Chapter 89
Josh
One morning in spring, I am shocked to receive an email from Wilf. He sent it to my agent first, who forwarded it on with only a run of exclamation marks in the subject line, as he does whenever he’s affronted, which is often.
When I open the email, I can see why – although I do have to laugh.
Wilf tells me he’s been sitting on his notes for Graveyard Heart for almost two decades, so he thought it was about time.
The notes, which he’s attached on a three-page document, are largely criticism and only partly constructive – not to mention entirely pointless, since he never even read a draft.
He informs me, too, that he’ll be back in the UK later this summer, suggests we go for a drink.
If I agree, it will be the first time I have seen him in nearly thirty years. I wonder if, at last, he is feeling the need to reconnect with the only other person in the world who knows what it’s like to be him – minus the Einstein-sized brain, obviously.
Wilf tells me he got married a few years ago, to Camila, a Spanish woman he met on the poker circuit.
She’s in her thirties, which I’m not too sure how I feel about, given that, like me, Wilf is – chronologically – pushing seventy.
But I’m not going to judge. There have never been any rulebooks, after all, for what we did.
He’s a dad now, to boys aged three and eighteen months.
He attaches a photo of the four of them on a mountainside, the kids in toddler carrier packs, Camila and Wilf lifting hiking poles skyward.
This amuses me, since Wilf always used to claim he was allergic to any form of exercise, that it brought him out in hives.
But I can’t help thinking, now what? Is Wilf just planning on watching the three people he loves most in the world getting old and infirm and dying, exactly as I am having to do with Rachel?
In terms of my own future, practically speaking, I’m relatively fortunate.
I’ve got savings, which I’ve been surviving on since Rachel got ill and I took a break from writing.
But, looking ahead, I’m pretty sure retirement – as most people know it – won’t be an option for me.
At some point the DWP are bound to red-flag the pension I’ve deferred, since I’m pretty sure the government don’t have the money to bankroll people with zero impulse control and indefinite lifespans.
I wonder if Wilf ever thought, over the years, that a pill like the one we took might have become mass-market by now. That we’d be living in a world where old age was nothing but a scar on the landscape of history.
It will be good to see him, I think. I have a feeling that by the time he makes it back here, I will be needing all the friends I can get.