Книга - The Boy Who Gave His Heart Away: A Death that Brought the Gift of Life

The Boy Who Gave His Heart Away: A Death that Brought the Gift of Life
Cole Moreton


‘Gripping … so powerfully emotional that at times I had to put it down to wipe my eyes’Mail on Sunday‘How do you say thank you to someone for giving you their heart? It is the greatest gift a person can ever give.’Marc is a promising young footballers of 15, growing up in Scotland. A few hundred miles away in England, Martin is a fun-loving 16-year-old. Both are enjoying their summers when they are suddenly struck down by debilitating illnesses. Within days, the boys are close to death.Although their paths have never crossed, their fortunes are about to be bound in the most extraordinary, intimate way. One of them will die and in doing so, he will save the other’s life.This is a deeply powerful and dramatic story. It is extremely rare for the family of a donor to have any personal contact with the recipient of their loved one’s organ. Yet remarkably, the mothers of these two boys meet and become friends, enabling the extraordinary, bittersweet moment in which a mother who has lost her son meets the boy he saved. Reaching out and placing her palm flat against his chest, she feels the heart of her son beating away inside another. Her boy, the boy who gave his heart away.










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Copyright (#u28b2f8d2-9e4a-5b45-838e-5eb53e034497)







HarperElement

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First published by HarperElement 2017

FIRST EDITION

© Cole Moreton 2017

Cover design and illustration Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

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Source ISBN: 9780008225728

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Version: 2017-09-20




Contents


Cover (#uf281bcf8-c224-5bdb-9064-8741307a3025)

Title Page (#ucce82bcf-6fbe-59e2-bb77-bfc23ee77a50)

Copyright (#u2be344de-0564-5c73-b135-5acdc48b9b99)

Introduction (#u7ba037b9-cbff-554c-8c16-999e6a2049d1)

Epigraph (#u17c85d75-c48b-59cb-8689-d6ae08398fad)

One: Marc (#u3544a6f4-6f4f-59b6-acce-760513bb04fe)

Two: Martin (#u7509e184-eb28-5d33-b6b4-889dc107e45b)

Three: Marc (#uff8e2477-6c2a-5504-b99c-e42b27bc70e6)

Four: Martin (#u0fab08b8-9175-5248-b9d7-7d17e9f46e00)

Five: Marc (#u841de082-3fc6-5b4e-adf2-26c0da64ef26)

Six: Martin (#u22a43a88-9f87-5662-9543-4756cae1f336)

Seven: Marc (#u75532e5b-410c-57a9-bb0b-839b8c10d07a)

Eight: Martin (#u2de468e5-99ed-5367-807e-b49f16e60f57)

Nine: Marc (#u2a889880-e97e-5053-b4a7-cb7a6b570aa1)

Ten: Martin (#u6db03515-fd61-53c6-a254-a9d143b361f1)

Eleven: Marc (#litres_trial_promo)

Twelve: Martin (#litres_trial_promo)

Thirteen: Martin & Marc (#litres_trial_promo)

Fourteen: Marc (#litres_trial_promo)

Fifteen: Martin (#litres_trial_promo)

Sixteen: Marc (#litres_trial_promo)

Seventeen: Martin (#litres_trial_promo)

Eighteen: Marc (#litres_trial_promo)

Nineteen: Martin (#litres_trial_promo)

Twenty: Marc (#litres_trial_promo)

Twenty-One: Martin (#litres_trial_promo)

Twenty-Two: Marc (#litres_trial_promo)

Twenty-Three: Martin (#litres_trial_promo)

Twenty-Four: Marc (#litres_trial_promo)

Twenty-Five: Martin (#litres_trial_promo)

Twenty-Six: Marc (#litres_trial_promo)

Twenty-Seven: Martin (#litres_trial_promo)

Twenty-Eight: Andrew (#litres_trial_promo)

Twenty-Nine: Marc (#litres_trial_promo)

Thirty: Martin (#litres_trial_promo)

Thirty-One: Linda (#litres_trial_promo)

Thirty-Two: Marc & Sue (#litres_trial_promo)

Thirty-Three: Marc (#litres_trial_promo)

Thirty-Four: Sue & Linda (#litres_trial_promo)

Thirty-Five: Marc & Sue (#litres_trial_promo)

Afterword: Marc & Martin (#litres_trial_promo)

For Marc and Martin (#litres_trial_promo)

Author’s Thanks (#litres_trial_promo)

Moving Memoirs eNewsletter (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




Introduction (#u28b2f8d2-9e4a-5b45-838e-5eb53e034497)


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 (#u28b2f8d2-9e4a-5b45-838e-5eb53e034497)


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 (#u28b2f8d2-9e4a-5b45-838e-5eb53e034497)


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 (#u28b2f8d2-9e4a-5b45-838e-5eb53e034497)


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 (#u28b2f8d2-9e4a-5b45-838e-5eb53e034497)


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.

Most people catch a cold or a sore throat from the same virus but after a few days the body fights it off and the bad feeling passes. This time the cells of the virus travelled through the bloodstream all the way to the meaty muscle of Marc’s heart. This is the myocardium and a bad attack by a virus leaves it thin and inflamed, a rare condition known as acute viral myocarditis. We don’t pay that meaty muscle much attention, but it is the practical reason we go on living, the engine room of our ship, the physical source of the power that keeps our lights on. Ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom. That’s the rhythm of life, the sound of the engine working, pumping blood into the lungs to pick up the oxygen we need to survive, then pumping it on again to feed the rest of the body.

When the engine fails, we know it. The lights go out.

Marc’s heart was ill and swollen and could beat only weakly so the blood was not getting around his body properly. His organs were being starved of the oxygen they needed and they were failing – his liver was drying up, his lungs filling with blood. Marc was fading fast.

His family took turns to stand by his bedside, watching over him. Leasa, his sister, who was just nineteen and studying to be a nurse, had read that if you cry in front of people who are unconscious they might hear you and get scared, but if you tell them stories or sing it might stimulate their brain. So she sang to him. The song that came to mind was called Pretty Green Eyes by Ultrabeat and it usually had a massive club sound; but as she sat there by his bedside in the quiet murmur of the hospital, singing into his ear, her pure, clear voice made it sound like a song as old as the hills.

Pretty green eyes,

So full of wonder and despair,

It’s all right to cry, for I’ll be there to wipe your tears …

You’ll never have to be alone.

Blood is pumped away from the heart to the rest of the body through the arteries and one of them runs deep through the groin and the leg. For the doctors, it offers a way into places that are otherwise untouchable without surgery. They injected Marc with a long needle and pushed an impossibly thin, flexible pipe through the needle, into the artery and all the way up his body against the flow of blood, into his chest. Gas was used to inflate and deflate a six-inch-long balloon on the end of the pipe so that it rose and fell inside the aorta – the main artery of the body – with a natural rhythm to match that of the heart, allowing the inflamed and weary muscle to rest and recover its strength. Amazing … but it wasn’t enough.

