Matters of Life and Death
By Victoria MacKenzie
Mouse
Its prettiness takes me by surprise. Its round eyes are shining and alert. Its face is slender, claws delicate and eerily hand-like. It’s almost weightless.
We kill it with a mortar. As in pestle and mortar. As in a small, heavy, granite bowl, usually used for crushing spices.
Afterwards we drink tea and eat digestive biscuits, talking about ethics and reassuring each other that we did the right thing. The mouse had been caught in a trap (who put the trap there, we don’t know. A horrible, inhumane thing, designed to catch and maim, rather than kill outright) and when we took it outside and opened the trap, the creature was alive but could only drag its back legs. Whether or not it was in pain seemed impossible to know, but death was inevitable. A mouse that cannot run cannot live.
Kidney
People said to me, ‘You’re so brave!’
I can assure you: I am not brave.
I have two younger sisters. Sister 1 has had two kidney transplants so far – a cadaver donor (a young Scottish man, killed in a motorbike accident) and a living donor (Hi, Dad!). But now she needs another kidney. Sister 2 and I are tested for compatibility. There are 6 ‘markers’ tested for. Sister 2 is a match for 1 out of 6. Everyone feels despondent. My results come back. I match 6 out of 6.
Of course I could have said no. Everyone said I could say no. Can you imagine saying no? I did not say no.
I had rarely been ill. I had never broken a bone. I had never had an operation or stayed in hospital before. And I am a wimp.
Sister 1 is brave. A veritable lion. Seriously ill all her life, multiple operations, vast quantities of meds to swallow since she was very young. Her disease is genetic. Sister 2 and I were lucky. Sister 1 was not. She never complains.
There are many months of tests (on me) to check I’m well enough for the operation. Losing an organ is not small beans, but it’s also fairly routine in UK hospitals – there are approximately 900 live kidneys donations carried out each year.
I sign lots of disclaimers. I promise not to sue. There are many possible side effects to donating a kidney. One of them is death.
Mouse
When we first released it from the trap, we stood and watched it quiver on the grass. We felt like huge God-like beings in coats and gloves discussing its fate. Isn’t a sudden death always better than a long drawn out agony? Isn’t that what we would wish for ourselves? This is how we reasoned. This is why we decided to kill a creature in cold blood. Surely anyone would say it was the right thing to do in the circumstances?
I couldn’t do it. I can think and reason and decide. I can weigh up different scenarios, different levels of suffering and pain and know what I would choose for myself. Yet for me to bring the granite bowl down on the tiny creature was impossible.
Once, death was a part of life. My grandmother’s grandmother attended the births in her village and also the deaths. She wrapped mewling red-skinned babies in blankets and cut their umbilical cords with sterilised scissors. She laid out the bodies of the newly dead and washed and dressed their cooling flesh. It was nothing to her to wring a chicken’s neck – any hen that stopped laying became a stew. But now, death feels remote. I stand there, knowing what is right, and yet still I cannot do it.
Kidney
We have a meeting with a psychologist. She needs proof we are sisters – we show her old family photos as requested. She checks I’m not donating in exchange for money. That I’m not being coerced. I’m not, unless you count the desire to not see my sister die. It’s quite motivating.
The day before the op, I get the train down from Scotland (where I live) to London. Guy’s Hospital has been taking care of my sister since she was a toddler.
I stay in hospital accommodation with my husband; it’s like grotty student halls. We meet my family for dinner in a pub by the river. I have a chicken pie. I wonder if it will be my last meal. I struggle to eat. Yes, I am afraid. Tomorrow I will be sliced open and my kidney removed. Ha, ha, ha! I don’t actually believe it.
In bed I finishing reading The Shooting Party by Isabel Colgate. I’m glad to have finished it, I hate the thought of dying mid-book.
The morning of the op I present myself to the ward at 7am. I am jittery. I overcompensate by being perky. No doubt this is irritating to my loved ones, but no one is going to criticise me today.
Then suddenly fear feels like leadenness. I weigh three hundred tonnes. I can scarcely move.
A doctor draws on my stomach with marker pen, indicating which kidney is to be taken. Although kidneys sit at the back of our bodies, either side of the spine, going in through the back is more dangerous. They are taking my best one; it’s in a slightly easier position for removal.
Mouse
We knew that, whatever we did to the mouse, we did not want to be guilty of callousness. ‘Callous’ – hardened, insensitive, a patch of tough skin on a hardworking hand. Perhaps that’s why we stood around talking about it for so long. To take the mouse outside and bash it on the head without a discussion might have seemed thoughtless. But, of course, in our fear of seeming callous, we prolonged the mouse’s suffering for a few minutes.
Kidney
My mum offers to come with me to theatre, to be with me until the general anaesthetic takes effect, but I shake my head. I will go to this, whatever ‘this’ is, by myself. Anyway, I’m already dead.
The hospital porter is jovial. It feels odd to be lying down already as I’m pushed down a corridor. I am, after all, in excellent health. He asks where I live; when I tell him he offers that he has been to Paisley. I’ve never been to Paisley. Now I think: Perhaps I never will.
I’m in a room. It might be the operating theatre or it might be another kind of room – lying down it’s hard to tell and I’m too frightened look around. I have gone very, very deep inside myself. In fact, I am just an atom, buried under many miles of lead. No one can reach me. No one can hurt me.
A line from A.A. Milne comes into my head. I am Sir Brian, as brave as a lion. I repeat it while clever young people bustle around me. I’m given an injection and a mask is gently placed over my face. No one asks me to count back from ten.
Mouse
Finally, my friend did it. My friend the Buddhist.
Kidney
My sister has had my kidney for ten years. She is not well, she will never be well. She doesn’t complain.
I still can’t kill a mouse.
Victoria MacKenzie is a fiction writer, essayist and poet based in Scotland. Her debut novel, For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain (Bloomsbury, 2023), explored the lives of the medieval mystics Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe; it won the Saltire First Book Award, was longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and was adapted for Radio 4.
Victoria’s short fiction has appeared in many journals and anthologies including Extra Teeth, Mslexia and New Writing Scotland. Her second novel, Each Leaf, Each Curve of Stem, about the Victorian art critic John Ruskin, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2027.
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