‘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
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
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