Marcel Theroux - Strange Bodies

*

I knew I couldn’t trust myself to stay in London for more than a few days. It was too much temptation. I would come up with some excuse to go and see Lucius and Sarah and it would end up putting them at risk. I needed to put some distance between us, for their sake. There was no hope of connecting the broken thread of my life. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was one meaningful task remaining to me.

I spent my last days in London in a room above a pub in Streatham, vacillating between the necessity of leaving and my desire to settle scores with Hunter.

It felt safer to be in a neighbourhood I knew and where I had an instinctive sense of what was ordinary. But it had its own form of peril. One afternoon, I saw Tadeusz, Jack’s old landlord, unloading crates from a van parked outside the pet shop. Unthinkingly, I went up to greet him. His body tensed as he caught sight of me. He set down his crate. The coldness in his face reminded me who I was. I lowered my eyes and turned away from him.

I learned that night from Misha that Hunter was in a hospice near Richmond Park, a private one, with a Zen garden in its grounds.

I made a couple of speculative visits. Misha had told me that Hunter, a crank to the last, was having his meals delivered from outside, by a company called Raw Genius that specialised in raw food. Each morning before seven, a man on a moped dropped off an array of bizarre juices, buckwheat groats, weird fruits and spiralised and dehydrated vegetables.

One chilly November day I arrived around mid-morning, wearing a chef’s jacket and carrying a hemp bag of items from a health-food shop.

The place was more like an exclusive hotel than a hospital. The reception area was warm, and heady with the smell of aromatherapy candles and gourmet cooking. ‘Clair de Lune’ was playing quietly through discreet speakers behind the desk.

I couldn’t help comparing it all to the DHU. The basic economic injustice of the world struck me: that the rich don’t live the same lives as us, or die the same deaths. Some, like Hunter, don’t intend to die at all.

The receptionist spoke to me in a hushed voice that somehow made my deception easier.

I identified myself as a member of the Raw Genius team and told her that we’d delivered the wrong items. It was the only occasion in two lifetimes that I’ve had reason to be grateful to Caspar’s wife Hilary and her obsession with fad diets.

‘Entirely our fault,’ I said. ‘We’ve got four clients on two different restricted diets and we got mixed up. We delivered one here with a soy lecithin supplement. I don’t think he’s intolerant, but it’s better not to take the risk.’

Soy lecithin. I felt an abstract, almost parental pride in the smoothness of my articulation.

She told me where to find him.

*

Hunter had a suite of rooms with a verandah. He was shrunken, coughing, his hands frail and liver-spotted. He walked unsteadily, supporting his weight with a frame. His expensive clothes hung loosely.

‘Just put them down over there,’ he said with a vague gesture in the direction of the galley kitchen.

‘I need to remove the other items,’ I said.

‘They’re in the fridge.’

I opened the fridge door.

‘How are you enjoying the meals?’ I said.

‘Good enough. Are you waiting for a tip?’

‘I take it you don’t recognise me.’

He moved his frame towards me and peered into my face with no trace of fear. ‘Why? Should I know you?’

I told him who I was. He appraised me for a moment.

‘Let’s go for a walk,’ he said.

*

I helped him into a big coat, fur hat and muffler. He manoeuvred his walking frame out onto the baize-green lawn, which was crisp with frost.

‘Nicholas said you could barely speak,’ he said.

‘It came back gradually.’

‘A miracle. Look at you.’ He was racked by one of his periodic fits of coughing. ‘But what’s wrong with your hands?’

‘They do this in the cold,’ I said, struggling to straighten my fingers.

I had to slow to a shuffle to keep pace with him. The rubber feet of his frame left scuff-marks in the gravel.

Ducks huddled round a water outflow in the middle of the frozen pond. Hunter dropped heavily onto a wooden bench by the side of the gravel path and gave a sigh.

For a few minutes we sat in silence, watching the ice creep imperceptibly across the water.

I was the first to speak. ‘I’m surprised you …’

‘What?’ he said. ‘Thought I’d be scared of you? There’s not much you can do to me now. I’m dying anyway. If I was a car, they’d scrap me. Cancer. Secondaries everywhere. I’m riddled with it. The upside is the drugs they’ve got me on. I’m higher than I’ve been for years.’

‘I thought the upside of being ill was that you were close to it.’

‘Close to what?’

‘Your higher spiritual life.’

He lowered his voice to an intoxicated hush. ‘Jesus Christ, it really is you.’ He gave me a sideways glance that had something curious and greedy in it. ‘Tell me something: what’s it like?’

What’s it like? The physical ache, the loneliness, the high clouds, Vera’s face as she twisted in the hands of her captors, Jack letting the Fielding novel slip from his hands, Caiaphas, the anonymous misery of the DHU. To know all this, to be me and not me; to be reflected in the frightened eyes of my son and see a monster. ‘It’s a miracle,’ I said quietly. ‘You’re going to love it.’

I was staring towards the water, remembering a cold winter when I’d pulled out big panes of ice from the pond on Tooting Common and given them to Lucius and Sarah to jump on. The ice had left a weedy, riverine smell on my hands.

Hunter’s eyes glittered as he tried to suppress his excitement. I could see him struggling to keep his emotions in check: the thought of what I represented. The hope! And imagine the carcass they’d set aside for him!

He pointed towards the pond. ‘They have geese here in the summer,’ he said. ‘You know, when I was a kid, I had a pet goose called Snoopy. A dog killed it. My mother got me another one. Called that one Snoopy too.’

‘You didn’t miss the other one?’

Hunter shrugged. ‘A goose is a goose.’ He reached inside his overcoat for something that he couldn’t find. ‘Will you remind me of that when we get back? I haven’t got my notebook with me.’

He levered himself up onto his frame. ‘Come on. I’m getting cold.’

I followed him back across the silent garden.

He leaned against my arm as he negotiated the step up to the French windows.

After the cold, the warmth in his rooms seemed intense and soporific. At Hunter’s request, I fetched his notebook from the bedside table. It was in the first drawer: a fat leatherbound Smythson’s with onionskin pages.

While he was writing down his memory of the goose, I made a pot of redbush tea and set it down on the coffee table.

‘Do you know where I’ve been?’ I said.

He looked up from his writing and for the first time, I think I saw a trace of fear in his eyes.

‘If I said the name Dr Philip White, would that mean anything to you?’ I said.

‘Not unless he’s an oncologist.’

‘Dr White’s my psychiatrist.’

‘I know things haven’t been easy for you,’ he said.

‘That’s one way of putting it.’

‘You’ve got to understand, I relinquished any day-to-day responsibilities some time ago. I’ve been here, getting my head straight. There was a view that we simply couldn’t risk work of this importance being jeopardised.’

‘Hence Nicky’s murder?’

Hunter suddenly blazed with a flash of anger. ‘I’m ill but don’t take me for a dumb fuck. What are you, wired up like he was? We all understood the complexity of this work. Vera did. Okay, Sinan’s dad had a problem with it, but the rest of us were on board from the get-go. Ethically — I won’t kid you — it’s not simple. But the upside is, literally, infinite. We’re not choosing to be in the business of death. With insights this rich, with the backing we’ve got, we are on the brink of something incredible. I’m talking about the deepest wish, Nicholas. Time is the great blessing. We’re going to get more time. All of us.’