Learning to Die

by Thomas Maloney

  Mike locks eyes with the portrait’s subject. Receding hair, discreet lippy, a nose that swells as you look at it. Sly bastard. Wheeler-dealer. Winner. Mike, by contrast, has been well and truly rumbled: fraud, bluffer, loser. The other box — the MRI — is to be closed. ‘Nothing personal,’ said the Generalissimo, cheerfully, eyes already wandering back to his screens. ‘Wrong market for us. Live and learn. Spot for you on the execution desk.’

  Victoria is looking for something more serious; Lulu is in Milan and might not come back; Carmen has just announced her civil partnership on Facebook. Good luck to them. Nothing personal.

  Time for that clean break? PhD? Hobby farm? Not-for-profit? Dry stone walling? He looks down at his slim, pinkish fingers. Never built so much as a Lego tower. All the maths forgotten. At that moment, realisation opens a scathing yellow eye: the fault doesn’t lie in his profession. His half-hearted defences of the investment industry are all basically, depressingly sound. You don’t have to lay actual bricks one upon the other to contribute something useful. The fault lies rather in himself. In his own incapacities and bad choices: the world’s technicalities a mystery his brain is not equipped to penetrate, its moral endeavours unfathomable to a shallow heart. A swindled silver spoon up his arse. Good for nothing.

  He opens the small display case, pinches the glinting object from its velvety cleft and holds it between his finger and thumb. Looks at the portrait, at the object, at the portrait, back to the object. Dan has his electrons (and more), Brenda her mountains, James his words — even Pete Walley, it turns out, plays mean improv piano. Mike Vickers has this only. His one claim on the universe, staked by means of a transaction.

  He rises, walks to his colossal hall mirror. Holds the object up to its rightful place. Stares. Leans closer, closer, until his forehead is pressed on the glass. Stepped in so far. Stepped in what? How far?

  Shakespeare’s putative earring slips from his worthless fingers, glances off his shoe and rolls onto the doormat. He doesn’t stoop to pick it up.

  Natalie’s friend Rachel raises a questioning eyebrow when she orders an Appletiser in the riverside gastropub, and Natalie has to laugh and shake her head. A curious thing, how pregnancy begins with a flurry of lies.

  The little art festival was surprisingly good. She might even dig out her pen and ink when she gets home. One particular portrait triggered a shiver of sadness — an act of preservation, deeply personal, infused with knowing as no photograph can be. There is no portrait of Dan.

  But this is a day to speak of other things. It is Dan’s absence, after all, that restores Rachel to her intimate, confiding, insightful best. The two friends eat, talk, laugh and treat themselves to dessert. As they part — one to her car, the other towards the station — they solemnly agree to reconvene. Rachel has already driven away when Natalie frowns abruptly and turns back to the pub.

  The monochrome faces of a hundred ladies with bouffant hair stare down from the papered walls and door of the toilet cubicle. Even the ceiling. Some of the faces are smugly smiling, some scornful, some apparently ready to pass out; a few offer pitying frowns. Black and white chequerboard floor, white porcelain, black seat.

  Somewhere a cistern falls silent, so that the only sound is Natalie’s breath ringing in the reverberant space. In the white bowl, glaring up between her white thighs, and blotted thickly across the white pants hammocked between her white knees: a precipitous shock of scarlet.

  Dan exerts his fading muscles to shift in his chair. A spot of rain pricks his windward cheek; tickles pleasantly — unreachable, unwipeable there. He stares into the distance, northward along the Long Walk, still engaged in orientation.

  Mould with attitude. Indeed — in one hot and fertile sweet spot, the intersection of improbable statistics, mutate-select-repeat happens upon a configuration with unprecedented élan. A mechanism unknown in all the earth’s astonishing biological engineering: reason. The power to exploit and subdue. Reason masters fire; annihilates with spears the stupider beasts; invents farming instead; axe, rope, wheel. Clear-fells whole countries, slashes, burns, replants, makes deserts bloom, dredges a harvest out of helpless oceans, slaughters and weeps at the slaughter and slaughters again.

