A Habit of Dying (8 page)

Is it the tiny cold centre that does this scribble in the journal? It seems not, it seems as if that is another person altogether, the scribe who works once removed from the [master’s] hand. The master watches this pen write and these hands move just as it watches everything else. Sometimes it does a little more than watch, sometimes it plots and schemes to free itself of the chaos, to do away with the [cacophony] of nerve ends spitting their messages to and fro.

15
^th
entry

Sleep. There is no sleep, only snatched minutes in the darkness. I want to sleep a dreamless, blank, dead, numb sleep for a hundred years. I want to lie in suspended animation, maintained but [comatose] like the film, hanging by a wire unseeing and uncaring and unthinking. How long would forever be? Until the electricity failed or the wire broke. Or someone got bored with the idea.

I half fear and half relish that I will lose the job soon. It is becoming so difficult to [concentrate] on, to make sense of the [nonsense] that I write and the nonsense I am asked to write. It is trivial beyond imagination, who gives a shit about anything that comes out the process. It pays the bills and there is not another single thing that can be said for it. And this nonsense, this blurb for today’s rubbish, today’s toothpaste, tomorrow’s [] [], just words jumbled and mixed and their tiny [nuances] pored over and poked
and examined and [user trialled] and they are still just words. Once I must have cared, must have been able to put them together how people liked them put together. Put them in just the right order with just the right amount of this and not too much of that so people would rush out and [cover themselves] in the cream or the lotion. But probably that was someone else completely. And if they were to fire me that would be excellent in a way, it would change things as I cannot change them, the whole set up would be different, we would need to speak of things, many things like [walruses] and sealing wax most likely. There’s a [cabbage] and a king in there somewhere too. Would we speak? Maybe, maybe the loss of income would force her to speak, if I were to tell her. How would I do that when I can tell her nothing at all. Tell her that there is no money, no job, no sleep all for thinking of how it was or how it might once have been or how I dreamed it once was.

16
^th
entry

S is away. Brighton or Bournemouth or somewhere. A conference. It is easier when she is not here. She is not right there where I see her at every turn, doing the things that she does, solitary, [undemanding], single in every respect bar my presence. [Supremely] self-contained, an ocean liner ploughing serenely onward looking neither to left nor right, unaware and uninterested in the drowning man thrashing in the swell. In the empty space I can float on the waves, breath air a little longer, until Friday when she will return.

Conferences are meant to be made for affairs, breathless tumbles and [blushing] mornings. Does she have that in her any more, did she ever? At 31 you’d think so, but how would I know, how could I judge. There is nothing there, nothing I recognize any more. There is a great big space where the spark and fire and interest used to be. Or else it is a face turned away from me, but I don’t think it looks upon anyone else. And all this in a body that seems much as it has always done, you can still see that she was very pretty once, still see that she has a figure, still goes in and out at roughly the right places, still takes some care over her hair, even though it becomes ever shorter. You can still see it through her clothes but not otherwise she was never one to prance about the house naked, and now there is neither prance nor nakedness. I remember dimly a picture with a caption ‘when did you last see your father?’ I could paint one that said ‘when did you last see your wife?’

17
^th
entry

Just a few days back from Brighton S announced that she is going away again in a couple of weeks, this time to [Harrogate], a training thing she signed up for a last minute place, something important to her promotion prospects or some such. It is almost certainly true, she is almost certainly going to [Harrogate] and will almost certainly be trained. Just for a millisecond of hesitation it could have been a lie. Or it could be both true and a lie. Maybe the lie is in what is not being said. Did she give me too much information, did she speak too quickly, what caught my attention. I [feigned] disinterest. Or I didn’t [feign] it at all. I am disinterested, I am completely and utterly without interest. Does this mean I am dead, drowned already? Maybe part drowned. I will have a few more days to float and breathe in a calm sea.

18
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entry

While she was not looking I checked her suitcase. Don’t know what I was looking for, but I had to see if she was taking anything that she might not usually take. Whatever that might be. I was looking for something, something out of place, something extra or something missing. There was no book. And she scuttled out of the house, couldn’t wait to be gone. I would imagine the scene but I see nothing at all, a completely blank space. If she is with someone else, it is just as if she were dead, I cannot feel how it would be, am I [ecstatic] or beyond [despair]. If I stay still and be nothing at all then it will stop. I will drift on my back on a slow ocean.

19
^th
entry

If I were to be gone from her life what would she do? I think she would do nothing at all, just carry on with her daily routine, take her little conference trips, tend her patch of garden, read her books, mark her homework, plan her lessons. She would say how she missed me when it was [appropriate] to do so, and say how she had got over it when that was more so. I could be gone before she even returns, just open the door and walk out into the summer air and keep on walking. Walk down to the river and walk right into it until it just floated me away downstream, gently bobbing until I was lost from view. It is a very soothing thought. My still centre can see the river weeds waving as I float past them, free to float and drift with the flow while they remain anchored to the river bed, [doomed] to ripple forever as the water floods past
them, never to [join] the flow themselves. But even as I see this, write this here, I see her drifting along with me, now a little ahead, now a little behind. We say nothing, do nothing.

20
^th
entry

The peace of last week is destroyed and turmoil takes its place. A greeting of sorts, a tentative, almost touching, excuse for what might once have been a kiss, no more than an acknowledgement of existence. An insult to every kiss there ever was. There was a time when we kissed to part and kissed to meet, kissed goodnight and kissed awake. There was a time when a longer absence made for more than kisses, made for hugs and squeezes, touching and stroking. If that was not someone else altogether. Maybe it was in a dream or a book or a film. Which day was it that she first turned her cheek a little to [subtly] change that kiss to the [proverbial] peck? And then that became no more than a touch, then even the touch was gone, not even a pretence of a kiss. And now she is back from her training and it is barely a nod.

