by Paul Sussman
‘Hello, Raphael,’ she said, sitting down and taking my (bandaged) hand in hers. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Hrmph,’ I mumbled through my dressings. ‘Hrmph.’
‘Try not to talk, Raphael. The doctor says it’s not good for you. You just lie there and I’ll do all the chatting.’
‘Hrmph,’ I acknowledged, staring adoringly at her through my right eye, that being the one part of my anatomy my carers had seen fit not to bandage. ‘Hrmph, hrmph, hrmph!’
My darling looked as young and fresh and vibrant as ever, her hair blonde and brilliant, her eyes a dazzling emerald. Which was strange because, like me, she was by then well into her eighties. Not the least curious of the many curious things about Emily is that for some reason she never seems to age. She has barely changed from the days I knew her when we were young. In her eighties she looked exactly the same as she did in her twenties, when in turn she looked exactly the same as she had done as a child. Old age – indeed any sort of age at all – appears to have completely bypassed her.
I can offer no proper explanation for this. More than once, indeed, the thought has crossed my mind that perhaps she has aged and I’m simply refusing to acknowledge the fact. That her youth is, so to speak, purely in the eye of the beholder. I don’t think that’s the case, however, and the way in which one of the young doctors kept staring at her when he came in to take my blood pressure – something he did eight times during her visit – seemed to confirm that I’m not the only person to recognize her exceptional, and exceptionally long-lived, pulchritude.
Whatever the truth, I lay there now gazing up at her beguiling pale-skinned face, its lips, as always, curved into a gentle smile, wishing to God my bandages were a little looser so I could sit up and embrace her.
‘Hrumph, hrumph!’ I mumbled, endeavouring to express how very pleased I was to see her, and how much I’d missed her these last nine years.
‘Now, Raphael, you know you mustn’t talk. Doctor’s orders. Isn’t that so?’ This to the young doctor who’d just come in again with the blood-pressure apparatus.
‘Quite right,’ he stammered, pumping up my arm till it hurt. ‘Quite right.’
She remained with me for about two hours, eating half the grapes and chattering away childishly about nothing of any great consequence. Not that I minded. It was good just to be with her after all these years. My relationship with Emily has always operated at a deeper level than language can express. Words for us are simply yachts sailing back and forth across an ocean of unimaginable profundity.
Mind you, she did come up with one interesting piece of information. Namely, that far from being suspected of murdering Mrs Bunshop, I was apparently being hailed as a hero for trying to save her. The police, it seems, had carried out an exhaustive investigation into the affair, and, as the police can always be relied upon to do in such circumstances, had drawn entirely the wrong conclusion. The coroner’s final report stated that she had, for reasons best known to herself, climbed out of the window of her own accord and, whilst perching on the floodlight, caught fire. Death by misadventure. I hrumphed a long sigh of relief. Emily squeezed my hand.
Eventually, and all too soon, she stood to go. That’s how it’s always been with her. She appears suddenly from nowhere, like a daydream and, equally suddenly, disappears back into it again. You can never hold her for long.
‘There is one thing,’ she said, leaning over and stroking my bandaged forehead (bloody bandages!). ‘I don’t know if it’s of any interest, but there’s an old castle by the sea. It’s been in the family for years. It’s very remote, apparently. I’ve never been there myself, but if you want to go up and recuperate, you’re more than welcome. Stay as long as you want. I’ve left all the details with the warden at Nannybrook. Goodbye, dear Raphael. My hero!’
Whereupon she kissed me on my mummified cheek and, with a farewell wave, disappeared from the room.
‘Hrmph, hrmph, hrmph!’ I gargled after her.
We didn’t see each other for another 15 years.
There’s not much left to say.
I remained in hospital for six months. Everyone expected me to be horribly disfigured by the fire, but when my bandages were removed I was, to general consternation, completely unscarred.
‘Extraordinary,’ muttered my doctors. ‘Contrary to all natural laws. Extraordinary.’
I returned to Nannybrook, where my room had been kept for me, but things weren’t the same. I felt restless. I wanted to move on. Even Archie Bogosian’s stories had lost their sparkle.
