Thomas Maloney - Learning to Die

Since he is carrying a sack of rubbish in each hand, and thinking guiltily of the glass of wine he has just poured himself rather than the interaction between breezes and buildings — guiltily because his wife is in hospital with multiple injuries — Daniel Mock leaves the back door open on his way through the mid-terrace house and out into the street. He encourages the sacks to settle against the low front wall. He glances automatically at those left out by his neighbours on each side to confirm the well-established fact, faintly satisfying even on a night like this, that he and Mrs Mock are less wasteful than some.

He turns back to the house, remembering the waiting warm-smacky glass of rosso with a feeling that his last duty is done, just as the front door slams in his face with theatrical violence. He stands staring at it for a few seconds, gives it a forlorn push, then looks down at himself. He is wearing a shabby towelling dressing gown and a pair of slippers. He sinks his hands speculatively into the gown’s pockets but they encounter only a couple of well-used tissues of unknown vintage. He leans and peers through the living room window, where between the casually closed curtains he can plainly see the rim-glistening chalice on the table.

He steps back and looks left and right at his profligate neighbours’ windows, which are uncharacteristically and unequivocally dark; the spare key will not be forthcoming. His wife has a punctured lung and is not about to come to his rescue. He turns to the street and looks up at the drifting urban-orange Friday night sky. A pale smear, a nocturnal emission beyond the high-rise, might be the moon. He puts his hands back in his pockets.

Meanwhile, in his lop-sided bedroom in the north-eastern coastal village of Merryman’s Bay, James F. Saunders is feeling anything but merry. The couple next door are at it again. They must like the way the headboard thumps against the wall, otherwise why not move the bed back an inch or two? He has to admire their stamina: they go at it hammer and tongs for a few minutes, then subside into faint moaning and shuffling, and then, just as James begins to drift off, they’re at it again. Bang, bang, bang, moan, moan, moan, faster and faster, until he begins to worry about the plasterwork, then a few slow, emphatic crashes like someone trying to shoulder down a door, another hiatus of recuperating sighs, and then it begins yet again. He cannot suppress the thought that it was never quite so gung-ho with Becks.

Of course what depresses James most about his neighbours’ weekend performances, as he lies in his winter pyjamas in his own bed, is that despite himself he gets aroused. When the woman — Trudy is her name, late thirties, wary eyes, new-age type — moans or yelps or calls out something stupid she heard on TV, James’ jaded body responds. Like a decrepit retired soldier stubbornly heeding the call of duty, making a fool of himself.

He adjusts his pyjama trousers sulkily, rolls over and closes his eyes. There is a merciful pause in the fucking, and the last sound he hears is the restive sea pawing the ramp outside the Bay Hotel: it is a spring tide.

Tomorrow he will begin.

Natalie Mock is in the Royal Berkshire with a punctured lung, concussion and a smorgasbord of bumps and bruises.

When the Mocks were house-hunting in Reading in the spring, she was impressed by the water pressure in what is now their bathroom: she always tested the shower, and this one was a belter. Cleaning the bathroom is Dan’s job, and he is pretty reliable (Nat is in charge of the kitchen). But Reading water is not like the sweet moorland run-off in Sheffield, where they went to university, or Manchester, where Dan grew up. Reading water is a groundwater soup of calcium ions, and these too are house-hunting.

This morning the showerhead, hopelessly clogged with scale, shot off the pipe like a champagne cork and struck Natalie on the right temple. A slight young woman still makes quite a crash. The riot-hose cascade soon roused her to a consciousness of sorts, but early attempts to sit up met with failure. Her back was apparently pressed not against the bottom of the bath but on a bed of nails, and it hurt to breathe. Blood, diluted by the deluge to something like raspberry juice, was trickling impressively between her breasts and pooling in her belly button, which it treated as a sort of roundabout, turning neatly to the right and overflowing around one throbbing hip. A faint but conspicuous stripe of raspberry juice was running down the side of the bath from one of the ornamented prongs of the shower’s cradle. She’d never liked the fittings in here.

‘Krovvy,’ she murmured, the word blossoming from nowhere. ‘Red, red krovvy.’ Her stunned dizziness was, despite even odds of her being sick, only two points south of exhilaration. The jolted rational machinery of her brain slowly started to turn: she was alone in the house; she should summon medical assistance. An urgent corollary to the latter thought was the matter of her soapy nudity: twisting her head she glimpsed her pants and T-shirt dangling reassuringly on the edge of the basin. Everything was going to be alright. She applied herself more systematically to the conundrum of getting up by stretching a trembling foot towards the tap.

Now she lies in a comfortable annexe of the nothing-too-serious ward, after the nurses agreed to move her from Respiratory because, my God, the coughing! Breathing is painful, but the doctor says the lung damage from the puncture-wound on her back is not serious, and has opted to wait, see and prescribe painkillers. She has a jug of water, a button to call the nurse, and a slatted view of the Reading evening: garage rooftops like a Rio favela, the back of a pub where a dozen hardy patrons are sipping and puffing on damp garden furniture, and a sighting through clouds of the penny-hard edge of the full moon.

Mike Vickers stands at a pane of glass the size of a small house, watching a stubby short-haul plane taxi past from left to right, while a jumbo slides along a parallel lane in the opposite direction. It’s like a screensaver, if you remember those. The programmer’s whimsical signature is the unmistakeable silhouette of Windsor Castle upstage right, its tiny speck of a flag picked out by a spotlight, broadening the vista of both space and time.

Mike, thirty-three last week, feels he wears a faint halo of precociousness among the middle-aged gadget-toting veterans of the Executive Club. He turns away from the window to observe the one pretty waitress (this is BA) bend gorgeously to serve his G&T on a table whose lowness he silently appreciates. She might just fall for his habitual masque: the dot-com entrepreneur modestly eschewing First as part of some trendy web-ethos. He almost believes it himself.

Is one likely to obtain more pleasure, he wonders, letting the ice cubes nuzzle the fine Cupid’s bow of his upper lip — or rather should one obtain more pleasure — from a luxury one chooses and pays for oneself out of hard-earned spondulicks, or a luxury that falls quite properly into one’s lap? (We omit the phenomenon of theft, he notes.) The difference is surprisingly slight: in other words, these free G&Ts are tasting better and better.

Brenda Vickers zigs for another twenty yards, then starts her long zag up onto the dim bluish whaleback of the ridge. This is her favourite moment. The bite of her crampons is the only sound above the layered orchestra of the wind, which is winding up to its ridge-top crescendo. She prods her imagination to conjure the abyss of hard snow that the November darkness conceals, and smiles.