Everything You Need

by A. L. Kennedy

  But what?—Lou Reed? The Beatles? “Ae Fond Kiss”? What? A fine time this is, to find out I’m hard to please.

  Then again, this is the last thing I’d want to get wrong.

  Or just the last thing. The last thing.

  He decided he’d best pick his soundtrack when everything else had been done. Meanwhile, he’d check his other preparations in the hope they might suggest a sympathetic melody.

  His chosen equipment was simple, elegant. In proper combination, every item was absolutely capable of doing what he planned it should. This was something—in a way—to be proud of. This part was all so resolute and clean.

  I planned this. I actually sat down and planned out the best way of doing this. I probably deserve to die.

  No. None of that.

  Nathan tried not to have an opinion on whether he actually liked or approved of his plan because this might, however slightly, influence its results and everything here must be left entirely and scrupulously to chance. His primary task was to offer himself up whole into the arms of all relevant natural laws and then let them mesh around him as they would.

  I am going to do it. I just don’t want to think about it first.

  Shivers started in him, rose like beaten birds. He could feel the process kicking in, his commitment lifting and holding him like a kiss. He felt naked, clear and sweet.

  And then nothing but terrified, because now terror was completely appropriate. Soon the entire right order of the universe was going to show itself here, in this one event, plainly written out. There would be no good and no bad about it, only the unavoidable and correct.

  That’s a kind of consolation. But if I need it, I won’t be the one it will console. Poor bloody Nathan. Poor bloody me.

  He held his hand to his face and caught his own breathing, the dunting of blood in his skull and in his jaw. For a person of his age and experience, he wasn’t badly put together—all in working order, more or less.

  He gradually widened the spaces between his fingers, so he could see what was coming next.

  My equipment. My paraphernalia. My accoutrements.

  Panic floundered in him and he rode it down.

  All right, then, let’s go.

  Sash cord. It wasn’t entirely easy to get sash cord, but he was worth this little effort to get the right instrument for the job: one continuous length of cord, curling, relaxed on the table and measuring six feet precisely. Not that Nathan needed it precise, it was simply sold that way. All he cared about was that six feet—even roughly six feet—would give him enough slack to work with, would be adequate, would not cause confusion and dangerous loops. He didn’t want any unplanned dangerous loops.

  Ready.

  Low chair.

  Looks like the product of a therapeutic exercise: one of those meaningless hospital tasks. Can’t ever see it without imagining some hopeless amputee, hacking it into shape with new prosthetics; everything doubly missing at each stroke.

  Which is nonsense. So now I’m thinking nonsense—stress-related, I’ve no doubt. And, then again, nonsense does no harm and I do so very much want to do no harm.

  Currently, of course, he loved the hideous chair, because it finally had purpose, his purpose. Perhaps, in the end, it might even earn a degree of notoriety.

  Ready.

  Metal hook. One of eight, solidly fixed through the whitewashed plaster ceiling and deep into a central beam. This cottage had been a barracks block, back in the 1860s. The first line of defence against the Irish. Or was it the French? It didn’t matter, either way. A good deal had changed since, but the soldier boys had still involuntarily bequeathed him their quite viable water tank and their eight inexplicably purposeful iron hooks.

  Could have been used for hammocks, onion strings, bestial indecency of the homo-erotic sort.

  Each to his own. For Nathan’s private purposes, one hook was quite enough.

  Ready.

  Rope.

  Shit. Rope. That’s the one. Oh, that’s the one.

  He felt a stickiness, a swither coating his ribs: the cling and tease of utter cowardice.

  The way it looks, so patient.

  But it’s here to be helpful. No need to fret.

  Rope. A soft, dark drop of jute, falling for exactly six feet five and three-quarter inches. This length he had measured and cut himself, exactly as it had to be—figure-of-eight loop to secure it on the hook and then a running bowline, tied and waiting at its foot. All fine.

  Ready.

  Time to go, then.

  Ssh. I know.

  He took off his shoes and socks and drummed softly across the boards to his CD player—his one little luxury. He knew the disc he wanted now, unmistakably.