Marc’s heart was too damaged and weak for the balloon to help much, so they tried a more advanced piece of kit that was new to the Royal Infirmary: a device that sucked blood out of the body, gave it oxygen and pumped it back in – a bedside mechanical stand-in for the heart and lungs. This was cutting-edge technology that made the television news that evening: ‘For the first time ever in Scotland, a mechanical assist has been used to keep a patient’s heart going.’ And it was a fantastic success at first. The monitors that had been so quiet as Marc lay there, barely functioning, now bleeped and flashed as his body found new strength.

Norrie, Marc’s father, who was a roofer in his forties at the time, remembers what he said when he saw the screens behind Marc come to life: ‘Wow, this is us sorted. It’s like the Blackpool Illuminations in here!’

Linda was in the room with him and she was just as thrilled. She grabbed hold of her ex-husband and laughed, but the joy didn’t last. The movement on the monitors slowed again and then stopped, and within half an hour they were as quiet as before. Marc was sinking again. And the high was followed by a new low. Linda saw something else now, something that horrified her. She noticed that the colour had begun to drain from Marc’s legs, leaving them grey with white and red blotches. The death tartan. She recognised that from seeing patients die on her ward.

‘That’s it, he’s going now,’ she thought, getting angry. ‘This is not the way the world is meant to work. They are not supposed to go before us!’

So says every parent who has had to watch a child die. Stunned and confused, she and Norrie went back to the family room, where their sons and daughter and Linda’s mother did not know what to say. Then the doctor entered the room too and the sky fell in.

‘Marc is dying right now, as we speak, and there is nothing else we can do.’

Linda heard a fierce sound like a riot in the street outside, but it was right beside her: Betty, her ‘wee, sensible mother’, going frantic. Linda heard her cries through the double glazing of panic and fear. Norrie was angry too, but their daughter Leasa tried to hold it all together for all of them. The eldest and quietest child was also the strongest, and now as the doctor talked again about a virus and tried to explain myocarditis she interrupted him and the words came spilling out of her. ‘What does that mean? He’s fit, he’s healthy, he doesn’t drink and he doesn’t smoke. We’ve got no history of heart problems in the family. What are you talking about?’

She thought of her brother, wrapped in silver foil to keep the heat in as warm air was fanned over his body, and Leasa felt as if the doctors had already made their decision and all this medical jargon was a way to justify letting him go. ‘It was like they were giving him his last rites.’

Linda lost control then and in her wild panic she fixed on a consultant cardiologist who had come to help explain, a small man she thought looked Italian. Grabbing his lapels, she yelled into his face. ‘You’ve got to do something. He’s only fifteen!’ The doctor was sorry, he said. He told them that he would do anything he could to save Marc, she had to believe that, but that they had run out of options.

‘There is nothing more we can do.’

What do you say when your friend is dying? How do you go up to a mate in a coma, all wrapped up in blankets, unconscious with a tube down his throat and all those wires connecting his body to machines, in front of his parents and his granny and his sister, and say, ‘Yeah, so … Right. Goodbye then, pal.’ The two lads who came to visit Marc were brave and resourceful but they couldn’t help the tears. Linda held them both, one on either side of her, pushing their heads hard against her shoulders as if trying to squeeze the pain away, for all three of them. It didn’t work.

Norrie was in the corner of the room, answering strange questions from the dishevelled but commanding doctor: ‘What height is Marc? What weight do you think he is?’

Linda overheard and turned on the medic, furiously. ‘What are you asking that for? You wanna be measuring him for the morgue, is that it?’

‘No, Linda, hang on,’ said Norrie, grabbing a hand to get her to listen. ‘There’s something going on, they’ve got an idea, I’m sure of it.’

She refused to believe it until the doctor offered just a chance, the slimmest chance, of help. ‘There is a machine in Newcastle, it could take over the work of Marc’s heart and keep him going until another heart becomes available.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘From a donor.’

A dead boy’s heart. Or a girl’s. A dead girl’s heart in Marc – that struck Linda as even stranger for a moment. But then again, why not? ‘Could it be anyone?’

‘As long as the size and blood type are right. You won’t remember this I’m sure, of course – there’s a lot going on for you – but this machine is called an ECMO, or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine …’

Weirdly, those words stayed in Linda’s brain forever, as did the next thing she heard the doctor say. ‘… Make no mistake, Marc is dying right now. There is only a one per cent chance he can survive the journey. He might not even make it off the hospital bed and down that corridor, let alone all the way to Newcastle …’

‘What did you say, about Marc’s chances?’

‘One per cent. I’m sorry, Norrie, I can’t put it higher than that.’

Norrie seized the tiny chance anyway. ‘What are we waiting for? Let’s go now!’

But Linda hesitated – she looked down at her son – she understood what was likely to happen. ‘If my son dies in that ambulance he is going to die on his own, isn’t he? He needs us with him. Please let me and his dad go with him.’

The doctor was touched, Linda could see that, but she remembers being told it was not possible. They were going to use a specialist intensive care ambulance to take Marc to Edinburgh Airport, where he would be put on an adapted plane and flown down to Newcastle. There was already barely enough room in the ambulance for the medical staff and all the equipment they needed to fight for Marc’s life. A police escort would take spare oxygen bottles for the ventilator, but one person might be able to squeeze in there and then sit in the back of the plane if it was big enough. That was the best they could do. Another ambulance and patrol car would be waiting when they landed. Norrie said he would go with the cops, if they let him. Leasa, the level-headed daughter, took control of her mum. ‘You’re better off coming in the car with me. We’ll go down together.’

Linda was terrified. She was panicking and pleading in her head, praying, ‘God, can I make a deal, make a pact?’ Then she got an idea so crazy that she thought it just might work. She grabbed the doctor’s arm tight and yanked him, demanding his full attention. ‘Listen, I’m forty, I’ve had my life, can you not give Marc my heart, here and now?’

She meant it, too. They could have put Linda under with anaesthetic right there and then and taken a knife to her chest, pulled out her heart to give to Marc and left her dead and she would have let it happen, without hesitation.

‘I’m serious, I’m telling you, why not?

‘Please, doctor, please. Please give my heart to my son.’

They couldn’t. Of course not. No doctor would kill a healthy mother to save an ailing, almost-adult son, no matter how much she pleaded. The others all knew that.

