The Boy Who Gave His Heart Away: A Death that Brought the Gift of Life. Cole Moreton

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      One

       Marc

      Marc was in agony, writhing around on the back seat of the car and calling for his mum. She was driving as fast as she could, up to the hospital and over the red warning lines, straight into the ambulance bay, blocking the way for everyone else. Linda didn’t care. She thought her son was dying. She was right. She leaned on the horn again and again and the loud, flat sound echoed under the canopy, an alarm and a plea for help. ‘Come out! Come on! Where are you?’

      Marc couldn’t walk and there was no way she could carry a hefty, dazed teenager out of the car and all the way through the doors to Accident & Emergency, but surely somebody in there would hear the noise and wonder what was going on? A hospital porter came striding over with an angry face but Linda shouted at him: ‘I’m not moving. Not until my son gets seen!’

      The porter was confused, he knew her as a friend and a nurse who worked the night shift. Then he looked into the back of the car and saw Marc in a terrible state.

      ‘Holy crap, Linda – is that your boy?’

      Yanking open the car door, he swore loudly and waved at a colleague for a trolley. Marc didn’t answer his questions and Linda couldn’t get the words out right. ‘Just help him, please.’

      The porter took hold of Marc under both arms to lift him out and tried to be reassuring. ‘We’ll take him, hen. You get this thing moved, yeah?’

      Linda turned the key, put her foot down and the car lurched forward out of the bay. She left it half up on a pavement and ran back through the double doors into the gloomy reception area where the faces of the sick and injured looked up at her. Where the hell was Marc?

      ‘This way,’ shouted a voice she knew and Linda saw the fuss around her son first. A couple of nurses in blue, busy with machines and a tangle of wires and tubing. More coming over. A young doctor in a white coat saying something about the lad being only fifteen. Marc was on the trolley in the middle of the growing crowd, already with a clear plastic breathing mask over his face and then Linda knew – she just knew, in her shock and horror – that this was as serious as it could be.

      ‘My poor wee man is dying away …’

      ‘When the sun shone his hair went blonder. He had lovely green eyes, just like his father,’ says Linda now, sitting cross-legged on a sofa and remembering Marc as a child. Her hands turn over and over on her lap, a little sign of anguish. ‘Marc was a quiet boy. A shy boy. The best boy ever.’ The mothers and fathers of children who have been in danger or lost often say things like that, but they are not deluding themselves. It’s self-defence. If mums didn’t forget the pain of giving birth, no more babies would be born. In the same way, we try to forget how scary it is to be a parent. We wrap the good times around us instead, for protection. ‘He had the best nature of all my children,’ says Linda in her urgent, breathy voice with a strong Scottish accent. ‘Any one of the others will tell you that.’

      She had only just turned forty when Marc fell ill in the summer of 2003, but Linda already had four sons and a daughter aged between thirteen and nineteen. The kids had been raised in the beautiful countryside west of Glasgow but they now lived with her or close to each other in houses and flats around Johnstone, a town struggling for an identity. Linda loved being a mum, and thank God for that she says with a laugh. ‘I’d been pregnant for the whole of the Eighties!’

      The family name is McCay, to rhyme with hay. She was no longer married to Norrie, the father of her children – a sharp, funny guy who worked as a roofer – but Linda still used his name and he was still in all their lives. ‘Together or apart, divorced or not, we were good parents.’

      Linda worked four nights a week as a nursing assistant at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley, a few miles from Johnstone. She relied on her mother and daughter for help with the young ones. ‘We all hung out together, we were still a close family.’ The boys supported Rangers, the proud old Glasgow club. Ryan, the second eldest lad, was a professional footballer heading for the Scottish Premier League and Marc wanted to get there too, so he played the game any time he could: at school, on the field, at midweek training, in the league on Saturday when the СКАЧАТЬ