The deal is made swiftly. Once upstairs, James’ charge, a boy named Hugo, follows his every move with huge, tragic eyes.
‘So. What shall we do? Would you like to look in the rock pools? The tide’s dropped.’
Hugo looks disappointed. ‘Actually, I’ve done that several times before,’ he says in a tiny voice, his enunciation much better than his father’s. Then he adds, respectfully, ‘Though it is very interesting.’
‘The museum?’ The disappointed expression remains; it is a very small museum. ‘How about exploring the secret passages in the village? Have you done that? Have you seen where the smugglers hid their cargo?’
A complicated frown spreads like a vine across Hugo’s enormous forehead. His head is far too big for his body, and not quite the right shape.
‘Actually, I don’t think so,’ he replies, carefully.
‘Get your coat on, then. And take some paper so we can draw a map. If we don’t draw a map, we’ll get lost and starve to death.’
James glances back ruefully at the laptop as they leave. Cyril Connolly, the failed writer’s writer, asserted that the only treatment for a writer’s envy of successful and distracted peers is to write. ‘By working,’ goes the line that old Cyril relegated to a footnote, but that jingles so often in James’ head, ‘you are doing what they would most envy you.’ By working — writing — not by babysitting creepy children.
But maybe there’s some material here. Hugo, aged six, is the son of Rob, who rents the adjoining house in the heart of Merryman’s Bay. This house, originally intended by Rob as a base for family fun, became instead the venue for his extramarital assignations with Trudy, a work associate. He has now separated from his wife and lives with Trudy semi-legitimately in Leeds, but the crooked little house, with its bouncy bed and naughty associations, apparently remains useful for rekindling the flames. Rob has his son every other weekend, but makes liberal use of the childcare services of his mother — who lives further up the coast and can often be persuaded to take the boy overnight — as well as various cash-strapped locals.
This much James has inferred from his own observations and the barbed comments of his landlady. Rob doesn’t say much to the Bay locals, though he did wax philosophical yesterday evening, leaning on his BMW, watching Hugo labour up James’ steep stairs with a pile of beloved books and toys. ‘Life, man — it happens to you.’
Rob is not back when he promised, so James takes the boy to the chippie. The weather has brightened and they carry their warm, greasy bundles up a flight of steps and along a path to a bench contemplating the village from the south. A ray of sun catches the red roofs tumbling down towards the sea.
‘This is the fish and chips bench,’ says the boy.
‘It is.’ The boy stares out at the cloud-scuffed horizon.
‘James?’
‘Yes?’
‘Have you got any brothers or sisters?’
‘No. When I was a baby, I cried so much that my parents called it a day. Have you?’
‘Actually, I had a sister. But Mummy said that God wanted her to live in Heaven.’ The boy folds a chip into his small mouth and chews it, frowning. ‘Daddy said that means she came out dead.’ James finds he has no words to answer this abridged family tragedy. ‘Daddy says life goes on,’ the boy adds, with his mouth still full. ‘Mummy says that’s wrong, and she says Daddy’s a callous. But life does go on, doesn’t it?’
James’ sense of adult authority has drained away in the presence of this sorrowful, big-headed boy. It’s not a child but a little man, a philosopher, whose minuscule bottom is perched on the front plank of the bench, feet swinging.
‘Well,’ he replies, ‘I suppose it does and it doesn’t.’
11. Unspoken meaning
‘This is a backward step, but hardly perceptible.’
Montaigne
Dan Mock considers himself a feminist. In other words, he doesn’t just believe in equality of the sexes, but also that society — even the most enlightened, liberal society — isn’t quite there yet. Of all the campaigns Natalie helps to design, the ones for girls’ education and women’s rights strike him as the most laudable. He rates the empowerment of women in western and other cultures as their greatest achievement of the past century.
In spite of this, sex in the Mock marriage is not a cat-and-cat game, or a mouse-and-mouse game: it’s a cat-and-mouse game, and Dan is nearly always the cat. Today, a Sunday, is day six since they last had sex. Dan is counting, Natalie is not: that’s the difference between them.
