Diversifications

by James Lovegrove

  He hoisted himself up onto the kitchen table, stretched the bare right leg in front of him, took a few glugs of the whisky to calm his nerves and serve as a mild anaesthetic, then set to work with the saw, severing the leg.

  He had remembered, vaguely, reading once in a medical journal about a German man who did this selfsame thing to himself in order to demonstrate that he had the courage and the willpower to go through with it. The man had had a friend standing by, poised to call the emergency services once the dismemberment was completed, and surgeons had sewn the leg back on and the man was able to walk again. Dr M did not have such a friend standing by, nor for that matter did he have a telephone. All he had was himself and his determined conviction that removing one limb was going to propel him to perfect quintessence.

  Of course it was disgustingly painful. Hideous to hack through his own quadriceps muscles, to carve grittily through his own femur, to sit there writhing and howling in a sea of his own released blood. Of course it was. And of course it was awful then to have to grope for the log that was sticking out of the stove door and use its glowing end to cauterise the stump. He shrieked and gagged as the stench of his own charred flesh clogged his nostrils.

  But he did it, that was what mattered. He carried out the amputation successfully, and when it was over he eyed the removed leg, which had tumbled off the table onto the floor and lay there leaking blood, and he was able to fix his sweating, reddened face into an expression that closely resembled a grin.

  Then he passed out.

  Endlessly dreamless

  Pure oblivion cradles

  Dreamlessly endless

  The adjustment to life with one leg was not easy. M hopped hopelessly about the cottage, waiting for the agony that was coming from his truncated leg to abate. It would not. He drank all the whisky he had and it made scant difference. He ate but was unable to keep food down. He struggled around like this for a couple of days, trusting that things would get better, but they did not, and he began to wonder if he had not made a dreadful mistake.

  But the mistake was not, as one might suppose, the severing of the leg. The mistake was in unbalancing himself. The lack of a leg had made his life harder. Might not the lack of the other leg even things up?

  So M put himself through amputation again, this time without any whisky to soften the trauma. (After all, he could not have cycled into town to buy some more booze, and he certainly could not have hopped all that distance.) He perched himself on the table again, which was tarred with blood from the previous operation. He had a cauterising log ready. He tourniqueted his leg. He raised the wood-saw.

  Suffering teaches

  We soon learn the true lesson

  Pain begets more pain

  Crawling on the floor, hauling himself with his arms and elbows, M perceived that he had attained equilibrium once more, but, sadly, at the expense of his humanity. He was now little better than a half-person, a shuffling creature, a dweller among the dust and detritus, an insect, a mite.

  Perhaps that was no bad thing. Mites had few qualms and queries. Mites went through life simply as they were. This was a reduction in circumstances that could well prove beneficial to him after all.

  However, after two days and nights as a floor-slitherer, unable to leave the cottage, relieving himself where he lay, it dawned on M that he had succeeding in creating more, not fewer, difficulties for himself. Foolishly he had thought leglessness a boon, but instead it had had the result of transforming him into a Thing himself. Were he not living isolated, alone, he would now be in a hospital somewhere, having to be cared for; and when discharged from that hospital, he would be wheelchair-bound and would forever after have to rely on nurses and physiotherapists and home helps and all sorts of other aids and assistance in order to be able to survive.

  M was ashamed. He had become one of the very objects he had striven so hard to escape. He was now useless baggage. A living hindrance. An appurtenance, an excrescence.

  How could he live with himself?

  A blade turned inwards

  Brings truth with its cutting edge

  A man faces himself

  As the blood purled out from his radial and ulnar veins, washing over his forearms, gloving his hands, dribbling onto the floor beside the discarded kitchen knife, M had a glimpse, a revelation.

  He saw the world not as a place of traps and snares and dragging encumbrances but as a finely spread web of connection and interdependence. Everyone balanced everyone else. What affected one person in this web affected his neighbour too, and so on and so forth, ripples of event shimmering out through strands of relationship, the whole delicate artefact quivering with mutual incident.