‘Come on, Mum. Come on,’ said Leasa, pulling her close. So once again Linda had to let her boy go, despite every instinct telling her that this journey would be his last, feeling that prayers were all she had left.

‘Please, God. Don’t let him die on the way.’




Four

Martin (#u28b2f8d2-9e4a-5b45-838e-5eb53e034497)


Hot and sweaty from playing football and thirsty for milk from the fridge, Martin Burton got back to his house in Grantham on that Tuesday evening to find there was nobody else home. His big brother was at his girlfriend’s house for tea and would spend the night there. He already knew his mother Sue was at the swimming pool with her friend. Martin had eaten his dinner before going off to the park but now he wanted a big bowl of Coco Pops. If he ate a bit too much sometimes, well then he burned it off. A restless lad, he was always on the go and up for a laugh. The telephone rang and it was his father calling from America, where he was on a desert exercise with the RAF. It was a happy, chatty call of the kind they always had when Dad was away.

‘Am I going to get a cuddly?’

‘Sorry son. You’ve got plenty. This isn’t a cuddly place – they don’t have a lot of cuddlies in Las Vegas.’

It was no big deal, he always asked that. They laughed about it then said goodnight.

‘Love you, son.’

‘Love you, Dad.’

However many miles were between them, they were still close. Nigel was a military man but his sons meant the world to him.

When the call was over, Martin probably turned up the television louder than Mum usually allowed, because he didn’t like to be on his own. Big Brother was his favourite, all those people going mad in a house like a prison, only it looked fun with the stuff they had to do, dressing up and playing silly games. A big lad in a kilt called Cameron had just won it a month before and he was nice. Martin bounded up to his mum for a hug when she came in from swimming, her hair still wet. They sat together for a while watching the box, his legs over hers. This was a bit uncomfortable because Martin was a growing boy of sixteen and she was petite – ‘but you’ve got to enjoy having them close while you can, haven’t you?’ That was what she always said. Her other son had grown up so fast and, proud as she was of the man he was becoming, she missed him as a boy. Nothing was wrong with Martin that night. Nothing at all. She left him watching the telly and went to bed. ‘Be quiet when you come up, will you? I’ve got work in the morning.’

Sue was a small, neat woman with a short dark hair, serious glasses and an efficient manner. She liked an orderly home, which was a challenge with teenagers. Still, they knew very well that they were loved by their mum. She had flashes of temper about things like leaving dirty washing all over the floor but Mum also knew how to have fun. They lived in a detached house with a garage and a drive on the edge of Grantham, a quiet market town in the flatlands of Lincolnshire, best known as the birthplace of the former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, not that there was much to show for it. Grantham didn’t like to make a fuss, and the Burtons were a bit like that too.

They had moved to the town when Nigel was stationed at a local airbase. It seemed sensible to buy a house and make a family home somewhere, rather than travel all over the world after him. Nigel had been to war once in the Balkans and twice in the Gulf since then, but the boys were safe and settled in Grantham. Now their youngest was just on the verge of becoming a man, says Sue. ‘Martin was just getting to the age when boys gain maturity and he had started to be a bit more sensible. Girls had come on the scene. There was a big gang of boys and girls who used to hang around together. His body and his personality were changing. When he went to bed he was a normal, happy teenager.’

Sue woke at two in the morning because of the noise – there was a lot of banging and bumping coming from Martin’s room across the landing. This wasn’t fair, she had to get up early for work. ‘Martin? What on earth are you doing?’

She sat up in bed just as her son appeared in the doorway, a silhouette in the dark. He looked strange in the half light, but she couldn’t say why. Martin looked into the room at his mum but somehow looked right through her, as if he couldn’t see or recognise her face. ‘Martin?’ His answer was just a mumble. Was this one of his jokes? Had he fallen out of bed and banged his head?

‘What’s the matter, love? Stop pratting about!’

He mumbled again and took a couple of steps forward but his knees buckled and he collapsed, face down, on her bed. Frightened now, she shook him but he slid off and rolled onto the floor.

‘Get up! Come on!’

But Martin was slumped against the side of the bed in his pyjamas, the shirt riding up. His mother touched his face and it was warm but not fevered. She stroked his hair once, maybe twice, trying to be calm but feeling the fear rising as she wondered what on earth to do. The only phone was across the landing in the spare room so she ran in there to phone for an ambulance, calling back, ‘Hang on, love. Hang on.’

‘Is he breathing?’ the emergency operator wanted to know, so Sue rushed back to check, rolling Martin into the recovery position as best she could. He was a big lad. Breathing, yes. With a guttural noise like a deep snore that scared her. ‘That’s when I realised it was serious. He wasn’t getting up. But it still never entered my mind that this could be life-threatening.’

The operator was clear and precise. ‘Okay, can you open the bedroom curtains please and put the light on so the ambulance driver can see which house in the street is yours? Then I need you to go downstairs and unlock the front door, is that okay?’

The ambulance arrived within minutes.

‘I saw the flashing lights outside from the room upstairs. I called from the top of the stairs and they came up. They shone a light into his eyes, asked me what had happened and got him straight on to a stretcher.’

Sue pulled on a T-shirt and some jeans and found her purse and keys. ‘They wouldn’t let me in the ambulance until they were ready, but they did say, “Have you locked the door? Have you got your phone? You’re going to need to make some calls.” All the practical things they are trained to say, I guess. They wanted to make sure I was leaving the place secure. I just wanted to go.’

She rode in the ambulance with her son, holding on hard as it swayed around corners. ‘This was two in the morning now and the Grantham hospital was only two miles from our house, so it took minutes, literally. Martin looked fast asleep. They got him out of the ambulance and into the hospital, then they were like, “The waiting room is over there …” They whizzed him off through some doors, which promptly slammed behind him, shutting me out. I was stuck in the waiting room, the only person there. There was not even anybody behind the desk because it was the middle of the night and the main doors were locked.’

There were no other patients waiting to be seen, the little hospital was empty. The hard plastic seat pinched the back of her legs. She shivered. This was the quiet time between the last of the drunks and the first of the morning casualties. The calm before the dawn. The moments piled up, crowding her in. Sue was getting cold and scared but she was made of strong stuff. This will all work out, she told herself. No need to panic. ‘Somebody came and took notes: name and address, date of birth, allergies and that sort of thing. Then some young doctor came and asked me, was there a chance Martin had taken any drugs? I was pretty sure the answer was no.’

The doctor was insistent: ‘What about his brother, would he know? Could we perhaps ring him, just to make sure?’

‘No, we cannot,’ said Sue, rattled. Christopher had just turned twenty, he was sleeping over at his girlfriend Ashley’s house, his mother did not think it was appropriate to disturb him. ‘Unless you have got good reason to believe it’s drugs, I’m not waking Christopher to ask him.’