Natalie swam a kilometre this morning, which both demonstrated her substantial recovery from the accident and denied Dan his habitual stratagem of pouncing as she comes out of the shower (a moment, he reasons, that might just supply the requisite combination of relaxation and invigoration — though a woman armed with hairdryer and straighteners is no pushover). This coming week he’s working the night shift at the synchrotron — his seniority ensures this happens rarely, but he has to show willing — so their paths will rarely intersect in the bedroom. Six plus another five equals eleven. Dan has factored this in. Natalie, apparently, has not.
In Natalie’s world, sex seems to occupy a place beside going for a walk by the river. Something to consider when more pressing tasks are out of the way; enjoyable, once it gets going; afterwards she might say, ‘We should do that more often.’ But peripheral. Dan envies her this absolute freedom from the sex curse. He suspects, however, that in its place in her mind are mostly mundane concerns — a mental grocery list, what to wear tomorrow, whose birthday is coming up. Is the demon crouching in his own mind better or worse than these?
Their marriage has brought Dan oscillating phases of satiety and gnawing hunger. During the sexual droughts his mind fixates on foolish, repetitive fantasies, destined to be swept away by the glorious saving fuck, which, when it finally arrives, offers richer, subtler pleasures that the demon had completely overlooked. For a few days or weeks of plenty, sex is not an obsession. Then the cycle begins again.
Like any quantum physicist, he thinks in distributions and not generalisations: there are outliers as well as averages. But he guesses most marriages are in more or less the same boat as the Mocks — the quantities of desire not merely dissimilar but plotted on different axes. Man’s anxiety about Woman’s sexual indifference is, after all, almost as entrenched in human culture as His paranoia about Her ungovernable lust. The poor woman can’t win, it seems.
‘Shall we get an early night?’ Dan suggests lightly, after dinner.
‘I promised Mum I’d give her a call.’
He presses his lips together and nods, stoically. These calls tend to be long. ‘Okay. Come up soon, though.’
How would Natalie tell her side of the sex story? After ten years together, Dan isn’t sure. Presumably, she feels mildly pestered (though on rare, unforeseen occasions she’s gone at him so hard he thought he’d suffer an injury). When he asks, she says defensively that yes, of course it’s important to her. That’s about it. The defining characteristic of sexual desire is its appalling selfishness: the dark heart of any marriage.
Mike Vickers commutes by car, cab, bus or tube as the whim takes him. On cool summer mornings he likes to walk to work through Hyde Park. He doesn’t do bicycles. Today, the Friday morning after the office Christmas party, he stumbles onto a bus. It stops in traffic near Edgware Road tube station, next to a roadside sculpture of a window cleaner holding a short ladder and looking up at a ten-storey building — symbolising resolve in adversity, Mike supposes, or work that’s never done, or following ambitious dreams. What’s his ten-storey building — his noble aim? He doesn’t have one. The bus moves on, passes a gap between buildings: a soft strike of sunlight on his eyes knocks down the lids — a touch of the divine. The world is full of blessings, and what is his response? To invent nothing, inspire nothing, contribute nothing. Whatever else James accused hi
m of. It doesn’t need to be factually correct — it feels true enough.
He misses his stop, and as the bus trundles onward down baubled Oxford Street and Regent Street, he watches the grotesque theatre of shop workers preparing their windows for the day ahead — smoothing, straightening, dusting, tip-toeing reverently around plastic idols in their glass tanks. Nothing important, nothing good, nothing true.
Mike begins his descent from the top deck just as the driver accelerates into the Regent Street bend. He lets his body swing wildly into the gaping stairwell and imagines himself flying through trees on a liana. Then he stumbles out onto the chill grey pavement, and it’s over. All for one pound thirty.
The plastic women are far too skinny in the waist and legs, but have fabulous breasts.
Natalie Mock was thirty-one today. She and Dan hosted a little Christmassy party. They were expecting about ten guests, but only five showed. People have lots on at this time of year, and Reading is just a little too far from London — such a pain to get home. Rachel and Mark are dependable, but Mike was a no-show (payback for them missing his bash last month?), as was Dan’s flighty sister, Laura.