  He turned his head and with failing eyes regarded the sky through the window, where clouds bumped and jostled together against the blue. Fraught by winds, the stratosphere teemed with collision. Nothing up there existed in isolation, not even the sun, whose exertions warmed the seas that spawned the clouds and whose refracted light generated that backdrop of unvarying azure.

  His gaze dropped and he beheld a woodlouse, making its careful way along the floor beside the expanding blood puddle. Its myriad legs on either side rippled in perfect succession. M admired its segmented carapace, strong enough and flexible enough to protect the woodlouse and enable it to roll itself into a ball when it felt threatened. Just a tiny, insignificant insect, but it was an emblem of longevity. Its species had survived, in various evolutionary incarnations, for millions upon millions of years.

  There was confluence and eternity all around. The two were one and the same. M saw this at last. Life entailed not separation but immersion. Life was an epic poem that never ended. Life was too complex for words.

  The poet drops brush

  His dream both freed and captured

  His work is now done

  THE METEOR PARTY

  Bill yanked open the front door.

  “Hope you’ve brought some decent fucking wine. Trev and Jennifer came with Liebfraumilch. Can you bloody believe it? Liebfraumilch! I thought they were taking the piss.”

  “But instead they were just giving it,” I said.

  Bill guffawed.

  “Will this do?” Caroline held up our own offering, and Bill’s face relaxed into an expression of almost beatific relief.

  “Veuve Clicquot. You god and goddess. I could kiss you. In fact, I will.”

  He enveloped Caroline in a hug—petite her, huge him, engulfing. Then my turn: he planted a big wet smacker on my cheek.

  “You big gay,” I said, crunching my face up and scrubbing at the slobbered-on spot.

  “You wish,” Bill leered, and ushered us in.

  Deirdra, an Irish cyclone, whirled toward us in the kitchen. “Caroline! Jon! I’m going to murder that bloody husband of mine.”

  Bill rolled his eyes at me.

  “Why, what’s he done?” Caroline asked.

  “What hasn’t he done’s the problem more like. I sent him down to Sainsbury’s this evening to buy some veggieburgers for you because he’d forgotten to, and I told him not to get the TVP ones you hate and so what did he get? Only the damn TVP ones. The man’s an arse, and I’m so terribly sorry, and when this evening’s over you get second stab with the carving knife.”

  From the shopping bag I was carrying, rabbit out of hat, I produced the correct brand of veggieburgers. “Ta-daa.”

  Deirdra clasped her hands together. “Saints be praised,” she said in her best Sister O’Leary voice, adding, “But the useless focker still has to die.”

  “You just try it, you Erse bint,” Bill growled, shouldering past us, unwiring the champagne cork as he went.

  “Sure and that’s the last time you call me that again,” Deirdra fired back.

  “Erse bint.”

  “Great beardy gobshite.”

  It seemed like banter. The trouble with those two was, you could never tell for sure.

  Trev and Jennifer, purveyors of bad wine, were out on the patio, enjo
ying the sunset. Trev I got on well with; Jennifer I had always found hard to take. I didn’t dislike her and she had never been anything other than civil towards me. I just got the impression that at home, behind closed doors, she made Trev’s life a misery—an impression reinforced by hints Trev dropped now and then. I was under wifely orders, however, to be nice to her tonight, and not simply because it was the polite and proper thing to do. Jennifer had recently suffered a miscarriage. A terrible thing to happen to anyone, but all the worse for her and Trev because they had been trying for children for four years and this was the nearest they had come to success.

  “Going to be a clear night,” Trev said. “The weathergirl said so. Perfect conditions for it.”

  “Tenner on it pissing down by nine p.m.,” I replied.

  “You ever see a meteor shower before?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “Me either. Don’t know why. I mean, this lot comes round every year, doesn’t it? Maybe the time and the weather’s just not been right before.”

  “I did see that comet that passed by a couple of years back. Wasn’t all that impressive, though. Just sort of a murky pale spot in the sky.”