  Glenn Gould—gobbled down his own premature extinction in heart and assorted other types of pill—he’s your man. But not because of that: because he will be company.

  And so he was. Gould was there for him, as usual: perfect and quixotic as death. Nathan stood, blood climbing and arcing through him like red light, and let Bach clamber in between his nerves. The cool of the sound was such a comfort, such a kind of protection, that it brought on a certain childishness, tearfulness. The Well-tempered Clavier—all clarity and distance and order—closed on every mortal piece of him. It squeezed at his sum, at his still breathing total, at his only way of being Nathan Staples, and it started to swing him away from any sense of adequacy or permanence.

  As Nathan began what he had to do, Gould matched him, paced him, the ideal accompaniment. Nathan allowed himself a smile at the familiar, faintly recorded murmurings, the ticks of motion while Gould played, the odd hints of exhalation from a dead man who’d added himself to his interpretation, a marked irregularity under its pulse.

  All right.

  Nathan took the sash cord, tied the live end into a loop and lassoed it— just for now—around his wrist. A minor surge of horror sledged over him and was gone.

  The right wrist, because I’m right-handed—so that must be the one that’s done most wrong. Although, now that I think, my sins have mostly been ambidextrous.

  Oh, Jesus Christ.

  Nathan had that cliff-top feeling—the exhilaration of space and beauty and the lovely urge to jump. He found he couldn’t swallow any more.

  And then he set to in earnest because these things become unwieldy when they take too long.

  He caught the rope, opened the bowline and snuggled the noose in over his ears and down.

  It’s like a tight rollneck, a collar, it’s nothing at all.

  Nathan checked on the final placement of the chair, then sat. Sweat had already soaked through his overalls. There was still a flinch or two of slack in the rope.

  Fuck.

  His systems were protesting, every damper and safeguard off. His balls tightened: his prick growing not so much hard as live and almost frantically aware. When he braced his legs apart and set his heels sharp under the chair, he felt on the lip of violation. Opened for anything.

  When this is done, I’m in their hands. In anyone’s hands. I’m meat.

  His own hands were soapy with fear; with that big, blank, hot-mouthing, hair-lifting, sexy, sexy fear that he only ever met at times like this. It was already tugging at him, working him up to one single, hard slither—terror as his bit of rough.

  Gingerly, delicately, Nathan leaned forward and fumbled at his legs, pushed the sash-cord loop around one naked ankle and then hobbled his feet, as if he might actually try to escape his own intentions. The work wasn’t especially hard, but left him panting.

  Then, shoulders back and clicking at the strain, he began to fix his arms behind his spine. His body was defeated now, stretched and aching, defenceless while Gould’s piano licked round the walls, tipping rhythm out of rhythm, pressing compact breaks of emptiness between sounds.

  He finished the last knot at his wrist. Stage one over. Done his best.

  He was still then, the noose a light reminder at his neck. He stared at the meaningless white o
f the wall, the dumb corner of the window, his insane reflection across the rushing night.

  My stupid self in my stupid overalls—last things I’ll see.

  He suddenly wished he was better dressed.

  Then he shut up his eyes and let himself fall in the fist of his private chemistries, his intimate construction. Endorphins and adrenaline raced his brain to a smear and all of him rang at every twitch of his little heart, the obedient yawning and clamping of valves, the biddable sway of his ribs. Jesus, he loved the way he was.

  I love you.

  Thank you.

  Now just shut up and go.

  Much faster and much slower than he’d expected, he’s hauled up and to the right as he topples the chair. Deafening crest of fear, breaking over his shoulders. He would like to gasp, but is bottled somehow.

  Lassitude in his hands, very sweet, but he makes them worry, scrabble, twist. Various ripping pains—most especially at one knee. Something on the edge of sound, a kick of sound. Lunging constriction in the cheek-bones, over the eyes. Life struggling in the throat.

  The fear of never thinking again.