So then she was left alone again, on her own in the empty waiting room. Her mouth was dry, her eyes felt raw. A nurse came after a while and asked if she wanted to ring someone and ask them to come over to the hospital, but Sue said no. ‘I’m a Forces wife. I’m a big girl, I’ve spent a lot of my married life on my own, I’m used to handling things. I am not waking anyone at this hour just because my son has bumped his head.’

The nurse returned at four in the morning and insisted it would actually be best to call someone, to have them there for support. ‘Martin really is very poorly.’

That was when the penny dropped, remembers Sue. ‘She was drip-feeding me. This was the first time anyone had said that it was really serious.’ But the nurse was not going to tell her just how serious it was until there was someone to hold her hand. Or to catch her fall.

The phone rang and rang until the answerphone clicked on. ‘Please leave a message after the tone.’ Sue pressed redial and listened again to the purr of the call, steady and insistent, alerting the landline in the house of her parents, Len and Joan, in Lincoln, twenty-five miles to the north. If they didn’t pick up, what was she going to do? Who else could she call? Could she get the police to go round there and rouse them?

‘Hello?’

Her father sounded startled.

‘Dad, it’s me, Sue. Listen, I need you –’

‘Who is this?’

He was confused by sleep. She got frustrated and shouted.

‘It’s Susan. Your daughter. I’m in hospital –’

‘What’s wrong? Are you hurt? Where are you?’

‘It’s Martin. He’s had a fall. I need you to come, Dad. I’m on my own …’

The confusion fell away as Len recognised what she was saying and the fear in her voice woke him up, fully. ‘We’ll be there as soon as we can.’ He shook Joan, they dressed quickly and set off in the chill of the early morning. Both were seventy-three years old.

Len was concentrating on the road but Joan was worried, really worried. ‘What did she say exactly? Come on, she must have said more than that? What do you think is wrong? Did she really give you no idea?’ The sky began to glow beyond the street lights during the forty-minute drive. The roads were empty. The world seemed calm, too calm.

They were both scared stiff but Len was trying not to think too much about what was happening as they arrived at the hospital, a huddle of low prefab buildings that looked more like an old army base. They had to press a buzzer to be let into the hospital, which was otherwise deserted.

Sue was in a back room, distraught. ‘They think he’s got a bleed on his brain. They’re taking him to Nottingham to see a specialist, right away.’

The nurse beside her spoke softly. ‘Would you like to see him before he goes?’

Sue felt giddy, fluttery. ‘Yes, please.’

‘He’s on a machine …’

Somewhere in among the nurses and the monitors and drips and tubes in a room full of people and things was Martin. Her normal instinct would have been to push everyone aside, but Sue was rattled by what was happening and uncertain of herself in that moment: the doctors must know best. So she held back, thinking, ‘I have to let them do whatever they need to do.’

But then the nurses parted and she saw Martin, under a clear plastic mask. His eyes were closed. His hair was all messed up. He was unusually still, she sensed that in an instant. She hoped he couldn’t hear all this commotion: the beeping of the monitors, the tense conversations between staff, the rattling of her own heart. He would be afraid, poor love. She moved in close, trying to reassure him. ‘You’ve had a fall. That’s all, silly pudding. You’ve bumped your head. You’ll be fine.’

There was no way of knowing if he could hear her voice, but she had to say something, even if she was struggling to believe it. Half-blind from the tears, Sue bent to give her son a brief, soft kiss on the forehead before he was taken to the ambulance. ‘It’s all right, love. It’s all right. Mum’s here. Everything will be okay.’




Five

Marc (#u28b2f8d2-9e4a-5b45-838e-5eb53e034497)


Marc was not going to make it down the corridor. He could not survive being moved out of the ward in a swarm of medics, trailing drips, monitors and machines. If he did then he would die in the lift on the way down to the specialist ambulance or somewhere out on the City of Edinburgh bypass in the night. There was no way he would get to the airport alive, his mum and dad were convinced of that, although neither of them dared say so. They were both hoping and praying to be wrong. Linda was weeping and keening as the bed was loaded into a big, boxy white ambulance. Marc lay at the centre of an octopus of tubes and wires. The ventilator was helping his lungs, the mechanical assist relieving his heart. All of this was tricky to get into the vehicle and it was going to be even harder to move out and into the aircraft without a slip that could mean a broken connection and a nasty death. They had to get there first, though. One of the medics, a stubbled Scot who might have had a son of his own about the same age, flashed Norrie McCay a sympathetic look. Norrie hoped he would talk to Marc on the way, even though the boy was unconscious. He didn’t want his son to feel alone.

‘Come on, son, let’s do this,’ Norrie said to himself as he got into the back of the police escort car, as if he was talking to Marc. But when they pulled up on the apron at Edinburgh Airport, he could see a problem. A really serious one.

‘Is that the plane for our Marc?’

‘Aye,’ said his driver. ‘Think so.’

Norrie had imagined a transporter plane that would open up at the back and allow the ambulance to drive right in – but this was just a small light aircraft, nowhere near big enough for the equipment, Marc and the medics. It was horrifying.

‘I’d no get in that door myself. What the hell’s going on? My Marc’s dying here!’

‘Calm down. We’ll get this sorted.’

The police officers looked uncertain as they went into a huddle with the ambulance crew on the tarmac. Norrie listened with the window of the police car wound down then called his oldest child, Leasa, on his mobile. ‘They’re saying the plane’s too small, hen.’

He was beginning to panic now. The one per cent chance of survival he had grabbed so thankfully and desperately was vanishing. ‘They’ve got tae take us by road. No, I don’t understand it either.’

Norrie remembers being told there was only enough battery power in the ambulance to keep the life-saving machines in the back going without a recharge for another two hours. The Freeman Hospital in Newcastle was at least two and a half hours away by the usual route, down the A1 through Berwick, Seahouses and Alnwick and into the city from the north. There was not enough time, even at night. This was hopeless, but the driver had a plan. They could go a more direct way, cross-country down the A68, shaving off miles. This might be a rollercoaster ride over the border hills, but if the police car went ahead to clear the way they hoped to drive smoothly enough to keep from hurting Marc. They might just make it before the power in the medical systems began to run out, or at least get near enough to transfer the patient if a Newcastle ambulance came up to meet them. Marc might not be able to survive the vibrations of a high-speed cross-country race for more than 100 miles, but then he might also have a heart attack here at the airport. There was no alternative. This was his only chance.

‘Okay, son, here we go,’ said Norrie aloud, looking back at the ambulance through the rear window of the police car as it led the way out of the airport. ‘Hold on tight!’




