Learning to Die

by Thomas Maloney

  He’s a similar age to Mike, taller, with stooped shoulders and a week’s untidy stubble. Kind of southern European complexion, but paler than he ought to be. You ain’t seen the southern sun for a while, kiddo. Jeans with one knee ripped (not by design) and a shabby cardigan that proclaims arty type. Didn’t get the memo about not being a student anymore. Mike feels an urge to talk to him, and meanders casually in his direction.

  ‘Do you like my sculpture?’ he asks, following James’ sullen gaze.

  ‘In a way.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘In that I’m glad the rich waste their money on tasteless, pointless crap. If they spent wisely I’d be more inclined to envy them.’

  Nasal voice, well-spoken, hint of Brum. No doubt a disappointment to middle-class parents. Mike smiles. ‘You envy their wealth precisely because you believe it would enable you to accomplish greater things, greater good, but you would struggle to elaborate. Anyway, it’s not pointless: it’s a tribute. Laocoön is one of my heroes.’

  The wastrel shoots him a critical glance. For a moment it looks like there might be some substance to his arty charade, but then his face slackens and his puffy-looking eyes drift off. He needs a bath, a shave, a hot meal and a good night’s sleep. Mike, on the other hand, needs to rescue Brenda, and politely excuses himself.

  ‘We won’t bite!’

  It’s Maurice, a university acquaintance, usually tiresome, occasionally sincere — Mike always invites him because he looks flamboyant (this evening, purple silk and mascara) and talks a lot. He doesn’t know about Brenda, and his encouragements have a mocking edge.

  ‘Oh, but you will, Maurice,’ says Mike, feigning disapprobation and stepping between Brenda and the Oxford crowd. ‘You’re like an angler fish, dangling your little lamp.’ Maurice, whose face has filled out alarmingly and looks more like a pink puffer fish, stares at him open-mouthed.

  ‘That’s the kindest thing anyone’s ever said to me.’ The others laugh, and Mike guides Brenda away.

  ‘I’m going upstairs,’ she declares, quietly. Mike gently takes her by the shoulders.

  ‘Let’s look at you. You’re doing fine. Don’t go yet. I want to introduce you to some friends I think you’ll like. They run. One’s a triathlete.’ Brenda shakes her head.

  ‘I can’t. My mouth’s going weird. Just leave me alone.’ Mike sighs.

  ‘Alright. Just observe. I want a report on who’s genuine and who’s —’ he emits a small cough ‘— fake.’

  It’s the very worst kind of party for an outsider — the kind with no other outsiders. These people, thinks James, punching out the mots justes in his mind, have harmonised their affluent conviviality to perfection. Nobody is even rude to him. As an opportunity to think bitter thoughts it could hardly be bettered, and he indulges.

  The recent slow collapse of his self-belief, not from visible disappointments or external influences, but from an accumulation of internal failures — the insistent song of emptiness that plays in his mind — is neatly complemented by this evening’s outward humiliation. An authentic wastrel — yes, he really is wasting his life trying to do something for which he has no talent.

  There is, he notices, one woman standing on her own, devouring chips from a miniature cone of newspaper — the latest droll canapé offering. Her dress doesn’t quite measure up to the general elegance: a plain navy number with a bit of lace on the upper arms that might be intended to conceal her formidable biceps, but only draws attention to them. She’s another outsider.

  James is beginning to overheat, but he hasn’t washed for three days so the cardigan must stay on. As he goes for another cold beer, he catches the woman’s eye and sees a refreshing hostility in it. That’s more like it.

  ‘Quite a party,’ he says, momentarily revived by the slug of lager. ‘You look like you don’t know anyone either.’

  A monotone is the best he can manage, but at least he’s talking. The woman isn’t wearing any make-up, and reminds James of the primary school teacher he yearned for at the age of seven. The pangs of love were sharpest when Miss Morley was vulnerable, when the class was out of control. The face now confronting him is the same.

  ‘I’m Mike’s sister,’ she says, with a voice like a sulky teenager — sulky but real. ‘Brenda. I live in Scotland.’

  ‘Ah, that explains it. I’m James. I live up that way too. Well, Yorkshire. What do you do in Scotland?’

