Chapter 1
Takotsubo cardiomyopathy
2007
If you yearned for, and daydreamed about, someone enough, could you drive your subconscious mind insane? Could you lose your grip on reality and start hallucinating?
‘Frankie? Hello, can you hear me?’ Lou trilled as she waved her hand in front of my face. I was staring over her shoulder at the rapidly approaching figure, trying to determine whether he was, in fact, a figment of my fevered imagination. ‘Frankie?’ she called again, her voice now tinged with concern. ‘Jesus, you look like you’re going to pass out.’
She turned to follow the direction of my gaze, and we were now both looking up into the gorgeous (if somewhat bloodshot), sky-blue eyes of Thomas G. Longley. ‘Holy crap,’ she muttered under her breath, taking a small step back.
‘Hi, I’m Tom,’ my possible hallucination said. He was focusing on me, just as he had been throughout his determined walk towards us across the bar. My expression was likely akin to that of a crazed Belieber when confronted with a pair of Justin’s used underpants, and I was frozen in place.
Lou gave me a sharp kick in the shin with the pointed toe of her boot, snapping me out of my stupor. I realized that my mouth was hanging open, and snapped it shut. The pain in my leg suggested that this was reality, and he was the genuine article. Although happy that I wasn’t as crazy as a box of frogs, I had unfortunately lost the power of speech.
I was pathologically shy, especially around attractive men, and this was not just any man; this was Thomas G. Longley. My best friend, Lou, and I had been obsessing over Thomas G. Longley for the last two years. He was the star of most of my fantasies, and, bizarrely, my imagination didn’t just restrict itself to the steamy ones. I had even caught myself daydreaming about washing his sweaty rugby kit and sorting his socks into pairs, such was the extent of my infatuation.
Tom was four years above us at medical school. So whilst we were nearing the end of our second year, he was about to qualify that summer. Well over six foot tall, solidly built, with light brown, messy hair, and amazing blue eyes framed with incredible thick eyelashes, he was our idea of perfection.
He always looked in need of a shave, and most of the time his clothes were downright scruffy, his wardrobe seeming to consist of only well-worn jeans (no bad thing with his arse), and equally well-worn rugby or tour tops. But his lack of care for his appearance made him even sexier in our eyes, highlighting his natural confidence and the fact he couldn’t care less how people saw him. Lou and I thought he was the cat’s pyjamas, along with the rest of the female population of our medical school (although I doubt they were quite sad enough to obsess over him to the extent that we did).
For some weird reason we always used his full name when referring to him, and not just ‘Tom’, by which he was widely known. We would have loved to know what the G of his middle name stood for. The only reason we even knew the first letter was because we checked the viva results for his year like the crazy stalkers we were. Not wanting to be outed as creepy nutcases, we never worked up the courage to find out more, as this would have involved asking his friends and risking exposure.
London medical schools are pretty insular when they’re not part of larger universities, and there were only about a hundred and fifty students in each year at ours. This enabled our rampant observation of Thomas G. Longley; but even though he was the subject of our obsession, neither of us had ever had an actual conversation with him.
There was, however, the ‘Library Incident’, which took place towards the end of my fresher year. In a revision frenzy, I tripped on the way through the bookshelves to get to my friends. I ended up sprawled face down, right in front of a table of rugby players, one of whom was Thomas G. Longley.
My books had flown everywhere, and unfortunately so had other mortifying items from my bag: my Tampax Extra Super tampons, my trusty multicolour glitter pen, and worst of all, Lady Princess le Foof (the small, dog-eared, ancient My-Little-Pony that I used to bring me luck in exams, and religiously carried around whilst revising).
Thomas G. Longley leapt up, rounded his sniggering mates at the table, and crouched down to help me gather my stuff. I could feel the heat in my cheeks as I frantically grabbed for the most embarrassing items, but I was too late for Lady Princess le Foof, who had rolled out of my reach.
‘You okay?’ he asked, holding out Lady Princess le Foof in his tanned hand. I looked briefly up into his gorgeous face, which was lit with a wide smile, and felt my heart stop before I quickly looked away.
