The Boy Who Gave His Heart Away

  Copyright

  HarperElement

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published by HarperElement 2017

  FIRST EDITION

  © Cole Moreton 2017

  Cover layout Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

  Cover photograph © Mark Owen/Arcangel Images

  A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

  Cole Moreton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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  Source ISBN: 9780008225728

  Ebook Edition © April 2017 ISBN: 9780008225711

  Version: 2017-03-14

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Epigraph

  One: Marc

  Two: Martin

  Three: Marc

  Four: Martin

  Five: Marc

  Six: Martin

  Seven: Marc

  Eight: Martin

  Nine: Marc

  Ten: Martin

  Eleven: Marc

  Twelve: Martin

  Thirteen: Martin & Marc

  Fourteen: Marc

  Fifteen: Martin

  Sixteen: Marc

  Seventeen: Martin

  Eighteen: Marc

  Nineteen: Martin

  Twenty: Marc

  Twenty-One: Martin

  Twenty-Two: Marc

  Twenty-Three: Martin

  Twenty-Four: Marc

  Twenty-Five: Martin

  Twenty-Six: Marc

  Twenty-Seven: Martin

  Twenty-Eight: Andrew

  Twenty-Nine: Marc

  Thirty: Martin

  Thirty-One: Linda

  Thirty-Two: Marc & Sue

  Thirty-Three: Marc

  Thirty-Four: Sue & Linda

  Thirty-Five: Marc & Sue

  Afterword: Marc & Martin

  For Marc and Martin

  Author’s Thanks

  Moving Memoirs eNewsletter

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  This is the true story of two boys who never met, but who are bound together in the most astonishing way. Marc was fit and fast, a star player in his local football team. Strong and brave but shy and gentle, he had a sharp face, sandy hair and striking green eyes. Martin was big, bright and breezy, a loving lad who was always up for a laugh, with a mop of brown hair and a friendly face that made everyone smile. Their names were alike and they were more or less the same age, either side of a sixteenth birthday, but they lived hundreds of miles apart in Scotland and England and never even knew each other existed. Then, one summer, they both fell down. Just like that, without warning, they were taken seriously ill at the same time. That’s where we begin. One of these boys will die. And without ever knowing it, he will save the other’s life.

  This is also the story of their mums, Linda and Sue, who will go through grief and worry enough to break most of us. I have got to know the families, the medics and one of the boys well over several years and this book is based on their own accounts of what happened, which are terribly sad but also inspirational and full of wonders. Towards the end of the telling, the mother of the boy who was lost will meet the boy who was saved, now grown into a man. She will reach out and put her hand flat against his chest, to feel the heart of her own poor son still beating away inside him. Life will have sprung from death, miraculously. But before that extraordinary moment can happen, there must be a tragedy. Marc or Martin. One of these boys is about to give his heart away …

  Epigraph

  We are not meant to touch hearts. Hearts are away, hidden, at the centre where they can’t be got at. Protected. Vital. The seat of the soul. If a heart is touched, it can only be a miracle.

  Louisa Young, The Book of the Heart 2002

  One

  Marc

  Marc was in agony, writhing around on the back seat of the car and calling for his mum. She was driving as fast as she could, up to the hospital and over the red warning lines, straight into the ambulance bay, blocking the way for everyone else. Linda didn’t care. She thought her son was dying. She was right. She leaned on the horn again and again and the loud, flat sound echoed under the canopy, an alarm and a plea for help. ‘Come out! Come on! Where are you?’

  Marc couldn’t walk and there was no way she could carry a hefty, dazed teenager out of the car and all the way through the doors to Accident & Emergency, but surely somebody in there would hear the noise and wonder what was going on? A hospital porter came striding over with an angry face but Linda shouted at him: ‘I’m not moving. Not until my son gets seen!’

  The porter was confused, he knew her as a friend and a nurse who worked the night shift. Then he looked into the back of the car and saw Marc in a terrible state.

  ‘Holy crap, Linda – is that your boy?’

  Yanking open the car door, he swore loudly and waved at a colleague for a trolley. Marc didn’t answer his questions and Linda couldn’t get the words out right. ‘Just help him, please.’

  The porter took hold of Marc under both arms to lift him out and tried to be reassuring. ‘We’ll take him, hen. You get this thing moved, yeah?’

  Linda turned the key, put her foot down and the car lurched forward out of the bay. She left it half up on a pavement and ran back through the double doors into the gloomy reception area where the faces of the sick and injured looked up at her. Where the hell was Marc?

  ‘This way,’ shouted a voice she knew and Linda saw the fuss around her son first. A couple of nurses in blue, busy with machines and a tangle of wires and tubing. More coming over. A young doctor in a white coat saying something about the lad being only fifteen. Marc was on the trolley in the middle of the growing crowd, already with a clear plastic breathing mask over his face and then Linda knew – she just knew, in her shock and horror – that this was as serious as it could be.

