doesn’t feel bad enough having a bad heart without having to be a walking ad for the wonders of modern science? She’s a seven-year-old girl, for Christ’s sake! You can talk to all the effing reporters when the time comes. She doesn’t have to do it.”
“It’s better if she doesn’t have to be hidden away,” Daddy said. “It’s better if she can speak for herself. If she understands what’s going on, she’ll be able to cope with all the questions, and the prejudices of idiots won’t upset her.”
It wasn’t easy to figure out who won the argument, but at least they didn’t force her to take sides. By the time they all had to sit down to eat dinner, the row had dwindled away into a frosty silence. Chloe didn’t mind frosty silences; they were generally less taxing than polite conversations. The next day, though, Daddy took her to see the piglet yet again, while Mummy fretted and fumed at home.
* * * *
The last time Chloe saw the pig that had her heart it certainly wasn’t a damn piglet any more. It was bigger and heavier than she was, although that was partly because she was even thinner than usual just then. She hadn’t been well, and had missed a whole week of school. Christmas had come and gone and “next year” had become “this year,” which wasn’t a distant prospect at all.
The pig that had her heart was lean and lively; it didn’t look at all like the chubby pigs in her picture-books. Its hide was far rougher now, and its once-soft ears were now so bristly that Chloe had begun to understand why people sometimes said that you couldn’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. The pig looked as if it ought to have been out of doors, rooting around in a field, but it was still kept indoors, and not in the shed either. It had a run in a windowless basement lit by harsh striplights, where everything was just as clean as it had been in the old lab.
Chloe wasn’t allowed to touch the pig this time; she just stood at one end of the run and watched it from behind the bars. It galloped up to see her, and she could tell that it really did recognize her. It knew that it had seen her before, that she had visited it regularly since it was very tiny. It didn’t know, of course, that it had her heart, but it knew that there was something between the two of them, that they weren’t just strangers.
“You don’t have to worry about her, Chloe” the man in the white coat said to her, gently. “She won’t feel a thing. She’ll just go to sleep and never wake up. She’s had a better life than most living creatures—better than most people. You mustn’t be sad for her.”
If I’m made of all the things I’ve eaten, Chloe thought, as she looked at the mashed cereals and mixed vegetables that were just then being poured into the pig’s trough, then even the bits of me that aren’t made directly from vegetables are made from second-hand vegetables. But what are vegetables made of? Soil and water? I’m mud, really, and my heart’s mud too. All mud, eaten once or eaten twice.
“It won’t do any harm for her to be a little bit sentimental,” Daddy said to the scientist. “It’s only right that she should know what’ll happen—that her life will only be saved by virtue of the sacrifice of another living creature. Her mother wants to hide it all from her, but I want her to understand, and that’s what Chloe wants too. Every seven-year-old wants to understand everything. I did. I still do.”
“I don’t want to go into hospital,” Chloe said, although she knew full well that it wouldn’t do any good.
“I know you don’t, Beauty,” Daddy said. “Nobody ever does. But the doctors have to make you better. The doctors have to put your new heart inside your body, before the old one gives up altogether. We all want you to get better, don’t we?”
The pig was already tucking into the food that had been put into its trough. It ate greedily, just like a pig was supposed to. Chloe was glad to see that it had a good appetite. After all, it was her heart that was filling the pig with such energy, such enthusiasm. When she got her new heart, that would become her energy, her enthusiasm.
“I want to play football,” she said contemplatively, “for Queen’s Park Rangers.”
Daddy and the scientist laughed. “That’s what comes of moving down south for the sake of work,” her father said.
“It could be worse,” the man in the white coat observed. “She might want to play for Millwall.”
* * * *
After the operation she was in hospital for weeks on end. She missed a whole half-term of school, which was good. She knew that when she went back the other kids would be ready and waiting, avid to chant: “Chloe has a pig’s heart! Chloe has a pig’s heart” now that it was true. Except, of course, that it wasn’t really true. She had her own heart, lovingly designed by her own genes, without the flaw that had spoiled the one she had been born with.
“Soon,” Mummy told her, as the day of her release finally approached, “you’ll be able to go anywhere you like. “You’ll be able to run fast, and climb, and do anything you want.”
“Except play for Queen’s Park Rangers,” Daddy put in, because he liked private jokes.
“This is a new beginning,” Mummy said, making a big show out of ignoring him. “This is the real beginning of your whole life.”
“And you owe it all to science,” Daddy said, “and to the other Chloe.”
“I do wish you’d forget all that, Mike,” Mummy said, petulantly. “And I do wish you wouldn’t keeping calling the damn pig the other Chloe. What are you trying to do, give the poor kid a complex?”
“It’s you who’s trying to give her a complex,” Daddy retorted. Chloe hoped that they weren’t going to ask her to decide which one of them was giving her a complex, because she really didn’t know.
“She’s just a little girl, Mike,” Mummy said. “I’m her mother, for Christ’s sake!”
“She’s not just a little girl,” Daddy insisted. “She’s our little girl—not to mention a miracle of modern science, and a heroine of the genetic revolution.”
“I don’t want her to be a scientific miracle and a heroine of the genetic revolution,” Mummy said. “I want her to be a little girl like any other little girl, who doesn’t get made fun of by her schoolmates, and who doesn’t get doorstepped by tabloid journalists, and who doesn’t have to have her head full of morbid fantasies about pigs.”
“You can’t always get what you want,” Daddy pointed out, “and there’s no way we can armor her against the curiosity of the world—but we can make sure that she doesn’t have any morbid fantasies, and the way we can do that is to make sure she understands exactly what’s happened to her, and how, and why.”
“The nurse said she had a nightmare only the other day,” Mummy reported, resentfully.
“All kids have nightmares,” Daddy said, flatly. “Did you have a nightmare, darling? What was it about?”
“I don’t remember,” Chloe said, truthfully, fearing that the truth might not suffice.
“It’s okay, Lovely,” Mummy said, putting a reassuring arm around her shoulder. “You’ll be home soon, and everything will be all right, won’t it?”
“Yes it will,” said Daddy. “Everything.”
Later, when they had gone off in the car—not fighting exactly, but not really speaking to one another either—Chloe thought about the pig. She knew that Daddy wanted her to think about the pig and Mummy didn’t, but she didn’t feel that she was taking sides because she couldn’t not think about the pig without thinking about it. Anyway, she couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to the rest of the pig now that they’d taken out her heart.
Presumably, it would all be bacon and sausages by now, and if they’d left a little bit of her behind when they’d cut out the heart, that would be sausages too—and through being sausages, might eventually end up being a little bit of someone