The Curious Heart of Ailsa Rae (ARC)

by Stephanie Butland

  Twenty minutes later, Ailsa is made up and outside, in front of the camera. It would feel odd, but she has her word for protection, and Lennox’s tree makes a safe shelter. So she can manage. She can. If Apple does her bit, she can take care of the rest.

  Jules doesn’t ask her to pose, apart from directing her in the way she holds the word: ‘It’s not a shield. Drop your arms a bit, that’s it, and don’t hold it tight, just balance the bottom corners between your fingers. Let your shoulders take the weight, let them be pulled down.’ Once she’s comfortable, Jules keeps her moving: ‘Do you see there’s an apple coming, just above you? Can you look towards the kitchen window, lovely? Now can you take a look at the toes of my boots? Grand. And over my left shoulder?’

  She’s just starting to feel cold in her feet and tired in her arms, when Seb appears on the back step, sunglasses on, a trilby on his head. He holds up his word – ‘Revived’ – and Ailsa recognises it as belonging to Romeo, although she’s not sure where from. He kisses his fingers, waves them at her, and she laughs at the sight of him, at how foolish she has been to be churning over all that didn’t happen that night after the tango club. Seb is just Seb. She is just Ailsa. She’s been thinking about the five seconds where it went wrong, and had forgotten everything else. Although she hasn’t forgotten Lennox; can’t. She loses her balance, puts her hand out to the trunk to steady herself.

  Jules says, ‘I think we’re done. Here, look.’ Ailsa braces herself for the photos, but she didn’t brace hard enough. Jules scrolls through the images she’s taken – laughing, looking up, looking away – and Ailsa feels a rush and glut of anxiety. She didn’t realise the lipstick was red. And not any red: the carmine of transfusing blood, on a day when there’s nothing to do but watch it flow, and hope, even though there’s hardly any point in hoping anymore. Oh, Lennox.

  ‘I look really different,’ she gets out.

  Jules’s hand is on her back. ‘OK? This has got to be a bit emotional.’

  She nods and excuses herself, goes to the downstairs loo and scrubs her mouth clean, before she goes to do her filmed interview. If Libby notices that her lipstick has gone, she doesn’t comment.

  9 June, 2018

  Ailsa’s hair smells unfamiliar to her, hairspray-scent in her nostrils when she moves her head. Seb turned up to the photoshoot in a plum, peach and silver-grey paisley-patterned shirt, in glorious disregard of Libby’s rules, and even though he does, presumably, have other clothes in the overnight bag at his feet, no one asked him to change. They are eating olives, waiting for salads. Looking at each other. The Northbridge Brasserie has, it seems, become their bar.

  There’s a bottle of wine on the table. Seb ordered it – it’s Sancerre, his favourite wine and something that Ailsa has developed a taste for. Water first, though.

  ‘What’s new?’ Seb asks.

  ‘Well, we did ganchos at tango this week,’ she says. ‘That was fun.’

  Seb winces. ‘In theory. It’s a bit nerve-racking when you’ve got a three-inch stiletto flying at your crotch.’

  ‘Like I said…’ They look at each other, properly, for a moment; even with the sunglasses, Ailsa feels the intensity of the look. She’s back in the bar on their last night in London, stepping out onto the dance floor, feeling Seb’s hand on the small of her back. She wouldn’t say she’s smiling at the memory. It’s more that the corner of her mouth is moving upwards at the taste of lust and shared memories.

  Seb laughs. ‘We’ll agree to differ,’ he says. ‘I like your hair.’

  ‘Oh, Pip did it,’ Ailsa says. She’d thought it might have been straightened for the shoot. Its natural wave is neither curl nor straight, and means if it’s not tied back it looks as though she doesn’t care what she looks like. But heated rollers have made soft, deliberate waves.

  ‘It’s nice,’ Seb says. ‘I hate how everyone straightens their hair. They all look the same.’

  ‘I can’t tell men with beards apart, either.’

  Seb laughs. ‘And this is why I miss you,’ he says. ‘You’re like a moral compass. But fun. I did not mean that all women look the same. I meant to say that – like men with beards – it’s like a uniform. Which is unhelpful. In telling people apart.’

  The thought of Seb missing her gave her a flare of happiness; being a moral compass extinguished it. Plus, she’s annoyed with herself for caring. She has more important things to think about.

  ‘So, I can make a decent espresso, according to my manager,’ she says. ‘It’s not as easy as it looks.’