  ‘Estate management.’

  ‘What does that involve?’ Words keep coming out of his mouth. He doesn’t really care what her job involves, but a direct approach seems to come as standard with the jaded, robotic tone.

  She hesitates. ‘Well, I’m more of a — a chainsaw operator.’

  The c-word cuts through the background babble of urban sophistication like, well, like a chainsaw. James feels this might be just a scene he’s writing, and laughs. She’s a chainsaw operator.

  ‘So, your brother does — whatever it is that he does, to feel entitled to all this —’ he waves a hand dismissively ‘— while you dismember the crap out of trees. Interesting. I’d like to hear your story.’ He almost sounds like he means it.

  ‘My story? What are you, a journalist?’ No hint of a smile. He likes that.

  ‘No — a novelist, actually.’ Why make that absurd claim? The requisite embarrassment follows swiftly: a piggy-eyed androgyne in purple silk, cradling a trio of garnished highballs, has overheard him.

  ‘Oh? Who’s your publisher, Zadie?’

  Again the sullen monotone: ‘I’m not published yet.’

  The interloper smirks, rolls his eyes at Brenda, mouths, ‘Ah, one of those,’ and waddles on his way.

  ‘I don’t much like the idea of being written about,’ says Brenda. A trace of warmth creeps into her face.

  ‘I’m glad to hear it.’

  Brenda has endured an hour and a half of this hell. People keep trying to talk to her. The drugged-up homeless guy was the least hateful of them, but he slunk off. Probably nicked something — Mike can afford it. Now her decline is gathering pace — the familiar disengagement from her surroundings, the muffled voices, the hallucinations: arcs of blood suspended in the air, a thundering double bass, a keen soprano wail. Jeering eyes are on her sweat-soaked back as she climbs the stairs. It doesn’t matter now. Just get into the room, turn the key. Lock them out. Five more steps. Three. Two. One.

  The door has been locked from the inside. She hears a muffled giggling. So stupid. Not to have locked it herself. Didn’t think it would be that sort of party. Can’t knock, make a fuss — God knows who might answer and in what state. Nowhere to hide. Have to get out. She hurries back down the stairs and through the hideous gauntlet of bodies — one woman points, another laughs — snatches her proper shoes and coat from the hall, thuds down the echoing stairwell — no lifts for Brenda — and plunges outside.

  A fine rain is now falling, and has softened the earlier etched glitter of the canal to an impressionistic glow. It’s the sort of rain to dampen — rather than quicken with shrieks of laughter and running footsteps — the spirits of the Friday night crowd. Brenda glances back up at the looming apartment block, and thinks she can pick out her commandeered room, six floors up — dim lights behind the blind. Her one refuge in this nightmare city, now invaded.

  She walks. The rain is balm. But bare legs make her feel naked, and this is not a place to be naked. The shadows slinking along the towpath are few enough to seem threatening. People are dangerous. On her return she follows the other side of the canal, which is busier and better lit. There’s a figure slumped in the shadows under a road bridge, but room enough on the towpath to give it a wide berth. She walks faster and her body tenses, ready to run.

  ‘Brenda?’

  She starts, and James can see it takes her a moment to recognise him, wrapped as he is in a duffle-coat and a dirty woollen hat
knitted by his landlady in Merryman’s Bay.

  ‘Oh. Hi.’ She still looks angry, or scared. But relieved that it’s him.

  ‘Sorry if I scared you. Partied out too?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘I’m not really homeless, you know.’ He somehow manages to clamber to his feet. ‘I’m just sheltering from the rain.’

  ‘I’m glad.’ For the first time, she actually smiles. His jaded heart skips.

  ‘I was just thinking that it’s a shame that I’ll never see you again, and here you are.’ Now she seems to nod and shrug at the same time, as though she both does and doesn’t give a shit. He perseveres: ‘Could I have your phone number?’

  She looks him up and down. ‘Okay,’ she replies at last, vaguely.

  He slips from his coat pocket the neglected writer’s notebook and biro that he still keeps there as a kind of private joke, and hands them to her. She writes something, closes the book and hands it back.

