The Curious Heart of Ailsa Rae (ARC)

by Stephanie Butland

  ‘I just had lemonade.’

  ‘Good,’ Hayley says, then turns to the barman, ‘A bottle of Pinot Grigio,’ she says, ‘two glasses, and two bags of the least pretentious crisps that you’ve got. Nothing fishy.’

  The barman nods, as though this is a request he gets most days. ‘Have a seat. I’ll bring them over.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  There’s a table tucked to the side of a stripped-back slate fireplace, with armchairs on either side of it. They sit quietly until the wine arrives. Ailsa checks her phone, taking her time over it, although there are no new emails, nothing to look at except her website stats, which have been falling fairly constantly since she left hospital. Well, there’s not so much drama when she’s definitely going to be alive tomorrow. (Not definitely. But not dead of a cold, still heart.) The winners of the blog awards will be announced later. Apple is thrumming the blood around her body a little faster, in anticipation.

  The barman puts down two vast glasses and pours an inch of wine into the bottom of each. Hayley tops the glasses up to something nearer halfway, then says to Ailsa, ‘That’s your lot, OK?’

  ‘OK.’ Her mother has always had double standards where alcohol and smoking are concerned. Hayley drinks and smokes to balance out the stress of raising an ill child single-handedly; Ailsa needs to look after herself. It’s not logical, but it’s obvious. It annoys her, too, most of the time. But maybe not right now.

  The barman’s back with the crisps, which are sea-salted; he smiles at the topped-up glasses and waits for Hayley’s thumbs-up for the crisps (‘Not sure why it needs to come from the sea, but they’ll do’).

  ‘Cheers,’ Hayley says, clinking glasses with Ailsa, and then, ‘here’s to Lennox. And to you.’

  Clink, clink. ‘Here’s to us,’ Ailsa says. All of the tension that’s kept her going through this afternoon has dissipated on the walk, and now she’s tired. ‘Let’s talk about something that isn’t –’ She angles her head back in the direction of the Douglas’s house. Then, hearing how she sounds, ‘I mean…’

  ‘Motion carried,’ Hayley says. ‘We need tae think about something else or we’ll break our hearts all over again.’ She puts her glass down, opens the first bag of crisps, and holds them out to her daughter.

  ‘I shouldn’t.’ She takes some of the proffered crisps, even though she’s eaten enough today, really.

  ‘Why not? Dinnae let Dennis get to you. Women chucked themselves in front of horses to put an end to that sort of thing.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ Ailsa says. ‘I really do need to be healthier.’

  Hayley nods. ‘Well, I’ll no disagree with that. It can’t hurt. What are you going to do?’

  Ailsa shrugs, and takes a sip from her glass, because she knows what will come when she answers. ‘I’ll do a bit of research, then I’ll – I’ll ask the blog.’ The wine is crisp and cool, like the frosty air on the day she and Apple were discharged from hospital.

  Hayley’s glass makes a stiletto-clack when she puts it down, and she says, ‘Oh, Ailsa. I can see you’re no happy and the steroids weren’t helping you, but why would anyone else decide what you should put into your body?’

  ‘It’s not that…’

  ‘I mean,’ wine, crisps, wave of the hand, ‘would you really let people you don’t know tell you not to eat cheese? Does that not strike you as mad?’

  Ailsa laughs. She can’t help it. Hayley does too. ‘People get it, Mum. I’m maybe winning an award for it.’

  Hayley nods. ‘You’re winning an award for being clever, and brave, and making your point. But you have a new heart now, hen. Your point’s made. You can decide. Stand up for yourself, and what you want.’

  Ailsa sighs. ‘I know. But how do I know what I want? It’s weird. It’s like – before I got – Apple – it all seemed clear.’

  ‘What did you think you wanted?’

  ‘All the things we talked about. An ordinary job. A boyfriend who was a bit rubbish…’

  Hayley laughs. ‘They’re all rubbish, hen. Have I not mentioned your father?’

  Nothing ventured, nothing gained. ‘That’s one of the things, though.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Hayley’s face is serious now.

  ‘When I thought I was going to die, life was too short to really think about a dad I’d never met.’