Six

Martin (#ulink_66b0f515-853e-5d44-8af7-176557f86b1b)


‘You’re shivering, we’ve got to go home to get you sorted,’ said Sue’s mother as they left Grantham Hospital in the early hours of that Wednesday morning, having seen the ambulance carrying Martin set off for Nottingham at high speed. Shock was setting in. Sue only had on a T-shirt and jeans and the dawn was chilly. The ambulance driver had told her father that it was pointless to try and follow behind, so they went back briefly to her house first and Sue found some warmer clothes. Rocky, their grizzled old Border Collie, was baffled by all these people turning up in his kitchen so early, booting him out into the garden to do his business.

‘Come on, old boy, we don’t know when we’ll be home again,’ said Len, helping the dog out of the door with the side of his foot, but Rocky didn’t get it. He did what he had to do, then came straight back in and flopped back into bed.

‘Where can we put a key?’

Len was thinking ahead. They put it under a pot in the shed and left that door unlocked. ‘I’ll phone your friend later and get her to take the dog,’ said Joan. She would also phone Sue’s office and tell them what was happening, assuming control of that side of things to help out her daughter.

Sue was barely there. She was thinking of Martin and the bleed on his brain, whatever that meant. The hospital staff had not said much more. She was thinking about brain damage. She was thinking about therapy and what that meant and what it cost and whether she would have to give up work to care for him at least for a while and whether their house would have to be adapted in some way, until he was better. He was alive, at least. Whatever happened, he was still her boy. His ambulance would have arrived in Nottingham by now. Their journey took an hour, with her father driving painfully slowly and Sue got exasperated, believing the doctors could not operate on her son without her permission.

‘Go faster, Dad. Go faster! I haven’t signed anything, they can’t take him into theatre without my signature as a parent, you’ve got to speed up here.’ But Len wouldn’t go faster, for fear of crashing. They had to follow a map, they didn’t know where they were going and when they got to the vast Queen’s Medical Centre – the biggest hospital in the country at the time, with more than a thousand beds – and were eventually able to find the intensive care unit, the night sister had not heard of a Martin Burton. ‘Sorry, we don’t have anyone of that name. Where have you come from again? No, we’ve not had any patients from Grantham here and I don’t think we’re expecting any.’

Sue panicked then, but the sister looked at her again. ‘Hang on, what age is your son? Sixteen? You want PICU then, he might be there.’

A young male nurse who didn’t look much older than Martin himself explained in a kindly voice that the P was for paediatric, for kids. She knew that, of course, but her head wasn’t working properly. He walked them there, ten minutes away through the labyrinth of the hospital, up to the fifth floor in the lift and through corridors that confused and this time the answer was yes, they had Martin. ‘Or we will have, he’s just coming back from theatre.’ So they were already operating without asking, thought Sue. He must be in a really bad way. Her stomach twisted tighter. There was tea or coffee in the family room, but she didn’t want either. There were tissues, but she was past tears. There was nothing to do now but wait.

The hammering on the door startled Nigel Burton as he lay awake in a bed far from home, on the other side of the Atlantic and on the far side of America.

‘Yes? What?’

It was still Tuesday night there, eight hours behind Nottingham.

‘Chief Tech Burton?’

The big, bulky Sergeant Supplier with a grim look on his face clearly hadn’t come to drag Nigel out on the town. ‘I’ve had a call from the guard room at Cottesmore.’

They worked at the same base in England but were staying in apartments on Las Vegas Boulevard for ‘Red Flag’, an advanced aerial combat exercise in the skies above Nevada. Red versus Blue with live bombs, the RAF on the side of the good guys in raids and dogfights across hundreds of miles, training for serious combat. Nigel was the liaison between the pilots and the ground crews that kept the planes flying. The Sergeant Supplier at his door saw to the spare parts, but they knew each other only by sight. Whatever this was about, couldn’t it wait? Nigel had been up at half past four that morning and out to Nellis Air Force Base on the edge of town to get the first wave of Harrier Jump Jets away. He’d turned down a trip to the Strip with the lads for an early night, but clearly wasn’t going to get it.

‘One of your sons has collapsed and they’d like you to phone home.’

Nigel had served his country in wartime, and this carefully spoken man with a dark moustache and close-cropped, thinning hair was known and admired for being cool under pressure. He was trained to put other worries to the back of his mind and focus on the task in hand. This news was nothing he could not handle, although somebody at home had obviously thought it was serious enough to ring the helpline for forces families, which was how he had been traced and told. He didn’t expect it was Christopher who was poorly, Martin was the one who was always tripping over his own feet. He once fell off his skateboard and they took him to hospital then, but it all worked out okay. Fully expecting to be told that the crisis had passed, he rang home. There was no answer. Len and Joan did not reply to the phone at their house either. Nigel rang his own father, who knew nothing.

‘It’s very early here.’

Nigel told the sergeant he was not too worried.

‘These things happen. It will be fine, I’m sure.’

They sat in the apartment kitchen while Nigel kept trying to call home without success, but the next person he spoke to was a squadron leader calling from RAF Innsworth in Gloucestershire, the management centre for the RAF, who said he had been tasked with getting Nigel home. That was alarming. They didn’t pay for a commercial ticket back to the UK without a good, urgent reason, particularly if you were the only person in your unit who could do your job during an important exercise.

‘All I can tell you at the moment is that Martin has collapsed and it is serious. The earliest I can get you out of Vegas is 07.45 hours tomorrow morning. You will have to stop over in Pittsburgh for three hours, then catch the Gatwick flight from there. It’s the quickest way. We’ll have a car at the airport to take you to Nottingham. We’ll get you to your son as fast as we can.’

Fine, thought Nigel, as he started to pack his two kit bags, alone again in his room, but why the massive rush? There must be something he was not being told. Something terrible.




Seven

Marc (#ulink_e9ce6eaa-02ca-5a5b-83ce-24ff7fe72f0e)


The police car rode the hills like a speedboat on the waves. Pushed back into his seat by the force of it all, Norrie felt sick to the stomach and gripped the hand rest with fright. He didn’t dare look at the speedometer. They were plunging into deep space, with the blackness wrapping back around them in the rearview mirror. The ambulance was just about in their slipstream, but suddenly they were slowing down.

‘What’s up? What are we doing?’

‘This is England. We have to stop.’

The ambulance passed by at speed as they pulled over and Norrie was alarmed. ‘You’re not gonna let them leave me behind?’

‘No way. See?’

Another police car sat in the lay-by ahead, this time with the markings of the Northumberland Police. ‘Come on, Norrie, let’s get you swapped,’ the officer said as he grabbed the spare oxygen bottles out from the back seat, letting in a rush of cold air. Norrie quickly tried to climb in the back of the next car but the door wouldn’t open.

