Learning to Die

by Thomas Maloney

Mike Vickers is sandwiched between an English tearaway daddy’s girl with indecent lips and an older Lithuanian lady of doubtful profession and penetrating intelligence; a Ghanaian model with a gift for deadpan one-liners sits beside Pete Walley, who is in his element; and Maurice, summoned by text, has just arrived wearing a vinyl zip-up shirt, to the general delight of the table. Mike’s Amex card is behind the bar.

  ‘I work in investments,’ he admits to the ladies, ‘but only until something better comes along.’

  ‘Mike’s idea of spontaneous,’ explains Pete, ‘is to buy monthly travelcards instead of an annual, in case he has to jam. He’s that wild.’ Verity, the tearaway, who has probably never purchased a travelcard, snorts.

  ‘Michael,’ purrs Maurice, slipping into his Anthony Blanche Brideshead act, ‘you would have us b-believe that you have made a great sacrifice, that you have laboriously b-bricked up the windows of your imagination in the service of your career. But I rather think you are like the P-pantheon or La Madeleine — you were constructed with no windows. Only a single round hole in the t-top of your head.’

  The table dissolves into hardly-warranted laughter and Mike meekly displays the ginger crown of his head to left and right. Maurice feels entitled to refer to Mike’s flat as the far-famed masturbatorium. Pete keeps mockingly calling him the Jack of Hearts. The more drinks you buy them, the more freely they insult you. Interlopers come and go, contributing to the atmosphere of entitlement and little else. The abuse in James’ emails tastes much, much better than this.

  When he goes to pay, Mike is casually presented with a bill for eight hundred and three pounds. He glances at it just as casually and taps in his code. The manager slithers out from somewhere.

  ‘I hope sir and guests had an enjoyable evening,’ he fawns.

  ‘It’s salvageable,’ shrugs Mike. ‘I’ve had better.’

  Just a drop in the shallow end of the swimming pool of digits he signed over to shrewd, twinkly Ira McFooley this afternoon, in exchange for an object rather smaller than a penny and of no special beauty. He feels sick both at the probability it’s junk, and at the remote possibility it’s not.

  Life: you know it’s a swindle, but you still buy.

  James F. Saunders awakes in an unfamiliar metal bed. A police cell, maybe, or a hospital. His shoes are standing neatly in a plastic tray on the floor, stuffed with newspaper. Birds are chirruping. Without raising his head he tugs at the curtain and sees hard blue sky. Swaying tree branches — no leaves on them, just a few dozen of the sniggering feathered imps.

  A motor starts up outside — a trimmer or a saw. The birds skedaddle and James thinks of Brenda. If I have not. Love. Her cold eyes, full of hatred. Out of control. What if she’s done something stupid? The classic twofold melodrama; the double whammy. He lurches out of bed and tries the door.

  It’s not a police cell — it’s the YHA at Stoupe Hole. Walkers, he’s told, reported his wretched existence to the manageress, who ventured out onto the rocks at dusk and recognised him as Bay’s unofficial writer-in-residence. She lets him use the phone for free — Brenda won’t recognise the number — but there’s no answer. No voicemail. He tries three times, then tries calling from his own phone, which he finds intact and functional in his pocket. Where Brenda should be, there’s nothing.

  Mike Vickers is awakened by his phone’s Ride of the Valkyries ringtone and insistent buzzing on the bedside table. He turns apprehensively to the other pillow but it’s untenanted. Ah, yes. He and Lulu played a delicious, wordless game in the back of a cab after the club but then she left him hanging. Just a fragrant nuzzle on the cheek. Clever, classy girl. Mike’s arrangement with Victoria is informal, of course, a pragmatic alliance. But there is a special sweetness in pleasure that leaves the conscience clean. In every bad night a bright spot.

  Oh. Only now does he remember Ira McFooley. The confiding whisper. The uncatalogued item. The elaborate provenance, tantalisingly incomplete. George egging him on in that dimly-lit room where common sense has no jurisdiction. He slumps back, fingers planted in his eyes, but the phone is still chuntering. He submits. It’s James, of all people.

  ‘James, old man,’ he croaks, with affected cheeriness. ‘How nice of you to call. I was thinking of you last night. Among other topics dear to my heart.’