  “I hope it doesn’t rain,” said Jennifer. Brave face, wounded eyes.

  “Ah, it won’t,” Trev said. “Jon’s just a born pessimist.”

  “Not born, thank you. I worked very hard at becoming one.”

  Jennifer turned to Caroline. “And how are the kids?”

  I had to hand it to her: she’d had the guts to broach the subject of children herself, so that the rest of us wouldn’t have to pussyfoot around it all evening.

  “They’re well,” Caroline replied.

  “And giving the babysitter hell, I hope,” I chimed in. “Making sure she earns every penny of her extortionate rate.”

  Bill arrived with the opened champagne and distributed it. Then he asked if any of us knew how to get a barbecue going. Trev and I both volunteered the benefit of our expertise, and Caroline said, “Men and fires. What is it about men and fires?”

  “It’s a Y-chromosome thing, dear,” I told her. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  It took the pair of us, Trev and I, the best part of quarter of an hour, and half a pack of firelighters, to get the charcoal alight. It took another ten minutes of assiduous blowing to nurture a decent glowing heat. Then Bill, resplendent in a spatter-proof comedy “nude man” apron, began laying slabs of marinaded meat on the grille. The sizzle and smell were gorgeous.

  “I trust you’ve not caught veggie off the missus, Jon.”

  “Not going to happen,” I said, revelling in the smoke. “Not in a million years.”

  The final couple of guests arrived: Steve and Elaine. I’d known them both since college. Elaine I’d gone out with for a while. Steve had been the dweeb in our year, but had since blossomed into a successful computer entrepreneur. Still a dweeb, but a dweeb with a Mercedes S-class and a holiday home on the Cap d’Antibes.

  Elaine’s kiss on the cheek evoked a tantalising combination of nostalgia and might-have-been. It made me twenty again and got me wondering, not for the first time, how things would have turned out if I hadn’t been so callous and cavalier as to dump her just six months into our relationship. In Elaine’s beautiful grey eyes I always saw, or thought I saw, recrimination and a flint-spark of hope. I still felt that there was a chance for us. Which was a bad way to be when both of us were married to other people.

  “I finished your new book the other day, Jon,” she said. “I liked it.”

  “You and none of the critics.”

  “Oh, what do they know?”

  “They know how to dismiss two years’ work in two hundred words.”

  “And the next novel’s due to be delivered when? Should be soon, shouldn’t it?”

  “It’s on its way,” I said, with a cheery grin.

  On its way into the crapper. I had, just that week, abandoned my latest opus a hundred and fifty pages in. It was rubbish. I knew that, and my agent, having read the unfinished manuscript, agreed, although his evaluation of its badness was somewhat more delicate. “I just don’t ‘get’ it, Jon,” was what he said. “Your stuff usually works for me right from the start, but this time …”

  This time, I had created something that simply didn’t live, and the shame of failure throbbed hard inside me.

  “What’s it about?” Elaine asked.

  Caroline came to my rescue. “Jon doesn’t talk about his books while he’s writing them. It jinxes them if he does.”

  “Ah.”

  A quick crackle of rivalry between them. Caroline demonstrating how much better she knew me than Elaine. Elaine, with a lowering of her eyes, gracefully conceding.

  Not bad for the old male ego, that. Two women getting into a territory-marking contest over you.

  Deirdra circulated with some more booze. The dusk deepened, with a few fuchsia clouds loitering innocently on the horizon. No portent of rain. Not even a likelihood of the sky being overcast. The clear night we had been promised.

  The meat was charring nicely and Bill announced an ETD—Estimated Time of Dining—of five minutes from now. Deirdra laid out a huge bowl of salad, some corn on the cob, coleslaw, potato salad, cherry tomatoes, French bread…The garden table groaned.

  We lavished more booze on ourselves. Everyone lived more or less within walking distance of Deirdra and Bill’s, so no need for designated-driver self-restraint. Only Jennifer refused to have her glass refilled, but then she was famously incapable of letting go and enjoying herself.

