad class thunders down the staircase. Outside, through the thin Victorian-glass panes, Roy Orbison croons ‘Only the Lonely’ on a transistor radio.

  He boils water on the Bunsen burner someone pinched from the chemistry lab. The instant coffee is on the shelf with the bell jars. He pours, using his sleeve as a mitt, and, in the absence of a spoon, uses the pencil that’s always tucked behind his ear.

  At the vast chapel-arch of a window, he can just see the treetops of Gordon Square, burnished with autumn, and far below, the gardeners raking leaves and lifting bulbs. Beyond it, from this height, he can see as far as Tavistock Square, though the old copper beech stands between him and a view of his own attic window at the top of Connaught Hall.

  He tries not to think about Ella, whom he hopes to find, several hours from now, on the other side of that window, in his room – i.e. his bed – where they have agreed to meet to ‘compare the findings’ of their respective days. Ella, a literature student, has been coolly bluffing her way into the Press Box at the Old Bailey this week. For his part, he’d never heard of the infamous novel until the headlines got hold of it, but Ella is gripped, and even the sound of her voice in his ear fills him with a desire worthy of the finest dirty book.

  He fills the first micropipette with potassium chloride, inserts the silver thread-wire and connects it to the valve on his home-made amp. Soon, Antony and Günter, his undergrad assistants, will shuffle in for duty. He’ll post Antony, with the camera and a stockpile of film, at the oscilloscope’s screen. Günter will take to the darkroom next to the lab, and emerge pale and blinking at the end of the day.

  He prepares a slide, sets up the Zeiss, switches on its light and swivels the lens into place. The view is good. His wrist is steady, which means every impulse from the heart, every rapid-fire excitation, should travel up the pipette through the thread-wire and into the valve of the amplifier. The oscilloscope will ‘listen’ to the amp. Fleeting waves of voltage will rise and fall across its screen, and Antony will snap away on the Nikon, capturing every fluctuation, every trace. Günter, for his part, has already removed himself like a penitent to the darkroom. There, if all goes well, he’ll capture the divine spark of life on Kodak paper, over and over again.

  In time, they’ll convert the electrical ephemera of the day into scrolling graphs; they’ll chart the unfolding peaks and troughs; they’ll watch on paper the ineffable currents that compel the heart to life.

  ‘Tell me,’ says Ella, ‘about the excitable cells. I like those.’ Their heads share one pillow. Schubert’s piano trio is rising through the floorboards. A cello student he has yet to meet lives below.

  ‘I’ll give you excitable.’ He pinches her buttock. She bites the end of his nose. Through the crack of open window, they can smell trampled leaves, wet pavement and frost-bitten earth. In the night above the attic window, the stars throb.

  She sighs luxuriously and shifts, so that Denis has to grip the mattress of the narrow single bed. ‘Excuse me, but I’m about to go over the edge.’

  ‘Of the bed or your mental health? Have you found those canals yet?’

  ‘Channels.’

  ‘Yes. Plutonium channels.’

  ‘Potassium.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Potassium channels.’ He rolls her towards him and kisses her nipple. He is someone different with her.

  ‘What do you do with these potassium channels?’

  He surfaces from her cleavage. ‘I map their electrical activity. I demonstrate the movement of ions – electrically charged particles – through cell membranes.’ At the mattress edge, he gets hold of her hip.

  ‘Why aren’t you more pleased?’

  ‘I am. Now tell me about your day.’

  ‘I thought you said those channels of yours were the challenges.’

  ‘Yes. It’s going well. Ta.’ He throws back the eiderdown, springs to his feet and rifles through her
shoulder bag for her notebook. ‘Is it in here?’

  ‘Is what?’

  ‘Your notebook.’

  ‘A man’s testicles are never at their best as he bends.’

  He waves the notebook. ‘Did the Wigs put on a good show today?’

  She folds her arms across the eiderdown. ‘I’m not telling you until you tell me about your potassium what-nots.’

  ‘Channels.’ Across the room, he flips through the notebook. ‘They’re simply passages or pores in the cell membrane that allow a mass of charged ions to be shunted into the cell – or out of it again if there’s an excess.’