There is a darkness, a [blackness], that is spreading [relentlessly] outwards from the [diamond] bright pinprick at its centre. When it covers me completely I will be gone. But if it reaches her first then she will be gone. Absorbed, [dissolved] and gone as if we had never ever been. Nothing nix null absolute zero on anybody’s scale. There is a curious [disembodied] interest to see which of us disappears first. It is of no consequence to me nor to anyone else which it might be. It [is] just conceivable that it could embrace us both in the same instant. A final togetherness.

21
^st
entry

I watched her eating her breakfast yoghurt and wondered if it might be poisoned by some random serial killer. People do that, they buy a load of yoghurt then inject poison into each pack and put it back on the shelves. Or Marmite to hide the taste. They do it. You never know how it will get you or who it will get. Nobody ever knows not even the one who puts it there. And why did they buy it, because I wrote some little [jingle] that tickled their taste buds just enough to increase the sales by a [decimal] dot. And it was full of poison. How do you like that, then. Or shampoo that makes you come out in blisters. There are a million ways it will get you.

Shoot a dozen people who you don’t know, then shoot the one you do.
That’s the way to hide a body, with a lot of other bodies. Want to hide a leaf, then drop it on the forest floor. They can see all the leaves but they can’t see yours and after a while neither can you. Clever [brains] but not that clever. But if you shoot a dozen people where would you put the one you know? Not number one for sure, never number one remember. No and not number twelve either. Maybe number eight or nine or ten, but how to decide which number? Or make a pattern that does not really exist just to throw them off. Invent a pattern of Sundays or Fridays. Maybe Tuesdays. I can’t work out a pattern that does not exist. Some very careful thought needed to do that and that needs a focus of energy. Which I may have tomorrow or the next day. A lens to focus energy is needed.

It had taken Lydia nearly two weeks working most evenings and weekends to get this far. Only where she needed to refer back to compare a word with another version of it did she read back anything that she copied from the book. She was perhaps two-thirds of the way through. She needed a break and there was no reason not to take one, her rules were no more than a self-imposed discipline. The results puzzled, depressed and fascinated her. Gone completely was the feeling of intruding on a private grief, of looking through the keyhole. Whatever these words might be, their underlying meaning seemed clear. For her puzzle of anonymous faces she had swapped a greater mystery, and one that she was sure would haunt her until she could unravel it. And all the while that she was reading through her finished work, the words that ended it all, the words to which she was slowly moving, hovered over the pages, a mystery in their own right.

Without any warning one fact about the book jumped into her mind. If this were fiction, carefully crafted by a writer, considered prose that might be a novel or used later in a story, then it would not have been physically written with such passion and aggression. It would not have so many changes of style from the barely legible to the clear; it would not be lightly scribbled in one section and practically gouged out of the paper in the next. It would be written so that it could be read. Here, in this oddly chosen book, the words of passion were written with passion, those of anger were written with anger, words of calm were written with clarity.

Lydia let the idea sink in. A real person, a man, had written all these secret thoughts out on paper. A real man with a real wife. A real man with real demons in his head. A man who called for help or a man who found help through writing them out? He did not seem to be finding help, on the contrary he seemed more in need of it that ever. Although she knew the ending, knew that it would provide no ultimate answer or satisfaction, she had to follow the narrative through. But even before Lydia had the whole thing in front of her, a part of her mind began to consider how she might identify these people, date the events, discover hard facts. And that small part of her brain also realised the task might be impossible, something which would dwarf the difficulties she’d encountered with the Longlands family and Henry Myers.

Evenings flew past, Lydia labouring with a growing intensity as the end came into sight. Words began to form themselves naturally in her mind as she copied the scribble, so much so that on a couple of occasions she had to stop and retrace her steps to feel sure that she had not invented anything of her own. The twenty-fourth entry had defeated her completely, extracting no more than a few words with any certainty. At length her task was completed. She knew the story, as far as it went. The Saturday evening after she had finished she printed out the remaining pages, settled to her favourite position in her favourite chair and read the whole thing straight through. Even though she was now intimately bound up in its contents, the anguish flowed undiminished from the pages. The twenty-second entry had been easy to interpret. It had been written with clarity, written slowly, Lydia thought.

22
^nd
entry

S can see my ideas and she does not think much of them, they are pathetic to her and inside she is laughing at them. She has her own plans now and they do not involve me, at least not as far as I can see. Her self-sufficiency is complete. I have less bearing on her life now than the smallest
and most insignificant piece of chalk in her classroom. She does not talk to me any more and I do not listen. She nods sometimes and her smile once so open and beautiful, once lighting up her face, is reduced to a twisted smirk. If I am careful I can avoid her nearly all the time now. She does not see me in the mornings when she goes to work, leaving me undisturbed on the sofa where I spend the nights drifting in and out of sleep with the world service. We have not spoken of this separation and I am sure we will not. It gives me time to think of the end game. It is at a critical stage, and the pattern appears to be coalescing into a uniform whole. I can’t see the shape or the details yet but I sense their formation. There is a flow and method just hidden beneath the churning surface. Resolution beckons but the direction is not yet determined. I may need more time to work it all out, it is getting harder to think in the office, too many interruptions and the thread is lost before I can hold it. If I spend more time at home and then go to work late and stay when the rest have gone home then there will be less distraction, give it a chance to become clear. And I must speed the process before it is all taken out of my hands. I must choose the weapon, the weapon of choice, before one is chosen for me. Choose the time and place, the hour and the minute, down to the second, before it happens without me. As each thought becomes ordered I will write it down so as not to have to keep it in my head. It will relieve the pressure, make room for analysis and focus the rest. Thought number 1 – find a calm point from which to order the thoughts. And number 2 – decide the order in which they must be written.