Читать книгу The Boy Who Gave His Heart Away: A Death that Brought the Gift of Life - Cole Moreton, Cole Moreton - Страница 10

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.’