I remember my first day of school, aged five: my mum delivered my twin sister to her classroom and then walked me round to mine. It was only when she was leaving me that the horror of what was happening dawned on me and I went to pieces in the doorway. There was a kind teacher right there, bringing me into the classroom, but what really helped, and instantly it seems to me now, was seeing all the storybooks—the Ladybird ‘Peter and Jane’ books—just there near the doorway, laid out face up.
I’ve always found reading a comfort, but they don’t have to be ‘comfortable’ stories. The uneasiness of Shirley Jackson’s work or the tension of a Patricia Highsmith can have medicinal properties. Last year, I was on a panel that was asked whether horror stories could have a detrimental effect. In my experience, they can be positively healing.
In summer 2016, my third novel, Death and the Seaside, was published in the UK. That October, conversations began about the possibility of me giving one of my kidneys to my husband, who has Polycystic Kidney Disease. He had reached the point at which a donor kidney was needed and a live donor kidney is by far the preferred option. Our blood groups matched and I passed a full health assessment, so we were able to go ahead. Dan received my right kidney in April 2017, and more than two years on he is doing extremely well. I’m wholeheartedly glad I was able to do that for him, but it was nonetheless a frightening and almost unreal experience. It was hard to get my head around the fact that I would be going into hospital healthy and, even if all went well, coming out less healthy, with a big bite taken out of the kidney function that I hope will see me into old age.
As it happens, it was also in October 2016 that I was contacted by Dead Ink Books, ‘a small, ambitious and experimental literary publisher’ in the UK, inviting me to take part in a project that would involve me writing a horror novelette, set in another era, under a pseudonym. The idea was that Dead Ink had acquired the archives of the Eden Book Society [https://edenbooksociety.com], ‘a publishing house that produced horror novelettes for a private list of subscribers… For the first time, these books—nearly a century of unseen British horror—will be available to the public.’ The first batch of stories would be from 1972. The project sounded fun, but what might I write about? Well, what better way to get myself through the strange experience of donating a kidney than by writing a horror story about it? And serendipitously, in the early 1970s, organ transplantation was in its infancy. So, alongside drafting my fourth novel and a chapter book for children, I worked on my horror novelette, my ‘kidney story’. By mid-spring, I had it roughed out, and I’d done my research, but there’s nothing like first-hand experience…
In April 2017, after waving goodbye to our eight-year-old son—who was spending the week in the good care of my sister—Dan and I were driven to the hospital by his mum. He and I were given beds and prepped for the procedure: blood taken; paperwork done; marks made on skin; meals ordered and delivered; blood pressure, pulse and temperature taken; substances injected. And all the while, I was making notes on my phone.
11.30pm When she is nearly asleep, they come to inject / a nurse injects her with something that will thin her blood; they stick the needle in her stomach. At midnight, she is nil by mouth. She woke at times during the night, hearing voices, the rustle of paperwork the snapping-shut of ring-binders.
Even when, the following morning, I was taken down to the theatre, I was making a mental note of procedure and details, hoping to wake from the anaesthetic with it all still in my head. And I did!
Go down to theatre in your bed (on wheels), not a separate trolley. Someone / a nurse asks about her children and whether they will visit… wheeled through hospital corridors… feeling like a fraud because she was perfectly well, although rather frightened, as if she were being taken to the guillotine… Into theatre via a series of ante-rooms: in first, got off bed and onto trolley, leaving gown open at the back so they could get at her; checked permission. I need you to sign… Ah, no, you have already signed it. Is this your signature? And it was. Through to next ante-room: canula inserted, drip attached, tubes going into her. Injection in back of hand, cold, and mask put over her face… She never sees the operating theatre itself.
On the seventh day, Dan came out of the hospital with a healthy kidney, while I’d come out with three and a half thousand words of notes.
When I’d gone into hospital, I’d been halfway through my fourth novel, but when I came out I was in a strange recovery bubble and (after the first week during which I did little but read and watch TV and walk down the road to collect our son at the end of the school day) the one thing I wanted to write was the organ transplant story.
I went through my notes, which meant going back through every day, every step of the pre- and mid- and post-transplant procedure, which I suspect in itself was therapeutic as it’s equally tempting to never look that way again, to never look it in the eye, which might not be so helpful. (Apart from one local TV interview I agreed to do with Dan, I ignored the calls from friendly journalists who were interested in my experience—I wouldn’t normally be so rude but I didn’t even want to talk about why I didn’t want to talk about it.) Picking which details I wanted, making them fit, using them to make the story work, gave me a kind of control over the subject matter that’s vividly lacking when you’re struggling to make it from one end of a hospital corridor to the other.
On the seventh day, Dan came out of the hospital with a healthy kidney, while I’d come out with three and a half thousand words of notes.A recent study concluded that a crucial element of the widely recognized link between creativity and happiness is the problem-solving that’s involved in creating a work of art. (‘Problem-solving ability and stress mediate the relationship between creativity and happiness’, Creativity Research Journal, Vol 31.) Experientially, this makes sense, both in terms of the immediate satisfaction of tinkering with and fine-tuning a narrative, and, more broadly, the feel-good that comes from managing to express something that was difficult. When asked how the transplant went, I say it went well, that we’re both really well, and that’s true, and Dan wrote an engaging account of the process. But in addition to that, A Dedicated Friend is my attempt to express what I don’t and wouldn’t say in those brief exchanges, and although certain elements, especially the denouement, are fictional, it feels truthful in its own way.
I’m enormously proud of how our son coped during that unusual period, and grateful to my sister for looking after him, and my brother for organizing their visit to the hospital, and my friend for taking our son to school each morning while I was too slow to get everything done. I’m also grateful to the novelette: I’m sometimes asked which of my books I’m most proud of, and I’ve found that my new answer is A Dedicated Friend, which was like having a story baby—after months of medical appointments and a hospital stay I was back at home with a swollen but emptier abdomen, taking time away from my main writing job to tend to my new novelette. And at some point I slipped back into the real world: I found I was able to do up my jeans and reach my feet, and I got back on track with my fourth novel, Missing, which was published in the UK in 2018, followed by my first children’s book, Sunny and the Ghosts, and A Dedicated Friend. This October, Biblioasis published the North American edition of Death and the Seaside, a novel whose sense of damage, expressed through uncanny fiction, fittingly bookends our adventure.
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