‘The Two of Hearts’ by Niall McArdle

The birthmark was small but unmissable, a heart-shaped rash-red bump placed precisely over the pulse on the right side of my neck. ‘She has her heart in her throat,’ my mother always said. It throbbed at me every morning in the bathroom mirror, and I was always aware when people stared at it. Did they think, as I sometimes did, that the heart was a second self inside me, all that was left of a twin I’d killed inside my mother’s belly?

I tried to imagine life with a twin. Would we have been best of friends, speaking in a language only we could understand? Or would we have always been at each other’s throats, fighting over toys and boys?

The other children used to look at me strangely, their eyes always wandering to my neck. They called me The Two of Hearts. As nicknames go, it could have been worse. But still I took to wearing scarves and high collars. I was terrified no boy would want to go with me because of my heart, but I hadn’t reckoned on their intrepid spirits. Getting off with me became a dare, and afterwards the boy would face an interrogation. What does it feel like? Is she ticklish there? Does she get, you know, excited when you touch it?

Later, with men, my heart was a place on my body that obsessed them. One man told me that he dreamed my heart was bleeding down my throat.

- I kissed and lapped it up. When I woke up I could still taste your blood. It was sweet like a strawberry.

I had another lover who was an artist. He painted my portrait with the heart outsized and monstrous, an enormous grim beast fastened to my neck.

- It doesn’t define you. Of course not. You are so much more than it. But I can’t ignore it. If a man has a big nose, am I to paint him with a button nose just to please him? Your heart is, well, it’s yours, it’s a part of you, and I want to celebrate you.

- But you made it so big, so frightening. It doesn’t look anything like that. You made me look like something out of a horror film.

He insisted it was how he sometimes saw me.

- Some mornings I wake up and it’s right there beside me. I can’t unsee it.

I left him soon after that and started wearing scarves again.

I had a habit of reaching for it when I was nervous, like it was a talisman. I hated that others figured out my tell so easily, and I worked hard to stop doing it.

I am tall and have a thin neck, which didn’t help at all. And I am pale: the heart’s redness against my skin made it stand out like a traffic light, visible from yards away. And when I went to the sun and got a tan, it was even worse. My heart coloured differently to the rest of me: I grew brown but it became rusty.

I thought about getting a tattoo that would disguise it as something else, the body of a turtle, say. My sisters weren’t much help. Liz, the smartarse, wanted to make it even more noticeable.

- You could have a little Cupid beside it. Better yet, you could get them to put the word BREAKER below it.

Jane, she’s the oldest, she’s supposed to be the sensible one. Her idea was a little better.

A little better.

- I think you should have the word THE above it and IS A LONELY HUNTER underneath.

When I first met Tom, I was relieved that although he glanced at my heart, his eyes quickly went back to my face. He never commented on it or paid it any notice, and when we were in bed his fingers and mouth and teeth and tongue explored every part of me except my heart. He avoided it on purpose. We’d been together three months, moony and still eagerly pawing each other, before I asked him why.

We were getting dressed to go out. He was zipping up my dress when his hand accidentally brushed my heart. He felt me flinch and heard the tiny hush of my breath.

- Sorry, he said. His hand was resting on my shoulder. He was biting his lip.

- It’s ... it’s okay. You just surprised me is all. You never ...

- Yeah, I know. I thought maybe you wouldn’t like it. Or maybe that it’d hurt or something.

- Hurt?

- Is your skin not tender there, I mean.

Once he understood that he could touch my heart without fear of harming me, kissing it became a ritual for him. He would stand behind me and drop his mouth to my throat like a bird dipping its beak to feed. Often he did this as I was looking at myself in the mirror, so that while he was nibbling at my heart I was presented with the reflection of his hair slicked back on his head, and couldn’t help but think of him as a vampire. It made me wonder what had become of my painter and his portrait.

- I think. I love. This part. Of you. The most, Tom said between kisses.

- Really?

- Oh yeah, yeah, it’s grand, yeah. Brilliant.

He has that way of speaking hurriedly as if he’s always in a rush to finish his thoughts, the words crashing into each other yet still carefully enunciated, filled with round vowels and soft endings, marking him clearly as an old boy from one of the posh rugby schools. He has the body of a former rugby player too, all knotted muscle and massive thighs, broad at the shoulder, tapered at the waist. He’ll probably run to fat after forty, I thought, as I let him pull me to the floor and press himself on top of me, his tongue delicately tracing the outline of my heart.