‘No, Jock,’ said the driver, an Englishman on his own in the car. ‘You sit up front with me.’ Norrie would have got cross if anyone else had called him Jock, but he wasn’t going to argue with the only man who could get him to his son. The ambulance had disappeared over the hill but the driver saw him looking after it and grinned. ‘Don’t worry, Jock, we’ll catch them.’

What happened next was a shock, says Norrie. ‘I swear it was like being in a plane. We nearly took off. I thought, “My god, he’s bombing it!”’

They had been going fast before, north of the border, but this was something else and it made Norrie laugh. He was getting hysterical with the grief, the stress and the fear, but he was elated, too – they were doing something for Marc at last, going somewhere fast, getting the best help they could. At least they were trying, all these people – the doctors, the nurses, the paramedics, the cops – all on his son’s side. They were hurtling through the dark again now, but he knew they were heading down through the open country of the Northumberland National Park. ‘I could see the ambulance far off in front, but there were hills, so the tail lights would pop up red in the distance then they’d disappear.’

The lights started to get closer but Norrie suddenly began to feel really sick.

‘Are you all right?’ The driver must have heard him groan.

‘Not really. Can I have a cigarette, to settle my nerves?’

‘What? No, pal. You’re in a police car!’ The driver was concentrating on the road but he must have thought about his passenger and how there would be nobody else to clear up the sick, because he changed his mind. ‘Special circumstances? All right, you can.’

The window next to Norrie opened just a crack and the wind raged in his ear, but it was clear what he was expected to try and do. So he lit his fag, took a drag, craned his neck and tried to blow smoke out of the window. They were going at more than 100 miles an hour. The wind blew the smoke back in his eyes and the ash in his mouth, all over his face. The driver laughed. ‘Nice one, Jock.’

Norrie laughed too, high on adrenaline. It felt like seconds before they were in among houses and street lights again and the shop signs suggested they were on the edge of Newcastle, where two other patrol cars joined them. ‘My mates are going to play tag,’ said the driver, meaning that one car would race ahead and block off the road for the ambulance to pass through, then the other would accelerate away to the next junction to do the same. ‘I felt like I was in a movie,’ says Norrie, who had never seen such driving. Jock or not, he was grateful. ‘I couldn’t thank those guys enough for what they did that night.’

Still, when they got to the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle the distractions of the drive fell away and he was hit again by the full force of what was happening to his son. Norrie expected to walk into the hospital and be told that Marc was dead, but there was nobody there to meet them. The English policeman led the way up the stairs, but as they were going up he saw the doctor and nurses who had ridden with the ambulance coming towards him. There were four women and the older man, the medic he recognised from before, looking exhausted now. The man’s face was wet with tears, and Norrie felt a rush of despair, as he realised what that meant. It had all been in vain. Marc had not made it.

But as they passed on the stairs, the man reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. Norrie braced himself.

‘Your son’s a fighter. He’s still with us in there …’




Eight

Martin (#ulink_c10b6d2f-2878-5032-aad3-03d6ada826e2)


When his phone rang at home at five-thirty on the Wednesday morning, the doctor who would take charge of Martin’s care at Nottingham was already awake. Harish Vyas was an early riser, no matter what time he had gone to bed. He answered quickly, so as not to disturb his wife and four sons asleep in their home in a village to the north of Nottingham. This was his sanctuary, the place to which he came home after the long days and nights that so often ran together on the ward, but he was always ready to return to the hospital at a moment’s notice. If there was one thing you could say about this comfortably built man in his mid-fifties with his swept-back hair and greying brush of a moustache, it was that he really cared. Other doctors knew how to detach themselves from work and walk away at the end of the day for their own survival, but not him. ‘I am an emotional being, that is who I am. I have chosen not to fight it. I cannot help becoming involved.’

Dr Vyas was in charge of the children’s intensive care unit at the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham, with a dozen patients at any one time, and he felt for every family. He knew the names of mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers, grandparents and carers and sometimes even pets, and once he was involved in an urgent case he found it hard to leave the hospital. ‘I could go on without much sleep for five or six days at a time, easily. This is really personal. You talk to the family, you stick with them and you don’t want the baton to be passed on to somebody new, for their sake.’

The unit required hard work and very long hours and needed a certain stamina and commitment. Working together in this environment produced phenomenal loyalty among the doctors and nurses. The ward sister knew he would come. She had only called because it was really important.

‘A young man of sixteen is coming to us from Grantham with significant neurological features. It could be a bleed on the brain. He is going straight for a scan and then to theatre.’

Sixteen years old. The same age as one of his own sons, sleeping safe. Harish Vyas thought of that as he drove up the hill away from his village and down to the hospital, through the dawn. It was only three hours since Martin’s collapse. ‘The brains of children are very different from adult brains,’ the doctor says now, looking back at that moment. ‘They have such amazing resilience. I saw a young girl who was brought in after a wardrobe fell on her and she was crushed. She had multiple fractures and a bleed in the brain. When she came to the emergency department, she was squirting blood from her nose. After surgery, I brought her over to our unit and ventilated her and, to cut a long story short, she is now back to normal. So children do surprise me. But Martin was, perhaps, a bit old.’

The brain is a fragile thing. Squishy to the touch, it looks like half a ball of fatty, uncooked sausagemeat bound up in clingfilm. It weighs three pounds, the same as a big bag of flour, but doesn’t feel that heavy in your head because it actually floats around, suspended in a salty fluid. This odd lump of white and grey matter is – by some miracle – the place where our thoughts and feelings occur, but it is also the beginning of the central nervous system that controls every part of the body. From here, the orders go out to make the heart beat, the lungs breathe, the tongue taste, the eyes see, the nose smell, the ears hear and the skin feel.

All this is done by 100 billion nerve cells which need oxygen to survive and thrive. Without it they begin to die, and that can cause headaches and seizures, take away the ability to speak, paralyse the body or ultimately kill. That vital oxygen comes from the lungs and is carried in the blood pumped up by the heart, through the neck to the head, where the arteries wrap themselves around the brain like an intricate cradle of incredibly thin fingers. At the tip of each finger is a patch where the blood gives up the oxygen and takes away carbon dioxide, turning purple in the process. Then the old purple blood is carried away by a spidery network of veins, back down the neck to be pumped again through the heart and lungs and refreshed.