It was a nice evening, though. Natalie jostles unopened bottles of wine into a cupboard and consolidates unfinished plates of nibbles. She made a quiche that nobody touched. ‘Oh well,’ is how she verbalises a crushing, disproportionate pang of sadness. She carries back upstairs the first of two chairs that nobody sat on. This would normally be Dan’s job, but he went straight from the party to his last night shift. He’s been looking exhausted. Last weekend at the shopping centre he seemed to be limping but said it was nothing, and this evening he couldn’t pull the cork from a bottle of wine. Have to feed him up, go for some winter walks.
Annoying Lisa replied to the email. Ed — whoever he is — is taking her to the Canaries. Charlie’s an early talker. Six of her pupils had interviews at Oxbridge this week. Smug bitch. No, she hasn’t heard anything about Natalie’s ex for years:
He was trying to be a DJ or something — guess it never came to anything LOL. He was gorgeous though, wasn’t he. Intense. I used to be so jealous LOL. TTFN.
Gorgeous, intense — yes, he was. Natalie pours the dregs of a bottle of Cava into her glass and plants her bum against the table. Party music is still playing softly. His university was barely an hour’s bus or train ride from hers, and at first they met almost every weekend, comparing canteens, shower facilities, narrow beds — and work. Natalie worked hard: the studio was her passion and devoured huge tracts of time, late into the evenings, but she also had to keep up with modules on IT, construction principles, history and, worst of all, contract law. She needed support and encouragement from him, and was disappointed: he sneered when she wanted to attend lectures, skipped his own, and would sneak into the studio and distract her — it’s not easy to assemble tiny model components with UHU and tweezers while a guy is feeling you up.
His passion in those days was clubbing — he considered himself a techno music connoisseur, but he’d settle for anywhere with drinks, pills, dancing, a hedonistic vibe. He wanted Natalie to be there, but he would go without her and, when she had deadlines looming, often did. He was charismatic, of course, and attracted a ragtag of disciples. He had ideas. He passed his first year exams without effort. But he had a problem with authority, and with responsibility, and with commitment.
Back then. People change.
‘We did the nativity this week,’ says Hugo. ‘I was a wise man.’
‘Very apt.’
Again the fish and chips bench. James is earning another twenty pounds, which will help to cover his bus fare home for Christmas. The annual charade.
‘What’s does yapt mean?’
‘It means very suitable.’
Hugo has got ketchup on his scarf, and bows his big head to suck it off. James is surprised that he doesn’t topple forward. ‘I had to kneel down,’ adds the boy, sounding puzzled, ‘worship the baby Jesus and give him a bottle.’
‘I always think it’s worth remembering, even at Christmas, that when the baby Jesus grew up to be my age, they nailed him to a tree.’
‘No they didn’t — they nailed him to a cross.’
‘Oh yes, a cross. You’re right. He had to carry it himself. Shall I tell you something to make you even wiser?’
‘Yes.’
‘When Jesus had to carry his cross, that was a symbol. A kind of message. It means that we all have to carry difficult things.’
‘Like Trudy’s suitcase.’
‘No — things we have to carry in our heads.’
‘What things?’ James hesitates. Is the boy too young? No — he deserves the truth.
‘Cross number one: you are alone. Even if someone else is with you, you’re still alone inside — nothing can change that.’ Hugo frowns his huge, sorrowful frown, but he doesn’t argue. ‘Cross number two: you must die. You don’t know when, but you know it won’t be long. When someone says forever, they’re lying.’ The little man fishes out his last, soggy chip and stares at it with wide eyes. ‘That brings us to cross number three, the heaviest of them all.’ A look of dread creeps over the odd-shaped face, and James attempts a consoling smile.
‘What’s cross number three?’ A voice to break your heart. James scans the dirty grey horizon. A few ships, precise number immaterial.
‘There’s nothing new under the sun.’