  ‘Have you heard from Brenda?’ James’ voice is even more humourless than he remembers. A hint of urgency. James and Brenda: Mike has forgotten all about that curious match.

  ‘Not for a while. Should I have?’

  ‘I’m worried about her. We had a row. She — she’s not answering her phone.’

  ‘She rarely does.’

  ‘We had a bad row,’ James repeats. His whining tone resounds with guilt and defeat. Mike is surprised by a flash of suspicion.

  ‘What did you do to her?’ he asks, sharply.

  ‘Nothing! We were — having a good time. She came to visit me. I was talking about my book, some things I said came out the wrong way, and she — she flipped.’ This story sounds plausible, and Mike’s suspicion recedes. He’s seen Brenda flip, once or twice.

  ‘I’m sure she’s fine. I warned you not to mess with her.’

  ‘Can you call her? She looked crazy. I’m worried.’

  Brenda doesn’t answer Mike’s call. No surprise there. He texts her the single word ok?, which is an agreed signal. There is no reply. She’s probably in the mountains. Fasting in the wilderness.

  Mike dons a silk dressing gown, pads down to the kitchen and slices his grapefruit with a fiendish Japanese knife. A sensualist not only by inclination but by deliberate cultivation, his first refuge is always pleasure. The masturbatorium, indeed. He manspreads luxuriously in his Eames recliner and consults a mental library of fantasies into which Lulu might be inserted; the opening premises tend to be crude, but unexpected nuances often develop. They’re a creative outlet of sorts: expressive therapy.

  Afterwards, he sits looking up at his Damoclean chrome chandelier and feels utterly worthless.

  Twisted headstock, broken engine mount, cracked wheel rim, bent disc: the bike, now at the garage, will fetch a few hundred quid for parts. Torn jacket sleeve. A scuffed boot. Dan’s flawed biological machinery untouched. He reaches for his tablet and watches the wipeout video again: probably the last ride of his life. A wistful sense of what might have been.

  Natalie has gone to the supermarket. They’ve always shopped together but he’ll only slow her down. He, blitzkrieg shopper, round in seven minutes, expert judge of the fastest queue, will now slow her down.

  The crash was an accident, he keeps assuring her, but she doesn’t quite believe him. ‘Promise me you wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘Not without telling me. Not without —’ She wept; he promised. I admit I was riding carelessly, he said again, but it was an accident.

  Death is a bird of paradise: we all know what it is, but it can be many different things that aren’t at all alike.

  The vase on James’ desk is nearly dry, and alstroemeria petals lie scattered among the abandoned plates and cups. One has fallen into the open pot of jam, another clings to its sticky edge. When you sit here, she said, feeling lonely, I want you to remember our little breakfast. Yes, he remembers it. The desk a crime scene. As his head and heart begin to clear, he feels not a trace of anger towards Brenda. You might as well be angry with a cornered leopardess for lashing out. Never love a wild thing.

  As for the novel’s destruction — that he might or should rewrite it does not even occur to him — since he woke up in the hostel this has lost its horror: a tragic twist is only really sad the first time. Now it’s a simple fact in the sordid, inconsequential non-bibliography of James F. Saunders. Fitting, that even its tragedies disappoint.

  The horror is rather in the drastically altered landscape of his conscience. His face twitches with disgust at the thought of Project Q. He wallows in the reproaches of Brenda’s
warmth, optimism and guileless generosity. Where is she, his accidental soulmate? Where is she now?

  ‘Oi! James! Get down here!’ It’s Rob — Hugo’s dad — below the window. James gets up slowly, mechanically descends the stairs and opens the door. Rob is wearing his cords and country check and has a sneer on his face.

  ‘You really are a worthless shit.’

  James stares at him blankly. Tell me something I don’t —

  ‘Do you know how old my son is? Well?’ James casts his mind into the distant realm of last week and last month.

  ‘Six, I think,’ he murmurs.

