Tote

Jacob Melville carried a flint of quartz in his heart, nuzzled up against the outer lining of the pericardium. Stuck like gum. The doctors identified it, discussed it, and sent Jacob on his way, swaddled in slumber and love and a defective heart.

When he could, he told people about it. He parroted his parents’ explanation to his friends, his acquaintances, his teachers and doctors. “My heart is wearing a diamond,” he said, and they smiled and laughed and patted his head. He clapped at their humour, repeating the wordDiamond, diamond, diamondlike his own, personal monologue.

Sally, who was ten with a mouthful of braces, said, “Is your heart going to get married?”

“I suppose so,” said Jacob. “I suppose it would get married to another heart,” and he laughed at the thought. In class that day he made a Crayola drawing of a plump, red heart wearing a wedding veil, with a big smile across its left ventricle. He stuck out his tongue while drawing, leaning close to the paper like he did when following marching ants around the paving stones of his back garden.

He showed the picture to his friends, who laughed, and to Sally, who said it was very life-like.

“She’s a girl,” Sally pointed out. Jacob nodded. “Who is she getting married to?”

Jacob clutched the drawing in his left hand all the way home, and set to work on its first revision straight after dinner. He squeezed a second, smaller heart into the white, blank space to the right of the Girl-Heart. He gave this one a top hat, and showed it to Sally on the very next day of school.

“He’s the groom,” he said, and spelled out the word. “Groom. It’s the man in the wedding. He gave her the diamond.”

Sally thumbed her chin, her brow furrowed. “He doesn’t have his diamond anymore,” she said.

“Oh,” said Jacob. “Well, they’re married now, so he still has it,” he said carefully, thinking it over. “It’s just that she’s keeping it safe for him.”

Sally accepted this with a nod and a smile.


On the second-to-last day of school, before the barbeque round the back of the terrapin huts, Jacob presented Sally with the drawing, which he had slipped into a clear, plastic envelope. “It’s only a silly thing, but,” he shrugged, itching the back of his neck awkwardly.

Sally accepted it with a soft smile and a “Thank you.” She was moving to the outskirts of the city centre, having got into the Perivale Independent School on three points. Jacob had missed out on four, and attended the local secondary on Collier Street from that September. He lost touch with Sally, although without quite realising it, and made new friends. He forgot to tell any of them about the diamond inside his heart, except for Gwen, who said she was his girlfriend, and drew him pastel pictures.

“You can get it removed, you know”. They were sitting out on the field, idly watching several of the Sixth Formers play football. “There’s all sorts of procedures. My uncle had a gall stone removed. He’s got it in a jar in the kitchen. Auntie Millie says she’ll mistake it for a raisin one of these days.”

“I can’t take it out,” Jacob said, touching a hand to the left of his breast. He had never been told the position of his heart, and would not have believed it if he had.

“Why not? There’s all sorts of procedures.”

“I just can’t,” he said, and looked away, out towards the players tussling in the mud and the wind.

He ate his lunch, sharing a sandwich with Gwen, and thought about a doctor taking out his diamond. The doctor, dressed in a surgeon’s gown with his face obscured by a creased mask, held the little circle aloft in a pair of forceps. He dropped it into a dish with a dull clink. “Done and dusted,” he said, and the nurses around him smiled and nodded.

April came and went. Jacob kissed Gwen under the apple tree by the tennis courts, and they held hands in the following week, before Jacob stopped seeing her. When she asked him for a reason, he could only shrug and pepper his mumbled sentences with “just”s and “but”s until she stormed away.

In his heart, he felt his diamond shine.

He attended college in Bristol, and kept his head down. In his first summer he visited Ireland with his mother, and fell for a girl called Bliss, who lived in Clevedon. He visited on odd weekends, and on a cold November evening she became his first, although he was not hers. He called her beautiful, which she accepted with good grace, and he liked to tousle his fingers through her dark hair. He wanted to write a song about her, but never found the time or the aptitude, and in time the desire passed.

“I used to tell people it was a diamond,” he said. They were lying in the bed of their first flat, a shared accommodation with four other students of the UWE, and Bliss was tracing what she felt was the outline of his heart through his ribcage. They were both bare chested. “I told everybody.”

“It’s nice,” she said. “Romantic.”

“It’s quartz,” Jacob said. “Nobody really knows how it got there, only that it might have been some kind of ingested mineral deposit. Exterior. It’s just a tiny shard, hardly even noticeable.”

“It’s nice,” she said lazily, and in time slipped into sleep on his chest, her head rising and falling with his shallow breathing.


He had the first coughing fit four days later. Within a month, his mother scheduled a hospital appointment for him. Bliss, who had a license since she was nineteen, drove him to the Royal Infirmary. The doctor’s name was Allen, with a receding hairline and a tall brow.

“Quartz dust,” he said, pacing the room while Jacob sat on the edge of the bed. Bliss was in the waiting room. “Very fine. Miners suffer with it sometimes. There’s a very long medical name I won’t bore you with, but it’s probably safe to say silicosis. You say you’ve had this from birth?”

“Yes,” said Jacob.

“Frankly, this shouldn’t be happening now. Your body should either have reacted well before this, or your immune system should have already dealt with it and moved on.” He shook his head and tut-tutted in the manner of a man thinking about the paperwork. “I’ll schedule you in.”

Jacob frowned. “In for what?”

“The operation,” Doctor Allen said. “Your little diamond in the rough needs to go.”


The years came and went with jobs and friends, and Jacob returned to study in Wales, picking up on his love of art, although renewing his passion in the corridors of academia seemed somehow to dilute it, like a watercolour run thin.

He saw Sally once more, in a chance encounter in the middle of a busy street in Cardiff. Her hair was dyed straw blonde, although Jacob recognised her instantly. They exchanged flurried hellos and stumbled into a brief hug. “How are you?” she asked him. “How have you been?”

“I’m fine,” he said, and let her talk about her life. She was into architecture, and engaged to a nurse. She showed Jacob the ring; a simple, burnished band of gold circling her heart finger.

“It’s not a diamond,” she said, with a smile. Jacob nodded. She tapped him on the chest and asked him how his diamond was doing.

“It’s fine,” he said, and that was that. He watched Sally meander off along the street, feeling slightly bemused, and wandered home, lost in his own little daydream. He was sharing a studio flat with a fellow Arts student, who never did his dishes, and was anyway usually out of town.

Jacob entered the sitting area and tossed his coat over the television, which was hardly ever used anyway. He crossed to the thin shelf next to the kitchen door and retrieved the glass, screw top jar stowed at one end of a pile of obscure text books. It clinked as he handled it, carrying it across to the settee. He sat, bringing the jar to eye level, and observed the little hunk of mineral as he jangled the jar back and forth.

It was tiny, a speck of clustered crystalline fluff that never quite caught the light. The word “diamond” didn’t seem to apply. It had felt new, and old, on Sally’s lips.

As he observed the little flint, Jacob remembered the picture he had drawn, long ago, of a Girl-Heart and of a Boy-Heart, made in crayon. He realised he had not asked Sally about it, but dismissed the thought a moment later. She would probably not even have remembered it.

He stood, carefully carried the jar back to its circle on the dusty shelf, and went into the kitchen to finish off the washing up.