A door clicks somewhere, releasing a waft of voices and footsteps. Mike’s rep looks up from her phone, smiles nervously and mouths, ‘Here we go.’ The outgoing rivals stride into view, and the smug, confident little smile that Mike has prepared for them dies on his face. His adversary — hawk nose, crooked tie, greying hair slightly wild — grins broadly.
‘Michael. Fancy that. May the best man win.’ It’s Crispin. Crispin, ferocious boffin-in-chief, who should be in Hong Kong, and he knew he was up against Mike. Which means this battle is lost.
The muffled, resigned yelps of his neighbours’ midlife therapy transport James F. Saunders back to the night before he started his late novel. The ghosts of Byron and Van Gogh, wasn’t it? The spectre of death. All just repetition from here on. It’s easy to wallow in dark thoughts when you’re holding a luminous lifeline of hope, as he was then.
He frowns at the ceiling. He could have emailed the novel to himself — he even thought of doing it, about forty thousand words in — but he didn’t act. Why not? He doesn’t know. Its absence is still palpable — it is like a death, but a death, perhaps, of someone he misses less than he expected.
Is it time to begin the next doomed cycle of repetition? The altered landscape of his life would demand a very different book now, of course. A more — dare he even form the words in his head? — a more grown-up sort of book. Or — this new thought, impossible before his impromptu reunion with Becks, hits him like a tomahawk, and he gasps audibly — is it finally time to call it quits? Is this the end? And if it is the end, so what?
A breeze from the open window wafts, caresses, consoles James’ face in the darkness. The neighbours are all fucked out now, and wavelets are crisply slapping the shingle. Kesh; kesh; kesh. If this is the end of his endeavour, his writing dream, then there will be, after all, no special legacy for James F. Saunders, no lasting work to touch the hearts of readers yet unborn, just as there will be no solemn slab laid down to mark his eventual passing, trod by reverent feet, but instead, crammed out of sight, unloved and tended by contract, a grubby little pellet of reconstituted stone.
Dan Mock, stuck indoors on a day of roiling clouds and hot, glistening pavements, has driven his chair to the front window to watch, hear and smell the latest downpour. He slides a weak hand through the opening. If he could, he’d lift the sash high and stick his head out.
He has mixed feelings about the peculiar re-entry of Natalie’s ex into their lives. For himself, he is glad: he feels like a missing puzzle piece has been pressed into place, or a stubborn Sudoku grid has resolved itself. But meeting James seems to have upset Natalie. Dan is sympathetic rather than suspicious — he’s not sure whether this is because James did, after all, turn out to be a bit of a loser, comfortingly unimaginable as his successor, or whether the jealous impulse has receded with his illness, just as the sex demon itself has relaxed its grip (the apparatus still functions, surprisingly, but the balance between his higher and lower selves has shifted).
But no — jealousy hasn’t receded: it has merely changed colour. The thought of Natalie having children with and growing old with another man — not with him, after all, despite everything they’ve been through together, but with someone else, someone who thinks different thoughts, feels different, smells different, stands an alien razor in the bathroom cabinet — this thought conjures no indignation now, but only a grey, fathomless sadness. The more firmly he resolves that she must one day find someone else, that she must be happy without him, the further he slides down into his private, jealous sorrow. But still, she must.
Last Friday they went to watch the Olympic swimming. Once in a lifetime, people say. A nine-hour round trip for eighty minutes of frenzied splashing and churning. Not much of a spectator sport, swimming, you’d think, but it was fun. Mike offered them tickets for Saturday’s athletics, but Dan declined — he wanted Nat to see her swimming, and consecutive days would have been too much. Instead, they watched what the papers are now calling Super Saturday on TV with Mark and Rachel. Dan felt an echo of his childhood fascination with records and results, a whisper of envy for all that flowing motion, and a resigned sense that in staging such spectacles, in relentlessly overdoing it, humanity is trying just a little too hard.
On the long drive round the M25 to Stratford, the topic of James cropped up a few times. Gritted teeth from Natalie, reluctance, even now. Memories that shine a light on life choices and life outcomes, perhaps. A loser James may be, but he can still take the bins out. Dan is slowly coming to accept that there will be no great opening of hearts. Their relationship is strong but also bounded.
