Collected Stories (50 page)

‘Dream on it,’ he said. ‘You’ve heard enough for one evening. It would be too much for anyone to take in. See you tomorrow. It’s getting late. I really want to dance. I can dance all night, without stimulants.’

He pressed my hand, looked into my eyes as if we already had an understanding, and walked away.

The conversation had ended abruptly but not impolitely. Perhaps he had said all there was to say for the moment. He had certainly left me wanting to know more. Hadn’t I, like everyone else, often thought of how I’d live had I known all that I know now? But wasn’t it a ridiculous idea? If anything made life and feeling possible, it was transience.

I watched Ralph join a group of drama students, his ‘contemporaries’. Like him, presumably, but unlike me, they didn’t think of their own death every day.

I got up and briefly talked to my friends – the old fucks with watery eyes; some of them quite shrunken, their best work long done – finished my drink, and said goodbye to the host.

At the door, when I looked back, Ralph was dancing with a group of young people among whom were the two women who’d been watching him. Walking through the house, I saw the kids I’d met at the front door sitting at a long table drinking, playing with one another’s hair. I was sure I could hear someone saying they preferred the book to the film, or was it the film to the book? Suddenly, I longed for a new world, one in which no one compared the book to the film, or vice versa. Ever.

In order to think, I walked home, but this time I didn’t feel tired. As I went I was aware of groups of young men and women hanging around the streets. The boys, in long coats and hoods that concealed most of their faces, made me think of figures from
The
Seventh Seal
. They made me recall my best friend’s painful death, two months before.

‘It won’t be the same without me around,’ he had said. We had known each other since university. He was a bad alcoholic and fuck-up. ‘Look at your life and all you’ve done. I’ve wasted my life.’

‘I don’t know what waste means.’

‘Oh, I know what it is now,’ he had said. ‘The inability to take pleasure in oneself or others. Cheerio.’

The chess pieces of my life were being removed one by one. My friend’s death had taken me by surprise; I had believed he would never give up his suffering. The end of my life was approaching, too; there was a lot I was already unable to do, soon there would be more. I’d been alive a long time but my life, like most lives, seemed to have happened too quickly, when I was not ready.

The shouts of the street kids, their incomprehensibly hip vocabulary and threatening presence reminded me of how much the needs of the young terrify the old. Maybe it would be interesting to know what they felt. I’m sure they would be willing to talk. But there was no way, until now, that I could actually have ‘had’ their feelings.

At home, I looked at myself in the mirror. Margot had said that with my rotund stomach, veiny, spindly legs and left-leaning posture I was beginning to resemble my father just before his death. Did that matter? What did I think a younger body would bring me? More love? Even I knew that that wasn’t what I required as much as the ability to love more.

I waited up for my wife, watched her undress and followed her instruction to sit in the bathroom as she bathed by candle-light, attending to her account of the day and – the highlight for me – who had annoyed her the most. She and I also liked to discuss our chocolate indulgences and bodies: which part of which of us, for example, seemed full of ice-cream and was expanding. Various diets and possible types of exercise were always popular between us. She liked to accuse me of not being ‘toned’, of being, in fact, ‘mush’, but threatened murder and suicide if I mentioned any of her body parts without reverence. As I looked at her with her hair up, wearing a dressing gown and examining and cleaning her face in the mirror, I wondered how many more such ordinary nights we would have together.

A few minutes after getting into bed, she was slipping into sleep. I resented her ability to drop off. Although sleeping had come to seem more luxurious, I hadn’t got any better at it. I guess children and older adults fear the separation from consciousness, as though it’ll never return. If anyone asked me, I said that consciousness was the thing I liked most about life. But who doesn’t need a rest from it now and again?

Lying beside Margot, chatting and sleeping, was exceptional every night. To be well married you have to have a penchant for the intricacies of intimacy and larval change: to be interested, for instance, in people dreaming together. If the personality is a spider’s web, you will want to know every thread. Otherwise, after forty, when the colour begins to drain from the world, it’s either retirement or reinvention. Pleasures no longer come to you, but there are pickings to be had if you can learn to scavenge for them.

