Learning to Die

by Thomas Maloney

  And she laughs.

  Dan Mock relishes a practical challenge, and the crutches present many. The tool holster he wears round the house and lab accommodates his tablet, phone, tea flask, snacks, and anything else he needs to carry from one room to another. He’s cushioned the crutch handles with gel-filled sleeves and armed the tips with all-weather rubber feet. He’s had five cheap bar stools delivered, one for each room of the house (including one in the shower) for easy sitting and rising. His father, arriving with a toolbox in each hand and a sort of fierce, desperate joy at being able to help, has helped him to install grab handles in tricky places.

  Yes, humans are adaptable in the face of incapacity. Practical victories encourage profounder internal ones. But Dan’s disease harbours a unique scorn for such resilience. Just as he gains purchase, traction on his difficulties (and as he and Natalie even feel able to laugh at them), it changes the rules: deepens his incapacity and renders all his adaptations useless. Presents a snake to cancel all his laboriously-climbed ladders.

  At the start of April, a quick hand up — from Natalie, a colleague or a fellow commuter — was sufficient to get Dan out of a chair. By the end of the month, it’s not. Simply standing his body upright is a precarious operation, as it might be for a badly-made action figure. After his fourth fall, from which he is unable to get himself up, Natalie persuades him to try the wheelchair. Within a week, months earlier than he expected, it’s his new reality. Ramps now his domain, stairs of mere sculptural interest with no practical function. Working from home less a leisurely treat, more a prison sentence.

  And it’s not just Dan’s legs. His hands still work but he can’t lift his arms above his head: shirts, yes; T-shirts, no. Shirt buttons: annoying. His voice has started to change, which is a bad sign. Its pitch has crept up a couple of notes, and it slurs when he’s tired.

  His parents think he and Nat should move house. They look at property websites, tick the ‘accessible’ box and send suggestions. But the two-up-two-down has its advantages: downstairs bathroom; central location; sunny front room where Dan sets up his workstation; gloomy back room a natural bedroom; plenty of space for guests upstairs. Best of all, the wheelchair neatly clears the kink in the hall by one centimetre, which gives Dan, tongue clamped in teeth as he manoeuvres, the thrill of unlikely success every time.

  The car becomes a dreaded battleground of heaving and grappling, suddenly swept aside by the arrival of the Motability car in mid-May. You just drive straight into the back, like a drone docking in the mothership. As gadgets go, it’s good.

  These arrangements, foresighted concessions to practical needs, are similar, Dan imagines, to the preparations of expectant parents (Nat hasn’t mentioned that idea for a while, thankfully). He too is expectant. Just like the nervous, excited dad-to-be that wasn’t-to-be, he sometimes forgets what is going to happen despite the glaring parade of reminders. Each time reality bites, he feels an incursion of raw panic, incoherent antithesis of all his careful philosophy. The panic is that he doesn’t even know what is unfinished, what unexplored in his dwindling life. He tells himself to get a grip.

  Life is preparation.

  Six weeks after his thoughtless betrayal (like all thoughtless errors, James’ visit acquired this identity only after the fact), Mike Vickers has failed to re-establish meaningful contact with his sister. He has, apparently, driven Brenda to the other side of the world — to cheery, self-satisfied brother Austin and his New South Wales sheep station.

  Faithless brother is a heavy charge to add to Mike’s lengthening roster of worthlessness and wasted privilege, which swells and flexes under the awful magnifying glass of Dan’s illness. However, like all early-stage addicts, Mike is blind to the connections between his various woes — in particular, he’s not prepared to give up James. He likes James. His moment of madness in Ira McFooley’s gallery was both in spite of, and inspired by James. And he doesn’t want James on his conscience as well.

  Mike is still spending, cycling grimly between restraint and profligacy. His friends have quickly come to expect and rely on his largesse, and when news of his latest extravagance fails to elicit the enthusiastic affirmation he craves, Mike finds himself calling James.

  ‘I’ve just signed a rental agreement,’ he announces.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For a summerhouse. On an island in the river — Shepperton. River frontage. Punt. Hot tub. Cocktail bar. Baby grand. For the whole month of June.’

