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.
90.
Josh
June 2037
We’ve been told Rachel is nearing the end.
She’s been hospitalised with chest infections twice in the past six months, and is now confined to bed. Her breathing grates and chafes as she drifts in and out of consciousness. She murmurs things, from time to time. Lately, she has started asking where her rings are again, who has stolen them. I always promise her we’ll look for them, which seems to reassure her, if only temporarily.
I stay constantly by her side, with a heavily pregnant Emma. The house buzzes with visitors – Polly and Darren, Lo and her girls, Emma’s friends, and, once, even Oliver and his new partner, from whom I kept a judicious distance. Old neighbours and colleagues drop by too, and countless other people whose relationships to Rachel are unclear to me, until Emma fills me in. Ingrid and Sean fly back from LA and rent a flat down the road. Gifts proliferate everywhere – flowers and cookies, chocolates, scented candles.
I keep drifting off then jerking awake like a dog, terrified Rachel will pass away while I’m sleeping. Next to me, Emma does the same. Both of us are delirious now with exhaustion. Consequently, we have been talking absolute nonsense pretty much non-stop. Yesterday, Kai walked in to find me halfway through some kind of soliloquy about the Milton Keynes grid system as Emma snored next to me, dribbling on to the shoulder of my T-shirt.
‘You know, it’s funny,’ Emma murmurs, at one point. ‘That Mum asked you to look after me, if anything happened to her. I reckon it’ll be the other way around.’
I’d love to prove Emma wrong. But the truth is, I’ve no idea how I’ll fare after Rachel is gone. I have only a handful of memories from my life before she was in it.
Still. No need to offload my entirely avoidable problems on to someone heavily pregnant with twins.
‘I think you’re going to have your hands full enough,’ I say, plucking a shard of chocolate from the foil between us. Together, we have been destroying a leftover Easter egg that started out almost as big as my head. Of this, I feel sure Rachel would approve.
Next to us, Rachel starts to stir. She’s become pretty restless over the past few days. The palliative team have told us this is probably because her organs are beginning to fail.
I hate hearing them say stuff like that. But Emma was firm about wanting the facts. Straight up, never sugar-coated. I guess she’s advocated in enough cases of stabbings and stranglings and hammer-wielding lunatics to be immune, on some level, to bodies being reduced to blood, flesh, bones.
My eyes stray to the collection of Rachel’s artwork on the wall. The embankment, splashed with watercolour. Geese on a lake in winter. And the front aspect of our old flat, the place I still call home. Bright blue front door, roses scaling the brickwork. The Victorian sash window she used to love looking out of.
I turn my gaze to Rachel again. Her greying hair is a cloud on the pillow, the lines on her face like the staves of a song. I hope her mind is stirring only with beautiful music, memories of a life well-lived.
But, as I’m looking down at her, Rachel begins trying – with much effort, and quite out of nowhere – to speak. To say my name, and then her daughter’s.
Emma straightens up, swings a hand on to my arm, grips hard.
Rachel blinks twice. Her eyes swim, their burnt-sugar brown unchanged since the day we met.
She draws a long breath and swallows, moistens her lips. Then: ‘Josh.’
Impossibly, her voice is clear as an alpine stream.
91.
Rachel
June 2037
Like a rescue flare into a darkened sky, my mind has roared to life.
Synapses stir. Pathways swell and expand, cells remember.
Yes, I think.I have a daughter, and a loving family, and two grandchildren on the way.
I feel a hand grip mine. And it is a hand I know well, by its gentle weight, the geography of its palm. The cool kiss of a watch strap. I feel with my thumb for the writer’s bump, and find it straight away: that soft knot, right middle finger.