  A red blackness—seductive—something drawing him up from the headache and the sweat. Reality shrugs and then licks him whole, salting something dark and raw, in close beneath his skin. He begins to feel softly tempted to waste his time.

  He drives to stand, to kick aside the chair. Does it, staggers, flails out for the rope and clings to it an inch above the noose.

  He can’t fall again. If he does, he’s done with.

  Fingers pleading under the jute, gouging skin.

  He is being washed. Everything but the closing of death and his own tiny nature has gone.

  Eye to eye with nothing, he finds that he is dumbfounded by all that he is. The usually sealed essentials of his nature break out and start screaming, surprising him with how much he has a liking for all of that breathing and feeling and moving and fucking remembering he used to do. He wants it, would give the world for it, but wants the world, as well. Boiled down to basics he has a hunger for more of himself, for more of everything.

  Noose off. Now it will be fine for him to fall.

  Yes.

  Yes.

  Yes.

  Yes.

  Yes.

  He whooped in air, bucking on the floor, every effort tearing at him while he tried not to retch.

  Take it easy. Easy. Haven’t broken the neck, crushed the hyoid bone, collapsed the windpipe. I am able to think that I am thinking this and can therefore assume that I haven’t a damaged brain. I will suffer petechial redness in my eyes, a purely cosmetic problem, a trouble to victims of strangulation who survive.

  Who survive.

  Delight coshed up his torso and nearly choked him, while dopamine yammered insanely out through the sap of his mind—the body’s Great Again.

  Easy.

  Christ, it hurts. I am able to hurt. Jesus Christ, I fucking hurt. That’s fucking lovely. Yes.

  His pulse tumped fantastically in his ears and swirled nauseous pain in tighter and tighter round his skull. Then he was sick—a few mouthfuls of thin, bitter liquid that scorched his tender throat so badly he could only whimper and curl for a while on his side, feet still bound.

  I’m still here, then. I’m still here.

  The shivering had started, and the shock. His hair was sodden with perspiration, his overalls clammy, his skin like a dead man’s—pale and chill—although he was very thoroughly and certainly and demonstrably not dead. Reconfirmed existence ricocheted in every bone. His sternum creaked, trying to contain it, while Nathan quietly imagined himself, incandescent with life.

  Yes.

  The best of all possible highs, the fix of fixes, joy at the cellular level and then up.

  Yes.

  And then the aftershock. He knew the form. Having been so close to extinction, it was natural for his anxiety to re-ignite and set his muscles pulsing uselessly, his breath rabbit-punching in his chest. He had escaped and was still escaping and would feel the rush of flight burning in him for the next whole day, maybe more. And he would be a hair’s breadth different, permanently, because he had let himself be recast, restarted. He knew he should consider himself lucky.

  Nathan coughed without thinking, a spasm of lacerating panic following. It was important to rest at the moment, but he must make an effort soon to get up and take care of himself. The thought of his own care for his own self pushed him into a tighter curl: a slippery, well-meant hug for the engineer of his salvation. This was always a pleasant stage in recovery.

  At the moment, Nathan Staples loved and trusted Nathan Staples unquestioningly. His self-esteem didn’t ever get too much better than this. He knew that, in the kitchen, he had left out a hopeful little range of treats and kindnesses. This moved him. He hadn’t only planned his death, he’d been prepared for his survival and had anticipated some of its most immediate needs. He was cheered by the thought of the sweet herbal tea, set ready and warm in a Thermos; the witch hazel for his bruises; his only comfortable blanket, newly washed; disinfectant for abrasions; soluble painkillers for pains. He’d make someone a wonderful husband—if all it took was slightly obsessive domestic diligence.

  The probable tasks left behind in the wake of his demise had not concerned him. They would have been none of his business.

  Back again.

  A tremor rattled his teeth and he squirmed down to work at the cord round his feet. He needed that blanket now. And the tea.

  His head was clear enough to let the Bach fold in again. It had been playing all this while: prelude and fugue, prelude and fugue: but well beyond Nathan’s reach. He let it nudge at him for a moment, was careful to be appropriately glad that he’d come back to hearing with something so beautiful.