Sometimes, disastrously, the arteries or the veins just burst. The blood floods between the brain and the skull. This bleeding is what the emergency neurosurgeons at the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham could see had happened to Martin as they examined his brain scan in the early hours of Wednesday morning, although they could not yet be sure of the cause. It might have been the result of a head injury, like the one suffered by the little girl Dr Vyas was talking about – perhaps if he had fallen out of bed in the night. Or possibly a condition called Arteriovenous Malformation, a tiny tangling of the veins and arteries that could have been secretly lurking in his head for years, even since birth. They did know that he was bleeding heavily – catastrophically, in medical terms – and the blood had formed a clot that was pressing down on his soft brain like a butcher’s thumb.

There was no time to waste: it was three or four hours since Sue had seen Martin collapse and the surgeons suspected his condition was getting worse by the minute. They could not wait for his mother to arrive at the hospital, to explain to her what the scan had shown and to ask her permission to act, so they took Martin straight to theatre. There, the surgeons drilled a hole in the skull to let some blood flow out and to relieve the pressure and they sucked out the clot as best they could, hoping that the brain would stop swelling. If it did not then it would continue to get bigger, pressing upwards against the inside of his skull and downwards through the brain stem, the three-inch stalk that connects the brain with the spinal cord and controls vital functions like the heart rate, breathing and sleeping. Drugs were used to paralyse Martin and keep him from writhing about, because any movement was going to make things worse. A very high dose of morphine stopped him feeling any pain. He was being kept in a coma for his own good.

When Martin came back from surgery, he was put on his own in the room nearest the entrance to the intensive care unit. Reserved for the most serious cases, Cub 2, as the little sign with a cheeky monkey said, was away from the rest of the ward so that fretting mums and dads whose sons or daughters were close to death did not have to see the other children, who were mostly getting better, and the other children and their families did not have to see them. Sue and her parents were shown a kettle and supplies in the family room for hot drinks and a microwave to heat up food if they felt like eating, which they did not. They sat on two sofas staring at the television without seeing anything, minds hazy with the interference of anxiety and fear. Harish Vyas could see the distress on their faces as they stood up when he entered the room.

‘Would you like to sit down?’

He introduced himself and offered tea and biscuits, knowing that even in moments of high anxiety, people often have an urge to sip a drink and perhaps taste something sweet. There were no takers this time.

‘Can I ask what else you have been told?’

Something about a bleed on the brain said Sue, and the doctor agreed.

‘The most likely event is that the blood vessels in his brain have burst. The extra blood has caused pressure to build up inside his head.’

A registrar who had come up from the operating theatre two floors below explained what had been done in surgery, and that sickened Sue. Then Dr Vyas took over again, gently but firmly. They needed to see how he would settle down and do some more tests before they could be sure what had caused this and what might happen next.

‘If I can just prepare you a little, Martin is still very poorly. He has a tube in his mouth and there are various lines into him. These things are all part and parcel of his treatment here. You will notice that he isn’t moving, this is because of the drugs we give him to prevent any more problems. Would you like to see Martin now?’

If Martin had been awake he could have looked out of the window and seen the early morning sky. The pale blue curtains were drawn back, offering a grim view of air conditioning units and the flat top of the next hospital block, but the sky was out there too, distant and hopeful. But this handsome young lad could see nothing with his eyes closed and there was no prospect of them opening soon, not even when his mother entered the room. He lay flat on his back on a white iron bed with his head in a support block and a white, corrugated plastic pipe going into his mouth and down into his oesophagus for the ventilator, feeding air into his lungs to help them work. The monitors behind him showed a series of squiggly lines, changing all the time: blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen levels and the reading from a gauge on the end of a hairline wire going into his head. Half a dozen pumps sent drugs into his body through a single feed in the groin – ‘the hosepipe’, as the staff called it when there was nobody else around. Martin wasn’t moving, except for the rise and fall of his chest.

‘You can touch him,’ said the nurse gently, feeling Sue hold back. ‘It’s okay.’

She went closer then, feeling the warmth rising from his body, or maybe it was the warm air under the blanket, but it was suddenly hot in that room, stiflingly so, prickling her neck. Sue kissed the tips of her fingers and placed them on his forehead, pushing them through his hair.

‘Oh, Martin. What are we going to do with you?’

‘Call for you,’ said a nurse at the door and Sue went to the desk confused, but it was Nigel on a crackly line from Las Vegas, sounding far away. She was just about able to hold it together and describe the situation, as much as she had been told and could remember, until she had to tell him the condition Martin was in, right there and then. ‘He’s got a bleed in the brain. We don’t know what the outcome is going to be, we don’t know …’ Her voice cracked and Nigel also struggled not to lose control. ‘I’ll get there as soon as I can.’

Sue put the phone down and turned back to the reality of the ward, momentarily thrown, before being overcome by a rush of concern for her other son Christopher, aged twenty, who had arrived with his girlfriend, Ashley. ‘I was split between the two boys, divided between thinking about Martin on life support and worrying how Chris was coping with it. Christopher was very angry that he couldn’t do anything to protect Martin. He was very angry that Nigel wasn’t there. I think he felt he had to be the man. He kept having to go out to go off for a walk. I think he was letting himself vent that anger by storming around outside the hospital, rather than actually sitting with Martin and showing his emotions.’

‘Ashley stayed with him the whole time. If he moved, she moved. I was aware that he was a very angry young man right then and I wanted her to not have to deal with that, so I said to Ashley, “If he gets more angry and you need anybody, just fetch my dad.”’

Back at Martin’s bedside, for the sake of something to say to the young nurse in blue who was moving around her son, Sue began to ask questions. ‘What will happen now? If everything is for the best, how long do you think it might be before Martin could come home? We’ll do whatever is necessary for him, obviously …’

The way the nurse responded made Sue realise with a lurch that she might be getting this wrong. Everything she was fearing and dreading might actually be too much to hope for.

‘We’ll wake him up slowly,’ the nurse said cautiously. ‘Then we’ll wait and see.’




Nine

Marc (#ulink_861630b5-f0b4-5b3d-88ea-f5f660b6ba9e)


Somewhere south of the border, Linda was struggling too. She was in her own car with Leasa travelling to Newcastle when she felt her tongue swell up inside her mouth until she couldn’t talk. Her lips ballooned and her eyes became raw, weeping like they were full of grit.

‘Oh my God, what’s happened to you?’

The nurse who met them at the Freeman was shocked and treated Linda straight away. She had been given a couple of pills for a headache by a paramedic up in Scotland and was suffering an allergic reaction. The symptoms were dramatic but they would pass away with the right drugs. Linda was weak though and she needed to be put under observation. A porter pushed her to a ward in a wheelchair.

‘I was sedated and they kept me in overnight, with large doses of antihistamines. That was a really bad start, I just wanted to be with my boy.’

Norrie was already at the hospital and couldn’t believe it when Leasa found him and told him. ‘Seriously, that could only happen to Linda. Unbelievable.’