  ‘I didn’t know you played the piano.’

  ‘I don’t. But I can punt like a pro.’

  ‘Sounds idyllic,’ says James, dully. Mike falters for a moment, then presses on.

  ‘I hope so, because during the week, it’s yours. Your retreat. Sun-dappled, river-rounded change of scene. What can you write in four weeks? Two or three short stories? An avant-garde novella? Gatsby-on-Thames?’

  ‘Very generous of you, but no thanks.’

  ‘At the very least come to my garden party there on the ninth.’ James emits a savage snort of laughter that makes Mike wince. It hurts, and it feels good.

  ‘What on earth are we celebrating?’ asks James.

  Natalie Mock’s outward life is locked in a downward dance with Dan’s. When he can no longer safely drive, Natalie can no longer not drive. When he can no longer stand at the kitchen counter, Natalie is committed to all the cooking and all the washing up. When he needs a shower enclosure, she loses a bath. One of the heaviest visible burdens stems from her resolve to spare him the banalities of terminal illness — navigating the bewildering web of well-meaning professionals and volunteers with their leaflets and ring binders, addressing perverse financial complications and, above all, filling in forms. Even three-score and ten is far too short a span to be filling in forms, Natalie reasons, so Dan’s precious few months or years will be form-free if she can help it. In consequence, her downward-dancing outward life has a triple helping of infuriating, bureaucratic crap.

  Her internal life is following a stranger, richer course. Each practical necessity has its attendant love-angel — patient, indomitable, ennobling, recalling helpless ministerings to her father but fledged now, matured, drawing out the very best of her once-doubtful respecting and cherishing of Dan. On the other hand, angel or no, each must be accomplished amid the pitch and roll of wretchedness.

  Last night, she and Dan argued. ‘I get it!’ she snapped. ‘I get that our future was a blank fucking page that means nothing to you. But this is not only about what might or might not have been, it’s about what’s happening right now — this long, dismal, slow motion goodbye.’

  Dan nodded, as he might at a seminar, and replied, in that calm, matter-of-fact voice that makes her want to shake him, ‘A sudden death piles all its sorrow onto those left behind. At least a slow-motion goodbye is shared.’

  ‘That’s just it!’ she returned. ‘You’re not letting me share it! Sharing it does not mean me turning into your fucking nurse.’ She cried and said sorry, and he said sorry, and it ended.

  The little plastic wand lies thoughtfully on the rim of the sink, considering its answer. Natalie’s periods never exhibited much of a sense of rhythm in the bygone era before she went on the pill, so a missed beat need not be significant. But if. She recalls Dan’s three reasons — the three tragedies he wants to avoid: his, hers, and its. He said, ‘There is no divine decree tying you to me.’ It was well-meant, presumably — it might even be true — but could anything be more hurtful?

  She tries to stop herself looking down too early. Looks over at the new enclosure. Pictures the old bath, and herself, last year, lying in a marinade of diluted blood. Reaches back, elbow crooked, to feel the dint of the scar.

  Her eyes snap down to the edge of the sink. One bar, clear and solitary as her own deluded plot. She feels a crashing wave of relief — only relief. If. If nothing. Not built for babies.

  James
F. Saunders remembers the Upstart suggesting that the first impulse after a humiliation is to look into a mirror. As for the Exile, his private prescription was simple: Write it! What else are you good for? The foundations of a novel cannot, he feels sure, be laid from unsorted rubble, nor from the still-hot, gelatinous matter of raw feeling. But poetry, perhaps. Yes, it is as poems, or fragments of poems, or poems of fragments, that James’ benighted thoughts stagger back into the light.

  The conjunction of several minor observations, each insignificant in itself, convinces him that the Bay locals have become less friendly. Rob’s been dishing the dirt on him. Nobody in Bay much likes Rob, but the dirt sticks anyway. It’s bank holiday weekend, but the Bay Hotel doesn’t have any bar work for him. All very fitting. Sackcloth and ashes, tar and feathers, grime and banishment. Write it.

