Learning to Die

by Thomas Maloney

  ‘Piece of shit,’ she declares, and heaves the ring not very impressively into the river. Splosh. A couple of half-hearted cheers. Then the group wanders on down the towpath walkway.

  Ripples glint as the life-ring begins to drift downstream, accelerating silently. Two thoughts branch in Dan’s mind. The first is how the season of peak flow depends on the geography of the region: while alpine rivers are super-charged by snowmelt in the early summer and tropical waters are swelled by the rainy season, here, in a temperate lowland with year-round rainfall, evaporation rates run the show and winter is the river’s busy shift.

  This thought snaps out automatically along synapses long trained to test observations against stores of knowledge. The second thought is more leisurely, and seems to reach away in the direction of the retreating teenagers: while these kids probably do suffer from a failure to imagine that something bad might happen to them, or to someone they love, the girl may have rightly estimated that the probability of any single life-ring ever being used to save a life is almost zero. He’ll give her the benefit of the doubt.

  He continues apprehensively into the boozy heart of the town. A glimpsed crane leads him down an unfamiliar street, and he is soon lost. Reading has a special gift for disorientation. After four years his mental map is still a bubble-chart of familiar fragments with no unifying structure. He does know the ring road — a crumpled triangle with each side a little under a mile — and so his last resort is always to proceed in a straight line until he hits this noisy and well-charted feature. Tonight he is in no hurry, so he allows himself to wander.

  In a grimy side-street, more youths and plenty of not-so-youths stand outside a bar, and will have to be passed. Dan checks his dressing gown belt and tries to project a force-field of unremarkability. He receives stares and sniggers but no comments until his back is turned. Then a voice booms.

  ‘’ospital’s the other way, mate!’

  Guffaws. But this direction is helpful. If the hospital — and Natalie — are behind him, he is on course for the building sites near the station.

  ‘Freak,’ is the funny-man’s final judgement. We are all freaks: we are all highly improbable. The crane looms nearer, and here is the last obstacle — the main shopping street, bustling with revellers. Dan strides out calmly. Involuntarily his mind sketches forces onto the crane’s silhouette, delighting in the knowledge that all the pushing, pulling, weighing and hanging adds up beautifully according to simple geometric tricks.

  As he steps briskly up onto the pavement, he feels the toe of his slipper catch on the kerb. Time slows as the slipper drags sideways along the vertical face of the kerbstone, deflected by some slight overhang and his oblique course, unable to clear the obstacle while his bodyweight pivots forward irresistibly. In free fall, he acquires for a moment the grace of an asteroid, all Newtonian mass and no weight, rolling silently through space. Then the earth intervenes, in the form of paving slabs and a low wall that eludes the defences of his groping hands and finds its mark glancingly on his cheekbone. To trip and almost fall is a commonplace, but to go the whole hog, to crash and burn, a rare honour. Somebody cheers. The more sober bystanders hesitate, noting the bare legs and dressing gown, but once Dan has hoisted himself into a sitting position a young woman approaches boldly.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asks. ‘There’s an ambulance parked round that corner, if you need some help.’

  Dan looks at his angel, his Samaritan. Mid-twenties, a little overweight but healthy-looking, probably donates blood and volunteers for the Guides. Now she’s dressed for a night out but it doesn’t come naturally. He can feel a trickling on his cheek, touches, looks, yes — blood, plenty, a dull darkish smear in the yellow lamplight.

  ‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘I think perhaps I do.’

  As a professional physicist who dabbles in chemistry and biology, Dan knows precisely why the lamplight is yellow and why the blood is red. But the presence of idle paramedics waiting to pick up drunks is genuine new information.

  ‘Shall I go with you?’ she offers. Her waiting friends, hot priests and Levites in short dresses, groan.

  ‘I’ll be fine. Thanks a lot, though. Have a good night.’ Isn’t that what you say to young people?

  While the breezy but effective paramedic patches him up, a policewoman strolls over to find out whether he’s a threat to himself or others. Apparently he is, because she offers to drive him to Mark and Rachel’s place. Will somebody be at home, she keeps asking in the car. Yes, he repeats wearily, they’re as old as me, they’ll be home. And they are, with concerned faces quickly breaking into laughter, a slightly inferior glass of rosso and, best of all, a toothbrush in an unopened packet.

