Tiny Pieces of Us

by Nicky Pellegrino

Genres: Women's Fiction; General Fiction

Synopsis

'Heartrending and compelling' JOJO MOYES on Recipe for Life

My heart is less than 1% of my body, it weighs hardly anything; it is only a tiny piece of me, yet it is the part everyone finds most interesting.

Vivi Palmer knows what it's like to live life carefully. Born with a heart defect, she was given a second chance after a transplant, but has never quite dared to make the most of it. Until she comes face-to-face with her donor's mother, Grace, who wants something in return for Vivi's second-hand heart: her help to find all the other people who have tiny pieces of her son.

Reluctantly drawn into Grace's mission, Vivi's journalist training takes over as one by one she tracks down a small group of strangers. As their lives intertwine Vivi finds herself with a new kind of family, and by finding out more about all the pieces that make up the many parts of her, Vivi might just discover a whole new world waiting for her...

Readers are loving Tiny Pieces of Us:

'Warning! You will need tissues. Absolutely beautiful'

'Emotional and thought-provoking'

'Couldn't put it down!'

'Made me laugh, made me cry'

'Full of sensitivity, warmth and love'

Release date: May 25, 2021

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

How it begins …

Jamie can’t wait to get home. Normally after school he likes to hang out with his friends – kick a ball around, share a carton of fries, have a laugh – until the very last minute when he pedals as fast as he can to be back home in time for dinner.

Today a good thing happened and Jamie is excited about seeing the look on his mum’s face when he tells her. She doesn’t even know he applied for the scholarship. It seemed better not to mention it as there was so much competition and he assumed he didn’t stand a chance. Jamie worked really hard on the application. He explained all the reasons he wanted to do the summer school in robotics, describing the dreams he had for his future. Some day he hoped to design super-cool bionic arms and legs, so cool that kids who weren’t amputees would be sorry they couldn’t have one. Jamie had filled a notebook with drawings of his ideas but there was so much he needed to learn and he couldn’t wait to get started.

His mum is going to be really pleased. She is always telling him he can do anything he sets his mind to. He is sure she would have found the money to pay for the summer school if he had asked. But Jamie didn’t want that. Not that they are poor exactly but his mum spends very little on herself, saving to buy things for him instead – the mountain bike for his last birthday, the trip to London to visit the science museum, his new iPhone. It seems important that he shouldn’t always be asking for more. He is sixteen now and wants her to know that she doesn’t have to worry about him all the time. So when he heard about the scholarship he put in an application and hoped for the best. He didn’t believe it when the computer science teacher told him he had been chosen. Like, he really didn’t believe it. But it is official; he has a letter now to prove it. It is tucked inside the school bag he wears slung around his shoulders as he cycles home along Cowley Road in a hurry to show it to his mother.

It has been raining and the tarmac is glossy but Jamie has all the proper safety gear; a helmet, a high-vis vest and really good lights for his bike. His mum insisted on it. She seems to worry more than other mothers do, probably because there’s only the two of them. Jamie used to wish his dad hadn’t walked out when he was a kid, and that he had a brother or sister maybe, but now he kind of likes the way things are. His friends seem to have endless whinges about their families. Little sisters are annoying, big brothers are bullies and parents are always spoiling things. Jamie gets on with his mum mostly. In the evenings they watch television together and on weekends she always has time to drive him wherever he wants to go. She isn’t one of those mothers who is always getting upset, going on and on about things, or even worse, shouting. Jamie can’t remember the last time they argued.

He wonders what she has planned for their dinner. Maybe when she hears his good news she will decide to take him out for a celebration instead. Just McDonald’s; it is his favourite place, and always where he asks to go when she wants to treat him.

Jamie pumps the pedals of his bike, flying along the busy road towards home. It isn’t a particularly long ride and it is pretty flat. On the weekend he might get his mum to drive him out to a mountain biking trail so he can have a proper blast. He wants to get fitter and stronger, perhaps even do some races. He loves the feeling of his heart and muscles working to power the bike forwards, faster and faster. It would be great to have a go at a few jumps too; he has heard there are some in the Shotover Woods. Maybe she will drive him there then they can go to Pizza Express afterwards because his mum really likes the American Hot with the spicy pepperoni and jalapeño peppers.

