The Boy Who Gave His Heart Away Page 9

  Marc was connected to a heart monitor, and there were tubes into his neck, his arm, his groin and in his nose. A bigger one down his throat was helping him to breathe. Mum was in there – she had pulled up the armchair to the end of his bed and was holding his feet. She’d lost a couple of stone since Marc got sick, Leasa could see that. Mum wasn’t sleeping and had refused to take any more sleeping tablets since that second morning, when Ryan had to wake her up. ‘I wanted to sleep, honest I did, because if I could sleep then none of this would be happening,’ remembers Linda. ‘I could block it all out. But I didn’t want to go to sleep, at the same time, because I wanted to be there for Marc. I didn’t want to miss a single thing.’

  She had to be careful where she moved in order to not jog anything or pull it out by accident so her back was burning as she sat by his bed for hours, stroking his forehead, holding his hand and talking to him about his sixteenth birthday that was coming up soon. Without even thinking about it, she was focusing on the future, willing him to get there. ‘Marc, what do you want for your birthday, darling? It’s your birthday next week, you can have anything you want. Do you want a surprise? I know you love surprises.’ She would break down in tears for a while, before starting up again. ‘Marc, you’re needing a haircut.’

  The nurses were quiet behind her, she could tell something was wrong.

  ‘Have you seen him move, Linda? There, on his right side?’

  She hadn’t, come to think of it. But she couldn’t be sure.

  ‘Okay. We’ll do some tests. He’s under sedation, but still …’

  His left foot twitched under Linda’s hand, but not the right. The test results came back and revealed that Marc had suffered a stroke which had partially paralysed his right side. Linda became hysterical, rushing out of the room to find her daughter, who tried to calm her down. ‘I don’t know what I would have done without Leasa,’ she says now. ‘When I settled a bit I was thinking, “I don’t care if he’s had a stroke and his right side doesn’t work, because he’s still here and he’s still my Marc. I’ve still got him, after everything that has happened. I’ll cope. I have to.”’

  Seventeen

  Martin

  So now Sue and Nigel had to register Martin’s death, to make it official. The stroke of a pen, a mark on a page, the facts of the matter and a couple of signatures. The boy whose birth had been recorded in Grantham in April 1987 was now to become another entry on a different register, far too soon. That meant Sue and Nigel driving back to Nottingham only a few days after they had left him there, which was tough. By now, though, the pair of them were so mummified by layer upon layer of grief, sadness and anger and who knows what other emotions that they had almost ceased to feel anything. Almost. Until they walked into the register office on the Monday. ‘There was this young lady sitting behind a desk and all around her on the walls were pictures that had been done by her kids. She did not appreciate what was going on. In front of her was a couple who had just lost a child and these pictures were reminding us of our loss,’ says Sue, who was thrown by what she saw. ‘She should have taken us into a neutral office. I thought that was the most uncaring, thoughtless act.’

  Martin’s body was taken to the Chapel of Rest at the offices of Robert Holland, a friend of the family who had been an independent funeral director in the town for more than two decades. His own son knew Martin and she remembers that what Mr Holland said was kind. ‘Come any time of day, or in the night if you need to. Just give us a call and a couple of minutes to get prepared for you, but do come.’

  She did not want to go to see Martin in his coffin at all, but Nigel knew it was necessary. ‘The last time I had seen my son he was warm, he was pink, he was breathing. I had to go and see him again to put in my mind, finally, that he was dead. It’s not pleasant to have to view your child like that but I felt I had to finalise the thing.’

  Sue was persuaded to go with Nigel by a friend who happened to be a nurse. ‘I didn’t think I would cope, but she pointed out that if I didn’t go to see Martin then my lasting memories would be of him wired up to life support. She encouraged me to go and see him looking like himself in his own clothes without all the tubes and things.’

  Sue was afraid of the state he would be in after the organ retrieval, but Robert Holland insisted it would be fine, he would make sure that she did not see anything she could not cope with. ‘On those grounds, I agreed to go.’

