Why We Die (6 page)

She slipped her mobile into her pocket and leaned on the rail to watch the train come to a halt by the cemetery. Last time she’d caught a train from London, the fifty-minute journey had taken a shade under three hours. It was a wonder ties and shoelaces weren’t confiscated on boarding, as a suicide precaution.

Back on ground level, the cops had gone. On the field, there were kids still playing kickabout, though not with a ball, she realized, but something ball-shaped: a rolled-up wodge of wet newspaper, or a human head. They had better things to do than watch a car expire. Happened every day. She left them to it, and walked into town.

iii

It was office procedure to give one week’s notice of time off. Tim Whitby had always set a good example, and hesitated now to say he wouldn’t be in tomorrow. A dozen small but cumulatively significant obstacles suggested themselves as he sat tapping a pencil against his thumbnail. His office was small, windowless, would have passed for a cupboard without effort, but it allowed him a certain amount of privacy despite his open-door policy. And there were usually people outside that door, because the office was off the staff room, which wasn’t much larger but had more chairs.

The previous Monday, of course, he had called in sick. This had felt legitimate – he had, after all, planned on being dead – but had not gone unnoticed.

‘Feeling better?’ Jean had asked, every morning since.

Jean was the shop mother. Jean fussed over everybody; even – especially – those who didn’t welcome it.
Fuss
was Jean’s default setting. If Tim announced that he was taking tomorrow off, she’d assume he’d had to make an emergency appointment with a specialist. So he needed a plausible explanation for absence; another sick day, and she’d send an ambulance round his house.

. . . And this was what his decision to live had returned him to. He favoured an open-door policy, but was locked back in his old life as severely as if it were a cell; worrying about how much notice he should give for a day off. He’d planned on taking the rest of forever off: how much warning had he given of that? Tim had the feeling he’d passed a fork in the road, and there was no turning back – suicide was a one-time-only offer, if you were Tim Whitby. Like those rubrics in job adverts: Previous applicants need not apply. He’d sometimes wondered how he’d feel if he saw one of those and knew it meant him. Well, this was it. Death had rejected him. It would catch up eventually, of course, but at a time of its own choosing. Not his.

He realized that he was bent forward over his desk, eyes closed, and that anyone could have looked in. In case they had, and were still there now, he tried to adopt an expression of intense concentration, provoking instead a fleeting amalgam of self-disgust, amusement and despair, which convulsed his shoulders in a kind of emotional hiccup. Great. Now his observer would think he was crying. Tim opened his eyes. There was nobody there. On his desk various invoices craved his attention, but not loudly enough to warrant it. He stood and walked through the staff room to the storage area, and let himself out of the side door.

It was another bright blue day, too windy to be warm. There was something he ought to be doing now, for a moment he couldn’t imagine what, and then decided it was smoking – he should be smoking. This was your alibi when you’d walked out of your office and were standing doing nothing much while work piled up behind you. But his occasional nicotine binges left him sick and hungover, and he wasn’t in the habit of carrying cigarettes. So he stood doing nothing, while the wind rearranged his hair. He yawned suddenly and largely. He hadn’t slept much last night.

His bedroom was at the front of the house, and though it was a quiet neighbourhood, noises from the street carried to him nonetheless, offering a commentary on lives unconnected to his. Last night, he’d heard footsteps – a woman, in heels; their regular click/click providing a rhythm for his insomnia. And as they reached their loudest, directly beneath his window, they stopped, and for half a beat he imagined the next sound he’d hear would be her key in the lock, and that this was Emma come back to him. But Emma wasn’t coming back to him.
This is what
your life is like now
. But he allowed himself to dwell for a second on what would happen if she did; the readjustments that would ensue; the endless explanations to friends and neighbours. The rot that would result from this attempt to repair the irreparably sundered. It wasn’t going to happen. She wasn’t coming back. Something rasped on the street below – a match or an inefficient lighter – and the footsteps started again; grew quieter, more distant, disappeared.

He’d somehow dozed off after that, and had the second dream.

