Thomas Maloney - Learning to Die

He’ll have it out with Brenda. Or perhaps not — has she just given him two connections for the price of one? Could the smarmy salesman brother be a useful offshoot of Project Q?

‘You worked a miracle on this cupboard,’ says Natalie on Saturday morning, as she bends stiffly and files away some hospital paperwork that she’ll never need again. Dan immediately recognises this as his moment.

‘All part of the service. By the way,’ he adds casually, ‘I found some letters of yours in there.’ She glances enquiringly; has no idea. ‘From before we met. In a bundle.’ Her face adjusts slowly: the sparkle fades out of it.

‘Oh, them.’

‘I didn’t read them, obviously. You never talk about that guy.’

‘Why would I?’

‘Well, it was two years of your life. I’m interested in any two years of your life.’

‘You’re saying you actually want to hear about my ex-boyfriend from ten years ago.’ Then she adds, with sarcastic brightness, ‘Which bits shall I tell you about?’

Dan shoots her a reproving glance. ‘I just wondered. I’m always interested in how you became the person you are.’ He crosses the room to her, remembers at the last moment not to put his hand on her bandaged back, kisses her hair. ‘The person I love.’

She looks up at him and her face softens, then hardens again. ‘It was just a wrong turning, a dead end — it didn’t lead me here. It’s better forgotten about. I didn’t even know those letters still existed.’

‘I’ll throw them in the recycling, then.’

‘Sure.’ They both know he won’t.

Dan survives lunch, but as he dries the soup pan he finds he can’t quite let the subject drop. There’s a fine line between dismissiveness and touchiness and he wants a positive ID.

‘The guy who wrote those letters — was he your first?’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake.’

‘What?’ Dan spreads his hands in protest, pan in one, towel in the other. ‘It’s just a question.’

‘No, he wasn’t. As it happens.’ Dan’s mind quietly boggles: how much history doesn’t he know?

‘Who was, then?’ Nat is about to snap, but gives him a pitying smile instead.

‘Just some pimply boy. Not all of us went to repressed single-sex schools, you know.’

‘We had girls in the sixth form.’

‘The school did, but you didn’t, did you, my love?’ That hurts.

James gets up too late for a coffee from his landlady, so heads to the tearoom. One of the proprietors gives a little smile of pride as he flips open his laptop, while the other looks suspicious — she’s heard all about the internet.

He awoke with a sense of purpose. Mike’s text message has been niggling him for two days: the slimy, hand-shaking, wink-and-gun spiv is so rich, so superior, so infuriatingly charmant that he doesn’t give a damn about losing his book. If James had managed to snaffle all three volumes, he’d have sold them online and made enough to write for months uninterrupted by the need to earn his daily bread. Volume Two on its own isn’t worth selling.

James dislikes text messages, ugly and ephemeral abasers of his beloved language, crushing it to fit a tiny screen. Email he considers an acceptable medium for correspondence (he used to correspond with friends, before ‘How’s the book going?’ became intolerable). Without giving his objective a moment’s thought, he begins typing.

Dear Mike,

I have the book: it is necessary for my work. If you are looking for something pretty to replace it, might I suggest a jewel-encrusted tortoise?

P.S. My intention is to marry your sister and thereby inherit your ill-gotten wealth when your chopper crashes mysteriously in the Carpathians. I hope this plan has your blessing.

Send. He hasn’t felt so good for weeks. Does he have enough change for a parkin square?

Natalie has to pay attention to her breathing: normal, shallow breaths are fine now, but anything deeper still hurts. She’s surprised by how often she sighs, while awake and, apparently, while asleep too. Every sleepy sigh wakes her with an unpleasant start. She stares up into the darkness and waits for sleep to come creeping back.

She hasn’t thought about him, Dan’s predecessor, for years: used to, perhaps, occasionally, but not anymore. Time heals. Or conceals. Or just obliterates. Outside, a jet scores a murmuring line across the sky.

She curtails another sigh. She met him in Laos, on her gap year: they had both joined a loose-knit group of backpackers to tackle a hiking trail. The two of them got ahead of the group, and she had hiccups that wouldn’t go away. ‘You need to surprise me,’ she said, as they paused on an outcrop and looked out across the bejungled hills — a pristine realm at their feet. He kissed her (the best kiss of her life); the hiccups stopped; they stayed together for two years, despite going to different universities; they split up. Now, a decade later, she finds that she doesn’t quite like to say his name even in her head.

Unlike Dan, he seemed to know her by instinct. There — she’s committed the thought-crime of comparing them. It didn’t stop him being a knob, of course, and the fact that he always knew when his behaviour was knobbish made it less excusable. Dan’s occasional knobbishness tends to be accidental.

The comparisons come easily now. Unlike Dan, he was spontaneous. He persuaded her to do mad things — hitching a lift with Mexican gangsters — while Dan, fearsome logician, can rarely persuade her to do sane things. Why is that? After all, Dan usually turns out to be right.

Unlike Dan the walking encyclopaedia, her ex experienced the world with a childlike wonder. ‘Look at that!’ she can hear him saying. ‘Feel this!’ Facts were unimportant; guidebooks were shunned — sensation was everything. He ignored, subverted the obvious to delight in the peripheral and the overlooked. ‘Weird!’ he would pronounce, turning to look at her, his eyes flashing with joy. Odd, the tricks of memory: those times seem so expansive, so luxurious, while the years with Dan have flown.

Natalie remembers the feeling of being eighteen, the taste of it. ‘Let’s do it right here,’ he would whisper, usually as part of a running joke, sometimes for real. How silly and selfish life was then, and yet… She shifts a little closer to Dan, whose back is turned to her. Presses her face gently against the nape of his neck to smell him, feels that little stab in her lungs again and cuts short her inhalation. Slides a hand onto his chest, where he has an off-centre straggle of hair. He grunts and sleepily reaches an answering hand back onto her hip. The hand stops, surprised to find no T-shirt or pants, and he gives a murmur of pleasure.

‘Hi,’ she breathes into his ear. ‘Be gentle.’

Stocks are down, bonds are up, copper is tanking. Mike is short copper. He sits quietly and surveys the markets. He double-clicks a chart of the copper price so that it fills one of his four screens: a jagged white path on a black map, a quiet trail of destruction that is twitching and probing as he watches.

A gobbet of economic news emerged from China this morning. Mike is hazy on the details — Rocket Jesus he may be, but he doesn’t know the first thing about investing or economics (okay, perhaps the first thing, but not the second). As far as he can tell, he’s not alone. The pundits paraded on the financial news channels are the new astrologers, aren’t they? Spouting shameless, ambiguous crap designed to seem like a bold prediction while keeping all options open. As for the other traders around him, Mike wouldn’t be able distinguish luck from skill. There might be a bit of both.