Learning to Die Read online

  Contents

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  2011

  1. Hard water

  2. Life ring

  3. Crowded room

  4. Stacked fragments

  5. Rocket Jesus

  6. Empty space

  7. Mad things

  8. Unruly trail

  9. Honour codes

  10. Explicit response

  11. Unspoken meaning

  12. Family history

  2012

  13. Lifetime allowance

  14. Blank page

  15. Nervous system

  16. Rich tapestry

  17. Glorious flood

  18. Deadest thing

  19. Damage zone

  20. Tracing paper

  21. Slap bang

  22. Living thing

  23. Two halves

  24. Not enough

  2013

  25. How deep

  26. Circling scythe

  27. Warm sea

  28. Yours absolutely

  LEARNING TO DIE

  Thomas Maloney was born in Kent in 1979, grew up in London, and studied Physics at Oxford. His first novel, The Sacred Combe, was published in 2016. He lives in Oxfordshire with his family.

  For A.

  Scribe Publications

  18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

  2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

  Published by Scribe 2018

  Copyright © Thomas Maloney 2018

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  9781925322170 (Australian edition)

  9781911344308 (UK edition)

  9781925548266 (e-book)

  CiP records for this title are available from the British Library and the National Library of Australia.

  scribepublications.com.au

  scribepublications.co.uk

  2011

  1. Hard water

  ‘I do not teach; I relate.’

  Montaigne

  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 butto
n 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.

  A vast white tentacle of moonlight slides up and over the mountain, and picks out in brilliant detail the tiny figure on the ridge, now walking fast. She is wearing a neat black windproof jacket, black leggings, and a headband to corral a wiry tumble of dark hair. You might want her to be a glamour-puss but she isn’t, and the mountain doesn’t care: her face is rather narrow, her forehead high, and her body lacking in curves, but, striding out onto a spiny outcrop of snow-plastered rocks, she moves like a wildcat.

  It was somewhere just below here. She steps across a gap between two boulders, testing the footing of steel spikes on snowy rock before she commits, then leans to execute a delicate side-pull with a gloved hand, redirecting her nine stone of weight as she drops neatly into a sheltered hollow. Life feels precious up here. One false step.

  Dan Mock has no friends in this unlovely tangle of a town. There is a chilly breeze but he feels quite calm, his own predicament merely comic when viewed beside that of his stricken wife. Limescale and the prong of a shower cradle: an unlikely conspiracy of violence, intruding on her well-ordered life. Undeserved. Not serious, the doctor said — but too close to serious, and his fault. What would he do or be without her?

  His gaze alights with a flourish on his tarp-covered Yamaha steed: mile-devourer, freedom-giver. He’ll hotwire it, hitch up his dressing gown, ride to Mark and Rachel’s place along the Berkshire back-lanes — out of sight of the rozzas — and be tucked up on their sofa within half an hour. But hotwire with what? For a third time he fingers those balsa-woody tissues in his pockets. He mentally scans the bike for anything detachable. Nada: he keeps a tight ship. He will walk, and find a skip. Reading is well-supplied with skips, and skips are full of wire.

  He passes a few lighted windows — should he knock at a door? These people will recognise him at least, if not know his name. Won’t they? He plays through the possible outcomes and they are not encouraging — he doesn’t even know Mark’s phone number by heart — so he walks on. At the street corner he spies a beer can in the gutter: that will conduct, if he can cut a strip off. He scatters the dregs — Special Brew, no less — and puts it in his pocket to keep his options open.

  Compared to his own shadowy street, the main road is lit up like a film set. A man approaches, shelters behind his terrier and looks away. A young couple, students, cross to the other side before they pass him. He reaches the little parade of shops and sees his reflection in a darkened window: a shambling weirdo in a too-short dressing gown. A glimpse of somehow misshapen knees. He at last looks like he often secretly feels. Like everyone feels, for all he knows. The beer can protrudes shamelessly. He moves to throw it away but cannot bring himself to drop litter. He finds a rubbish bin, checks inside for any handy lengths of wire, shivers, blows on his hands, and wanders on.

