He fixes his gaze on the place where his novel will stand, flanked by Sartre and Schlink; the infinitesimal crack between those unsuspecting literary comrades forms the sole egress from his life’s impasse. He smiles. He’s going to make it. He has sixty thousand words that glitter like the scales of a dangerous reptile: not one out of place. He’s almost there.
And he knows exactly how it’s going to end.
By March, Dan’s right leg has given up the ghost and he walks with crutches. The change comes swiftly, over a few weeks. Because of the weakness in his hands, the occupational therapist has advised him to skip the hand-pushed chair and go straight for the electric model. It’s already been ordered. ‘You don’t need it yet, of course, but let’s be prepared.’ Positive words that signify despair. ‘I seem to be on the fast track,’ he replies.
A defining characteristic of illness, in Dan’s past experience, was that eventually you recover. It takes longer than you hope — sore throats evolve into colds that evolve into lingering coughs, blocking out swathes of the calendar; a poisoned digestive system keeps making one more frenzied ejection — but you do recover. The prospect of recovery is sewn into the illness with silver thread.
Now he’s discovering the other kind, and the psychological flavour is unrecognisable. As different as au revoir and adieu. He’s bidding adieu capabilities he never even noticed possessing: kicking off his shoes; sidling between parked cars; opening childproof medicine bottles (the last a painful and symbolic affront). He feels a gathering sense of urgency even as his disobliging body slows down, and each passing moment carries the taint of impatience.
17. Glorious flood
‘The most valiant are sometimes the most unfortunate.’
Montaigne
Brenda’s bus, having growled across the moors for half an hour, swings abruptly onto a side road. Suddenly you can’t miss the sea, into which the land here — an unstable marriage of flatness and height, a toppling table with a broken edge — seems to want to tip you. A brown expanse tending to grey, specks of foam, the horizon blurred. Suggestion of a distant ship.
Now comes the irresistible hiccup of joy as she catches sight of James slouched playfully against the bus stop, hair curling from a flat cap worn not quite straight. So this is his territory, his stronghold: the village leaning over the tidal beach, shedding houses every few decades; the cobbled lanes; his small room a student’s room, but a tidy one — bed, desk, bookshelf, coffee machine, flowers. From the window you can almost touch the sea. James tugs the curtain across it and they kiss, smiling so much their teeth collide. Blessed rightness of being together.
Now as a rule, Brenda doesn’t do blow-jobs — one-sided wastes of a fuck (ditto the tickly converse) — but today calls for a gesture, and she’s decided to make an exception. She unfastens his shirt buttons, slides lips to his chest, and resists, ignoring the slow burn of her own needs, when he tries to pull her towards the bed. Only when the insistent trickle of kisses reaches his stomach does the penny drop. He freezes, as if any movement might change her mind. A hyperventilating teenage boy getting it for the first time. He lasts about thirty seconds, and afterwards just stands there, looking dazed. She pulls his jeans up for him and they have a divine cuddle on the bed with their clothes on.
Later he takes her to a low, dark seafood restaurant about fifty yards from his room — there is only one, and it’s perfect. He behaves with exaggerated gallantry. He’s funny. Afterwards he leads her to a bench overlooking the village and wraps his coat round her, and they watch the lights benevolently trawling the horizon. She could get used to this. More drinks in his room. Then his narrow, creaky bed a nest of whispers and giggles.
The Mocks’ street slumbers heedless beneath a blazing pink mackerel sky, as Dan eases himself awkwardly down the step onto the pavement. He can barely walk without the sticks, but he can still ride.
He positions himself astride his bike, helmet balanced on the engine, one glove off to operate his phone, scrolling with ever-so-slightly clumsy flicks of his thumb. Some of these he will never hear again — his final listen has already passed by, unnoticed. A Springsteen album. A Beethoven symphony. The same with everything, of course. More and more things as he gets sicker. Last this, last that. The same for everyone. But this list of discrete, named experiences dangles its complacent orderliness before his eyes and drives the point home.