She is going to be so proud of him; Jamie can’t wait. He plans to give her the envelope and not tell her what is inside. She will probably think it is another boring school letter; details of new gear he needs or a parent/teacher appointment. She will tell him to leave it on the kitchen bench for her to look at later and wonder why he is so insistent that she read it right away. He imagines her surprise when she sees that her son has won a scholarship; out of all the kids who applied he was the one who was chosen. This is his lucky day, thinks Jamie.

The road is slick and wet, and a car is making a clumsy right turn through the heavy traffic. Jamie realises the driver hasn’t noticed him and he brakes hard but too late. His last thought is that this is going to hurt, then the impact, then nothing. He doesn’t see the shocked bystanders, one of them crying softly as she kneels down and takes his hand, waiting for the ambulance somebody has called. The lights, the sirens, the paramedics checking vital signs, the race to the hospital, Jamie isn’t aware of any of it. His heart is still beating but his life has ended.

Later on his mother will find the letter tucked carefully into the school bag that has been returned to her. It will be a long time before she opens it though. Not until well after the days and nights in hospital when the miracle everyone is praying for never happens. Not until after the hardest decision of all, the one that still wakes her up in the middle of the night filling her with an awful mix of regret and panic.

Jamie is breathing with the help of a ventilator when she says goodbye to him. They tell her not to feel rushed, she can stay as long as she likes. But no time will ever be enough, how could it be? She sits very close as Jamie breathes in and out. She can’t quite let go of the last of her hope, but he is gone, this is what they keep saying. Her boy with all his energy and brightness and life. It seems impossible; it is too huge a thing and she can’t take it in. She doesn’t want to.

For years the school bag stays on the desk in his room. She dusts around it from time to time, but touches nothing, assuming she knows exactly what is inside. The iPhone Jamie was so proud of, the notebook he was always scribbling in, his dented old laptop, schoolbooks, a few pens, coins. The bag sits there until its fabric starts to fade slightly from the sunlight that pours through the window. She isn’t sure what makes her pick it up one day, sit down on his bed and empty out its contents.

These are all the familiar things that Jamie touched everyday. She leafs through a notebook full of complicated diagrams, glances at the dark screen of his phone, opens the laptop and rests her fingers on the worn keys. Finding a slim envelope deep in one of the bag’s pockets, she tears into it and starts to read.

Grace hadn’t thought it was possible to feel any worse than she already did. But now she reads the letter and sees it all; the life Jamie should have had, the future he was cheated out of, everything that has been lost, all those beautiful dreams.

Her son is gone and she is broken. Mostly what she wants is to be gone now too. Grace longs to curl into herself, disappear, be nothing at all; it would be such a relief.

The only thing that has ever made her feel slightly better is knowing that out there somewhere Jamie’s heart is still beating, that his death meant other people had a future. She thinks about the ones that have tiny pieces of him inside them, about the stranger who sees the world through his eyes, and most of all, the one who was gifted his brave heart. She wonders about them, what their dreams were and if they are making the most of their chance to live them. At times it makes her angry – they got so much, Jamie lost everything – but often it helps just a little. Right now it seems to make no difference at all.

Grace wants all of this to be over.



































Vivi

London, spring 2017

My heart is less than one per cent of my body, it weighs hardly anything; it is only a tiny piece of me yet it is the part that everyone finds most interesting, even me. Whenever I wake in the middle of the night, with one of those 3 a.m. spikes of anxiety, it is my heart I reach for first. Is it beating properly? Is one thud following another, slow and steady, or is it skittering a little, out of rhythm, is it about to fail me? I press my hand against my chest and feel each soft resting beat and it always takes a while before I am reassured enough to think of sleeping again. For now, everything is as it should be. For now, there is nothing I need to worry about.

I was born with a heart that couldn’t be trusted to pump my blood properly. In and out of hospital, fainting at school, always exhausted; I was the child who couldn’t go places or do things, the sick kid, the special one, the girl who was going to die young.

Growing up with a body that keeps letting you down isn’t much fun. People feel sorry for you but they must resent you too. My sister put up with years of me getting the best of everything – all the attention, the biggest bedroom, the nicest presents – while the doctors bought me time. First drugs, then a pacemaker and finally they put in a mechanical pump to keep my failing heart going while I was on the waiting list for a transplant. No one expected to keep me for long; it was an unspoken thing but somehow I knew it. So for years I got everything I wanted, until at last I got someone else’s heart.