  Lying on his friends’ sofa in the faint, pointless glow of standby lights on various screens and boxes, Dan Mock briefly, guiltily entertains the thought that he subconsciously ignored the clogged showerhead because he likes being pummelled.

  Mike Vickers has set his screen to display the flight path, and is disappointed to see that it won’t, this time, commit the daring aeronautical transgression of cutting the nib of the giant Brie of Greenland. The glimpse across that desolation is pure geo-porn, inspiring a voluptuous shudder of horror at the vastness of the world. This time, sparsely twinkling Nova Scotia will have to suffice.

  He likes the airlines’ habit of labelling unexpected cities on the sprawling continents: not Paris, Moscow, Rome, but instead Vigo, Zagreb, Khartoum. They want you to feel there’s more out there to explore — air tickets still worth buying. In Mike — a rare air-travel enthusiast — they’re preaching to the converted. Even Heathrow for all its faults is a place, fittingly, of big and beautiful skies. And then there are the aeroplane skies, surpassing all comprehension: a sea of shining feathers; a shagpile combed by the gods — all humanity mere unseen underlay; a field of white cow-pats as far as the eye can see; a slash of scarlet bisected by a black spillage of rain; a billowing tower ten miles high, to which jets are meaningless flecks of aluminium to be swallowed, tossed about, spat into space; horizons banked in impossible precipices of mauve and gold.

  Yes, even business travel is an adventure. As the right wing dipped after this evening’s take-off, Mike ogled the M25 — those two competing funeral processions, the whites and the reds — and behind it the giant glowing organism of London. A god’s-eye view of this triumph of civilization to make the heart sing, of peaceful, productive coexistence, orderly yet free, unparalleled in the history of humankind.

  He again picks up his magazine. Unrest. Inequality. A lost generation. Apparently. A few weeks ago, in a European airport (he forgets which), there was a handwritten notice beside the immigrant cleaners’ tips box: ‘your money or we sing’. He dried his hands and slipped in twenty euros. Has he done his bit?

  Brenda Vickers sleeps soundly until daybreak. This is a long time if you choose to measure it in hours, which she does not. The chill has crept into her arms and hands, and slows her movements as she retrieves her water bottle from her sleeping bag, lights the stove and makes tea. Speech would be difficult — her face is very cold — but is not necessary.

  Boots are retrieved from the sleeping bag, crampons fitted, balaclava comes off, gloves go on, rucksack hoisted, ice axe gripped, and she steps out onto the slope of bullet-hard frozen snow. The sunrise picks out a thousand details of striation and patina whose beauty registers only peripherally as she monitors any implications for her own body’s safe, steady passage, sideways across the great invisible arrow of gravity. Her mouth has warmed up now, and she begins to sing, quietly.

  The slope softens at last into a frozen corrie, which in turn drops into a narrow glen where the snow peters out. The glen broadens and leads to a bay in a loch — a loch charged with the mystery and motion of the tide, somewhere joined to the unseen open sea. She half-walks, half-jogs along the shoreline path for five miles. The loch narrows and then terminates in a bleak, rocky bea
ch. Behind the beach is the end, or the beginning, of a chaotic little road that leads to the rest of the world. Brenda’s small green van stands meekly at the trailhead, the faded imprint of its effaced Forestry Commission insignia showing faintly under the frost. The windows are double-glazed with ice.

  After teasing for a few seconds, it starts. She revs the engine hard, and then swaps her boots for a pair of grubby plimsolls. On the dashboard: gloves and socks frozen into odd shapes, malt loaf wrappers, empty box of Inderal (we are permitted to know that this is sometimes prescribed for anxiety and panic attacks). She opens the back of the van and tosses rucksack and boots in beside the chainsaw, petrol can, sun-lounger cushion used as a sleeping mat, multipacks of budget tinned spaghetti and other detritus. The door has to be slammed hard, and its report might have been heard for a mile or two up the glen, had there been anyone to hear.

  The van tips and weaves playfully along the tiny rollercoaster road. Brenda hums the Postman Pat theme. Her mountain shock therapy has worked its usual magic: she’s out of the woods.

  ‘Oh, you have got to be joking.’