  He writes four or five poems a day, takes pleasure in squashing them into perfectly round, compacted balls, and then, at high tide, sitting with his back to the usual bollard, flicks them one by one into the appreciative sea.

  Natalie Mock is hauled out of a frantic dream by a gentle but persistent tinkling bell, apparently right inside her head. She had a beautiful baby in the dream, about the size of a baby gerbil, but then lost it somewhere in the house and searched with growing desperation, cursing her negligence. The tinkling bell is Dan, fully dressed, stirring a cup of coffee he’s delivered to her bedside table. He grins. The clock says before five.

  ‘Can you help me get the blunderbuss out front? We have to be quick.’

  They stand on the pavement in the bright, birdsung dawn. Dan fits a sort of lid of dark glass over the front of his telescope, slots an eyepiece into place and points the barrel straight along the street towards the sun. He applies his eye and grins again.

  ‘Tell me what you see.’

  What Natalie sees, stooping over the telescope and applying an unpractised eye, is a luminous orange. There’s a little round black spot on the orange, and some even tinier specks and marks.

  ‘I think there’s some dirt on your lid-thing,’ she says. ‘And maybe a price sticker — a round one.’ Dan grins again.

  ‘Look again at that round sticker.’

  Suddenly her mind begins to grasp what she’s looking at. The orange — it’s the sun — is bright at the centre, dimmer at the edge, as a thing would be if you were peering through a dimmer skin into a potent, glowing core; the marks are not on the glass but, shockingly, etched on the sun’s fiery surface; and the black spot is something else again — not a sticker, not on the glass or on the sun but drifting somewhere in between: a celestial photobomber. A planet. She feels a lift in her stomach as the solar system suddenly seems not an abstraction on children’s posters but a reality upon which she is lightly perched.

  She looks up at the empty street, at the empty dawn sky, and at Dan’s face glowing with excitement, and feels a violent heave of loneliness. When Dan is gone, this is what remains: a black stone circling a ball of fire.

  ‘Venus,’ whispers Dan, squinting, adjusting the telescope’s aim to keep up with the rising sun. ‘Not stopping. Just in transit. The next time this happens —’

  ‘You don’t have to say it.’

  ‘The next time this happens,’ he repeats patiently, ‘we’ll both be dead and gone.’ He squeezes her hand, gently but probably as hard as he can. Our fragile existence may seem to divide us, he’s saying, but really it unites us. Yes, but.

  When she stoops and looks again, the black circle has drifted, silent and sure and without any of the fuss the rarity of this event seems to demand, closer to the edge.

  21. Slap bang

  ‘How many improbable things there are, vouched for by trustworthy people, about which we should at least preserve an open mind, even if they do not convince us!’

  Montaigne

  Mike tells Dan and Natalie to present themselves at Shepperton Lock at four. There’s disabled parking, he says; everything else is arranged, he says. It’s a blazing, pulsating June afternoon with all that entails for the west London traffic, but they arrive at the riverside only mildly late and mildly frazzled to find the miraculous parking space just as Mike promised. A bronzed boy in shorts and flip-flops waves them over to a launch moored with its stern to the bank and a ramp already unfolded. His lithe, undiseased body seems, to Dan, only vaguely subject to the law of gravity.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Mock?’ he enquires. ‘Guests of Mr Vickers? Step aboard, please!’

  Dan pushes aside a ripple of envy. He smiles at Nat, and manoeuvres his chair with an appreciable remnant of that satisfaction peculiar to self-taught expertise. The mooring rope is loosed. Terra firma, traffic and the humdrum world drop quietly away behind them. The launch glides in a breezy arc around the nearest island, past a churning weir, a small marina, a rowing club littered with more tanned bodies and boats, and a parade of houses with immaculate, dreamy gardens. One of the larger gardens is thronged with chattering people, and it is here the launch slows and backs up to a narrow landing stage. Dan steers down the ramp backwards and executes a graceful one-eighty on the striped lawn.

  Mike is already strolling down to greet them, tongs in hand, wearing a novelty Statue of David apron over a pink shirt and dazzling white trousers.

