Marcel Theroux: Strange Bodies

‘And Nicholas?’

‘Here you are, Nicholas! You’re right here.’ His anger had subsided and now he gave me a look of calm, transcendent love. I understood the joy I had given him. He was thinking of himself.

There were steps in the corridor. They seemed to be approaching the door, then they died away. Outside, the garden was suddenly bathed in light. A squirrel ventured right up to the French doors with brisk, staccato movements as though it were driven by clockwork. I thought of the wind-up ballerina on the South Bank, and the tragic lifelessness of her dancing. I saw Sarah barely hours old; her eyes milky and unaccustomed to the light; her arms and legs paddling the air. I remembered Lucius, as a child, leaning sleepily against the toilet as he peed in the middle of the night, and then collapsing into my arms. But not into these arms, into Nicky Slopen’s arms, not these counterfeits.

‘One day, we’ll look back at this time the way we look back at the era of surgery without anaesthesia, or before antibiotics. We’re going to make death optional.’

‘Not for Nicholas.’

‘And yet you’re here, aren’t you?’

‘I’m here because Vera felt things had got out of control,’ I said.

Hunter smiled. ‘Vera accepted what we needed to do. We were clear with each other at the outset. We can’t stop this thing because someone’s gotten squeamish. There’s too much at stake now. We’re at war, Nicholas …’ He was struggling to keep his eyes open. The walk in the cold had exhausted him. ‘We’re at war with death.’

The book slid to the floor. A moment later he was asleep.

I picked up his notebook and leafed through it. His handwriting was surprisingly characterful, very masculine, with a Greek e and a long flat tail on his ys and gs . He’d filled it with page after page of personal trivia.

So, for example: mom’s meat loaf. wrapped in greaseproof paper. grey slabs covered in ketchup.

Or: clap clinic 1967 — Deirdre, Phoebe, the Vassar girl?

I turned another page.

That afternoon at the Barbican. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Tricia morose about my affair with C. I say we can have another kid if she really wants them, but what about the complications? Her age, etc.

It was just past one o’clock. I wasn’t sure how much longer I would be alone with him. I warmed my hands on the radiators to relax the muscles and take the chill off my fingers. I didn’t want the cold of them to wake him.

I had envisaged this moment so many times that the act was something of a let-down. In my fantasy it was always a haler Hunter, a more worthy adversary. And there was a particular shamefulness attached to killing such an attenuated version of the man. On what I’d based them, I don’t know, but I’d had such vividly different hopes for how things would turn out. Very briefly he opened his eyes, there was the slightest of struggles, and then his life left him, almost willingly, like a bird flying out of a thicket.

My wanderings since are not exactly pertinent to this testimony. But once you’ve acquired the habit of reminiscence, it gets harder and harder to decide what merits exclusion.

I hitchhiked from London to Swindon. Strange as it seems, in 2010 someone was willing to pick up a large, rather intimidating, heavily built man who was not only an escapee from a secure hospital with an outstanding section under the Mental Health Act, but a murderer.

The Good Samaritan’s name was Gordon Swanage. He was an ex-soldier from Newcastle. When I hungrily eyed the chicken salad sandwich in his glove box he pulled over and bought me gammon, egg and chips from a Little Chef on the M4. I told him I had been a teacher.

‘I went through hard times myself when I got back from Iraq,’ he said, as though he had heard nothing of what I had just said to him. The abrupt syllables of his Geordie accent made him sound, to my ear, like he was speaking Danish. ‘We’re still suing the Ministry of Defence. When I get the money I’m going to give all this up. Move to Spain. How about you? What’s your dream?’

‘Just living day to day,’ I said through a mouthful of food. ‘You know.’

‘I do indeed, my friend. I do.’

His kindness to me seemed almost without limit. I find it as mystifying — more, in fact — than the reasoned cruelties of Hunter and whoever or whatever stands behind him.

At Swindon, he went out of his way to set me down at a hand car wash where, he said, the manager was always looking out for good people and didn’t ask too many questions, if I knew what he meant.

The car wash was jerry-built out of timber and plywood. A couple of Union Jacks hung over it as a form of camouflage. Everyone there was from Eastern Europe. The workers slept in a condemned building behind it. Sunk in the world of the labouring poor, I began to believe that Nicholas Slopen had never existed.

What I had now was a terribly truncated version of a life, but it was better than the DHU and it wasn’t unsafe. With an effort of will, I compelled my thoughts away from anything to do with my past, Nicky’s past. I thought about calling myself Viktor, but the name stuck in my throat. I told people my name was Stan, my father’s name, and no one ever asked more of me.

After I’d been there ten days, a Volkswagen camper van pulled in. It was so battered and rusty that it seemed odd that anyone would want to clean it; and in fact, its driver, a young woman with dirty blonde dreadlocks held back in a headscarf, was having trouble with the engine and wanted someone to take a look at it. I recused myself on the grounds of total engineering ignorance, which she found funny. While one of the other washers was checking her vehicle, she told me I looked familiar. I said that was unlikely and asked her where she was headed. She told me she lived in a commune on the border of Devon and Dorset. They had cows and grew much of their own food, she said. She had been on her way to fetch a couple of volunteer workers, but they’d called to say they had swine flu and then the van had broken down on the way back.

‘So I’m going back empty-handed if I get there at all.’

We’d had a slow week and Alex, our boss, was happy to lose me for a while. I went there with her that afternoon.

*

It had been a school for half a century — an experimental one that was closed down by the inspectors — and before that a vicarage. It still had a vaguely scholastic atmosphere. There was a library on the second floor which no one used. The books on the shelves were still alphabetised, not because of the diligence of the communards, but because none of them read any more. Firbank, Forster, Galsworthy, Gissing, Golding, it went, and so on, through all the other dead white men, like me. At times, I felt like the Time Traveller among the unlettered Eloi.

Mixed in with them were scatterings of more predictable volumes: What Colour is Your Parachute? The Tao of Physics, absurd speculations about the Turin Shroud or the Templars.

Willow — the girl with dreadlocks — was about right when she described it as a commune. They were ineffectual at self-sufficiency, but they did their best and supported themselves by offering the place as a centre for retreats: dance, sacred drumming, all the stuff the old Nicholas thought was nonsense. Come to think of it, the new Nicholas also thinks it’s nonsense. But he liked the people themselves. I have to fight the urge to call them kids, but it’s how I think of them.

I want to avoid the obvious characterisations of it. There was more than a hint of dippiness about them. And there was an incuriousness, a complacency that you probably find among any people who feel they’re getting through life without making any compromises. But the thing to say is that they were so kind to me. There were even children there, with all the optimism that implies.