He nurses a cold coffee in the tearoom and silently admits that Mike’s emails score highly for conciseness. Tailored for an attention-deficient world. The patronising, conciliatory tone of the last deserves an abrupt and violent reply, but James finds he wants to keep the exchange rolling.
Dear Mike,
Let me educate you a little on the subject of literature. Literature can shine a light on our most secret and intimate thoughts, feelings and motives. It can pose moral puzzles of great complexity, explore the implications of social or technological change, engender empathy and understanding for those in different circumstances, and expose bullshit. Since literature spread beyond a privileged elite and trickled its way deep into the living matter of civilisation, the human race has become wiser, more sympathetic and more generous, and people have lived richer, more fulfilling lives. There is further to go. That’s the business I’m in. Merry Christmas.
Sincerely,
James
P.S. As for your bus — ars longa: developing genuine skill and expertise takes time. I’ve spent ten years learning to write. What have you learned to do?
The Merry Ladies are ready to close for Christmas, and encourage James out the door. He tucks the precious laptop under his arm.
12. Family history
‘I never the see the whole of anything; nor do those who promise to show it to us.’
Montaigne
If all goes well, Invergarry to Basildon is a ten-hour journey: an hour’s drive in the van, train to Edinburgh, train to London, tube, train again. All does go well. As the Intercity races down the Vale of Mowbray, Brenda looks east towards the bleak rampart of the Moors and thinks of James. Is he thinking of her too? (In fact he is in York, duffle-coated, waiting for the bus to Coventry, pondering Henry Miller’s admiration for Hamsun; her train passes within a hundred yards.) At Basildon station, she throws her rucksack into the boot of the ageing Jag.
‘Is that whisky I hear clinking?’ her dad calls through the open window. He leans across and gives her a beery bear-hug. ‘Brennie.’ He’s looking more and more like Grandad.
‘Hi Dad.’
Mike’s Audi is already in the driveway — thank god. Mum has thrown the front door open, letting all the heat out. The TV is blaring. The flashing Father Christmas is climbing the drainpipe.
Brenda’s mum is smiling so broadly that she seems about to cry. They embrace silently and a tear is indeed transferred from mother’s cheek to daughter’s. Brenda sighs.
‘Mum, what are you crying for? You saw me six weeks ago.’
‘I’ll cry if I want to.’
‘Let’s get inside and close the door.’
‘You look well, Brennie.’ Then she adds, with a sudden, inspired gasp, ‘You haven’t met someone, have you?’
Natalie is well aware that Dan finds staying with her mum awkward. It’s a small house with thin walls, and Mum isn’t very good at giving them space. Last year, she forgot to lock the bathroom door and Dan walked in on her perched on the loo, wearing nothing but a towel turban. Barnstaple is a three-hour drive from Reading and she insists they stay at least one night. Dan insists they stay at most one night, so one night it is.
Dan looks tired in the car — they share the driving — but he’s on good form when they arrive. They’ve decided not to mention his appointment. They’ll tell her if she notices anything and asks, but she doesn’t. Nor does she mention the dreaded having of babies. In fact, she seems to forget Nat and Dan’s circumstances and the lives they lead in Reading, and talks instead about the local gossip, about family overseas, and about the past. She’s put on another few pounds, and her arms are going flabby. Her parsnips are still heavenly, though.
Poor Mum. Who would she be, what life would she be leading, if Dad hadn’t died? She reminds Natalie of a child in a playground game who’s ‘out’ right at the start, and just waits glumly by the wall while the other girls play on. She’s misinterpreted the rules: she could have rejoined if she wanted to.
Several glasses of wine later, Natalie closes the flimsy door silently but firmly and lowers herself onto the sofa bed that takes up most of the tiny spare room.
‘Thanks, love,’ she whispers in the darkness.
‘For what?’
They hear her mum cough, and the stairs creak. Natalie snuggles up to Dan, slides a hand down his stomach and onto his boxers.
‘What are you doing?’ he breathes.
‘Nothing.’ His dick swells — poor thing can’t help it.
‘Nat. Your mum?’
‘We can be quiet.’
