A Clue to the Exit

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  For Janey

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I want to thank Francis Wyndham whose subtlety, sympathy and rigour make him the reader every writer is looking for.

  Clearly you move still in the human maze—but I like to think of you there; may it be long before you find the clue to the exit.

  —HENRY JAMES TO HUGH WALPOLE, 14 AUGUST 1912

  1

  I’ve started to drive more cautiously since I was told I only have six months to live. All the love I’ve ever felt seems to have waited for this narrowing funnel of time to be decanted more precisely into my flooding veins. Bankrupt, I cannot resist staring through jewellers’ windows at those diamond chokers locked solid around black velvet necks.

  I’ve often wondered whether to commit suicide. I assume I needn’t go into the temptations, but in a self-service world where you have to fill your own petrol tank, assess your own taxes, and help yourself to self-help, the one thing you don’t have to do for yourself is end your life. So why not luxuriate in that old-fashioned sense of service? Go on, do yourself a favour, you know you deserve it: let something else finish you off.

  As I watch the dying leaves turn red in the valley, I shudder with admiration. The defiance of that incandescent decrepitude, spitting in the face of its executioner: that’s what I want. The smoke, wobbling up in diffident communion with the sky, thrills me less. It soon dilates over the reddening fields and sinks back to the clotted earth.

  Red ochre was the first decorative material. Even Homo erectus, barely upright and still nervous on safari, one and a half million years before the delivery of the first armoured Land Rover, loved to rub a little rouge into her bearded cheeks. The linguists tell us that after black and white the first stain of colour in every lexicon is red. Once light and dark have been distinguished what’s fundamental is blood and fire. Looking at the leaves turn red in the valley simplifies my mind, a javelin flying past those tightly packed tubes of paint in which so many subtle frequencies of light have been trapped, and landing where there is only blood and fire.

  My doctor, who is unable to cure anything at all, has nevertheless ‘given’ me six months to live. I have never been given six months before and I don’t know how to thank him adequately. If I die one day sooner he’ll be hearing from my lawyers. One day later and he’ll be hearing from me. He peeped over the parapet of his half-moon specs and gave me an indulgent smile, his expensive black pen writhing epileptically on the prescription pad. Prozac.

  ‘No point in getting depressed on top of everything else,’ he said.

  ‘On top of what else?’ I asked.

  Until the brain transplant has been perfected, the only thing worth getting from a doctor is morphine. As to nurses, don’t let them anywhere near you or they’ll hike up their striped skirts and jab the precious liquid into that interval of white thigh between their black stockings and their sensible knickers.

  The happy pills – I don’t begrudge their happiness, nor do I envy it – are unopened on the shelf. I don’t want any pills, shots, consoling books, or chats with chaplains. I just want to see if I can stay exactly where I am. This is after all the heart of the matter, the place where everything – not without difficulty, not without civil war, not without nailing down my tongue and drawing over it the serrated knife of one thing after another, not without learning to thank my torturers because it’s been such a growth opportunity for all of us, not without betrayal always cutting its prices to meet the competition of feeling betrayed, not without the drive-by shootings of the desire for things which, let’s face it, aren’t going to happen, not without finding myself in the safety-deposit vaults with the unpinned grenade of involuntary memory, not without all the people I’ve hurt, been hurt by, and been hurt by being, scattering like cats’ paws across an ocean of interstellar darkness, not without knowing that the things I mean most will be considered the most pretentious – this is still the place where everything might be reconciled. Reconciled by what? By the intolerable proximity of contradictions, by meltdown, by taking up residence in the Chernobyl of intimacy.

