Thomas Maloney - Learning to Die

Replicating, fornicating beasties, each a thermodynamic house of cards, improbable, expendable, ready to dissolve: if a lucky few perform their party trick, their replication, that’s enough. Mutate, select, repeat. Can’t pause it, can’t switch it off. Repeat, repeat, repeat, and then — a gasp, and a hush. Another, stranger accident. Self; angst; not Eve who ate the apple but that blind watchmaker gone berserk. Repenting now, perhaps.

One red kite keens loudly above and another replies; a buffet of wind lifts Dan’s hair and lays it down in the fair approximation of a caress. With three strokes, the shadow of a long, low rag of cloud recolours in softer tones the western row of trees, the walk, the eastern row.

Mould with attitude. We are. But material orientation is not enough.

The heart of Mike Vickers is about as heavy as the mahogany box that he sets down on the table beside the drained glass and empty bottle of ’82. He flips the clasp; the lid swings back until restrained by two gold chains. Mounted and framed inside it, as though on the screen of a ridiculous laptop, is a print of the famous, luminous portrait. In the box, two snug, artfully arranged compartments: a leather folder (letters, memoranda, copies of wills all in slip cases — the provenance) and a small, velvet-lined and Perspex-lidded display case.

Mike locks eyes with the portrait’s subject. Receding hair, discreet lippy, a nose that swells as you look at it. Sly bastard. Wheeler-dealer. Winner. Mike, by contrast, has been well and truly rumbled: fraud, bluffer, loser. The other box — the MRI — is to be closed. ‘Nothing personal,’ said the Generalissimo, cheerfully, eyes already wandering back to his screens. ‘Wrong market for us. Live and learn. Spot for you on the execution desk.’

Victoria is looking for something more serious; Lulu is in Milan and might not come back; Carmen has just announced her civil partnership on Facebook. Good luck to them. Nothing personal.

Time for that clean break? PhD? Hobby farm? Not-for-profit? Dry stone walling? He looks down at his slim, pinkish fingers. Never built so much as a Lego tower. All the maths forgotten. At that moment, realisation opens a scathing yellow eye: the fault doesn’t lie in his profession. His half-hearted defences of the investment industry are all basically, depressingly sound. You don’t have to lay actual bricks one upon the other to contribute something useful. The fault lies rather in himself. In his own incapacities and bad choices: the world’s technicalities a mystery his brain is not equipped to penetrate, its moral endeavours unfathomable to a shallow heart. A swindled silver spoon up his arse. Good for nothing.

He opens the small display case, pinches the glinting object from its velvety cleft and holds it between his finger and thumb. Looks at the portrait, at the object, at the portrait, back to the object. Dan has his electrons (and more), Brenda her mountains, James his words — even Pete Walley, it turns out, plays mean improv piano. Mike Vickers has this only. His one claim on the universe, staked by means of a transaction.

He rises, walks to his colossal hall mirror. Holds the object up to its rightful place. Stares. Leans closer, closer, until his forehead is pressed on the glass. Stepped in so far. Stepped in what? How far?

Shakespeare’s putative earring slips from his worthless fingers, glances off his shoe and rolls onto the doormat. He doesn’t stoop to pick it up.

Natalie’s friend Rachel raises a questioning eyebrow when she orders an Appletiser in the riverside gastropub, and Natalie has to laugh and shake her head. A curious thing, how pregnancy begins with a flurry of lies.

The little art festival was surprisingly good. She might even dig out her pen and ink when she gets home. One particular portrait triggered a shiver of sadness — an act of preservation, deeply personal, infused with knowing as no photograph can be. There is no portrait of Dan.

But this is a day to speak of other things. It is Dan’s absence, after all, that restores Rachel to her intimate, confiding, insightful best. The two friends eat, talk, laugh and treat themselves to dessert. As they part — one to her car, the other towards the station — they solemnly agree to reconvene. Rachel has already driven away when Natalie frowns abruptly and turns back to the pub.

The monochrome faces of a hundred ladies with bouffant hair stare down from the papered walls and door of the toilet cubicle. Even the ceiling. Some of the faces are smugly smiling, some scornful, some apparently ready to pass out; a few offer pitying frowns. Black and white chequerboard floor, white porcelain, black seat.

Somewhere a cistern falls silent, so that the only sound is Natalie’s breath ringing in the reverberant space. In the white bowl, glaring up between her white thighs, and blotted thickly across the white pants hammocked between her white knees: a precipitous shock of scarlet.

Dan exerts his fading muscles to shift in his chair. A spot of rain pricks his windward cheek; tickles pleasantly — unreachable, unwipeable there. He stares into the distance, northward along the Long Walk, still engaged in orientation.

Mould with attitude. Indeed — in one hot and fertile sweet spot, the intersection of improbable statistics, mutate-select-repeat happens upon a configuration with unprecedented élan. A mechanism unknown in all the earth’s astonishing biological engineering: reason. The power to exploit and subdue. Reason masters fire; annihilates with spears the stupider beasts; invents farming instead; axe, rope, wheel. Clear-fells whole countries, slashes, burns, replants, makes deserts bloom, dredges a harvest out of helpless oceans, slaughters and weeps at the slaughter and slaughters again.

With tenacity and courage it crosses oceans and deserts, adapts in the face of searing heat, cold, drought and disease, claims the whole planet as its domain (and in recent times, recrosses those oceans solo and unsupported, by canoe or balloon or pea-green pedalo, just for the hell of it). It’s not goodbye to the universe for Dan — the universe recycles its waste — but goodbye to this inadvertent biological venture, this wide game frantically cross-hatched by triumph and despair: this society of humankind.

Goodbye to the untold microstructure of history — its countless individual struggles and sorrows, scoring their vivid colours one upon the other, overlapping, intersecting until the very soul of the species is saturated and numb, its characteristic anxiety born of the possibility it might forget all this vital substance and remember only the outlines, the peevish machinations of politics, dogma and war. Even now, at this very moment, as the day begins to turn above this million-footworn paddock west of Londinium and the season follows close behind, the flood tide of humanity rises. Trickling, prickling along the Eurasian Steppe, the Rift Valley and the Gangetic Plains, Yangtze and Orinoco, Appalachia, Patagonia, Arabia and the Norfolk Broads, fierce, private longings that never find expression, wells of loneliness, prisons of enmity and fleeting intermissions of joy. Acts of gross stupidity. Unreason. Madness. Rage. Acts of defiance, of quiet, untold fortitude, of generosity and love, inundating with blood and tears the ever-absorbent, ever-renewing earth.

Goodbye to the human form, strutting and bopping along the delicious fine line between existential grace and sexual sorcery; to harmonious voices or those merely kind or sincere; to transcendental smiles; to the stranger’s face that takes your breath away.

Goodbye to labours of love, to marvels of engineering and imagination, to music of such omniscient loveliness it might have cascaded from the gods, but was in fact dashed off one Sunday afternoon over the billiard table. Goodbye to skulduggery and to earnest discourse, to stacked tomes of ethics, philosophy and law. Goodbye to the million hearts in mouths as the ball balloons over the bar; to the stunned theatre audience, sharing a moment unrecordable but lingering like a shape on the retina; to long-awaited headlights on a foggy night, throwing shadows like black windmills; to the old busker, lungs ruined, who jangles his strings tunelessly, stops them with a sad, remorseful hand (wife long-suffering, now long gone), and then dives into the twelve-bar blues.