Learning to Die

by Thomas Maloney

  And yet at the same time he perceives the wonder of it, the miracle, like a faint, cold, dawn light falling across this tangled web of sorrows. And he recognises the tribute, the act of devotion: binding the future to the past.

  But sharper and closer than either the sorrow or the wonder is the acute sting of misapprehension, of his blithe failure to comprehend the only person he can ever hope to comprehend. Would you call it a betrayal? (Stupidly, Dan’s memory snatches at the only available comparator — the time Mike nabbed the ’92 science prize after stealing Dan’s idea for his project — then flings it away in despair.)

  ‘I can’t believe what you’ve done,’ he murmurs, at last. ‘I just can’t believe you’ve done it.’

  Natalie’s face has recovered itself, become a grown woman’s again — his wife’s again — though still streaked with tears. She wipes them away with precise fingers.

  ‘Well, I have, so let’s make the best of it.’

  James has almost finished packing, the Boatman drawling softly from the tape player, when Mrs Peacock’s doorbell rattles his Anglo-Irish-Portuguese bones. She doesn’t seem to be home, so he traipses down the stairs himself and finds Trudy standing in the road, looking pained, with her hands resting on Hugo’s narrow shoulders. Could James look after Hugo for an hour or so, just this once? The wounded look on her face is not, in fact, embarrassment at having to go back on Rob’s angry vow, but actual physical pain — she has a cracked tooth. Hugo, who has made his mouth as small as possible in an effort not to smile, looks like a solemn, pinched little wizard.

  Upstairs, the boy’s triumphant grin crumples into a frown.

  ‘Why are all your things packed up?’

  ‘I’m moving to Whitters. Whitby. I’ll miss you.’ Hugo’s frown deepens to its full tectonic grandeur.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’ve found a job there.’

  ‘You already have a job. You’re a —’

  ‘I know, but I thought I’d try something different.’

  Hugo perches on the edge of the bed, still frowning, legs kicking to further express his agitation.

  ‘Can we go and sit on the fish and chips bench?’

  ‘We can try. Last time I went up there, about twelve hikers were trying to squeeze on at once. I’ll just skip to the loo.’

  After James has left the room, Hugo’s eyes wander dolefully over the empty shelves and gaping wardrobe. He recognises a small rectangular shadow on one door as the former site of James’ faded cut-out picture of the staring man with glasses, moustache and brimmed hat, now gone. His gaze finds its way to the rubbish bin, which is crammed with papers. Yes, the picture is in there, and beneath it what looks like an unfinished letter. There’s an addressed envelope, too.

  Hugo lifts these items out — then, hearing James’ tread on the stairs, stuffs them into the writer’s notebook that he proudly keeps in the pocket of his shorts.

  The latch on the Mocks’ front door has been changed and lowered, after Dan found himself unable to admit his physiotherapist last week. Even his customised litter-picker failed him, and the consultation took place through the letter slot.

  He hooks his weak fingers over the new latch and reverses the chair so the door can swing into the hall. There they are: his mother and father, laden with bags. There is still something unsettling about looking up at them rather than down, a familial ache so tangled in all the other sadness that he doesn’t examine it too closely.

  Age is making of them something slightly comical, but no less lovable. His mother was fine-looking, an auburn warmth in the dark hair that she has always — except a brief bob-stint in the eighties — worn long. She probably dyes it now, but he doesn’t know for sure. He has a theory that the moment she stopped believing in her physical impact, it disappeared like a broken spell.

  Physical impact is not a concept anyone would associate with Dan’s father, who, though an ingenious, energetic and honourable man, has always had the bearing and features of a squirrel. His shoulders are stooped and narrow, and his face has a puckered look as though not quite finished, not fully inflated — a trait visible but mercifully diluted in the faces of Dan and his sister. Dan remembers painfully acknowledging to himself his father’s shortcomings, sometime in his mid-teens while watching Mr Mock and Big Vince Vickers in conversation after a school function: mouse and man.

