She worked part time until Dan’s first serious choking incident. When she explained her working hours to a supplier with whom she was arranging a meeting, the guy assumed she was ‘another one of these super-mums.’ It happened a few times, but she remembers that occasion because it was just about when their baby would have been born. Their one miraculous chance. She’s never started the pill again, and nothing’s happened. Teasing, irregular periods; half a dozen negative tests in the dustbin of her life. Dan says it’s probably him — still likes to imagine her carting about some other guy’s child after he’s gone. But Natalie has always known she wasn’t built for babies.
As she pours the last blenderful straight into a bowl for them to share, the monitor sings out, lights flashing. She picks up the bowl, spoon, napkin, and walks promptly but calmly down the hall to their room.
Dan’s eyes are already fixed on the door as she enters. Breathing, he taps. She leans close, can hear and feel his shallow, laboured breaths.
‘You need the puffer?’ His thumb twitches assent. She switches on the machine, fiddles with the settings, untangles the tubes, carefully fits the bands over his head and adjusts the seal around his nose and mouth. It works by giving the air an extra push each time he breathes in. She holds his hand. After a minute or so, says, ‘Better?’
The thumb twitches. It begins slowly picking out letters on his keypad.
Natalie — a pause, in which the puffer wheezes softly, then he adds, my love — another pause — I think we are nearly there.
27. Warm sea
‘Neither men nor their lives are measured by the ell.’
Montaigne
Dan Mock savours the near-silence: Nat has turned off the puffer, just for a few minutes, because it keeps making him cough — or try to cough. His puckered lungs, full of bad stuff, twitch their feeble, rapid breaths. It has occurred to him that this is a sort of trial run.
He pushes his sluggish, reluctant mind along one corridor of thought after another, looking for the old luminous clarity that seems to have deserted him. Life hangover. He could listen to a piece of music. Something delicate that rejoices in a soundless room; something heartbreaking, while he still has a heart to break. He turns his eyes to the screen and scans his collection, but can’t decide. Last chance for a last listen. No. It feels too late for that. Too late to worry about things he won’t do, places he won’t go, people he won’t see. His eyes swivel up to his Hubble galaxies. Uncounted thousands of them in that postage stamp of sky. Teeming with life — maybe. But the meaning, the vision is slipping now.
His family were here today. His parents would be here every day, of course, but he and Nat talked months ago, agreed to set gentle boundaries. He guiltily prefers to depend on her than on them. They all understand now that the end is near; don’t realise quite how near, perhaps, which is just as well. The atmosphere was serious but not grief-stricken. Nobody said much. Laura, his sister, surprised him by calmly recounting childhood memories. Little things: the time he ruined a birthday magic show; epic games of Monopoly and Scrabble; the prize stag beetle that escaped and found its way into her sock drawer. The past is a sock drawer. It was enough.
Two days later. Natalie Mock stands in the bathroom, but this time she’s not looking in the mirror. So this is it. The doctor switched Dan’s puffer to its more aggressive mode, not assisting but controlling. Said it had to stay like that now, said Dan would get used to it. He hates it. He can’t communicate distress even with his eyes, but she could tell. And now he’s drawn the line. Just like that. Refusal of treatment. She takes deep, slow breaths. If only she could breathe for him.
Mike, the GP and the nurse are in the kitchen, conferring in low voices. Dan asked them to wheel his bed into the front room, where his pictures are, and where slatted winter sunlight comes and goes.
Try not to fight me, he said last week, when the time comes.
Dan’s consciousness flees before the oppressive discomfort, the tyrannical machine assaulting his lungs, and finds itself in a strange, whimsical corner of his mind. The gnawings and scrabblings of panic, of what he’s leaving behind, of what he’s forgotten, of what he never knew — these persist but are muted, blunted by a mantle of something like relief.
Perhaps, he muses, my legacy, my achievement is to anoint the lives of my friends with a mortal essence. To teach them that there is no masterpiece, no transaction by which you can cheat death; you cannot run to the hills, and you cannot look to your children. A child is a genetic extension, yes, but surely in every sense that matters to our humanity, a child is not a continuation but something entirely new. My love, you see that now. Death has to be absolute to make life thrilling.
This death is a gift, my friends. Use it wisely.
The doctor has said all the things she’s obliged to say, and Natalie steps forward as the others respectfully make way and then melt out of the room. She looks into Dan’s moist, blinking eyes. The old mood diagnostics — tone of voice, movement or the subliminal semaphore of the face — so painstakingly tuned over the years of their marriage, are useless now, when she needs them most. Disconnected. Dan’s state of mind can be deduced only from the pauses before and between his answers. When the doctor asked him to confirm his decision, he didn’t hesitate.
‘Dan.’
Natalie. My love.
They sit for a while, his hand inert in hers except for a faint twitch of his thumb. His chest rises and falls at the puffer’s command. The doctor has tried to set a natural rhythm, but how could it be natural? At last, Natalie manages to say it.
‘Dan, do you remember Assisi?’ Now he does hesitate.