I have tried not to think of him, the kid who died so I could live. I didn’t want to imagine a screeching of brakes or the crash of a car accident, sirens, shocked bystanders, a still, bleeding body. I never wanted to know his name, or where he came from or how sad his family was. All of that was too much. Once I knew I had a future, it seemed better not to look back.

My mother called it a miracle; that was how we all thought of it. In the beginning everyone was focused on me recovering from the transplant surgery. There was a scare when my body started rejecting the new heart, so they had to fill me with steroids and that fixed things, although I still have to take drugs and be really careful. I was in hospital for ages and when I finally got home we had this big party with all the family and neighbours coming through and everyone telling me the same thing, ‘You’ve got your whole life ahead of you now.’

Not a single person mentioned him, the boy whose heart I had taken. I suppose they thought it wasn’t appropriate over cups of tea and chocolate cake in a room hung with bunting, not very nice to mention death when I was celebrating being alive.

The transplant nurse encouraged me to write a thank you letter to the donor’s family; she even suggested what to put in it. Keep everything anonymous, mention how grateful you are, describe what it was like before and say how things have changed for the better, offer words of comfort such as, ‘I hope this letter will help you through your loss, because you have helped to save my life.’

I wrote it fast and sealed the envelope, not really considering who would open it and read those words. I was nineteen when I sent that letter. Now seven years have passed and there is nothing wrong with my heart. It just isn’t the one I was born with.

There are scars, of course, but the smaller ones on my neck are fading and the dramatic long one down my chest I keep well covered most of the time. Hardly anyone at work knows, only Dan because we were sleeping together and I had to tell him.



Dan is my boss, an editor on the tabloid newspaper I’ve been working at for the past four years; the one who is always making me interview reality TV stars even though he knows I would rather be working on newsier, investigative pieces. I can’t say no to him, not with the tricky state the print industry is in right now. Probably the only reason I still have a job is that I can turn my hand to pretty much anything – royal rumours, disgraced politicians, soap star weddings. If Dan asks then I write the story. One evening, following after-work drinks at the Prince of Wales pub, he asked for something more and I found myself saying yes to that too, then going back to his place.

Dan was fascinated by my scar, kept touching it with his fingers, putting his hand flat on my chest and feeling my heart beating. And he asked the question anyone else might have shied away from. ‘Whose is it? Who did it belong to?’

‘I don’t know,’ I told him, pushing his hand away and pulling the duvet up to my chin.

‘Seriously?’ He propped himself on one elbow and stared down at me. ‘You’ve got no idea?’

‘It’s all confidential,’ I explained. ‘They don’t tell you anything.’

For a while Dan and I had been having one of those secretive workplace flirtations. We would buy each other coffees and send messages back and forth; it was a way to break up the day, and Dan was a laugh, I liked him. And then there I was lying naked in his bed.

‘Don’t say anything, OK?’ I pleaded, as his fingers strayed back beneath the duvet and traced the long ridge of scar tissue scoring my chest. ‘There’s no need for people to know.’

‘Sure,’ Dan said, too casually.

‘I’ve had all those years of being a sick kid, I just want to be normal now.’

‘Aren’t you curious to find out though? I’d have to know.’

‘You mean who my heart belonged to?’

‘Yeah, it must be possible to get more details. You could start by looking back through the news archives for accidents on dates that match up with your surgery. That would give you some clues.’

Dan was an expert at chasing people down and uncovering stories. It had been his job for years and, when I arrived on the scene as an intern, he devoted a lot of time to showing me how. But this wasn’t just another story, it was my life and I didn’t necessarily want to solve all its mysteries.

‘I could try and find out more about my donor but what good would it do?’ I asked. ‘There’s no point really.’

‘Maybe you’d feel a connection with the family, an emotional link. It might make a really good feature for the weekend paper.’

‘No,’ I said hesitantly, almost testing the word, because it wasn’t one I had used with him before. Then with more certainty, ‘No, I can’t.’

Dan must have assumed he would be able to talk me round. He mentioned it again several times when we were in bed together, or at the pub, or out for dinner and I always gave him the same answer. No way. I was not going to be clickbait for the Daily Post website. There would be no bittersweet video of my first meeting with the donor’s family, no moving first-person piece.

