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.
Goodbye, too, to the arms race between means to destroy and motives to desist, galloping to its inevitable, poetic end: the bomb. Stuff of myth. Only one outcome. But the species holds fire, we hold fire — screw that, we want to live, too much, more than they do in the myths. We dance Gangnam Style instead. Savour a brief heyday of partial peace and unequal plenty. Indulge in glass phalluses half a mile high, engrave poems on grains of rice, stick flags in the moon. Build colossal experiments underground. Kick a ball around. Sip flat whites and chillax.
Yes, the involuntary wide game of humanity is something like this. Its players come and go. Meanwhile, nature maintains a ruthless blast of indifference, cleansing, laying waste without vengeful motive, by storm or by disease; but not always — sometimes sympathetic to our predicament or seeming so, in a moment of dappled calm, or in swifts flying low at twilight, crying out the very same tuneless song of sorrow.
Goodbye to all that.
Dan stirs and blinks, his bout of orienteering complete for now: the foundations laid. He is not ready to address his goodbyes closer to home. Larger spots of rain peck at his face and eyes, and streak the great stones of the pedestal beside him. There is an inscription: PATRI OPTIMO. Best of fathers. A mocking eulogy that finds an accidental mark two centuries on. Putative pater-to-be Dan bumps and wobbles down the slope to the start of the walk.
There he pauses, a small, sedentary figure, parked on the starting line of this monumental home straight. Suddenly the brooding sky unveils a flood of late summer sunshine, and, at the same instant, fills the air with hard, shining, autumn rain.
From our distant vantage on the Walk we can only just make out Dan’s hand pulling a plastic bag from the side of the chair and covering his precious joystick. A few figures hurry past without noticing him, in search of shelter. The chair rolls forward along the rain-slick asphalt, wheel-deep in golden spray. From here we cannot see the finger finding the new switch or hear the wavering hum of the auxiliary electric motor, and we do not expect what happens next.
With a soft, distinct thwack, a black umbrella opens above the wheelchair, whose occupant continues resolutely towards his rendezvous.
2013
25. How deep
‘If you do not know how to die, never mind. Nature will give you full and adequate instruction on the spot.’
The lane runs on and on before the headlight beams, straight and narrow as a chute, while the dashboard clock adds another minute to its damning score. There are no signs, but James F. Saunders can feel the sour, potent gravity of the sea. Here, at last, are some houses; a pub, The Gun; a small car park, and beyond it a suggestion of yachts’ masts and a primeval darkness.
The car park is deserted apart from a few vehicles crouched and frosted in the shadows and two cars incongruously gleaming beneath a lamp: an Aston Martin and a Motability car.
‘They’ve gone without us.’
‘They wouldn’t.’ James swings the van alongside, stops the engine and opens his door to the cold, silent dawn. ‘Not when we’ve come so far.’
‘I told you they would.’
But they haven’t. The outer silence is broken by the unmistakeable sound of a hand-dryer and a door banging, and a procession makes its way into the car park from what is evidently a public toilet.
Natalie Mock feels ridiculous in her wellies, waterproofs and woolly hat. Dan and Mike cooked up this escapade while Dan was in the hospice. Sea-fishing in November. Will it be safe for you, she asked; Dan can still do withering looks. Fine. Whatever. She slings the rucksack over her shoulder (medicines and other necessaries — each month it grows heavier) and follows the conspirators out into the car park; two newcomers are standing under the car park’s single lamp.
‘It was them,’ says Mike, pushing his old friend’s chair. ‘Time and tide, people — time and tide!’
James has changed more in eighteen months than in the previous decade. He has a beard now — not like Dan’s regrettable Crusoe tribute (they abandoned the daily shave last summer because of skin irritation), but a neat goatee that suits him. His characteristic forward hunch — to Natalie always a signifier of eagerness, of leaning in, rather than weakness or burden — has been ironed straight. He shakes Mike’s proffered hand with ironic emphasis, then without hesitating stoops and warmly grasps both of Dan’s gloved hands where they rest on the arms of his chair.
‘Dan. Good to see you. Sausage for your thoughts — remember?’ Now, finally, he turns to her. ‘Natalie.’ The name still sounds odd on his lips. He leans to kiss her and gets a faceful of hat and waterproof jacket.