  They had sorted out a pair of jeans and a football shirt for Martin to wear in his coffin. ‘We sent a West Ham cap so that any head injuries could be covered up and the funeral director told us that because he had donated his corneas, each of his eyes would be closed with just a small stitch.’

  You could hardly see those stitches, says Sue. ‘If anybody else had looked in and seen him, they would not have noticed immediately that there was anything different about him. He looked very pale, very cold, but at least he was in his own clothes rather than a hospital gown. In that sense, he looked like Martin.’

  They were not alone at the Chapel of Rest. Her mother and father, Len and Joan, came too and Joan almost collapsed when they entered the room, remembers Sue. ‘We were trying to hold her up.’

  Christopher was there and this time he did cry, at the sight of his baby brother looking so strange. Sue and Ashley hugged him together.

  Afterwards, when they were back at home, Sue told Nigel that she had been thinking. It was good for them to do that together as a family, but would he mind if they went back? ‘I felt I had to go for a second time later, just with my husband. Without anyone else. We didn’t even tell anyone we were going.’

  So the next day they were able to stand quietly alone together in the Chapel of Rest in the presence of their son, too numb to know what they were thinking or feeling. It was only later that Sue would reflect on how this moment helped her understand, at last, deep inside herself, that these were his remains and the Martin she knew and loved so much was no longer there.

  ‘I needed my time. I didn’t want to have to worry about my mother, I didn’t want to have to worry about Christopher, I had to go for me. I had to stand there, look at Martin and establish in my own mind that this was for real.’

  A letter from the transplant nurse at the hospital arrived before Martin had even been buried, letting them know what had happened to the parts of his body that had been taken away. ‘Firstly, may I pass on my sincere condolences to you all at this time. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for allowing Martin to become an organ donor, it was an incredibly brave decision of yours.’

  His heart, lungs, liver and both kidneys had been used. The pancreas was inflamed and disposed of, but that was not unusual. They knew this meant it had been incinerated. There were no children with the right blood type who needed a kidney, so patients had been chosen from the adult waiting list. ‘Martin’s left kidney was transplanted into a sixty-one-year-old man. He has a daughter and a grand-daughter aged eighteen years. The co-ordinator involved with his care has informed me that he is extremely grateful for the opportunity of a more normal life that you have given to him, and his new kidney is working well.’

  The right kidney had gone to a fifty-five-year-old lady, but there was no more information about that yet. Nor did the transplant nurse know anything about the man who had received his lungs. The liver had helped a thirty-four-year-old man suffering with an extremely rare liver condition, who was now recovering well. He was married with two children. Martin’s eyes were being stored for future use.

  Then there was the heart.

  ‘Martin was able to donate his heart to a fifteen-year-old boy, who had suffered from a condition known as cardiomyopathy and was desperately ill. He has woken up since his operation, obviously he has a long recovery ahead.’

  That was all the letter said about his condition, which the doctors had also called myocarditis, but the letter finished with a personal note from the nurse who had written it.

  I cannot imagine the su
ffering you are going through at this time and I only hope this information will be of some small comfort to you in the future. Martin has allowed five persons the opportunity of life-saving or life-enhancing transplants, I am sure you must be very proud of him. It was a privilege to spend time with Martin and to meet you. I hope you will feel able to contact me if there is anything I can help you with. You are very special people, it would be nice to help you as you have selflessly helped others.

  That was comfort to Sue, but quite honestly, she could barely take it all in. The funeral was coming. Then she would really have to let him go.

  Eighteen

  Marc

  Marc walked beside his father, down by the river. The sunlight slipped between the leaves of the trees, falling down on them like golden rain as they talked about this and that. The football and the weather, everything and nothing, Norrie and Marc just shooting the breeze as father and son, but there was another man beside them. Marc’s grandfather, a proud, straight-backed man in a crisp white shirt and dark blazer from the bowls club, walking with a measured step, head down as if pacing out the distance to the jack.