Later, unusually – it had been a long time – she woke me up to make love, which I did happily, telling her that I’d always loved her, and reminiscing, as we often did, about how we met and got together. These were our favourite stories, always the same and also slightly different so that I listened out for a new feeling or aspect.

For the rest of the night I was awake, walking about the house, wondering.

The following morning there was no question of not meeting Ralph at the coffee shop he’d suggested. At the same time I didn’t believe he’d show up; perhaps that was my wish. He had made me think so hard, the scope of my everyday life seemed so mundane and I had become so excited about this possible adventure and future that I was already beginning to feel afraid.

He arrived on a bicycle, wearing few clothes, and told me he’d stayed up late dancing, woken up early, exercised and studied a ‘dramatic text’ before coming here. It was common, he said, that people living a ‘second’ life, like people on a second marriage, took what they did more seriously. Each moment seemed even more precious. There was no doubt he looked fit, well and ready to be interested in things.

I found myself studying his face. How should I put it? If the body is a picture of the mind, his body was like a map of a place that didn’t exist. What I wanted was to see his original face, before he was reborn. Otherwise it was like speaking on the phone to someone you’d never met, trying to guess what they were really like.

But it was me, not him, we were there for, and he was businesslike, as I guessed he must have been in his former life. He went through everything as though reading from a clipboard in his mind. After two hours we shook hands, and I returned home.

Margot and I always talked and bickered over lunch together, soup and bread, or salad and sandwiches, before our afternoon nap on separate sofas. Today, I had to tell her I was going away.

Earlier in the year Margot had gone to Australia for two months to visit friends and travel. We needed each other, Margot and I, but we didn’t want to turn our marriage into more of an enclosure than necessary. We had agreed that I, too, could go on ‘walkabout’ if I wanted to. (Apparently, ‘walkabout’ was called ‘the dreaming’ by some Aboriginals.) I told her I wanted to leave in three days’ time. I asked for ‘a six-month sabbatical’. As well as being upset by the suddenness of my decision, she was shocked and hurt by the length of time I required. She and I are always pleased to part, but then, after a few days, we need to share our complaints. I guess that was how we knew our marriage was still alive. Yet she knew that when I make up my mind, I enter a tunnel of determination, for fear that vacillation is never far away.

She said, ‘Without you here to talk about yourself in bed, how will I go to sleep?’

‘At least I am some use, then.’

She acquiesced because she was kind. She didn’t believe I’d last six months. In a few weeks I’d be bored and tired. How could anyone be as interested in my ailments as her?

It took me less time than I would have hoped to settle my affairs before the ‘trip’. I had a circle of male friends who came to the house once a fortnight to drink, watch football and discuss the miseries of our work. Margot would inform them I was going walkabout and we would reconvene on my return. I made the necessary financial arrangements through my lawyer, and followed the other preparations Ralph had insisted on.

When Ralph and I met up again he took one look at me and said, ‘You’re my first initiate. I’m delighted that you’re doing this. You live your life trying to find out how to live a life, and then it ends. I don’t think I could have picked a better person.’

‘Initiate?’

‘I’ve been waiting for the right person to follow me down this path, and it’s someone as distinguished as you!’

‘I need to see what this will bring me,’ I murmured, mostly to myself.

‘The face you have must have brought you plenty,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you see those girls watching you at the party? They asked me later if you were really you.’

‘They did?’

‘Now – ready?’

He was already walking to his car. I followed. Ralph was so solicitous and optimistic, I felt as comfortable as anyone could in the circumstances. Then I began to look forward to ‘the change’ and fantasised about all that I would do in my new skin.

By now we’d arrived at the ‘hospital’, a run-down warehouse on a bleak, wind-blown industrial estate outside London (he had already explained that ‘things would not be as they seemed’). I noticed from the size of the fence and the number of black-uniformed men that security was tight. Ralph and I showed our passports at the door. We were both searched.

