A Preparation for Death

by Greg Baxter

  By the time the beer was finished, the cloudy light had cast a dullness over everything. The cool months had become exasperating – not winter, not spring, not anything. We went to a pub across the road and sat on stools because all the tables were taken. Clare wore a green-and-white dress that was tight around her waist. We had known each other for many months, but I’d only just discovered her attraction to me – she did not seem like the kind of woman who’d be interested. I remember nothing of the conversation except my surprise that it was taking place. Later we kissed inside a lifeless, unadorned pizza-slice kiosk with a Polish man in a white hat behind the counter, talking on his mobile phone.

  3

  It takes forever to get anywhere now. The city is overrun – tourist season has begun. The streets you hardly notice are suddenly worth a million photographs.

  The enthusiasm of the tourists depresses me, because it makes me think of the tedium of wherever they are from. I think of a single civilization linked by grey intersections and manicured parks, and the world becomes inescapable – its inescapability is a fact.

  There are too many days in the week. Too many weeks in the year. Too much space to fill. I would like to have lived for an afternoon only, born at the age of twenty, dead eight hours later, experienced life, all by myself, in a corner apartment with a high view of a busy junction, an ambulance route, a metro entrance, the back of a restaurant, warring neighbours in the corridors, a broken television, an empty bookshelf, and learned only sensitivity, because I would have missed nothing, gained the same experience of life, and would not have grown so addicted to existence that the thought of not existing gives me indigestion and bad dreams.

  He who has learned to die has unlearned how to be a slave. [Montaigne]

  But I am like anyone else – fear and apprehension rule many of my hours. And addiction to the dispensable. Because it is more agreeable to be in bondage to the superficial, and have a thing or two in common with the man sitting beside you on the bus – whose acts are repetitions, whose memories are souvenirs, whose entertainment is palatable – than to become incomprehensible.

  Never did a man prepare to leave the world more utterly and completely, nor detach himself from it more universally, than I propose to do. [Montaigne]

  I want to peel my skin off with my fingernails, nail it down, batter it with a mallet until it is the consistency of stomach, and wrap it around every shaft and every curve and every angle of every letter in this sentence. I want this sentence to forgive me. Instead, it becomes a reminder of my incapability as a man.

  4

  This morning, while sitting on a bench in the grounds of Dublin Castle, eating one of the sandwiches I made at home, I took in some sun while other reporters chased doctors around: between the keynote speaker and the first panel discussion, there was a twenty-minute coffee break. The fraternity of eminent Irish cancer specialists had gathered – Hollywood, Reynolds, Lawler, Keane, Armstrong – to deliver updates and arguments to a banquet hall full of empty chairs and half a dozen journalists. After the keynote speech, the organizer addressed us all – thank you for contributing to one of the largest conferences in our history, he said. During the Q&A afterwards, a woman in a white suit with large, freckled, sunburned cleavage and unnecessarily high heels dashed around with a microphone, though all the questions came from one very annoying woman and one very annoying man – and they were not even questions, just noise. When it finished, I found a free bench in the courtyard. The doctors watched me leave with disappointment – how could they pretend to want to avoid the press, if the press was going to decamp? But it was not contempt for them – I have no feelings personally toward them – but for my own unpreparedness for death. And the loathing for the whole race that quickens in me, listening to its obsession with survival.

  5

  I am the dream of what I see, now, from a folding metal chair on my terrace: gigantic white clouds, moving fast toward the sea. Above the sea, they are slate-coloured, the colour of glaciers. Rooftops to my right. To my left, a cluttered dining room and kitchen. A dead strawberry plant that belongs to Helen. A gathering of pathetic vegetation, including an overgrown rosemary bush, and three pots of dirt. It is a Saturday, and the estate is empty. I haven’t heard a person walking all morning, or a car drive by. By now – it is noon – the neighbourhood kids should be drinking and smoking in my driveway. It is better to let them. Helen found herself a handsome boyfriend and is never around anymore. The other day she told me she plans to move out in a month – I live too far away from the city. Katie, who moved in briefly, has left to live with a musician friend in Smithfield. If she were here, she’d be playing the fiddle downstairs, in the room she slept in, which has no bed. I’m listening to Niel Gow to make up for her absence. My vision of a summer with two pretty twentysomething girls with funny accents sunning on my terrace is gone. The washing machine, from time to time, spins and drowns everything out. Now it is beeping. It is time to hang up my boring blue shirts.

  6

  Yesterday at the office I checked email: Clare had been overjoyed by the sight of a tall woman and a dwarf smoking cigarettes outside a pub – the dwarf was standing on a short wall, so they were the same height. Katie’s life in the city, playing sessions every night, was wonderful, but she missed the acoustics in my house. John was flying to Prague for a stag – that man surrounds himself with trouble. Some students had questions about assignments. At ten to one I ate my sandwiches, and at one I left the office for my work local, and read two stories by new students. I had a short chat with the bartender, a fat and wise and irascible and lazy man who is always stoned. At two, I was back at my desk. My list of things to do seemed longer, but only because I now had half a day to accomplish them. Outside, the weather changed, and the bright clear day was suddenly full of hail and wind and darkness.

