Our Nicky’s Heart

Our Nicky’s Heart

 

Frank Randall had three sons: Michael, Eddy and Mark. That was fine by him. A farmer whose business is rearing livestock¹ knows that the sums extend to his own offspring. Sons are a good investment. His wife couldn’t argue. She’d married a farmer with her eyes open and knew the score. Three sons in nine years at almost exact three-year intervals, and that was that. But she could have done with a daughter to leaven² the male dough. So when she became pregnant a fourth time, and a little unexpectedly, she set her hopes high. She even named her Sally secretly to herself. I know because she told me, years later.

When Sally turned out to be Nick she put a good face on³ her disappointment and never made a grudge of⁴ it All the same, I think Nicky must have known he was meant to have been a girl because when he grew up all his emphasis was in the other direction. More than any of his brothers, he was the cocky, reckless young stud⁵ and, being such, was indulged like none of his brothers had been—his mother’s favorite despite, or because of, not being a girl. She doted on him⁶, I think, more than if he had been a girl, while to the males of the family he was always the baby and something of an amusement. Michael, nearly twelve when Nick was born, could almost have felt he could be Nick’s father, though in practice the image hardly worked, since Michael seemed not to get around to⁷ women till he was past twenty, and then in no great rush.

By contrast, I can remember catching Nicky once in front of the bathroom mirror when he hadn’t seen me, running a comb again and again through his hair and giving himself a steady slow burn of a stare⁸. He was only sixteen but he had the looks and the way about him, and he knew it. He wasn’t a girl but he got them. As many at least as there were to be had in our corner of the county.

He never saw me looking at him—too busy with himself. That comb was like a knife with which he was sculpting the last touches to his head, but he put it aside anyway to run a claw of a hand through the results⁹.

When men, or boys, look at themselves like this in a mirror, which way round does it work? Do they see the girl in their own face in the glass, or is the girl inside them, getting the stare and going weak-kneed?

Sometimes it wasn’t Nicky who ran that final rough hand through his hair. It was Mum. She’d see him all slicked and preened¹⁰ and she’d go and muss it up¹¹ for him, just a bit. He got the habit from her.

I was the odd one out in my own way: Mark, the “clever one”, the renegade—or the one with ambition and sense¹². Michael and Eddy stuck to Dad and the farm, I went to veterinary college. As it turned out, I never became a farmer’s vet. I live in Exeter¹³ now and my practice is mostly domestic pets. All this might have just earned me the family’s scorn—cats and dogs! Guinea pigs for God’s sake! But, as things have gone, they’re in no position to mock.

At one time I might even have opted for general medicine. Vets will always seem like thwarted¹⁴ doctors. It’s not true of course, and anyway it’s different when animals were what you grew up with. I like my practice, my cats and dogs. I like the attachment, the care, their owners have for them. It rests on simple affection, not on a way of life.

Besides, I have a link with human medicine. My wife is a theatre sister at the Devon and Exeter.

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All this—I mean remembering Nicky combing his hair in front of the mirror—seems far off now, across a divide. If you’d said to my father even then—it’s only sixteen years ago—that one day meat and stock prices would plunge¹⁵, that one day there’d be talk of “mad cows”, one day he’d only be punishing himself, bringing bull calves into the world just to send them to slaughter, he’d have laughed in your face, looked round at the yard and called you an idiot.

If you’d said to him that one day, soon, what had always been a given, the way a farmer works not just for himself but for what he hands on, wouldn’t seem like a given at all but like something teetering on its edge¹⁶, he’d have called you more than a fool. And if you’d said it wouldn’t be so rare for a farmer at the end of the twentieth century to go into his barn with a shotgun and never walk out… Well, you wouldn’t have said that, even if you’d known.

I didn’t know. I couldn’t read the future. I just went my own way. What happened to Nicky clinched it. Now it seems, of course, except to my mother, that I was the traitor, the deserter, making my escape safe, leaving a sinking ship.