- Two hearts, he said. Just think, if you had three more of these you’d have a straight flush.

- I think I’m going to have it removed.

His face crumpled like a child who breaks his toy on Christmas morning.

- Ah no. It isn’t a blemish. It completes you.

- Jesus.

- No, listen, I love it, yeah? And I love it because it’s yours. Why would you want to get rid of it?

- You just answered your own question. It’s mine. That’s the thing. Yeah, it’s a part of me. But so is my hair. You didn’t say anything when I got a new haircut.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah, but. Again the rush of words that sounded like he was agreeing but was just another way of disagreeing, to talk over me and smother me with positivity that was really a No Way.

- But what?

- Your hair will grow back.

I pushed him off and stood up, straightening my dress and smoothing my hair. I caught my heart in the mirror again. It pulsed angrily at me.

Tom and I didn’t just talk about my heart. We did other things, too, all the usual stuff that couples do. We trawled furniture shops and antique shops and hardware shops. We picked out paint colours, or I did, anyway, while he glanced away from the football long enough to go yeah-yeah-yeah-brilliant -grand. We went to dinner parties at our friends’ places and said nice things about the furniture and the kitchen and the food and the baby, and then came home relieved we weren’t any of our friends. On Sundays we went for ambitious mountain hikes that quickly became easy hill walks that always ended up at a pub. We drank too much, and sometimes not enough.

We would sit in the park and watch children playing. We didn’t go there just to see kids, you understand, but somehow we always found ourselves sitting on a bench near the playground. Neither of us spoke. The expression on Tom’s face was a mystery to me at those moments, and every now and again I would catch him smiling slightly. Once a toddler kicked a ball in our direction and came humping over to collect it. Tom jumped up to stop the ball, tapping it between his feet before gently kicking it towards the child and calling him a regular little Messi.

He kissed my heart. We didn’t have the talk, the one you’re supposed to have before you get serious, the talk that needs more than yeah-yeah-yeah-brilliant-grand. He blew gently on my heart. We were being careful. He pressed his mouth over my heart. We were taking precautions. He licked my heart. Do you think we could? He caressed my heart. We should probably decide. He inhaled my heart. I don’t know if I’m ready. He bit my heart. If we’re ready. He suckled my heart like an infant at his mother’s breast.

I sat on the toilet and peed on the stick and waited. The little blue cross glowered at me.

Tom borrowed books about babies and childcare from the library. He lectured me on what I should eat and how much exercise I should get. We had long discussions about folic acid. Who the hell seriously talks for an hour about folic acid? He kept an eye on me. He was very sweet, and I should have been happy because for the first time he started really pulling his weight around the house, insisting I put my feet up and rest while he did the dishes or sorted the laundry or did the hoovering. He got weirdly obsessed with the hoover – the thought of me bending over had him panicked, I think, for fear I would somehow harm the baby. I was forbidden to go near the thing.

The baby. We never even talked about it in those terms. It was always Junior, the little one, or our future lord and master.

After I lost Junior, Tom cried. He cried a lot. He feels guilty, the way that men often do when something they had no control over happens, because they convince themselves that if they’d had a hand in things, nothing bad would ever happen and they’d be there always to save the day.

- We can try again, he said. When you’re ready. There’s no rush. I love you.

He pressed his head into my shoulder and blubbered and snuffled and dripped tears and snot all over my heart. I stood in the bathroom looking at my newly slackening belly. I put my fingers to my throat. My heart beat a message in Morse: N.O. N.O. N.O.

Soon after I stopped my heart with a laser. The surgeon said the procedure was simple and quick, and he cut out my heart when I was on my lunch break. There was ointment to help the scar heal better. The heart left only its shadow, a slight echo of its shape.

Tom insists that he still loves where my heart used to be, but I know that when he presses down on me and hugs me tightly and pushes himself inside me in his yeah-yeah-yeah-brilliant-grand way that he wishes that one morning he’ll wake beside me to find my heart miraculously restored.

I still glance at the place it was when I look in the mirror. My long neck is officially improved by its absence, but when I put my fingers on my pulse, I can still feel my heart beating faintly, and every beat sounds like a tiny hiccoughing sob.

From issue 4: spring/summer 2017

About the Author
Niall McArdle’s work has appeared in The Irish Times, Spontaneity, The Honest Ulsterman and Phoenix Irish Short Stories, and broadcast on RTÉ Radio. He has been shortlisted for the Hennessy Literary Awards and the Francis MacManus Short Story Competition.