‘Fine, thanks,’ I muttered in barely more than a whisper, before snatching away Lady Princess le Foof and scrambling to my feet. I kept my eyes averted as I scurried away, while his mates continued to jeer in the background.
After dissecting the ‘Library Incident’ at length with Lou, we both concluded that I most likely came across as a rude, clumsy, mentally deficient – not the first impression I would have gone for, but there was little point dwelling on it (which unfortunately I did, an unhealthy amount).
Lou herself had undergone the ‘Bar Incident’. The price of going out and drinking in central London restricted all but the fabulously wealthy to the dingy student bar, so it was invariably heaving, and one night Lou had found herself pressed up against Thomas G. Longley whilst waiting the requisite five hundred years to order. As soon as Thomas G. Longley had drawn up he had been served instantly (such was his appeal to the female bar staff), but as further proof of his perfection he directed the barmaid to Lou, explaining that she had been waiting longer.
Lou had fared a bit better than me in her interaction with him. For a start she wasn’t sprawled on the floor, and she did manage to thank him warmly, using more than the two words I had limited myself to.
So as you can see, past experience had not prepared me for the approach of the unwitting subject of my unhealthy obsession. Hence my second ever conversation with Thomas G. Longley was veering towards me, once again threatening to demonstrate subnormal behaviour on my part.
Despite this, instead of actually answering him, my mind was making a frantic inventory of my appearance. It was caveman night at the bar, and Lou and I had embraced this theme with gusto, both of us donning the micro-mini, furry, leopard-print skirts we had found in the Topshop sale. Lou had backcombed my hair to go along with the whole cavewoman thing, and I was now regretting having allowed this. My hair was the one part of my appearance that I was normally happy with, being very dark, long, thick and shiny, when in its normal state.
Although I doubted that shoes or cosmetics were available in the Jurassic period, Lou had forced me into wearing four-inch stilettos and full-on makeup. All our mates were dressed up too, including the guys (most of whom were wearing extremely ill-advised loin cloths), and we had thought that our outfits were awesome and hilarious. But now that I was looking into the gorgeous eyes of a very obviously not-dressed-up Thomas G. Longley, I thought with horror that we probably looked like a pair of demented cave-sluts.
Lou gave me another sharp kick in the shin, and I realized that I needed to pull it together and speak.
‘I – I’m Frankie,’ I managed to get out. Tom smiled and swayed slightly on the spot. He leaned in and I could smell the alcohol on his breath. We stood staring at each other for another few seconds before he lurched forward, closing the gap between our mouths. He tasted of gin and cigarettes but I didn’t care, this was Thomas G. Longley and he was finally, finally kissing me. The perfection of the moment started slipping away, however, when the catcalls of his mates penetrated my hormone-fuelled mind.
I could hear the standard ‘Way-hey!’, ‘Go on mate!’, ‘Give it some beans!’ and ‘Show her who’s boss, son!’ No doubt spurred on by his vile friends, I felt one of Tom’s hands pushing its way up into my skirt, unfortunately taking said skirt with it, and nearly exposing my knickers. His other hand was clamped round the back of my neck and his tongue was down my throat.
Panicked by imminent knicker exposure, and being the subject of practically the whole bar’s attention, I started frantically pushing at his shoulders. He lifted his head from mine and I could see him trying to focus on me with his bloodshot eyes. A frown creased his forehead and a look of confusion passed across his handsome face, which I noticed was now decidedly pale. He gagged, and I took a hasty step back just as we were approached by my friend Dylan.
Dylan was a member of the rugby team but also in my year and one of my best friends. He gave me an apologetic look and grabbed a now green-tinged Tom.
‘Come on, Longley,’ he said, leading him away in the direction of the loos. ‘Can’t have you blowing chunks over the ladies can we.’