  ‘Biological father,’ Hayley says; it’s an automatic reaction to the term ‘dad’ or ‘father’ being applied to the man who left before Ailsa was born.

  ‘Biological father. But now I think – maybe – I mean – I don’t know, Mum. I’m not saying that I want to see him or anything…’

  ‘Glad tae hear it.’

  ‘Right,’ Ailsa says. ‘I mean we had plans before, did we not? If I got a transplant I was going to get a job, and you – you were going to move out…’

  ‘Oh, aye. Me and your aunt Tamsin, reliving our youth. Getting a few tattoos, notching up a few threesomes and some STDs…’

  ‘Oh my God, Mum.’ Hayley’s hooting with laughter and refilling her glass. Ailsa suspects that they are both reacting to the strain of the afternoon: Ailsa by saying the unsayable about her biological father, Hayley by saying everything that comes into her head.

  ‘Dinnae worry, hen. We haven’t learned a lot but we’ve learned about contraception. Well, Tamsin has. I think I’ve healed over, it’s been that long.’

  ‘MUM.’

  ‘OK, OK,’ Hayley says, ‘but aye, we did say I’d go and stay with Tamsin after six months, didn’t we? Give you your space, give me and Tamsin our misspent youth back.’

  ‘We did – we said you’d move out…’ And Ailsa has thought that it’s what she wants, on her long quiet afternoons in the flat, her mother at work. She’s lain in the bath thinking about what she might re-paint and who she’ll invite over, and what it will feel like to be living the life she should be living at twenty-eight. Even her least motivated uni friends don’t live with their parents anymore. She takes a breath. ‘I think – I think it will be time. By then. I’m so much better and it’s only been four months.’

  Hayley looks away from Ailsa, back towards the bar. ‘I know, hen. It’s – it’s hard, though. I feel like I felt when you were tiny. I feel like you’re learning everything. I want to make sure you’re OK. And then, you cannae really find a job until you hit the six-month mark, so there’ll be a lot to get used tae.’

  ‘I know,’ Ailsa says, and she tries to make sure that the impatience she feels doesn’t come out in her voice, because she’s not trying to upset her mother. ‘But I’m only going to be OK if I can have a go at standing on my own feet. It’s not that I don’t want – It’s not you. It’s me.’

  ‘Ah, so you’re breaking up with me now?’ Hayley’s eyebrows are raised and she’s smiling, but it’s not really a smile.

  Ailsa tries to smile back, but her attempt is just as poor. Try again. ‘I need to find out what it’s like, now. Being me. And being – there – this afternoon – thinking about Lennox – it makes you think…’

  Hayley nods. ‘But just because he didnae have the chance – it doesnae mean you have to do everything.’ Ailsa thinks that’s it, but then her mother adds, ‘We’ve never really been without each other,’ and there’s the smallest catch in her voice, as though a tablet has caught in her throat on the way down.

  ‘And we won’t be,’ Ailsa says, trying again to put all the gentleness she can into her voice, even though it drives her mad when doctors think words spoken softly make bad news better. ‘I don’t even care if you don’t move to Tamsin’s. You can go next door, if you like. Or I could. Rent a room. Nearly everyone I know who has a mortgage is struggling to pay it. I just – I need to find out what I’m about. Now I’m not dying anymore.’

  Hayley still flinches at the D-word. ‘If that’s what you want, we’ll talk about it some more,’ she says, and drinks the last of the wine in her glass. Then she smiles, touches Ailsa’s hand. ‘You could be independent with me there, you k
now. I wouldnae vet your boyfriends or tell you to turn your music down. I never have.’

  ‘I know, Mum. I just want to be – normal. Like any twenty-eight-year-old.’

  Hayley laughs, and Ailsa knows what’s in that laugh: the memory of when she was twenty-eight, and had a five-year-old with a serious heart condition, and was living in a flat in what was then a less-than-desirable part of Edinburgh. But she doesn’t say so. It looks as though it might be an effort.

  ‘When you’re ready we’ll walk along and find a taxi, aye? And by the time we get home you’ll have won that award, for sure.’

  Ailsa nods. ‘Thanks, Mum.’ She couldn’t love her mother more. But she needs to give Apple a proper life. She puts her hand to her chest. If she presses her palm to her sternum hard enough she can feel the muscle of her heart move. Or at least she thinks she can, and sometimes that’s all that matters.

