Chapter 32
THIRTY-TWO
LAUREL
‘Well, I’d call that a success.’ Harry stacked up the last few leaflets and put them in the box. ‘We’ll have more nurses than we can shake a stick at in a few years, if that lot were anything to go by.’
‘Careful what you wish for.’ I tried to echo his upbeat tone, but the truth was I was exhausted: fatigued from my sleep being interrupted by dreams of Gray, then spending the rest of the night scrolling futilely on my phone looking for clues to how I might track down Joel.
Weary of putting a brave face on things at work, given that few of my colleagues knew of Gray’s existence, never mind his death.
Worn out from providing care and sympathy to other people when I didn’t feel entitled to claim any myself.
‘It’s not like we can afford to pay the ones we’ve got. ’
‘True.’ He winced. ‘Anyway, I think I can just about stretch to a half of lager down the Crown and Castle – fancy it?’
‘God, yes. I could murder a drink. And I don’t know about you, but if I never see another teenager in my life, it’ll be too soon.’
‘I couldn’t help noticing,’ he remarked as we made our way to the locker rooms, ‘that your girl didn’t turn up. Your fellow’s daughter, who we saw at the school earlier in the year?’
‘Lulu.’ I frowned. All day, I’d been looking out for her, trying to spot her among all the other teenage girls who’d turned up to the hospital careers open day.
But I had been disappointed – not just because speaking to her would have given me a longed-for connection, however tenuous, to Gray, but because…
Well, because of her. Because she was his child and she would be suffering even more than I was.
I could picture Gray’s face lighting up in a smile and him saying, Ah, so you saw my girl? How is she?
Now, I wouldn’t have the luxury of imagining that conversation with him.
‘No, she didn’t show,’ I said to Harry. ‘Shame, really. But the schools only went back last week – I guess she’s busy. But she texted me a couple of days ago and said she’d see me here. I hope she’s okay.’
‘A sixteen-year-old with better things to do on a Saturday than hang out with the likes of us.’ Harry turned one way into the men’s locker room while I turned the other into the women’s. ‘Hard to imagine, really, but here we are.’
I laughed. ‘See you in ten minutes.’
It was more like fifteen by the time I’d showered, changed and applied some lip gloss, but soon we were sitting at a table in the pub garden, a jug of sangria and a bowl of chips between us.
‘Starving.’ Harry dipped a few in the paper tub of ketchup and shoved three of them into his mouth at once. ‘God, talking all day takes it out of you.’
‘I’m more thirsty.’ I gulped some sangria. ‘My throat feels drier than when I did a hundred-k cycle last weekend.’
It had been an unsuccessful attempt to escape my thoughts and subdue my body into sleep, but I didn’t tell Harry that.
‘Get you, Miss Fitness Influencer. Wasting your weekends doing that, when you could be doing things that are actually important.’
‘Like what?’ I asked.
‘Like holding a housewarming for your nearest and dearest. You’ve been in that flat – what, six weeks now? And have we been invited round for so much as a cup of tea? Have we fuck.’
‘I know, I know.’ I took a long sip of my drink and dunked a chip into ketchup. ‘I’ll get around to it, I promise. It’s just all a bit new. I’m not ready to have people spilling red wine on my sofa, treading crisps into the carpet and being sick in my shiny toilet.’
‘All wrong.’ He shook his head in mock reproof. ‘Anyway. How are you, darling girl? Bearing up all right?’
If I was honest, I was struggling. Some mornings it took all my energy to get out of bed, and a few times when I’d managed that, I’d had to call in sick so I could spend the day crying on the sofa.
Once, after an elderly patient had passed away peacefully surrounded by her family, I’d had a full-blown panic attack.
Cycling felt like the one thing that kept me sane, because it was the one time I could imagine I was close to Gray again. And Lulu’s absence that day was hitting me harder than I wanted to admit to anyone, even Harry.
Feeling the sting of impending tears, I pushed my sunglasses down off my forehead.
‘I’m okay,’ I said. ‘Just about. You know – one day at a time. But I’m not going to lie – it’s hard.’
Harry nodded sympathetically, waiting for me to carry on.
‘I keep thinking,’ I said, ‘about the guy who Gray donated his kidney to. You know, if it hadn’t been for that, he might have been able to have treatment.
The cancer would probably still have killed him – pancreatic, you know, it’s a fucker.
But if he could’ve had a few rounds of chemo he might still be here.
I could have had another couple of months with him.
And his wife and kids, obviously. And instead, there’s someone out there walking around with a bit of Gray inside him, still alive.