Yes.
‘Do you remember — the tiny little church where St. Francis died — with the vast Renaissance basilica built over it, like —’ she falters. Dan is selecting words with his eyes.
Like an architect’s delusion of grandeur.
She smiles.
‘Yes, like that. Like a fantasy. I was thinking of that place. That great, soaring palace of stone, built to honour one man who lived like a beggar, and died in a — a little shed, smaller than this room.’
Yes.
Natalie’s sobs are coming like shivers, but she keeps going. ‘Dan, I can’t build a palace like that for you. Not out of stone. But I promise I will love and honour you just as much — as much as any of them. I’ll build a palace for you, over you — inside — in my —’
In your thoughts. Yes. I know you will. A tear gathers in the outer corner of his eye, half-reclined as he is, then spills. Instinctively Natalie wipes it away.
‘I’ll build it, and I’ll sit in it and think of you — and us, and all these years we had.’
Yes. But Nat. Build it over me. Not over you. Do you understand me. She nods; cries. Build it with open doors. You’ll want to hear — he stops, looks at her, waits for a lull in the tears — those turtle doves — another long look.
She nods again, kisses his hand, his forehead, smells his hair. There is no need for a full stop.
Mike Vickers stands in a column of dread while the others make their arrangements. If you feel you could do it, Dan wrote last week, it will be a great mercy to Nat. She doesn’t really like the doctor, doesn’t want her to be the one. And she herself — no. The two friends discussed this once before, at the hospice. Conspirators.
‘Afterwards,’ wrote Mike, ‘and in the years to come, I will make sure Nat is alright.’
I know. I’m counting on you.
The doctor nods and Mike steps forward, looking at Dan, not at Natalie. Never at Natalie. Dan’s eyes follow him steadily, encouragingly. He reaches for the clips that secure the life-sustaining mask. Natalie sobs, but with restraint. As for Mike, he finds that he’s not going to cry. He’s going to do this — claim the last of his undeserved victories over his friend, the better man. He’s going to do this and not cry.
The m
orphine is weaving its sleepy spell. Dan can hear the distant music of Natalie’s voice, but not the words. He remembers — his body remembers — floating in a warm sea. Greece, perhaps. He was naked, the most naked he has ever felt, the sea a womb. Eyes closed, arms and legs gently paddling the void. And then, without warning: an eddy of cold water. A sharp, penetrating chill against which he had no defence. A moment only, before the uterine warmth flooded back.
That momentary chill was the chill of life. Up close, life is a magnum opus. But from a distance, it’s just a cold eddy, fleeting and unheralded, in a warm sea of nothing.
His mind finds time for one last observation. There will be no fear, after all: no reverent hush, no chill, no halls of alabaster white. Just a warm sea; a drowsy, forgetful womb of peace.
Dyspnoea. Beautiful, hypnotic word. Sad peony. Pansy ode. Open days. Soapy den. Easy pond.
28. Yours absolutely
‘… even on the greatest subjects too much can be said.’
Montaigne
Natalie Mock drifts from one room to another. Dan is in all of them, and none of them. Oddly, stupidly, it’s her birthday today. He’s not here to. He’s not here.
Mike is coming round in. To help. Now that the funeral is done and. Over. Mike said his few words very well. Couldn’t have asked for. He said Dan was a cautious man. Planned everything, he said, except the best and worst things that ever happened to him. Dan did think that, yes. Their marriage a miraculous accident. Perhaps. Mike hardly mentioned the disease. Said Dan was everything he, Mike, ever wanted to be. His quiet genius an inspiration. No sense of humour, though. He said.
But now it’s over. Maybe it’s time to. Just a bit of tidying up. Sorting out. Putting away.
She perches on the edge of Dan’s reclining chair — the chair in which he died. Died, yes: that’s the word for what Dan did. She switches on his computer and types the password. There is the familiar background picture of a galaxy, but all the icons have disappeared. All except one — a document nestled in one of the galaxy’s spiral arms. For Natalie. She clicks. A document.
Dear Natalie,
How do you say goodbye when it’s forever? I give myself two chances to get it right: in person and in this short letter. If I get it wrong, I’m sorry — I know you will forgive me.
You once suggested I publish a record of my illness, and I refused, saying I would leave public introspection to the artists. But I thought about what you said, and started keeping a private diary. A place to say the things I couldn’t say to you in that stupid electronic voice, I thought. Something for you to remember me by. I didn’t write every day. I often felt better after writing it, but as the months passed and the entries multiplied, it occurred to me that the Dan presented in those pages might not be the Dan I wanted you to remember. The diary had become an outlet for all the self-pity and despair that I was determined to conceal. It was a true likeness, perhaps, but a partial one, and not my better side. I felt I trusted your memories more.