  Seb laughs. ‘I’ve drunk some awful coffee. I believe you. Are you enjoying it?’

  ‘I think so. I like being with people and – I’ve never earned money before.’ She offers the heel of her left hand for inspection. There’s a welt where she caught it in the steam, when she was making tea. He takes her hand in both of his, inspects, and for a moment it seems that he will kiss it. Ailsa holds her breath and at the same time tells herself off. If she didn’t know otherwise she’d think Apple’s last owner was fifteen.

  ‘Ouch,’ he says, and lets go.

  ‘I know,’ Ailsa says. ‘I won’t show you my blisters.’ It’s tiring, being on her feet, of course, but the time flies past, and the steps rack up – an easy three thousand an hour. Getting home, taking a bath, she feels as though she’s achieved something. And she’s sleeping better. She used to be afraid that she was depressed. Now she thinks she might have been bored.

  ‘You look well on it, though. Are they new glasses?’

  ‘No, same ones.’

  ‘Thinner face, then.’

  Ailsa still likes this non-judgemental way Seb has, of talking about the physical.

  ‘I’m getting there,’ she says. ‘It was good of you to come up.’

  He shrugs. ‘I wanted to see you. And to help with this calendar thing. And I told Roz I was coming up, so we’re meeting Juliet tomorrow.’

  ‘Three birds with one stone.’

  Seb laughs. ‘Meredith is flying back from somewhere in Europe. She’s been filming some – I’m saying perfume ads, not with much conviction – some sort of ads. Roz talked her into flying into Edinburgh. We’re meeting her for lunch then she and I are taking the train back to London.’

  ‘Right.’ Roz, Ailsa thinks, would be a good person to be shipwrecked with.

  Seb adds, ‘Meredith used to be in a TV show…’

  ‘I know who she is,’ Ailsa says.

  Seb grins. ‘Really? That’s offensive. If you didn’t know who I was – you should be consistent.’ And then he opens the overnight bag that he tucked between his chair and the wall when they came in. ‘I brought you something.’ He pulls out a parcel, in silver paper with gold and purple ribbon hanging from it, big enough to be held in both hands. He puts it on his lap, pulls at the ribbon in a way that reminds Ailsa of Pip, teasing out her hair when the rollers were removed. ‘It’s all got a bit squashed. I had it wrapped in the shop. The ribbon was,’ groping for the word, ‘ringlets. A sort of waterfall of ringlets. Camp as you like.’ He hands it across to her.

  ‘Wow,’ Ailsa says, ‘that is a lot of ribbon.’ She’s not used to receiving gifts, unless they are of the basket-of-fruit or get-wellchocolate variety. She balances this one at the space to the right of her cutlery, but Seb flinches.

  ‘Not on the table,’ he says. Then, ‘You’ll see.’

  Ailsa pushes back her chair so there’s room on her lap for the box: it’s shoebox-sized.

  The ribbons are tight and the edges of the paper taped down with precision and force. In the end, Seb takes a Swiss army knife from his pocket and runs the blade around the slackening waist of paper where the lid fits the box beneath.

  ‘There you go,’ he says.

  Ailsa takes off the lid. Black tissue paper, and inside it, tango shoes. They are patent, black with an ankle strap, a closed toe, tiny silver buckles, silver-coloured crystals scattered across the top of the foot. She turns them over. Smooth leather sole. Heels maybe a
half inch lower than Fenella’s. Ailsa has never been much of a shoe person, but these she can appreciate.

  ‘Well?’ Seb says. ‘What do you think?’

  Ailsa exhales slowly, looks over at him. ‘They’re lovely.’

  He smiles. ‘Just don’t gancho some poor bastard with them. They should fit – I took Fenella’s to the shop, said I thought you’d want something not so high, and a bit wider. I saw the look of relief on your face when you took them off.’

  ‘I know what tango shoes cost, Seb. I’ve been looking. I can’t accept these. It’s too much.’ Since she’s left London she’s been telling herself that she and Seb are just – passing. He’s like the best kind of doctor, the one that makes you feel that you, Ailsa, and your trying, failing heart, are the only reason she/he went through years of training. Of all the hearts that they will ever see in their career, their consultations seem to suggest, yours is the most interesting, the most important. And then, when that doctor moves on, to a new rotation or a different post, or another hospital, your sense of loss is out of all proportion because you thought you were special. And some other ailing patient is feeling that theirs is the broken heart that this doctor has been searching for all of their professional life.

