This Is the Life

by Alex Shearer

  “Maybe everyone’s got something wrong with them.”

  “No,” Louis said. “Not seriously wrong, not like that. We had more than our fair share of crazy people and mental cases. And what about the lodgers?”

  “Louis, no one who takes in lodgers expects them to be normal.”

  “I want to forget all about it,” he said. “I want to forget I ever had a childhood. But instead I remember everything. I just can’t recall what happened five minutes ago.”

  “We were sitting in the barber’s, Louis, getting your eyebrows trimmed.”

  “You want something to eat? I’m hungry.”

  “Okay. Let’s get some lunch. You want to see the menu?”

  “I won’t be able to read it.”

  “I’ll read it out to you.”

  “And the prices.”

  “Louis, you don’t need to care about the prices.”

  “Oh? Why not?”

  “I mean, we can afford it. I’ll pay.”

  “I’ll pay. You’ve flown all the way over here.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I’ll pay.”

  I read out the menu to him and I knocked five dollars off everything.

  “Seems pricey to me,” he said—even with the five dollars deducted.

  “Louis, you’re all right for money, believe me, you don’t need to worry.”

  “They’ll never give me any.”

  “Louis, I talked to the hospital social worker, to Leonora. She’s dealing with it. It’s all going through. You’ll get the money. No one expects someone with a diagnosed brain tumor to clock in on a Monday morning.”

  “You don’t know how it works over here. They’ll find a way to wriggle out of it. We’re screwed.”

  “Louis—”

  “I’ll have a melted cheese panini.”

  “Yeah, okay. Me too.”

  I motioned to the waitress, who came over and took our food orders. We sat there, under the burner, in the cool, crisp Australian winter. The light was high and bright and the­ cars moved along the streets and the pedestrians passed us, and no one knew or cared or would ever have recognized that a condemned man and his brother sat at that table and upon those chairs. Same as I had walked past many a dying person in my time and had evinced no interest.

  Louis pulled his beanie back on and sat with his Buddha smile and milky eyes, watching the world go about its business.

  “You start the radiotherapy in the morning? Is that right?”

  “Radio and chemo both.”

  “I read about a guy on the Internet, had the same as you, diagnosed with it seven years ago, still going. In remission and still going. Seven years.”

  “That’s good,” Louis said. “That’s good.”

  Any port in a storm. Any straw in the wind.

  The paninis arrived and we ate them hot.

  “Okay, Louis?”

  “This is good,” he said, cheese dribbling down his chin. That was Louis for you. Never a stylish eater. More of a hungry man with an appetite who needed to get fed.

  Halfway through the panini, he paused and looked across the table.

  “You know something,” he said. “You’re all I’ve got.”

  Which I thought was pretty terrible.

  “Then you’re in a worse way than we thought, Louis,” I said. “It’s more serious than we imagined.”

  Which he had the decency to laugh at. But it made me sad. I shouldn’t have been all he had. He should have had a lover still, a wife, a daughter, a son. But he’d never had children, though he could have done. Chancelle would have had his babies for starters—and I doubt she was the only one.

  “I could never have dealt with it,” he said to me once. “Don’t know how you coped with them. I could never have coped.”

  “Louis, you don’t get it. No one can cope. No one has children thinking they know what to do. It’s just one generation of hopeless cases bringing up another. Nobody knows what they’re doing.”

  “They’d have driven me nuts.”

  “Mine drive me nuts. Everyone’s kids drive them nuts.”

  “I’d have had a breakdown.”

  “Everyone’s having a breakdown. People who don’t have kids have breakdowns.”

  “True enough.”

  “But you’ve got your friends.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “It’s not like you’re on your own.”

  “No—maybe not.”

  The next morning I woke at five to hear Louis moving about in the kitchen. The morning was chilly and I got reluctantly out of bed. Louis was standing by the table with a glass of water in his hand, wearing a paint-stained T-shirt and the sort of underpants that went out of fashion a long time since and which I didn’t even know you could still buy.

  “You all right?”

  “Just taking my anti-nausea.”

  “At this time?”

  “Got to take it an hour before the chemo tablet. And then wait another hour. And then the hospital car’ll come. And then go in for the radio treatment, then after that I can eat.”

  “Want me to make you a sandwich to take?”

  “I’m going back to bed.”

  He went back to bed, resetting his alarm. I made a sandwich and left it on the table, wrapped up. Then I went back to bed too and fell asleep again.

  I woke to the sound of the doorbell ringing. Louis was dressed and throwing his stuff into his cooler bag and getting ready to go.

  “I’ll see you later.”

  “Good luck, Louis.”

  The door was open now and the hospital car driver was out on the veranda at the top of the step.

  “I’ll see you later, Louis.”

  I put my arm around him and to my surprise he kissed me. His moustache tickled and his beard was damp. I felt a moment of revulsion—to my shame. But then I wished him luck once more, and he was gone.