  ‘That’s right. Six years old. When you talk to a six-year-old boy, you talk about pirates and dinosaurs and Kung Fu fucking Panda. You do not talk about loneliness and death and whatever fucked-up crap is in your miserable, retarded head.’ James feels a bland relief; abuse from a hypocrite, that he can take. ‘You won’t be getting another penny out of me,’ continues Rob, ‘and I’ll make sure everyone here knows just what a disturbed, pathetic creature you are. Christ — look at you. What was I even thinking, leaving him with you?’

  Lacking the desire even to communicate his indifference, James moves to close the door but Rob stops it with a mud-splashed suede boot.

  ‘One more thing. Hugo asked me to give you this.’ He holds up a dirty black sack with something heavy in it. ‘He found it on the beach. He says it’s yours. You could think of it as a goodbye present. Enjoy!’

  James takes the sack without a word, carries it upstairs, drops it in the corner of his room and tries to ignore it. There doesn’t seem to be any point in opening it. So he’s lost Hugo too. The solemn, big-headed boy was his largest source of income. Also, it so happens, his best friend. His counsellor. Truth is none the wiser for being old. Gone now. In for a penny.

  After a while the sack’s forlorn presence becomes overwhelming. He reaches into the wet plastic shroud, lifts out the laptop carcase and lays it on his desk. There is water behind the cracked screen, which flaps on its hinges without resistance; the keyboard and the various sockets are caked in wet grey sand; every surface is streaked and mottled by a sheen of salt. Even though it looks and smells precisely like Hardy’s deadest thing, James cannot stop his hand travelling to the power button, which no longer yields to a push. Just above the screen, the inch of red embossing tape he stuck there ten years ago is somehow still clinging on, still announcing its one-word command in clear white capitals.

  ‘INCIPE.’ is what the tape says. Begin. But it doesn’t matter that Steinbeck’s dog ate one of his drafts, or that John Stuart Mill’s stern father routinely tossed his son’s first attempts into the flames. For James, incipe signifies nothing. He flicks off the tape with his fingernail and drops the stinking wreck into the rubbish bin.

  19. Damage zone

  ‘Poets have the feelings of common men.’

  Montaigne

  Natalie Mock always used to know right from wrong. The quandaries presented in novels and films; the behaviour of boyfriends; government policies; the responsibilities of multinational corporations; how to remedy injustice. She argued with friends, held her ground and usually won them over. Dan asked her for advice. ‘I trust your instincts,’ he would say.

  In recent years, her instincts have wilted. She couldn’t even decide how to vote at the last election, not, as some of her colleagues asserted, because all the parties were alike, but because she simply couldn’t judge whose approach was the best. For every well-meant intervention, an unforeseen consequence. Is SmartAid, on balance, helping Africa? She hopes it is, but she’s no longer sure. Should you bail out the borrowers or the savers? Protect the fishing communities or the dolphins? Is she a good person? Is she doing the right thing?

  As she helps Dan up the stairs and they get ready for bed, she twice seems to feel a sort of pelvic twitch, an awakening, a latent treachery that she tries to ignore.

  Brenda stands on the hulking summit of Carn Eige, one of the country’s highest but least known peaks, and taps the tip of her ice axe against the trig’s grotesque armour of hoar frost. Above, around and below her, the cloudscape shifts. Small, sharp details appear briefly between gulfs of nothing: silhouetted cairn on the neighbouring peak, shore of the angry black loch far below, feeble yellow hole-punch of the sinking sun, patch of scoured rocks that marks the way down. The wind shoves and snatches at her body and scalds her face.

  This is the tenth and highest of the twelve tops. She’s been walking for eighteen hours with barely a rest, by bright moon and impotent sun, and has four or five hours to go. She’s seen nobody. The usual neat black rucksack is not on her back — she has no stove, no food, no map, no phone. Only her axe and the contents of her pocket: a pill bottle, a knife and a small forked stick.

  Love — men — boys — what was she thinking? This empty world, this world of abundant silence, is her plenty, her pleasure and her satisfaction. There is relief — even elation — in the confident resolution that she will never again allow herself to fall in love.