They drove home in silence, weary and hoarse from cheering on the titans.
Natalie ducks under the shop’s porch and shakes herself down. As she stalks past the fruit and veg, her foot slips on the wet floor and she flails wildly to stay upright. ‘Oh, no you don’t,’ she whispers. No room for her to get injured these days — no slack in the system.
The item she needs is shelved meaningly between the condoms and the tampons, in the aisle reserved for accessories to adult life — razors, deodorant, multi-vits. But as she nears the tills, first her eye and then the rest of her is drawn up a different aisle, one she always skips on the weekly round. First, a preparatory run of dog and cat food, and then — babies. Faces like grinning, gap-toothed pumpkins, everywhere you look. Giant shrink-wrapped slabs, seventy-two nappies in each, are on offer: three for two. How much do babies crap? Baby-dry, baby-snug, baby-soft, huggie-snuggie-snot-nosed-cherub. Stacked crates of baby formula look like something you’d see at a builder’s merchant. Nappy bags. Breast pumps.
She couldn’t do all this, and look after Dan as well. Could she? Should she? No slack in the system. She retreats to the tills, tosses the test on the nearest conveyor belt and avoids eye contact.
The rain stops abruptly but Dan stays on for a moment, listening to the daytime traffic as it calmly, sedately shears the flooded streets. He should be working, but instead he’s been reading about the law. He already knows that euthanasia and assisted suicide are illegal in England, but it’s worth making sure. A patient can refuse treatment, and indeed can issue legally-binding instructions in advance. Yes — his leaflets told him that. In other words, the illness is allowed to kill you, to play God, but no one else is. What if the illness doesn’t play a decent god? What if it takes you far enough to make life utterly miserable, whimpering at the roadside of existence, and won’t finish you off with a spade? It’ll be alright, the illness whispers, with a malevolent wink — trust me.
The law is an ass, but Dan is not the person to fight it. He’s not prepared to spend his last days on earth making adversaries of principled, well-intentioned fellow men and women. Nor is he the person to ‘raise awareness’ by getting his face in the papers, or, for that matter, the person to raise hard cash for research. He leaves these worthy tasks to others.
Is he selfish? He hopes not. In the cause of science, not his own, he has signed up to all the trials he ticks the boxes for, although most have disappointingly modest ambitions — counselling therapies, a better way of tracking symptoms, an adjustable collar. Magic healing potions are conspicuously absent. Apart from the trials, rather than reinvent himself, Dan has decided to live his life according to the same principles he hazily espoused before his diagnosis, but to follow them more strictly: do what you’re good at; do what you love; do what you think is right.
If, thanks to Dan’s elaborate ranks of magnets, the synchrotron can deliver to its customer experiments shades and flavours of blinding light that it couldn’t when he began, and if those shades and flavours help to answer questions that couldn’t be answered before (the tuberculosis team did get their image; a grainy print-out is taped to the wall by his makeshift desk), and if just one of his sixteen published papers — or his work still in progress — ends up nudging human understanding in the right direction, he’ll have achieved something.
If he manages to find pleasure and wonder in the world, even as his means of engaging with it disappear one by one — yesterday he took a nostalgic mathematical tour through Maxwell’s equations and their many elegant implications — he’ll have achieved something else.
And if he somehow succeeds in bequeathing Natalie, and his family and friends, a legacy of good feelings, feelings that engender strength and self-belief rather than despair, he’ll have achieved something yet more. Success and failure are both assured; achievement comes in the shades and flavours.
Dan concentrates for a moment to execute a swallow, and again to effect a satisfyingly deep sigh. It is somehow reassuring to be reminded how lightly he has touched the world. This room, the moulding on this window frame, the tiny heart-shaped pock of rust on the fastening — they were here before him, and will be here long after he’s gone: quietly, effortlessly existing.
At first, Brenda Vickers finds herself to be quite an attraction at the sheep station. The shepherds and shearers see few enough women, it seems, fewer even than the dour Highland foresters, and fewer still who’ll fearlessly try their hand at manhandling a ram or herding a deafening woolly torrent through the chute. Any uncouth behaviour from the men is returned in kind.
