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The Artificial Anatomy of Parks

Legend Times Ltd

It's nine o'clock in the morning when the phone call comes through.

"Miss Park?"

"Yes?"

"This is Marylebone Heart Hospital. I'm afraid your father has had a heart attack."

For a moment I don't understand. I'm still in bed, under the covers, head and one arm out in the open.

"He was brought in here at six this morning. We'll be moving him to coronary care shortly, where you'll be able to visit him. He's still under, though."

"Right." I feel I should say more. "Please let me know if there's any change in his condition."

"Of course."

I hang up.

I lie back in my bed. My brain feels like it's out of sync with the rest of me. I try to think about the last time I spoke to my father; it was five years ago. I can see him before me, white-faced, the nurse's arm around his chest as she propelled him out of the room. I wonder whether this heart attack was already lurking offstage, biding its time. I know that heart problems can build up over a long period, treacherous plaque mushrooming on the inner walls of the coronary artery. When I was a baby, my father gave me a plastic simulacrum of a heart to play with. It was meant for medical students, but I used it to chew on when my teeth were coming through.

Years later, when I was alone in the house on rainy afternoons, I would read his medical journals. I became obsessed with the heart, its unpredictability. I can still recite the facts: ... damage to the heart restricts the flow of oxygenated blood usually pumped out of the left ventricle. This causes left ventricular failure and fluid accumulation in the lungs; it's at this point that the sufferer will feel a shortness of breath. Patients may also feel weak, light-headed, nauseous; experience sweating and palpitations. Approximately half of all heart-attack patients have experienced warning symptoms such as chest pain at some point prior to the actual attack.

My ears are ringing now. I plug them with my fingers, trying to push the sound back into my brain. I can't imagine how it must feel, the realisation that your heart is failing you, when for so many years you forgot that it was even there, ticking away like a little death-clock. All my muscles start to curl up just thinking about it. I couldn't have stopped it, I tell myself, but there's a heavy feeling in the room, like when you're a kid and you've done something bad and you're waiting to be found out. I drag myself out of bed to throw up in the sink that stands in the corner of the bedroom. My hands shake when I run the taps to clear away the mess. I cross the room to the window. We don't swim in your toilet, so don't piss in our pool – my cousin, Starr, taped that sign to the glass.

I force the window open and stick my head out into the fresh air. Below me a cyclist screeches to a stop, drops his bike and runs into the building two doors down, his hair slick with sweat. The traffic is heavy and the air is already thick and sultry. Shop workers stand in their doorways, fanning themselves. Behind them, JXL curls out of the radio – the remix of Elvis Presley's 'A Little Less Conversation'. It's been number one in the charts for a month this summer. It's 2002, the year of the King's big comeback.

I feel sick again; I haven't been in a hospital for five years either.

My flat is in a converted Victorian house on Essex Road, N1. It's supposed to be a prestigious postcode, but the ground floor of our building and the one next door is taken up with a funeral parlour, hence the cheap rent. They do transporting, embalming, flower arrangements, the works. When I first moved in I was freaked by all the coffins I saw being carried in and out, but now I'm used to it. Below me is another flat, I share a toilet on the half-landing with him. Mine is the attic – two medium-sized rooms, a bedroom with sink, a kitchen with shower. It's not much – it's peeling and yellow and recently there's been a strange damp smell that sometimes means I wake up wheezing. I took it because it was close to work, and I have a weakness for badly-fitting wooden floorboards and windowpanes that let in cold air. I blame my grandmother.

Now, though, for the first time since I moved in five months ago, I wish the place felt more like home.

I pad into the kitchen and fill the kettle, checking my reflection in my cracked, bear-shaped hand mirror while it boils. My hair is dirty and there's yesterday's makeup smeared around my face; I don't necessarily want to go to the hospital, but I can imagine what my grandmother would say if I turned up like this – 'The poor man's got a weak heart, do you want him to die of fright?'

I shower, scrubbing myself hard. I drink a coffee while it's steaming and sort through the post, drumming my fingers on the kitchen table, impatient for the caffeine to kick in.

My uniform is draped across the back of a chair, waiting to be put on. It's a tight turquoise-and-purple mini dress like waitresses used to wear in American diners in the fifties. My name is stitched into it over the left breast, so male customers can gawp at my chest and get away with it.

Maybe I should let my boss know about my situation, but the more time that passes, the more I feel I don't have to go and sit by my father's bedside – there's a reason we haven't kept in touch.

I get dressed in the kitchen, trying to iron out the creases with my hands. I can hear the golf coming in waves through the paper-thin wall separating me from my neighbour. I wonder what my mother would say to try to convince me to go, although if she were here we probably wouldn't be in this mess in the first place. She was always able to talk me out of being angry when I was younger. She'd say something like, 'This is the only point in your life you can go to the post office in a Batgirl outfit. Don't waste it on getting upset.'