I had been back for about a week when I remembered Emily’s castle. I asked the warden about it, and he duly handed over a large manila envelope containing keys and details. It sounded just the ticket. I set off two days later.
And that was the beginning of the life I am about to end. I found the castle. I liked it. I moved in, with The Photo, a suitcase full of clothes, some odds and ends of furniture and, of course, The Pill. One and a half grains of strychnine, one and a half grains of arsenic, half a grain of salt of hydrocyanic acid . . . but then you know all that by now.
I thought I might get a moving-in card from Emily, but none came. Instead, after I had been at the castle a month, I received a letter from my old friend the Nannybrook warden.
Dear Mr Phoenix,
In view of your extraordinary and selfless bravery in attempting to save the life of the late, lamented Ethel Bunshop, née Boocock, it has been decided, by a unanimous vote of staff and residents, to rename the day room The Raphael Phoenix Room.
We shall be holding a short opening ceremony, and would be most honoured if you would attend. The mayor will be there, as will Mrs Bunshop’s son, and, of course, all the residents.
I do hope you are well and look forward to hearing from you,
Yours sincerely,
Norman Stoppard, Warden
I declined the invitation. Acceptance would, in the circumstances, have been in extraordinarily bad taste. The Raphael Phoenix Room indeed. Outrageous. Quite outrageous!
CHAPTER THREE
AND SO I’M writing my note in Emily’s castle. The castle at the end of the world, as I’ve christened it. And for good reason, for it sits on the very edge of a towering cliff, the land at its feet dropping 100 metres straight down into the churning sea. Far below, the waves crash furiously about incisors of jagged rock.
‘Castle’ is perhaps pushing it a bit. It certainly looks castle-shaped, and even boasts a few barred windows and a set of crenellated battlements. It is, however, not a real castle. No one has ever attacked it, nor, indeed, was anyone intended to. It was built in the middle of the last century as an astronomical observatory. The sky in this part of the world is, apparently, particularly rich in stars.
On top of my castle is a large metallic dome, protruding like a squashed head on an outsize body. This vast, weather-dulled semi-sphere once opened like a cleft fruit to reveal an enormous telescope, through which sundry experts would peer hopefully up at the night sky. The telescope and experts are long gone, but the dome remains. It’s up there now, warming under the light of a climbing sun.
I have resided here, a hermit, for the past 15 years, ever since I left Nannybrook. I have no phone, no radio, no television, no friends. I rarely venture more than a few yards from my own front door, and on the rare occasions when I do invariably have a panic attack and have to hurry back. I hear that great celebrations are planned for the turn of the millennium, but such things don’t really interest me. I am wholly detached, perched on my promontory like a bird on the very edge of the sky.
My sole connection with reality, tethering me to the outside world like a knotted umbilical, is a narrow rutted drive that zigzags its way from my front door down to the local village, three miles southwards along the coast. Up this flinty track, once a week, in his mud-spattered Land Rover, comes Dr Bannen, with boxes of supplies, the odd bill and my pension money. It’s not the sort of service doctors normally offer, but he seems happy eno
ugh to do it, and I don’t complain. I have no other means of providing for myself. Churlish in my dotage, I have never once invited him in for a cup of tea. Not that he’d accept, of course. Dr Bannen thinks I’m mad.
I have worn badly these last 15 years. My limbs, supple and active right up till my mid-eighties, have slowed and stiffened, and my skin has succumbed to a barrage of wrinkles, leaving me looking like an over-ripe apple. My sapphire-blue eyes no longer see as well as they used to; and I have become distinctly stooped. I feel listless and slack, like a ship with a broken rudder. I walk very slowly, and cough a lot.
In my castle I have a bedroom on the first floor, to the right of the stairs, a bathroom, and, downstairs, directly beneath my bedroom, a perfectly adequate, if mouldy, kitchen. This is all I need or want. The rest of the building is empty, it’s wood-floored rooms carpeted toe-deep in dust. For some reason, aside from a front one, the castle has no doors. Doorframes, yes, but nothing to fill them. Their absence makes the place appear even emptier than it actually is. For what it’s worth, I append a floor plan of the building.