  Dan is struck by a little wavelet of joy at seeing his wife her old self, and stoops to kiss her. A fringe of bruised skin extends beyond the dressing on her temple. He can hear her shallow breaths. ‘Good morning, my love. How are you feeling?’

  She smiles and whispers, ‘Better, thank you, but seriously —’ she raises a hand to his own dressing ‘— what the fuck?’

  It is nearly ten o’clock, and the village is audibly going about its morning business. James F. Saunders, newly awakened from his eventual deep sleep, thinks of Under Milk Wood. This is an unoriginal opening salvo in the ridiculous cannonade of associations that habitually pounds away at his consciousness, but he isn’t concerned. Not yet. This, no matter what, is the day he will begin.

  He yanks back the flimsy curtain to reveal the sea view that supposedly makes up for his lodgings’ lack of practical facilities. Fifty yards of sand, seaweed and slimy bedrock now lie exposed between the cobbled ramp and the breakers. A dozen gulls peck about. ‘Attention,’ declares a tinny voice somewhere up the too-narrow-to-turn-round street. ‘This vehicle is reversing.’

  James will today break out of his own creative cul-de-sac by a decisive forward plunge into perilous waters. He pulls on his clothes, fills a glass at the sink and clears his desk of everything except laptop, glass and a tattered paperback copy of the Essays of Montaigne, who is to be his maharishi. He has a notion that he will write better hungry. He closes his eyes and takes a slow breath, cold fingers poised over the keys.

  Mediocrity in poets is not allowed by gods or men.

  3. Crowded room

  ‘… when they are grown men we find them to excel in nothing.’

  Montaigne

  Rewind eight days. A man stands unsteady and unwashed in a carriage on the London Underground, staring in fascinated horror at his reflection in the curved window. He and his inverted Siamese twin are joined at the head. As he steps back, the heads are swallowed into the bodies, and then the bodies into the legs, until he is just two grotesque unconnected legs with feet at both ends. Becks’ oft-repeated prediction has come true at last: he has literally disappeared up his own arse.

  He sinks to the floor and slumps back against a seat, door, whatever. With his eyes closed, the speeding train sounds like the end of the world. There is a rumbling of thunder or guns or bombs, the rising howl of some tortured phantom, a sudden juddering scream. After hours, days, it all stops. For a single second there is perfect silence. He thinks he might have died. Then the door slides open, and he falls backwards into space.

  ‘This station is Holborn,’ says a female robot. He’s alive. There is a dazzling light, and a jostling. He has fallen into the surprised arms of a man with pasty white skin and floppy hair.

  ‘Well, hello,’ the stooping man says, calmly checking that nothing unpleasant is getting on his suit. ‘Are you hopping off or staying on?’

  ‘Change here for the Piccadilly line,’ suggests the robot.

  ‘I don’t care,’ mumbles our fallen hero.

  ‘Alrighty, on we jump!’ The man hoists him up and propels him into a seat. Sits next to him, unnecessarily as the carriage is sparsely peopled. Sound of doors flinging themselves together. A lurch into motion.

  ‘Had a bad day, sir?’ asks the man, cheerily. ‘Me too, but it’s about to get better. Walley.’

  The man is proffering a white, long-fingered hand.

  ‘Walley’s the name,’ he repeats. ‘You?’

  ‘James F. Saunders.’

  ‘James. F. Saunders,’ repeats Walley slowly, smirkingly. ‘What does the F stand for?’

  A whisper: ‘Failure.’

  Walley smirks again. What a wanker, thinks James, to laugh at a thing like that. Has never failed, I suppose. Goody two-shoes fucking banker or lawyer. Or an accountant. Never set a foot wrong or had an original thought. Thinks his floppy fucking hair is a mark of character. Tosser.

  ‘Tell me, James F. Saunders — would you like to have an adventure?’ He still has that smirk on his face.

  ‘Leave me alone.’

  ‘You’ll be just the ticket. Vickers will adore you. Free drinks.’ He leans and whispers: ‘Free everything.’

  James surrenders sullenly to this wanker’s whim. Maybe he came to London in the hope that the city might do something to him, might abuse him in some way, and now it’s doing it. Merryman’s Bay is ineffectual: the only abuse he gets there is from the weather.

  ‘Walley! Thank God. But who’s this?’

