A vast white tentacle of moonlight slides up and over the mountain, and picks out in brilliant detail the tiny figure on the ridge, now walking fast. She is wearing a neat black windproof jacket, black leggings, and a headband to corral a wiry tumble of dark hair. You might want her to be a glamour-puss but she isn’t, and the mountain doesn’t care: her face is rather narrow, her forehead high, and her body lacking in curves, but, striding out onto a spiny outcrop of snow-plastered rocks, she moves like a wildcat.
It was somewhere just below here. She steps across a gap between two boulders, testing the footing of steel spikes on snowy rock before she commits, then leans to execute a delicate side-pull with a gloved hand, redirecting her nine stone of weight as she drops neatly into a sheltered hollow. Life feels precious up here. One false step.
Dan Mock has no friends in this unlovely tangle of a town. There is a chilly breeze but he feels quite calm, his own predicament merely comic when viewed beside that of his stricken wife. Limescale and the prong of a shower cradle: an unlikely conspiracy of violence, intruding on her well-ordered life. Undeserved. Not serious, the doctor said — but too close to serious, and his fault. What would he do or be without her?
His gaze alights with a flourish on his tarp-covered Yamaha steed: mile-devourer, freedom-giver. He’ll hotwire it, hitch up his dressing gown, ride to Mark and Rachel’s place along the Berkshire back-lanes — out of sight of the rozzas — and be tucked up on their sofa within half an hour. But hotwire with what? For a third time he fingers those balsa-woody tissues in his pockets. He mentally scans the bike for anything detachable. Nada: he keeps a tight ship. He will walk, and find a skip. Reading is well-supplied with skips, and skips are full of wire.
He passes a few lighted windows — should he knock at a door? These people will recognise him at least, if not know his name. Won’t they? He plays through the possible outcomes and they are not encouraging — he doesn’t even know Mark’s phone number by heart — so he walks on. At the street corner he spies a beer can in the gutter: that will conduct, if he can cut a strip off. He scatters the dregs — Special Brew, no less — and puts it in his pocket to keep his options open.
Compared to his own shadowy street, the main road is lit up like a film set. A man approaches, shelters behind his terrier and looks away. A young couple, students, cross to the other side before they pass him. He reaches the little parade of shops and sees his reflection in a darkened window: a shambling weirdo in a too-short dressing gown. A glimpse of somehow misshapen knees. He at last looks like he often secretly feels. Like everyone feels, for all he knows. The beer can protrudes shamelessly. He moves to throw it away but cannot bring himself to drop litter. He finds a rubbish bin, checks inside for any handy lengths of wire, shivers, blows on his hands, and wanders on.
James F. Saunders is awakened by the moist rustle of rain, or perhaps by its smell, which restores him instantly to the recumbent, unseeing alertness that the world’s somniacs are spared. He imagines involuntarily the damp, tangled nest of limbs and hair beyond the wall; consciously stops grinding his teeth; extends an arm outside the duvet’s warmth and explores the edge of his desk until his fingers close on a plastic cigarette lighter with no fuel left in it. He sits up suddenly and flicks the wheel. Zhip. There it is: this crappy little room, his whole dead-end life, in a flash. Chair desk lop-sided wardrobe dormer window tiny sink. None of it his. A mound of his clothes is heaped over the chair-back — this nightly balancing act unchanged since his student days — his jeans and long-johns half-covering the chunky laptop as though trying to delay the punch-line of a moderately good joke. Again: zhip.
He seems to smell something else, something rotten in that midnight rain. Yes indeed, he muses: why shouldn’t the spectre of death loom large in one’s early thirties? The ghosts of Byron, Mozart and Van Gogh, whose heavy-scented genius he both reveres and despises, all dwell hereabouts, flashing cold, brilliant eyes and whispering that it really doesn’t matter whether or not you have a few decades left to live. You’ve had ample time to prove your worth, and from here on it’s probably all just repetition. Who can blame old Rob and Trudy for moaning and slamming their headboard against the wall? Were they fucking or just having a breakdown?
James lets the lighter fall and sinks back onto his pillow. Without noticing what he is doing he begins to count — instead of sheep, and like the fool he undoubtedly is — all the great men and women who died when they were younger than he is now.
Nevertheless, tomorrow he will begin.
Natalie looks down at the little plastic socket they have stuck in the back of her hand, currently unattached to any tube. Her body is, of course, just a gadget to be charged up, and into which various branded gizmos must occasionally be downloaded.
How silly of her to forget this. It is, she supposes, a good thing to be reminded of the fragility of the body, that soggy bundle of offal without which all the rest, all the important stuff in your head, simply disappears. Every living adult is a miraculous soap opera of deaths averted, offal preserved — buses not walked in front of; infections heroically fought off by mechanisms she suspects nobody quite understands even today; railings on boats, bridges and balconies wistfully leaned against but not climbed over; cars impeccably, implausibly steered along miles of winding lanes — as well as a terrifyingly dense compress of experience: the bleak and brutal vastness of childhood somehow overcome. And yet, she observes, turning again to the sea of rooftops, here they are in their burgeoning thousands: the survivors. Adult specimens.
Mike strolls nonchalantly past the queuing mortals, waves his passport, springs jauntily down the walkway and is shown to his weird peapod of a seat. He changes from loafers to slippers and slides The Economist from his slim portfolio briefcase.
He settles into his seat and sighs: here in his hands are the troubles of the troubled world. As an accidental member of the so-called one per cent (his father would never believe it), he is duty bound at the very least to read, to understand.
Later. Wearing the same expression as Prince Hal trying out the burden of kingship, he crowns himself with a pair of noise-cancelling headphones, thumbs his way to something exquisite and closes his blond-lashed eyes.
Brenda shrugs off her rucksack and stands motionless for a few seconds, listening to wind singing gently over snow. She carefully backs out of the hollow and down onto the yawning slope, then turns to face the night and kicks in her spiked heels expertly. Hot piss burning through snow like an arc welder: always satisfying. The fifty blue-white peaks of Knoydart glow softly in the light of a clouded moon.
Back in the hollow she steps out of the crampons and boots and into a light sleeping bag, sits on her rucksack with her back nestled into a comfortable cleft and lights a tiny propane stove. Ten minutes after dropping into this remembered hollow just grazing three thousand feet and with the air temperature at minus six and falling, she has drunk a cup of hot soup, brushed her teeth, washed her face with a delicious gloveful of snow, pulled on a silk balaclava pre-warmed in her inside pocket, and is comfortably fast asleep. Her eyelashes, dark, carry a single fleck of wind-borne snow.
A hundred miles to the south, a 747 howls through space, heading for what was once the New World.
2. Life ring