I don’t really do very much any more. Not because I am old and infirm – which at 99 years and counting I am – but because I can’t really think of anything I would especially wish to do. My existence is a void, bereft of ideas.
Each morning at five I struggle from my bed and shuffle downstairs to make myself a cup of tea. I nibble a bit of dry toast, light my first cigarette of the day, peer out of the window empty-headed and then make my slow way back upwards to the dome, stopping en route for a shit and a shave. I sleep in white cotton pyjamas and spend all day in them too. No wonder Dr Bannen gets nervous around me.
To reach the dome I climb a brief staircase, starting from a doorway in my bedroom, just to the left of my bed, and issuing after 13 steps (unlucky for some!) on to the flat concrete terrace of the castle roof, the latter hemmed in on all sides by chest-high battlements. To the west, in which direction my front door opens, purple hills roll away up to the horizon, climbing steadily to a rumour of mountains far beyond the edge of sight. To north and south a battered line of coast unfolds, its crumpled course disturbed by a series of promontories which cling to the land like so many severed limbs. Eastwards there is nothing but sea, dotted here and there with the occasional smear of a distant island. When the sea mist comes up about its feet the castle looks like it’s floating in the air.
Crossing the roof north to south and east to west and bisecting each other at its centre are two sets of rails upon which sits, and presumably once moved, a circular iron turntable on wheels. On top of this is the dome, slumped like a large metallic jelly on a plate. The original idea, it seems, was that the turntable could be shunted back and forth and from side to side across the roof, and swivelled 360 degrees, hence giving astronomers the freedom to pursue their chosen stars across the heavens. Now, unfortunately, the wheels are rusted and the turntable unturnable, rather like my own atrophied joints, so that the dome rests like a stricken bug at the very centre of the crossed rails, gazing eternally eastwards to the sea and the rising sun.
It can, at least, still be opened. By turning a handle at its base its curved metal plates slide grudgingly aside to reveal a silent interior, from which, once upon a time, a giant telescope probed outwards into the cosmos. Now all that’s there is my wickerwork chair, a small table, fag-ends, and a rather clever little mechanism I rigged up to allow me to open and close the structure from within. The latter would have made my father proud. Like all inventors, he adored gadgets.
The dome is where I have spent most of my time for the last 15 years. I ensconce myself there at dawn, propped in my wickerwork chair, a cigarette in my hand, legs crossed upon the arm of the winching mechanism, and then just sit, staring out across the ocean with not a thought in my head until suddenly, as though the day has been fast-forwarded by an unseen finger, I notice the first dusk stars twinkling far above me. Sometimes I gaze at The Photo, crumpled now almost beyond recognition, its subject dim and faded, and sometimes I caress The Pill. Usually, however, I just sit, still and silent, like a dried seed in a shrivelled pod. My blooming days, it seems, are well and truly over. Decay, decay. All is decay.
Or rather all was decay, before yesterday morning. Because yesterday morning I decided to kill myself, and suddenly my life was full of purpose.
It wasn’t a hard decision to make. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t even a decision at all. I neither argued nor debated nor agonized over the matter. I simply knew, instinctively, that the time was right. Death wasn’t a choice. It was an inevitability. I felt very calm about the whole thing.
I rose painfully from my bed, dwelt for a moment upon the previous night’s encounter with Emily, and then, with a shake of the head, descended to the kitchen. The weather was cold and frosty, and I shivered as I trudged down the stairs. Through the corner of the kitchen window I could see an icy yellow sun bubbling upwards into a cloudless December sky. I made myself a cup of tea and began ruminating on the practicalities of my decease.
That I’d kill myself with The Pill was obvious. What, after all, was the point of carrying it around with me for 90 years if, when I finally decided to top myself, I didn’t use it? Slitting my wrists, hanging myself or leaping from the castle battlements were all out of the question. It was The Pill or nothing.
Other issues, however, remained to be decided. Where, for instance, would I do the deed? What location should I chose? Such considerations are important. It’s like going on a train journey. If, say, you wish to travel to Manchester, you have to leave from the right station. Likewise, death. No point starting from the wrong place, or chances are you’ll end up in the wrong place. And with suicide there’s no return service.
