Starting Over Read Online Free PDF Page A

like the fur in a kettle, doesn’t it?’ The baby doctors eagerly agreed. ‘That’s what caused the thrombus – the blood clot – which blocked the artery, depriving a segment of the heart muscle of oxygen, and quite literally suffocating it.’ He put down the floppy black picture. ‘And that was the heart attack.’
    He was talking about me. For some reason I listened to all this with total indifference. It might have been the drugs. The doctor peered at Lara over the top of his reading glasses. ‘How long has he been on the NTD?’ he said, and she looked bewildered. ‘The National Transplant Database,’ he translated, and a light dawned in her eyes, a terrible light. Because of course she knew what he was talking about. It had become a big black chunk of our lives.
    ‘Three months,’ she said. ‘That makes it sound as though it’s a new problem, but it’s not.’ She was talking too fast, almost babbling. She held my hand as if that would make things a bit better. And funnily enough, it did. ‘The problems have been going on for years,’ she said.
    I looked at Rufus and Ruby, who had retreated to the walls when the doctors came in. They were in the chairs pressed up against the corner of the little room, frightened and uncertain, and I saw that at seventeen and fifteen, they were suddenly children again. They did not seem like teenagers now.
    No wry superiority in a hospital ward.
    No knowing smirks in here.
    ‘What are the odds?’ Lara said to the doctor, and one of our children whimpered at the question.
    The boy.
    ‘The odds get better the longer he holds on,’ the doctor said, getting ready to leave. He was smiling at Lara now, even as he edged towards the door. ‘Thousands of men die before even making it to the list. One in ten waiting for a transplant don’t make it because there’s no donor.’ He gave her a smile, and it wasn’t much of a smile, but I saw that he wasn’t such a bad guy, it was just that what was the end of the world for us was merely another day at work for him. And it was a big enough smile for my wife to cling to, and I could see that she was grateful. Some of the baby doctors were already out of the room. The big chief doctor was ready to say goodbye. ‘So the longer he holds on,’ he said to Lara, and it was as if I wasn’t there, or in a coma, or invisible, ‘the better the odds.’
    It was good news.
    Sort of good news.
    So I couldn’t understand why it made Lara unravel. She hugged me, making my IV drip wobble dangerously, and she told me the thing that was always between us though never spoken. And I regretted it now, leaving it unspoken through all those years, not telling her more often, and it seemed like such a stupid thing to have forgotten. And such a waste.
    ‘I love you,’ she whispered, stroking the back of my head. ‘It’s okay,’ she smiled. ‘You don’t have to say it back.’
    Then she straightened up. She was tough, my wife. She was brave.
    ‘Say something to your father,’ she commanded, and Ruby immediately threw herself on me with a ‘Daddy!’ that came out like a sob, the impact knocking the wind out of me for a second, and I held her with the arm that didn’t have an IV drip stuck into it, and I could smell the shampoo in her long brown hair.
    Then it was her brother’s turn.
    Rufus reluctantly shuffled towards me, uncomfortable in this hospital ward, uncomfortable in his troubled skin, uncomfortable with the whole thing. He didn’t want to do it, he recoiled from it all, probably wanted to run away and hide in his room. But Lara gently led him to the bed where he touched the top sheet and held it to his mouth. He began to cry. Pulling my sheet up like that made my feet stick out the end of the bed, and I felt the air conditioning chill my toes.
    There was something unbearable about his tears. He was not a child any more but he cried like one and I recalled a playground accident, a split head, blood all over the happily