Her mum is still moving around in the next room. But Natalie is thirty-one years old and has every right to fuck her husband. If Mum has a problem with it, she should finally see about getting herself a boyfriend. A dance class. The internet. Life goes on.
They have sex with the volume switched off. She gets a bit carried away, but the sofa bed doesn’t creak. It’s like being a teenager again.
‘Shit doesn’t just happen, actually,’ preaches Richard Saunders, father of James F. This is one of his most infuriating catchphrases. He’s arguing with his cousin, Joe, visiting from Cork.
‘Jaysus, Richard, what made you such a hard-hearted man?’ These disagreements on the interpretation of the family history are an annual tradition. As are the childhood reminiscences which Richard intends as a lesson for his no-hoper son.
‘In the fifties,’ he begins, as always, ‘one of our favourite games was to take a paper bag — we didn’t have polythene ones — and catch as many wasps as we could, one by one, until they were roaring like a jet engine. Then you’d twist the top and hide it in someone’s desk at the start of a lesson —’
‘Or how about the chickens’ feet?’ suggests Uncle Joe, playing along. ‘When you came to stay with us on the farm, if my mother killed a chicken she’d give us boys the feet to play with. You could make them open and close by pulling the tendons, like little wires.’
‘We did a lot with a little in those days, didn’t we?’ says Richard. ‘Now it’s all video games and iPods.’ They both look at James.
‘Is it?’ says James. Who, apart from Dad, calls them polythene bags? ‘I wouldn’t know. I don’t have kids.’
‘Fortunate,’ retorts his father under his breath, ‘given the circumstances.’
Later, Uncle Joe brings out his fiddle. James has a hard English heart of his own, but it melts at the bouncing, tripping tones, timeless as birdsong, butter-knifing down the sad, swift decades. ‘I wish, I wish,’ sings Joe, in a cracked voice that suits the song perfectly, ‘I wish in vain, I wish, I wish, I was a youth again.’
James, slumped awkwardly on the same sofa that hosted his first kiss fifteen years earlier — Emma was her name — and on which he and Becks many times sat and talked and once made love, and on which he read Virginia Woolf’s The Waves in one spellbound sitting, and on which, fuming after a family row, he first formed his decade-old resolution never to compromise, never to submit, and never to take his father’s advice, now with a glass of the old man’s Jameson in his hand, feels the pang of mortality.
This song nails crosses one and two. But it’s well-worn and trite, and affecting only when you’re drunk — and there is cross three. Nothing new: incitement and curse.
‘So. Mikey. How’s work? Good year?’
Big Vince, Mike’s dad, has litmus lips — blue when sober, they flush to a more conventional pink after a couple of pints. His blotchy skin seems half obscured under a permanent thin dusting of builders’ plaster. Yet despite questionable health he is immensely strong. A memory: Dad teaching him to saw timber when he was about twelve. Mike would do ten hard thrusts, and then his dad would bite through the same distance with a single smooth stroke. ‘One day, I’ll be able to do that,’ he thought then, marvelling at the mystery of manhood. He was wrong: at thirty-three, with as much manliness
as he’s likely to acquire, he’s still a child. A crafty child, but a child nonetheless.
‘It was a pretty good year for me.’ On the coffee table is a dish filled with gold and silver: chocolate money.
‘How does it feel to be a big, swinging plonker? Isn’t that what you are now?’
‘I’m a trader. But I still just run Crispin’s system — I don’t make trading decisions myself.’
‘Funny bloke, that Crispin,’ muses Vince. ‘Drove a TVR but didn’t know how to change a tyre. Sold up and buggered off to Hong Kong. Who’d have thought my son’s entire career would come down to him?’ Mike doesn’t like the sound of that. Entire career. It’s early days.
‘I owe him a lot.’
‘How much? I mean, how much are they paying you these days? I’m your father — you can tell me.’
‘I’m doing well. I haven’t got my bonus yet.’
‘But you must have a sense.’ He stresses that word, showing big, sound, yellow teeth. For one Oedipal moment, Mike imagines his father’s enormous skull. The timber-sawing anecdote told at the funeral. He smiles nervously.