Inside, the place did resemble a small, expensive private hospital. The walls, sofas and pictures were pastel-coloured and the building seemed almost silent, as if it had monumental walls. There were no patients moving about, no visitors with flowers, books and fruit, only the occasional doctor and nurse. When I did glimpse, at the far end of a corridor, a withered old woman in a pink flannel night-gown being pushed in a wheelchair by an orderly, Ralph and I were rapidly ushered into a side office.

Immediately, the surgeon came into the room, a man in his mid-thirties who seemed so serene I could only wonder what kind of yoga or therapy he had had, and for how long.

His assistant ensured the paperwork was rapidly taken care of, and I wrote a cheque. It was for a considerable amount, money that would otherwise have gone to my children. I hoped scarcity would make them inventive and vital. My wife was already provided for. What was bothering me? I couldn’t stop suspecting that this was a confidence trick, that I’d been made a fool of in my most vulnerable areas: my vanity and fear of decline and death. But if it was a hoax, it was a laboured one, and I would have parted with money to hear about it.

The surgeon said, ‘We are delighted to have an artist of your calibre join us.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Have you done anything I might have heard of?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘I think my wife saw one of your plays. She loves comedy and now has the leisure to enjoy herself. Ralph has told me that it’s a short-term body rental you require, initially? The six-months minimum – is that correct?’

‘That is correct,’ I said. ‘After six months I’ll be happy to return to myself again.’

‘I have to warn you, not everyone wants to go back.’

‘I will. I am fascinated by this experiment and want to be involved, but I’m not particularly unhappy with my life.’

‘You might be unhappy with your death.’

‘Not necessarily.’

He countered, ‘I wouldn’t leave it until you’re on your deathbed to find out. Some people, you know, lose the power of speech then. Or it is too late for all kinds of other reasons.’

‘You’re suggesting I won’t want to return to myself?’

‘It’s impossible for either of us to predict how you will feel in six months’ time.’

I nodded.

He noticed me looking at him. ‘You are wondering if –’

‘Of course.’

‘I am,’ he replied, glancing at Ralph. ‘We both are. Newbodies.’

‘And ordinary people going about their business out there’ – I pointed somewhere into the distance – ‘are called Oldbodies?’

‘Perhaps. Yes. Why not?’

‘These are words that will eventually be part of most people’s everyday vocabulary, you think?’

‘Words are your living,’ he said. ‘Bodies are mine. But I would imagine so.’

‘The existence of Newbodies, as you call them, will create considerable confusion, won’t it? How will we know who is new and who old?’

‘The thinking in this area has yet to be done,’ he said. ‘Just as there has been argument over abortion, genetic engineering, cloning and organ transplants, or any other medical advances, so there will be over this.’

‘Surely this is of a different order,’ I said. ‘Parents the same age as their children, or even younger, for instance. What will that mean?’

‘That is for the philosophers, priests, poets and television pundits to say. My work is only to extend life.’

‘As an educated man, you must have thought this over.’

‘How could I work out the implications alone? They can only be lived.’

‘But –’

We batted this subject back and forth until it became clear even to me that I was playing for time.

‘I was just thinking …’ said Ralph. He was smiling. ‘If I were dead we wouldn’t be having this conversation.’

The doctor said, ‘Adam’s is a necessary equivocation.’ He turned to me. ‘You have to make a second important decision.’

I guessed this was coming. ‘It won’t be so difficult, I hope.’

‘Please, follow me.’

The doctor, accompanied by a porter and a young nurse, took me and Ralph down several corridors and through several locked doors. At last we entered what seemed like a broad, low-ceilinged, neon-lit fridge with a tiled floor.

I was shivering as I stood there, and not only because of the temperature. Ralph took my arm and began to murmur in my ear, but I couldn’t hear him. What I saw was unlike anything I had seen before; indeed, unlike anything anyone had ever seen. This was no longer amusing speculation or inquisitiveness. It was where the new world began.