  ‘Y’all right, son?’ he said to Marc, nodding before the answer. Marc’s grandfather was not a man to suffer fools gladly, he was self-contained and severe. He knew his opinions and backed his own judgement, and he valued the respect of his peers as the foreman at an engineering company. They called him Mr McCay, never by his first name, but Marc knew him as Grampa, the man of the house, the head of the family, who was walking with them by the river.

  ‘See this right, there’s someone I want you to meet,’ said Norrie, slowing down and stopping, and there standing under a tree, leaning against the trunk, in a black three-piece suit with a high collar and tie from the old days was a pear-shaped man, pale and a little wheezy, but with a certain dignity. ‘This is your great-grampa.’

  Marc took the hand that was offered to him and wondered how his great-grampa and grampa could be the same age, and he was surprised when the man spoke. ‘What about ye?’ His accent was a little Irish, warm and friendly but precise in his diction. ‘Glad to see ye. I’ve heard your troubles, son. I hear ye can play.’

  Marc said, ‘Yes, up front.’ His great-grandfather smiled. ‘Ah. Inside-forward? Aye. Good. Strength, agility, pace. Courage, too. You will be needing that. There’s a big match ahead, a big match ahead. You’re a Hun, then?’ Marc laughed, recognising an old nickname for the followers of Rangers. ‘I am John McCay, by the way.’

  Marc was startled by the way he pronounced his name, to rhyme with eye. He knew nothing at all about the Edwardian gentleman he was talking to, but that was no surprise. They had never met before, because John McCay had been dead for twenty-two years. Marc was lying in a hospital bed in Newcastle in a coma, yet still here they were, speaking together. It seemed so real, but this was actually a dream he had while unconscious, probably in the high dependency unit after his operation. Marc was kept deep in the coma and on the ventilator for a day after surgery to allow his body to recover, and in case anything went wrong and they needed to put him back under fast. Then the drugs were reduced gradually over the next few days to allow him to surface slowly. When he did eventually come round, Marc would remember the dream, vividly.

  ‘I wish you well then. Pleasure to meet you, son,’ said the old man. ‘I’ll be waiting for ye, but I’m gonnae put ye back with your Mum and your Dad now …’

  And with that, Marc woke up.

  Nineteen

  Martin

  What song should Martin have at his funeral? His parents asked his friends, who picked something he would have loved. Not a soppy song like ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’ or one of the oldies like Frank Sinatra singing ‘My Way’ but a happy, catchy cover of ‘The Tide is High’ by Atomic Kitten, a glossy pop trio who were in the charts. ‘He was very much into Atomic Kitten, which was more to do with the attractive young ladies than with the music,’ says Nigel fondly. ‘That was a very popular song at the time. Music for Martin was quite easy.’

  The funeral was held on a Friday afternoon in early September 2003, just eight days after Martin’s death. They had to make their choices quickly, says Sue, but that was a mercy. ‘You are still in your bubble of shock, that’s what protects you through all the preparations. How on earth can you sit and discuss with somebody what you want in the service when it has been a sudden death and it’s your own child? But you do have to choose music and what he is going to wear and it was good to get it done.’ They went for a simple service with words and songs familiar to them: ‘The Lord of the Dance’, as heard in many a school assembly, the traditional version of The Lord’s Prayer and the hymn ‘Lord of All Hopefulness’, with its plea for God to be ‘there at our sleeping’ and grant peace. ‘If the funeral had been six weeks later I think we would have gone to pieces over the decisions, because by then you just don’t want to go there. Grief has really set in.’

  His friends turned up in force. There were a couple of hundred teenagers at the funeral, standing around outside the Grantham crematorium before the service, in clusters in the chilly air, the girls dabbing at their eyes, the boys trying to look as if they had not also been crying. Most were in the uniform of Sir William Robertson Academy, a navy blue blazer, white shirt and black trousers or a black skirt. ‘That was humbling, to see how many of Martin’s peers had come to pay their final respects to our son’, remembers Sue. ‘They were everywhere, it really hit home. He was such a well-liked person. They still remember his birthday and his death day, the mates he had then. They take flowers up to the Garden of Remembrance. They’re very good.’

