Thomas Maloney - Learning to Die

He’ll keep eyesight, hearing, touch. Movement is his rare earth: this coming summer might be his last as a locomotive organism. Last chance to take the perfect corner on his bike. Dance badly and not care. Play an instrument (he’s never learned one). Row a boat, kick a ball (when did he last do that?). Fix things. Adjust a dial. Shake hands, perhaps. Hold Nat, stroke her hair — but he diverts his train of thought from that too-painful track.

A small launch appears from behind the island and turns into the main channel, casting a fan of ripples. These advance across the marbled river, reflect off its banks, intersect their fellows, superpose, cohere and decohere in a silent, mathematical dance. Dan smiles at the sheer beauty of it. In the time he has left it’s more of this he wants, but you can’t buy it, you can’t add it to a list and tick it off. You just have to keep your eyes and your mind open as long as you can.

The streetlights on the bridge go on, lighting a world of possibilities that is no longer his. This world, down here, the exquisite ripples in the dusk — this is his world. He already feels reborn.

Brenda Vickers has reached Section Six of her online course. It’s telling her about SMART goals. She begins to grasp the intention: to bore her out of her phobia. To make it ridiculous — paint a moustache on it, balance a traffic cone of self-help jargon on its head. Maybe it will work. When her mouth goes weird, she can’t smile or express herself or engage with humanity, but presumably she can still yawn.

Outside lie two feet of fresh snow. Work is cancelled until the access boys have cleared the tracks. Her skis were stolen last winter, so she needs a brief thaw cycle — a moist breeze or a sunny afternoon — to bake the mountain snow into a giant, firm meringue for her crampons to devour.

She and James exchanged half a dozen texts this morning. When he was here she could feel his high spirits, a kind of exhilaration in him that was infectious. She’s never felt it with a guy before. He genuinely likes her — likes being around her, likes everything about her ( likes is the word she hears in her head, but her heart hears the other). In Edinburgh she told him it wouldn’t work, but it has to work.

Her boss mentioned a vacancy on the Galloway estate, which is much closer to James. There are even some pretty seaside towns nearby — not Bay pretty, maybe, but pretty for Scotland. There’s that town with all the bookshops. He might like that. She hasn’t mentioned this idea yet — there’s no rush. But she has a goal: somehow James and Brenda has to work.

Specific, measurable, achievable.

Natalie Mock has trained her swimming thoughts to occupy a territory as narrow as the lane, the furrow her body ploughs and reploughs: her stroke, her breathing, her time and distance, the status of her muscles, or by default a pleasant sensual trance. But today her thoughts are a marble too heavy to stay in its groove.

Diagnosis. The same thing happening again, but not the same. Everywhere Natalie sees the unconditional love of kin: parents for children, children for parents, sisters for brothers, wives for the fathers of their children. She and Dan have a different sort of tie. A work in progress. Even after six years of marriage, if she has to state ‘next of kin’ she begins to write her moping mother’s name, and inserts Dan’s only with some confusion.

She thinks back to their marriage vows — something about respecting and cherishing, throughout our lives together. Neither of them wanted anything too soppy. She dragged him out for a run on the morning of the wedding. Her thumb feels for the ring, which is not there, of course, but in her locker. There are days when she forgets to put it on. Dan always wears his.

Less than two weeks ago, she was searching for news of her ex-boyfriend with a vague, mutinous sense that Dan didn’t understand her. Life without him was vaguely, mutinously imaginable. And now? She tests that shady mental water, while the pool’s bubbles course brightly over her skin.

Now, life without Dan is an unimaginable horror. An injustice. Get ill if you must, but stay with me. She urges her body towards the wall and ducks into her turn. Stay with me, my love.

James F. Saunders takes a triumphant sip of his first homemade cup of espresso. A bitter, clinging swamp in the mouth: superb. The machine arrived yesterday, a birthday present from his parents. From his mother — though his father did sign the card this year.

James’ relationship with his mother was collateral damage in the just war of following his vocation. When he fell out with his father she patiently negotiated, tried to make peace. Blessed are that bunch.

‘Whose side are you on?’ James asked her, bluntly.

‘I’m on both your sides.’

‘Sorry, Mum, that’s not possible. Either you believe in me, support me, or you don’t.’

‘Of course I believe in you, James. But I also know your father is only thinking of you and your future.’

‘I can’t be entangled in that stuff. Goodbye.’

‘What do you mean, goodbye?’ There was a note of anger in her voice that she would afterwards regret. Too bad.

‘I’ll visit at Christmas. That’s it. Goodbye, Mum.’

He can still remember the triumphant rush as he hung up on the woman who had more or less dedicated her life to his happiness. A sacrificial offering has to be something precious, and the best writers have to be bastards.

He takes another sip and opens his laptop. The coffee is good; the novel, splendid and precarious like an unfinished bridge. The anxiety attendant on committing to a project of uncertain worth is nothing new, but the weight of ten years’ commitment and ten years’ anxiety now rests on this one trail of words. Doubts are inevitable. For instance: his story takes place over a calendar year — his aim to harness the deep, biological rhythm of the seasons — but perhaps a single day would have better suited his purpose. One voyage from wife to lover, or lover to wife. A day is nearly eternity for the mind, as the Exile demonstrated.

But he’s learned his lesson: to hesitate now would be to invite disaster. He has to see it through. Fifty thousand words down. Just keep writing.

One distraction that needs eliminating is Mike. A barren connection, after all, though it is doubly gratifying to James that the ginger spiv both allowed himself to be goaded back into an exchange of insults, and saw fit, in the same email, to ask for advice. What a prize pillock: but James will answer his question.

Dear Mike,

You ask what I would do if I had absolute freedom. Ah, freedom: that great divider of what it means to be human. So much of the human story, and the art reflecting it, is concerned with the struggles of individuals in the face of hostile external forces — war, tyranny, penury. In such circumstances, the goal is clear — simple freedom to live and to love. Even Montaigne’s self-examination was, in a sense — as of course you know — a private quest for freedom in barbarous times.

Then there are the rest of us — the lucky few already free and whose freedom is not threatened. We face an odder sort of struggle towards odder sorts of goals. We get the occasional existential bump from death but the intervening years are eerily quiet. We look for guidance but there is none. Where there is no right to sorrow, what right is there to happiness? Anxiety has filled the gap left by religion — material anxiety in those whose souls have entirely shut down, and in the rest, in those who cling to a vision of beauty, a churning, ceaseless anxiety of the spirit.

James frowns, and is about to delete this unplanned outburst. Those who cling to a vision of beauty! He should have taken that job writing the copy for car adverts. But he doesn’t delete it. Instead, he gives a bored sigh before nailing a final, unanswerable paragraph onto their doomed correspondence: a reconciliation of sorts.