  A man of about James’ age has opened the imposing door — five-nine, coiffed ginger hair, cocked ginger eyebrow, dinner jacket. Sort of carrot-top 007. Another goody two-shoes banker type. Or maybe worse — a salesman.

  ‘Monseigneur le comte de Vickers,’ pronounces Walley, bowing low with a flamboyant flopping of hair. ‘May I present my undying felicitations.’ He actually kisses the salesman’s hand. ‘This —’ indicating James with a flourish ‘— is your big present. A deliciously authentic wastrel. Its name is James F. Saunders. Ask it what the F stands for.’ As he crosses the threshold he taps his pocket and whispers, ‘Don’t worry — I brought you a little present, too.’

  The host, Vickers, frowns. Or rather, he conjures a complex and masterful facial expression that simultaneously communicates puzzlement, amusement, tolerant disapproval toward his friend and cheery welcome to the newcomer. Definitely a salesman, and he’s good.

  ‘I’ve no idea what this is about, but do come in. Any friend of Pete’s is very welcome. What does the F stand for?’

  Another handshake. Always shaking hands, these people. Next he’ll be giving me the wink and gun, thinks James.

  ‘I’m not his friend. It stands for “Fuck fakes”.’

  Upstairs, Brenda Vickers peers between the vertical louvres of the ceiling-to-floor blind, along the canal with its lamp-lit concrete promenades and Paddington Basin’s indecisive mix of office and apartment blocks, towards a narrow chink of horizon. There is of course no comforting glimpse of distant hills or fields — this city, its peculiar breed of self-satisfied desolation, sprawls away for miles in every direction.

  She steps back and glances at a full-length mirror, which frames her reflection as snugly as an open coffin. Boyish pants, a comfortable unwired bra that just barely escapes the category of sports bra, a physique not quite Jessica Ennis but unyielding, unforgiving and impossible to dress. Her body gives an impression of solid bigness, despite being neither broad nor especially tall. She can, after all — and frequently does as part of her on-off job — dead-lift a sizeable tree. She hates being in a crowded room.

  The dress on the bed was last worn the last time she was told to wear a dress, perhaps at her graduation party. Her brother, who makes such choices effortlessly, has contributed an unshowy pendant that she doesn’t
hate. She picks it up. She seems to have stopped sweating.

  Her gift to him — he’s the birthday boy, after all — was a whittled sphere of scots pine the size of a tennis ball, with carved lines of latitude and longitude picked out in black, and a simple stand carved from the same wood. It had cost her one pound and ninety-five pence, for a fine-pointed pen.

  ‘What can you give the man who already holds the world in the palm of his hand?’ That was her prepared line, and it went down well. He frowned for an instant, but then twizzled the globe with delight and unhesitatingly put it on his mantelpiece beside a bronze knick-knack that he’d picked up in Marylebone for the price of a small car, after receiving his last bonus.

  Brenda takes five deep breaths and reaches for the door. Her bedroom opens onto a mezzanine gallery above the double-height living space. A throng of about fifty people sips and babbles around a ridiculous ice sculpture, which depicts a naked muscleman wrestling a python. You are supposed to pour your drink into the man’s grimacing mouth, and then collect it when it dribbles, well-chilled, out of the snake’s mouth, or maybe out of the man’s dick — she isn’t sure whether Mike was joking about that and doesn’t intend to embarrass herself by trying it out. A three-piece funk band is playing some gentle openers. She walks down the open-tread staircase with a white-knuckled grip on the handrail, and tries to ignore the two-dozen faces that glance upwards.

  Mike Vickers has a birthday party every two years (on the even years, he lines up a date). He sips his Chablis and casts an approving eye over proceedings. Now that Pete Walley has arrived, the only really significant people missing are Dan (a cousin’s wedding — who gets married in November?) and Mike’s colleague Mij, whose stunning and oddly familiar-looking wife he will once again not meet. Sly bastard, is Mij.

  Pete is already standing on a chair, force-feeding the Laocoön (a custom order from hotandicy.co.uk, donated by Mike’s new boss, who tactfully declined his invitation) with a vivid red cocktail. There is a crackle of laughter. Brenda isn’t talking to anyone, but looks calm. James, Pete’s tramp, is behaving himself, sampling but not scoffing the nibbles and now eyeing up the place thoughtfully and sipping a bottle of beer.