Thomas Maloney - Learning to Die

Mike looks at it blankly for a moment. ‘Oh, that — are you sure you’ve finished with it?’

‘Yes,’ replies James, quickly. ‘I’m sure.’

‘I’ve never actually read it, you know.’

‘That I can believe.’

Mike turns the book in his hands, frowns at the obvious new bruises, then opens it just a crack, as though committing a forbidden act, and peers inside. ‘Crispin, my old boss, gave me the set for my thirtieth birthday. I was holding out for a bottle of ’82, and didn’t know what to say. He was very solemn about it. Should I read it, do you think? Would I get much out of it?’

‘I don’t know,’ says James, reaching for the wine bottle. ‘I can’t remember what it’s about.’ He smirks at the label: what Mike has achieved is for the ’82 to become his daily plonk.

Dan asks Natalie to help him up the ladder into their tiny loft. There isn’t enough headroom to convert it — academic now — but last autumn Dan insulated and part-boarded the space. Slid the boxes of their least often-needed possessions into two neat rows. Cold storage in winter, in summer a kiln. Now, in spring, there is merely an ecclesiastical coolness as the Mocks kneel beside the open hatch, surveying their sentimental hoard.

In her row: a few large zipped portfolio cases; long carrier bags stuffed with storage tubes, rolls of tracing paper, balsa offcuts; CDs; a large backpacker’s rucksack stuffed with old clothes — Dan’s mind makes a glancing, involuntary connection to the stack of letters, the ex-boyfriend that he’d forgotten all about — a high stool; an easel he gave her that never saw much, if any, use. Before he knew her, she painted.

In his row: a heavy box of miniature soldiers from his childhood — his mind’s eye sees the stacked rank and file, cavalry with paper pennons laboriously painted and curled, siege engines, winged beasts in lurid hues — once so prized, now a perplexing irrelevance. Irrelevant too the school essays, exercise books, embarrassingly bad artworks, his house tie — a decade in one box. Ah, but this is more like it: his homemade wind-up radio, his collection of fossils and rock samples in stacked ice cream tubs, his chemistry set, his Commodore 64, and finally, right at the back, just visible, bubble-wrapped barrel lying across the unboarded rafters, his telescope.

‘Will you help me bring it down?’ he says. Natalie knows what he’s referring to, and sexily straddles the boxes to reach it. On his way down, with Nat guiding his useless foot onto each rung, he takes one last look before switching off the light.

James picks his way judiciously around Mike’s flat. Sliding glass doors recede into walls; ink drawings are printed on huge sheets of metal; windows have both blinds and curtains for good measure; toilet seats hover and then come to rest gracefully like UFOs. Even the air, once exhaled or abluted in, is silently, protectively drawn away to accommodate a filtered inflow.

He feels the old twinge of possibility — that there’s material here. This is life, after all, for better or worse. This is the age he’s been born into, and every age has a story to tell posterity.

Over breakfast Mike tried to explain, to justify his profession. Even if we are just monkeys throwing darts, he said, we’re necessary. We’re oil in the works. We operate in public markets using public information. Outcomes are dominated by randomness in many enterprises. Whale-watching tours. Test cricket in rainy nations. He claimed there were industries with less honourable methods and worse consequences. Not just satisfying a need, but creating one. Bottled water, he suggested, piously. Every second , thousands of plastic bottles are made, shipped, bought, landfilled. The Minoans, he said, were piping water four millennia ago. Whatever makes you feel better, replied James. Self-justification is, of course, a battle he understands.

He surveys the booze cabinet and wine fridge, idly sends heavy kitchen drawers rolling out and back on silent bearings. This material disparity between two losers apparently a meaningless accident. But no, not meaningless. The penniless humiliation of the artistic life is essential and just, a test of intention as well as resolve, and the mercenary’s riches are no different.

A cascade of electronic chimes breaks into his thoughts: the doorbell. He might well have ignored it, but happens to be standing at that moment in the hall. The heavy front door, three inches thick, swings back from its lisping seal and there, gracing with faded denim and khaki the grotesque, indigo marblings of the corridor carpet, stands Brenda the beloved.

‘Surpri—’ she starts to say. Surprise does indeed reverberate, ricochet between them, measuring out its own silent space. James is doubly confused, ambushed by vivid imaginings, decade-buried but scored deep, of the reunion, the reckoning that he never had with Becks. He’s practised this scene over and over, but with the wrong script.

‘Brenda,’ he murmurs at last, drawn out across the threshold. Thus I; faltering forward . ‘You got my letter.’

Brenda steps back, her eyes child-wide. She steps back again, retreats. Then her face crumples into a mask of very grown-up disgust.

‘Brenda. Wait. Just wait a moment. You don’t have to say anything. Just listen.’ She shakes her head, turns and hurries away down the corridor, duffle bag swinging. ‘Wait! I’ll leave, you stay.’ He follows to the stairwell, hears her echoing steps below.

‘I’m nobody — you stay!’ he calls. ‘I’ll leave!’ Then in desperation he adds, ‘I’m sorry for what I said! I was confused!’ Confused? These are the wrong words, he knows. The footsteps recede and a door bangs shut.

‘Can’t we just start again?’ he pleads of the silence.

Back in the cavernous fraternal crime scene of a flat, he calls Mike, leaves a message telling him to call Brenda tout de suite and packs his miserable bag.

Brenda Vickers stands beside the canal, her body soaked in cold sweat and her mind a hot infusion of anger and self-loathing (a hint of dissolved sweetness is ignored). Why did Mike have to put her through that? What was he thinking? Why is the world so stupid?

Her phone buzzes in her pocket. She yanks it out: Mike. Her phone, she suddenly understands, is the surgical implant by which these hateful people control her. Invading her mental space with their pathetic, desperate sexts and their concerned family signals (commands, rather) and their rescheduled appointments, pressing their obligations upon her. She lets it swing for a moment between her finger and thumb, cracked screen abrading cracked skin, then flicks it spinning into the canal. Plop. The water is clear, and she sees it plumb the four or five feet to the bottom, raise a little puff of silt, and lie there, face up in the sun, drowning mutely. Out of your misery. An electronics serial killer now.

And she laughs.

Dan Mock relishes a practical challenge, and the crutches present many. The tool holster he wears round the house and lab accommodates his tablet, phone, tea flask, snacks, and anything else he needs to carry from one room to another. He’s cushioned the crutch handles with gel-filled sleeves and armed the tips with all-weather rubber feet. He’s had five cheap bar stools delivered, one for each room of the house (including one in the shower) for easy sitting and rising. His father, arriving with a toolbox in each hand and a sort of fierce, desperate joy at being able to help, has helped him to install grab handles in tricky places.

Yes, humans are adaptable in the face of incapacity. Practical victories encourage profounder internal ones. But Dan’s disease harbours a unique scorn for such resilience. Just as he gains purchase, traction on his difficulties (and as he and Natalie even feel able to laugh at them), it changes the rules: deepens his incapacity and renders all his adaptations useless. Presents a snake to cancel all his laboriously-climbed ladders.