‘I don’t know what to do with it. And I don’t know what do with myself. I never wanted to be — you know — one of those people.’
‘Well, you are one. Relax. Give a little away, if it’ll make you feel better. Give some to your college — establish the Vickers bursary for ginger students.’
‘People talk about good causes, but I don’t know which causes are good. And if I just give it away, I’m back where I started — scrabbling for more.’
‘Then quit. Start your own business.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Jesus, Mike. Show a bit of initiative. What are you passionate about?’
Mike frowns, as though he’s never considered that question — or rather as though he has, but doesn’t know the answer. He’s always been like this. The world rewards grace, polish and a harmony of elements — attributes Mike has in spades — while Dan’s substantive passion leaves it indifferent, has to fight for recognition. Not that it matters now.
Mike asks him about work, about his family, about Nat, but not about his health — not a simple, ‘How are you?’ that would demand an honest answer. Dan finds himself preferring not to volunteer his news. It will pollute everything it touches, including friendships.
‘Regards to Nat,’ says Mike as they part. ‘Funnily enough, I had a dream about her the other night.’ Dan turns, and he and Mike stand looking at each other, five yards apart. ‘It was absolutely filthy.’ The years, the light years, fall away and then pile back up swiftly. ‘That was a joke,’ adds Mike, with a frown and a parting wave.
Dan must have forgotten to smile.
‘EAT DA RICH.’ Mike, homeward bound, notices the enormous lamp-lit graffito on the approach to Paddington. His eyebrow twitches. Boarding the train earlier this evening, on his way out to Reading with the commuter hordes, he observed the righteous anger of the passengers unable to board — raving, knocking on the glass — and the sulking, incremental accommodation of those standing in the aisle. Shuffle a few steps to gift a stranger the chance to say goodnight to his kids — but the gift isn’t given. A microcosm of haves and have-nots. Factions at war forever, like the young and the old, the sick and well, perhaps the lover and the beloved.
Mike, with his sculptures and his Audi, was already a have. What does that make him now? With freedom comes responsibility. So said Spiderman, maybe. Now that the central excuse, the central apology of Mike’s life — the necessity to earn his crust — has effectively expired, he feels moral obligations pressing down on him unsupported, inescapable: obligations to the fellow man who didn’t strike it so lucky, obligations to his family and friends, and, above all, obligations to himself.
He owes something to his past self, that accomplished, popular schoolboy — Ginger Knickers, they called him, but they admired him nonetheless — patiently expectant and expected-of; and he owes something to his future self, the bent old man looking back on his life, a cup of dread in his hands, searching for traces of worth. He even feels like he owes something to his as-yet unimaginable children — some achievement, some narrative to earn their respect. His life so far would set an incoherent example.
He can’t ignore a sneaking feeling of being hard done by. His very privilege and good fortune have given him no material with which to build his character. Is that his fault? He might, after all, have battled adversity or injustice as lustily as the next man. (The last time he suffered severe physical discomfort? He fell out of an overloaded hammock five years ago and fractured his kneecap. The girl, a curvy Spanish siren, fell on top of him.) He never asked for all this. Does he deserve to be judged?
You might think luck would even out — for every serendipitous swing an eventual roundabout — but even Mike is hazily aware that randomness doesn’t work like that. That’s the gambler’s fallacy. The truth is that unevenness persists. Those honest plodders at Oxford, whose tutorial work he copied religiously before outscoring them in the final exams — they’ll never see a payback.
So there it is: no misfortune, no adversity, no character (being thirty-three, in the absolute prime of life, is the crowning insult). What is he passionate about? Women, obviously — sculpted contours of a woman’s crossed legs, exquisite interplay of muscle and bone — but what else? Air travel. Chablis. Civilisation. Beautiful things. In days gone by, one could simply be a collector. Today, that doesn’t wash.
His train slides into the snug, curved holster of the station. Dan was in a peculiar mood. He looked overworked and underpaid. Should meet him again to get to the bottom of it. Can’t have miserable friends. Mike swings the door open and contemplates Brunel’s iron cathedral as he treads the long, gum-pocked aisle of Platform Four.
Dear James, he taps swiftly from the back of his cab.
Sorry it’s taken me so long to reply to your heartfelt, ego-felt defence of literature. I get all that. The problem, as I thought we had established, is that you haven’t produced any. What makes you think your ideas are better than everyone else’s? You’re like a crackpot evangelist, stubbornly traipsing from door to slammed door. Nobody cares.
He’s about to sign off, but then adds a second paragraph, not so swiftly:
Here’s a question for you. What would you do if you had absolute freedom? If money was no object? And don’t say you’d write — money can’t buy you your masterpiece, so you’d be in the same predicament there. What would you do if, say, you inherited a fortune? I’m sure literature has explored that plotline pretty thoroughly, so as a beneficiary of those insights, you ought to have a good answer.
Natalie Mock grasps the handle of the rumbling kettle, stares out of the window at the neighbour’s fence and surrenders for a moment to selfish thoughts. She can’t believe this is happening again. For twenty years she’s constructed something original and resilient on the rubble of her father’s death. She can still remember asking him what the word diagnosis meant. Horrible long-legged insect of a word, now crawling back into her life. Did she ignore Dan’s symptoms because of scar tissue in her brain blocking out any thoughts of a re-run? Will it be harder this time? Slower? Lonelier?
She looks down at the two waiting mugs and feels an upwelling of love that inhabits, recolours her anger. Dan is sitting quietly, waiting. Is he ready for what’s going to happen?
She sets the mugs down and takes her usual place, half facing him on the adjacent side of the old table they bought in Sheffield for twenty pounds. Winter sun charms the twin snakes of steam and makes a dissection puzzle of the tabletop, belying, offending the overwhelming atmosphere of gloom. When Natalie speaks, her voice is barely audible even to herself.
‘It’s all those particles you work with.’ Dan says nothing. When he lifts his mug, he uses both hands. ‘Radiation. Magnetic fields. It must be. It’s scrambled your nervous system. That place you work is so — so unnatural.’
‘I don’t think it was my work.’
‘But that other physicist — whatshisname — Stephen Hawkins. He got the same thing.’
‘Hawking. He’s a theorist,’ replies Dan, wearily. ‘He wasn’t exposed to anything more hazardous than a stick of chalk.’
Natalie is powerless. ‘Then why?’ she whispers. ‘Why you?’
‘I don’t know. For years I’ve felt like there’s — something not quite right with me. Getting old before my time.’ This is the first Natalie’s heard of it.
‘Why didn’t you say something earlier?’
‘I told myself it was just paranoia. It probably was. We all feel a bit feeble inside, a bit achy and creaky, a bit twitchy — don’t we?’