  The deputy editor, Mary Anne, who is two years younger than me, stared out the window contemplatively. It was almost time to go, and she – like all of us – would get caught in it. Sometimes she is pretty, and sometimes she is exceptionally pretty. She is pale with large blue eyes and her cheeks go bright red for no reason that I know of. She wears skirts and has beautiful legs, which move slowly and luxuriously under her desk when she is concentrating – and when I notice this happening I spend the next few minutes being the dream of her high patent-leather grey heels.

  7

  On the first warm day of the year, Clare and I took the Dart to Howth. The walk from my house to Howth Junction winds through two bleakly repetitive estates. I don’t mind the vulgarity of suburbs, only my imprisonment in one. I don’t hate peace and quiet, or children, just my proximity to them.

  Clare is a constant anthropologist. Her mind is always decoding her surroundings. Sometimes this leads her to outlandish conclusions, and experimental solutions to the problem of suburbs, such as destroying them all. I sense that she is great company for herself, and that other people tend to get in the way. She walks twice as fast as me, and admits that she does so because she is small, and doesn’t like to slow tall people down.

  I had hoped that we might have a bit of seaside to ourselves, but Howth was swarmed with day trippers, particularly foreigners: eastern Europeans, Italians, Americans, Germans. Outside the station, traffic was jammed in both directions. The bar underneath the station was overrun – people were sitting in windows and on rails; it was like a third-world train carriage. There was a posh market selling cheeses and jams and jewellery. I saw a French flag and heard some accordion music. It was as busy as a city street at rush hour, except no one was in a hurry. Everyone was in shorts and sunglasses. We headed toward the yacht club, an ugly yellow pentagonal building, to look at some of the sailboats docked in the marina. Sailboats are a kind of aphrodisiac to Clare. The fact that I crew for a boat in Dun Laoghaire – this is a remnant of my old life – makes the sight of them that much more alluring, since she feels that if only we could get our hands on a small dinghy, I could sail her around Ireland.
But it was low tide, and the marina was full of sludge and stank of sea-fish. And a soccer game that seemed to have neither goals nor boundaries had usurped all the nice places to sit.

  We walked a little further. For a little while we lay on a patch of grass so I could try to sleep. I was badly hungover. Beside us, people in shorts and flip-flops mobbed the pier. And though I could not sleep – I can hardly ever sleep – I closed my eyes and put my hands on Clare’s belly, which is soft and flat and white, and has a few moles on it.

  I tend to idle with anxiety – I always feel that I’m forgetting something. Clare idles with a nonchalance so stylish that it borders on the professional. It is as though she could sit still, admiring her own contentment, during an earthquake.

  We hiked up Howth Head to avoid drinking too early. I had seen it from the sea many times. It is dark green and gorse-patched, with sheer rock cliffs. When you are on a boat, the head seems merely large, but when you are looking from the head to the water, you feel as though you’re on a mountain, and that a gust might throw you to your death. That day the sea was calm and the waves bashed the rocks quietly. We walked beside each other when the path was wide enough, and single file when it narrowed. We passed a woman with a video camera. She was filming the sea while talking to a friend: the camera would experience the moment for her.

  We had a pint outside a small hotel in Howth village. A group of drunk English tourists were shouting and drinking cider in the last hour or two of high sunlight, sunlight still above the rooftops opposite. They were all very sunburned and this made them feel beautiful. The men wore unbuttoned shirts and the women wore white trousers. One woman, sitting down, suddenly fell into the bushes.

  We took a late train back home – it was filled with the same crowds that had come out with us, but now they were slumbering – and had some wine on the terrace. Summer had arrived. I was disconsolate: the world was unstoppable. We went to bed and she undressed. I kept my clothes on for a few minutes and examined every inch of her. I put my hands around her throat. She has large soft breasts, and they flatten when she is on her back. She has multiple orgasms and goes limp for a while after them.

  The next day, after breakfast and coffee, we sat on the terrace again – there is nowhere else one would sit in pleasant weather – and she sat on my lap and we kissed in the sunlight. The whole thing – the first warmth of the year, breakfast outside, the sound of airplanes – aroused her so much that she gave me head in plain sight of the third-storey windows across the street, all open. We spent the afternoon in bed. She came again and again, and slept, and I scratched her back and bottom while she slept. I felt, that day, that I was twenty-one again, and no part of the past decade had taken place.

  8

  I am going to miss Helen much more than she knows. She has become an ersatz wife. She is messy and poor, and has no interest in chit-chat. If I liked her music, I would throw myself at her feet and beg her to love me. Instead we operate in proximity but separately.

