Learning to Die

by Thomas Maloney

  But why just the right amount? And why are the sun’s temperature and distance perfectly tuned to ensure those photons are conveniently energetic (for photosynthesis) but arrive with moderate, non-roasting flux? And why, after all, have the dials on the fundamental forces been so precisely and perfectly adjusted to permit star formation, heavy elements, complex structures and the habitable universe? And why has space-time itself been configured slap bang in the sweet spot (two or four spatial dimensions would be non-starters for life)? Why, indeed. Ah. Dan smiles.

  The anthropic principle and its more personal corollaries constitute, in his view, a refuge of almost limitless therapeutic power. The answer to so many questions. Why are life’s necessary ducks lined up in such a convenient row? Why did Daniel Mock come to be born, given the infinitesimal probability of his parents’ union, and those of his grandparents, and his great-grandparents, and every scattered ancestor forever before? Why did he contract motor neurone disease? Of all the weirdly fucked-up ways to die. Why not the more likely heart disease, or cancer, or, for that matter, nuclear war? Why didn’t that roadside wall of flint swat his incoming frame like a cricket bat? Why? Because. Because he’s asking the question.

  Of course, many people reject this line of reasoning — not only the superstitious, the faters, but many of his scientific acquaintance, both theoreticians and experimentalists. There is a kind of hunger for something more, a kind of —

  ‘Sausage for your thoughts?’ says a voice. Dan opens his eyes. A skinny, shaven-headed man has taken hold of his precious straw and is using it to shepherd a wasp out of the glass. In his other hand he holds out two sauce-slathered hot dogs precariously; perhaps a little unsteadily.

  ‘Thanks,’ says Dan, maintaining his serene, happy countenance. ‘But I’ve already eaten. Thanks, though.’ The man is wearing faded black jeans and a faded Nick Cave T-shirt. Not very summery.

  ‘I’m James,’ he says. Not someone Mike has ever mentioned. Dan took him for the gardener.

  Natalie Mock can’t quite hit it off with Mike’s groupies. They seem nice enough, but that’s just it — their politeness has the familiar flavour of crutches and wheelchairs. She feels the empty place next to her like a wound.

  To an onlooker on the bank she’s already what she’ll one day become again: one of the girls. She hesitantly trails her fingers in the water, copying Victoria — it’s pleasant for a few seconds but then something brushes against them. She wipes them on the seat and smiles weakly.

  James F. Saunders has judged his preparatory inebriation well. A few drinks give his present consciousness a literary distinction — a grandeur, even — usually reserved for the regretted past or the dreaded future. His world’s a stage, and hot sun pours down on him like a spotlight. The disabled man — presumably Mike’s tragic school chum — is called Dan. He asks James rather doubtfully if he’s a friend of Mike’s. Doesn’t like the cut of his jib.

  ‘I suppose so,’ shrugs James with a smile. It’s strange, but true. ‘Where is that slimy fucker, anyway?’

  The man suppresses a smile. ‘Showing off in the punt. My wife’s with him.’

  After a silence marking the moment when he might have made his excuses but chooses not to, James says, ‘So what were you thinking about?’

  ‘Luck.’

  James is uncharacteristically ravenous and has just taken a bite of hot dog. The man seems disinclined to elaborate, so he valiantly shepherds the food to one side of his mouth.

  ‘Last week,’ he announces, ‘my landlady found four double-yolkers in a box of eggs. One in a million. Doesn’t win a penny.’

  The man — was it Dan or Dave? — says something like, ‘Clustering,’ his voice slurring. He tries again. ‘Classic example of a rare event that occurs in clusters. Young chickens, big eggs. Not really one in a million.’ Ah yes, he was — is — some sort of science nerd. Doctor Who. Doctor Strangelove, maybe. James decides to advance the conversation, the dialogue, onto matters of substance.

  ‘What kind of bad luck put you in the chair?’ he inquires, simply. Mike never actually specified the disease.

  The man calmly names it, the six Delphic syllables tripping off his tongue with no slurring. It is a nasty one. A clock ticker. I’m not the only one who’s cursed, thinks James. Worth remembering.