  Of course, the physical ageing process seems laughably benign beside his own degeneration. It’s the behavioural changes that Dan really notices — the bickering of new retirees with time on their hands, the fussing, the stories told or questions asked twice over, the missed cues, the odd habits, the pullovers worn on warm days.

  He and his father discuss modifications that might be made to his wheelchair — an ongoing project that brings both pleasure — and everyone teams up to move him to the sofa while the old man sets to work. Each time Dan leaves the chair, marooned now wherever he’s put, he recognises its transformative powers — powers not unlike those of the much-missed Yamaha, but with a different frame of reference. He calls the chair Shadowfax.

  With Natalie, who has been promised and fully deserves a day to herself, he exchanges a nod of understanding, that she is to relax and not worry about him, and that their bombshell of a secret is safe, as agreed. She leaves the house briskly, carrying, for once, nothing but a small handbag. Mr Mock then steps out to buy some parts from the electrical shop, leaving Dan alone with his mother. She offers him more cushions; offers him tea; offers him a shoulder rub.

  ‘Mum, you don’t have to nurse me.’

  ‘I’m not nursing you,’ she retorts, straightening his pile of science magazines. ‘I’m mothering you. Deal with it.’

  The sliding doors snub Natalie for just long enough to break her step and slop a scalding dribble of coffee over her thumb, then grudgingly part. She enters the busy station and selects one of the intersecting queues for the various banks of ticket machines. It’s a jolly, Saturday-morning crowd, bound for early-season football matches, open-air concerts and days out with the kids. In front of her: a silent young couple carrying huge rucksacks, holding hands, destined for adventure. Natalie feels a flash of envy, but she too is free today. A day off. Dan-free. Time, at last, to reflect on the damage she has caused.

  Dan said he could never have done what she did. He’s right — both because he is not a schemer (his intended meaning) and (more to the point) because he wouldn’t have got away with it. In his place, she would have recognised that the matter of babies wasn’t closed. His observation echoes the subtext of most of their quarrels: the moral gradient between thoughtlessness (Dan) and meanness (Nat) — which way does it tilt? Most people, in Natalie’s experience, tend towards one fault or the other, probably because in the face of sporadic thoughtlessness — the box of chocolates finished off accidentally, the forgotten favour, the mood cues missed — the considerate must occasionally resort to calculated meanness to even the score.

  This time it’s different, of course, the scale unprecedented, the consequences profound. Dan hasn’t mentioned the possibility of terminating the pregnancy: he knows his rightful jurisdiction, as a man, and as — she feels the hot prick of tears — as the one to whom it soon won’t matter one way or the other.

  A commotion in the queue behind turns her head: a pushchair has tipped backwards under the weight of a bag hung from its handles. The baby is safely strapped in but startled, and lets out a choking scream. The parents right the pushchair but don’t think to comfort its occupant — or are weary of comforting. They argue instead. The baby can’t see them and cranes its head wildly, then fixes wide, streaming eyes on Natalie. It freezes for a moment, out of puff, then hauls in another lungful and flings it out with ear-splitting abandon.

  Her heart lurches: in all her long experience with images of suffering, she has never seen such a hysterical mask of misery.

  ‘It’
s got some poke,’ murmurs Mr Mock admiringly, as he accelerates the Motability car down the M4 slip road. Dan smiles: he hasn’t been alone with his father for a long time. Mrs Mock is following in the other car; if she loses them, she has the satnav.

  Dan turns to look at his father’s familiar, mousy profile. The baby bombshell has changed everything, including his feelings for his parents. They will be overjoyed, of course — they never had the option of starting again after he’s gone. Before, Dan’s overriding urge when he saw them was simply to apologise for amounting to nothing, despite all their patient parenting efforts. Now there is something, but it’s a gift given unwillingly. The guilt remains.

  ‘I don’t really know how to say this,’ he begins, without clear intention. ‘I know it’s not my fault that I’ve got this disease — but — I still want to say sorry. I’m sorry that I’ll never be able to repay what you and Mum invested in me. Or even put it to good use. Instead, I’m just taking more. More looking after, more worrying. And this time — it’s all for nothing.’

