Chapter 3
Josh
My particular fear of dying has always felt like something and nothing.
Something: not a single male relative in my paternal bloodline has lived past the age of thirty.
Nothing: I’ve heard the usual arguments a million times. Just a sad coincidence. Doesn’t mean it’s going to happen to me. The past doesn’t equal the future. Etcetera, etcetera.
Some days I can half-believe this. Logic hasn’t entirely left the building.
And yet . . . I can’t prevent the quicksand fear of it closing in, usually in the middle of the night. I’ll spring violently awake, convinced I’m having a heart attack, or a stroke.
As far back as the 1800s, possibly further, every male on my father’s side of our family has died young.
Not from misfortune, but disease. The youngest was just eighteen.
My great-great-grandfather. So in my mind it’s long been a case of simple arithmetic, to which the answer is always the same: at an unknown point before I reach the age of thirty-one, my body will malfunction in some way, and I will die.
Whenever these night-time panics descend, I do my best not to wake Rachel. I try to remain still as my heart goes berserk, attempting to recall all the evidence I have for this simply being a phobia.
My GP tried to diagnose me officially, once. ‘Thanatophobia, Josh,’ she said, with a hint of triumph. As though between us we’d just invented an entirely new subsection of lunatic. ‘I believe you have an irrational fear of dying.’
I could have reminded her that my fear, in fact, was perfectly rational.
That I had rock-solid evidence running ominously down one side of my family tree.
But I’d gone to her for help, not an argument.
So I accepted her prescription for anti-anxiety medication, took it for two months, then stopped when it made absolutely zero difference to the way I was feeling.
It happened again this morning, at somewhere around four a.m. The pounding heart. The spasming thoughts. So I got up and went downstairs, stood barefoot in front of a grandfather clock in the huge expanse of the mansion’s wood-panelled hallway.
It felt extra-ominous, somehow. Standing in the dark, beneath that sinister wagon-wheel chandelier, surrounded by stags’ heads and coats of arms, on a rug made of squashed bear.
Shit, it’s January.
This means I have – I am convinced of this – no more than seventeen months left to live.
The masochists are back from their walk.
Rachel and I attempt to persuade them we’d simply got the wrong lobby and had been downstairs waiting for them in our wellies all along.
We are instantly disbelieved, of course, because Rachel and I are not – have never been – outdoorsy, fond of forced exercise, embracers of mud.
I occasionally feel for our imaginary future children, who would no doubt grow up to have rickets, unable to name basic vegetables.
To soothe the collective hangover I cook lunch for all fourteen of us, despite some half-hearted meddling from a mid-comedown Ingrid. Afterwards, Giles talks me into playing cards in one of the many sitting rooms.
I will never not be grateful that my three closest friends all still live within a ten-minute drive of my flat.
I know how rare that is – making it through your twenties without one of you relocating to Australia, or moving up north for more square footage, or deciding you’ve got more in common with new colleagues, flatmates, in-laws.
The sitting room we find ourselves in is more like a library. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, every one of them crammed full.
‘Reckon they’ve read all these?’ I say to Giles, perusing the spines as if I’m ten again and pressing my nose up to a pet-shop aquarium. The house belongs to a friend of Ingrid’s mum, who apparently got rich by renting out a vast portfolio of cheap houses she’d snapped up in the eighties.
‘Nah. They’re just for show, aren’t they? There must be hundreds in here.’
More like thousands, I think.
I picture our flat, creaking under the weight of the piles of books I’ve read and can’t bring myself to part with. They take up every available inch of floor space – the hallway and our bedroom, the living room, my study.
For a moment – fancifully – I wonder if they might have any of my novels in here. That’s what I do for work, mostly: I’m a novelist. My debut got picked up when I was only eighteen, the ensuing buzz such that it generated enough cash for a down-payment on the flat where Rach and I live now.
My fourth book was published eighteen months ago. But sales have more or less flatlined, forcing me to supplement my dwindling income with a job teaching creative writing at a local college.
Not that this is a bad thing. The opposite, in fact. It’s a privilege, getting to coach someone into becoming the writer we both know they can be. Helping them to craft a complex character or even a simple sentence, and feeling the magic of it land in my spine.
No such alchemy with my own work. I’m trying to write a fifth novel right now, but progress has been pretty dismal.
I keep half-starting drafts, then ditching them.
Rachel reminds me to follow my own advice: rise at dawn, stay rooted at my desk till dark, re-read all the how-to books I’ve ever bought.
She tells me she knows my next book will be the one.
But none of it really helps. My focus constantly feels off.
I know it’s partly the fear, clouding my clarity of thought. A squatter in my amygdala, roadblocking my brain.
Carefully, I pull a book from the shelf I’m next to, flip to the title page.
‘Jesus. This is a first-edition Swallows and Amazons. It’s got to be worth thousands.’
Giles shrugs. ‘Take it. They’ll never know. Bet they don’t appreciate it like you would.’
‘Um, I know you’re the product of two ardent socialists but isn’t that stealing?’
‘Redistribution of wealth.’ He winks, holds up a port bottle. ‘Hair of the dog?’
Thieving booze I can get on board with. I’m pretty sure consumables don’t count. They go off, after all, and this library looks as though it hasn’t been sat in for the best part of a century.
I nod and slide the book back, though it hurts my heart to do so.
We each take a sofa on either side of a walnut coffee table. The room has that distinctive country-house smell: antiques and dust-choked drapery, beeswax and woodsmoke. I can’t quite decide if it’s pleasant or not.
Giles hands me a glass. By our knees, the fire spits and crackles.
I raise my glass to his, take a swig, then another. The port is velvet-smooth, but it doesn’t seem to soften the stiffness in my stomach. Why can’t I relax? Another swig. ‘What percentage is this?’
Giles picks up the cards, starts to deal. ‘You know, Jeanne Calment smoked and drank her whole life, and she lived to be well over a hundred.’
Is this his backhanded way of suggesting we break into the humidor? ‘Who’s Jeanne Calment?’
‘The world’s oldest verified human.’
‘What’s a verified human?’
‘My point is, the people you expect to die early are often the ones who live the longest. Death defies logic, mate. It always has.’ He looks up, meets my eye. ‘You really believe you’re not going to make it past thirty, don’t you?’
I could ask if it’s that obvious. But I already know it is. It has been for years. Almost as long as he’s known me.
I’ve always thought of myself as rational, but this . . . I just can’t seem to shake it. The foreboding that lives in the back of my mind. A crouched animal, permanently primed to pounce.
Giles keeps dealing. ‘It doesn’t sound like Rachel thinks you’re on the way out.’
She says not. And, most of the time, I believe her. Because Rachel is a relentless pragmatist. But sometimes, she gets this look in her eye. A fleeting flash of doubt. A crack of lightning so fast, you question if you saw it at all.
But I guess that’s fear for you. It tends to be contagious.
I sip my port, trying to hold on to the image of my wife last night. Our champagne kiss in the wine cellar. The way her brown eyes hooked to mine. How she whispered on caught breaths how much she loved me.
‘Maybe you need something big to focus on,’ Giles continues. ‘Like having kids. They’re the best thing we ever did, mate. Truly. Your world transforms.’
Giles and his wife Lola have one-year-old twins, to whom Rachel and I are godparents. My favourite thing is to scoop them up, one in each arm, and talk to them very earnestly about Tolstoy, at which they always get the giggles. And it makes Rachel laugh, too.
Inside me, a splinter of envy lodges. A split-second shard of pain.
Sombrely, the grandfather clock in the corner of the room begins to chime.
‘Can I beat you at cards now, please?’ Giles says.
I pick up my hand and try to smile.