This Is the Life (17 page)

31

Shell

When you push open a swinging door, then let it go, it doesn't close immediately, but swings back and forth a few times, still permitting access and egress. Then, finally, its energy is used up, and it stays still.

Louis was taken for a CT scan and then an MRI. Despite all that they had thrown at it, all the surgery, chemo, and radiation, the tumor was back, regrowing rapidly, even creating its own small blood vessels in the brain, so it could nourish itself. There was NFT—no further treatment.

One day Louis was walking, the next not.

“We're sending you to St. Peter's, Louis, because we need the bed here. It's just because we need the bed, that's all.”

They kind of told him, and kind of didn't. They took him to St. Peter's and he got visitors there, and he was giving them bone-crushing handshakes, to show that the strength was still in his arms.

Louis had a deal with his friend Michael Meere that if Louis asked, then Michael would give it to him straight and
no bullshit. But he didn't ask. Not directly. He just said, “I think they'll be letting me out in a couple of days. Feel my grip, Mike. You feel the strength in my hand there?”

“Louis, I think that if you want the doctors to send you home, you've got to show them that you can walk around. I'm not sure you can even walk to the bathroom right now, can you, Louis?”

Louis didn't answer him, just looked away.

And that was how they kept their bargain.

Two days later, Louis was comatose, and the nurses were turning him every three or four hours, to stop bedsores, and I sat with him for a week.

And that's what happens. That's how it is. Just life, taking its course.

They put the wrong date on the death certificate and misspelled his occupation as
chemmical
engineer, and Louis's will went missing. I appointed lawyers and talked to real estate agents and I cleared the house, and there was nothing more I could do.

My flight was booked for the Thursday, and on Wednesday night, we all went out to Fried Fish, and I said good-bye to everyone and thanked them for all they had done.

Halley and Don and Mike and Marion came back with me to the house, and we finished off the Little Creatures. I gave Halley keys so he could come and take the fridge away tomorrow, after I had gone. Then we said our good-byes again, and they left, and I slept for the last time in Louis's house.

In the morning I finished packing and checked I hadn't forgotten anything. The place was an empty shell, just the Salvation Army furniture, waiting to go back to where it had come from.

I checked the cupboards and drawers, in case I had overlooked something. In one of the drawers I found a postcard, of scenery in Scotland. I turned it over. Louis's address had been written in my hand, but the message had been inscribed by a child.

“Dear Uncle Louis,” it read. “We are on holiday in Scotland. Thank you for my book and my kangaroo which I love very much.”

And under the brief message my daughter had put kisses and signed her name. She is now a grown woman.

Louis had never thrown the card away.

The whole edifice and structure cracked. You think the building you live in is reinforced against earthquakes. You imagine that your carefully constructed tower, built of experience and past adversity, will withstand all hurricanes, gales, and storms. And then a feather flutters down from the sky, and that's all it takes. I sat on the Salvation Army sofa and wept to drown the world.

* * *

My cell phone rang. It was the taxi driver, saying that he was waiting outside. I put the cases out on the veranda, took one last look, and closed the door. Then carried the bags down to the cab.

The driver was Indian, maybe an illegal, but what difference does it make? We talked about the cricket and the Punjab, where he came from, and the heat and the humidity.

We hit the morning traffic, and I got concerned that I would miss the flight. I asked the driver if he thought we would be all right to get there. He thought we would.

“No worries, sir,” he said. “No dramas.”

It seems to me that there are—amongst the others—
many good and kind people in the world, who do not want you to worry.

But I fear their exhortations might be in vain.

* * *

When I got to Heathrow, my wife was waiting. We walked up to the lot where she had left the car. The day was rainy and cold, and I was still wearing clothes suitable for the warm Australian springtime.

“You okay?” she said. “You chilly?”

“No, I'm fine,” I said. “I don't feel it.”

For Louis and I were always like that.

We were tough.

32

In Time

Louis had some pension insurance that paid out on terminal illness and death. The pension company needed to be reassured that Louis had no living dependents before they would pay the money to his estate. Dependents included any living parents. We had none. But the pension company needed proof that our parents were no longer alive.

I found our mother's death certificate, but not our father's. I did, however, find his burial certificate. So I sent that in. It proved not to be acceptable.

I called the pension company. They insisted I produce our father's death certificate.

“But you can see from the burial certificate,” I said, “that he was buried half a century ago.”

“That doesn't prove anything,” the guy taking the call said. “We need proof that he's actually dead.”

“He's been in a coffin for fifty-plus years.”

“That's not evidence. That's hearsay.”