I ducked my undoubtedly beet-red face and straightened my rucked-up skirt. The jeers from the rugby table continued, although now they were shouting ‘Denied Longley!’ and ‘Unlucky mate!’ Lou cast them all killing looks, straightened up to her full five foot ten (given her four inch heels), grabbed my hand and dragged me away.
We retreated over to a table of our friends, which was luckily about as far as you could get from the rugby boys. I was relieved that we hadn’t shared our stupid crush with the others over the last two years. It was mortifying enough that I had allowed a bloke so obviously plastered to stick his tongue down my throat and his hand up my skirt, exposing me to the whole bar moments before he had to be dragged away to throw up. If everyone had known the perfect being I had built him up into before this happened, I would never have lived it down.
‘Buck up, Frankie,’ my friend Georgia said in my ear. ‘We all know that lot can be complete bell-ends, just ignore it.’ I gave her a weak smile and looked down into my pint of snakebite to avoid the concerned looks from the others.
Just as I was starting to feel a bit better, Dylan came up to our table.
‘You okay, Frank?’ he asked, crouching down next to me.
‘Fine, Dyl, no worries,’ I chirped in a voice that sounded falsely bright, even to me.
‘Drinking games got a bit out of hand, see,’ Dylan explained in his Welsh lilt. ‘Longley got too many wets in and they’ve all decided that tonight is “fuck a fresher night”.’
I looked at Dylan in horror, ‘But I’m not a fresher.’ Dylan shifted uncomfortably and ran his hand through his hair before he answered.
‘I guess he hadn’t noticed you before, Ladies.’ (‘Ladies’ was Dylan’s bizarre name for me; I had no idea why, and presumed it was a Welsh thing).
‘Oh right, of course,’ I replied in a small voice, feeling like an idiot. Of course Tom hadn’t noticed me before, despite the small size of our medical school, our frequent proximity, and even the ‘Library Incident’. I was an expert in blending into the background, being only five-foot-four, with dark hair and eyes (inherited from my Italian parents), and a conspicuous lack of curves. No wonder he hadn’t recognized me.
With a hot crushing pain in my chest and my nose stinging as tears threatened, I looked away from Dylan and continued my contemplation of my snakebite. I think Dylan had caught sight of the unshed tears before I looked down, and he bumped my stool with his hip.
‘Come on, Ladies, make some room for your favourite valleys’ boy.’
I smiled and stood, letting him slip onto my stool and pull me down into his lap. He was tall, with a bulky frame and hair almost as dark as mine. I knew lots of girls panted after him, but I thought of him more like a brother. Although he was always flirting, I never took it seriously. He’d even tried to snog me a couple of times, which was probably more a drunken mistake on his part, and we were firmly in the friend zone now.
He swept my hair back over my shoulder so he could talk softly into my ear. ‘Want my opinion, he’s more than a bit twp not to have noticed you before, Ladies. Forget him.’ I had been around Dylan enough to know that ‘twp’ meant ‘daft’. I didn’t think Tom was daft though, just drunk and thoughtless.
‘Yeah, Frankie,’ Lou said from my other side. ‘In fact I’m going to officially rechristen him Thomas “Gankface” Longley, Weasel Gankface for short.’ I sniggered into my drink and took a decent swig. Gank was Lou’s very favourite word of the moment (what can I say? We were students) and she used it at every available opportunity.
‘Perfect. Weasel Gankface it is.’
We didn’t see Weasel Gankface for the rest of the evening, and I put a brave face on my humiliation. But it proved impossible to completely avoid the rugby boys, a couple of whom stumbled up to us on the dance floor. After disengaging a second time from their wandering hands, I got another demonstration of why Thomas G. Longley’s new nickname was well earned.
‘Bloody hell,’ the drunken prop forward slurred, after I had slapped his hands away from my bum. ‘Longley’s right, you are frigid.’
‘Yeah,’ his friend put in. ‘Frigid Frankie!’ They both burst into gales of laughter at their joke, but were cut short when a furious Lou whipped her blonde head around, stormed up to them, grabbed them both by an ear and banged their heads together. They stood frozen in place and stared at her, shocked.
