This Is the Life

by Alex Shearer

  “They have some right idiots on that program. Some complete stiffs. If they just bothered to work out the mathematical odds in advance—”

  “Well, you sit down and work them out.”

  “Yogurt and chips, right?”

  “Kind of, yeah.”

  “I’m going to lie down awhile.”

  “Don’t fall asleep.”

  “What’s my PIN number?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Zero seven—one—eight.”

  “Fifteen, Louis. Seven fifteen.”

  “Zero seven one five, damn it. I’m so stupid. I’m so stupid. I’m just so goddamn stupid.”

  “Louis, you are not stupid. You were always cleverer than the rest of us put together.”

  “It’s the bits and pieces. The damn—bits and pieces . . .”

  “I know, Louis. I know. I’m going to start cooking now.”

  “Okay. Hey. Zero seven one three! That’s it, isn’t it? Zero seven one three.”

  “You’re getting better all the time, Louis. But let’s leave the PIN for now. Let’s have a rest from it. We can come back to it later. That’s the secret. Not too much at once.”

  “I’m going to watch Deal or No Deal.”

  “I’ll call you when it’s ready.”

  “Hey—what’s that? Did you buy some strawberries?”

  “We got them in the supermarket earlier.”

  “You know how to live, huh. You know how to live.”

  “I’ll call you when it’s ready.”

  And he went to watch TV.

  * * *

  But I’ve got it in me now and it won’t go away. Other people celebrate the newborn baby and the lamb in the field. I just think the beautiful creature is going to die, and how we were all once like that—the welcomed arrival, the treasured child, the celebrated birth, the golden infant to do wonders in the world. And look what happened. We grew up into Louis and me. We grew up into men with beer bellies and women of hard experience and of lost and regretted youth. We grew to become the crowds in the subway and the tired, weary faces on the trains. Which is really no way to think about things.

  No good way at all. But maybe it will pass.

  10

  Cat

  The sun-kissed blonde was called Bella, and while I felt Louis had maybe exaggerated about the sun-kissed part—for the UK weather was not helping in that respect, and her tan faded even as you looked at her—she seemed presentable enough and not lacking in charm, even if most of that charm did not work on others the way it worked on Louis.

  It is normally the colonizers who think the natives quaint. But time had changed all this for Bella and things were on the other foot. We were a land of those who did things differently, for lack of knowledge of how to do them properly, and who lived in peculiar houses with inferior plumbing and nowhere to keep the horses.

  But she and Louis got along, and if love had a passport photograph of what it looked like, it maybe looked like the two of them back then. It wouldn’t look like that now. It got barely recognizable. But then time does that to most IDs.

  Bella was only seeing the Old World, and not intending to adopt it as a permanent residence—what with the inconveniences of it and the lack of decent stabling facilities in town.

  All the same, she put up with our sofa for a while, to Iona’s irritation, which soon became so obvious that they moved out and found a place of their own, and shortly afterward Louis announced that he was going south with her, to live in Australia and start a whole new career. Which I thought something of a misnomer, as Louis hadn’t yet had an old career, so it was premature to be thinking of a new one already.

  They packed their bags and took a slow boat, calling in at interesting places along the way. International phone calls were still expensive and postcards were a lot of trouble, and Louis was never big on them anyhow, so we lost touch a little and he drifted on with his life and I went on with mine.

  Iona went off to have someone else’s babies and left me with her cat, Henry. Henry had been in poor mental condition almost since the day he had been born, for his mother had been guillotined by a collapsing window, the sash cord of which had perished and which had been propped open for ventilation with an unreliable stick.

  The stick gave way while Henry’s mother was under the heavy window frame, down it came, and that was the start of Henry’s bereaved and traumatized mental troubles. Maybe he suffered from separation anxiety, maybe he just didn’t like the food I gave him, but he seemed to go out of his way to annoy me, howling to get out in the middle of the night and then, the instant I had returned to bed, howling to get in again. I installed a cat flap, but he preferred the howling arrangement. And then when I was thawing some hamburger out on top of the fridge, back in my carnivorous days, I discovered him with his face in it, polishing off what was going to be an essential ingredient in my spaghetti bolognese.

  To my shame I chased him around the garden, throwing the remaining hamburger at him, shouting, “You want some hamburger? Here, have this!” while the curtains twitched in adjacent properties and summary judgments were made behind them.

  And then, going on a holiday, I had to put him in a kennel for a week. I knew he didn’t like the place from the moment we arrived and he refused to get out of the carrier without extensive cajoling and much persuading. When I got back from holiday, he wouldn’t speak to me, not even in a feline way. He turned his back on me and plainly bore an eternal grudge now and things were never the same, not even when he got tapeworms and I cleared up the mess and bought his tablets from the vet and made sure that he took them and got him treats.

  I think he wanted to be with Iona and maybe felt twice abandoned, once by his mother, whom the window had done for, and then by Iona, whom the urge to have babies had done for. I resented her leaving us quite a lot too, for she had gone off to have babies with someone we would never have met if it hadn’t been for Louis—for Nigel was one of Louis’s dockside friends. That was typical of Louis, I thought, that he should introduce some acquaintance of his into our lives who would then disappear with my girlfriend to have babies. And instead of accepting responsibility for the situation, Louis then simply disappeared himself, off to the Antipodes with sun-kissed blondes, leaving me on my own in a rough part of town with no hamburger and a disturbed cat with worms.