  With tenacity and courage it crosses oceans and deserts, adapts in the face of searing heat, cold, drought and disease, claims the whole planet as its domain (and in recent times, recrosses those oceans solo and unsupported, by canoe or balloon or pea-green pedalo, just for the hell of it). It’s not goodbye to the universe for Dan — the universe recycles its waste — but goodbye to this inadvertent biological venture, this wide game frantically cross-hatched by triumph and despair: this society of humankind.

  Goodbye to the untold microstructure of history — its countless individual struggles and sorrows, scoring their vivid colours one upon the other, overlapping, intersecting until the very soul of the species is saturated and numb, its characteristic anxiety born of the possibility it might forget all this vital substance and remember only the outlines, the peevish machinations of politics, dogma and war. Even now, at this very moment, as the day begins to turn above this million-footworn paddock west of Londinium and the season follows close behind, the flood tide of humanity rises. Trickling, prickling along the Eurasian Steppe, the Rift Valley and the Gangetic Plains, Yangtze and Orinoco, Appalachia, Patagonia, Arabia and the Norfolk Broads, fierce, private longings that never find expression, wells of loneliness, prisons of enmity and fleeting intermissions of joy. Acts of gross stupidity. Unreason. Madness. Rage. Acts of defiance, of quiet, untold fortitude, of generosity and love, inundating with blood and tears the ever-absorbent, ever-renewing earth.

  Goodbye to the human form, strutting and bopping along the delicious fine line between existential grace and sexual sorcery; to harmonious voices or those merely kind or sincere; to transcendental smiles; to the stranger’s face that takes your breath away.

  Goodbye to labours of love, to marvels of engineering and imagination, to music of such omniscient loveliness it might have cascaded from the gods, but was in fact dashed off one Sunday afternoon over the billiard table. Goodbye to skulduggery and to earnest discourse, to stacked tomes of ethics, philosophy and law. Goodbye to the million hearts in mouths as the ball balloons over the bar; to the stunned theatre audience, sharing a moment unrecordable but lingering like a shape on the retina; to long-awaited headlights on a foggy night, throwing shadows like black windmills; to the old busker, lungs ruined, who jangles his strings tunelessly, stops them with a sad, remorseful hand (wife long-suffering, now long gone), and then dives into the twelve-bar blues.

  Goodbye, too, to the arms race between means to destroy and motives to desist, galloping to its inevitable, poetic end: the bomb. Stuff of myth. Only one outcome. But the species holds fire, we hold fire — screw that, we want to live, too much, more than they do in the myths. We dance Gangnam Style instead. Savour a brief heyday of partial peace and unequal plenty. Indulge in glass phalluses half a mile high, engrave poems on grains of rice, stick flags in the moon. Build colossal experiments underground. Kick a ball around. Sip flat whites and chillax.

  Yes, the involuntary wide game of humanity is something like this. Its players come and go. Meanwhile, nature maintains a ruthless blast of indifference, cleansing, laying waste without vengeful motive, by storm or by disease; but not always — sometimes sympathetic to our predicament or seeming so, in a moment of dappled calm, or in swifts flying low at twilight, crying out the very same tuneless song of sorrow.

  Goodbye to all that.

  Dan stirs and blinks, his bout of orienteering complete for now: the foundations laid. He is not ready to address his goodbyes closer to home. Larger spots of rain peck at his face and eyes, and streak the great stones of the pedestal beside him. There is an inscription: PATRI OPTIMO. Best of fathers. A mocking eulogy that finds an accidental mark two centuries on. Putative pater-to-be Dan bumps and wobbles down the sl
ope to the start of the walk.

  There he pauses, a small, sedentary figure, parked on the starting line of this monumental home straight. Suddenly the brooding sky unveils a flood of late summer sunshine, and, at the same instant, fills the air with hard, shining, autumn rain.

  From our distant vantage on the Walk we can only just make out Dan’s hand pulling a plastic bag from the side of the chair and covering his precious joystick. A few figures hurry past without noticing him, in search of shelter. The chair rolls forward along the rain-slick asphalt, wheel-deep in golden spray. From here we cannot see the finger finding the new switch or hear the wavering hum of the auxiliary electric motor, and we do not expect what happens next.

  With a soft, distinct thwack, a black umbrella opens above the wheelchair, whose occupant continues resolutely towards his rendezvous.

  2013

  25. How deep

  ‘If you do not know how to die, never mind. Nature will give you full and adequate instruction on the spot.’