  ‘Are you heading back to your brother’s place?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘It’s a long way round.’ The apartment block is almost opposite them, but there’s no way up onto this road bridge. The canal glints. ‘Unless you fancy a swim.’

  She glances each way along the canal to confirm the truth of what he says, and then up at the apartment block. Then she peers up at the underside of the bridge. Huge steel I-beams. She runs a careful eye the whole length of one, wipes her rain-dampened hands carefully inside her coat, and rolls her shoulders.

  ‘You’re not serious.’

  ‘Nice meeting you.’ Suddenly, her voice is bolder. ‘Look after yourself — I mean that. You look a mess.’

  She jumps up and catches the beam neatly with a hand on each side, and then hefts herself out over the water. She doesn’t waste energy kicking her legs about, but calmly swings her weight from one hand to the other — she’s done this before. He glances down the towpath but nobody else seems to notice, and in about thirty seconds the thing is done. She drops lightly onto the opposite side.

  ‘You’re mad!’ he shouts. ‘I’ll call you.’ She is brushing something off her hands, and holds them up to display blackened fingers.

  ‘Pigeon shit!’ And she walks away.

  James is buzzing. Without even trying, he has activated his long-abandoned Project Q. A case study. And a conduit, a wellhead for accessing buried treasure. If I have not love. He opens the notebook. What Brenda’s written isn’t a phone number. The letters ‘NH’ are followed by two sets of five digits: it looks like a grid reference.

  4. Stacked fragments

  ‘I speak the truth, not to the full, but as much as I dare.’

  Montaigne

  Dan Mock pours yesterday’s glass of wine down the sink. It rankles that the television, the PC and several lights were switched on all night in the briefly impregnable house. With a couple of finger-taps he brings up the graph of the Mocks’ past twenty-four hours’ energy usage, overlaid on the daily profile averaged over the last three winters. There is a grotesque nocturnal overspend. He does a few quick sums in his head and, from the same virtual dashboard, tweaks the thermostat to make good: he’ll wear an extra jumper until Nat comes home. It’s not that they can’t afford it — though bills do devour the lion’s share of their salaries — and Dan is neither a raving environmentalist nor a miser. He just abhors waste.

  With another finger-tap he summons a Sudoku puzzle. Sudoku doesn’t count as waste, in Dan’s book. At university he wrote one of the first programs to accurately grade any grid on a numerical scale, and he has now linked this to a scanner on his phone to create a handheld Sudoku Geiger counter. He usually focuses on puzzles graded from sixty-five to eighty-five on his scale, only stooping to the fifties (often described by newspapers as fiendish or devilish) if he’s feeling lazy. He occasionally tracks down a ninety or a ninety-two just to prove that he’s still got the Mock magic. He is happy to justify his hobby to the many detractors. No, it is not a narrow-minded obsession but an elegant means to appreciate the beauty of mathematics and human reason. And an allegory, perhaps: the basic components so few; the permutations, the possibilities, so many. It seems pointless only if you’ve missed the point.

  After nailing three puzzles, he kills the screen and turns to a pile of small boxes delivered last week. He slits the tape on the first, and lifts out the bubble-wrapped treasure: an anemometer destined for his chimney pot. Then he pauses. This is how Natalie would expect him to spend the day — fiddling with his gadgets — but he’ll surprise her and do something useful. His searching gaze falls on the cupboard where they keep their paperwork — Dan has had only partial success in his mission to eradicate paper — and into which an array of bric-a-brac has been crammed to keep it out of sight. It’s a mess. He starts to pull the contents out onto the floor.

  James F. Saunders was runner-up in the university poetry competition in his second year at York. His poem, ‘Every hour, on the hour’, about Becks and all the little associations that summoned her memory, evoked such fierce melancholy that readers assumed he was bereaved. It seemed a promising start. Becks, to his knowledge, never read it.

  Disappointments followed, but another little gust of hope arrived two years later in the shape of his agent, Martin — the only person who has ever believed in him. Martin was not computer literate and struggled with electronic submissions, but nevertheless achieved some tantalising near misses with James’ unfinished avant-garde novel, The Cormorant. So he said. Unfortunately, Martin died four years ago.