  ‘My poor wee man is dying away …’

  ‘When the sun shone his hair went blonder. He had lovely green eyes, just like his father,’ says Linda now, sitting cross-legged on a sofa and remembering Marc as a child. Her hands turn over and over on her lap, a little sign of anguish. ‘Marc was a quiet boy. A shy boy. The best boy ever.’ The mothers and fathers of children who have been in danger or lost often say things like that, but they are not deluding themselves. It’s self-defence. If mums didn’t forget the pain of giving birth, no more babies would be born. In the same way, we try to forget how scary it is to be a parent. We wrap the good times around us instead, for protection. ‘He had the best nature of all my children,’ says Linda in her urgent, breathy voice with a strong Scottish accent. ‘Any one of the others will tell you that.’

  She had only just turned forty when Marc fell ill in the summer of 2003, but Linda already had four sons and a daughter aged between thirteen and nineteen. The kids had been raised in the beautiful countryside west
of Glasgow but they now lived with her or close to each other in houses and flats around Johnstone, a town struggling for an identity. Linda loved being a mum, and thank God for that she says with a laugh. ‘I’d been pregnant for the whole of the Eighties!’

  The family name is McCay, to rhyme with hay. She was no longer married to Norrie, the father of her children – a sharp, funny guy who worked as a roofer – but Linda still used his name and he was still in all their lives. ‘Together or apart, divorced or not, we were good parents.’

  Linda worked four nights a week as a nursing assistant at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley, a few miles from Johnstone. She relied on her mother and daughter for help with the young ones. ‘We all hung out together, we were still a close family.’ The boys supported Rangers, the proud old Glasgow club. Ryan, the second eldest lad, was a professional footballer heading for the Scottish Premier League and Marc wanted to get there too, so he played the game any time he could: at school, on the field, at midweek training, in the league on Saturday when the scouts from the big clubs were watching, at the park with his mates on Sunday, anywhere. Kicking and running, shooting and scoring. Banging them in. He was strong and fast up front – the top scorer in his team – a fit lad with a good pair of shoulders and a sharp face under his fringe of sandy hair. He could have made it, says Linda. ‘A lot of people said Marc was a better footballer than his brother. He was a happy lad, chasing his dream. Then a virus came and attacked him, out of the blue.’

  Marc was fine when he went away with his big brother Darren that summer, to an all-inclusive resort in Ibiza. Boys will be boys and Linda didn’t dare ask too many questions, but their texts got a bit worrying. ‘The last couple of days he was a bit breathless and said he was having terrible pains in his tummy. I thought maybe he’d caught a bug. I remember standing at Glasgow Airport and seeing him come through to Arrivals. He looked yellow, there was something really not right with him.’

  The ache in his bones felt like the flu and the stomach pains drove him to his bed. Linda worried that her son’s liver was failing – she had seen the signs at work – but Marc insisted he had barely touched a drop of alcohol on holiday. His brother backed him up and she believed them both. He was that keen on being fit for the football. ‘I never thought it was really the drink, not for a moment. Alarm bells were ringing in my head. I was thinking, “What’s going on here?”’

  Linda left Marc lying on the sofa at home listless the next day, watching television, not eating and complaining of the pain, which wasn’t like him at all. Then she heard groaning and found him tossing about in a fever, unable to take in what she was saying to him. ‘He was even more yellow, a horrible colour. And he was confused. It was as though the light was on and nobody was in, he was so disorientated.’

  The locum they saw at the family clinic that afternoon decided Marc had overdone it on holiday, drunk too much or taken whatever lads took at his age. Marc swore otherwise but the doctor didn’t believe him. ‘Go home and rest. Take painkillers. Eat healthy and drink plenty of fluids and you’ll be fine.’ But Marc wasn’t fine. As soon as they got outside the clinic he wandered off up the street, staggering about like a drunk.

  ‘Come here, son …’

  ‘What?’

  He sounded confused. Then he bent over double, crying and shouting, growling with the pain. Scared, Linda thought fast. She didn’t want to go back into the clinic and face that doctor again. An ambulance could take ages. The hospital was only a couple of miles outside Johnstone, so she got Marc to the car somehow, holding him up all the way.

  ‘I felt very frustrated, very angry.’

  He let her lay him down on the back seat. ‘He was just exhausted and putting his life into my hands: “Mum is telling me to lie down, so I will lie down.”’

  Traffic lights and roundabouts slowed them down on the way to the Royal Alexandra Hospital, on a hill just outside of town. Linda was torn between wanting to put her foot down and go fast between the lights – to hell with the speed limit – and not wanting to throw her fragile boy about too much.

  ‘Sorry, son. Sorry …’

  The car park was full and it was too far from the entrance in any case, but the ambulance bay at A&E was empty. Cars were banned but she went for it anyway. ‘I am a very pushy person and for once in my life that was an advantage. I don’t know if it was mother’s instinct or the experience I had of seeing people in that hospital who were very ill, but I knew my son was in deep, deep trouble.’