  I wondered if the car driver realized we were brothers. We didn’t look a whole lot like each other now, not with Louis traveling incognito in his beanie hat. Maybe the driver thought we were lovers instead—a couple of aging civil partners.

  I heard the car drive off and felt I should have gone too. I felt like a noncombatant who hasn’t been drafted into the army yet, seeing a relative off to war. But against that was the knowledge that one day, somewhere along the road, my conscription papers would also come.

  I made some coffee and sat at the kitchen table to drink it. When I had showered and dressed, I started in on Louis’s paperwork. There were drawers of the stuff. I didn’t really know where to begin. I dumped a load of it down on the floor.

  Louis, I thought, why did you do this to me?

  Though he hadn’t done anything, of course. I was just being a selfish bastard.

  But aren’t we all?

  * * *

  When our father was dying, our mother was tending to him. He was high on morphine at the time, and she said to him, “What do you want the boys to be, John, when they grow up?”

  He thought a moment and said, “Matadors.”

  Neither Louis nor I ever became a matador. There was no tradition of bullfighting where we lived. So, in that sense, we let him down. We were actually unacquainted with his wishes, as our mother did not disclose them to us for some years, and by then it was too late to take the matadoring route. I wouldn’t have done it anyway, since I lacked the courage and my reactions were no way quick enough and I didn’t have a cape.

  But Louis’s eyes lit up when he heard about it, and he seemed to be dreaming of going to Spain. Maybe he should have done something about it. He might have been good at it. It’s a cruel sport but wasn’t really considered so then. You could still be an elegant hero back then in a gold brocade suit with a sharp waistcoat and a stylish h
at.

  But I don’t go for the alternative universe theory. There are too many options. How can there be other worlds for every infinitesimal variation that there could have been in our lives? That we turned right instead of left? That we crossed the road a moment earlier, a moment later? That the seats in the theater were upholstered in red and not in blue? And this must be so for every creature that ever lived and every blade of grass and every ant that ever crawled along a leaf—but could have crawled across another leaf, in a different direction.

  Where is there the space for all this infinity?

  Or maybe I’m wrong and there is a world in which Louis is still driving his ute down to the harbor to potter around on his sailboat. Maybe there is a world in which he does not suffer a mysterious nausea and a sudden migraine. It’s not this world though. And this is the one we must deal with.

  9

  Strawberries

  After a while the Australian winter turned to spring. But I’d started seeing darkness and the end of things everywhere, even in the faces of children and babies sitting in strollers. I’d see infants with their mothers and think, Why have they done it, why did they bring these people into the world only to have to die?

  Finality would be there too in old sepia memories, on ­the walls of restaurants and bars and hospital receptions—photographs of pioneers and illustrious founders and settlers of untamed lands. All gone and all dead, every single one of them. And if one of the men had a moustache, then so they all did; and if one of the women wore a bonnet and an impeccable white apron, the rest did too. And they were all dead.

  And the waitress at Kangaroo Point would bring over my coffee, and for all her youth and beauty, she would one day be dead. And the runners and the joggers and the personal trainers and all the pursuers of life and health and immortality, they would, without exception, all soon die.

  Yet had you said to any one of them that your relative was dying, they’d have given you their sympathy, or maybe acted shocked and surprised, as if this were some uncommon event, instead of a regular and perpetual occurrence. For people are dying everywhere, every moment of the day, in their thousands and then in their millions and then in their billions too. And of the population of the world, of the seven billion or however many there are, plus those born since you began to read this sentence, one day they will all be dead, every one. And you and me and every single thing that lives, all dead. And I sat with my coffee, watching the boats on the river and the ferries taking the commuters to work, and it would all pass and be over and ended too.

  And I thought that of that seven billion or more, many millions, maybe many billions, believe there is another world of some spiritual kind that they will go to when they stop breathing. But I didn’t think so.

  “No one knows why we’re here, do they, Louis?” I said to him later. “Not even the best brains. People believe things, but faith isn’t knowing. Nobody knows what we’re doing here and they never will. We’ll go on dying until the world falls into the sun, and we’ll still never know. And that’s it. People can build you an airplane and send men to the moon but they can’t tell you what we’re doing here.”

  “What’s for dinner?” Louis said.

  “What do you want?” I said.

  “Whatever you’re making,” he said.

  “How about eggs and chips and peas, followed by strawberries and yogurt?”

  “Man, you know how to live.”

  “No need to be sarcastic.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Louis, when did you last eat strawberries?”

  “I don’t buy them.”

  “Why not?”

  “They’re pricey.”

  “Louis, I know how much you have in the bank.”

  “That’s got to last me.”

  “Louis, you’ve got to get a new fridge here.”

  “What’s wrong with the fridge? Nothing wrong with the fridge. I’ve had the fridge a quarter of a century.”