  When they step outside, Ailsa takes a deep breath, but now all she can smell is wine, salt, smoke.

  www.myblueblueheart.blogspot.co.uk

  11 February, 2018

  I WON! And … I Need to Lose

  Hello, my friends,

  Wow. Thank you. Thank you, thank you.

  I am officially the UK’s Best Health Blogger when it comes to patient experience.

  I can’t tell you what this means to me. I tried.

  Click here to watch the video I made.

  Yesterday was a hard, sad day for me, and so this boost really means more than you know.

  Here’s something you do know, though, if you’ve watched the video: you know what I look like. You know my name is Ailsa.

  You can probably tell from the shape of my face I’m a wee bit chubby.

  You know, if you’ve been here before, that steroids and taking life gently mean I’ve been putting weight on.

  I’ve gained twenty-six pounds in the almost-four months since I had the transplant, and most of that seems to be in the Space Hopper area. (Don’t panic. If my heart was rejecting then I would be gaining about two pounds a day, and it would mostly be retained fluid, so I’d have big squooshy ankles and fourteen chins. And my mother would have me at the hospital before you could say black pudding sandwich.)

  In fairness, it’s tough not to gain weight after a transplant. I’m going to be taking steroids as well as immunosuppressants for the rest of my life. In time the dosage will reduce, but for now, I’m hungry all the damn time. I’ve been using cream to get rid of my beard, so I can’t even blame the weight on that.

  I have to be honest, though, because this is an honest place. I could be hungry and eat an apple or some porridge. But I’d rather have a doughnut or some proper salt and sauce, chip-shop chips. There’s a great cafe not so far from here, which is quiet enough in the late afternoons for me to feel safe in, in the infection-avoidance stakes; my mother and I like the flapjacks. Because I have to be a bit careful of crowded places, my friends often come round, and they don’t come empty-handed.

  Four months feels like long enough to understand what steroids do, eat myself better, and indulge in yay-I’m-not-dead macaroons.

  I have to get fit. I have to lose weight.

  Getting fit is under control (I think): Apple and I are being disciplined about walking every day, and as dancing won – you lovely folk, you – I’ve got my first tango class next week. I’m all set.

  But I need your help with the weight thing. I’ve never dieted before – weight has always been the least of my worries, and anyway, when you’re in hospital/being not well at home a lot, you spend a lot of time in pyjamas, onesies and other elasticated things, so the odd pound on or off is neither here nor there. I’ve done a bit of googling and narrowed things down, so now it’s over to you.

  You know what to do. Polls close in a week. That gives me time to sort myself (and my cupboards) out and start the new regime.

  Which diet?

  –  Paleo: eat like a hypothetical cave lady. No processed foods, no wheat, no dairy (gulp).

  –  5:2: eat sod-all for two days a week and feast on whatever your heart desires the rest of the time. (OK, I might not have researched that one very thoroughly, but I think that’s the gist.)

  –  Don’t be silly, Ailsa, diets don’t work. Adopt a healthy lifestyle: lay off the biscuits, keep moving, and be patient.

  –  Go to Weight Watchers, or Slimming World, or Fat Fighters. Have a list of what you can eat and what you can’t, and get weighed every week.

  4 shares

  39 comments

  Results:

  Paleo:

  32%

  5:2:

  17%

  Change lifestyle:

  29%

  Weekly weigh-in:

  22%

  14 February, 2017

  This Time Last Year

  ‘Hey, BlueHeart. I made you some red hearts.’ Lennox holds out a piece of paper, pulled carefully from a notebook, covered in tiny hearts drawn in red biro. ‘Happy Valentine’s Day.’

  Ailsa finds a smile. ‘I thought we weren’t doing this.’ There’s an intensity to the way they are and it frightens her. Because it isn’t that kind of love; it can’t be. She feels the same way about Lennox now as she did when they first got to know each other, walking back to the bus stop when they’d finished their volunteering stint after school on Wednesday afternoons. She looks forward to seeing him in exactly the same way: with thrill and dread. She wants to touch him. When they look at each other, there’s a crackle of unseen light in the air.