  She smooths her hair and sighs. ‘If it’s all so matter of fact, why are you bothering?’

  He returns, kisses the top of her head and negotiates his way back into the bed. ‘My supervisor put me on the case, and, like I say, all’s well. I’m getting the results, rather more quickly than I expected, so I’m pleased. Because in truth, I would have looked a little silly if I hadn’t found them. They’re already known to exist in muscle cells, and the heart is only another muscle after all.’

  ‘Only another muscle?’

  ‘Yes.’ He passes her the notebook.

  ‘But this is something that has you running through Bloomsbury in the middle of the night for a date with a computer.’

  He kisses her shoulder. ‘The computer isn’t nearly so amiable as you.’

  ‘Denis Noble, are you doing important work or aren’t you?’

  ‘I have a dissertation to produce.’

  She frowns. ‘Never be, you know . . . matter of fact. Men who aren’t curious bore me. Tell me what you will discover next.’ She divests him of his half of the eiderdown.

  ‘If I know, it won’t be a discovery.’

  ‘Perhaps it isn’t an “it”,’ she muses. ‘Have you thought of that?’

  ‘When is an “it” not an “it”?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she says, and she wraps herself up like the Queen of Sheba. The eiderdown crackles with static, and her fine, shiny hair flies away in the light of the desk lamp. ‘A book, for example, is not an “it”.’

  ‘Of course it’s an “it”. It’s an object, a thing. Ask any girl in her deportment class, as she walks about with one on her head.’

  ‘All right. A story is not an “it”. It’s a living thing.’

  He smiles beseechingly. ‘Perhaps we should save the metaphysics for after?’

  ‘Every part of a great story “contains” every other part. Every small part anticipates the whole. Nothing can be passive or static. Not if it’s great and . . . true to life. Nothing is just a part. Not really. Because the whole cannot be divided. That’s what a real creation is. It has its own unity.’ She pauses to examine the birthmark on his hip, a new discovery. ‘The heart is, I suspect, a great creation, so the same rule will apply.’

  ‘Which rule might that be?’ He loves listening to her, even if he has no choice but to mock her, gently.

  ‘The same principle then.’

  He raises an eyebrow.

  She adjusts her generous breasts. ‘The principle of Eros. Eros is an attractive force. It binds the world; it makes connections. At best, it gives way to a sense of wholeness, a sense of the sacred even; at worst, it leads to fuzzy vision. Logos, your contender, particularises. It makes the elements of the world distinct. At best, it is illuminating; at worst, it is reductive. It cheapens. Both are vital. The balance is the thing. You need Eros, Denis. You’re missing Eros.’

  He taps her notebook. ‘On that point, we agree wholeheartedly. I need to . . . connect.’

  She studies him warily, then opens the spiral-bound stenographer’s notebook. In the days before the trial, she taught herself shorthand in record time simply to capture, like any other putative member of the press, the banned passages of prose. She was determined to help carry their erotic charge into the world. ‘T. S. Eliot was supposed to give evidence for the defence today, but apparently he sat in his taxi and couldn’t bring himself to “do the deed”.’

  ‘Old men – impotent. Young men’ – he smiles shyly – ‘ready.’ He opens her notebook to a random page of shorthand. The ink is purple.

  ‘My little joke,’ she says. ‘A sense of humour is de rigueur in the Press Box.’ She nestles into the pillow. He pats down her electric hair. ‘From Chapter Ten,’ she begins. ‘“Then with a quiver of exquisite pleasure he touched the warm soft body, and touched her navel for a moment in a kiss. And he had to come into her at once, to enter the peace on earth of her soft, quiescent body.”’

  ‘That gamekeeper chap doesn’t hang about,’ he says, laying his head against her breast and listening to the beat of her heart as she reads. Her voice enters him like a current and radiates through him until he feels himself hum with it, as if he is the body of a violin or cello that exists only to amplify her voice. He suspects he is not in love with her – and that is really just as well – but it occurs to him that he has never known such sweetness, such delight. He tries to stay in the moment, to loiter in the beats between the words she reads, between the breaths she takes. He runs his hand over the bell of her hip and tries not to think that in just four hours he will set off into the darkened streets of Bloomsbury, descend a set of basement steps and begin his night shift in the company of the only computer in London that is powerful enough to crunch his milliseconds of data into readable equations.