She was the one who bought me the Batgirl outfit too, a reward for being brave after I fell out of a tree in our garden when I was five. I don't remember the fall; I remember my father picking me up off the lawn and carrying me inside. He laid me down on the sofa and started prodding me gently. I was completely still, but I winced when he took my head in his hands and examined my eyebrow. I could feel something warm start to meander down my face, and when I blinked my eyelashes felt sticky.

"You're bleeding a bit," he told me. "Do you know how bleeding happens?"

"How?"

"It means you've severed tiny blood vessels near the surface of the skin. When you do that, the blood comes out of the body, and we call that loss 'bleeding'."

"Okay," I said.

"Good girl," he said, and helped me up.

"Is it serious?" my mother asked.

"She'll need stitches, but she'll be fine."

We sat in the hospital waiting room for an hour; the bright lights and squeaky plastic floor and coughing patients made me shrink back into my chair. My mother held my hand the whole time. On the way home she rode in the back with me, showing me all her scars.

"This one is from my first cat," she said, showing me a white line running down the inside of her right arm. "And this one is from chickenpox." She pointed to a circle next to her left eye.

"You obviously ignored your doctor and scratched it," my father said, from the front seat.

"If only I'd known you back then, Edward," my mother said.

She was smiling. I looked at my father's eyes in the rear-view mirror and saw the skin crease around them, like he was smiling too.

"What's that one?" I asked, putting my finger on the little cross on her chin.

"That was from when your mother was saving the world," my father said.

"I fell over at a CND demonstration," she said, "and cut myself. It was when you were a tiny baby, and I was going to take you along in a sling, like in those photos I showed you, but thank God I didn't, or I might have squashed you."

"Where was I?" I asked.

"At home with Daddy," she said. "It was the first time I was away from you."

"Yes," my father said. "I seem to remember you cried all night."

* * *

I'm feeling the caffeine buzz now – my heart is pumping a little too fast and my ears are choked-up with its clamouring. Lub-dub, lub-dub. I wonder if I'm going to throw up again.

My mobile rings, it's Starr. "Thank God you picked up, have you heard?"

"Yeah, the hospital just called."

"Are you there?"

I light a cigarette. "Not yet."

"Are you on your way?"

"Not yet."

"Hon, what are you waiting for?"

I make my hand into a fist, and consider it. Roughly speaking, it is the size of my heart; my father taught me that. "I have to call work."

"So call them."

"I will."

"When?"

"Now."

"This is a really big fucking deal. You're the only one he has left, apart from Mum and Aunt G ... You have to go."

I pretend not to hear her. "Where are you? It's a really bad line."

"I'm in Spain, remember, with Riccardo. I wish I could fly back but we're in the middle of fucking nowhere – flights once every ten days or something, and we've just missed one. Give Uncle Edward my love."

"Alright."

"You are going, aren't you?"

"Get off my back, Starr. I don't know yet. It's not like we're that close, is it?"

I hang up. I'm not ready to face my past quite yet, no matter how bad Starr makes me feel.

I sit on the edge of the bed, working up the will to put on my socks and shoes – black flats that won't pinch after an eight-hour shift. My feet have always been big with knobbly toes, like monkeys'. When I was a kid I used them to pick things up and carry them around – pens, rubber bands, coins. I wonder if my father remembers it.

If he dies now ...

I pick up the phone again and call my boss to tell him I won't be in today. "It's a family emergency," I say.

"You can't expect me to believe that," he says. "That's the oldest trick in the book."

"Well this time it's true."

He makes a disgusted noise down the receiver. "I see right through you, missy," he says. "You've got a hangover again."

I start to say something, but he cuts me off. "I don't really care. If you're not in usual time on Wednesday, you can forget about coming in for good."

I bang the telephone down. If I had the guts or the money I'd quit in a flash.

"And do what?" Starr asked me once. I pretended I hadn't thought about it.

So work isn't an obstacle anymore. I don't want to see my father, but I can't pretend I don't know about it. If I hadn't picked up the phone this morning, I could get on with my daily routine. But I did pick up the phone. 'You were raised to know the right thing to do,' my grandmother would say. 'If you don't go now, it'll be because of your own pigheadedness.'

"You win," I tell her. "But I'm only going for you."

I throw on some non-work clothes and grab my cigarettes, keys, and phone and leave the flat, locking the door behind me. I walk to Islington Green, running the last few yards to catch the number 30 pulling in at the stop. It's only when I'm on it that I realise my aunts might be at the hospital too. The doors are still open, and I almost get off again, but something inside me puts its foot down – no more wavering. My grandmother's influence again, probably. I sit by the window and watch as the bus sails past sunbathers on the green, then Pizza Express and William Hill and the new Thai restaurant, with potted bamboo and stone buddhas outside. Pedestrians amble alongside us in the heat, flip-flops slapping against the pavement, and Brazilian flags still hang from second and third-floor flat windows, mementoes of their fifth World Cup win back in June.