  But they’ve both moved on. It’s eight years since their first-year-at-university split, and though they are both single now, Ailsa’s wary of what’s happening here. She feels like a plant in a greenhouse, being cultivated out of season: her emotions are reaching and growing, forced to unnatural spread in this confined, overheated hospital space. Would she feel this feverish need for Lennox if the two of them were walking on Portobello Sands, out in the cold air, their whole lives – the normal span of their whole lives – ahead of them? Probably not. Does that matter? She doesn’t know.

  ‘We’re not. I just thought – you know.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ She kisses him, a friendly thank-you except the corner of their mouths touch and their faces hesitate, close to each other, waiting to see what happens next. After a (normal) heartbeat, Lennox leans back onto his pillows. She takes a breath and waits until she doesn’t mind. ‘I didn’t bring you anything. I didn’t think there was room.’

  Lennox laughs, and looks around. ‘You’ve a point, to be fair.’ Lennox’s birthday, the previous week, had brought cards and gifts from far and wide – not just family and friends, but the kids Lennox teaches (taught) at a primary school near Glasgow. Every surface is covered with home-made cards, most showing Lennox kicking footballs or holding trophies. He had cried as he’d looked through them on the day they’d arrived. ‘Do you want to help me get through some of this chocolate? I’m not doing very well with it. And Ma brings shortbread all the time. They’re not going to find my liver in all the fat, when the new one comes.’

  ‘Go on, then,’ Ailsa says. Lennox shuffles along the bed and she perches next to him, kicking off her shoes and stretching her legs out next to his. ‘This time next year, you’ll have better things to be doing on Valentine’s Day than eating chocolate in a hospital bed with me.’

  Lennox offers a box of dark chocolate truffles. ‘If I’m fixed, eating chocolates in bed with you on Valentine’s Day is the best thing I can think of.’

  14 February, 2018

  They don’t see her; she could be a ghost in the doorway. It’s just as well, because she needs a minute to let Apple calm and slow after the stairs. And she’s early, too early, because that seemed safer than running the risk of being late.

  So she waits, and watches. In the centre of the room, on a dance floor surrounded by tables and chairs, a man holds out his hand to a woman. She rests her palm on his, and their fingers close. She pivots her body towards him. Somethin
g in both of them changes; they become taut, tall, ready. His arm curves around her back, and she places her other hand on his shoulder. For a second, they sway, and then he steps forward, she steps back, and they are dancing, a fast fizzing series of steps that makes Ailsa catch her breath as she watches.

  The couple is moving – they have to be a couple, surely; you couldn’t move with such intimacy otherwise? – as though each body is the echo of the other. He steps to one side and she pivots in the space he makes; she flickers a foot up and under his leg, and then they are travelling again. He’s taking bigger steps now, almost striding, and she is matching him, walking back-back-back, until they reach the edge of the dance floor and stop, suddenly, precisely, looking intently into each other’s faces, and Ailsa thinks suddenly of Lennox, the grey of his eyes. She pulls her thoughts back to here, now. Valentine’s Day is a day to be wary. It’s just a Wednesday in February, in the room above the Dragon’s Nest pub, and she and Apple are going to learn to tango.

  The woman nods and laughs and steps away, and then the two of them start replaying something they did, in slow-motion, counting and talking, looking at their feet. Ailsa realises that someone is standing beside her. She looks around to see a woman of about her own age, slender and straight as a daffodil. She feels herself pull her shoulders back, just looking at her.

  ‘You must be Ailsa? I’m Edie Gardiner. I’m glad you came. That’s my sister, Eliza. She was supposed to be setting up the music, but you cannot stop her from dancing.’ Edie’s smile seems wider than her face. She has the same hazelnut hair, springy with curls, as her sister.

  ‘Thank you for answering all my questions.’ On Edie and Eliza’s website Ailsa had found details of the weekly tango class: ‘All you need to do is grab some shoes with a non-rubber sole, come along and give tango a try!’ But it wasn’t quite as simple for Ailsa. Nothing is.

  ‘We were happy to help,’ Edie says, ‘and like I said, we’re used to all this, since Fiona had her chemo last year. Hand sanitiser before we start, and we’ll be sure to keep anyone who’s not well out of your way.’