Marcel Theroux: Strange Bodies

The van filled the B roads with the sound of its hoarse engine and strained to keep pace in the slow lane of the motorway. The steering was a little loose and eerily slow to respond. But you get used to anything.

Yesterday, I drove up to the Lake District for a valediction.

Before I abandoned the van, I went to visit the tiny whitewashed cottage where Leonora and Nicholas spent their honeymoon. It’s down two miles of single track on the side of an obscure fell. A wisp of smoke was escaping from the chimney. I remembered the two upstairs rooms and the dark kitchen where they read to each other and played board games. No part of me accepts the rational truth: that I was seeing it for the first time.

*

Sitting on the bonnet of the van, I tied rope around my shoes to give me grip on the snow which covered the slopes above the tawny moorland. On the summit of the fell, with the wind in my ears, I flipped Hunter’s klyuchka into the air and watched it flash in the weak midwinter light before splashing into a black hillside tarn. I don’t know if I’m coming back, but he definitely isn’t.

From the moment I saw them, I had no doubt that his rambling journals were intended to be coded. I searched his room for every scrap of paper I could lay my hands on, determined to destroy them.

In the lowest drawer of his bedside table, I found his birth certificate, his navy blue US passport and a copy of his will. Underneath them all was a small black velvet bag with a quartz disc in it. Of course , I remember thinking. It’s already done. Hunter was keeping notes to reduce the gap, to make his own resuscitation less jarring. Had he learned about that from Nicky, before he killed him? Did he have Vera standing by in the mental hospital in Chita to finetune the code?

Hunter’s klyuchka will never reach Baikonur. I made sure of that. I took his and left mine in its place. I put a cuckoo’s egg in the nest of the Common Task.

Somewhere, perhaps, the other I am is stirring, another Nikolasha blinking into life, harbouring all the old hopes, facing all the zappings, the coercive instructions to adjust him to his new carcass. And maybe for him there’s a way home that never opened up for me. Whatever happens, I’ll make sure he has the advantage of this testimony.

But for me, it’s almost over.

Even a mankurt like me is sad to leave this world of dew. Nothing that was done to me makes me believe my sojourn here was abject and meaningless. And I, in a strange body, the fragments of another man’s memories, have so many things to speak of: that seal’s head breaking the waters of the bay, the light on Rossett Gill yesterday morning, mist in ribbons on Tooting Common, the dead weight of one of my children on my shoulder as I carried them sleeping from the car, my father’s dying words to me, as he clutched his own father’s medal, telling me he loved me.

This stranger inside me is a creature like every other: obsessed with the limits of his existence, haunted by the spectacle of his passage through time, the blossoming and deterioration of his relationships with other creatures, the unutterable sadness of a finite life on a beautiful planet. And as he’s aged, a second world has appeared beside him, compounded of memories and recollected emotion. To this world I will turn in my last days. All my pain and beauty is here.

Looking around this place — an internet cafe beside a minicab office in a northern city — with its wet lino and jingling doorbell, I find it hard to consent to my departure. There is so much still that is sacred and beautiful: the man in headphones typing to the tsk of its secret rhythms, the woman with her backpack on the floor and her inadvertent smile, so absorbed in their tappings, their promises and farewells, weaving themselves from shreds of something, the words that were made by the dead, fending off the great oblivion; but, yes, goodbye my pretty ones, goodbye.

Marcel Theroux is a novelist, a broadcaster and a screenwriter. He was born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1968. He grew up in England, studied at Cambridge University and Yale where he took an MA in International Relations with a specialisation in Soviet and East European Studies. He has published four novels to critical acclaim. His second novel, The Paperchase, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His most recent novel, Far North (2009), was a finalist for the US National Book Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and was awarded the Prix de l’Inaperçu in 2011. Far North has been translated into German, Dutch and French. A Japanese edition, prepared by the acclaimed novelist Haruki Murakami, was published in April 2012. He has written and presented more than a dozen documentaries on subjects ranging from climate change to the Japanese aesthetic principle of wabi-sabi.