  “That’s what’s wrong with the fridge. And it looks even older than that.”

  “I got it secondhand. But it’s still got some life in it.”

  “That’s precisely what’s worrying me, Louis. There’s life in your fridge I’ve never seen before. Gray, moldy, whiskery life that there probably isn’t an antidote for. And what about the half a grapefruit in there?”

  “I’m going to eat it.”

  “Louis, it’s gone brown. Brown and green.”

  “Be all right for a few more days.”

  “And while we’re buying you a new fridge, we may as well get a new washing machine.”

  “Nothing wrong with the washing machine.”

  “It doesn’t work, Louis.”

  “So what? Apart from that, it’s fine.”

  “Louis, you’ve got it plumbed into the rainwater collection tank, and when you start the pump up, it floods the basement.”

  “A little water never did anyone any harm.”

  “And then you have to stand there next to it wearing wellingtons, otherwise your feet will get wet, holding your wristwatch in your hand and timing the cycle so you can change it manually because the auto part of your so-called automatic washing machine doesn’t work.”

  “Ah, but the matic part still works, doesn’t it?”

  “Louis, I don’t even know what the matic part is.”

  “Yeah, well, you were never much of a scientist, were you? You’d never even have got your geography O level if I hadn’t given you private tuition.”

  “Louis, geography isn’t science.”

  “No, it’s not brain surgery either.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I’ve had brain surgery so I know what I’m talking about. And if you want to know about rocket science, I can explain that to you too.”

  “You just can’t remember your PIN number.”

  “No, I can’t! Bastard thing.”

  “You just have to remember it as a time, Louis. Seven fifteen in the morning. What’s that in numbers?”

  “Zero seven one five.”

  “You’ve got it.”

  “What time did you say again?”

  “Seven fifteen in the morning.”

  “That’s easy to remember.”

  “Good, so you’ve got it now, and the machine won’t keep your card again like it did.”

  “Seven fifteen. I can remember that.”

  “Good.”

  “Ask me what my PIN number is.”

  “What’s your PIN number, Louis?”

  “Easy. It’s nineteen fifteen. One nine one five.”

  “No, Louis, no. It’s seven fifteen in the morning.”

  “What is?”

  “Your PIN number.”

  “The bollocks it is!”

  “No, it is, Louis, it is.”

  “A.m.?”

  “Yes, a.m., not p.m.”

  “Okay. I’ve got it now. Let’s try again.”

  “Let’s let a moment go past first.”

  “Okay.”

  “You remember what we’re having for dinner?”

  “Yeah. Yogurt and chips. That right?”

  “Pretty close. Okay. Let’s try the PIN number again.”

  “You know that strictly speaking it should just be PIN without saying number after. Because PIN stands for personal identification number. So if you add another number after that, what you’re really saying is personal identification number number.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Now, that’s the kind of stuff I can remember.”

  “Useful.”

  “It’s all the—bits and pieces—I forget.”

  “Okay. Shall we try the PIN number again?”

  “Just PIN. No number. Just PIN.”

 
“Okay. Shall we try your PIN again?”

  “Okay. Shall I go first?”

  “Yes, of course, Louis. There’s no point in my telling you what it is. That’s not going to help.”

  “Okay, I’ll go first with the—the bits and pieces—”

  “PIN number.”

  “PIN. Just PIN.”

  “Okay, Louis. What’s your PIN? Can you remember the mnemonic?”

  “The what?”

  “The aide-mémoire?”

  “What aide-mémoire?”

  “The little tip for remembering. The time.”

  “Oh, yeah. Right. Seven fifteen. In the morning.”

  “Good, good. That’s great. That’s progress, Louis. That’s great. So what’s your PIN?”

  “It’s—it’s seven one five.”

  “It’s four digits, Louis, four.”

  “It’s—seven one five—ah, damn it!”

  “Slowly, Louis, take it slowly, don’t get angry. It’ll come to you. There’s no pressure. Just relax.”

  “Zero seven one—five.”

  “Got it. Perfect. See? Said you’d get it. Good. All right.”

  “We’re screwed, you know. We’re screwed.”

  “Louis, we’re not screwed. You’ve had the surgery, they’ve taken out as much of the tumor as they can. Now they’re going to nuke the rest and kill it with the chemo. In six months’ time you can fly over and see us. We’ll take a trip, go to Scotland, wherever you want to go.”

  “You remember the last time I came over and we went to the book festival and saw that woman talking about that guy, what’s-his-name?”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “We had some good times, didn’t we?”

  “Yes, we did, Louis. We did.”

  “She talked about her life in New York and the bits and pieces. She was from that rich family.”

  “Rothschild.”

  “And he was that jazz player.”

  “Was it Monk?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m going to start cooking in a minute, Louis. Why don’t you go and watch Deal or No Deal? You like that.”