  The car is noisy and Dan’s voice, a mewing monotone now, doesn’t project. But his father gets the gist. Mr Mock shakes his head slowly, keeping his eyes on the road.

  ‘Let me tell you something your mother and I have discovered — or remembered — this year about being parents.’ The studied calm in his voice reminds Dan of stern, reasoned tellings-off in years gone by. ‘You do hope and expect your kids will outlive you — of course you do. That hope, that miraculous continuity is one of the things that keeps you going through the — shall we say less glamorous parenting duties. But from the first moment you find out you’re going to be a parent, you sense that you’re involving yourself in forces that are out of your control. You can’t even choose whether it’s a girl or a boy, let alone whether he or she will be healthy, or happy, or clever or kind. Childbirth is no longer the roulette it was for millennia, but it’s no game. Things go wrong. Some of those things — those outcomes — can’t be righted, but just have to be lived with. If you get lucky — as we did for thirty years — you feel lucky. And if you don’t, then you adapt.’

  ‘Adapt in what way?’

  ‘The hopes that you have for your child — that we have for you — they sort of evolve. They don’t just disappear in a puff of miserable smoke. What we hope now — ’ he flicks away a tear, but his voice remains steady ‘— is that you’ll continue to meet this challenge with the great courage you’ve shown so far, that you’ll feel loved, that we’ll be able to help you to get the very most you can out of life, and that —’ he falters, not quite able to say the last thing on his mind. Instead he bats the indicator stalk as the Windsor turning approaches.

  ‘Thanks, Dad.’

  ‘Don’t thank me — thank your mother. She helped me to understand all of this. But she wouldn’t be able to tell you, so I have. So there. Last week, we were having a bit of a trip down memory lane, and —’

  Dan isn’t listening. He’s thinking that he will never take that complex parenting journey, and his own child won’t remember him.

  It’s been windy: twigs and immature conkers litter the paths, making for a bumpy ride. Dan has requested this park visit; he has to do that now — request things. He can’t just get up and go. James, Nat’s ex, was right about autonomy being a treasure.

  The Mock trio makes its way slowly towards the statue on the hill. Passers-by ignore Dan but flash sad smiles at his parents. A bout of good-natured bickering commences over Dan’s head — something about his sister Laura and whether her latest business venture will succeed. A swooping crow catches Dan’s eye — dips low, wheels round into the wind, stalls and lands neatly on a tree-root. O, joy of a skilful action! Suddenly he wants to be alone. This urge strikes often now; he values careful observation of his surroundings, flights of fancy, rumination. He remembers the same impulse before exams or important lectures — fear of the big event catching him with disordered thoughts.

  Presumably he still has a right to solitude. When the time comes, will he want to be alone?

  Brenda Vickers kills the van’s sputtering engine, strides up the little path that badly wants weeding but won’t get it, opens her front door. She’s been driving in her work boots, which are still caked in peat and sawdust, and she nearly tramples an envelope lying on the mat.

  James. Again. ‘Seriously,’ she murmurs. After all this time, he hasn’t given up. She stoops, and the familiar bitter-sweet indignation gets a jolt when she feels something lumpy in the envelope. Christ, what now? His ear? She closes the door slowly, leans against it and inserts a grimy, nail-bitten finger.

  Inside is a folded letter enclosing a second piece of paper as creased and bedraggled as though put through the wash, and a large, flat seashell. In Essex they used to call them otter shells. This one is a beauty, smooth and grey on the outside, striped with fine, concentric lines of orange, and inside a creamy white. Its two halves are still joined by a tenuous, wobbly hinge of tissue.

  The letter begins in James’ meticulous hand — Dear Brenda, I am not asking you to come back to me, but — then it stops, to be taken up, apparently, by a young child writing in pencil.

  I found this in Jameses bin. Hes too scarred to send it, so I will. He writes poems and throws them in the sea. I saved one for you and dried it out. Hes going soon and Im going to miss him. You can have my best shell from the beach here to remember him.

  From Jameses friend, Hugo

  Brenda opens the stiff, wrinkled fragment. The writing, though smeared and faded, is still legible. It’s a poem.