She spends a few evenings at the bar with a gentle veterinary student from Argentina who’s finding the job less pleasant than he bargained for. He’s a mountaineer of sorts back home — Brenda forgives him some mild exaggeration — he has a good heart and his accent is gorgeous. They like each other — they have no particular reason not to. But it’s not the same. There’s a missing ingredient whose taste she can still remember. If this is an experiment, the results are clear.
Meanwhile, a few of the shearers realise that she’s not quite right, not quite normal. They remember her put-downs and turn mean. ‘Keep calm, boys,’ they murmur when she passes, hands shaking in mock fear, exchanging grins at the running joke. Austin, so contented when she arrived, finds out and reacts with fury.
She also misses, more than she expected — there are mountains here, after all — the ancient, storm-rounded, midge-swept hills of home. She can’t stay.
Meanwhile, James F. Saunders collides head-on with a job — one he would have found intolerable before his encounter on the Shepperton lawn. After determining that Whitby Library does not hold a copy of Nerval’s Sylvie, which he has a sudden, scholarly yen to reread, James locates it in the town’s bookshop. Unwilling to fork out ten pounds for the slim volume, he starts reading on the shop floor. Between chapters he moves about, pretending to browse, brushing his fingers over the neatly-stacked wares. The shelf bearing Salinger, Sarraute and Sayers registers no particular significance. He frowns, then smiles — the shimmer and the scorn have quite disappeared. He might as well be in a hardware shop.
After a hundred pages he’s politely accosted by the manager, a sardonic, savvy woman in the late stages of pregnancy. They start talking about Nerval and the Romantic movement, and one thing leads to another.
‘We’re looking for someone prepared to work weekends,’ she explains, hesitantly. ‘For six months. After that — we’ll see.’
‘Weekends mean nothing to me, except fewer buses.’
‘Are you mobile? You could move here, to Whitby, perhaps.’ James thinks of his meagre possessions, and his pariah status in Bay.
‘Yes, I could do that.’
So he finds a flat, still within earshot of the sea; gives notice to Mrs Peacock, promising to visit. Counts the days, and measures his internal adjustments. ‘You haven’t changed,’ Becks said when they met, her tone measured, deliberately neutral. She couldn’t see, in that moment, what he’s become. Or maybe she could see precisely what he’s become, or what he hasn’t become, as the world has grown up around him. The friends, the admiring disciples all gone now. The nightclubs unwelcoming or closed down. The attitude unbecoming.
But now some stubborn lever has shifted. Seeing and speaking to Becks has effected a recalibration, has swept his expectations into line with his reality, and there is much more relief in this change than discomfort. Ambition is a stomach ulcer, healed now.
Again and again he settles himself into the warm, fragrant memory-bath of Becks’ tragic splendour, her admission that she’s thought of him, her reciprocal curiosity, that veined hand that used to hold his so tightly on rope bridges and rafts and reaching across from one sleeper-train bunk to the other as they rattled across a night-blotted world.
He takes from his shelf a copy of the York University magazine dated 2002, lets it fall open at a familiar page, and decides that his second-prize-winning poem needs an extra, final stanza. He wrestles with the ten lines for an hour, subdues them at last, writes out a fair copy, studies it judiciously, and then screws it into the usual tight ball for committal to the sea. Amen to an idiot prayer.
What puzzles him is that each time he remembers Becks, Brenda’s absence gnaws at him. Brenda-guilt and Brenda-love. Perhaps a trace of Brenda-hope. Those, after all, are his reality. He writes Dear Brenda across the specious blankness of page after page, but nothing is sent. And still he thinks of Becks.
Becks, Natalie, stands in front of the bathroom mirror, calmly putting off the pleas of her bladder. She turns her head a little, lifts her chin, tries a different mouth. The puffy grey nubs under her eyes aren’t a good look, but she feels worse — bad enough to threaten the breezy competence that she wears each day like a uniform. Bad enough to need an explanation.
She tears open the slim packet she bought last week and unzips her jeans. Dips into the singing cord of pee, extracts, watches. The tiny front of wetness advances rapidly, overrunning the window while she’s still in full flow.
