Greg Baxter - A Preparation for Death

This is a very different December from the last, most of which I spent shopping and at dinner parties where the hosts and guests tried to outdo each other with toasts and clean, large houses. I have probably tripled in biological age since then. I get winded walking up one flight of stairs. I’ve sprouted a few grey hairs at my temples. My deterioration gives me a sense of great freedom. My thoughts go unencumbered now. I approach a state of equilibrial disdain, disdain without heat. Wherever I see crowds, I avoid them. If I offend, it is not because I have sought to. If I please, it is an accident.

I spent a whole decade cultivating rage. I laboured to disappoint. I infected the people I knew with bitterness. I pulled them in close and betrayed them. I felt no remorse, just pity. I left the tiny battlefields of my relationships scorched and full of smoking corpses. I walked over the bodies without examination.

I like to call my Vespa midnight blue, but in truth it is dangerously close to purple. Not long ago, on my way to Evelyn’s apartment in Leopardstown, I hit a large pothole in Donnybrook. I saw it too late, driving only a few feet behind a car at high speed, in the rain. I braced and slammed into it; to brake fully in wet weather on a Vespa is suicide. I think I said Oh SHIT. There was a loud crash and the handlebars popped out of my grip for a moment. My feet came off the little platform. I was disconnected from the bike for only half a second, but I was pretty certain I was dead. The hole was only a few inches deep but Vespas aren’t very rugged. Primarily they are to be sat on while smoking cigarettes in Italy, talking to pretty girls. The hit sent a jolt right into my neck. For a few days I couldn’t turn my head sideways, or lift it.

The first time Katie saw my scooter, she laughed. She said, in the most wonderful accent imaginable, Oh dear, and put her hand to her mouth. But your helmet? she said. It’s for a real motorcycle.

Last week, Katie and I went ice-skating at the RDS for her birthday. A Canadian friend of hers, Patricia, came along. Patricia is a short girl with sturdy legs and a voice like shattered glass being rubbed into your eyes; but she has pretty brown hair, light freckles, and a nose so tiny that you feel you must touch it. Katie has phases in which she surrounds herself with as many people as possible, plays six or seven instruments at small sessions with friends, and goes after men with the gargantuan clumsiness of an elephant. But when she is feeling low she withdraws from crowds, assumes she will never be a good musician, and swears off romance forever. When she is happy she is like a large soap bubble, or thousands of them, blowing down a sunny street. When she is sad she is very pretty. That night she was feeling sorry for herself. She had made a point to invite nobody along to the ice-skating party, so Patricia and I had invited ourselves.

I had been ice-skating only once before, at the age of sixteen, so seventeen years later I was just trying to move around the rink without falling and shattering my wrists. The rink was small and almost square, so that as soon as you came out of a corner you were heading into the next. I took long rests every few minutes, stretching the cramps out of the muscles in my shins, and watched the girls race around the ice. Katie was pretty good. She was trying to learn the hop. Patricia skated with the effortless finesse and astronomical speed I had expected from a Canadian. There were a bunch of teenage boys there who were purposely crashing at full speed into the walls. One grabbed my shirt trying to regain his balance and, on purpose, I elbowed him in the face. Patricia, however, slipped gracefully through them. They tried to keep up but could not. She skated backward, taking photographs of Katie and me, faster than the boys could go forward. Now and again I’d mimic her style and almost fall over. My arms would spin and I’d go back and forth like a pendulum. She stayed low and smooth and instinctually aware of her surroundings. By the end of the night I’d learned how to take corners by crossing my legs, but that was it. Katie learned to hop and kept doing that. She was unaware, probably, that her large breasts were bouncing around in her tight black top, and that nearly all the boys and men, including me, were helplessly transfixed by them.

I am always hoping that one night she will give in to curiosity and fuck me. But women don’t seem to fuck men out of curiosity, at least not friends.

Afterwards, we went to Mary Mac’s and had cheeseburgers and cake — a cake that Patricia made at the table in the pub with ingredients she pulled out of a plastic bag. It was Monday, and the place was nearly empty. Mary Mac’s had been a regular spot for me the year before, great for all-evening Friday drinks in summer. The girls ate the cake before the cheeseburgers. They nearly finished it. I had to slice a tiny piece and move it far away from them, and they even tried to eat that. When the food was finished, Patricia took a phone call from her boyfriend and disappeared for an hour. Katie and I sat together drinking. She mentioned, for the hundredth time, that she would leave Ireland soon but that she would never return to Wales. She wanted to live in a small village by the sea and play music. Her job was no good, but she needed the money for travel. She sighed, and then she snapped out of it. Underneath the table, I let my feet touch her feet. She didn’t notice.

I had to spend Christmas in Texas. It was out of my hands. My father had demanded, in the way he has of demanding, that I come home: he knew a thing or two about collapsed marriages. I left my house in the hands of Helen, a former student who owned a thousand books without covers (she worked in a bookstore), and who liked to dance on my dining-room table in the middle of the night; sometimes I watched from a chair, drinking whatever was left in the house.

I got home at four in the morning on the 21st, the day I was to fly out, and, having no clean clothes, threw some dirty boxers and socks and a pair of flip-flops into a large suitcase — I would buy clothing in Texas. After a long shower I went up to my little terrace and paced around in the streetlit dark. My taxi wouldn’t be long, and I needed to stay awake. Since my heart probably couldn’t take the strain of coffee, I decided to expose myself to the cold for half an hour. I had survived a month-long binge, and I couldn’t trust myself to open my eyes if I closed them.

That night, I’d been drinking with John, another former student, at the Lord Edward, an uncomfortably lit and foul-smelling box near Christchurch, full of very calm old people. We’d ended up there after drifting from one unsatisfactory spot to the next. It was the Thursday before the city broke up, so everywhere was jammed — the bars, the footpaths, restaurants, shops. The following night would be worse, but I’d be five thousand miles away.

John is a big guy, handsome, at six foot two an inch taller than me, not fat but large-bellied. He always wears T-shirts and big jackets, never combs his hair, and shaves once a month. He was finishing a thesis for a master’s in computer programming — or obsessing over its lack of progress. It had become — this tiny document — the most wretched and debilitating task in his life, and he could not talk about it without slipping into nonsensical rambling. He was the most talented writer I’d come across in a year of teaching, but it hadn’t come together for him, and now, I knew, he was going to quit. His decision to commit murder on his talent was something I remorsefully admired — I had played a decisive role in John’s disillusionment. I had passed on too freely my loathing for the propriety of being a writer , tried to help him find the pure and fearless voice of total disenchantment. During one of our conversations I said that a man who can write ought to commit an act of violence against literature or abandon it entirely. John had written three or four stories in his whole life.