  ‘Try them on,’ he says, as though she hadn’t spoken. This ought to be annoying. Actually, it is.

  ‘I’ve got trainers on,’ she says.

  Seb’s eyebrows arch, and he says, ‘I’m rolling my eyes behind here. I didn’t think you were barefoot. Try them! No one’s looking.’

  Ailsa is minded to refuse – no one gets to tell her what to do with her feet – but there’s a naughtiness to Seb’s suggestion that reminds her of her and Lennox in the hospital garden in the dark, when visiting hours were technically over and he should have been in bed. She pushes her left trainer off, from the heel, with the toe of the right one. She slips off her sock, puts the shoebox on the floor and pulls out the left shoe. She’s afraid her feet might stick, but actually –

  ‘Does it fit?’

  Ailsa smiles and raises a leg so he can see it. ‘Like a glove. For feet.’ She takes the shoe off and rewraps it in the tissue. She’s about to pick the box up, then remembering, asks, ‘Why not on the table?’

  ‘Shoes on the table is bad luck,’ Seb says, matter-of-factly. And then, ‘This is a thank-you. If it makes you feel better, the ladies at the dance shop I go to do me all sorts of deals, because I got my StarDance kit from there, and I did selfies with them and generally bigged them up all over social media.’

  ‘Did they wrap them up for you?’

  ‘They did,’ Seb says, ‘though I resent your implication that I couldn’t have made my own ribbon ringlet waterfall, if I’d wanted to.’

  Ailsa laughs. ‘I would not doubt that for a minute. Thank you.’

  ‘No worries,’ Seb says. Then, ‘You’re great to dance with. Plus, with the show coming up, I can’t have your footwear making me look bad.’ The sexy-cute-flirtiness of his smile is so deliberate that Ailsa feels sick at the thought she has ever lost sleep over Seb. He’s impulse-bought some tango shoes and sent a couple of emails. She needs to get a grip. ‘How’s it going, anyway?’ he asks. ‘The tango classes, I mean? Apart from the ganchos?’

  ‘It’s good. And at the beginning of dance class every week we make a circle and Edie says, “What is this about?” and we shout, “Make Sebastian Morley look great!” and we all clap and cheer.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No. Idiot.’

  ‘I knew that,’ Seb says, ‘you just couldn’t see my eyes. Look.’ He pulls up the sunglasses, pulls a face. He’s OK, when he’s not acting.

  Here’s the food: two chicken salads, a side of chunky chips to share. Ailsa picks out the croutons and lies them on the side of her plate. She can’t be bothered to remove the flakes of parmesan, and, not having eaten it for so long, the tang on her tongue is sharp, salty, sweet, too good to exclude. Her fridge-freezer these days is a virtuous place, full of nut milks and vegetables, dark chocolate that she has broken into chunks and wrapped, individually, in cling film. She has frozen spinach and berries for smoothies, avocados to make lunchtimes interesting.

  Ah, but this cheese. There’s not a lot of it and it’s worth the extra thousand steps she’s going to walk tomorrow to compensate for eating it.

  ‘I liked your word,’ Seb says.

  ‘Sorry?’ She was miles away, as her mother would say. In a place where looking at a photograph of herself wouldn’t make her blink and wonder if that’s what she really looks like. Or where the sight of red lipstick, bright and beautiful on her pink-cream skin, bringing out the blue of her eyes and the gold in her hair, wouldn’t make her shaky.

  ‘I liked your word. Torchbearer. To light me on my way to Mantua.’

  ‘I liked yours. I knew it was Romeo, but I couldn’t place it.’

  ‘“I dreamt my lady came and found me dead –/Strange dream to give a dead man leave to think!”’

  Ailsa nods. ‘Of course. “And breathed such life with kisses in my lips,/That I revived and was an emperor.”’

  ‘Precisely,’ Seb says. ‘I’m glad you like it. It took me ages to find something.’ A pause. ‘I chose it myself,’ he adds.

  ‘I chose my options,’ she says. ‘I picked three I would be happy with.’

  ‘Fair point,’ and his face goes from serious, to smiling, to serious again, ‘I suppose. But – don’t you think it’s a bit weird?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not making your own decisions? And doesn’t it make your “torchbearer” not so … not so meaningful?’

  ‘Have you been talking to my mother? You sound just like her.’