  How convenient to frame that last paragraph with the revelation that it was written by a character we can all agree to find deranged. And yet how inconvenient to become the manager of yet another surrogate self, carrier of some cherished or despised qualities, vehicle for a certain story which demands to be shaped before it is blurted out. No, this time it’s the first-person singular, the skydiver who forgot his parachute, the idiot who tries to tell it how it is; no Ted, Carol, Bob, or Alice, but the unadorned ‘I’, the pockmarked column standing alone among the ruins. It is midday and the shadow is briefly beneath its broken foot. It is ‘I’ and, yes, you’ve guessed it, milk-fed on manuals of rhetoric and seminal deconstructions of the art of writing, or perhaps reading a book for the very first time, it doesn’t matter, you’ve still guessed it: ‘I’ is just as flimsy a fabrication as the rest of them, Ted, Carol, Bob, and Alice. So, what is the authentic ground of being, if this footling pronoun is so inessential?

  2

  I have to own up and admit that I’ve experimented with the Prozac. I know I said I wouldn’t and I suppose that makes me an unreliable narrator, if that’s what an unreliable narrator is.

  What made me do it? It wasn’t a sense of futility. I am consumed by the need to write something honest and complete before I die.

  Fear, pure fear. Something’s burning, something’s on fire. It’s me, I’m burning. Instead of standing quietly in the fireplace and agreeing to be a human log, I rush about setting fire to everything – tapestries, curtains, canvases – every one of them irreplaceable and none of them insured. It shows such a lack of consideration. Instead of my daughter being able to say, ‘This is the house where we’ve lived since 1999,’ ruins, just ruins. She might wrinkle up her nose and add, ‘I mean, the point of that house was its things.’ Whereas, if I showed a little consideration and left the Neo-Geo wheel and the Australian aboriginal rugs unscorched, she might say instead, with a strain of tenderness in her voice, ‘Dad wasn’t such a bad sort in the end.’

  Well, it wasn’t the fear either.

  What made me take the Prozac was Lola. Lola is an unbelievably literary friend of mine and I’ve been dreading her call. What would I say to her gloating condolences? ‘As you can imagine, I’m deep in Marcus Aurelius,’ or, ‘I find that these days I can only bear to listen to the very Late Quartets.’ What would satisfy her greed for seriousness?

  I hadn’t had time to prepare anything when she sprang on me.

  ‘Are you writing about it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Dying.’

  ‘How did you find out?’

  ‘Are you writing about it?’

  ‘No. I don’t think it’s that interesting.’

  ‘An opportunity missed. You know I’ve always thought you could do something serious.’

  ‘It’s wasted on me,’ I
said. ‘It’s all yours if you want it; no need to feel you’re poaching on my territory.’

  ‘Well, if I were dying…’ she said. ‘I remember you when you were an undergraduate – you were so interested in how the mind works. We expected great things of you and then you got sucked into that silly film world. Aren’t you having any big thoughts at the moment?’

  ‘Only big thoughts and very small ones. It’s the medium-sized thoughts that jump ship in an emergency.’

  ‘Write that down.’

  ‘No,’ I snapped, ending the call.

  In any case, it’s a good thing I’m taking the Prozac. I’m enjoying my positive attitude. It’s got me making plans, being practical. The medium-sized thoughts are back. I may only have six months to live but I’ve still got to survive. I’m going to New York to see my agent, Arnie Cornfield. Arnie is famous for his introductory rap, ‘Some people want an agent to hold their hand. Some people want a shoulder to cry on. Well, I’m not that kind of an agent. I’m interested in one thing and one thing only: money.’

  When I was writing Aliens with a Human Heart (perhaps you were one of the fifty-three million people who paid to see it) I enjoyed pointing out to novelists struggling with a £3,800 advance spread over seventeen years that the novel is dead. Now that I’m about to join it I’m not so sure. Why should the novel die? Why should anybody die?

  Arnie won’t be pleased that I want to write a novel. Too bad. I just need enough money to see me out. This house I bought near St Tropez is expensive to keep up.

