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Part 3 of 3 — The Road After
Something I still don't fully understand.
The encounters in this book didn't happen as I've described them. Not in the way stories like to pretend that life arranges itself into neat, cinematic encounters. George, the nurse, and Henry are not courtroom witnesses; they are story-shapes my mind reuses because they can carry unbearable truth across the boundary without dropping it.
John and I met again in the late 1980s, in circumstances so ordinary they barely deserve a sentence. No mist. No compartments. No impossible faces from 1975. Just two men who had once shared a summer, recognising each other across the years and falling back into step as if the thread had never snapped.
It was ordinary, and that ordinariness was its own kind of grace.
But the mind doesn't store events in the order they happened.
It stores them in the order they matter. So if a person appears twice, or a year bends, take it as the psyche insisting on a pattern, not the author failing at a timetable.
So I've arranged this road the way memory arranged John: by weight, not by chronology.
And when I think of John now, it is the 1975 Cornwall holiday version and the 1999 train version that return, the boundary layer versions, the impossible versions, the moments that feel truer than the truth.
The ordinary John isn't erased; he's simply quieter in the archive than the versions lit by grief. Because the real ending wasn't a twist. It was a sequence.
The 1994 operation left me with a metal heart valve, and with the uneasy knowledge that the body keeps its own counsel. I returned to work in 1995 and a few years later, on a lunch break by the Thames, the world briefly unhooked. I became confused, disoriented, unable to place myself. The doctors couldn't agree whether it was PTSD or a TIA. The body went on. Then 2001 arrived.
I woke up feeling ill and went to the cardiology department expecting reassurance. They wouldn't let me leave. The metal valve was leaking, and the day narrowed to waiting rooms, consent forms, and the familiar drift toward theatre lights. A second operation followed: the metal valve replaced with another, slightly larger one.
In the same year, 2001, John died in a motorcycle accident. It wasn't meaningful in the way stories like to pretend, only final. The news reached our house before it reached me. I didn't know. Ann did.
She held the news like a fragile object, afraid that if she put it in my hands too soon it would shatter something vital, inside me, or inside the surgeon's careful work. So she waited. And when I woke in recovery, drifting up through anaesthetic fog with the world still soft at the edges, she told me.
She told me gently, quietly, as if the words themselves needed to be handled with care. John was gone. Two hearts stopped, in their own ways, in the same year. One repaired and restarted. One stopped forever.
The 2001 operation was successful in that my heart's function was normal. Unfortunately, scar tissue around the valve was causing turbulence and paravalvular leakage which together were damaging my red blood cells as they passed through, mechanical haemolysis. From 2001 until 2014 I was suffering from chronic anaemia which meant work was impossible. Numerous attempts were made to repair the leakage percutaneously, by inserting devices next to the valve. The devices were deployed by pushing them through a tube inserted into an artery in the leg or the arm. By 2014 I had six of these devices positioned around the metal valve.
In 2008, whilst in hospital for a blood transfusion, episodes of complete heart block were recorded on an electrocardiogram, and a pacemaker device was immediately implanted.
I lost sight in the upper half of my right eye. The consultant said, "The hemianopia is probably cardioembolic". A TIA, a mini stroke.
In 2014, I underwent a third operation, placed on heart bypass, heart stopped again. The metal heart valve was removed along with the devices around it, and a new bioprosthetic valve was inserted. The valve itself uses bovine tissue. "Whatever you do, try not to moo". This operation took eight hours, but the leakage, and the anaemia were cured.
In 2016, I collapsed at home. Ann called the ambulance.
The ambulance crew detected ventricular tachycardia on an electrocardiogram. I was taken to hospital, and the pacemaker was replaced with a CRT-D (Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy and Defibrillator) device.
In the early 2020s, I underwent seven and a half weeks of radical radiotherapy to cure prostate cancer, and it seems to have been successful. During the diagnosis, it was discovered that I have a hereditary condition called Paget's Disease of Bone.
Over the years, a small constellation of consultants has gathered around me: cardiology, nephrology, haematology, oncology, endocrinology. Each one is another reminder that the body is both astonishing and fallible. Travel insurance is out of reach now, but I don't feel deprived by that. I love the UK. I love the life Ann and I have made, and the family that grew inside it. Life is an amazing journey. And I love the road, wherever it leads.
Sometimes, in the quiet between one day and the next, I can still hear it: that low, steady hum of a train at a platform, the sound of a journey about to begin. It isn't time travel. It's memory, doing what it does, looping back, not to change what happened, but to remind me what mattered.
And when the carriage doors open, I try to step through with both feet.
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