  As a lowly biologist, an ostensible lightweight among the physicists and computer chaps, he has been allocated the least enviable slot on the computer, from two till four a.m. By five, he’ll be on the Northern Line again, heading for the slaughterhouse.

  Ella half wakes as he leaves.

  ‘Go back to sleep,’ he whispers, grabbing his jacket and the holdall.

  She sits up in bed, blinking in the light of the lamp which he has turned to the wall. ‘Are you going now?’

  ‘Yes.’ He smiles, glancing at her, finds his wallet and checks he has enough cash for the hearts of the day. ‘Bye, then.’

  ‘Goodbye, Denis,’ she says softly.

  ‘Sweet dreams,’ he says.

  But she doesn’t stretch and settle back under the eiderdown. She remains upright and naked, even though the room is so cold, their breath has turned to frost on the inside of the window. He wonders if there isn’t something odd in her expression. He hovers for a moment before deciding it is either a shadow from the lamp or the residue of a dream. Whatever the case, he can’t be late for his shift. If he is, the porter won’t be there to let him in.

  He switches off the lamp.

  In his later years, Denis Noble has allowed himself to wonder, privately, about the physiology of love. He has loved – with gratitude and frustration – parents, siblings, a spouse and two children. What, he asks himself, is love if not a force within? And what is a force within if not something lived through the body? Nevertheless, as Emeritus Professor of Cardiovascular Physiology, he has to admit he knows little more about love than he did on the night he fell in love with his mother; the night their shelter was bombed; the night he felt with utter certainty the strange life of the heart in his chest.

  Before 1960 drew to a close, he would – like hundreds of thousands of other liberated readers – buy the banned book and try to understand it as Ella had understood it. Later still in life, he would dedicate himself to the music and poetry of the Occitan troubadours. He would read and reread the ancient sacred-sexual texts of the Far East. He would learn, almost by heart, St Teresa’s account of her vision of the loving seraph: ‘I saw in his hands a long spear of gold . . . He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart . . .’ The Bernini sculpture of her in Rome was a favourite.

  But what, he wanted to ask St Teresa, could the heart, that feat of flesh, blood and voltage, have to do with love? Where, he’d like to know, is love?

  *

  On the train to Totteridge, he can still smell the citrus of Ella’s perfume on his hands, in spite of the punched paper-tape
offerings he’s been feeding to the computer through the night. He only left its subterranean den an hour ago.

  He is allowed ‘to live’ and to sleep from seven each evening to half past one the next morning, when his alarm wakes him for his shift in the computer unit. He closes the door on the darkness of Connaught Hall and sprints across Bloomsbury. After his shift, he travels from the Comp. Science basement to the Northern Line, from the Northern Line to the slaughterhouse, from the slaughterhouse to Euston and from Euston to the lab for his twelve-hour day.

  He revels briefly in the thought of a pretty girl still asleep in his bed, a luxury he’d never, as a science student, dared hope to win. Through the smeared carriage windows, the darkness is thinning into a murky dawn. The Thermos jiggles in the holdall at his feet, the carriage door rattles and clangs, and his head falls back.

  Up ahead, Ella is standing naked and grand on a bright woodland path in Tavistock Square. She doesn’t seem to care that she can be seen by all the morning commuters and the students rushing past on their way to classes. She slips through the gate at the western end of the square and turns, closing it quickly. As he reaches it, he realises it is a kissing gate. She stands on the other side but refuses him her lips. ‘Gates open,’ she says tenderly, ‘and they close.’ He tries to go through but she shakes her head. When he pulls on the gate, he gets an electric shock. ‘Why are you surprised?’ she says.

  The dream returns to him only later as Marty is scooping the pluck from the first sheep on the line.

  He feels again the force of the electric shock in the dream.

  The gate was conductive.

  It opened . . .

  It closed.

  He receives from Marty the first heart of the day. It’s hot between his palms but he doesn’t reach for his scissors. Deep within him, it’s as if his own heart has been jump-started to life.