Thomas Maloney - Learning to Die

James is talking to Pete, his original discoverer and champion, and waves a casual, friendly farewell to the Mocks as a single entity.

From now on, Mike’s going to be there for them. This resolve, like James’ farewell, finds it convenient to address the two as one. But as the launch swings out into the channel and the Mocks themselves turn to wave, and as love and sadness well up in Mike’s stunted heart, the eye he catches is Natalie’s.

Winter is a surprisingly chilly affair in Kentucky, New South Wales. Brenda likes the cold, of course, but isn’t dressed for it, and blows on her hands as the cabin warms up. She imagined a rustic log cabin, but it’s more of a portakabin. On the wall there really are pictures of prize sheep wearing rosettes.

‘Can you tell me again,’ says Austin, thoughtfully scratching his stubbly jaw so that muscles bulge in the crook of his arm, ‘exactly what this bloke of yours did wrong?’

Brenda feels her chest tighten. ‘He admitted that he was just using our relationship as material for his book.’

Austin chuckles and shakes his head. ‘Christ, Bren — sorry, I don’t mean to laugh. But you do pick ’em. And this would be the book that you, er, relieved him of.’ Brenda nods. ‘And Mikey knew this, and took his side?’

‘I don’t actually know what Mike knows. But James was in his flat. Opened the door to me, like they were best mates.’

Austin grunts and nods, as though his point had been made. ‘And I guess this author bloke went spare when you — took your revenge. Since his precious book was all he cared about, I mean.’

‘Not really,’ answers Brenda. ‘He wanted me back.’ Austin grunts and nods again, letting the implications of this fact, whatever he considers them to be, speak for themselves.

‘Still,’ he sighs, cracking a can of imported English cider, ‘plenty more tups in the rut, as they say.’

Austin thinks the best of everyone. Always has. One result is that he lives in a portakabin. Another is that he always seems to be happy. That’s why Brenda came here, buying her ticket with Mike’s unused fifties — that, and the certainty that Austin wouldn’t try to make her see a doctor. They both know she’s unwell, but they believe in other kinds of treatments.

Mike Vickers sits forward on the perverse reception-area chair, elbows on knees, fingers bridged, waiting his turn. The sales rep thumbs her phone intently. This is the culmination of three months’ schmoozing — a finals pitch, a direct contest against one or more unknown rivals. Thirty minutes each in front of the investment committee, and Mike’s up next.

The MRI’s lacklustre, dodgem-car year has continued, but last year’s bonanza keeps prospective investors interested. Past performance is no guide to… but nobody listens to that, least of all the professionals. Mike has learned to push the miraculous doublethink that while the MRI program itself is a ruthless algorithm immune to all human foibles, its investors also gain some sort of unspecified access to his firm’s world-renowned human traders and economists, its superstar sparkle. CIOs don’t want to hear that the strategy is just fresh-faced Mike, a standard issue desktop PC and ten thousand lines of inherited code.

The marketing team have helped him out with a new logo inspired by CSI , or maybe ER , and a glossy brochure. They can’t improve on Mike’s immaculate charts, of course — he has an A* in geography and he’s not afraid to use it — and the magic show doesn’t work in hard-copy. But the new introduction, emphasising his firm’s peerless reputation and limitless resources, doesn’t do any harm.

A door clicks somewhere, releasing a waft of voices and footsteps. Mike’s rep looks up from her phone, smiles nervously and mouths, ‘Here we go.’ The outgoing rivals stride into view, and the smug, confident little smile that Mike has prepared for them dies on his face. His adversary — hawk nose, crooked tie, greying hair slightly wild — grins broadly.

‘Michael. Fancy that. May the best man win.’ It’s Crispin. Crispin, ferocious boffin-in-chief, who should be in Hong Kong, and he knew he was up against Mike. Which means this battle is lost.

The muffled, resigned yelps of his neighbours’ midlife therapy transport James F. Saunders back to the night before he started his late novel. The ghosts of Byron and Van Gogh, wasn’t it? The spectre of death. All just repetition from here on. It’s easy to wallow in dark thoughts when you’re holding a luminous lifeline of hope, as he was then.

He frowns at the ceiling. He could have emailed the novel to himself — he even thought of doing it, about forty thousand words in — but he didn’t act. Why not? He doesn’t know. Its absence is still palpable — it is like a death, but a death, perhaps, of someone he misses less than he expected.

Is it time to begin the next doomed cycle of repetition? The altered landscape of his life would demand a very different book now, of course. A more — dare he even form the words in his head? — a more grown-up sort of book. Or — this new thought, impossible before his impromptu reunion with Becks, hits him like a tomahawk, and he gasps audibly — is it finally time to call it quits? Is this the end? And if it is the end, so what?

A breeze from the open window wafts, caresses, consoles James’ face in the darkness. The neighbours are all fucked out now, and wavelets are crisply slapping the shingle. Kesh; kesh; kesh . If this is the end of his endeavour, his writing dream, then there will be, after all, no special legacy for James F. Saunders, no lasting work to touch the hearts of readers yet unborn, just as there will be no solemn slab laid down to mark his eventual passing, trod by reverent feet, but instead, crammed out of sight, unloved and tended by contract, a grubby little pellet of reconstituted stone.

Dan Mock, stuck indoors on a day of roiling clouds and hot, glistening pavements, has driven his chair to the front window to watch, hear and smell the latest downpour. He slides a weak hand through the opening. If he could, he’d lift the sash high and stick his head out.

He has mixed feelings about the peculiar re-entry of Natalie’s ex into their lives. For himself, he is glad: he feels like a missing puzzle piece has been pressed into place, or a stubborn Sudoku grid has resolved itself. But meeting James seems to have upset Natalie. Dan is sympathetic rather than suspicious — he’s not sure whether this is because James did, after all, turn out to be a bit of a loser, comfortingly unimaginable as his successor, or whether the jealous impulse has receded with his illness, just as the sex demon itself has relaxed its grip (the apparatus still functions, surprisingly, but the balance between his higher and lower selves has shifted).

But no — jealousy hasn’t receded: it has merely changed colour. The thought of Natalie having children with and growing old with another man — not with him, after all, despite everything they’ve been through together, but with someone else, someone who thinks different thoughts, feels different, smells different, stands an alien razor in the bathroom cabinet — this thought conjures no indignation now, but only a grey, fathomless sadness. The more firmly he resolves that she must one day find someone else, that she must be happy without him, the further he slides down into his private, jealous sorrow. But still, she must.

Last Friday they went to watch the Olympic swimming. Once in a lifetime, people say. A nine-hour round trip for eighty minutes of frenzied splashing and churning. Not much of a spectator sport, swimming, you’d think, but it was fun. Mike offered them tickets for Saturday’s athletics, but Dan declined — he wanted Nat to see her swimming, and consecutive days would have been too much. Instead, they watched what the papers are now calling Super Saturday on TV with Mark and Rachel. Dan felt an echo of his childhood fascination with records and results, a whisper of envy for all that flowing motion, and a resigned sense that in staging such spectacles, in relentlessly overdoing it, humanity is trying just a little too hard.