‘Think of all the good it would do. It might encourage readers to register as donors and help other sick kids,’ Dan pointed out.

It was the sort of line he had taught me to use when trying to coax a story from a reluctant interviewee, and I couldn’t believe he was trying it now.

‘I already wrote a big feature for organ donor awareness week,’ I reminded him.

‘Yeah, somebody does one exactly like that every year. Dull, isn’t it? Not likely to stir any feelings or touch a reader’s heart. Your own story could be really powerful.’

‘No,’ I repeated, shaking my head, because even though he was my boss I didn’t think he could make me do this. Briefly, his expression seemed to darken.

By then Dan and me were in a routine where I would spend a few nights a week sleeping over at his place, but still we weren’t officially ‘together’ and at work we were keeping things discreet. I hadn’t pushed for more because I didn’t think I wanted it. Guys like Dan are my unhealthy addiction – like cigarettes or alcohol are for other people: not good for me, a temporary pleasure I ought to give up at some point, just not quite yet.

‘OK Vivi.’ He treated me to a smile that widened into his most mischievous grin. ‘You can’t blame me for trying though.’



One of the things our newspaper is always doing in a bid to boost its readership is launching these big campaigns. In recent months there had been one to tackle loneliness and another to raise funds to pay for a dying woman’s dream wedding. Readers love that sort of thing and Dan was constantly on the hunt for another good cause to back.

It was him who came up with ‘Donate for Life’. Hearing about my transplant must have put the idea in his head and then me reminding him about that article I had written, filled with statistics about the numbers of people needing organs, had got him thinking. Thousands with faulty hearts, kidneys, lungs, livers … some of them dying while they were waiting for new ones. Surely something could be done to help them.

‘I’ve had a brilliant idea,’ he announced. ‘This has to be our next big crusade.’

Newsrooms are quiet places these days. There is no pounding on typewriters or yelling down phones any more, just a lot of people jammed into a large room, all staring at their screens and not saying much. So when Dan spoke up everyone heard and half the office got in on the discussion, with even the editor-in-chief coming over and leaning on the edge of his desk as they brainstormed.

‘In lots of other countries all adults are potential donors unless they opt out,’ Dan explained, ‘but not in England. Here you have to be proactive and sign up to a donor register. Lots of people never get round to doing that. We need to push for a change in the law to bring us in line.’

‘Great, great, this could be huge,’ enthused the editor-in-chief. ‘Find me a good face for the campaign though. A cute-looking kid on the waiting list or someone young and attractive who would have died if they hadn’t got their transplant in time.’

‘Yeah, I’ll get onto it right away,’ promised Dan.

I was hunched behind my computer, trying to look busy. It was often me that was assigned articles like these. I had written the lead piece about the loneliness epidemic and followed the dream wedding story through to its inevitable unhappy ending. Mostly I liked working on those campaigns – it felt as if we were helping make a real difference – but I didn’t want to touch this one.

‘Vivi?’ Dan called.

Looking over the top of my computer screen, I shook my head. ‘Not me, sorry; I’ve got too much other stuff on.’

‘Park what you’re doing, this is more important.’

I couldn’t say no to him in front of everyone. Even if we hadn’t been sleeping together, which added a whole extra layer of complication, a journalist on the Daily Post didn’t refuse to chase up a story. There had been times I had put things on my list then quietly forgotten to get on with them, but that wasn’t going to work this time.

‘OK then, I’ll start hunting out a case study,’ I said, reluctantly.

‘Come on Vivi, forget boring case studies, write me a first-person piece, how a heart transplant changed your life. Knock it out this afternoon and we’ll get a quick shot of you, then we can have it up online tonight and in tomorrow’s paper.’

Everyone was looking my way curiously: the editor-in-chief, the other people at the desks around mine, a couple of sub-editors heading back from the kitchen with their cups of tea.

‘Put loads of emotion into it,’ Dan urged. ‘We need to hear how close you were to death and how thankful you are to the family of the donor. I want our readers smiling through their tears.’

He was talking fast, full of his own brilliance. He may have been good-looking with his shock of fair floppy hair and boyish smile, but right at that moment his charm was missing entirely.