  Finally, food. We heaped platefuls and then, in various chairs across the dampening lawn, unheaped them. Bill, Trev and I discussed the all-too-likely prospect of a war. The West had got it in for yet another “rogue state” and the politicians were busy thumping the tom-toms.

  “It’s a fucking business decision,” Bill said. “Always is. The stock market’s slumped and the best thing to give the economy a boost is to pick on some hapless little nowhere nation and bomb it to buggery.”

  “Also, the president’s in trouble,” Trev said. “Congress is gunning for him on account of those dodgy share deals he did a while back. Anything that deflects attention from that.”

  “You can’t criticise your leader while there’s a war on,” I said, nodding.

  “What really pisses me off is the way our leaders go along with it,” said Bill. “Every time. Whatever the American government does, ours does. Just on principle I’d like the prime minister to turn round one time and say, ‘Actually, no, I think that’s a terrible idea, Mr President, sod off.’”

  “He’s a spineless tosser, isn’t he. Did you vote for him, Trev?”

  “I voted for his party, not for him. What about you?”

  “I voted for the local MP. For what he said he could do for the area, not for his politics.”

  “And you believe he’ll really do what he says he will?”

  “Oh no. But you’ve got to have faith.”

  “I never vote,” Bill observed. “Absolute waste of time.”

  Night came. The early, brighter stars scintillated overhead. Deirdra produced garden flares for illumination and citronella candles to keep the mosquitoes at bay.

  More booze. Bill had pointedly used up all the guests’ offerings except Trev and Jennifer’s, then delved into his own cellar, leaving the Liebfraumilch sitting lonely and unopened on the kitchen sideboard. He had a talent for choosing good wines and, better yet, was not miserly with them. Soon all the stars were out, steady and brilliant, and we were as pissed as farts.

  I found myself in a bower-like corner of the garden, with Elaine.

  “Orion,” she said, pointing upwards.

  “Everyone can do Orion. Cassiopeia. That five-star zigzag there. See it?”

  “The woman in the chair.”

  “Correct. And the mother of Andromeda. Who’s just…there. To Cassiopeia’s left.”

  “You’re so clever.”

  “I kno
w. And that’s Hercules. The one that looks a bit like a stick man jitterbugging. Or a swastika. And he’s with Boötes, the ploughman.”

  “Which one’s Boötes?”

  “On Hercules’s right. Sort of, I don’t know, shaped like a lightbulb. And listen, if you want really clever, I even know the name for a group of stars within a constellation.”

  “Go on.”

  “An asterism.”

  “Nice word.”

  “Isn’t it? Like ‘asterisk’ but with, you know, an ‘-ism’.”

  “What it must be to have a brain full of this sort of information.”

  “Yeah. I’m special.”

  “Special as in ‘special needs’.”

  “Ha ha ha.”

  Elaine smiled, and trained her gaze upwards again. “You’ve always been into astronomy, haven’t you.”

  “Not so much astronomy. I like the constellations. I like the idea that they’re so random, just accidents of distribution, and yet all throughout civilisation people have recognised them as distinct shapes. The Ancient Greeks, and before them the Phoenicians, and before them the Semites, and before them the Egyptians, and before them the Sumerians—they all looked up and saw the patterns and gave them names and worked them into their mythologies. Like the patterns were waiting there, just needing identification. Like somehow they were meant to be what we made of them.”

  “But it’s just perception. Just our viewpoint down here on Earth.”

  “Yeah. The individual stars don’t bear any relation to one another except the relation we’ve given them. What it comes down to is humankind’s remarkable knack for finding order in chaos. For making sense of things which we know, rationally, are senseless. That’s what I like.”

  She moved closer to me, only a matter of millimetres, nothing that you’d notice—unless you were standing right by her. I cast a guilty glance over in Caroline’s direction. She was deep in conversation with Jennifer, her head down, her body inclined towards Jennifer. Compassion. Commiseration.