“I’m glad,” said Sarah.

“About Ray? Or Ed?” asked Katie.

“About Ray,” said Sarah, “and you.”

She put her teaspoon down and they waited for the atmosphere to warm up again.

“Incidentally,” said Sarah. “How’s your little brother doing these days? I haven’t seen him in yonks.”

“Fine. Bought himself a place in Hornsey. Haven’t seen him much myself to be honest. Proper boyfriend, too. I mean, like, an actual pleasant well-adjusted human being. Of course, you’ll meet them at the wedding.”

They sat for a few moments watching Jacob direct some kind of aerial combat between the disabled Action Man and an octopus made of blue felt.

“I’m doing the right thing,” said Katie.

“Good,” said Sarah.

23

Jean came back at four. Her extended lunch with Ursula had worked its usual magic. The Jamie debacle was forgotten and George was grateful for a supper of Irish stew over which they were able to commiserate amiably with each other about the forthcoming union.

“Does anyone like their children’s spouses?” He ran a triangle of crust around the bowl to mop up the remaining liquid.

“Jane Riley’s husband seemed nice.”

Jane Riley? George was repeatedly amazed by the ability of women to remember people. They walked into a crowded room and drank it down. Names. Faces. Children. Jobs.

“John and Marilyn’s party,” said Jean. “The tall chap who’d lost his finger in some kind of machine.”

“Oh yes.” It came fuzzily back. Perhaps it was the retrieval system men were missing. “The accountant.”

“Surveyor.”

After doing the washing up he retired to the living room with Sharpe’s Enemy and read the last twenty pages (“Two bodies marked this winter. The one whose hair had been spread on the snows of the Gateway of God, and now this one. Obadiah Hakeswill, being lifted into his coffin, dead…”). He was tempted to start another of his still-unread Christmas presents. But you had to let the atmosphere of one novel seep away before launching into the next, so he turned the television on and found himself midway through a medical documentary about the last year in the life of a man dying from some kind of abdominal cancer.

Jean made some caustic comment about his ghoulish taste and retired elsewhere to write letters.

He might have chosen a different program if one were available. But a documentary left you edified at least. And anything was better than some tawdry melodrama in a hair salon.

On-screen the chap pottered round his garden, smoked cigarettes and spent a great deal of time under a tartan rug on the sofa wired up to various tubes. If anything, it was slightly tedious. A rather reassuring message if one thought about it.

The chap went outside and had some trouble bending down to feed his chickens.

Jean was squeamish, that was the truth of the matter. How We Die might not be everyone’s choice of bedtime reading. But Jean read books by people who had been kidnapped in Beirut or survived for eight weeks on a life raft. And whilst everyone died sooner or later very few people needed to know how to repel sharks.

Most men of George’s age thought they were going to live forever. The way Bob had driven, it was clear that he had had no concept of what might happen in five seconds’ time, let alone five years.

The chap on television was taken to the seaside. He sat on the shingle in a deck chair until he got too cold and had to return to the camper van.

Obviously it would be nice to go quietly in one’s sleep. But going quietly in one’s sleep was an idea cooked up by parents to make the deaths of grandparents and hamsters less traumatic. And doubtless some people did go quietly in their sleep but most did so only after many wounding rounds with the Grim Reaper.

His own preferred exits were rapid and decisive. Others might want time to bury the hatchet with estranged children and tell their wives where the stopcock was. Personally, he wanted the lights to go out with no warning and the minimum attendant mess. Dying was bad enough without having to make it easier for everyone else.

He popped to the kitchen during the ad break and returned with a cup of coffee to find the chap entering his last couple of weeks, marooned almost permanently on his sofa and weeping a little in the small hours. And if George had turned the television off at this point the evening might have continued in a pleasantly uneventful manner.

But he did not turn the television off, and when the man’s cat climbed onto the tartan rug in his lap to be stroked someone unscrewed a panel in the side of George’s head, reached in and tore out a handful of very important wiring.

He felt violently ill. Sweat was pouring from beneath his hair and from the backs of his hands.

He was going to die.

Maybe not this month. Maybe not this year. But somehow, at some time, in a manner and at a speed very much not of his choosing.

The floor seemed to have vanished to reveal a vast open shaft beneath the living room.

With blinding clarity he realized that everyone was frolicking in a summer meadow surrounded by a dark and impenetrable forest, waiting for that grim day on which they were dragged into the dark beyond the trees and individually butchered.

How in God’s name had he not noticed this before? And how did others not notice? Why did one not find them curled on the pavement howling? How did they saunter through their days unaware of this indigestible fact? And how, once the truth dawned, was it possible to forget?

Unaccountably he was now on all fours between the armchair and the television, rocking back and forth, attempting to comfort himself by making the sound of a cow.

He considered grasping the nettle and lifting his shirt and undoing his trousers to examine the lesion. A part of his mind knew that it would be reassuringly unchanged. Another part of his mind knew with equal certainty that it would be broiling like a fist of live bait. And a third part of his mind knew that the precise nature of what he would find was irrelevant to this new problem which was bigger and considerably less soluble than the health of his skin.

He was not used to having his mind occupied by three entirely separate voices. There was so much pressure inside his head it seemed possible that his eyes might burst.

He tried moving back to the armchair, for propriety’s sake if nothing else, but he couldn’t do it, as if the terrifying thoughts now haunting him were borne on some ferocious wind which was partly blocked by the furniture.

He continued to rock back and forth and resigned himself to keeping the mooing at as low a volume as possible.

24

Jamie parked round the corner from Katie’s house and composed himself.

You never did escape, of course.

School might have been shit, but at least it was simple. If you could remember your nine times table, steer clear of Greg Pattershall and draw cartoons of Mrs. Cox with fangs and bat wings you pretty much had it sorted.

None of which got you very far at thirty-three.

What they failed to teach you at school was that the whole business of being human just got messier and more complicated as you got older.

You could tell the truth, be polite, take everyone’s feelings into consideration and still have to deal with other people’s shit. At nine or ninety.

He met Daniel at college. And at first it was a relief to find someone who wasn’t shagging everything in sight now they were away from home. Then, when the thrill of having a steady boyfriend faded, he realized he was living with a bird-watching Black Sabbath fan and the horrifying thought occurred to him that he might be cut from the same cloth, that even being a sexual pariah in the eyes of the good burghers of Peterborough had failed to make him interesting or cool.