‘This is your opportunity to raise awareness and save lives, Vivi,’ he was saying. ‘Give other sick people the second chance you’ve had.’

The trouble was there was no denying he was right. If a stranger hadn’t given me a healthy heart I wouldn’t have been sitting there at all; my own would have stopped beating years ago. Didn’t other people deserve the same gift of life? Shouldn’t I be helping them if I could?

‘This is a way for you to give something back,’ Dan pushed on, ‘to repay a debt. How can you say no to that?’

‘I suppose I can’t,’ I admitted.

‘Then why are you staring at me like that? Get on with it.’

And so I did. It came out more fluently than I expected, as if the words had always been there in my head ready to flood out onto the page and be a story. Afterwards, feeling slightly stunned, I put on some make-up, swapped my black shirt for another woman’s brighter top, and managed to smile down a photographer’s lens. They even shot some video of me talking about changing the law and saving lives. And when it was all over I went to the Prince of Wales and ordered a large glass of wine.

‘Should you be doing that?’ wondered one of the senior reporters. ‘Don’t you have to take care of your health?’

‘I don’t have a moral obligation not to drink Chardonnay just because I’ve got someone else’s heart,’ I snapped.

‘That’s not what I meant at all,’ she protested, but of course it was.

Dan must have expected me to go home with him that night. He was there at the pub, drinking pints of beer, and he looked surprised when I grabbed my bag and headed off alone. I went to my own place, a tiny rented room in a Victorian bay-fronted villa in Highbury. There was barely enough space for a large single bed and a clothes rack, but mostly I used it as a place to crash so I didn’t particularly care.

That night I slept badly and woke with a headache. Normally I would never ring in sick. I’ve had enough days of resting in bed to last me a lifetime and would rather be at work. But with the thought of my face spread across the pages of the Daily Post, I texted Dan a feeble lie about having a stomach bug, rolled over and tried to go back to sleep. My phone kept ringing and I ignored it for a while but eventually needed to climb out of bed and open a window because the stuffiness of the room was making my headache even worse. I checked the calls I had missed: a couple from Dan, one from my parents, and several from my sister Imogen. Clearly she wasn’t going to give up. The phone rang again and her picture flashed up.

‘So, you’re a celebrity now,’ she said when I answered.

‘It’s only one article.’

‘Vivi’s Law – help our brave reporter Vivi Palmer save the lives of thousands.’

Grabbing my laptop, I checked the Daily Post website. There I was on the home page, forcing a smile and wearing clothes that didn’t suit me. I could hardly bear to read the story. Dan had been late to the pub the evening before and now I saw why. He’d had a good go at rewriting it. In this new version I was a little battler, literally days from death and saying goodbye to the world when miraculously I was saved by the anonymous donor whose family I dreamed of thanking in person some day. My life was devoted to making Vivi’s Law a reality and helping other sick kids have a future.

‘I didn’t write most of this,’ I told Imogen. ‘Shit, it’s terrible.’

‘Well, Mum and Dad love it; they couldn’t be prouder, their little girl helping others.’

‘That’s good … I guess.’

The Daily Post is the third most read online newspaper in the world, everybody looks at it. My dad has the app on his phone and checks for my stories now and then. I hated the thought of him reading this one.

‘They forced me into being the face of the campaign,’ I told Imogen. ‘I’d much rather not have done it.’

‘That’s ridiculous. How could they force you?’

Imogen is married to a lawyer. Since having kids she hasn’t gone back to work because they don’t need the money.

‘I can’t afford to lose my job,’ I pointed out. ‘There’s always talk of redundancies these days. And besides, the campaign might work; it may help save lives.’

‘Mmm,’ she sounded distracted. ‘Farah, Darya, stop that now, you know the cat doesn’t like it. No, she’ll scratch you. What did I say? … oh God, sorry, hope stardom goes well for you, talk soon.’

And my sister was gone.

I had spent the past few years talking other people into sharing their stories. Heartbreak, love, dreams; I had a talent for finding out the most interesting details and crafting them into a feature article or news piece, I prided myself on being good at it. Now I realised how exposed all those interviewees must have felt, and I felt a bit queasy.

A spike alert pinged on my phone to say my story was getting a high number of views. It was quickly followed by a message from Dan telling me to get in sharpish because London Live were sending a crew over to shoot a. . .