And yet here he is now, alive. He doesn’t normally listen while riding, but this isn’t going to be a normal ride. It’s a joyride. As the familiar names fly past, his eye catches Killing Joke. Perfect. He checks the helmet’s wireless internal speakers, activates the borrowed video camera perched on top, lifts the whole apparatus with some difficulty and slides it onto his head. Hits play on the phone, zips it into a sleeve pocket, pulls on his glove and throttles up hard. Wake these healthy slugabeds — ha! Strokes back the kickstand with his good leg. Joy already.
Out of town, asphalt flashing, surfing on a sea of inertial forces, Joke pounding into his brain like the grace of God. Somewhere in his mind, a dial has been adjusted. It’s not so much that the goods at stake have shrunk in value, but rather his life’s discount rate (Dan is up on his neuroeconomics) has rocketed. He accelerates hard out of a bend and feels the rear wheel twitch. His heart, somewhere under the leather and the storm of noise, is racing.
Brenda shifts, lets the inadequate duvet slip off her thigh and the cool morning air rouse her into wakefulness. James’ short, regular exhalations weave in and out of time with the soughing of the North Sea. She could just lie here and bask in her happiness, but instead she lifts her head to survey the little room. Cold light spills under the curtains and across the desk: two emptied glasses, a bottle, the vase of cheery flowers, a plucked leaf that James folded around her fingertip — ‘thy finger’s taperness,’ he called it, even though her calloused fingers with their bitten-down nails don’t really taper.
And the laptop. His mysterious book is one of the private territories that must be opened up if they are to share each other’s lives, to build an alliance. There are others, she acknowledges, but let’s start with the book.
She dismisses his proposal to have breakfast in the tearoom, and instead carries pastries and takeaway coffee back to his room and lays them out carefully on the desk. ‘You have the sea view, after all,’ she explains brightly, ‘and when you sit here tomorrow, writing your novel and feeling lonely, and the next day, and the next, I want you to think of our little breakfast.’ James looks doubtful but doesn’t argue. As he unplugs the laptop and transfers it to the bed, her eyes follow.
‘Talking of your novel,’ she says, ‘isn’t it time you told me about it? What’s the subject?’ James gives a reticent smile.
‘It’s difficult to explain.’
‘Try me. Where’s it set?’
‘It could be set anywhere,’ he answers, reluctantly, ‘but it happens to be set just up the coast at South Shields, and in East London, and on a cargo ship out there. A coal ship. In about nineteen ten.’
‘You must have to do a lot of research,’ suggests Brenda, ‘to get the details right.’ She glances at his bookshelf. There are books, but not that many.
‘To be honest,’ says James, with an odd blend of self deprecation and arrogance, ‘I don’t really bother about historical details.’
‘Then what do you bother about?’
Their eyes meet and Brenda thinks of the Harris hawk. Cornered. Suddenly the hawk eyes flash and he leans forward — he’s going to spill the beans.
‘Alright. Here goes. The ancient Greeks recognised at least four distinct bonds that we lazily throw together under the umbrella of love — you might call them desire, friendship, kinship and general benevolence. You might, but nowadays if you really mean it you’re supposed to use the umbrella word: love. We also cram under there the attachments you feel towards a cat, a song, a view. Ice cream. McDonald’s. You’re ev
en told to love yourself, which must be easier for some people than others. With me so far?’
‘I think so.’
‘Now why would our language, our most triumphant achievement, the whole purpose of which is to draw distinctions, why would it fail us so badly when it comes to this diverse jumble of affections, which range from the cheapest, most trivial of whims to what most of us consider to be the profoundest feelings any person can have? Is it really just laziness, or something more deliberate?’
Brenda feels a faint touch of foreboding, a sense that she might regret her insistence. She’d like to change to a lighter subject, but it’s too late. ‘You tell me,’ she says, slowly dismembering a croissant.
Natalie Mock stands on the stinging bathroom tiles with bed hair and a man’s T-shirt down to mid-thigh, holding a packet of pills. A red arrow directs her to the next pill in the sequence. Eat me and lose Dan forever.
