The Curious Heart of Ailsa Rae (ARC)

by Stephanie Butland

  ‘Don’t be clever with me, Ailsa.’

  ‘Why not? I thought you wanted me to be clever? And you see what you just did? I mention my father, it’s like I haven’t spoken. You did the same thing just now.’

  People are starting to look around. ‘Aye, well, you’ve got Emily to talk to about that, haven’t you? I’ve nothing else to say about him.’

  ‘I’ve nothing else to say about my blog.’

  There’s a breath, a heartbeat, another. The waitress comes to clear their plates.

  Hayley says, ‘You’re sure they said it’s OK? At the clinic.’

  ‘They said it was a terrible idea and I’d likely be dead within the week.’

  ‘Sarcasm isn’t pretty, Ailsa.’

  ‘Oh, it’s my life goal to be pretty, now?’

  Hayley looks down at the remains of her coffee in the cup, looks up, straightening her shoulders. Her voice is deliberately gentle. ‘I think we’re both tired, aye?’

  Ailsa takes a breath, nods. They are both tired, and they are both learning. She makes her mouth smile. ‘I’ll be careful, I promise.’

  She remembers the morning of the transplant, and Hayley sitting quietly next to her bed, stroking her hand, saying, ‘After today, your life will be your own.’ She’d thought about those words as the anaesthetic pulled her under. It had seemed simple. It wasn’t.

  Hayley nods. ‘I’ll be all moved out when you get back. You’ll have what you want, and we’ll just have tae see how we get on.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ailsa says, and her words come out right, for once: not an accusation, but a memory. ‘I remember you saying that, after the transplant, my life would be my own.’

  ‘And it is. As much as anyone’s life is, hen. But this is still a big change. Things will never be the same. We need to be prepared for that.’

  Ailsa thinks about how she’s never lived on her own, and how she might not like it. How often, after Lennox died, she had made her way to her mother’s bed in the middle of the night, and, without waking, Hayley’s body made a space for Ailsa to fit into. Ailsa had been an injured bird, and her mother was the cupped hands that protected her. It might not be as easy as she thinks to fly.

  www.myblueblueheart.blogspot.co.uk

  18 May, 2018

  Apple in the City

  Apple and I really cannot thank you enough for sending us to London. We’ve done a whole ten thousand steps just inside the British Museum, and we’ve been to the theatre, because my friend here was horrified that when I used to be dying, I didn’t put ‘See Les Miserables’ at the top of my to-do list, which apparently is what all right-minded dying people do. I said I had enough Miserables of my own going on, which was true, but I have to say, it would have been a shame to have died without seeing it. I’ve been on the London Eye, which was fun (and fulfilled my pre-Apple desire for queuing – we’re over that now). And we’ve been on an open-topped bus, of course, though I think London is better on foot. We’ve been working very hard on The Thing most days. In the evenings we’ve meandered between restaurants and landmarks, parks and old streets, and I can see what he means. Above the street-level twenty-first-century stuff, there are gargoyles and fancy brickwork, hidden right in front of you. I think I’d got out of the habit of looking up.

  It’s like Edinburgh, but it’s not: here things are more hodgepodge. I suppose Edinburgh has themes – sandstone, tallness, Georgian proportions, red-brick Victorian baronial architecture. London’s more like: ‘Oh, let’s just leave this wee terrace here for now, next to a museum and a warehouse.’

  London smells of exhaust fumes and lemonade. It’s busy and bustling and you have to get busy and bustling too. But people smile if you smile, and there are wee bits of kindness everywhere, if you look for them. (I gave up my seat on the tube for a pregnant lady. She offered me a sherbet lemon.)

  And I’ve a flat to myself while I’m here. This is my first time living on my own. The first night I was so shattered that I barely noticed. The second, I lay awake for hours and listened to the city noises – they are the same but different to home – and when morning came I got up, because I had a job to go to, and I thought: This is what people do. Get up, go to work. And I’m doing it. It’s so exciting. (Apple was less impressed. I think she’s maybe lived on her own, and had a job, before.)

  When I get back to Edinburgh, I’ll be home alone. It’s a big deal. It’s what I want – but it’s a big change, too. This temporary home in London is showing me that. I’m having a practice at being in my own world. So far, I love it.

