‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘Your heart stopped.’
‘Bollocks — I’m thirty-five years old. How can I have a heart-attack?’
‘It wasn’t a heart-attack. It just stopped beating regularly. Something to do with electrical impulses.’
Her eyes were greyer than I’d ever seen them. I realised that she hadn’t slept. ‘How long have you been here?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Go home and sleep.’
She cried at last, her head resting on my malfunctioning chest, and I could feel all her movements with an intensity I’d never felt before and haven’t since. It was as if I had slipped into her body. I felt like pulped breadfruit, crushed chestnuts, pale and malleable, and I understood at last what it was to see the world as she did. ‘Sonja, Sonja.’ I lifted her head with my catheter-snaky hand and her water-washed eyes stared. ‘I’m not going to die. I’m not going to leave you. I am not going to die. Go home and sleep.’ She believed me and so she went.
* * *
Embedded in the wall of the heart are four structures that conduct impulses through the cardiac muscle to cause first the atria and then the ventricles to contract. These structures are the sinoatrial node, the atrioventricular node, the bundle of His and the Purkinje fibres: the pacemaker mechanisms. It was, apparently, my bundle of His that was causing a problem, short-circuiting the whole shooting match. So they cut my broad, hairy chest right open and put in a pacemaker, a small, shiny dumb-bell of metal. Ian could have made me one sporting curlicues and roundels. Now my sinoatrial node and bundle of His (whose? someone else’s?) sit there, unloved and bypassed. Sometimes I wonder if that is why I’m heartless.
Ian came to visit me in the hospital, his face grave and concerned, wiped clean of sweat and iron dust. He laid his huge hand on my chest and when he spoke my thorax vibrated.
‘How you doing, Special?’
‘Feeling like shit.’
He nodded and produced a bag of tiny kumquats. ‘Thought you might be.’
‘What’s the word for this week?’
‘Homeostasis. Difficult to work into a conversation down the Miners’ Arms without you there.’ He smiled and bit into a kumquat, the fine, minuscule zest spraying my face, reminding me of my mother.
I have conjectured for half my life, since that moment when I touched Sonja’s hand at King’s College, about her origins. I know she was born in Estonia, that she is Nordic, but she doesn’t seem to belong to the north of the world. She generates warmth as if her core is burning; her skin feels bronzed, smells of soft toffee. Where is she from? What journeys did her ancestors make? Did they climb the Himalayas and take the direct route, through Pakistan and Uzbekistan, through the swampy heartlands of Russia to Estonia? Or were they romantic stargazers, taking a leisurely, ten-generation stroll along the coasts and waterways of two continents? And as they wandered what made them move on? Move north? Weren’t there enough olives, fish and wild boar? What made them toil north through ever colder lands to fetch up in Kingisepp on the island of Saaremaa?