Nicky was no girl, when he was seventeen he somehow scraped together the cash to buy a six-year-old Yamaha on which he careered round the lanes and burned up and down the main roads, discovering, I think, that for all its throb and roar—what could you expect with the money he’d paid?—the thing was pretty short on power. Michael and Eddy would never have been allowed to do this, nor would I, if I’d wanted, but with Nicky it was somehow all right. Somehow it went with Nicky. Mum would have hated stopping him having his own way—he could twist her round his finger. All the same, I could see her dreading the worst, and it happened.

As far as we know, he tried to overtake a lorry and cut in before the bend, but he didn’t judge the speed, or didn’t have it, and the wet road was against him. After the accident it was a matter of less than two days before he was dead, but those days were like months, they were like a shift into a different time, a different world, one in which the farm and all that sure sense it could give you of how things lived and died, safe in the bosom of the land, didn’t count for a thing. Nicky was in his own little lost bubble of a world, held there by tubes and drips and wires, and the man who was in charge of Nicky and was seeing us now was carefully trying to explain that, because of the brain injury, Nicky would never regain consciousness again.

There was only one decision to be made.

They found us somewhere to sit, to think it through. It was three o’clock in the morning. As if we could think. There are times when a family has to cling together but those same times can make a family seem like a pretty clumsy piece of apparatus¹⁷. The tubes going into Nicky seemed more efficient. Dad looked at me as if maybe I should pronounce—as if being in my final year at vet college gave me an authority in situations like this. Anyhow, hadn’t I always been so keen to show it? That I was the one with the brains in the family? He started to shake his head slowly and mechanically from side to side.

Then Mum, who was drawing every breath like some long, deep adventure, took Dad’s hand, squeezed it and they got up. They asked me to go with them—as if I should be some kind of interpreter—and I saw Michael and Eddy shoot me looks¹⁸ I’d never seen them shoot me before but that I realized they must have been giving me all my life behind my back. I’ll never know what they said to each other, left by themselves.

Back with the doctor, Dad looked at Mum first, then he cleared his throat and said that we understood. I never heard him say anything further from the truth.

And that should have been the end of it. But the doctor said there was another doctor who wanted to speak to us, he was on his way. He glanced at his watch.

At that moment, I remember, a sudden light came into my mother’s face and I realized later that she must have thought for a few wild seconds that this other doctor was some super-special specialist who had overruled the first doctor and was coming to tell us that, after all, Nicky could be saved. But the second doctor said that he understood what we must be going through but in these situations more than one decision had to be made. He had his own careful way of saying what he said next—it must have come from training and practice—but the gist was that Nicky was (he didn’t say “had been”) a very healthy young man and we should consider whether his organs should be made available to others.

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In particular, the heart.

In my memory of that night I try to keep to the essentials, to remove the daze of sheer shock and amazement in which everything occurred, the dither¹⁹ of secondary complications, like those looks from Michael and Eddy.

In such a situation—to speak like an outsider—there are two opposing arguments. First, that only the victim has authority over his own body and since the victim is beyond all power of intelligence, how do we know that he would have been willing? (I’m sure it never entered Nicky’s mind.) On the other hand, how do we know, if we suppose the victim were able to judge his own situation, that he would not be willing?

Time, of course, was of the essence.

I remember looking at my parents and thinking there simply was no readiness for this. The one decision, or inevitable acceptance, was enough—too much. Now this, I remember too how they began to look suddenly like guilty, disobedient parties, placed more and more, as each moment passed by, in a position of blameworthy²⁰ obstinacy, backsliders who wouldn’t come round. They looked like they were under arrest.

And as more time passed, it changed into something worse. I could see the picture seeping into²¹ at least my mother’s head ( the second doctor hadn’t painted it for her but perhaps it was part of his training to let it take shape) of some person, perhaps not very far away, perhaps just down a corridor in this very hospital, some person in a situation, in its way, not unlike Nicky’s, some person, in fact, not unlike Nicky, a kind of second Nicky, and she was—we were—denying him life.