I considered doing it in bed, but I am not a fundamentally slothful person and a corpse curled up under a duvet might have left quite the wrong impression. I thought about returning to London and imploding on the site of White Lodge, or outside Emily’s old house on Baker Street, but neither option particularly appealed. At my age I didn’t fancy a long journey, and anyway, the idea of bending double and expiring on a filthy London street seemed somehow so tawdry after a life as long and murderous as mine.
No, there was only really one place to do it, and that was in the dome. Sitting on my wickerwork chair, drinking wine and looking out into the void. I would settle back into the cupped palm of Fate and allow myself to be flung outwards into eternity. Perfect.
Where, but also when? Again, look on it in terms of a train journey. If you’re travelling somewhere you need to know the time of the train you’re on. Likewise, suicide. Knowledge of when you’re leaving is imperative to the success of the expedition.
I wondered whether I should do it immediately. Finish my tea, trundle upstairs to the dome and start munching one and a half grains of strychnine, one and a half grains of arsenic, half a grain of salt of hydrocyanic acid and half a grain of crushed ipecacuanha root without further ado. No time like the present. Strike while the iron’s hot, etc., etc.
But then I thought: No. Bollocks. I’m ten days from my hundredth birthday. What an extraordinary act of self-destruction to self-destruct ten days short of my full century. Ridiculous. Leave it till your birthday, I thought. One hundred years, and then an end. Much neater.
So it was decided. With The Pill, in the dome, on my hundredth birthday. Perfect. Absolutely perfect.
Which then left the question: what should I do for the last ten days of my life? It somehow didn’t seem right, what with death so near, to just sit around twiddling my thumbs and staring into space. I needed something to occupy myself. A task. A mission.
And that’s how I got the idea for my current endeavour. Why not, I thought, sparking up my first cigarette of the day, write a suicide note? Not a conventional suicide note, mind. Not one of those awful ‘Goodbye, dear friends, I’m doing this because . . . and don’t forget to feed the cat’ sort of notes. No, this would be a quite different suicide note. Not even a
proper suicide note at all. More a sort of suicide biography (Suicideography – could this be a new literary form I’m bequeathing?). A history. A self-portrait. A detailed chronicle of the life and crimes of Raphael Ignatius Phoenix, dead by a pill on the morning of his hundredth birthday. I would end my life by describing my life. Conjure myself from the past. Revisit and remake. It would be the greatest suicide note ever written.
‘I shall carve myself a memorial in words!’ I cried excitedly. ‘It shall be my masterpiece.’
I got to work immediately.
Initially I thought I would write my note on paper, and duly set off on a hunt for the box of unused notebooks I had once noticed in a corner of one of the castle’s rooms. As I searched, however, moving from room to room, up and down, tracking the notebooks, I was struck by the pristine whiteness of the castle’s walls. The immaculate, virgin whiteness. I had never noticed how clean they were. Acres and acres of snowy white, smudged occasionally with a bloom of dampness or the shadow-marks where a picture had once hung, but on the whole as clean, crisp and dry as the untouched pages of an artist’s pad. I ran my hand across them as I walked, delighting in their unalloyed smoothness. I stopped and gazed up at them, and along them, and across them and over them. Yards of white. Miles of it. Rooms and halls and staircases and landings. I was surrounded by white. Swamped by it. And I thought: ‘Well, why not?’
And so I am writing my note on the walls of my home. I started in the foyer, directly to the left of the front door and to the right of the main stairway, filling the creamy whiteness with neat, three-foot-wide columns, ceiling to floor, ceiling to floor, ceiling to floor, one after another, like a row of identical skyscrapers. Before long I’d moved over to the right of the front door and then round the corner and into the first of my downstairs living rooms, the window of which commands an imposing view northwards up the coast. On and on and on I scribbled – my pen squeaking across the whitewashed plaster, my feet kicking up clouds of dust – until I’d filled that room, swung back into the foyer and thence into the next room along, a complete circuit of which I have now all but completed.