  It is delightful to watch her morning rituals. Since she works different hours every week, I catch different episodes of it. And sometimes on weekends, if I am up writing, I can observe it entirely. It begins like a single bee sucking nectar out of a flower, delightful, beautiful, delicate, and gradually others arrive, until suddenly the sky is black with a swarm of them.

  She wakes more than two hours before she must leave the house – the intent is to finally, for once in her life, not be late. First she goes upstairs to the kitchen and dining room, makes a cup of tea, and reads a book. She has good taste in books, and a broad appetite. She sits on a chair at the kitchen table, knees pulled up to her chin, and holds the book at a distance, sipping her tea, black, never removing the bag. Because the weather is warmer, she wears a vest top and boxers – in the winter she wore a thick black hooded jumper and check pyjama bottoms. Either way she is rather exquisite – not merely pretty but perfectly calm. When her tea is finished she goes downstairs to take a shower. This is where her schedule falls apart. She takes showers that last forty minutes. She says it is because she has lots of hair and must wash it completely. Sometimes she must wash it twice. The idea of her washing her hair for such a long time suffuses me with calm. I imagine she must wash every strand. I imagine she has no thoughts at all – that she becomes nothing more than the sound of a woman washing her hair, the sound of water on a body. When she emerges, she returns to the kitchen to read more and have another cup of tea and breakfast, which is usually a piece of toast. She already knows she will be late, but she must have peace with breakfast. Her hair is wet and thick and very black, and there are times I have wanted to put my hands on it – if only to lower my heart rate. Again she falls into a silence. When she is in this state, one must not speak to her. One feels that to make noise would be to shatter something precious. Then she will check her phone for the time, and slowly the swarm begins to gather. She jogs downstairs to put on make-up. This always takes longer than she expects, and then she must dry her hair. Because there is no socket in the bathroom, and no mirrors anywhere else but in the bathroom, she stands in front of the upstairs window – she has run upstairs – with a blow-dryer and a comb and watches herself in the reflection of the glass. She is always, at this stage, in a vest top and jeans or a skirt. She has a short tartan skirt that makes me feel like a paedophile. Her waist is nothing. I could reach around it with two hands – touching my thumbs and fingertips. The drying takes forever. Her hair comes down to the middle of her back. The repetition of combing and drying is slow and patient, but after fifteen minutes it becomes erratic, and she is full of sighs, and threatens to shave it all off. If I am watching, she asks me what time it is every minute. She never quite finishes – she always only has five minutes left, and there are still a million things to do. From then, it is all panic, running, stomping, doors slamming behind her, until a voice calls distantly from below, Goodbye! Then the front door shuts and she flies silently to the bus stop, and the air is empty again.

  9

  A new beginners course began tonight – a Thursday, mid-May – and now I am home after four straight nights of teaching. It is almost midnight. Helen has left an open bottle of red wine in the fridge. It tastes like cold, sour raspberries. I am too tired to write. My brain is exhausted. It is like this every night. I would like to say everything, but I can’t think to remember any of it. I will go downstairs and sleep without reading. The corpse of what I could say now, if I had the energy, tumbles into lost time, on top of all the others.

  10

  The clouds are a hundred shades of grey. It is like being in the centre of a nebula. You could spend your whole life staring upwards in Texas, and never see anything like them.

  11

  The future is a city. And I am the dream of a man who died in it. But I am also the dream that murdered that man.

  12

  A man who writes loves his city more than his own life or death – a failed writer all the more. The city inspires him, but refuses to belong to him. It endures all his nonsense. It does not requite his obsession.

  In the evenings after class, after drinks, I wait for the bus at the bottom of O’Connell Street, on Eden Quay. The stop is just outside a lap-dancing club, the Garden of Eden, and patrons – fat foreign men in scuffed leather jackets and necklaces – tiptoe in and out. I am going in, as soon as I can afford to. The daylight is unimaginable now – almost five years in Ireland and I still cannot get used to it – and even at eleven there is still a little blue in the sky. The north quays toward Connolly Station – this is how half the city goes home – are frenetic. Cars honk their horns, but nobody cares. Last night, a Monday night, the moon was gold and shining in a sheet of haze. I can’t afford cigarettes, but I am still buying them. I’ve decided to cut back on dinner, and just eat sandwiches for the rest of my life. Passengers gather at the bus stop. Ten minutes pass, fifteen. Buses mass at the light on Westmoreland Street, across the bridge. I squint to read their numbers – none of them are
mine. The light goes green and they trot up O’Connell Street like fat cattle. I tell myself that this is experience, this waiting.

  13

  I met Clare for dinner on Dame Street. I came straight from class, which had run twenty minutes late. I felt bad, but had forgotten that Clare likes moments on her own. She hadn’t even noticed. The weather was grey again, and when the late-lit nights in summer are full of uncertain rain – rain that begins when you take your hood down, and stops when you lift it up – and gusts of wind, and suddenly cool again, the city has the feel of apocalypse about it.