We ought to have discussed it with Michael and Eddy. Not sharing it with them might be a bad move, it might only store up permanent trouble. (It did.) But I said nothing and I could see that democratic debate was far from my mother’s thoughts. If word had to be given and given quickly, it could only be given under the pressure of whatever imaginings were right then rushing through her head. Her head—since I could see that my father was simply going to defer to her. Twenty-five years of being in charge of 400 acres and all that lived on it, generations of Randalls ruling the roost, of which he was the latest heir, hadn’t made him capable at that moment of being the one to step forward and speak.

My mother nodded. She said, “Yes. OK.” The second doctor left a just measurable pause (that, also, might have been in the training), then nodded too, gave a squeeze to his mouth. There were forms that had to be signed.

First and foremost, they needed the heart.

My father walked out of that room a second-in-command, but he had the task, he knew it, of telling Michael and Eddy what had been decided upon without their knowing.

If you’d said to him, years back, that one day they’d be able to take out someone’s heart and put it in someone else, he’d have thought you were crazy too.

In the subsequent days and weeks my mother’s grief went through terrible lurches and swings. She was torn, I know, between the thought that she’d signed away the last living part of her son—what mother could do that?—and the knowledge that part of her son lived on, giving life to another. Wasn’t that some small answer to grief? But then, if part of her son lived on in another, wasn’t it just a new kind of agony not to know who or where? Wasn’t it worse? She had only denied her grief its completion. It was like knowing someone was missing but never knowing, finally, that they were dead. Or knowing they were dead and never knowing the whereabouts of the remains.

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As for my own grief, I kept it suppressed, even vaguely concealed, like something that had an edge of shame. My mother had taken on for herself a pitch of anguish that none of the men in her family could match.

The heart, what is it? It’s a piece of muscle, a pump.

In more recent years, I’ve come to see my practice, my cats and dogs, as my principal cushion—a solace, a kind of immunization even—against the worst things life can bring. It sounds like mere softness, an evasion, I know. But I think we demean²² what they give us, the animals we choose to keep by our side, by calling them “pets”. In those weeks after Nicky’s death it wasn’t the cows in the shed, with their own lot of doom, that either comforted or troubled me. It was our border collie²³, Ned, who knew there was a gap, an unclosable space. We all rubbed against each other strangely harshly and cruelly, but we were all of us more tender than we’d ever been with Ned.

It’s a regular part of my job to put down animals, to “send them to sleep”. I never take it lightly. I know that the brave or matter-of-fact face their owners put on things—their “let’s not be silly, it’s only a dog”—isn’t the whole story at all. Usually, the animal comes to me. Sometimes, because of the circumstances, I have to go to the house. I always take a heavy-duty black plastic sack. After the procedure is over I might be seen off with the same householderly mannerliness²⁴ with which the man who’s fixed the washing machine is shown on his way. But more than once, barely a pace or two down the front path, I’ve been stopped like a thief in my tracks by the sudden sob, wail even, of genuine grief coming from behind the closed door.

I think it was in those weeks after Nicky’s death that I decided that when I became a vet, it wouldn’t be of the kind that visits farms.

Nicky, after all—it’s not to make light or soft, either—had been a kind of pet.

As for that space that my mother could never close, her not knowing where Nicky’s heart had gone, it seemed to become more of an issue for her, not less, not a secondary thing but somehow the nub—I can’t say the other word—of the matter.

She understood, of course, that there were strict rules about preserving the anonymity of the recipient—understood, but didn’t understand, though I tried to explain some of the reasons. She wanted to know, at least—didn’t she lave the right?—what had happened to Nicky’s heart during that first astonishing stage of disconnection, when it had been removed from Nicky and before it was lodged with its new owner.

I said that first (as if I really knew) you had to think of it from the other end. Someone—they might have been close or hundreds of miles away—would have received a phone call, been woken from sleep, perhaps in those same early hours in which we sat, sleepless and disbelieving, in the hospital. A phone call they had been given to understand could come at any time—soon or maybe years ahead (if they were still there to receive it), maybe never—a phone call they knew would allow them only seconds to agree and prepare.