  It’s a pink house with white gates. At the front there are two palm trees, floodlit, so the burglars don’t fall flat on their faces. At the back, four minuscule cypresses, like self-conscious bridesmaids, accompany the concrete driveway to the garage. If you climb on the roof and jump, you can see the sea. Inside there are still-empty niches everywhere, and tiny flights of steps leading from one thing to another. Two steps up to the kitchen, three down to the living area, one onto the patio, two into the garden, and a final glissando of steps back to the entrance area.

  It’s as if the builder had stumbled across the concept of a step and couldn’t believe his luck. Get a load of this thing that goes up and down. C’est un petit miracle. Imagine the atmosphere of excitement on the building site, the dawning of a new possibility, like Homo habilis bringing a stone down for the first time on the bones of a scavenged gazelle and sucking out the marrow. The world would never be the same again.

  The strange thing about these discoveries is that they often happen simultaneously in quite different places. It makes you think that ideas might be ‘in the air’.

  3

  Is the oyster waiting for the lemon juice, or does the juice just fall? Who thought of bringing together elements from such remote worlds: oysters and lemons, ducks and oranges? It was you, you greedy thing. And so isn’t it natural, in our delirium, on the borders between waking and insomnia, that we should imagine our death as the culinary triumph of a careless superior being? The bitter white splash of some unsuspected fruit, the stubby prongs, the big swallow.

  From the way he tucked into his lunch at Mi Casa Ti Casa, I can only assume that Arnie Cornfield was not afflicted by these reflections.

  ‘Nobody wants to hear about death,’ he said, loading a dripping cable of spaghetti alle vongole into his mouth. ‘It’s depressing. The audience have gotta leave the movie with a smile on their faces.’

  ‘But it’s my only subject: I live it, I breathe it, I eat death.’

  ‘Eat death, eat shit,’ said Arnie. ‘Gimme that feel-good factor, like you did in Aliens with a Human Heart.’ His face lit up again. ‘That was a beautiful deal.’

  ‘But I’m not in that space any more,’ I said. ‘I’ve had some very serious medical news; as you will, if you live long enough. I’ve got to communicate what’s happening – I mean,’ I suddenly saw my opportunity, ‘talk about “Wake up and smell the flowers”.’

  ‘Smell the Flowers, I like,’ said Arnie. ‘Smell the Flowers, there’s a market for. How about they get the files mixed up and he’s not really dying at all – it’s some other schmuck, a weirdo serial killer: someone who deserves to die.’

  ‘But they didn’t get the files mixed up, Arnie, this is happening to me. Don’t you get it? I’m dying.’

  ‘Who’s your executor?’ said Arnie. ‘It’s a dog-eat-dog world.’

  ‘When did you last see a dog eat a dog?’

  ‘Gimme a break, it’s an expression, like … eh, “The pursuit of happiness” it’s not meant to be taken literally, right?’ Arnie wiped some of the orange sauce from his chin. ‘Even after you die you gotta have representation, otherwise you’re yesterday’s news, kaput, finito.’

  ‘Will you be my executor?’ I simpered.

  ‘I’d be honoured,’ said Arnie. ‘Tony!’

  Tony came over. He’s big in the theatre.

  ‘You know Charlie.’

  Tony smiled.

  ‘We’re planning a big retrospective of Charlie’s work. Boy Meets Girl, The Frog Prince and, of course, the jewel in the crown, Aliens with a Human Heart. In about … how long is it, Charlie?’

  ‘Six months.’

  ‘Six months,’ said Arnie.

  ‘Congratulations,’ said Tony.

  I looked suitably modest.

  ‘By the way, I’ve had a peep at your friend’s manuscript,’ said Tony, ‘and I think what he’s doing is very dangerous. One little rule we have in the theatre is never let the public into rehearsals. I don’t know what’s wrong with writers these days. I mean, why can’t he just establish some credible characters…’

  Arnie started nodding his head vigorously. ‘Tell the fucking story.’

  ‘And by imagining their lives,’ Tony went on, ‘explore the themes he wants to bring to our attention.’