I don't want to see any of them – my place among the family was always a little uncertain – but especially not Aunt Vivienne. She's my father's younger sister, Starr's mum, and I remember her being tall and glamorous and fierce. When I knew her, she had short, dark hair that licked each ear. "To look like Cyd Charisse," she said. In 1974 and 1975, a twenty-two-year-old Vivienne had appeared, scantily clad, in several films with titles like: Vampira, The Arabian Nights and Supervixens.

She might not show up though – she has a bad track record of attending funerals at least. And as far as I could tell, when I was a kid, Aunt Vivienne didn't seem to notice my father much; maybe they haven't seen each other recently either. Starr said, once, that after I left my father basically turned into a recluse, but Starr exaggerates.

* * *

When we were children I thought Starr was the coolest person I knew. She wore glitter eye-shadow that suited her name, and could balance whole stacks of books on her head while walking round the living-room. Sometimes we'd visit them in their Primrose Hill flat and she would show us. She said that Aunt Vivienne made her practise every night so she'd have the right posture for modelling or acting.

"You know, I went a whole year without buying myself a single drink," Aunt Vivienne said once, smoking a cigarette and crossing her legs. "Everyone took me out to dinner. I went along with it of course, but I knew they just wanted to see if I'd get my tits out."

Me and Starr, playing quietly under the kitchen table, giggled to ourselves at the t-word.

"You should have come with me sometimes, Evie," Aunt Vivienne said to my mother. "You're very cute, you know. Not exactly right for the roles I got, but you could definitely have played a young country ingénue. That would have been right up your street, wouldn't it?"

Under the table I saw my mother's hands tighten in her lap.

"Right," Aunt Vivienne said, her face appearing suddenly. "Get out you two. Don't think I don't know you're snooping around down there."

We crawled out and I went to stand next to my mother. Aunt Vivienne watched me. I watched her back. Aunt Vivienne never dressed the same as other women on the street – she looked more like the people from black and white films – and now she was wearing white trousers that flared at the bottom, and a white silk shirt. I could see through her top to her purple bra, and I wondered if she still needed to show people her tits.

My mother was wearing her red tea dress and her blonde hair big and wavy. When she'd come down for breakfast that morning my father had pretended to think she was Farrah Fawcett, although I thought she was much prettier. She put her arm around me and buried her face in my hair, speaking into it. "What are you up to?"

"Playing with dolls."

"That sounds nice," she said, and nuzzled my ear.

Starr was standing near the door. Aunt Vivienne crushed her cigarette out in the saucer in front of her and turned in her seat. "Starr, go to your room. And take your cousin with you. Can't I ever have an adult conversation around here?"

"Come on," Starr said when we were in the hallway. "Let's go to Mum's bedroom and try on makeup."

"Okay," I said. I thought Starr was very brave after the way Aunt Vivienne had just looked at her.

Aunt Vivienne had a whole row of lipsticks and pots of cream and brushes.

"The blusher's in here," Starr said, pulling open the top drawer of the dresser. She was wearing shiny silver leggings with gold spots on them, and a pink t-shirt with two elephants kissing. I stuck my hands in the pockets of my denim shorts and wished I looked as exciting as her.

"Oh, it's the left one." Starr struggled to close the open drawer. "Help me."

We tried pushing it together.

"You have to jiggle it," Starr said. "Quietly, or she'll hear us." She mimed drawing a line across her throat. I giggled.

"There's something stuck at the back," Starr said, reaching into the drawer and pulling out sheets of writing paper, bills and photos. "Take these. We have to shove everything down."

I looked at the photo on the top of the stack Starr had given me. It looked like a birthday shot; there was cake on a table in the front and, standing slightly behind it, Aunt Vivienne and my mother, wearing party hats. My mother had an arm around Vivienne's waist. There was another face in the frame as well, all blurry. It looked like a man with dark hair, no one I'd ever seen before. Both my mother and Aunt Vivienne were looking at him, and Aunt Vivienne was reaching out a hand like she was trying to catch hold of his arm.

"Who's that?"

"Where?"

"Here."

We heard someone go into the bathroom next door and water running.

"Give them to me," Starr said, grabbing the stack and piling it back in the drawer. We scuttled out of Aunt Vivienne's bedroom and into Starr's. My mother put her head around the door as soon as we'd sat down. Her eyes looked red around the rims, like she had a cold.

"It's time to go, Tallie," she said.

Starr gave me a look and put her finger on her lips. We giggled again.

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Excerpted from The Artificial Anatomy of Parks by Kat Gordon. Copyright © 2015 Kat Gordon. Excerpted by permission of Legend Times Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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