She waits the obligatory sixty seconds, tilting the wand this way and that, weighing its physical substance, watching the play of light. No, this isn’t a dream, and she isn’t seeing double. A flash of primordial triumph is overwhelmed by panic. Oh shit oh shit oh shit.
23. Two halves
‘The soul’s greatness consists not so much in climbing high and pressing forward as in knowing how to adapt and limit itself.’
Montaigne
Mike Vickers casts a jaded glance across his screens, locks his computer, grabs his sunglasses and slips out of the office. He never really believed in his success, so he doesn’t take failure to heart. He lost the finals contest, of course, and the barbed feedback left little doubt that he lost to Crispin. He’s heard a rumour that his old boss is charging half the fee for MRI 2.0.
Last week he was sent a link to an article announcing that the Americom pension fund, his biggest investor, has a new CIO, and that his old sparring partner, the ambitious young woman in green, has been tasked with overhauling the hedge fund portfolio. Transparency and cost-effectiveness are to be the new watch-words, says the article: neither is a strong suit for the MRI. Mike expects the notice of redemption any day now.
In July the system gained a healthy three per cent, and for a few precious days the year’s performance turned from red to black (before fees, of course). But this bounty soon trickled between its careless algorithmic fingers. George’s grand predictions at the urinal have been flushed away like so much coffee-charged piss.
Mike paces the streets slowly so as not to sweat, jacket slung over his shoulder, and finds himself in a small park littered with the rejoicing bodies of office workers showing off their holiday tans. Bodies above, bodies below: like most of the city’s favourite lunching spots, this was once a burial ground. A many-layered lasagne of corpses, eighty thousand in all. The headstones have been respectfully cleared away and stacked along the boundaries, all except one large gated tomb — retained for aesthetic merit, the information board says, but crumbling now, pompous occupants long forgotten.
As Mike leans against the hot, white stone, shaded eyes wandering over the carnal cornucopia with its summer dresses, its kicked-off shoes and its gorgeous legs
in a hundred inventive attitudes of repose, he tries to reconcile this vague awareness of bodies above and below, of Natalie, of Dan, of the living, the dying and the dead. Dan’s illness is a window, facing downward.
His phone chirps: a message from Crispin, the first since the day of the übernerd’s dismissal, sixteen months ago. That old ‘good luck’ message is helpfully displayed above the new missive, which reads: Michael, hope all well. Want to meet for lunch? C. Bookends to Mike’s fleeting career as the Rocket Jesus.
‘What? What is it?’
The Mocks’ meals take longer than they used to. Meat has to be pre-chopped; spaghetti is off the menu. Dan spears and lifts his food with a clumsy, repeating motion and chews slowly, trying to avoid mess. They’ve developed an understanding that Natalie will do about three-quarters of the talking, but all this week she’s been giving one-word answers. Now she holds Dan’s gaze, then exhales slowly and for a long time, so that when she speaks it must be with the last whit of breath in her swimmer’s lungs.
‘I’m —’ (a needle-sharp ray of realisation dawns as her lips purse to form the ‘pr’) ‘— pregnant.’
The earth is rolling again, cornering, and Dan tries to find his balance. Out of all his incoherent reflexes of thought and feeling, the first to take expressible shape is a simple question of process.
‘But how? Did you forget your —’
Natalie is already shaking her head. His jaw drops; the fork eludes his clumsy grasp and clatters on the plate. Natalie slides off her chair and kneels beside him, takes his greasy hand. The muscles of her face slowly draw back in a spasm of silent crying. She might be eight years old.
‘I don’t want this to be the end.’ She mouths her confession, barely whispering. ‘I can’t just start again. You can’t tell me to start again.’
The repercussions that Dan has already traced out during long, painful meditations, that he was determined to avoid and thought he had, catch up with him in a sickening rush. A child. A child whom, at the rate he’s quite literally going, he will never hold or kiss; a mystery he will never unravel, a priceless treasure he will have to let go: hello, goodbye. And a chain fixing Natalie to the past, making impossible that renewal, that reinvention he’s imagined for her in the nobler corners of his mind.
Learning to Die Page 19
