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
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