They would have gone through an instant, perhaps, of wishing that this wished-for call hadn’t come, that life as they’d known it, with all its risk and distress, might simply go on as it had and not be subject to this imminent, immense change. Then they would have swallowed that thought with the thought that this moment, this chance, might never come again.

They would have been told what to do, to pack the things needed for a stay in hospital, where and to whom to present themselves.

Amid everything else, they would know there was only one way, a necessary prior event, in which this could be happening.

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Meanwhile, I said—as I went on it seemed more and more like some impossible fairy-tale, like something I must be making up—Nicky’s heart would have been placed in a container, a container perhaps a bit like a picnic cool-box, and then it would have been transported by special priority service, by a network of links that exists for such things. Who knows—it might even have been put on a plane? But almost certainly at some stage in the journey it would have been carried in the special pannier²⁵ of a motorcycle—the quickest way through traffic. There were motorcyclists who volunteered for such tasks. And almost certainly (but I didn’t offer this thought to my mother) it would occur to such motorcyclists that motorcyclists themselves formed a significant portion of the stock of organ donors. They tended to be young and fit. They had fatal accidents.

But it seemed my mother, even after months, would not give up her yearning. Surely, she had the right? To think that someone, somewhere, was walking around. A whole new person, with a whole new life. A lease of life. A deliverance.

In the end I did something irresponsible, foolish perhaps. By this time I knew Pauline, my future wife. She was only a junior nurse in those days, she didn’t even work at the hospital where Nicky had died. She knew no more than I did, and if she was about to make clandestine enquiries²⁶ it could be at the risk of her job. All she suggested—I could have come up with this myself—was that I phone up the office of Reynolds (that was the second doctor), hassle²⁷ the secretary, play the distraught²⁸ relative (but I was a distraught relative), see what might not, in a moment’s exasperation, be let slip over the phone.

She said, “But are you sure about this? It could all backfire²⁹.”

I made the call. I pleaded. The secretary insisted: she simply didn’t have access, even if she could release it, to this information. In the end she went away, for some while, came back. “All I can tell you,” she said, “is that the recipient was female and forty-six.” She didn’t say it as if she were whispering a secret that could get her dismissed. She said it as if it was meaningless knowledge: it hardly narrowed things down.

A female. I hadn’t really thought it or imagined it, though of course it was always possible. Nicky’s seventeen-year-old heart had ended up in the body of a forty-six-year-old woman. And of course that was a possibility too—the difference in age. That the organs of the young might be received by those older. Not the very old but, still, in this case, someone a lot older than Nicky.

But I didn’t say this to my mother. This has been my one big lie, the biggest lie of my life. I said I’d found out something. I’d been “ferreting around”³⁰. Contacts, I said, through vet college (as if there should have been any). I said there was absolutely nothing more to be found out, but I’d learned something: Nicky’s heart had gone to a girl. “A girl,” I said, “a young woman. That’s all I know.”

I said, “Keep this between you and me.”

The biggest lie of my life. But it gave my mother something with which to close, almost completely, that gap. Something to content her with never knowing more. It was only a half lie too, of sorts, false only by a span of years. If I’d told my mother that Nicky’s heart was inside the body of an older woman, a woman, in fact, not so far from my mother’s age, I know what my mother would have thought from that moment on. I know what I’d spared her from.

If only, she would have thought, it had not been that other woman’s fate to have the dicky ticker³¹, if only it could have been herself. If only she had not been a strong, robust woman, a mother of four, doomed to carry on being strong and robust while a farm and all that it stood for seemed to crumble away around her, and the men on it, a husband and two sons, seemed to crumble too, so it seemed it was left to her to put things right, to change things back. As if she could do that, as if she could wave a wand.

If only she hadn’t been that robust woman but a woman, in her middle years, with an incurable complaint of the heart.³² Then of course it wouldn’t have been terrible or even difficult to have made that decision that night, it wouldn’t have been the source for ever afterwards of confusion, mystery and remorse. They wouldn’t even have needed motorcyclists. She would have said, yes, let them take out Nicky’s heart and meanwhile cut her open and take out her iffy³³ one, and then tuck Nicky’s up safely inside her. Then everything would have been all right.

（2000）