  ‘Old man,’ he says, stooping to embrace Dan. ‘Natalie. Quite an entrance! Welcome.’

  It’s hard to mingle by joystick, and though Natalie does her best to intermediate, Dan’s sense of empowerment is soon punctured by the usual awkward smiles and greetings that assail them from both standoffish and overenthusiastic strangers. In fact, it’s worse than usual. To some of Mike’s friends he is invisible — even to some he’s met before — to others a child, and to yet others he’s apparently stark bollock naked. Natalie, fiercely protective and no expert at this game, sometimes makes things worse. Even the most innocuous small talk presents pitfalls to the awkward squad, and Dan finds himself wanting to let them get back to their party.

  He has a feeling that not all wheelchairs would have the same effect. A sporty big-wheeler evokes the Paralympics, burly shoulders, basketball; it’s the headrest, he suspects, that really scares people off. A proclamation of mental impairment, of drooling dependency. Dan doesn’t even need the damned headrest — yet — but he’s been advised to keep it in place, in case he gets tired.

  ‘I wanted to throw a surprise party especially for you,’ confides Mike over the barbecue, after their first circuit. ‘Invite all your friends and family. I had the whole thing worked out. But Nat thought you’d hate me forever for making you the centre of attention. So you’ll have to make do with my friends instead.’

  ‘Oh, but we love your friends,’ jokes Natalie. ‘Your friends are our friends.’

  Mike poles out into the channel and swings gracefully upstream. The punt handles like a dream, providing a welcome fillip to his morale. Dan’s arrival was a shock of the least flattering kind: the shock of new knowledge is honourable enough, but the shock you feel on seeing something you already knew to exist — the child victim of a civil war, what goes on in an abattoir, or your best friend’s wheelchair — is an indictment of your internal dishonesty, and guilt follows close behind.

  He takes a deep breath and adjusts his stance. Here, at least, is something that he can do well. When he should have been learning maths twelve years ago, or repaying his privilege in some other service to mankind, he was perfecting the art of prodding an elongated, upholstered crate along a river with studied nonchalance. It’s gratifying to finally see a return on the investment.

  Seated side by side on the velvet are Victoria, in a shoulderless red-and-gold number that’s trying just a little too hard, and Lulu in floral perfection. Not a seating arrangement they would have chosen, but neither wanted to be the one left behind and they’re both coping with characteristic grace. On the nearer seat, at Mike’s feet, facing forward and with her simple straw hat obscuring his view of h
er face, sits Natalie. She didn’t want to leave Dan, but he insisted. It’s just possible that he wanted to escape her constant, ministering presence. Let his hair down.

  Confronted by two of the most beautiful women he has ever met, silently competing to arrange their flawless legs to the most devastating effect, Mike nevertheless finds his gaze drawn downward towards Natalie. Her predicament troubles him in ways he hasn’t explored — ways related to, but distinct from his pain and pity for Dan. When she turns her head to the left or right he gets an eyeful of pallid breast and looks up guiltily.

  Dan’s chair is positioned beside a sundial, which supports his beer at the critical straw-sipping height. After another gauntlet of uncomfortable niceties, he is relieved to find himself alone. It’s not just the patronising and the awkwardness. Talking, laughing, nodding and even smiling are now for him the equivalent of running up steps or standing on one leg: manageable, but hard physical work for which he has a limited capacity.

  The sundial’s shadow rests on five, but it’s gone six — the error resulting from some combination of incorrect accommodation of latitude and longitude, the ellipticity of the earth’s orbit and British Summer Time. The inclined edge of the blade should lie parallel to the earth’s axis, of course. Dan closes his eyes and feels the planet rolling through space, northern hemisphere generously tipped, for now, towards the sun and basking in its summer bath of photons, whatever charged particles happen to penetrate its magnetic field, and a comically large number of neutrinos (a few trillion of the unassuming little buggers are landing in his beer every second). Why is the planet tipped over just the right amount to create the moderate seasonal variations so conducive to life? Ah. Good question. It got tipped sometime in the earth’s early history, of course, when the solar system was a jumble of rubble, possibly by the same humongous collision that created the moon.