She was going to be okay though, it was just a bit of a drama. Leasa shook her head and made a joke about how her emotional mum was the centre of attention, even now.

‘There’s no show without Punch.’

Linda was brought up in a village to the west of Glasgow, a country girl who fell for the first handsome boy she met at her first proper disco in the local town, when she was just seventeen. His name was Norman but everybody called him Norrie.

‘We just clicked right away.’

He was short and sharp, gregarious and funny, but not one for candlelight or flowers. ‘There was no romance. Never.’

Within six months, to the horror of both their parents, Linda was pregnant. Norrie proposed. Sort of. ‘My granny and my father think we should get married because you’re pregnant. They’ll pay for the register office in Johnstone, which is £36.’

‘There were no violins,’ says Linda. ‘We were too young. I’d hardly been out with any boys. I hadn’t lived my life. I hadn’t even been to the dancing before and I had to stop anyway because of the baby.’

Linda was seven months pregnant on the day they got married in 1981. The only witnesses were a couple who were their friends. ‘We had a meal. Then I went home and made my bed, cos I was knackered.’

Leasa was the first child to arrive, a beautiful, very calm baby, who would grow up to become a strong young woman. Then came Darren and Ryan, both proper lads, destined to be a soldier and a professional footballer. Marc was next, the sparky little lad they all doted on and called over for cuddles. ‘Marc gave me the least bother. He was never ill and he never got in trouble at school. If there was a cat or a dog in the house it would go straight to Marc, he had a really good soul. Very laid-back and never complained about nothing. A wonderful brother to his sister Leasa, really dedicated to his brothers and his friends. A very caring son.’ He was very shy, though. ‘If anyone spoke to Marc he went scarlet.’

Linda was proud of her kids, but seeing them grow up and get on with their own lives was a struggle for her sometimes. They needed her less and less. Marc became her ally against the passing of time. He was the one she could still hold close and keep safe, until a fifth child came along. ‘I was pregnant for the whole of the Eighties,’ she says with a laugh. ‘I kept trying for another girl. I was like, “Norrie, one more time, please?” I never got her!’

The youngest, baby Daryl, was poorly with a hip disease for a while and had to be in a wheelchair at the age of four. ‘That probably stopped me having any more kids. “I don’t need a pram, I’ve got a wheelchair!”’

By then Marc was away running with a pack of cheeky lads from the same street, with a river to swim in, a waterfall to jump over and a wood for games. But when all her own boys were home indoors, the house was a riot. ‘Darren was the funny, cocky one who made us all laugh. Ryan was the daddy who’d say: “I’ve got football in the morning, youse better stop making a noise.” Marc was the peacekeeper, the negotiator. He’d say to his brothers, “What did you say that to Leasa for? You need to go and say sorry.” What a wain.’ Leasa was like a second mother. ‘She’s one of the best folk I know in the world. She’s lost more than a brother. Leasa taught Marc to walk when she was five or six and he was just a baby.’

Once the kids didn’t need her so much, Linda trained to follow her own mother Betty into the health service and started as a nursing assistant at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in 1991, working the twilight shift four times a week in the respiratory ward, doing everything a nurse would do except giving controlled drugs. That meant looking after people who were on diamorphine at the end of their life, as they succumbed to lung cancer. ‘I was very good at that, giving people respect in those times. Nothing prepares you for seeing your first dead body though, or having relatives screaming in your face. Or patients that have got cancer in their brain and they’re violent with you.’

She soon saw a person die. ‘A wee old man called Robert. Nobody was sitting with him, so I did. After that, I couldn’t count how many people I was with in their last moments. We would strip the bed and get the person decent for their relatives to see. We’d get a vase – no red and white flowers in the same vase, it was bad luck – clear the room of any medical equipment, dim the lights and have it looking nice. Open the window to let the person’s soul out.’

She means that. It was superstition, but sincere. There were leaflets with advice for the family and she would ask if they wanted her to call anyone. ‘We had good china, so I would get a tray and set it up for the relatives, get some good hankies, give them a wee pat and listen, if they wanted to talk about their loved one.’ She really cared for those people. ‘I loved my job.’

Norrie was working hard as a roofer and if he had come straight home at night she would have been at the hospital anyway, so he tended not to. ‘He was only a young guy back then, so he was at snooker one night, football the next, the pub another and golfing the next. I thought, “D’ye know what? I earn good money. I manage fine. I don’t need a drunk man coming in at night, out ye go!”’ They split up in 1996 but are still friends to this day. ‘I could phone him for anything and Norrie would do it for me. Nobody will ever love or care for our kids the way he does.’

The new machine at Newcastle saved Marc’s life, at least for that first day. It took old blood out of a tube in his leg, warmed it and removed the carbon dioxide, refreshed the blood with oxygen and pumped it back into him, taking over from his heart to manage his whole circulation. His chances of getting through the next day and night rose above one per cent now, but he was still as sick as any living patient the nurses in Newcastle had ever seen. And there was a serious catch. The longer he was on the machine, the greater the chance of an infection that could kill him anyway.

A heart had to be found from somewhere fast.




Ten

Martin (#ulink_fe68eff5-9b1f-5655-a2ad-4037360ae808)


Nigel called the hospital at Nottingham again just before he boarded the plane to Pittsburgh very early on Wednesday morning in Las Vegas and he was answered by his mother-in-law, Joan. It was now the Wednesday afternoon in England, about twelve hours after Martin’s collapse. Joan said nothing had changed since the last call.

‘My wife wasn’t talking to me, she didn’t want to leave Martin to come to the phone, so I knew it was very serious. I was starting to get the feeling that this was not going to be a good outcome.’

Nobody spoke to him on the four-hour flight across Middle America, as they passed from west to east over the deserts of Utah, the mountains of Colorado, the plains of Kansas, then Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and finally, Pennsylvania. The couple in the next two seats slept all the way, so the introverted Englishman was left alone, thousands of miles from home and five miles up in the air, with dark feelings of guilt. ‘I was in the wrong place. I couldn’t have been further away from him if I had tried. It felt wrong. I was thinking about the times when the boys said I was never home.’

He loved them both dearly, more than they knew. His way of coping with all the time abroad was to crack on with work and try not to mope, but he gave them his full attention when he was home. Now the feelings that he usually tried to keep in check began to rise and threatened to flood over him. The wait at Pittsburgh International Airport was three hours. Nigel found a payphone and called the hospital straight after arrival and got through to Joan again, who said the same as before. He put the phone down, walked through the crowds to the departure lounge and found a seat in a corner. ‘That’s when it really hit me: I was going home to say goodbye and switch the life support machine off. They needed my authority. I put my coat over my head and just wept and wept, because I knew I had lost my son.’





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