  James F. Saunders is awakened by the moist rustle of rain, or perhaps by its smell, which restores him instantly to the recumbent, unseeing alertness that the world’s somniacs are spared. He imagines involuntarily the damp, tangled nest of limbs and hair beyond the wall; consciously stops grinding his teeth; extends an arm outside the duvet’s warmth and explores the edge of his desk until his fingers close on a plastic cigarette lighter with no fuel left in it. He sits up suddenly and flicks the wheel. Zhip. There it is: this crappy little room, his whole dead-end life, in a flash. Chair desk lop-sided wardrobe dormer window tiny sink. None of it his. A mound of his clothes is heaped over the chair-back — this nightly balancing act unchanged since his student days — his jeans and long-johns half-covering the chunky laptop as though trying to delay the punch-line of a moderately good joke. Again: zhip.

  He seems to smell something else, something rotten in that midnight rain. Yes indeed, he muses: why shouldn’t the spectre of death loom large in one’s early thirties? The ghosts of Byron, Mozart and Van Gogh, whose heavy-scented genius he both reveres and despises, all dwell hereabouts, flashing cold, brilliant eyes and whispering that it really doesn’t matter whether or not you have a few decades left to live. You’ve had ample time to prove your worth, and from here on it’s probably all just repetition. Who can blame old Rob and Trudy for moaning and slamming their headboard against the wall? Were they fucking or just having a breakdown?

  James lets the lighter fall and sinks back onto his pillow. Without noticing what he is doing he begins to count — instead of sheep, and like the fool he undoubtedly is — all the great men and women who died when they were younger than he is now.

  Nevertheless, tomorrow he will begin.

  Natalie looks down at the little plastic socket they have stuck in the back of her hand, currently unattached to any tube. Her body is, of course, just a gadget to be charged up, and into which various branded gizmos must occasionally be downloaded.

  How silly of her to forget this. It is, she supposes, a good thing to be reminded of the fragility of the body, that soggy bundle of offal without which all the rest, all the important stuff in your head, simply disappears. Every living adult is a miraculous soap opera of deaths averted, offal preserved — buses not walked in front of; infections heroically fought off by mechanisms she suspects nobody quite understands even today; railings on boats, bridges and balconies wistfully leaned against but not climbed over; cars impeccably, implausibly steered along miles of winding lanes — as well as a terrifyingly dense compress of experience: the bleak and brutal vastness of childhood somehow overcome. And yet, she observes, turning again to the sea of rooftops, here they are in their burgeoning thousands: the survivors. Adult specimens.

  Mike strolls nonchalantly past the queuing mortals, waves his passport, springs jauntily down the walkway and is shown to his weird peapod of a seat. He changes from loafers to slippers and slides The Economist from his slim portfolio briefcase.

  He settles into his seat and sighs: here in his hands are the troubles of the troubled world. As an accidental member of the so-called one per cent (his father would never believe it), he is duty bound at the very least to read, to understand.

  Later. Wearing the same expression as Prince Hal trying out the bur
den of kingship, he crowns himself with a pair of noise-cancelling headphones, thumbs his way to something exquisite and closes his blond-lashed eyes.

  Brenda shrugs off her rucksack and stands motionless for a few seconds, listening to wind singing gently over snow. She carefully backs out of the hollow and down onto the yawning slope, then turns to face the night and kicks in her spiked heels expertly. Hot piss burning through snow like an arc welder: always satisfying. The fifty blue-white peaks of Knoydart glow softly in the light of a clouded moon.

  Back in the hollow she steps out of the crampons and boots and into a light sleeping bag, sits on her rucksack with her back nestled into a comfortable cleft and lights a tiny propane stove. Ten minutes after dropping into this remembered hollow just grazing three thousand feet and with the air temperature at minus six and falling, she has drunk a cup of hot soup, brushed her teeth, washed her face with a delicious gloveful of snow, pulled on a silk balaclava pre-warmed in her inside pocket, and is comfortably fast asleep. Her eyelashes, dark, carry a single fleck of wind-borne snow.

  A hundred miles to the south, a 747 howls through space, heading for what was once the New World.

  2. Life ring

  ‘Do I feel her assaults? Indeed I do.’

  Montaigne

  Dan directs his steps towards the town centre: he recalls building sites that seem the most promising wire-troves. Reading is an obstacle-course town of underpasses, multi-storey car-parks and complex pedestrian crossings. The River Kennet somehow burrows its way through the concrete jungle to join the larger Thames, which glides dismissively round the leafier north side of the town.

  There are youths on the Kennet’s towpath, up to no good. Youths — at the age of thirty-two, Dan already finds the word on his lips. He stops for a moment on the footbridge. A girl who ought to be cold is trying to hula the life-ring, and shrieks when it lands on her foot with a thud. A boy laughs.