The Burying Beetle Read Free Page A

have to stay skinny so my heart can cope with my growth. Mum says it’s a Protective Mechanism.
    Summer has breasts and everything. I don’t care really. Except that then she sort of began to be bitchy and whispered behind my back – said I had anorexia not a heart disease – and before we moved she had started to see lots of Janine and Rosa. But I expect that was a sort of protective mechanism too – getting ready for when I left.
    My heart has to work really hard just to keep me sitting still. I’ve heard it through a stethoscope – it sounds like an express train going through a tunnel. Scary, really. I’ll have another operation, one day, I expect – when they’ve found a suitable donor. Which means that someone has to die first, someone whose blood type, tissue type, etc matches mine. It’s an amazing thought, someone else’s heart and lungs being used by me.
    Will I have their feelings? Will I have their heartbreak, their heartache, their heartstrings? What are heartstrings and what does warm the cockles of your heart mean? (A Grandpop expression. Maybe because he lived in Shoeburyness, and that’s where they get fresh cockles from the mud.) Will I feel heartless? If the donor is – was – older than me, will I be suddenly wiser or more stupid? Like when cannibals eat the brain and heart of an enemy. Do they do it in order to have the benefit of the dead person’s experiences? Will I be aware of having part of someone else in me? Maybe it’s a sort of rebirth for the donor. Like being born again.
    I wonder if the dead person’s parents will be happy, or rather, less unhappy, that their child’s heart will still be pumping for someone else. I would be.
    I think if I died and some of my organs could be used to benefit some very ill person, they should be used. I don’t suppose any of my organs are good enough. Apparently, I have an enlarged liver etc. Perhaps they could learn something though – the doctors – from my problem. I would be sort of living on then, wouldn’t I, my organs examined by medical students time and time again. Why not? Sounds a good idea to me. If I die.
    I was once used as a model patient at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. I had to go with Mum when I was about six and sit on a chair in my vest and knickers, and the paediatrician described my symptoms and asked me and Mum questions, and all the young doctors had a listen to my chest and back and had to guess what I had. I think because what I have is a rare condition they take a special interest in me.

CHAPTER TWO
    THIS HOUSE HAS got really ancient Ladybird books with learn-to-read stories for kids where boys do butch activities with their fathers, like camping and building things, and girls get to help the mother in the kitchen or knit a tea cosy. Can you believe it? It must have been terrible in the olden days, having to wear a skirt all the time and remembering to keep your knees together so you don’t show your knickers. Mum says they’re a piece of Valuable Social History of life since the Second World War.
    (Ladybird books, not knickers. Though I expect they are too.)
    ‘Get the door, Gussie, I’m in the bath.’
    She’s always in the bath. Don’t know what she does to herself in there. She always looks just the same as she did before she went in, except that her hair is wetter when she gets out and her face is shiny.
    ‘Hello, Postie.’
    ‘The name’s Eugene.’
    ‘Eugene? I thought that was a girl’s name.’
    ‘What sort of name ’ave you got then? Gussie? What’s that short for – Angus?’
    ‘No, it isn’t, actually. It’s short for Augusta.’
    ‘Augusta! Huh!’
    ‘Gussie, what are you doing being rude to the postman? He’s come all this way to deliver our letters and you’re rude to him. He’ll throw our mail over the cliff if we aren’t careful.’
    ‘Nah, she’s all right, she’s all right. We’re just getting to know each other.’
    Mum is standing there in her