  She sets off down the narrow spur of snow in bold heel-biting strides. A cloud sweeps over and she loses sight of the ground ahead just as the wind, now behind her, bats her skittering down a sloping sheet of ice. Her arms fly up and she regains her poise, only for another gust to swat her off her feet. She feels acceleration in her gut, and rolls hard onto the singing axe. Its pick judders madly on the ice, breaks loose, sings again, skitters and finally sticks, wrenching her arms upward. She comes to rest with her hands numbly clinging, face crammed hard into snow like broken glass.

  A tiny black speck, barely adhering to the white mountain’s breast, insignificant, redundant — now still, now shaking in silent sobs, now still.

  The Box is heading for a flat first quarter. Stocks have been raging, but Mike only just got long — he missed the rally. January’s profit would have been bigger if he hadn’t forgotten to reset the virtual dials he fiddled in December. He remembered in February, cranked up his leverage and duly handed back all the year’s gains. Banal. Like a dodgem car with no steering. If this was entertainment he’d ask for his money back. Instead, it’s his career.

  He hears nothing from Brenda for two days, and is feeling the deep, nascent prickles of fraternal worry when her answering signal arrives: aye. Nothing else, but that’s enough. He means to text James, but finds himself calling instead.

  ‘I’ve had a message from you-know-who. She’s okay.’ James doesn’t speak for a few seconds, but breathes and whispers something to himself. He really was worried about her.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he says at last. ‘Did she say anything about me?’

  ‘I don’t think she’s in a talkative mood. But yes, I’m sure she’s okay. She has her ways of dealing with things. How about you? Are you alright?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes — you. How’s the book coming along?’

  ‘I’m — I’m having a rethink.’ His voice trails off weakly. Then he adds, ‘Tell her I’m sorry, if you speak to her. Tell her to call me.’

  Mike feels unexpected sympathy for this waster who stole his property, upset his sister and insulted his way of life — at least, he takes it for sympathy.

  ‘Listen. James. I have a well-appointed spare room here. En suite. Objets d’art. Heaving booze cabinet. Why don’t you come down for a few days? I think we’d have fun.’

  He takes it for sympathy, but it could be a cry for help.

  Dan is travelling to work by train and bus. Nat gives him a lift to the station, and picks him up. People surrender their seats when they see the crutches; the ingenious bus lowers itself to help him disembark. The arrangement works. For now.

  He’s helping the tuberculosis team again. It took them months of painstaking effort to create their single tiny crystal of the crucial protein — the infuriating enzyme that helps TB to defend itself against antibiotics — and already it’s been damaged b
y the harsh glare of the X-rays. There is disagreement about how to proceed. Dan is proposing a trial of the new microfocus beamline, but he admits they may only get one shot. If they illuminate an even tinier volume of the crystal, he argues, they’ll be right inside the damage zone, right in the eye of the ionisation storm. The crystal will be toast, but they might just get a clean image.

  His colleagues all know about the diagnosis now, of course: the sprained ankle story was never going to wash for long. There’s pity on both sides as each unconsenting initiate receives his or her share of the knowledge burden and struggles for the right words. Some Dan tells himself, matter-of-factly — these have to react on the spot, and do so in unpredictable but telling ways — while others hear second-hand and have time to think of an appropriate response. The latter suffer the most: many, especially men, find their courage fails them and say nothing at all, but just conduct their interaction wearing an expression of exaggerated sympathy and avoiding any trace of humour. It makes for long days.

  Among his wider circle of family and acquaintance, the scientifically illiterate often suggest alternative treatments. ‘Don’t believe the doctors,’ they urge, brushing aside the self-evident wonders of biomedical research. ‘All you need is a deep detox. Let me send you some links.’ A few tempers have flared — Dan’s well-meaning aunt is no longer speaking to his father because of the latter’s curt dismissals and warnings off. Even Natalie, usually a bullshit bloodhound, wavered after too much internet exposure and had to be steered gently away from the soft verges of quackery and back to reality.

  Reality is palliative physio and unpronounceable drug that might give him an extra couple of months — a well-meant biomedical gesture that he chooses to accept with good grace.

  James F. Saunders has shaved his head. An odd sensation, this cold, naked bonce — he keeps wanting to rub it with a towel. Fitting, though. Everything is fit and proper. For servicing the internal works he can’t stretch to more Laphroaig, but the Spar offers a range of affordable substitutes. Cleansers.