  ‘In other words, tell the fucking story,’ said Arnie. ‘Thanks for having a look at it, Tony. That’s what I figured, but this guy comes highly recommended, and sometimes I think maybe I’m outta touch. I see so much material, I think maybe there’s a market for this shit.’

  Tony had to rush.

  ‘What are ya gonna call it?’ asked Arnie.

  ‘Smell the Flowers,’ I suggested.

  ‘Sounds great. Send me the treatment and I’ll get you the deal.’

  4

  It’s midnight. I am in the Westbury Hotel, sweating over the outline for Smell the Flowers. Arnie doesn’t even know that I want to write a novel yet, let alone the extent to which it will not be centred on a floral tribute. You would have thought that I could write a phoney outline for Smell the Flowers and then write the morbid novel I really have in mind, but I’ve made the fatal mistake of drawing a cordon sanitaire of honesty around the subject of my death.

  Earlier today I started writing something a little magical. ‘Magical, there’s a market for,’ as Arnie might say. News travels slowly from Paris to Bogotá, but from that ingenious capital it has pulsed around the world at the speed of light.

  Doña S was always very particular about attending confession, no easy matter given that she was permanently asleep and lived at the bottom of a well. The Jesuits from the seminary at San Sebastián refused to come over the mountains to our lonely little village, and so we chose my grandmother’s donkey to be our priest. To us simple folk, Eeh-Aw might as well have been the Pope. Once a week at noon we would follow our beloved confessor to the well in a candle-lit procession, give him a bucket of carrots and leave him to listen to Doña S’s seemingly chaotic but highly symbolical ramblings …

  Charming as it might be to skip along in the Andean style, I’ve decided that whimsy is not the royal road to freedom, and that I have to return to the one fact I can rely on: that I, whoever I am, am dying.

  The trouble is that when the mind is fixed on dying everything starts to spiral and to magnify. Have you noticed how many spirals there are? Double helixes, spiral galaxies, corkscrews. They are hints of the mental habits that dying brings. Maybe
if I settle into the helter-skelter of my final thoughts, the sharp edges will start to curve, the oppositions start to flow into each other. I must let it happen, I must soften my gaze. Being sharp is just one thing. Why get hung up on it?

  Imagine a very old, very lonely woman whose only wish is that somebody should really mind about her death. And then imagine her very reluctantly realizing that she’s going to have to go it alone on this one too. Join her for a moment. It doesn’t matter who she is.

  That idea didn’t take either. Instead, at five-thirty this morning as the garbage trucks outside my window were grinding the detritus of Madison Avenue in their savage jaws, I wrote the following fragment.

  Patrick climbed on board the two-forty-five for London Paddington. The pedantic emphasis on Paddington struck him as a rather shrill assertion of straightforwardness in a word-world grown too playful for its own good, as if the train might otherwise be hijacked by Doña S and, despite setting out from Oxford, dive under the metropolis and approach it from the east, terminating inconveniently at Liverpool Street station.

  Patrick flicked past the notes he had taken at the consciousness conference, until he reached some more personal reflections recorded at the back of his notebook.

  ‘Like St Francis I am wedded to poverty, but in my case the marriage has not been a success.’

  It was not true. He had enough money to be getting on with.

  ‘The night is young. I must try not to envy her too much.’

  His own youth had been a nightmare from which he was grateful to be distanced.

  He was exasperated by his craven need for elegance, disgusted by his own stylistic habits. Was it too late to change?

  He only had six months to find out. Cirrhosis, of course. The reprimand of those young nights.

  The truth was that he was desperate about everything and he would have to abandon his taste for aphorisms if he was going to get close to describing his feelings. Even the routine unhappiness of the strangers on the station platform devastated him. The feeling raged through him, like a burning rope he couldn’t hold on to, although someone he loved was falling at the other end of it; it ripped the skin from his hands. As he walked down the platform he had felt the pressure to drag bits of dead language over himself, like cardboard blankets on a freezing night. But he remained utterly exposed.