  What he says out loud is, ‘I imagine one of the worst things must be the loss of — of autonomy. To be autonomous, your own person, in control of your life, able to be alone and act alone, you need your body to cooperate.’

  The man frowns at this abrupt, Montaignian perspective on incapacity. ‘Technology helps,’ he says. ‘The chair, the computer, above all the internet.’ After a pause, he adds, ‘The other side of that dependency coin is that I appreciate the people I love — my wife and my family — and they me, I suppose — more than ever before. More than would have been possible before.’ This observation stings. ‘Are you married?’ pursues the man, relentlessly.

  ‘No. But I take your meaning. I’ve experienced something like it. Only a trauma makes love real. Without a trauma, love dissipates. Takes itself for granted. Wouldn’t you say?’

  The man nods. ‘Yes, I would say that. Love — I’m not speaking grandly here, just about what everyone feels for the people closest to them — finds a purpose.’

  Natalie fidgets. She can feel her legs and feet burning even under the sunblock. At last, Mike turns the punt and the river’s lazy flow helps them back over the same Ratty and Mole territory. As they round the tip of the island, a window between two willows slowly opens to reveal the pastel collage of the throng on the lawn. Burbling voices. She’s relieved to see Dan still where she left him, looking cheerful — in animated conversation with the oddly-dark figure of a man. A curtain of willow fronds drifts again across the scene, and she leans to one side, trying to identify Dan’s new friend.

  ‘Whoa there!’ says Mike, flailing for his balance as the punt tips. ‘That’s neither big nor clever.’ Victoria giggles and leans too, and some banter commences — but Natalie isn’t listening. Her eyes are still fixed on the duo beside the sundial. The landing stage approaches.

  Without a sound, the gin and tonic in Natalie’s hand slumps over, depositing a many-petalled effervescent bloom onto the cushion where Dan would have sat.

  Mike Vickers carefully applies weight to the pole — an expert puntist’s clothes are never wetted by so much as a drop — feels it slide a good foot down into the primeval mud, and leaves it standing there to trap the punt against the landing stage. He disembarks nimbly, dries his hand on a handkerchief and offers it to the ladies. Victoria. Lulu. Natalie.

  ‘Nat?’ Natalie clambers out distractedly, knee first, ignoring his assistance. She’s spilled her drink across the seat. ‘Are you alright?’

  ‘Fine,’ she replies, distantly, looking past him. ‘Fine.’ She straightens but makes no move away from the bank. Mike follows her gaze to Dan, who’s talking to, or rather being talked to by, of all people, James Fuck Fakes Saunders. Jesus, thinks Mike, seeing James’ inelegant get-up. If you’re going to come, at least make some sort of effort. At the same time he feels a surge of relief that his fairy godbrother is here.

  ‘Come on,’ he says, touching her arm. ‘Let’s go and rescue your dearly beloved. And I’ll introduce you to someone.’

  Natalie drifts forward, murmuring. ‘Is this some kind of —’

  James F. Saunders didn’t expect to meet Death on this gin-soaked lawn, let alone Love. But here They both are, sitting in the same electric wheelchair. More self-satisfaction than self-pity. Love conquers all.

  The man smiles suddenly, and half-raises a hand to wave. James turns to see Mike prancing up from the riverbank with his bevy of ladies. Two of them — one imperiously tall and dark, the other imperiously blonde and tanned — diverge towards rival party factions, leaving Mike with the third. The third is a freckly redhead, all of a
bout five foot two.

  The cheerful backdrop, the staging, falls away. Every hour, on the hour. Even to the original air-blue gown. No. Yes.

  Dan can’t easily shade his eyes. Venus is still up there, tracing out her less fortunate ellipse, thirty million miles closer to the blazing sun, out of line now but still lost in its dazzle: the slenderest eyelash of a backlit crescent, if you knew where to look.

  ‘Nat tried to drown us all,’ says Mike. ‘We had to tie her up and lock ’er in the foc’sle. Afternoon, James, old chap. So good of you to make it after all. Now, who needs a drink?’

