A two-minute breather. She’s learning to love this arse-end of Scotland. She was afraid she might feel hemmed in, with Glasgow sat sprawled between her and the Highlands like a vindictive troll, but these broad-shouldered, forest-skirted hills are a revelation: an unshowy, neglected, bleak Brenda-heaven. This fifteen-mile circuit is worth it just for the names: Murder Hole, Rig of the Jarkness, Loch of the Dungeon, Range of the Awful Hand. Sounds like a dinner party.
The Wigtown shop seemed to offer a new start — cold sweats and arcs of blood behind her. Last week’s debacle with James’ ex proved otherwise. Ah, well. James himself, at least, has come up trumps. He really was in love with her — Brenda — all along. The circumstances of their reconciliation — that letter sent by his little devotee, whom she later met over parkin and milkshakes — gives her a warm, cosy, sheltered-from-the-wind feeling. Maybe everything really does happen for a reason. She wouldn’t suggest that to James, of course — they try to avoid both laughing at each other and giving cause. There are frequent lapses, but that’s okay. They’re on the same side.
Brenda has heard that from this highest hill in the range you can sometimes see Snowdon, a hundred and forty miles to the south — the country’s longest direct sightline. The air is clear today, an ozone-tinted void, but not clear enough: she’ll have to make do with the Isle of Man, the Irish mainland and the peaks of Arran, each fifty miles away or more, etched along the shining, circling scythe of the sea.
Natalie blends the soup in short, weary bursts, keeping one eye on the baby monitor that will flash if Dan coughs or presses his call button. Carrot and ginger — his favourite. Chilblains on her fingers, knuckles that bleed from the slightest knock, a split on the tip of her thumb. Marks of her trade. And yes — a baby monitor, recommended by the nurse.
She worked part time until Dan’s first serious choking incident. When she explained her working hours to a supplier with whom she was arranging a meeting, the guy assumed she was ‘another one of these super-mums.’ It happened a few times, but she remembers that occasion because it was just about when their baby would have been born. Their one miraculous chance. She’s never started the pill again, and nothing’s happened. Teasing, irregular periods; half a dozen negative tests in the dustbin of her life. Dan says it’s probably him — still likes to imagine her carting about some other guy’s child after he’s gone. But Natalie has always known she wasn’t built for babies.
As she pours the last blenderful straight into a bowl for them to share, the monitor sings out, lights flashing. She picks up the bowl, spoon, napkin, and walks promptly but calmly down the hall to their room.
Dan’s eyes are already fixed on the door as she enters. Breathing, he taps. She leans close, can hear and feel his shallow, laboured breaths.
‘You need the puffer?’ His thumb twitches assent. She switches on the machine, fiddles with the settings, untangles the tubes, carefully fits the bands over his head and adjusts the seal around his nose and mouth. It works by giving the air an extra push each time he breathes in. She holds his hand. After a minute or so, says, ‘Better?’
The thumb twitches. It begins slowly picking out letters on his keypad.
Natalie — a pause, in which the puffer wheezes softly, then he adds, my love — another pause — I think we are nearly there.
27. Warm sea
‘Neither men nor their lives are measured by the ell.’
Dan Mock savours the near-silence: Nat has turned off the puffer, just for a few minutes, because it keeps making him cough — or try to cough. His puckered lungs, full of bad stuff, twitch their feeble, rapid breaths. It has occurred to him that this is a sort of trial run.
He pushes his sluggish, reluctant mind along one corridor of thought after another, looking for the old luminous clarity that seems to have deserted him. Life hangover. He could listen to a piece of music. Something delicate that rejoices in a soundless room; something heartbreaking, while he still has a heart to break. He turns his eyes to the screen and scans his collection, but can’t decide. Last chance for a last listen. No. It feels too late for that. Too late to worry about things he won’t do, places he won’t go, people he won’t see. His eyes swivel up to his Hubble galaxies. Uncounted thousands of them in that postage stamp of sky. Teeming with life — maybe. But the meaning, the vision is slipping now.
His family were here today. His parents would be here every day, of course, but he and Nat talked months ago, agreed to set gentle boundaries. He guiltily prefers to depend on her than on them. They all understand now that the end is near; don’t realise quite how near, perhaps, which is just as well. The atmosphere was serious but not grief-stricken. Nobody said much. Laura, his sister, surprised him by calmly recounting childhood memories. Little things: the time he ruined a birthday magic show; epic games of Monopoly and Scrabble; the prize stag beetle that escaped and found its way into her sock drawer. The past is a sock drawer. It was enough.
Two days later. Natalie Mock stands in the bathroom, but this time she’s not looking in the mirror. So this is it. The doctor switched Dan’s puffer to its more aggressive mode, not assisting but controlling. Said it had to stay like that now, said Dan would get used to it. He hates it. He can’t communicate distress even with his eyes, but she could tell. And now he’s drawn the line. Just like that. Refusal of treatment. She takes deep, slow breaths. If only she could breathe for him.
Mike, the GP and the nurse are in the kitchen, conferring in low voices. Dan asked them to wheel his bed into the front room, where his pictures are, and where slatted winter sunlight comes and goes.
Try not to fight me, he said last week, when the time comes.
Dan’s consciousness flees before the oppressive discomfort, the tyrannical machine assaulting his lungs, and finds itself in a strange, whimsical corner of his mind. The gnawings and scrabblings of panic, of what he’s leaving behind, of what he’s forgotten, of what he never knew — these persist but are muted, blunted by a mantle of something like relief.
Perhaps, he muses, my legacy, my achievement is to anoint the lives of my friends with a mortal essence. To teach them that there is no masterpiece, no transaction by which you can cheat death; you cannot run to the hills, and you cannot look to your children. A child is a genetic extension, yes, but surely in every sense that matters to our humanity, a child is not a continuation but something entirely new. My love, you see that now. Death has to be absolute to make life thrilling.
This death is a gift, my friends. Use it wisely.
The doctor has said all the things she’s obliged to say, and Natalie steps forward as the others respectfully make way and then melt out of the room. She looks into Dan’s moist, blinking eyes. The old mood diagnostics — tone of voice, movement or the subliminal semaphore of the face — so painstakingly tuned over the years of their marriage, are useless now, when she needs them most. Disconnected. Dan’s state of mind can be deduced only from the pauses before and between his answers. When the doctor asked him to confirm his decision, he didn’t hesitate.
‘Dan.’
Natalie. My love.