The store was part of a complex of large retail outlets – the others sold sporting goods and DIY materials – arranged as an open-ended square around a car park; a probably accidental parody of the quadrangle effect older buildings in the city were famous for. The car park’s level expanse was relieved here and there by strips of greenery intended as chicanes, but which also served as fast-food packaging depositories. Red-and-white-striped cardboard cartons nestled under exhaust-stripped shrubberies like a terrible taste of Christmas-yet-to-come. And the whole complex was just one of a series of such lining this busy road leading west out of the city: a consumer paradise, or possibly hell on earth.

He walked a little, to avoid capture. By the DIY store he paused. Its window-stickers offered unbeatable bargains with a gusto bordering on the desperate. He peered past them to pyramids of paint cans; to racks of tools designed for home improvements. Everything here came with the promise of a future attached. He left, kept walking; found himself tracing the car park perimeter with no real sense of purpose, but at least it was a ready-made route. At the main road he stopped, and thought about the dreams.

Emma had often described her dreams to him, and they had always been – or had seemed in the telling – coherent narratives, with defined beginnings, middles and endings, even if the endings turned out to be that hoary old staple
And then I woke up
– it was all a dream. But Tim had rarely recounted his, and she’d never, of course, pressed. Dreams are more interesting related than listened to. And Tim’s were pointless, shambolic episodes: fragments too scattered to shore up any ruin. But last night, and the night before, he’d dreamed about the woman.

The first time had felt like an act of infidelity. Something very like guilt clouded him that morning; dogged him all day until he burned it off with alcohol, the way Emma used to sear their Christmas pudding – infidelity? It was Emma who’d betrayed him. He was still here. At which the usual bout of hatred and self-pity enveloped him: the usual old snake, swallowing its own tail. It took the second dream to make him think about the dream itself.

Which had been almost eventless. They had not been in the hotel bar where they’d met, but in a cottage somewhere. She had her back to him, and he had been asking a question which had seemed, at the point of asking, to carry the weight of his entire life, but whose import he’d immediately forgotten. And when she turned, any answer she might have made became irrelevant, because all that mattered was the bruise, which was no longer a slight discoloration under one eye but a whole continent of purples, blacks and oranges; a bruise which blazoned not only the blow which had made it, but all the other blows suffered by the same body. That there had been others, he had no doubt. Perhaps it was that sense of certainty that woke him: it was an unfamiliar feeling these days. And dreaming the same dream twice was strange, too – but perhaps, in fact, he hadn’t. Perhaps the dream had arrived with familiarity hardwired into it: trailer and movie at once. Just another retail con trick; one with the promise of a history attached.

. . . His mind drifted. Concentration was hard to come by these days. His mind, in fact, didn’t drift: it took a predetermined route he was helpless to forbid. It began at his feet, stepped into the main road, and instantly hurled away into the traffic like a paper bag in a slipstream; whistled past shops so they blurred into a single endless mall: one huge window, plastered with insincere offers. Then on to the ring road: past estates bridges garden centres; skirting small communities long islanded by traffic. Through green lights red lights amber; over roundabouts; shaving corners. On to the London road, and a sudden shift of gear before rocketing away to what waited: a long sloping curve towards the motorway . . . And here, at this junction, somewhere under the road’s ever-scribbled-on surface, there would be skidmarks still. Like the plastic slate he’d drawn on as a child, which could be wiped clean repeatedly but retained every mark on its backing board: an incoherent mess of squiggles, each of which had meant something once . . . The skidmarks he was thinking of were Emma’s. What they meant was, she had lost control. They meant she was never coming back.

He did not know how many cars used that stretch of road every day: easily thousands, though; tens of thousands. And he did not know how many people died on the roads every year: but hundreds, tens of hundreds. That vaguely appreciated big number was not information consciously acquired; it was simply part of the condition of life. In a motorized society, there will be a certain amount of collateral damage. Tim had always known that, just as he had known that every time he picked up a newspaper, he’d find some version of that same story. But he hadn’t expected to find himself in it, and Emma gone.