  As Dan looks up at Mike, he notices Mike’s gaze wander with a frown across to his scruffy, plain-speaking friend, James. Dan’s own gaze wanders from Mike across to Natalie. Suddenly, the earth that he again feels rolling on its axis is a planet whose laws he doesn’t understand quite as well as he thought.

  His wife is standing as still as the sundial, her blue dress slightly rucked on her hip from sitting in the low seat of the punt. Her face is expressionless, but has the barely perceptible colouring and the extra-glossiness of eyes that always betray her discomposure. The fingers of her empty hands, at her sides, are held just a little too straight. She looks like she might break into a run. She looks magnificent.

  ‘Is someone going to say something?’ Mike’s voice, far away.

  Dan drags his eyes from Natalie and directs them up, up, towards the focus of her attention, James, who is standing at his side. James glances down at him. Their connection, their understanding has been displaced by something else. James looks back at Natalie. He seems at last to breathe.

  ‘Hello, Becks.’

  22. Living thing

  ‘My mode of living is the same in sickness and in health.’

  Montaigne

  Natalie Mock, née Beckett, feels herself to be in two places at once, and in each place she is a different person. One of the two is laughing, sliding down a snowy slope on her backside, with her boyfriend clutching her from behind, his weight pressing her to accelerate. They’re out of control, going much too fast, but the hill miraculously steers them past each threatening rock or tree, and they come to rest in a painless tangle with cold hands and ears and arses, and hot hearts. It’s her twenty-first birthday.

  The other is here, in this sultry corrupted Eden — wife, carer, homeowner and unfulfilled office pen-pusher. James is in both places, and he hasn’t changed a bit.

  James F. Saunders, seeing the changes wrought by ten years in a remembered face, feels a sickening, thrilling jolt — the wake left by time’s thundering passage. It’s not that Becks has aged in any trite, pejorative sense. She looks wonderful, in her Becksish way. But in that instant he sees for what it is his long-preserved, long-treasured sense of their star-crossed union — it recoils from her undeniably, unanswerably altered reality, back into the distant past where it belongs.

  ‘Why does he call you that, anyway? “Becks.”’

  ‘He always did. It’s the name he first heard — it was a school nickname, and I was backpacking with a school friend who used it. He sort of adopted it.’ Natalie doesn’t add the recollection that James said he preferred Becks to Nat — the sound, the strength of it — and that at the time she felt the same.

  ‘Huh,’ says Dan, nodding as though assimilating a significant fact. ‘You never told me that. The funny thing is, I always imagined him as a Chris.’ Natalie knows she shouldn’t find the subject uncomfortable, which only compounds her discomfort. ‘Have a few moments with him,’ adds Dan. ‘I don’t mind. In fact, I’d rather you did.’ Then he smiles. ‘Mocks.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve got anything to say to him.’ But Dan quietly, sincerely insists. This, apparently, is an ordeal that must be gone through.

  ‘Hello, Becks. It’s great to see you.’

  ‘It’s good to see you too.’

  James takes note of the moderated adjective. ‘You look great. Grown up. Sort of, er, womanly. I’m really sorry about your husband. It must be hard. Seems like a great guy.’ This is where James’ decade of wordsmithery has got him: great to see you, you look great, seems like a great guy. But he finds he’s not afraid of using the wrong words.

  ‘We do okay. And you — you’re here on your own?’

  James smiles and nods. ‘Yep.’

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘Yorkshire. On the coast. After uni I didn’t get far. You?’

  ‘Reading,’ she says, with defensive force, and then adds, perhaps in mitigation (though James hears too a note of reproach), ‘I work there.’

  He savours the next pause. It could last almost forever because of what he’s going to say at the end of it. She’s looking through the willow fronds towards the sparkling play of evening sun on the river. It’s beautiful. Mike was right — he could write here. Or just exist here, for a while. He breathes in. And out.

  ‘Have you ever thought about me?’

  Becks — Natalie — glances up with an eyebrow raised derisively, but then says, ‘Once or twice.’ James is surprised when she adds, after a pause, eyes fixed back on those miraculous, ever-changing, never-repeating reflections, ‘You?’