Dan’s three reasons for not having a baby were: for her sake, because she should be able to start again and live her life to the full with someone else; for his own sake, because it would — he thinks — make his predicament, his exit from the world, immeasurably more painful; and for the child’s sake, because every child deserves a father.
Stated together they sound damning, but examine each in turn and it doesn’t hold water. The opposing case, her case, is not a list. It is simply this: a child is hope and defiance against the terrible looming abyss of Dan’s absence.
She looks up at her reflection. Some decisions she is perhaps entitled to make.
Dan rides hard, without a destination in mind, keeping the sun roughly behind him. Takes turnings he’s always passed by and soon finds himself in unknown country. Everywhere the mocking vigour of early spring.
He accelerates down a long straight and thinks of all the misery lying ahead. The indignity, the frustration, above all the bloody wasted effort of all concerned. He can switch all that off with a flick of his hand. Later he’ll be trapped, but right now, just a flick. His chance, right now.
But around each and every corner is more life, waiting for him. How could anyone willingly renounce it? His bike is a kinetic spark tracing these fertile wrinkles on the planet’s skin, his mind a laser, projecting the perfect course on the road ahead, the rhythm guitar’s staccato thump is heaven in his ears and crowds of adoring daffodils, ferociously abundant, are cheering him on.
He brakes too late for the next bend, much too late, and feels the bike let go of the road. He closes his eyes while the nest of forces unravels according to Newton’s clear instructions, and the divine music plays on.
‘It’s deliberate,’ says James, in answer to his own question. Brenda picks a crumb from the corner of her mouth. ‘Our use of language draws distinctions but it also makes connections. We use the same love word for these things because they’re all the same thing. “What thing?” you ask. What is this love thing? It’s an emanation of the self. It’s an involuntary manifestation of a part of ourselves that we cannot otherwise see — the deepest core of the self. Belief could be considered another emanation — if anyone believed anything anymore — but belief can be conditioned. Love can’t.’
‘If love is all about the self,’ asks Brenda, her foreboding now tinged with panic, ‘where does the thing — or the person — you love come into it?’ James is oblivious.
‘The object of our love creates the resonance,’ he replies with a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘But the thrill is in self-discovery. Love is a mirror. “Love thy neighbour!” we’re told. But you can’t choose to love, and you can’t compel someone else to love. Love happens, or it doesn’t. It always tells truth about what you have hidden inside you. Meeting you has helped me to understand all this.’
‘Meeting me?’
‘Absolutely. Before I met you, I was washed up — I was finished. I didn’t know myself anymore. Believe it or not, I used to have this ridiculous plan to meet someone, to engage with someone emotionally, specifically to help me rediscover the person I used to be — I called it Project Q. Well guess what? Project Q came up trumps!’ He points at her and laughs. She feels sick. ‘You’ve been like — like an echo-sounder. Through the response I felt when I met you, and feel again each time I see you, I can see the very roots of myself, unreachable and ungovernable. It’s a goldmine for my writing. I can see past loves, some just fossils, others still alive but twisted round on themselves. Some loves are extensions of these unyielding roots, while others are just sort of breathed out like smoke. But I’ve been able to harness it, this process of revelation, in the novel.’ He points excitedly at the laptop. ‘Whatever happens to us now, whether the resonance we’re feeling lasts or fades, it doesn’t matter, because this record, this testimony will remain.’
The cascade of words runs dry. James turns his exultant gaze from the laptop to Brenda’s face. She’s been hauled out of this once-happy room to a high and lonely vantage, looking down at her pathetic, mooning, love-struck self. His surprise at seeing something in her eyes he wasn’t expecting, expressed in the sudden dropping of his saliva-flecked lower lip, shows him to be as deluded as her. He’s about to speak, to question, when her anger detonates in a glorious flood of adrenaline. In one movement she leaps to her feet, snatches the laptop from the bed and turns towards the door.
‘Brenda?’