‘Dad, if you want to know whether I’m earning more than you, yes I am. So if you’re ever in trouble, let me know.’ He stands up. ‘Can I get you a mince pie?’
‘Insolent little shit,’ says his dad, perhaps half joking. ‘Never built so much as a Lego tower.’ Too true.
In a closed system, disorder must increase. Even Dan Mock’s father’s garage, Exhibit A, would, if locked up for long enough — a few centuries — exhibit some traces of disorder. A drip from a leaking roof, perhaps, scudding down the tiny drawer-fronts and causing their handwritten labels to run; or a draught rolling the well-sharpened pencil off the workbench and shattering the lead; or a mouse eating through the homemade pulley-based ceiling storage to bring a pressure washer or pair of trestles crashing down. Exhibit B is the human body: immeasurably higher pinnacle of order; same laws. The universe does not permit such anomalies to endure. Et cetera.
Dan did not expect the outriders of disorder to be already at his door, though his limp has, he thinks, improved. That doesn’t stop his dad noticing it immediately — Dan says he isn’t sure what it is but has an appointment to get it checked out. ‘Good,’ is Dad’s reply, with a concerned pat on the shoulder. He considers Dan to be a chip off the sensible old block.
Dan takes a walnut from the bowl on the sideboard and fits it into the nutcracker. He has a delicious premonition of the nut’s stout resistance, its sudden yielding to ruthless mechanics, the mysterious, brain-like kernel — its feel in the fingers and in the mouth — and the dry-mouth aftertaste. Then he remembers the weakness in his hands, quietly replaces nut and nutcracker in the bowl, and takes a foil-wrapped chocolate instead.
He can hear Natalie in the kitchen with his mum, attempting with a light, unobtrusive touch to prevent the usual culinary disaster. If he does have MS or Parkinson’s, her life will change too — he’s told her this. But she doesn’t seem worried.
There is one possibility he hasn’t discussed with Natalie: a disease his GP chose to omit from her list. Much worse than MS. Dan has looked up what the first symptoms are.
Just after four, lunch is served. God bless us, every one.
2012
13. Lifetime allowance
‘I wish for no misunderstandings, either in my favour or my disfavour.’
Montaigne
James F. Saunders fell in love on the bus last week — he’s now comfortable using that phrase: fell in love — but is recovering. It’s New Year’s Eve, and he’s back in Bay; Coventry has nothing for him. He sits on the chill concrete of the sea wall, back against a bollard, legs dangling.
The girl seated behind him on the bus, whose face he never saw and who was probably only fifteen or sixteen, told her friend that she didn’t consider her parents to be fully human, because they didn’t feel as intensely as she did. They were more like fish, she suggested. The friend giggled; the girl didn’t. It was an unexceptional thing for an adolescent to say. But then she added, ‘And the worst thing is, they know it’s true, because they were our age themselves once, so they know they’ve like slowly become subhuman, but they won’t admit it. Not even to themselves. I feel sorry for them.’
This girl will, in time, discover her assertion to be precisely correct. Adults are indeed subhuman. Burned out bureaucrats of the species. Of course by then, she’ll be one too. Won’t care to remember her youthful insight. For a writer, emotion is an engine of ideas and not vice versa. If James experiences fewer and feebler emotions as he grows older, inhabits a barren, worked-out emotional field, is it any wonder he has fewer ideas?
He throws a pebble into the sea, with a vague notion that it’s the right thing, the emotional thing to do. The act resounds with emptiness. A single gull flies high above, following the line of the coast, making steady progress towards an unstated but certain goal: another reproach.
It doesn’t matter. There are methods, workarounds, by which old men can write great books. James walks slowly back to his lodgings. Flexes his fingers. For a subhuman to whom nothing comes naturally anymore, the novel is a test of intellect, guile, mettle; above all, memory. Bringing old emotion to mind. Project Q. Auld lang syne.
As Brenda’s train rushes northward past the snow-dusted Moors, she again watches for James. They did not avail themselves of the opportunity to meet up over Christmas. James’ texts have been petering out. Absence makes the heart grow cold, in Brenda’s experience.