  He smiles again. ‘Once or twice. Sorry for being — back then — the way I was —’

  Natalie shakes her head, raises a hand to cut him off — lightly veined now, ring on the finger. ‘It’s not even a thing.’

  James has finally, in the last hour, comprehended that their unresolved quarrelling is not a thing — not a living thing — but she says that as though it is.

  Mike waits on the landing stage. His best old friend and his best new friend are, it turns out, connected. That this connection runs through the body and soul of Natalie is, today, oddly unsurprising. The launch glides into sight and backs up. Mike nods at the boy, presses a twenty in his hand. At length, Dan and Natalie emerge from the house — their toilet mission accomplished — and negotiate the ramp he’s had fitted to the patio steps.

  James is talking to Pete, his original discoverer and champion, and waves a casual, friendly farewell to the Mocks as a single entity.

  From now on, Mike’s going to be there for them. This resolve, like James’ farewell, finds it convenient to address the two as one. But as the launch swings out into the channel and the Mocks themselves turn to wave, and as love and sadness well up in Mike’s stunted heart, the eye he catches is Natalie’s.

  Winter is a surprisingly chilly affair in Kentucky, New South Wales. Brenda likes the cold, of course, but isn’t dressed for it, and blows on her hands as the cabin warms up. She imagined a rustic log cabin, but it’s more of a portakabin. On the wall there really are pictures of prize sheep wearing rosettes.

  ‘Can you tell me again,’ says Austin, thoughtfully scratching his stubbly jaw so that muscles bulge in the crook of his arm, ‘exactly what this bloke of yours did wrong?’

  Brenda feels her chest tighten. ‘He admitted that he was just using our relationship as material for his book.’

  Austin chuckles and shakes his head. ‘Christ, Bren — sorry, I don’t mean to laugh. But you do pick ’em. And this would be the book that you, er, relieved him of.’ Brenda nods. ‘And Mikey knew this, and took his side?’

  ‘I don’t actually know what Mike knows. But James was in his flat. Opened the door to me, like they were best mates.’

  Austin grunts and nods, as though his point had been made. ‘And I guess this author bloke went spare when you — took your revenge. Since his precious book was all he cared about, I mean.’

  ‘Not really,’ answers Brenda. ‘He wanted me back.’ Austin grunts and nods again, letting the implications of this fact, whatever he considers them to be, speak for themselves.

  ‘Still,’ he sighs, cracking a can of imported English cider, ‘plenty more tups in the rut, as they say.’

  Austin thinks the best of everyone. Always has. One
result is that he lives in a portakabin. Another is that he always seems to be happy. That’s why Brenda came here, buying her ticket with Mike’s unused fifties — that, and the certainty that Austin wouldn’t try to make her see a doctor. They both know she’s unwell, but they believe in other kinds of treatments.

  Mike Vickers sits forward on the perverse reception-area chair, elbows on knees, fingers bridged, waiting his turn. The sales rep thumbs her phone intently. This is the culmination of three months’ schmoozing — a finals pitch, a direct contest against one or more unknown rivals. Thirty minutes each in front of the investment committee, and Mike’s up next.

  The MRI’s lacklustre, dodgem-car year has continued, but last year’s bonanza keeps prospective investors interested. Past performance is no guide to … but nobody listens to that, least of all the professionals. Mike has learned to push the miraculous doublethink that while the MRI program itself is a ruthless algorithm immune to all human foibles, its investors also gain some sort of unspecified access to his firm’s world-renowned human traders and economists, its superstar sparkle. CIOs don’t want to hear that the strategy is just fresh-faced Mike, a standard issue desktop PC and ten thousand lines of inherited code.

  The marketing team have helped him out with a new logo inspired by CSI, or maybe ER, and a glossy brochure. They can’t improve on Mike’s immaculate charts, of course — he has an A* in geography and he’s not afraid to use it — and the magic show doesn’t work in hard-copy. But the new introduction, emphasising his firm’s peerless reputation and limitless resources, doesn’t do any harm.