  Nathan understood that his worries would slowly follow the music in and eventually reclaim him. In hours, or days, or moments, the petty considerations that framed his life, his griefs and preoccupations and very personal cycles of hate would rain down predictably and stick. His physical exaltation would fade, the little difference in his make-up that his almost-death had lent him would become unremarkable to him, something else to disappoint. Only the music would stay good, that he could guarantee.

  I’m still here. Fuck.

  On the blind wall at the corner of Charter Road, someone had whitewashed a few blurry lines.

  A thug, vandal needs the rod of correction

  Proverbs 23:13–14

  A righteous child is a blessing

  to its parents and society

  Mary supposed the writer must have either forgotten the source for the final quotation, or just made it up—something about it didn’t sound convincingly biblical. She also wondered if the painters of texts on walls weren’t technically vandals themselves and if she really wanted her street semi-permanently scarred with the fruits of religious mania. Not that she’d be here much longer, but the Uncles would be staying and they wouldn’t like it at all.

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  Bryn was filling their hot-water bottles carefully two-thirds full with slightly less than boiling water. The kitchen welcomed Mary with the oddly spicy tang of rubberised steam.

  “I think a spiritual verse or two could add a bit of class to the place. Religious knowledge. I might approve. What about you, Mo?”

  “I think it’s that bloody maniac Danno again. You can’t ever be sure what he’ll do.” Uncle Morgan was waiting with a flannelette pillowcase.

  “Like you, then.”

  The Uncles smiled privately to each other and brushed hands as Morgan reached to swaddle up the bottle and temper its heat.

  Mary loved this—the Uncles’ preparations for their winter beds—it had always made part of the household’s cold-weather routine. The very first night she came here, Bryn had trotted through with a bottle for her while she searched in her case for something she felt she’d forgotten, for some persuasive memory of what had been her home.

  Her j
ourney to Capel Gofeg had taken hours, been filled with confusions of stance and platform numbers and incoming and outgoing times and the threat of her mother’s temper, leaking out in yanks at Mary’s arm, in sentences hissing with secret pressures, too close to release. It had been fully night before they arrived.

  And then, on first acquaintance, Mary hadn’t taken to the town. Gofeg’s streets had been too steep for her and too narrow and had seemed to be impatiently curled beneath the blustery evening, ready to whip at her and snap her flat. She’d stared at herself: a small, wavery figure, being tugged across the peculiar, yellow-screened window of the hosiery shop.

  Hosiery. She’d never seen the word before and took it for something Welsh, a foreign secret spelled out above the door with vaguely obsessive perfection in the shapes of warped and elongated socks. The shop itself had also seemed odd, slightly cunning, almost frightening. It had an unmistakable air of the unnatural, perhaps because its glass reflected her own and her mother’s shapes in a way that made them squat and lurching, patently ill at ease. Hosiery: she couldn’t take to it.

  Once they were finally warm indoors, Mary’s mother had paused in the Uncles’ paper- and aftershave-scented house just long enough for sandwiches and coffee. Mary knew that she and her mother never took coffee at night as a rule, but also knew she shouldn’t say. She could hear her mother’s voice being secretly angry, parts of words coiling and shrinking and other parts running away, but the Uncles hadn’t noticed, or hadn’t minded, and were asking her yards of questions and filling and refilling cups, as if there was nothing remotely wrong at all.

  “You can’t wait until the morning and go then?” This was from Uncle Morgan, the Uncle with the red hair and large ears. He’d been looking at Mary, even though he’d been speaking to her mother and then slowly slipping his eyes to the biscuit plate. He’d known that Mary kept looking there, too, and his eyes had been happy about it and very blue. Mary was used to brown eyes, like her mother’s and her own. The Uncles’ eyes were thoroughly blue.

  “Is there anything you need for the journey?”

  Mary and Morgan had stared at the biscuits and then at each other, then Morgan had slowly, solemnly picked up the plate and offered them across. Beyond them, the questions pressed on.