The Ghost of Hendo is a three-movement exploration of memory, love, trauma, and self-identity, told through the voice of a Glaswegian businessman, Tom Henderson.
Tom doesn’t trust his own memories unless he has something tangible to back them up. Like a photo, a smell or a sound.
When he experiences undiagnosed PTSD after a triple heart bypass, his mind sends him into a dark cave of critical voices and intrusive thoughts. He begins to wonder if he actually survived the surgeon’s attempts to give him a second shot at life. As his relationship with his fiancée Giulia breaks down in the months after the operation, he decides he needs to step out of his generation’s tendency to ‘not talk about feelings’ and seek the help that wasn’t covered in the leaflets he’d been given in hospital.
Told over three distinct movements - Physical Bypass, Mental Bypass and Emotional Bypass - Tom’s unreliable memories are challenged. He starts to identify the self-critical voices that have followed him since childhood as ‘the wee ned’ and ‘the harsh mother’. While attending therapy sessions with Jess, a clinical psychologist, Tom has to face his childhood fears, his feelings of not belonging in his new body, and grieve the loss of ‘Hendo’.
On trips to Romania and an off-season Spanish holiday town, the ghosts of his former life still haunt him. Tom slowly pieces together the man the surgery left behind on a bed in the ICU.
Below are two chapters from Part 1: Physical Bypass.
Big, Oily Bubbles
There’s a photo on my phone of my youngest son, James, when he was 3 or 4.
He’d spent some of his holiday money on a bubble wand. Basically, a bit of plastic in a bottle of soapy liquid.
He had a great time, running along the beach on holiday in France, looking behind him at the big, oily bubbles. He’d stop running and stare at them. Doing that thing kids do, getting too close to them because they want to see them better. Making them pop.
Memories, to me anyway, are like big, oily bubbles.
They float in front of you. When you move, they change shape. Their colour shifts depending on the light. And if you go right up to them, wanting a good look, they pop.
Memories are more reliable when you’ve got something tangible. Like a photo of the thing you’re remembering.
I can look at that photo of James now and remember how warm the sun was. I can feel the sand making the skin between my toes itch. I can hear him shouting for me to, “Look, Daddy, look at the big bubble!” I can remember exactly how I felt.
Smells are the same. You smell something, like warm oatmeal cookies, and you’re suddenly 6 or 7 years old. You’re in your mum’s kitchen.
And sounds. A song from when you were 18. It comes on the radio in the car, and you’re back in your bedroom in your parents’ house, putting gel in your hair.
Or the sound of a woman’s laughter.
You hear it, and you’re suddenly back beside her, on her big leather sofa, watching Anchorman. She’s buckled with laughter beside you, your hand’s on her leg, and you’re buckled laughing, too.
And life’s the very fucking best it can be.
Smashing Through a Pane of Black Glass
My memory of the moment I woke up in the ICU is rock solid.
Before you get a triple heart bypass, you’re shown a video of what to expect before and after it.
The video I watched looked like it had been made in the 90s.
This was the part about waking up in the ICU:
The camera slowly zoomed in on an old man lying partially upright on a hospital bed. A small bouquet of flowers was in an ornate vase on the bedside cabinet.
Gentle, optimistic synth music was playing.
The man was wearing a neat, pale blue gown. His legs were covered by a tidy, pressed white sheet, and his hands were folded in his lap.
His eyes flickered open, like he’d been enjoying a nap.
The camera pulled back to a wide shot.
A nurse was standing by his bed holding a clipboard.
The old man smiled at her.
I wish they’d shot a video of me waking up in the ICU.
It was like smashing through a pane of black glass.
The only thing that told me it was really happening was hearing Giulia’s voice. She phoned the ICU a couple of minutes after my breathing tube had been pulled out.
I can’t remember much of what she said to me. In my mind, she was speaking Italian. I’d never heard her speak Italian before.
I was floating on clouds of morphine, and somehow I was translating Italian into English, hearing her say the surgeon was delighted. Successful. Everyone loved me.
One thing I can remember with absolute certainty was telling her I didn’t believe her.
The Last 2 Years of Hendo and Giulia: The Consultation
The skies over the car park of the Golden Jubilee Hospital are grey and icy.
Hendo and Giulia are walking from her car into the big, modern reception area, a month after the angiogram.
She’s holding his hand.
They’re in an office, sitting on hard plastic chairs. A small Indian man with a tidy moustache is showing them a video on the monitor on his desk. He’s pointing at a thin black line moving through a dark grey tube.
Hendo’s noticing that the thin black line is bending when it bumps up against a light grey blob.
“This is what we saw during your angiogram, Mr Henderson. That's one of your main arteries. It’s completely blocked.”
Giulia’s gripping Hendo’s hand. Shit, it’s worse than she thought.
Hendo’s staring at the surgeon’s black slip-on shoes.
“The other main artery is 99% blocked. So, Mr Henderson, your case is quite complex. We need a little more time to confer as a team, maybe a month or so.”
Giulia’s got a tissue in her hand. She’s wiping her eyes.
“Can I ask you to roll up your trouser legs for me, please?”
Hendo’s looking at them looking at his legs.
“Ok, thanks. Well, the good news is you’re not obese. No comorbidities.”
Giulia’s speaking now.
“Can you give us any idea if you can operate?”
“As I said, we’d prefer to have a discussion as a surgical team, bringing all of our expertise together. But I’ll be honest with you.”
He’s looking at Hendo.
“If I open you up and stop your heart, and then find there are no viable vessels to graft onto, it will be very difficult to restart your heart. Mr Henderson, Mrs Henderson…”
Hendo wants to correct him. Wants to tell him they’re not married.
“The heart gets very angry when we interfere with it. That’s why we must be sure before we open you up.”
Giulia’s wiping away tears.
Hendo’s baffled at how they’ve got a video of inside his heart playing on a Dell monitor.
To help tell Tom’s story, I’ve created chapters, like the one above, that read like a Netflix docu-series. Tom’s talking head voice introduces each one. This is a symbol of his depersonalisation, one of the symptoms of his post-surgery trauma. It’s how Tom handles memories he can’t allow himself to get too close to.
The Ghost of Hendo isn’t a self-help book disguised as a novel. It’s not a story about redemption and happily ever after. It’s a raw tale of a man forced into facing life without the buffers and defensives he’d relied upon since the 1980s. It’s about who we have to become when we lose everything that made us the person we once were.