  Montaigne

  The lane runs on and on before the headlight beams, straight and narrow as a chute, while the dashboard clock adds another minute to its damning score. There are no signs, but James F. Saunders can feel the sour, potent gravity of the sea. Here, at last, are some houses; a pub, The Gun; a small car park, and beyond it a suggestion of yachts’ masts and a primeval darkness.

  The car park is deserted apart from a few vehicles crouched and frosted in the shadows and two cars incongruously gleaming beneath a lamp: an Aston Martin and a Motability car.

  ‘They’ve gone without us.’

  ‘They wouldn’t.’ James swings the van alongside, stops the engine and opens his door to the cold, silent dawn. ‘Not when we’ve come so far.’

  ‘I told you they would.’

  But they haven’t. The outer silence is broken by the unmistakeable sound of a hand-dryer and a door banging, and a procession makes its way into the car park from what is evidently a public toilet.

  Natalie Mock feels ridiculous in her wellies, waterproofs and woolly hat. Dan and Mike cooked up this escapade while Dan was in the hospice. Sea-fishing in November. Will it be safe for you, she asked; Dan can still do withering looks. Fine. Whatever. She slings the rucksack over her shoulder (medicines and other necessaries — each month it grows heavier) and follows the conspirators out into the car park; two newcomers are standing under the car park’s single lamp.

  ‘It was them,’ says Mike, pushing his old friend’s chair. ‘Time and tide, people — time and tide!’

  James has changed more in eighteen months than in the previous decade. He has a beard now — not like Dan’s regrettable Crusoe tribute (they abandoned the daily shave last summer because of skin irritation), but a neat goatee that suits him. His characteristic forward hunch — to Natalie always a signifier of eagerness, of leaning in, rather than weakness or burden — has been ironed straight. He shakes Mike’s proffered hand with ironic emphasis, then without hesitating stoops and warmly grasps both of Dan’s gloved hands where they rest on the arms of his chair.

  ‘Dan. Good to see you. Sausage for your thoughts — remember?’ Now, finally, he turns to her. ‘Natalie.’ The name still sounds odd on his lips. He leans to kiss her and gets a faceful of hat and waterproof jacket.

  ‘Hi.’

  Beside James stands a woman — yes, it is Mike’s sister, though she’s changed too since Natalie met her, just once, at one of Mike’s parties, perhaps six or seven years ago. She seemed very young then, an awkward, big-boned student dressed in black. She’s still dressed in black, and has been sort of squaring up to Dan, not sure how to greet him, but now gratefully follows James’ example.

  ‘Have you got wellies and things?’ asks Natalie, stupidly. It was Brenda who told them all what to bring. ‘The fisherman guy — Reg, Ron — he’s waiting for us on the boat.’

  ‘We’ll be ready in two shakes,’ says James, throwing open the back doors of the van.

  ‘Have you got the provisions?’ asks Brenda.

  ‘Vittles for both fishy- and humankind are all aboard,’ replies Mike. ‘Sandwiches still hot. We’ll sort the ramps out and see you there. You can’t miss her — name of Andromeda.’

  Jupiter is the last survivor in the dawn sky as the squat, rusty Andromeda chugs along her buoyed channel, past the mud flats, the lighthouse, the old fort on its precarious sickle of land, and out into the mile-wide neck of the Solent. Though the morning is perfectly clear and still, the sea bears in a remnant of swell from the Atlantic. It glints like molten lead under the bow and then reappears astern, savagely sculpted into rearing, glassy waves that hang, slump and tumble into lanes of foam.

  Dan Mock taps a question into his keypad with his left thumb, his last moveable digit: How deep. The electronic voice is drowned by the engine, but Nat reads the words and relays them to Mike, who ducks into the cab and asks Ron. ‘Eighteen metres.’ Is that all. Strange.

  Dan allows his senses to feast. After the well-meant, comfortable blandness of the hospice, every authentic world-morsel is precious — the mewing retinue of gulls, the bright, tangerine glow seeping up behind the Isle of Wight, the mingled smells of diesel and marine sulphur. And bacon: Mike, Brenda and James are all attacking their butties. Dan hasn’t bitten into a rasher of bacon for at least a year. But he isn’t vexed by the others’ enjoyment — or only a little. He’s grateful to be reminded.