‘Jog on, you pathetic Gankensteins,’ she bit out, her beautiful face flushed with anger. ‘Mark, I know for a fact that you have a pin-dick, and Harry, I know that you came in your pants from just snogging Milly Jones. How on earth you think you can try it on with Frankie, who is so out of your league it’s not even funny, I don’t know.’ With that she grabbed my hand and stalked off the dance floor with me in tow having to jog to keep up with her long strides. Once we had made it out of the bar and into the car park she slowed to a stop, snatching me into a fierce hug.
‘Hey, Lou-Lou,’ I wheezed whilst being crushed to her ample chest. ‘I’m okay, it’s fine.’ She pulled back so that she could look down into my eyes, and framed my face with her hands.
‘You’re not bloody well okay,’ she informed me, her tone still fierce. ‘Don’t you dare let those tossers push you into your shell. We’ve only just managed to extract you from it and I won’t have them setting you back.’
I had been painfully shy and homesick when I arrived at medical school, and Fresher’s Week had been a terrifying experience. Luckily Lou had been on the same floor as me in halls. She had noticed my rabbit-in-the-headlights expression on the first day after Mamma left, and took me under her wing.
Loud and outrageous, with a particular talent for creative swearing, she was the yin to my yang. Fortunately for me, Lou and I became part of an extremely close-knit group of friends in our first year. The bonds of friendships forged at medical school are strong, owing to the intense environment and pressure pushing you together. Generally the ethos was work hard, play harder, and my friends had made sure that I didn’t let my shyness and fear of big social situations hold me back from having fun.
I gave Lou a reassuring squeeze and managed to fake a small smile. ‘Really, Louey, no probs – okay? I’m tougher now than I used to be, remember?’ I lied. Lou narrowed her eyes but I could see that she was going to let it pass. She heaved out a sigh and released me so that we could link arms to walk through the car park together.
‘God,’ she said in a dejected tone. ‘Thomas G. Longley, what a sodding disappointment.’ I could tell that the death of that particular dream had cut her deep too.
‘Weasel Gankface from now on, Lou, don’t forget.’ Thankfully the heavy atmosphere was broken by our giggles as we made our way to the night bus.
Once we were on the bus, however, and meandering through the busy London streets, my mind replayed the events of the night. I had to turn away from Lou and look out of the window so she couldn’t read my expression, but I couldn’t help letting out a small sigh.
‘Hey,’ she said, grabbing my hand and squeezing, ‘don’t let him give you a raging case of Takotsubo cardiomyopathy. ’
I rolled my eyes and grinned despite the churning in my stomach. ‘Wow, Lou. That might just be the saddest joke I’ve ever heard. You do realize you’re a huge nerd for cracking that one.’
‘Well, you’re just as much of a dweeb for getting it,’ she retorted, looking relieved that I was smiling again. Takotsubo cardiomyopathy is otherwise known as Broken Heart Syndrome, and is the name for sudden heart failure after emotional trauma, when the stress hormones actually cause a weakening of the heart muscle. The trauma can be anything from grief, to a relationship break-up. And its existence proves that you can, in fact, die from a broken heart.
Well, I survived, and the one good thing to come out of that night was that it absolutely and thoroughly cured me of my crush. The few times that I saw Tom again (he had been demoted from the Reverend Thomas G. Longley), he studiously ignored me, and I began to wonder if he even remembered what happened. He qualified as a doctor a few months later, and that was that.
Unfortunately the name Frigid Frankie was bandied around campus and seemed to stick. Nobody actually said it to my face, but I could hear it muttered behind my back all the time. This meant that either guys were put off by what the name implied, or, worse, they considered me a challenge. Therefore, after a few regrettable incidents, my love life was pretty much put on hold for the rest of uni. This was not fun, seeing as I still had four years left.
So it was safe to say that Thomas G. Longley, a.k.a. Weasel Gankface, was not one of my favourite people. I sincerely hoped I never saw his stupid, gorgeous face ever again.