Free Donor, The by Helen FitzGerald

Heath.
    She was too scared to visit Heath again.
    At first, Cynthia quite enjoyed being mollycoddled . But Will Marion was a bore and sobriety was over-rated. She was glad when Heath appeared on her doorstep and said: ‘Well, if it isn’t Mrs Marion.’ With Heath to make love to on the sly, she thought, perhaps she could handle the drudgery of suburban life. Perhaps she could handle being a mother.
    *
     
    As Cynthia lay in the tent in Dahab, Peter snoring beside her, she congratulated herself once more for leaving Will all those years ago. She had made the right decision. She was not cut out for that life, and she would only have made it impossible for Will and the girls. She drew the last of her cigarette and lay back to imagine Heath. The years after she left Will blurred in a drugs haze – how many flats did she and Heath squat in? Who were they living with? She couldn’t recall . But it was fun, wasn’t it? Scary sometimes, like the time Heath stole a car for them to get home from a club and closed his eyes as they approached a red light. ‘If we’re meant to be together the universe will protect us,’ he said. ‘Ten seconds? Fifteen?’ He ignored Cynthia’s screams and pushed her arms away from the wheel with his elbows. ‘If God loves us, we’ll survive. If not, I don’t want to live. One, two, three …’ Turned out, God loved Heath and Cynthia a whole bunch more than Miriam from Jedburgh and the Ford Escort she’d just bought. Then there was the time a punter did something she didn’t like and she protested and yelled and Heath came into the bedroom and beat the man’s head against the window pane until he stopped moving. But being scared was similar to fun, wasn’t it?
    He got life at the age of forty-two – which meant ten years minimum in HM Prison Manchester. Cynthia waited, and waited. She tried rehab. She tried singing again. She tried making new friends at the local supermarket . She tried to make the days pass until he was out. But that last rejection was too much. She decided to deal with his absence the way she had when coke supplies dwindled in Glasgow in 1991. She accepted it. She moved on to something else. She withdrew. She got off the heavy stuff – indeed she stole what was left from the dealers she was living with in Finsbury Park, sold it, and got on a plane.
    Zzzz … Someone was fiddling with the zipper of the tent. ‘Excuse me?’ a man said from outside. ‘Is there a Cynthia Marion in there?’

15
     
     
    It had been two weeks since the weed visited Heath in prison. Since then, Heath had felt jubilant and powerful . As he lay in his bunk listening to the night noises of the hall, he smiled. He’d come in handy all right, the poofter. That’s what he and Cynth used to call him (although sometimes she became a bit defensive – ‘He’s not gay, Heath! Don’t be so judgemental!’). If he wasn’t gay, then what was he? He was pathetically small. Around five-nine, five-ten at the most. And what were those shoulders all about? They’d work for a girl, maybe, but not a grown man. Jesus, why did she ever bother with the guy, dare or no dare?
    ‘Well, if it isn’t Mrs Marion!’ Heath had said when he arrived on her doorstep. She looked about as freshly married as a widow of eighty-five. ‘May I come in?’
    And so Cynthia let him in. Let him take her in his car and in his flat. Told him all about her twice-a-week sex life with Will Marion.
    ‘He tells me he loves me constantly!’ she told Heath, and he laughed. ‘He tells me I have a beautiful flat stomach! He goes on and on, for an hour sometimes.’
    Sounded to Heath like better sex could be had in the prison showers than in their marital bedroom. The guy seemed like a pathetically grateful teenager, without the physique to match.
    God knows how the three years happened. Cynthia went on some nutcase mission to be normal – bonking Heath non-stop in the meantime, of course – and he sat by and waited till she