  Every hour, on the hour: silence. Faceless

  Clock of memory waving your white hands,

  There are eight more agonised lines, and the poem is signed in the bottom corner with what can only be kisses.

  24. Not enough

  ‘No proposition astounds me.’

  Montaigne

  Beneath George III on a gargantuan copper horse, Dan Mock sits on his own copper horse, his electric wheelchair with its new off-road tyres, and looks down the Long Walk towards Windsor Castle. Tiny, harlequin figures in congenial groups crawl here and there. Beyond the castle — head and shoulders perched on the Walk’s tapering skirt — a sumptuous grey-green horizon. You can see the curvature of the earth from the top of Everest, people say. Well, Dan can see it plainly from right here, at an altitude of two hundred and twenty feet. Nature abhors a straight line, after all, just as electrons aren’t too fond of corners.

  Nearly three miles to the castle: a fanfare sounded from its battlements would take, what, twelve seconds to reach him. A determined snail would cover the ground in four days. The flash of a mirror held by Rapunzel at her window, a seventy-thousandth of a second. Fast and slow, big and small. How much of human life is orientation?

  We are, thinks Dan, consciously opening his frontal lobe’s throttle valve, speckles of mould on the surface of a moist, gassy sphere of rock left accidentally whirling around a pathetic star. This devastating Copernican heresy is now a commonplace — the blue marble, the third stone. Yes, yes. But wait! Speckles of mould? Yes. Really? Yes: me, you, the baby. Three speckles. Our nondescript star buried in a big wheel of stuff. Big, big, yes. Stuff — heavy bits and bobs — gathers itself into these wheels. Big-bigger wheels devour big-littler wheels. Between: space, emptyish (quantum cameos like popping candy). Gravity a pull; angular momentum a dance. The stuff created out of energy. The energy happened — bang — because. Because we’re asking. Who’s asking? Mould. The universe a finite bubble of being with no edge, no outside worth worrying about, only an inside. Observable. Energy conservable. Quantum swervable. One of many? You choose — it doesn’t matter. Creator? Word games and mind games, only. Harmless fancies, yes. But the thing itself no speculation, no hypothesis, no fable — arranged in plain sight above our heads, the arm of our galaxy hanging there like one stupendous fucker of an arch, others beyond it, others beyond them, an
d beyond, and beyond. It took us a long time to figure out what we were looking at; to forget again, not long at all.

  And the mould itself, the curious infestations on that sun-bathed moisty marble — what of that? Soup accident, yes. Outlandish molecules stumble on the property of self-replication: a chemical freak that simmers discreetly for aeons and then suddenly, recently, gets out of hand. Mutate, select, repeat. In the blink of a geological eye, the planet is crawling with beasties. A single forest that stretches to the curved horizon is home to a trillion trees. Every tree a world, every leaf, the gut of every bug.

  Replicating, fornicating beasties, each a thermodynamic house of cards, improbable, expendable, ready to dissolve: if a lucky few perform their party trick, their replication, that’s enough. Mutate, select, repeat. Can’t pause it, can’t switch it off. Repeat, repeat, repeat, and then — a gasp, and a hush. Another, stranger accident. Self; angst; not Eve who ate the apple but that blind watchmaker gone berserk. Repenting now, perhaps.

  One red kite keens loudly above and another replies; a buffet of wind lifts Dan’s hair and lays it down in the fair approximation of a caress. With three strokes, the shadow of a long, low rag of cloud recolours in softer tones the western row of trees, the walk, the eastern row.

  Mould with attitude. We are. But material orientation is not enough.

  The heart of Mike Vickers is about as heavy as the mahogany box that he sets down on the table beside the drained glass and empty bottle of ’82. He flips the clasp; the lid swings back until restrained by two gold chains. Mounted and framed inside it, as though on the screen of a ridiculous laptop, is a print of the famous, luminous portrait. In the box, two snug, artfully arranged compartments: a leather folder (letters, memoranda, copies of wills all in slip cases — the provenance) and a small, velvet-lined and Perspex-lidded display case.