Or at least, I hope he is. If he is, then – you know.
It wouldn’t have been for nothing. Not that it would bring Gray back. ’
Harry reached across the table and took my hand. ‘You poor love. It’s tough, isn’t it? But you know a donated organ’s not like a book that you’re meant to return to the library, right? Once it’s gone it’s gone.’
I took my sunglasses off and wiped my eyes with a paper napkin. ‘I know. The surgeons would be kept pretty busy if they had to check them in and out every two weeks.’
Harry laughed. ‘You’re not wrong. It’s quite a thing though, an altruistic donation like that. Was the guy related to him?’
‘Just a friend, apparently. Someone he knew in secondary school. Gray never talked about it much – I think they lost touch soon after. But I got the impression… This is going to sound weird.’
‘Go on.’
‘I got the impression it was – not like paying a debt, like in those urban myths that go round online sometimes. But because he felt like he owed the guy something, in more of a moral sense.’
I could remember what he had said, quite clearly.
It was one of the nights we’d spent at the Premier Inn – or not a night, because Gray would need to be home by about two-thirty.
We’d been lying in bed, the remains of a Chinese takeaway surrounding us.
Gray was wearing his boxer shorts, and I was still naked, because he said there was nothing sexier than me eating chicken fried rice with no clothes on.
The top of the scar was visible above the waistband of his underwear, and I ran the blunt end of a chopstick lightly over it.
‘So what happened?’ I asked.
He knew me well enough for me not to need to elaborate on the question, and I knew him well enough to expect the kind of answer I’d got.
‘I was at a party and I met this hot Russian girl. She kept buying me drinks and then she invited me back to her hotel room. I thought it was my lucky night – and then I woke up in a bath full of ice.’
‘Come on!’ I urged. ‘Tell me what really happened.’
He reached over and pulled me close against him. ‘You going to have that last spring roll? There’s nothing to tell. I had a mate who needed a kidney, and I had a spare one, and it felt like the least I could do.’
‘What was wrong with him?’
‘His kidneys were fucked, obviously. Now come here,’ he breathed as he pulled me down on top of him. ‘We’ve still got twenty minutes until pumpkin o’clock.’
‘What do you mean, a moral sense?’ Harry said now. ‘Are you saying he was pressurised into it somehow?’
‘No! Not that at all – at least that’s not the impression I got. More like he was so grateful to the guy, he’d do that willingly. “It felt like the least I could do”, was what he said.’
Harry poured the last of the sangria into our glasses. ‘He sounds like one hell of a man, your Gray.’
‘He was. But what I want to know – what I can’t help thinking – is, if the recipient is still alive, how can I find him?’
Harry shook his head. ‘There are definitely ethical safeguards around that kind of thing.’
‘I know, but – there can’t be that many people who received donor kidneys in around 2000, right?’
‘About three-and-a-half-thousand transplants are performed in the UK a year,’ Harry said. ‘I read a thing about it as part of my CPD.’
‘Okay. That’s a lot.’
‘You’d only need to rule out three thousand four hundred and ninety-nine of them,’ he said. ‘But maybe – if you knew what the condition was – there’d be support groups, that kind of thing. You could track him down that way. If they were mates, he’d want to know how Gray was – that Gray had died.’
‘Yes,’ I said slowly. ‘But there are loads of conditions it could be, right?’
‘Diabetes, glomerulonephritis, autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease, lupus, Fabry disease…’ Harry rattled off.
‘Glad someone was paying attention in their CPD.’
‘But you’re not going to be able to find him. You know that, right?’
I did know – but somehow I needed Harry to say it.
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘Patient confidentiality. Come on, Laurel. You don’t need to have done your CPD to know that – it’s been drummed into us since day dot.’
‘I could try, though. If I don’t get anywhere lurking on online support groups, I could ask people.’
Harry raised his eyebrows. ‘Like who?’
‘I don’t know. People who know about kidneys. Specialists.’
‘They’re bound by patient confidentiality too,’ he pointed out.
I sighed. ‘I guess. So then I’ll just go back to spending my evenings counting the walls of my flat.’
‘Walls unsullied by the presence of any guests,’ Harry said pointedly.
‘Shut up. I’ll buy you another drink here instead.’
‘Deal,’ he said.
I got up to go to the bar. Harry had certainly poured cold water on my hopes of ever tracking Joel down through online research, and I knew he was right – it was an impossible quest.
There was only one person who I felt sure would be able to help me, and that was the one person I could never ask.
Anna.