But death was the smart bomb. Death could unerringly pick an individual from a crowd and obliterate her so particularly, so precisely, it was amazing any memory of her survived. As for those closest, they were left wondering what happened; the smoking crater beside them all that remained of their recent companion. And those approaching sirens heralded emergency counsellors, come to cut the survivors from the wreckage of their emotions.

Tim wished he had a cigarette after all. But the nearest pack would be across this busy road: a rushing metal river he didn’t care to step in once, let alone twice.

She had lived for two days. This was not precisely right. The quick, the true, the
ugly
fact was, she had not died for two days. Which was when Tim, who had not slept during that period, gave permission for the machine to be turned off: the machine being all that was keeping Emma breathing, though in his stricken exhausted mind, the machine
was
Emma by then; he was giving them permission to switch Emma off. And afterwards, he slept.

‘There is no sense in which you are responsible for her death. None at all.’

‘I know.’

‘She had the bad luck to be on the same stretch of road as a drunken –’

‘I know.’

These were the words of friends, and were meant to help.

‘There was no chance of recovery. It wasn’t that it was the kindest thing to do, it was the
only
thing to do.’

Consolation, though, wore off. People trod round him on eggshell feet, then gradually normalized, as if his own rate of recovery were somehow equivalent to theirs.

But there was no way of measuring the speed he was moving at. And as for time, it was ever-divisible. Even seconds broke down into smaller units, which frequently snagged on events like a loose thread – pauses in conversation seemed to last for days. Responses had once come automatically. Now he had to sift everything twice: what had been said, the available replies, which he should choose . . . Grief was slow-motion. This was what was meant by funereal pace.

And because there was so much of it, time was impossible to ignore. Clockwatching became obsession. It was as if he weren’t just passing time but accumulating it: one more thing he had to carry through the day. What would he do with all this time he was gathering? He’d find some way of killing it . . . Work became purgatory. He had always enjoyed his job, or more accurately, had enjoyed the knowledge that he was useful; that he could garner a salary for the time spent doing it. Now, it was barely credible they still paid him. What was it he did, exactly? There was a shop, and it sold electrical goods. Part of a nationwide chain, with a turnover in the mid-millions. Twelve staff under him; more at weekends; and God only knew how many above, when you took the national hierarchy into account. Once, he’d seen himself climbing this pyramid – but then once, he’d been good at what he did. Once, he’d been on first-name terms with his staff, even the Saturday part-timers. Lately, he kept forgetting what Jean was called. Once, he’d filled the store: it was his territory, and everybody breathing was a potential customer. Now, he’d become two-dimensional: he took up space, and wasted time.

Time, which passed so slowly.

A horn sounded somewhere behind him, and he came back to the present, looked at his watch. It would be lunchtime within the hour. He’d better return to his desk.

Where he dealt with invoices; returned a phone call; fended off Jean, who had logged his temporary absence: ‘Are you sure you’re –?’

‘I’m fine.’

She looked doubtful.

‘I’ll be taking a day’s leave tomorrow. Wednesday. Could you put that on the roster, please?’

‘Doing anything nice?’

‘Let’s hope so,’ he said, ‘Will you close the door? I need to make a phone call.’

So that was that.

Tiger, tiger, burning bright
. . .

And that was something else that popped into his mind every time he recalled that evening. The line, of course, he remembered from school:
Tyger, tyger
his textbook had read. There was more to poetry than spelling. Blake had been the poet’s name, and still was, because fame was a kind of antidote to death – your name lived on. But only kind of, because you were still dead. He didn’t know why it kept ringing in his head, and could only imagine that it was his brain’s way of preserving a memory he didn’t know he had – her name was Katrina. Her name was Katrina
Blake
.

It was not surprising, perhaps, that his subconscious had had to resort to subterfuge to preserve such shards. Saturday would have been his and Emma’s tenth anniversary. The hotel was where they’d spent their wedding weekend.