Donor

Hi, short little story I wrote on Organ donation as it's such a controversial topic. I hope you enjoy it!

I remember when we lay side by side, lulled to sleep by the sounds of each other's heartbeats through the monitors. Our scars showed red and angry against the pallid skin of our stomachs, the stench of bleach on the ground, the incessant sound of footsteps and carts and hushed voices preventing us from any real sleep. I remember when you lost your life, and I gave you half of mine.

I was fifteen at the time, and you were twenty. You were at college, the smartest person I knew, studying to be a radiographer. You were at a party when your kidneys gave up on you and closed up shop, drowning and beer and vodka and shots.

We were called to the hospital past two in the morning and arrived when it was nearly three. The doctor's faces were grim and grey, emphasised by the dimmed lights and shadows in their gaunt cheeks. They made me sit in the waiting room but I understood it wasn't good.

No one wanted to tell me anything but I worked it all out. They drew blood from my mother and shook their heads and then she spent hours on the phone, summoning Aunts and Uncles and cousins and even to track down my father, who was long gone. I listened to whispered words in the same plastic chair I had not risen from except to pace. He needed a new kidney by that evening and none of them were a match.

It took them until ten to remember my existence, hunched over in a hospital chair, not talking. One by one their eyes fell on me. They stuck a needle in the crook of my elbow at quarter past ten. I couldn't help thinking about how I should be in school even though I didn't care and nobody else did. The doctor reentered the room followed by an assortment of my distant relatives and my mother, with all of their fingers crossed. He cleared his throat, playing with his tie, rereading his notes as the tension climbed.

"The results state that Miss Grace Channing is a match for Mr John Channing-"

A loud chorus of relieved sighs swept through the room. I tried to breath out but there was no air left in my lungs.

"However," the doctor cut in. "No one can legally force her into this decision. Undergoing a transplant will restrict her from sports and drinking amongst other things, and all procedures have their risks."

Fourteen pairs of eyes were suddenly on me. Some one put some forms in front of me, a pen beside them.

Several of them began to plead with their eyes, whispered bribes and threats. I picked up the pen and they watched my quivering fingers fumble with it, shakily signing my name. I signed it because you were my brother and the most important thing in the world to me.

I was frail when I came home; slumped on the sofa, my joints creaking and limbs quivering as if I had aged aged seventy years. You moved back from college so our mother could look after you and we lay on opposite sofas with our water and pills, seeing who could swallow all eight of them faster.

But you were never back for good. You moved back to college and slowly came back less and less, until you graduated and moved and stopped visiting. While you were gone I grew up. I was an adult, I was eighteen and I was free.

But I wasn't free, you see. I watched my friends learn to dance and play football while I sat on the school field with my chemistry book. I sat in the corner at parties while my friends stumbled over each other, giggling. I could feel an empty space in my stomach, a cavernous hole where my kidney had been. Who could empathize with me? Who else could understand what it felt like to constantly sit out? Who else knew what it was like having to be careful?

You. You would understand me.

I tried to trace you. I heard you had married- a woman called Maisie. I felt a brief twang of pain knowing I wasn't invited but decided you'd not had a wedding, just a jeans and T-shirt affair in the registry office. I found your address, finally, but when I knocked on the door a bony, wide eyed woman answered, pupils dilated and fresh pin pricks in her arm. I assumed you'd moved. The alternative was too painful to think about.

I was at a party with my friends, hiding in the kitchen, when a guy walked in. He was tall and blonde and confident and fairly sober and the first guy I'd ever had an intelligent conversation with at a house party. He went to get me some coke and even convinced me to dance. My coke tasted strange that night- bitter, in a way- and my movements uncertain and awkward, but I cared less and less as the night went on. It was soon too late to put two and two together. I collapsed on the grass at midnight and when no one could wake me in the morning they called an ambulance.

I'm in the hospital again. Only one heart monitor is beeping and there is no spare kidney for me. End stage renal disease, they told me. The final stage, and then it was over, everything was over.

I kept my eyes shut tight. There are three of you in the room, watching me die, watching my life slip away. All my hopes and dreams and perfect marks. I'm realising now that it was a waste. You've taken my kidney and pumped it through with heroine and liquid happiness, but it hasn't given up. I had a bit of vodka and mine was gone.

In that moment, I hated you.

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