Thomas Maloney - Learning to Die

‘Well?’ prompts the japer, returning from the bar. ‘Playing the lurrve game?’

‘I suppose the main difference is that I’m not playing a game.’

Mike mouths the last five words in time with him — he considers his answer trite. Dan shrugs.

Later: he has cut it fine, and jogs along the foot tunnel towards the mainline station. As he takes the stairs two at a time, he misses his footing, plunges forward, and is one inch from knocking out his front teeth on the top step.

He stands up carefully, tests his jarred back and climbs into the vast chill of the station as though from an airlock into outer space, fingertips on his surprisingly intact teeth. Can he blame the beers this time and the slippers last time? Or does he need to slow down? Is he getting old already?

On the platform, two people he took to be strangers suddenly kiss. The world is full of possibility.

Nobody could call Brenda the black sheep of her family: her father, Vincent Vickers, builder, property developer, solar panel supplier and serial bankrupt, is hardly fleecy white. Her mother has proved a devoted wife — Vince’s third, the one retainer of his unlikely loyalty — as well as a big-hearted mother to two children, but the formative years of Brenda and her younger brother Austin were not a well-considered project. Mike’s mother, on the other hand — Elizabeth, never shortened — was organised, exacting and, until recently, unforgiving. While Mike may have grown up wondering why his parents couldn’t have stayed together, for Brenda the mystery was what could possibly have attracted her dad and Elizabeth to each other and sustained their five-year marriage.

Brenda is driving as far as Dalwhinnie, the nearest village on the Edinburgh railway line (road miles are precious because her van’s cam belt is ready to snap). Yes, she’s feeling sick at the prospect of her non-date with James, but no sicker than she would before meeting a new doctor or work associate: her social phobia is not sexual. Men are implicated in the world’s hostility, in its sneering rejection of her, but they are not the ringleaders. During her darker episodes men seem merely a different species, stupid and dangerous but without malice. In happier moods she is positively drawn to their simple honour codes and their exaltation of the physical. But there is something particular about James. She has a feeling they’re on the same side.

He’s there before her, standing beside the station Christmas tree as arranged, reading a free paper folded over in one hand. He’s ditched the shabby coat and woolly hat, and is sporting a sort of bomber jacket over a roll-neck jumper. He’s made an effort. Her nerves are, for once, the better sort of nerves. She takes a deep breath.

‘Hey.’

He starts. ‘Brenda! Hi.’ His jaw is smooth, a hint of tobacco. He looks happy to see her, and suggests they climb the Seat before it gets dark. Another breath. No trace of the usual horrors. This might just work out.

Natalie Mock has her bare feet on Dan’s lap. He can’t keep his hands off them, and the tickling is a distraction.

‘Can’t you just—’ She pulls them away, reads for a while, and then adds, reflectively, ‘Perverts always have a thing about feet, don’t they? I’ve never understood that. Feet are just feet.’

‘Mmm,’ answers Dan distantly, still reading the tablet balanced on the arm of the sofa, taking hold of her feet again, pushing his thumb along her instep as though scooping ice cream and ignoring her evasive twitches. ‘I hereby confess that I have a thing about your feet. I can’t get enough of them. Being trampled to death by your feet would be my ideal way to go.’

‘Careful,’ she says, kicking him. ‘What. You. Wish. For.’ The tablet falls on the rug with a thump, and Dan looks up.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ he says, in his serious voice. ‘Is it time?’

‘For?’

‘Is it time we had a baby?’ Christ. Here we go.

‘I don’t want a baby, Dan. You know I don’t. I’m not a having-a-baby kind of girl. Woman. Whatever.’

‘I know. But think about what that means. It means this is it. The story ends here with us sitting on the sofa.’

‘What story? The human race isn’t about to die out. Four babies are born every second.’

‘But not our babies.’

‘And every ten seconds, a child dies of hunger.’

Dan frowns, suddenly discomposed. When he hears a statistic like that, he actually thinks about what it means. Doesn’t jump up and down or become a vegan, but thinks about it and — in an instant — understands its moral enormity. Nat does love him for that.

‘Just think about it,’ he says, quietly. ‘That’s all I’m asking.’ He’s trying to look philosophical, but was clearly hoping for a more encouraging reaction. Too bad. Natalie has already thought about it. The idea of pushing a buggy is absurd; insulting, even. She thinks of women with ravaged bodies, stunted careers, dulled brains, cheerfully blaming it all on those ravenous little bundles of selfishness, the children. A fate not for her.

‘I’m not having a baby, Dan. You knew that when you married me.’

He nods slowly, and then adds, ‘You weren’t a big fan of getting married either, I seem to remember. At first.’ He loves bringing that up — that she didn’t say yes on the spot and faint away into his arms. Tells it to all and sundry as a self-deprecating anecdote. That she said she had to think about it.

‘No, Dan. The answer is no.’

‘I hope this is okay,’ says James, as they take their seats in a modest little bistro, after descending Arthur’s Seat in drizzle and dying light. ‘If you want to be taken to posh restaurants, I’m the wrong guy.’

‘I loathe posh restaurants,’ says Brenda. ‘You can’t imagine how much I loathe them.’ James could shout for joy: Project Q at a bargain price. Once settled, their eyes meet across the table. They smile, and nobody speaks. Two introverts on a first date, and there’s no awkwardness. Just energy. Charge.

‘You were going to tell me your story,’ suggests James at last. Brenda shrugs.

‘I’m not brainy. I’m not a people person. I like the outdoors — cold, rain, snow, whatever. I enjoy what I do. That’s it, really.’

‘Tell me something you like about being outdoors,’ says James, as the young waiter, sensing romance, pours house red with a flourish.

‘Something I like. Hmm. Well, yesterday I was thinking about the wind.’ She laughs. ‘Yes, that’s my world. How it doesn’t just slide smoothly over you. It has invisible fingers. It strokes you and tickles you and bumps against you. If you could see it, it would be all swirls and feathers, but you have to feel it instead.’ As she speaks, her eyes shine. Maybe she should be the writer.

‘Did you always want to work outdoors?’

‘I was never a girly girl, if that’s what you mean. My brother — not Mike, I mean my younger brother, Austin — we like all the same things. He lives in Australia now. Works on a farm.’

‘And Mike?’

‘He’s my half-brother. He’s a fund manager, or something. Earns megabucks. Prances about. Plays the field. We went to different schools, had different friends — we have nothing in common but he’s always been there for me.’

James feels a waft of possessiveness: Mike be damned — he wants to be the one who’s there for her now. At the same time he detects an echo of past emotion, of Becks’ ghost. Fascinating.

Natalie and Dan are still on the sofa. Natalie is writing an email to an old school friend, Lisa, whom she hasn’t seen for, what, five years? Could it really be ten? She has heard that Lisa is now both a teacher at a snazzy boarding school and a mother. Hard to imagine. At any of a dozen parties, Lisa was the one who drank too much or smoked too much and had to be carried home. Not in a wild-child way, but in an annoying, embarrassing way.