  How do I manage this change?

  You’ve got until I get home. Polls close Friday the 25th.

  PLAN – make sure you always have things to do and places to go, and be prepared that this change is going to bring the sort of discomfort that these things always do.

  PAINT – make the place your own. Decorate, move things around. A new era calls for new cushions. You might not have a lot of money but you walk past charity shops every day, and you know there’s treasure to be had if you look for it.

  PARTY – you’ve never had your own place. You might be a graduate but that doesn’t make you old. Make the most of it.

  3 shares

  17 comments

  Results:

  PLAN

  47%

  PAINT

  39%

  PARTY

  14%

  24 May, 2018

  Belsize Park

  ‘Come up and see me,’ Seb says, and the intercom buzzes. Ailsa waits for the click of the lock pulling back, pushes the door of the smart block of flats and takes the lift to the third floor. His flat door is open, and he’s stepping back to let her in.

  ‘Hey,’ he says. He kisses her, one cheek then the other, and she is almost used to this, almost able to not be startled by the way he looks up close, the stubble on his cheek a shade darker than his hair, the slope of his temples. ‘How are you this morning? And Apple?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Ailsa says, ‘and Apple’s behaving nicely.’ It’s just shy of ten. Seb keeps the curtains half drawn, so his flat is cool and dusky.

  ‘“… for my mind misgives. Some consequence, yet hanging in the stars”,’ she says.

  ‘“Shall bitterly begin his fearful date”,’ Seb adds, and they look at each other, smile.

  ‘Twentieth time in a row. Nailed it,’ Ailsa says. Their first stumbling point had been that line, Seb saying, ‘fearfully begin his bitter fate’. They’ve practised, practised, practised it.

  ‘Are you glad you came?’

  She looks up, surprised. ‘Of course. Why?’ She thinks about her silences, the moments when she’s been tired. She turned down going into town last night in favour of a takeaway and being back in her flat by nine. She thought he understood.

  Now he’s the one who’s looking away, flicking through the post on the table near the door. ‘Well, you only came because of the blog vote, didn’t you?’

  ‘If I’d known how it would be, I wouldn’t even have asked.’

  ‘Right.’ Seb turns, looks at her, his face hard to read, or it could just be the way the shadows fall in the hallway. ‘But if you knew what everything was going to be like before you decided whether to do it…’ He shakes his head, steps past her into the kitchen, re-emerges a few seconds later. ‘I picked you up a smoothie on my way back from the gym,’ he says. ‘Spinach, kiwi and almond milk. I turned down the spirulina because I didn’t know whether it was an established part of the caveman diet.’

  Ailsa laughs, and takes the domed plastic cup, blue straw sticking out of the top. ‘I’ll have to consult my caveman book,’ she says. ‘I don’t know what spirulina is.’ But she thanks it for changing the subject. She doesn’t need to have the conversations she has with her mother with Seb too.

  ‘Me neither, but I didn’t want to admit that and look stupid in front of you. I’ll be honest, I didn’t even know cavemen had access to smoothie makers. This diet of yours has really showed up my ignorance.�
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  ‘Thank you.’ One of the lovely things about Seb – and in these eleven days, Ailsa has made quite a long list – is that he’s very unselfconscious when it comes to talking about anything that relates to physical health. Ailsa is the same: years of checkups and meetings about what’s starting to fail and what blood tests are telling her doctors have made her able to see her body, in almost every respect, as something that she cannot afford to be precious or embarrassed about. But she’s noticed, in talking to others, those who have had more steady health, that this is not the norm. (After posting about gaining weight, she’d been amazed how many comments commended her bravery for saying so. She’s been amused – it’s not as though she could hide an extra thirty pounds. And being coy about it wasn’t going to miraculously turn it into twenty pounds.) Whether it’s because Seb is an actor, or whether he was like that anyway, she doesn’t know. But he is as aware of the minutiae of his body as Ailsa is, listening to its clicks and whirrs, and trying to work out what they might mean. He’s looking at her now. ‘I think you’ve lost weight. Since you’ve been here.’