Five minutes after signing off the day’s trade blotter and taking a last glance at his screen to observe that the Box’s year-to-date profit has crept above forty million dollars for the first time, Mike Vickers is approached in the street by a deranged-looking African man in ragged clothes. ‘You got to hep me,’ the man says, waving a crutch. The whites of his eyes catch the Christmas lights hanging above. ‘You got to hep me.’
‘Sorry,’ says Mike, trying to look sympathetic as he neatly swerves round the moving obstacle. Damn. Damn horrible world. Seconds later, his snap judgement — that this was just another supply-demand beggar who shouldn’t be encouraged — seems off the mark. The guy asked for help, not spare change. Mike could have told him about St. Martin’s, or some other shelter that would know what to do with him. Could have bought him a burger and walked him there. Could have shown a bit of humanity.
But it isn’t only Mike’s mind that has a void at its core. Apparently, his heart does too. His good intentions are repeatedly caught out by the little moral tests that life sets him. These tests can’t be crammed for like a maths exam or a sales pitch — they come in disguise when you’re not expecting them, each different from the last. Presumably, all you need to pass these tests is a measure of human decency.
Damn horrible world. Mike takes a breath, resets his face and hails a cab with a presumptuous flick of his hand.
Dear James,
I have suspended judgement on the question of benefitting my fellow man. I have means, but it is not yet clear to me how to proceed. I shall begin by attempting to do no harm and looking after myself. I don’t believe your own position is any better.
We’ve both a spent a long time doing what we’re doing. Today on the side of a bus I saw the slogan, ‘time is precious’ — meaningless unless you know what to do with your life, which of course these fuckers won’t tell you. May I take this opportunity to wish you a Merry Christmas.
Mike
He’s not sure whether that was a defence or a concession, but it makes him feel better.
Dan Mock has become vaguely aware that his right shoe keeps scuffing the ground, and that he’s subconsciously adjusted his walking pattern to stop it happening — as you might if you had a flapping sole. It was Natalie who first referred to this adjustment as a limp. Strictly speaking, it is a limp. And his fingers still feel weak and strange — sort of distant. After riding the bike, but not only after riding the bike.
Dan has no medical training beyond biolo
gy GCSE and twenty years of the New Scientist, but he is not, like many men, blind to his body’s messages. Something isn’t right. Natalie thinks a rest will cure him, but he has enough data to predict it won’t. He makes an appointment.
The GP, a woman in her fifties whom he hasn’t seen before, listens to his story attentively. She asks if he has any family history of neurological problems, paralysis, muscle wasting or tremors. He doesn’t think so. His father has arrhythmia, his maternal grandmother had arthritis. ‘It may be nothing,’ says the GP. ‘But I think you should see a neurologist, just to rule some things out.’
‘What could it be, in the worst case scenario?’ asks Dan. You have to get right to the point in these ten-minute visits.
‘In the worst case, it could be a neurological condition such as a form of multiple sclerosis. Or a genetic wasting condition that your family members have just been lucky not to develop.’ Great choice, thinks Dan. ‘On the other hand, it could just be a coincidence of several minor or not-so-minor health problems, possibly stress-related. The neurologist will have some very clever tests to figure out exactly what it is and isn’t. You’ll receive a letter with details of your appointment.’
The letter comes two days later: Dan’s appointment is in mid-January, three weeks away. These neurologists need their Christmas break, like anyone else.
After the poetry and before the novels, James F. Saunders wrote short stories. These usually described everyday events, but were supposed to be loaded with unspoken meaning and import like the stories of his hero, the Upstart. He sent them off to competitions and won nothing. Even the university magazine couldn’t find space for one. He made the mistake of reading a few last month, and they induced only bafflement and horror.
When he embarked on the now-abandoned Cormorant, his ambition, and indeed his sworn obligation, was to create a concise and concentrated gem with not one superfluous word (the bespectacled Exile taught him that). A sprawling, self-indulgent book was, he believed, an unforgivable arrogance, a spit in the eye of art and humanity. That belief hasn’t changed.
Learning to Die Page 9