Thomas Maloney - Learning to Die

‘Can you give me some possibilities, in order of likelihood?’

‘I’d rather not. I know it’s frustrating. We’ll get these tests arranged as quickly as possible — next week, hopefully. What I want you to do in the meantime is just…’

Something about wellbeing, relaxation and living his normal life.

Brenda rubs a little Swarfega into her palms to work out the grease, then cranks up the gas fire and changes into a fleece and jeans. While she’s eating her supper of tinned soup and half a pack of stale crackers, Callum, her neighbour, knocks on the door to tell her that another neighbour, Mrs McCready, had a turn after Christmas and died last week. Peacefully, he says. The funeral is on Friday.

Brenda drifts back to the kitchen, frowning. Old Mrs McCready led an uncomfortable life; her only pleasure, probably, came in cheerfully chronicling her many discomforts to anyone within earshot — usually Brenda. ‘Och, don’t worry about me,’ she would reply to any words of sympathy. ‘I’m no good to anyone.’ Which was true. A dark, tangled forest of memories, connections and secret foibles now clear-cut. Pulped. Peacefully pulped. Gone. Poor Mrs M.

Mike bought Brenda a laptop for Christmas — this is so that she can take an online self-help course which her therapist recommended after she missed three appointments in a row. ‘You will develop alternative, more helpful core beliefs,’ the programme confidently declares. ‘Fear extinction is achievable.’ She and Mike refer to it light-heartedly as her re-education course, a term her therapist gently rejects.

The first session explains the difference between agoraphobia, which as a solo mountaineer, fell-runner and expert in wilderness self-sufficiency she presumably doesn’t have, and social phobia, which sounds more like it. There are video clips of other messed-up people telling their stories. I’d like to hear your story, James said, but he’s not going to hear this story. Sweating seems to be a common symptom, but nobody in the videos says anything about their mouth going funny, or being unable to smile, or suspended arcs of blood.

Mike gave her cash as well, as usual. Always in fifties, always slipped into her bag without a word — it’s meant to be for the therapy. She fetches the envelope, rolls the stack of notes into a tight, red-and-white cigar and pushes it into an empty whisky miniature. Screws the lid tight. She appreciates his love and concern — even if they carry a faint, selfish odour of penance for crimes unknown — but she doesn’t need his money. This time, Mrs McCready doesn’t either. Someone else might — someone noble and undefeated.

The annual comp letters — yes, compensation is the euphemism of choice — always come in heavy white envelopes. Super opaque. Mij pretends to lick his enormous finger, reaches over to Mike’s envelope and makes a sizzling sound. Mike slides it silently into an inside pocket. He opens it later, in the park. It’s a short letter, and the number is in the first sentence. ‘Your total gross compensation for the year 2011 is £3,145,966.’ Then some blah blah. Finally: ‘We thank you for your ongoing contribution to the firm.’

So, here it is. Freedom to do anything. Of course, he could blow the lot in a few weeks. Move from the canal to an exquisite little flat here in Mayfair. Buy a more appropriate car, a few knick-knacks from these dimly-lit boutiques that stink of more money than sense.

Will they make him invest some of it in the Box? Alignment of interests. He’d rather not. Perhaps a token hundred k. He tucks the letter back in his pocket and looks around. The naff winter fairground rides have been taken down and the enclosures cleared away, leaving a few roped-off acres of mud. Above a smokescreen of bare trees, the naff London skyline, just as perfunctory, remains.

Yes, he could spend it easily here. Waste it. But out there in the world beyond — out there, it’s a fortune, and he could do anything.

Anywhere. Anything. Absolutely anything. But what?

Round one is electric shocks, round two is needles. If Dan didn’t have a serious neurological condition when he walked in here, he will by the time these inquisitors have finished with him. He really shouldn’t be squeamish about needles. He recognises that a conflict arises between the instinct to defend the territory demarcated by his skin, ancient and unthinking, and the judicious invasions of medicine: the surgical strike. But old instincts die hard, and there are a lot of needles, and these ones hurt. He focuses his gaze on the intersection of walls and ceiling, and takes slow breaths.

Round three is a blood sample, and round four — he did ask to have all the tests at once — is the MRI scan. Dan and the radiographer recognise each other at once.

‘You’re the man who tripped over on Friar Street.’

‘Wearing a dressing gown, yes — not unlike this. And you’re my Samaritan. Thanks for helping me that night.’ Dan can see that she’s trying to figure out whether the fall and this scan are related in some way, and is about to conclude that they aren’t. ‘I’d locked myself out,’ he explains. ‘That trip was — well — they think I might have a neurological condition.’

‘Right. Yes.’ She smiles, nods, very professional. But she grasps his meaning: she was there at the very beginning. Of whatever this is. A disconcerting note of intimacy chimes.

‘Three Tesla,’ says Dan, to change the subject, peering at the controls of the giant glossy polo mint. ‘That’s a strong magnet.’

‘This is the strongest magnet you’re ever likely to meet,’ she proclaims, brightly. ‘Any metal objects in this room have to be bolted down.’ The pen in her breast pocket is a plastic felt-tip. ‘But don’t worry, it won’t hurt you. It’s just a bit noisy. Let me explain how it works—’

‘It’s okay,’ says Dan, with a modest smile, ‘I know how it works.’ His mind’s eye peers into the moist, fibrous internal structure of his body, zooms in to its fabulous, soaring architecture of cells, zooms in again to its molecular frogspawn, again to a single atom of hydrogen, and again, past his little familiar, the orbiting electron, to the spinning proton at the atom’s core. Not really spinning, of course — spin is just a parameter in the elegant magic of the maths of Pauli and Dirac — but it’s an effective visual metaphor. ‘I’ve worked with superconducting magnets up to twelve T,’ he adds, ‘but I don’t usually lie inside them.’

The scan’s nightmare symphony is performed by an orchestra of monstrous sirens, frenzied ringtones and frantic assembly-line machinery. Dan stares at the blank casing inches from his face and thinks of mashers and slashers and bone-pulverisers, of barbed wire and searchlights, of Pink Floyd and late Radiohead, and of every alarm clock that ever snatched him from a beautiful dream.

James F. Saunders had a job delivering pizzas before he came to Merryman’s Bay. Logistics, he told his father. Menial jobs a long-established literary tradition, of course. It was always on the scooter that his flashes of self-confidence struck — glimpses of the unrevealed truth that would be his raw material, of the glittering style that would be his vehicle, of the fame and prizes that would be his inevitable destiny. Back at the keyboard, at the blank page, this intricate tissue of hope disintegrated in his hands, dissolved, drained into the gaps between the keys, only to rear up again, shimmering, on his next ride.

It was partly to break the cycle of delusion and despair that James moved to Bay. That, and the lure, the quickening influence, the fecund promise of the elements: the sea, the sea. His lodgings are in an ancient cottage called The End House, named after something he has never yet reached in his many abandoned novels. This time, this novel, will be different.