  Ailsa nods. ‘I think another couple of pounds. From here.’ She puts her hands at the top of her waist, above her ribs. It is good, to feel a waist emerging. But not a patch on the joy it is to have a body that can walk, easily; breath and strength and beating heart and balance, all together. It’s as though she used to be a flicker and now she’s a flame.

  ‘Yes,’ Seb says, ‘that’s what I thought. You’re getting more … hourglass.’ He’s turned away as he’s said it, checking his phone and then switching it to silent, so he misses the blush.

  She says to herself: Hourglass is not a compliment; it’s an observation, Ailsa, for heaven’s sake. Although she appreciates that he’s gone for ‘more hourglass’ rather than ‘less round’.

  He puts down his phone, looks up at her again. ‘And your glasses are getting bigger. Or your face is smaller. Not sure which.’

  ‘Ah, I always wear my bigger glasses on a Thursday. It’s a Scottish thing.’

  Seb laughs and stretches his arms upwards, lets them drop, shakes them. ‘OK. Let’s get going.’

  ‘Good idea. Romeo wasn’t built in a day.’

  ‘Still not funny,’ Seb says.

  ‘Still beg to differ.’ And they laugh, and then they begin.

  Here’s how it works. Ailsa sits in the armchair near the floor-to-ceiling windows that form the front of the flat, trusty turquoise satchel on the floor, notebook, pen and play text on her lap, feet tucked around to her side, and reads the couplet before Romeo’s line. Seb recites Romeo’s speech. Ailsa waits until he either gets stuck or gets to the end of it, or they get to the end of the scene, and then, when he looks at her, waiting, she tells him what he’s missed or goes over where he’s stumbled. He is mobile as they work, sometimes sitting on the sofa at right angles to her, sometimes pacing, clicking his fingers, sometimes – her favourite – sitting on the floor with his back against the arm of her chair. Close enough to touch. Not touching.

  It was arm-chewingly embarrassing at first, but now it feels normal, in the way that Ailsa had thought that waking up without a heaviness in her chest and an ache in her arms would feel normal. It doesn’t, yet. Neither does a pink skin or the way a rosy lipstick looks on her mouth. But a grid in a notebook, with scenes and speeches written down the left side, dates across the top, circles for having practised, a tick for every perfect run-through – this she is used to.

  They begin with the scenes that Seb already knows; he chatters through them, words as train-trucks, rapid and rattling, and Ailsa struggles to keep up on the page, although the lines are becoming familiar to her, too, and it’s her ear rather than her eye that tells him when he misspeaks.

  Ailsa consults her list. ‘Right,’ she says, ‘let’s start with the nurse coming to see you. Ready? “I pray you, sir, what saucy merchant was this that was so full of his ropery?”’

  Seb sighs. They’ve struggled with the prose: the rhythm of the pentameter gives footholds, stepping stones, but the prose is – well, it’s unmeasured. It’s the difference, Ailsa thinks, between the routine of hospital life, and waking up in your own bed and having a day full of your own choices ahead of you. The one that looks as though it’s easiest isn’t.

  He squares his shoulders, closes his eyes, opens them, looks at her and beyond her. ‘ “A gentleman, Nurse, that loves to hear himself talk and will speak more in a minute than he will stand to in a month.” ‘

  They work for three hours, then break for lunch. This afternoon, they’re going to tackle Romeo and Juliet’s parting. As usual, Seb has shopped at the deli on the way back from the gym, and brought in salads and cold meat for them to share, bread and cheese for him, fresh fruit and nut-stuffed dates for her. He lays them out on the kitchen island, along with the hand sanitiser Ailsa brought to leave here. They sit on high stools at either side of the island and eat. Their mealtimes have been quiet, and this last lunch is no different. Ailsa checks her blog stats and emails, Seb keeps an eye on his messages, on Facebook and Twitter. Then he makes phone calls while Ailsa takes a walk, twenty minutes or so around the leafy streets of Belsize Park. They are broader than home and quieter, the houses just as grand as those in Edinburgh, but squat-seeming rather than stretching for the sky. The air is heavy with May, the sky always soothing, whether it’s blue or grey, close to her or high above. Ailsa brings coffee back in with her – an iced latte for Seb and a black Americano for her – and they work for another three hours or so in the afternoon.