And you wanted us to have a baby. I said no: I gave you my reasons. Then, for no reasons whatsoever, the universe said no too. I thought about what you wanted, and about the steadfast, generous love I couldn’t understand and didn’t deserve, the love that wanted to open a path even beyond my death. I contacted a fertility clinic and discussed the possibility of leaving a sample in storage, a surprise gift for you to use or not use after I was gone. But then I began to change my mind. I sensed an alteration in you, perhaps. A different cord of strength: a possibility that you would, after all, build a future without me, as I’ve always hoped. My little gesture might threaten that, I thought — might send you the wrong message.
These gifts, these parts of myself — the diary and the DNA — I have decided not to give you (I deleted the diary and dismissed the clinic). Why am I telling you this? Because I want you to understand that you already have the best of me, safe and sound. What you have truly lost could not be saved, and what you have saved will not be lost. The rest is nothing.
What can I say of us? I can only thank you for what we had: for our bodies soldered, glued together so snugly that rolling apart must surely tear the skin. For your limitless capacity to surprise me — seeming distracted, uninterested, unsympathetic for a moment, and then looking at me in that way you have, as though you saw right down to the bedrock. For the wise humanity that you placed alongside my pedantic reason. We were a good team. I’m sorry we were so skewed at the end, that you gave so much and I could only take.
Others have given you the support I could not. New bonds have been forged. You know how I feel about my friends: how long I’ve known them, how I rate their strengths and their considerable weaknesses. But what I think doesn’t matter now. The world is yours, not mine. The world and the choice are yours absolutely.
I’m sorry we couldn’t journey further together, grow old together. But I’m glad we did journey together, you and I. If true love could really perform miracles, as it does in the fairy tales — but it can’t, of course. Or maybe it has.
Thank you.
With love,
Dan
Natalie stares at the letter through her tears. Reads it again from the top. Can’t believe it. Likeness. Clinic. Bedrock. She doesn’t want to close the file in case it’s somehow lost; drags it to one side of the screen to see if there is anything else. But there is nothing else.
Nothing else. She looks up at the wall, where the portrait she didn’t draw doesn’t hang. You have the best of me, safe and sound. What did he mean? She gets slowly to her feet and drifts into the gloomy hall, where her eye is drawn to the small mirror hanging beside the coats.
It’s just her puffy face, looking back. But when she sees her face, she can see his face too, as it used to be: magisterial, patient, brimming with nerdy exuberance.
‘What does the F stand for, anyway?’
James F. Saunders peers out between the curtains across the broad, wet, lamp-lit street. Over the lowest of the shops opposite he can see faint headlights crawling along the coast road on the other side of the bay. He’s learned that you can love two women, and be true to both of them. He quietly, copiously radiates gratitude for Brenda’s change of heart — that she did not merely take him back, but sought him out freely, makes all the difference to them both — and wonder, too, at her strength and restless courage, and fierce solicitude for her vulnerability. Every night he lives out a parallel life with Becks in his dreams. Two emanations of the same self. The lost novel has risen again, inarticulate now, of no service to humanity, subsumed in the imperfect structure of his soul.
‘James?’
As he turns from the window, James is aware of a slight sensation of pressure, a restrictive ache in his head or in his chest, or maybe both. He blinks and rolls his shoulders, and it goes away. The questioner is Mike, sat behind a sort of Giant’s Causeway of tottering book piles. Economics, business and finance. Incomprehensible to James, and with offensive titles — he was going to toss the lot, but since Mike’s here he might as well check for any hidden gems.
‘James? The F?’
James looks at Brenda, just in from her evening run, sitting on the floor with one lycra-clad leg outstretched, touching her toes; apple-cheeked, the sleet still melting in her hair. As she shifts from one stretch to another, her body leaves moist imprints on the floorboards. At the suggestion of her doctor, she has started a blog. The Chainsaw Diaries. The entries — a dozen so far — are a sort of piss-take, with careless snaps of the back of the van, muddy boots, bad weather, her packed lunch, surrounded by equally careless prose littered with typos, grocer’s apostrophes and outdoorsy slang. After barely a month she has ten times as many followers as the pithy erudition tweeted by Upstart Books.
If he was dying, and he could choose anyone in the world to care for him, it would be Becks. Yes. But he’s not dying.
‘James?’
He turn
s to his friend — millionaire, player of the field, the one Becks loves — smiles broadly and replies with a Portuguese flourish.
‘Fortunato.’
Natalie Mock waits while her mother fills the teapot, assembles the tray and carries it solemnly to the table. This potent, versatile ritual with its amulets, incense and porcelain song. When at last the two cups are filled and consecrated and stand between them, her mother heaves a slow, preparatory sigh.
‘Well, my love. My poor love.’
‘Well.’
‘Here we are. You and me.’
Natalie nods slowly. But her gaze drifts from her mother’s broad, comforting face to the window behind her. A winged cloud has caught the setting sun. Without touching her tea, she pushes back her chair, walks round to the window and opens it. The burning angel is already fragmenting. Cold air has never felt so good.
The ancient sideboard clock drip, drip, drips, emptying one vessel, perhaps, but filling another.
Natalie’s heart beats in time.
Learning to Die Page 23