  Linda had seen parents in the ward demented with fear, their faces all wet with tears, and now it was her turn. She knew the doctors and nurses here – their first names, their little habits and irritations, how they behaved under pressure – so she saw how baffled they were by his test results.

  ‘What is happening to my son?’

  ‘Linda, I’ve got to be honest,’ said a doctor. ‘We just don’t know.’

  Marc’s liver was failing, they told her, but his other organs were suffering too. His life was in danger, but they could not be sure of the cause. He would have to go to the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh straight away, for more expert help. Linda went all the way to the door of the ambulance with her son, who was unconscious on the trolley as the medics lifted him in. There was not enough room for her with all the equipment Marc needed, they were very sorry. She felt a terrible aching and a longing as she watched the white and yellow ambulance leave the hospital that Wednesday evening, 20 August 2003, with the blue light flashing and the siren telling everyone to get out of the way.

  Her boy was being taken away, beyond her outstretched arms. How could she hold him close and safe now?

  Two

  Martin

  Three hundred miles to the south, another teenage boy was playing football in the park. A friendly lad with a wide, gap-toothed smile and a mop of brown hair, Martin Burton was just having a kick-about with his mates in the warmth of a late summer evening in Grantham, Lincolnshire. He wore a West Ham United shirt, partly to wind up his big brother who supported Forest, but Martin was too much of a gentle soul to be properly sporty. He had a fuzz of hair on his top lip and was rapidly growing out of his puppy fat into the hefty build of a centre-back, having just turned sixteen. Emotionally, he was still young for his age though. Martin was a bit of a softie on the quiet, in a nice way. His bed was covered in soft toys he called ‘cuddlies’, brought home by his father Nigel from many trips away with the Royal Air Force.

  ‘From the day he was born he was always noisy, he was always in your face,’ says his mother Sue, a quiet and reserved English costs lawyer who was in her early forties. ‘He was a “Boy” with a capital B; but he was also a very caring and loving child and a really good friend. Martin was very popular and always helping people. His headmaster said he had a lot to say but he was never in any real trouble, and if the teacher needed any help then his hand was the first to go up.’ Martin told great stories, but something misfired when he tried to write things down. ‘They tested him for dyslexia, because he wasn’t just lazy. He did have a struggle with schooling, but they never could find any reason for that.’

  His ambition was to be a nurse and everyone agreed he would be great but his GCSE results a week or so earlier had not been good enough. ‘Martin wasn’t an academic, he was just a boy who loved life. He was too busy having fun to concentrate on what he should have been doing, I’m afraid. His attitude to school was, “I’ve turned up every day for 12 years, what more do they want?”’ So Martin was going to engineering college instead. ‘He was better with his hands. I’m very good with my hands,’ says Nigel Burton, who was a senior aircraft technician in the RAF.

  For now, though, Martin could enjoy the sweltering days of late August with his friends. He was fit and happy, says his mum. ‘There was absolutely no sign whatsoever that anything was about to go wrong.’

  Three

  Marc

  The long, bright corridors of the newly rebuilt Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh could have
been the set of an American medical drama. Linda McCay wandered them in the early hours of the morning, not really knowing or caring where she was going, clutching a Bible tight to her chest and praying out loud for her boy.

  ‘Please don’t take my son. I’ll do anything you want. I’m sorry for everything bad I’ve done in the past. I will be a better person. I’ll not smoke …’

  Her blonde hair was tangled like a bird’s nest after being twisted and pulled over the six days and nights she had kept up a vigil for Marc in that large, intimidating new hospital on the edge of the city. Sometimes she cried and walked until morning. Sometimes she sat in the chapel. Sometimes she slumped in a chair in a corner somewhere, oblivious to a passing trolley with its urgent crew of attendants or a weary nurse coming off shift who had taken too much crap that night to intrude – and sometimes Linda just prayed and had no idea what else she was doing. ‘Please. Anything. I promise, I promise …’

  In front of her, a man thumped the vending machine with the flat of his hand, cursing. Linda recognised him as one of the doctors in the team trying to keep her son alive, a crumpled figure in need of an iron for his shirt but with an air of authority. There were bags under the bags under his eyes, but she knew Marc’s life depended on him and his colleagues. The doctor gave up on the machine for a moment and offered Linda a weak, weary, sympathetic smile.

  ‘Your son has been unlucky. Very unlucky indeed.’

  A virus had probably attacked Marc while he was on holiday in Ibiza. Maybe a snotty kid had wiped his runny nose with the back of a hand, before leaving an invisible smear on a table top or a drinking glass. The little boy would never have known he was a carrier. A fever was easy to miss in a hot place, if you were in and out of the pool all day. Anyone could have come along and picked up the virus in that smear but it was Marc who did so, perhaps as he took a drink or lay down a poker card on the table. Maybe he put his fingers to his mouth just then, absent-mindedly. Maybe he stopped a sneeze. Maybe his eye was irritated by a trace of sun cream, so he rubbed it. Either way, the bug entered his body. That was when his luck turned really bad.