By the time he thinks to leap after her, she has one foot on the landing. She waits for his approach, then flings the door into his face. She takes the narrow stairs in threes, silently rejoicing in his pain, swings into the hall and grapples with the latch of the front door. He crashes down the stairs just as she gets it open.
‘Brenda! What are you doing? I didn’t mean it like that! Stop, for God’s sake! Give it back!’
He’s getting it now too — the adrenaline rush. She meets his eyes for a moment, says nothing, leaps into the street and down to the ramp. Plants her feet firmly on the glossy, barnacled cobbles. Brenda Vickers doesn’t throw like a girl. The Frisbee-spinning laptop flashes high. She turns her head and meets his eyes again just as the deep, dull thump of laptop meeting cold North Sea resounds behind her.
He’s standing in the street, arms by his sides, nose bleeding, face like death. He has no words.
‘Didn’t you have a back-up?’ asks Brenda, casually, as she strolls past him to the door of the cottage, climbs the stairs, stuffs a few belongings into her rucksack and returns to the street. His body hasn’t moved — his eyes are still fixed on the point of impact. As for his soul, who knows? Who cares? Brenda walks up the street, away from the sea.
Her gaze wanders idly like that of a tourist, and falls on a shop selling fudge. She steps in, buys a handful of vanilla choc chip and savours it, piece by piece, as she climbs the steep hill towards the bus stop.
Brenda loves fudge. She can’t help loving fudge. It’s an emanation of the self.
18. Deadest thing
‘There is … not so much misery in us as emptiness …’
Montaigne
James F. Saunders watches the heave and suck of the spastic sea. Stuff of madness. Destruction fantasy. He begins to shiver, then retches without warning. Stringy dribble of vomit and bloody snot on the cobbles. A gull swoops half-heartedly and veers away.
He turns, dimly registers Hugo’s moonlike face watching from a window with his round, black, crater mouth. Climbs the stairs to his room: the room where his laptop, his novel, is not. His eyes search for it, disbelieving, and then, moderating their goal, seek out something to cleanse the puke. The whisky she brought. Laphroaggie. Laugh rage. Medicinal purposes, she said. He fumbles with the heavy foil, pulls the stopper and swills. Cleansing fire. Choking liar. Gasping choir.
Dan Mock can hear a bird singing. A greenfinch, if he’s not mistaken. The other music — pounding drums, angry man shouting in his head — has stopped. He sees greenery squashed against his visor and smells its fierce distress, smells s
omething else too, something delicate and lovely. He tries to move. Turns his head without pain. A limb which seems to be his arm rustles some plants noisily, communicates a sensation of damp, and eventually presents a fully-functioning gloveless hand to the glossy problem of the helmet. He exerts his shoulders and another arm enters the fray. The helmet comes off and here is the wet, bright world.
He sits up. Daffodils. Everywhere. A flash of chrome above a nearby ditch. He crawls to a flint wall that his body apparently didn’t slam into, gets an arm over it and hauls himself upright.
He looks down at his mud-streaked leathers. There’s a small tear on one sleeve.
‘And you?’ he says to his leg. ‘Are you going to fucking start working too, as part of this fucking miracle?’ The leg twitches ineffectively. Dan looks to the sky and laughs.
James is on the beach. Tide down. Shoes wet through; on one a stubborn straggle of weed. The near-empty bottle leaves him only one coat-pocket to cram a hand into. The laptop corpse nowhere. Not content with destroying his novel, the sea has actually done away with the hardware. Acid bath murder.
Lines from the dead novel assail him. Flawless lines. The sun a dripping sponge on my face, between rounds of brawling night. Dismembered now, functionless, grotesque. It’s all come to nothing, after all. Thirty-odd years of blur and blot. The deadest thing. Stupid phrase, he’s always thought, but maybe Hardy was on to something. Wind oozing thin; yes, that too.
He turns unsteadily and sees the village now far away along the waste of mud and shingle. It seems easier to go on. Didn’t you have a back-up, she said. His father used to plead, nag, badger: ‘Write if you must, but finishing your degree will give you a back-up.’ James has never believed in back-ups.
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