  Seb sits on the floor at Ailsa’s feet, looks into her eyes; she reminds herself that he’s not looking at her. He’s looking at Juliet, Or rather, Meredith Katz.

  ‘You’re going to have to read all the speeches,’ he says, after another stumble. When they’re running through a scene, Ailsa usually reads the first two lines of a speech, rolls her hand, reads the last two.

  ‘Oh, no,’ Ailsa says, ‘there was nothing about acting in the contract.’ She half laughs but she’s squirming inside; it’s school play and waiting-room, all in one, and no way to look away, because when she drops her chin, Seb reaches out and tilts her face towards him, smiles.

  ‘I know,’ he says, ‘but honestly, I don’t want you to act it. I just need to hear it.’

  ‘OK,’ Ailsa says. Act three, scene five is short – or at least Romeo’s part in it is – but Juliet has more lines than her hero, and so Ailsa hears her voice quaver and stumble, while Seb’s gains confidence. They do it again, again, again. On the fourth time, or maybe the fifth, Ailsa puts down her pencil, stops making the marks where a correction needs to be made, and finds that Seb takes her hand. His memory stutters again and again over ‘vaulty heaven’, so when finally he gets it – ‘ “Nor that is not the lark whose notes do beat./The vaulty heaven so high above our heads:/I have more care to stay than will to go” ‘ – they look at each other, delighted, and then Seb is kneeling up and his arms are around her, bear-hugging. He sits back on his heels.

  ‘We did it,’ he says. ‘I think I get a tick.’

  ‘You do. But you need to run over it again, tomorrow. Just to make sure.’ Ailsa’s hand is warm where he has been holding it for so long. She can’t believe she’s even noticing. Seb jokes about the women who stop him in the street, squeal and squeak and take photos. Inside, she’s squeaking. She hopes he can’t tell.

  Seb laughs. ‘I’ll go with you to the station and we can do it in the cab,’ he says. And then, ‘I thought a lot of the speeches would come back. From when I did Wherefore Art Thou?. But they’ve gone.’

  Ailsa nods. She’d downloaded the final of the show the night before she left, and watched it on the train on the way to London. Seb was skinnier then – not that he’s fat now, but he’s muscled, broader. His hair was longer, too, his face more open, so that every feeling of tension and fear, panic and hope, passed across it like the shadows of clouds on a hillside. At the moment when the winner was announced, the camera moved
quickly from the airpunching, whooping victor to Seb, disconsolate, tears on his face.

  She stands, stretches, moving her weight cautiously from foot to foot, dispelling the beginning of pins and needles in her calves because she has sat unmoving for too long. It’s almost five thirty, and outside the window the purr and chatter of the rush hour is beginning.

  Seb stretches too, shakes out his shoulders, fingers, feet. He looks like an actor, a dancer, at these moments. He’s completely in command of his body, in a way that Ailsa will never be in charge of hers. Another deep breath, and then he opens his eyes, looks at her, before he puts his sunglasses on.

  ‘Do you fancy going dancing?’ he asks. ‘I know a place you might like. There’s a live band. A milonga. It’s fun. And it’s dark. I can actually take my sunglasses off.’ Even in the flat, with the light low, he still can’t tolerate more than an hour before his eyes start to ache, and he tries to rub at his lids, usually stopping himself just in time.

  Oh, she does. Tango has danced its way into her blood; alone in Yusef’s kitchen she’s been practising her ochos, hands either side of the door frame as she steps her feet across each other, hips twisting, opposite an imaginary partner.

  But a club, with Seb, who can really dance – that’s something else. ‘You know I haven’t had much practice,’ Ailsa says. She thinks of his fluidity, his confidence. ‘I don’t know if I’m good enough. And I don’t have my shoes.’

  Seb pushes the coffee table to one side, holds out his arms. ‘Let’s have a go,’ he says.

  It’s as though Apple propels her. She steps forward, puts her left hand on his shoulder, near his collarbone, lets her forearm touch, but not rest along, his upper arm, as Guy has shown her. He takes her right hand in his left, breathes in and out, slowly, and then starts to rock her from side to side, gently.