  They round the ghostly chalk spires of the Needles just as the late autumn sun peeps over the island, narrowing the friends’ five pairs of eyes and painting their faces with a wash of gold. The engine stops, the anchor chain rattles, and a deep quiet descends. The Channel plants gentle, slapping kisses along the Andromeda’s hull.

  Mike Vickers feels triumphant. The weather is perfect, Dan’s assurance that he’s comfortable and enjoying himself quite believable: the controversial outing is already a success. The small matter of inadequate insurance was resolved with a couple of fifties. There were no bites from the first drop, but does it matter whether you catch anything?

  General exultation can’t help the twist of specific revulsion on his face as he pokes around in the bait bucket. Some of the squid are still half-frozen into blocks, while others — whole or in pieces — are floating loose in the grey water. Eurgh.

  ‘You’re getting off lightly here, old man,’ he says to Dan, whose eyes swivel from the horizon they have been surveying. He taps a reply and hits play: You always were a big girl’s blouse.

  ‘You’re supposed to be attracting the fish,’ Brenda teases. ‘The bait is supposed to look irresistible. Yours looks like a —’

  ‘Like an instrument of torture,’ supplies Natalie.

  ‘You need to jam that hook right through the thing’s body, and then stick the barb through the eyes like I showed you. So it’s hidden.’

  ‘I’ll try my method, thanks,’ replies Mike, wiping hands on his now-filthy handkerchief, taking up his rod and releasing the spool.

  Again there are no bites, but as they reel in, the tip of Natalie’s rod starts to flex. They all crowd over to her side to see what creature of the deep might find itself hauled up to the light. It looks like — a very small, leopard-print shark.

  ‘Doggie,’ says Brenda. ‘We throw her back. Watch out — they have skin like sandpaper.’ She helps Natalie extract the hook from the poor creature, which twists and curls around her hands, weird, sleepy eyes dazzled and blinking, mouth gaping.

  ‘It’s bleeding.’

  ‘It’ll be fine. Character-building. Story to tell the grandkids.’

  When Mike gets his own bite, feels the unmistakeable heft of it and begins reeling in, his mind hums with childish speculation. Alpha male catches alpha cod. Saves the day. Three cheers for Mikey. When the quarry reveals itself to be another dogfish, and a small one at that, his disbelief quickly turns to quiet, unaccountable satisfaction that he an
d Natalie are the two pioneers. A team.

  Later, after a coffee break, and with the new baits down for just a few minutes, Brenda sweeps her rod back and begins slowly, carefully reeling. A frown of concentration that Mike remembers from long ago.

  ‘This is the one,’ says James, scrambling across to watch. ‘I can feel it. The White Whale.’ The first thing they see is a huge mouth, then two round, black, staring eyes.

  ‘May I present: dinner,’ declares Brenda. But the cod, when netted and brought aboard, is no whopper. Ron holds up his wooden rule, shakes his head and jerks a thumb towards the sea. It’s just a baby.

  ‘Good eating on that,’ says James wistfully, as they lean over and watch the dazed fish right itself and flop down out of sight.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ says Mike. ‘Plenty of time yet.’ But the morning slips by and their cavernous catch-bucket presents a mocking emptiness. Soon the favourable, sluggish waters of high tide are gone and the current drags at the lines, lifting the bait off the seabed where the elusive cod feed. Natalie keeps asking Dan if he’s had enough, and he begins to waver. Yes, soon, he taps, back aching, feet cold, maybe one last go. When the final baits are down, he taps again: Straw poll. Is it skill or is it luck?

  Brenda Vickers tries her rod gently and lets out ten feet of line. As teenagers she and Austin used to dabble from Southend pier and a few other local hotspots, but she’s never fished from a boat. Her presence is a favour for Mike, and for James.

  She remembers Dan, of course. When Mike explained how sick he was — that he can’t move or speak, but that mentally he’s all there — she found herself making excuses for not coming: it sounded so awkward. James talked her round, said he wanted to meet the guy again — said it might be their last chance. That’s his story. But let’s not forget the minor detail that Natalie has been bizarrely outed as James’ ex. Mike says she’s met Natalie before, but she doesn’t remember. Forgettable, perhaps. Or just one of the many mortifying nights blotted from Brenda’s memory.