  There were occasions when resentment got the better of me and I fell to brooding. To my mind, it had all been about Louis our whole lives. Since I was small I had been told by our parents of the greatness of Louis and the ambitions there were on his behalf. Louis was to go to a good school, and then to university—the first in the clan ever to do so—and then the oystered world out there would be waiting for his selection and his prying open, and he could take the one he wanted.

  Louis and our widowed mother would pass hours together in the kitchen discussing the glories of his future, of what he should aim for, of whether he was an Oxford man, or if Cambridge might suit him better, or whether Harvard was more the place.

  One afternoon, home from school, listening again to my mother describe to me the glory of Louis’s prospects and the extent of his current attainments—for he was first in his class in everything, always—I said to her, just out of casual, if not selfish, interest, “And what about me?”

  She looked at me blankly, as if this were either an irrelevant question or simply one that had never occurred to her.

  “Oh, you’ll be all right,” she finally said. “Maybe you’ll get a job as an electrician.”

  And this was my mother talking to the boy who had once taken the cover off a wall switch and stuck his finger into it just to see what might happen. (I was propelled six feet across the room.)

  So I realized that in my case not much was expected by way of academic achievement and, not wishing to make trouble in that case, I did my best to oblige, an
d took to juvenile delinquency, for which, it appeared, I had a natural aptitude and no small talent. So I took that up, along with smoking, staying out late in park shelters, and sitting in the cinema watching films I was too young for, having lied about my age to get in. I’d like to say they were happy days. But nothing’s ever that simple or so uncompromised that it can legitimately bear that description without mitigating circumstances or footnotes.

  In the end, Henry the cat got kidney problems and was put down and out of his misery. They don’t offer that service for human beings yet, at least not in many parts of the world.

  11

  Tricks

  One afternoon Halley rang up when Louis was in the hospice, and said, “How is he? How’s it going?”

  I said, “It’s the same as it was, Halley. He might know I’m here but I don’t know because he doesn’t say anything. They come and turn him over once every three hours and that’s about it. Most of the time his eyes are closed and there’s a machine for the drugs.”

  “Well, look, we’ve got tickets for the late-night cabaret at the Spiegeltent and were going to ask Louis along, but in the circumstances—what are you doing?”

  “I suppose it wouldn’t matter if I wasn’t here for a few hours.”

  “I’ll tell you where to meet us.”

  I felt I was turning into a Louis substitute—like him, but not him, yet close enough to do. Old resentments rekindled in me. I’d thought them doused, but they were merely smoldering. It was always so.

  “Hey—you’re Louis’s brother, aren’t you?”

  And thus defined. Which is no good to anybody—to be defined as simply being related to somebody else. What use is that, when you want to colonize your own territory and plant your own flag? But maybe that is the inevitable consequence of coming along later and of not having the sense to get there first.

  * * *

  I met Halley and another friend of Louis’s—Phil—in a downtown bar, sitting drinking Little Creatures, which seemed to be the bottle to buy. So I ordered the same and we downed those and then ate in Lock ’n’ Load, then headed toward South Bank, which was teeming. There was a festival on and crowds everywhere and Chinese lanterns and dragons, and there by the river was the Spiegeltent, with the romance of old Vienna about it, and the tantalizing scent of the forbidden and of slight decay.

  We went in and sat at the rear, perched on the backs of the seats, feet on the flip-downs, or we’d have been too low to get a view. The crowd was lively and most people had glasses in their hands. There were transvestites, and men and women who looked like they might have had sex changes. There was a heady decadence, which made for a good and receptive atmosphere. It was getting on for midnight when the show started and there were acrobats and cabaret artistes and a lot of exposed flesh. The high spot was a woman who made small handkerchiefs vanish.

  She appeared in a smart and formal business suit and made one handkerchief disappear. Then, adopting a perplexed look, as if to say, “Where’d it go?” she shrugged her jacket off, in case it might be hiding in there. But it wasn’t.

  Yet the handkerchief then reappeared in her hands, so she made it disappear again, and again the perplexed look. Was it in the waistband of her skirt perhaps? So the skirt came off.

  And so it continued. Her shirt came off, her bra came off, and still those handkerchiefs went on inexplicably disappearing.

  Finally, with a shall I, shan’t I expression, followed by one conveying that having come this far she might as well, she took her panties off. Still no handkerchief, but a fine and well-shaved vagina. Then she made the handkerchief ­reappear, but I won’t go into details.

  She got a big round of applause—and no doubt de­­served it.

  Over a final drink afterward, Halley said, “Louis would have enjoyed that.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” I told him. “So how’d she do it?”

  But none of us knew.

  When I got home I Googled “disappearing handkerchief trick.” I rang Halley the next day.

  “She’s got a false thumb,” I said.

  “She’s got a what?”