  Suicide has always been a mere fantasy, a recurring frisson of dread, no more than a thought experiment for so many reasons. But recently James forgot what those reasons were, and became afraid of the sea, the long autumn nights and the voluptuously humped cliffs. London was a concentrated dose of humanity: cut with nasty chemicals, no doubt, and causing unknown side effects, but worth taking as a last resort. He did find grim satisfaction in its misspent riches, in its misery and filth, in lives even more wasted than his own — but grim satisfaction wasn’t going to be enough. He vaguely remembers hearing the end of the world — or at least the end of his world — galloping towards him on a tube train. It was that self-satisfied wanker Walley who saved him, by leading him to Brenda. Chainsaw Brenda is only a connection — a human soul he doesn’t instantly despise — but a connection was apparently all he needed to sidestep a crash that had seemed inevitable. And to invoke Project Q.

  It wasn’t difficult to track her down. He has no internet access in his room, but during the summer he successfully campaigned for the Merry Ladies’ tearoom to install Wi-Fi. The proprietors ignored the suggestion when it came direct from him, but when he persuaded a few proper locals to ask for it, each separately and apparently unprompted, the old biddies surrendered. James’ weekly trips to Whitby Library, by bus or occasionally on foot, are now solely for the quaint purpose of borrowing books.

  The grid reference led him, on his return last week, to the village of Invergarry, right in the heart of the Highlands and adjacent to a large swathe of the National Forest Estate. A few phone calls later, he struck lucky and was told that Brenda Vickers was off sick — wearily, as though this was habitual — and would he like to leave a message? She hadn’t seemed sick to him. Or maybe she had. ‘Yes. Tell her James called. Do you mind if I leave a number?’

  The following day, a cold, sunny Wednesday, two good things happened. Brenda called him back, and, later in the evening, he had the idea for the novel. Not exactly a new idea, but a new way to unite old ideas. He was surprised by the sudden urge to tell her about it, and the opposing intuition that he should keep these cards close and tell no one. Was this momentary sense of conflict the point of conception? Had it really come at last? He had been burnt out, a charred log in the grate, a hunk of inert material in a bed of ashes. Did meeting Brenda turn him over? Were ideas coming out of him like foretokening smoke, and was he ab
out to burst into flames?

  Now it is Saturday, the day of beginning. James F. Saunders, a bitter and solitary man who has never fallen in love — unless you count harried Miss Morley from Year 3, or the determined blue-haired chugger in Scarborough last summer with the smile calculated and destined to break his heart, or Becks, who finally finished with James when he announced his absolute disbelief in love at her twenty-first birthday dinner — is writing a great novel about it. About love, so-called.

  Natalie, still in the hospital ward but now sitting in an enormous chair apparently designed for the morbidly obese, tries to read. ‘Which books?’ Dan asked, yesterday. ‘Whichever ones you think I’ll enjoy,’ she replied, to his obvious annoyance. Their reading choices rarely overlap, so it was indeed a sort of test.

  This morning he pulled a hefty tome from his rucksack and presented it with a flourish. ‘A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Omnibus edition.’ She hadn’t intended a tone quite so cutting.

  ‘I thought maybe you’d like something funny,’ he said defensively, ‘to cheer you up.’

  ‘Comedy sci-fi’s not really my thing, is it?’

  ‘Well, I brought you these as well.’ An Iris Murdoch she’d read before — he’d no doubt thought a female author a good bet — and a grim-looking Zola. Parisian squalor. Bit of escapism.

  ‘Quite a selection. How will I ever choose?’

  Dan doesn’t read fiction. Natalie, Dan would point out, doesn’t read fact.‘I tried,’ he muttered.

  She smiled and squeezed his hand. ‘I know — thanks. I think I will try the Hitchhiker’s.’

  She has now confirmed that it absolutely isn’t her thing, and flops it heavily back onto the table. She listens to the hospital sounds: brisk sweep of a privacy curtain; bang of a trolley against a yielding door; steady, determined crutching down an unseen corridor; gentle medley of coughs and beeps. Ostensibly peaceful. But there is that faint aura of dread, a sense that dehumanising horrors are enacted here behind closed doors. She’ll be glad to get out.