  Seb laughs. ‘I know what you’re saying. It’s none of my business.’

  He sounds so un-offended that she says more. ‘I feel a little bit adrift, sometimes. I like the wisdom of strangers.’

  ‘But no one knows you as well as you, surely?’

  Ailsa thinks about the feeling of being a body out of time and place, an uncertain host. It’s insignificant to doctors and would be puzzling to the people who love her and thought they might lose her. She’s well. And she must never say anything to suggest that she isn’t Lucky. Capital L.

  ‘Honestly? Not this me. I knew ill me pretty well.’

  Seb nods. ‘I suppose it’s like getting famous. Before and after.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ailsa says, ‘before and after.’

  Seb says, ‘I was thinking about us on the way up. Radio, tango, photo. All the Os. We’ve made a Venn diagram for ourselves. Of ourselves.’

  ‘You’re very philosophical tonight,’ Ailsa says. She’s thinking of the two of them, circled and circled and circled.

  ‘It must be all the Shakespeare.’

  The waitress clears the plates. Seb might be watching the waitress walk away. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t. When she’s gone, he asks, ‘Are you OK? Really?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ailsa says, because for so many years, being like this – sitting in a bar, not too tired, not ill – was her living definition of OK. But then she thinks of all the things that are making her not OK. A moment passes, another. Seb is checking his phone.

  ‘No. Not really.’

  ‘Not really what?’

  ‘Not really OK.’

  Seb nods, takes a drink. The lights are lower – it’s just passed seven o’clock, so it must officially be evening – and he takes off his sunglasses, blinks cautiously once, twice, lays them on the table. ‘Why not? What’s wrong? Is it still that Sun business?’

  ‘No, it isn’t. Well…’ Ailsa thinks about how often she thinks about it. Which is every time she goes to the fridge, where she’s stuck the article to curb her appetite. ‘No. It’s not that. I mean – it’s been on my mind more than I’d like to admit. But – no.’

  She thinks about all that’s not wrong, exactly, but unsettling. The memory of Lennox, made greater by being around the people who will never be able to put his loss behind th
em. The things that only she knew, and that she can never speak about: Lennox crying, late one night, when he knew that it was too late for a transplant and all there was to do now was die, and how they’d talked about suicide and how they could contrive it.

  Then there’s the retrospective stress of the photoshoot: how tired she is now, by all of the attention, the pushed-and-pulled feeling of it. The lipstick. Having to give ninety-second answers to questions like: ‘What does your transplant mean to you?’ and ‘What’s your message to anyone who isn’t on the donor register?’. Plus, she’s thinking about the last time she saw Seb, and the way it felt to dance with him: the solid heft of what happened/ didn’t happen afterwards is buckled around her, biting into the skin at her waist. She’s not sure what she wants to tell him or where to start with it all.

  But New Ailsa, with her coffee-shop job and her possible legal career and her bravely beating heart, needs to say something, because shutting herself off isn’t the life she is planning to have. She thinks about one of those consultants who made her feel that her heart was the beating/failing heart of the universe. He would come into her room, sit down on the end of her bed (he was the only one who did that, and it was against the rules, but he didn’t seem to care and neither did she) and simply say, ‘OK. Start anywhere, Ailsa.’

  Start anywhere.

  ‘You know Lennox and I were close?’ she says.

  ‘I’d gathered that,’ Seb says. ‘I assumed you were a couple?’

  ‘Yes. No. He was my first boyfriend. We split up not long after we went to uni. We kept in touch. Then when he was back here, and ill, and I was ill, we sort of got together again. But not – not physically.’

  He is looking at her, waiting, face serious. Start anywhere. Start somewhere else, maybe.

  ‘When Lennox died it was the most horrible time of my life. I’d have died if I could. It was – I was crushed by it. I was really ill. But I didn’t know which pain was which – grief or my body shutting down.’ Just remembering brings back an echo of the pain, a shadow through her body, Apple turning her volume down in respect. ‘Then I had my heart transplant. I’ve got – I’ve got scars, a big cut down my chest.’ She puts her finger at the top of it, an inch below her clavicle, just below where the first button covers the press-stud at the top of her shirt. Her other hand goes to the bottom of the scar, three inches above her navel, although it’s hidden from Seb’s view by the table. ‘And no one’s ever seen the – the damage. From the transplant. Except – except doctors. Nurses. My mother.’