  The room was simple but elegant, with wooden chairs, bare walls, high windows and a slatted wooden ceiling. The funeral attendants squeezed in as many mourners as they safely could. It was a difficult morning, even for them. Their job was to help things go smoothly and not be noticed, but by terrible coincidence that day they were serving at the cremation of two young men of similar ages, one after another. Some of the teenagers were there for both services, says Sue. ‘We know the other family very well now, the son died while they were on holiday.’

  Martin’s coffin rested on a plinth where the altar would have been in a church. The heavy curtain on either side of the recess made it feel more like a stage. Nigel was in a daze until right at the end of the service. ‘You don’t see the coffin go off, they just close the curtains around it and that is horrible, it is the final moment.’

  ‘It’s one of those final moments,’ says Sue quietly. ‘There seem to be so many.’

  There’s always an awkward silence at the end of a funeral service when nobody really knows what to do. Should we stand up yet? Is it okay to talk? So people sit there and pull out mints to suck, or bow their heads for a moment more of silent prayer or just stare at the Order of Service, waiting for release. This time it came with the crash of tinny drums and a swirl of cheap synthesiser, as the song Christopher had chosen for his brother began to play in the speakers. A tune everyone knew instantly, but some couldn’t quite believe they were hearing. First the unexpected sound of a cheering crowd then a cheesy reggae backing track and a rough choir, singing like they were on the terraces. ‘I’m forever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles in the air …’

  The big brother who was a Forest fan had chosen the West Ham theme song for his sibling, his little mate. They’d joked and sparred about football many times, and played in the park in their clashing team shirts, half tackling and half wrestling but always laughing and teasing. Now Chris had brought all that happy rivalry into the funeral room, in such a daft, unexpected way that it made people smile, look around, breathe out, relax.

  ‘It was such a tinny, Seventies sort of music and it was on repeat while everyone was filing out of the chapel so it played half a dozen times and seemed to get tinnier every time. The whole thing lifted the mood, which I felt was very important for the young people there. I could hear one or two of them tittering,’ says Sue. They glanced across at
her, feeling guilty for wanting to laugh, but she did her best to smile back. It was okay, she would have said if she had been capable of any kind of speech at that moment. Martin would have cracked some silly joke about it all, to break the tension. That was the whole point, says Nigel. ‘It was a way to represent Martin and to give his friends something to laugh about. Martin would have liked that.’

  Twenty

  Marc

  Marc had passed out in a battered old hospital in Glasgow, but now he began to wake up in some alien place, a futuristic room full of technology that looked like it belonged in a spaceship. He was hurting all over, but he was floating too and he couldn’t understand what was happening. Then he was sleeping again. He was in a shop, with a big plate glass window. A bed shop, maybe. No, Blackpool with his football team and this was a hotel, he was on his back in the hotel room, looking over at the window. That was his sister, Leasa, outside looking in. Waving at him. She was waving at him, with his brothers, Darren and Ryan. Where was his mum? He tried to call out, but there was something on his face. He was bound tight like a mummy or it felt that way, his arms tied tight to his side or maybe they were heavy, just heavy. Aye, they were heavy like lead and his feet too. Heavy.

  The light in the shop was bright, but there was a shadow, a figure, a sinister figure moving about, coming closer. A woman with a uniform on, blue like the Rangers strip, but she wasn’t a friend, she had a look in her eye like a killer. She was saying something and her accent was English, why was she English? She was coming for him with a needle, a huge needle, as big as a skewer. It was going into his arm, into his skin, he could see the puncture mark and the liquid going in. She was poisoning him, the woman was killing him and Leasa was waving but Marc was dying here, he was dying, he was dying away and where was his mum?