  “A false thumb. A false thumb made out of plastic that fits over your real thumb, and you slip it on and off and hide it in your fist, and that’s where the handkerchief comes and goes from.”

  “A false thumb?” Halley said. “How do you know?”

  “It’s a standard magician’s trick,” I told him. “Taking all your clothes off is just a variation on the theme.”

  “You’ve spoiled the mystery for me,” Halley said.

  “How about the nudity?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said. “The memory of that remains intact.”

  “Then you’ve kept the good part,” I said. “Because if she’d just made handkerchiefs vanish but had kept her clothes on—”

  “She wouldn’t be doing late-night cabaret.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Oh, well—pity Louis couldn’t be there.”

  “I told him about it when I got in to the hospice.”

  “Did he react?”

  “I don’t know if he heard or understood me, but maybe in some deep recess of his mind . . .”

  “They say your sense of hearing is the last to go.”

  “That’s what the nurses keep saying to me, but how would anyone know? Or is it just what they tell you, so that when you keep on talking, you don’t feel such a fool?”

  “So he didn’t react?”

  “Not really.”

  “Not even when you mentioned the panties coming off?”

  “No, Halley, not even then.”

  “But you never know.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Tell Louis I’ll be in to see him. When are you going back around?”

  “I’m there now. But I wouldn’t worry, Halley, I don’t think he’ll know you. I don’t think he knows me or anyone. I squeeze his arm or hold his hand but he doesn’t respond anymore.”

  “Well, I might come by anyhow.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  “Okay.”

  “I might drop back to the house. But if I’m not here, I’ll soon be back.”

  “Okay.”

  “And thanks for the ticket.”

  “Louis would have enjoyed that, wouldn’t he?”

  “He would, Halley. He would.”

  “A false thumb, eh?” he said again. “Well, even if it was, the rest of her seemed genuine.”

  “You didn’t think there was a little silicone there?” I asked.

  “Possibly. But well applied,” he said. “And Louis would have liked it.”

  * * *

  I sat by the bedside. Louis could neither eat nor drink anymore. He was unconscious all the time, his eyes like slits, curtained portholes. Every few hours the nurses came and turned him, to keep the bedsores at bay. There was a syringe driver under the bedsheet, which kept him topped up with morphine and various other ingredients of a drug cocktail that the doctor had prescribed. If Louis moaned or groaned or reached for his head, the good nurses might give him an extra morphine shot to help him rest. He had no IV drip since liquid would just prolong the end. They wet his mouth with a swab, and when I said, “Isn’t he very thirsty? He’s had no fluids now for days,” their answer was no, that he was all right.

  But how did they know? How do you know?

  I sat with him, reading books and changing the music on the CD player, his Van Morrison records and his Annie Lennox and his Bach and Chet Baker and others I had never heard of, who played melancholy jazz with feeling and sang torch songs of love and loss, about good times gone, back when love was new and youth was taken for granted.

  The next day I brought in photographs, because I wanted the nurses to know that Louis hadn’t always been an aging man with straggly and lost hair, and
with a big scar on the side of his head, and a matted beard and wild eyebrows again—which had grown back.

  I wanted them to know that he too had had youth and looks and spirit and adventures and had traveled and seen the world and had made things and done things, and women had loved him and cried over him and had wanted him for themselves.

  I brought in pictures of his younger self, of him together with old lovers, on decks and beaches, on marinas and sand. I brought in a picture of the boat he sailed up Australia’s east coast for six months, he and Kirstin.

  One of the nurses came in and saw the pictures, and offered to Blu-Tack them up in the window, so I thanked her and let her do it—she said it wouldn’t damage them.

  “We like pictures,” she said. And I thought, Yes, I’d hoped that.

  I don’t say it gets you any better treatment, though maybe in my heart and at the back of my mind I thought that the more they saw the dying man on the bed in front of them as a human being with a past and a story, the nicer they might be. Though they were all professional and compassionate. But it didn’t do any harm.

  I looked at the pictures and changed the music and dozed on the spare bed in the corner. When they came to change him, I wandered to the room with the TV and coffeemaker in it, and sometimes met other relatives there, same as me, in the small hours of the morning and in the long, empty afternoons. We’d talk, but didn’t really say much: Where you from? Who are you sitting with? What do they have? Sorry to hear that. Thank you. And good luck to you also.

  Then maybe you might not see them again.

  So you wait and wait, and wait and wait. The hours become days and you lose sense of time, while the world out there goes about its necessary business, but you’re looking down on it, from behind the double glazing, watching the silent dawn and deserted highway turn to bright morning and commuting throng. Then the traffic eases but stays consistent, then builds up again, then eases once more, then the darkness settles and the cars turn on their lights, then the traffic becomes sparser, like the last drops of water from a shut-off tap, just a trickle, a dribble, and then it stops, and it’s late and silent again, and the highway is empty, and there is the hum of equipment and occasionally a buzzer sounds or you hear a cart, and another day has gone, then another. Then you realize that you’ve been there nearly a week now, and no real change, and you wonder how much longer, not that you want to deprive those you love of useful life, but this—but this . . .