I got a copy of the death certificate from the government records and posted it on.

I rang up Halley on Skype and told him what had happened.

“It's unbelievable, isn't it, Halley?” I said.

He took so long to answer I thought the connection had gone dead.

“She did that trick with a plastic thumb, right?” he said.

“Yes. How's your shed, Halley? How are you doing? How are the bellbirds? How's the fridge?”

“I'm going out on the lake with Derek this weekend,” he said. “Fishing for red claw.”

“What bait are you using?” I asked.

“It's right here in the fruit bowl. You know,” he said, “I wish Louis was coming with us.”

“Me too,” I said. “Me too.”

* * *

Louis, my brother, always went places first, being older. And then, after a time, I would follow.

I expect he'll still be wearing the beanie hat.

He'll probably say, “What kept you?”

One of us will know what to do.

The Origins of

This Is the Life

Alex Shearer

There is often a fine line between fact and fiction—as fine a line as there may be between life and death—but nobody would pretend that they are the same thing.

Serious illness is a combination of tedium, anxiety, and chaos. You sit and you wait; then you panic and get stressed and fraught. And then there is nothing to do again. You are at the mercy of people and events.

To witness someone deal with terminal illness does not require a fraction of the courage that it takes to be the one who is ill. But it is still a fearful and exhausting business. It is a process that demands from you that you come to terms not just with the mortality of others but also your own.

This Is the Life
is by no means an accurate account by a reliable narrator. Perhaps no one is more unreliable a narrator than an actual witness to events, who recalls things not as they were, but as they might or should or could have been.

But all the same, the story here is based on experience and on truth—particularly the inescapable one that we are all human and will not live forever.

My own brother fell suddenly and seriously ill, and within a few months he was dead. We were close in some ways, but distant in others. We had known each other a lifetime, yet in some respects we barely knew each other at all.

In extremis
all the clichés prove true. Blood is thicker than water. You really do not know what you have until it is gone. Life is too short to quarrel. If you love someone you should tell them so while you still can. And your money is no good in the cemetery.

Books can be rewritten, but lives are only lived once. There can be no revisions: the spelling cannot be corrected; the grammar may not be improved. Yet with all its imperfections, this was a life worth living and worth recording.

Siblings are like no one else. Parents look after us, but we don't grow up with them. Brothers and sisters share our lives in a unique way.

My own brother, like the character in the book, was a talented, intelligent, and gifted man—and yet somehow he never did find his niche. I believe that many families have such members. The problem, maybe, is one of a greater idealism and honesty than the rest of us—who are more prepared to make compromises—possess. There are conscientious objectors in peacetime as in war, and they too pay a price for not conforming to what the majority do.

“He who neglects what is done for what ought to be done sooner effects his ruin than his preservation.” We had to do Machiavelli at school, and that quote always stuck in my mind. My brother's honesty and idealism did not help him in a less-than-honest and materialistic world.

And then there is Robert Service—a mostly forgotten poet, except perhaps for “The Shooting of Dan McGrew”—who also wrote a poem called “The Men That Don't Fit In.”
It is a verse about those who constantly and restlessly search for their proper groove in life, believing they would make a deep mark if only they could discover what they were good at and where their aptitudes lay.

So they chop and change, and each fresh move

Is only a fresh mistake.

My brother showed huge courage and stoicism in his last months. I don't really care for the expression “fighting cancer”; it implies that the person suffering from the disease is in some kind of boxing bout, some kind of fair contest, which—if they lose—implies weakness or deficiency on their part. It isn't like that. People overwhelmingly are not to blame for their illnesses; they are not combatants, they are patients; they are ill. It isn't their fault.

Yet my brother did fight—or at least he resisted; he withheld his consent right to the end. The good night surrounded him, but he did not go gentle into it. He was tough. He was braver than I will ever be.

I returned home after my brother's funeral and felt that somehow it was wrong—it was wrong that he should go, should disappear, should vanish without trace. And so I began to write.

This is not a factual account, but a much fictionalized one. Yet I am proud to have known the person who inspired it, and am glad to have been with him at the end of his life. I miss him. I wish he were here. I always will.

Photograph Courtesy of the Author

Alex Shearer has written for television, radio, film, and the stage and is the author of many books for children, including
The Speed of the Dark
, which was short-listed for the
Guardian
Children's Fiction Prize. He was born in Wick, in the north of Scotland, and now lives in Somerset, England.

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events,
real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters,
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Copyright © 2014 by Alex Shearer

Originally published in 2014 in Great Britain by Blue Door.

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ISBN 978-1-4767-6440-5

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