Mike did the older brother thing, told her to be careful. A guy like Mike is never likely to understand a guy like James. She braced herself for more, especially as James pinched his fancy book, but that was it — be careful. The cocked ginger eyebrow. Thanks, Mike, but I’m twenty-eight.
She spots a kestrel, a quivering fan of feathers fixed in space. Last summer she visited a birds of prey centre near Loch Lomond, and afterwards wished she hadn’t. Lots of chit-chat about conservation but ultimately birds in cages and birds tethered to posts. There’s no such thing as a cage big enough for an eagle. Now James is no eagle, but he could be, say, a Harris hawk — perched in a cage of his own devising. It used to have big ideas; now it blinks and fidgets on a well-soiled perch looking a bit foolish. But still handsome: the noble soul undefeated.
Brenda, on the other hand, is a hooded crow soaring free: the Highlands are calling. Will her van start? And is James on her side, or not?
Mike Vickers doesn’t have his money yet. His unauthorised nocturnal trade was probably a breach of contract and could, in theory, give the bastards an excuse not to pay him. But, he keeps telling himself, it made money: whoever heard of a rogue trader who made money? Nobody. Anyway, the trade seems to have gone unnoticed. Too small to matter. Mike just has to sit tight for another three weeks, and not get fired.
Every January an email goes round offering tax planning advice. Every year Mike, one of the small fry, embarrassed enough by his net pay, ignores it and takes the near-fifty-per cent PAYE hit like a gentleman. This year, Mij persuades him to make an appointment. If Mike has always felt like an imposter in this business, an inside man, now he feels like a double agent. He’s always hated spy thrillers — can never follow who’s working for whom.
‘Mr Vickers. Please take a seat.’ The accountant is an amphibian — small, moist and astonishingly ugly. Isn’t the devil supposed to wear fine raiment? His wife, in her silver frame, presents a stoical smile to the camera; the gurning children have their father’s looks.
Apparently Mike can whack some of his bonus into his pension, but not all of it because he’d blow his lifetime allowance. Or he can invest in some shady-but-safe scheme that attracts tax relief. Attracts it, just like that. Or he can keep the money offshore and withdraw a small amount each year, tax-free. A small amount, in his case, means over a hundred grand.
As he listens to these choices, Mik
e understands perfectly why the wealthy are so despised. Offshore bank account: here is the irrevocable fork in the road, the decisive plunge into Macbeth’s bloody river, the final, unambiguous breach of another, more important contract: the social contract.
But. For ten years this job has been a fat, obscuring blob of self-deception stuck fast in the middle of his life. Important things — beauty, truth, perhaps love — have peeped and curled at the margins, always just out of reach or sight. He could have been someone else, someone real, but he’s been this instead. He wants payback.
‘I’ll take the offshore option,’ he says, decisively. Stepped in so far.
The neurologist is younger than Dan. Sporty sort of chap — triathlon finisher’s medal, bicycle helmet hanging on the back of his door. He’s called Dan too.
During the past few family-filled and friend-filled weeks, our Dan’s apprehension has been a lonely burden. He said nothing more to his parents. His mum has always been a worrier, which of course means her children — usually Laura, but this time Dan — have always been less likely to tell her the things she so desperately wants to know. As for his dad, ten years ago Dan might have talked it all through with him in the pub, or more likely in the garage. But one of the subtle changes age has engineered in his dad’s mind is to make him a worrier too. The pair of them are now as bad as each other. And Dan might not be horribly ill, or might be only moderately horribly ill.
Finally, Natalie: he has told her everything the GP told him. Every last detail. He’s wanted to go further, to fling his worst fear on the table, but something has stopped him. He doesn’t want to touch that worst fear, to utter it, to justify it. Natalie’s matter-of-fact optimism — she may not be a doctor, but she’s no fool — is all he’s had to hold on to.
Now he needs answers. As he describes his symptoms again and the other Dan nods thoughtfully, he’s struck by the towering asymmetry between doctor and patient. No other human interaction is quite like it. Little wonder doctors have been revered and reviled over the millennia — setting themselves up as God. Dan himself, trained to a comparable level of specialised knowledge and skill, is a god only to his electrons; if he loses a batch, nobody weeps. Here, he might as well be on his knees.
Learning to Die Page 10
