A Short History of Richard Kline (10 page)

Perhaps because his son was the only person he loved more than himself, some of Rick's melancholy and boredom fell away. Luke became a lens, a refracting prism through which things he had once scorned, or been oblivious to, acquired meaning. His son gave him pleasure in the ordinary. Not that this was a cure for his restlessness; from the time of Luke's birth his discontent was always there, like rising damp, but never with the same degree of hollowness. With a child, you always had a reason to get out of bed in the morning. There was something more to your life than the seductive phantoms, the metallic aftertaste of your own ego. And a child had a way of making the mundane seem enchanted. Take those wintry Saturday mornings on the soccer field: the glittering white crust of frost on the grass, small boys and girls breathing gusts of steamy vapour into the air, a line of bare sycamores along a creek, the list to one side of a Japanese maple behind the goal, its perfect tilt of asymmetry. And the magic circle around the playing field, parents and grandparents stamping their feet behind the white chalk markings to relieve their chilled toes, clapping their gloved hands together, shouting at their children, earnest prodigies in floppy shorts. The skinny, awkward bow-legged kid who seemed hardly able to walk without tripping over his feet but could run with jagged speed and who scored every week, sometimes twice. The stocky boy who tried hard but miskicked so often he would beat his head with his fist, over and over, until his mother sang out, ‘It's okay, Stuart, it's okay!' (Someone needed to explain to her that having your mother sing out from the sidelines was no consolation. Where, Rick wondered, was his father?) At the end of the game the two coaches would shepherd their charges into the centre of the ground, and there, massed in a weary huddle, the kids would stand awkwardly to give the opposing team three cheers. No matter how half-heartedly they were offered, those cheers could move him.

Yes, in the years following his marriage it seemed as if he were on a roll, as if he had crossed a frontier. He was head-hunted to set up the project team for innovation in a prestigious software firm, while Zoe and he eased into an affectionate groove of mutual understanding. He felt at last that he was maturing, settling equably into early middle age and that the brooding demon of his youth had migrated to another planet. At odd times he would find himself thinking of Sarah Masson, and talking to her in his head. It had been years since he last saw her, although for a while after meeting Zoe he had continued to visit intermittently in a natural diminuendo of contact, until one evening he wrote out his last cheque.

It was May 17 (he remembered the date because it was the day before Zoe's birthday) and he had brought with him a bunch of flowers and a bottle of champagne. Sarah had smiled enigmatically and said, ‘Any time you feel the need for a booster, I'm here.' And he had thanked her again and kissed her on the cheek and said, yes, he knew, and he really appreciated all that she had done for him. But in his heart, he knew, he just knew, that he'd never be back again.

He had fallen into something called normality.

He had grown up.

Then came the drop, like a trapdoor had opened beneath his feet. Everything at work began to jar, to shudder and crack under the pressure of the recession. He had to shrivel his team from eleven into five, an impossible number, and the hours they worked were insane.

He knew that his protégé, Jason, had a coke habit but was shocked to discover he had moved on to heroin. Someone left an anonymous note on Rick's desk, someone perhaps who wanted Jason's job, or envied his preferment. What could he do about it? He was struggling to manage his own stress, in the office all day Saturday and sometimes Sunday morning. And drinking more at night. Sometimes, at work, it was as if pieces of him and everyone else were strewn around the floor, and they scarcely had enough energy to pick themselves up, like broken tin men, and put themselves back together for the evening drive home.

Anger began to fester, slow and insidious. In his sleep he ground his teeth from the strain of it and woke in the mornings with his jaw clamped and aching; that is, if he slept at all, for he was working long hours and was over-tired, and even when he did sleep it was as if he were cursed by an underlying alertness for which there was no off button. He was a machine in sleep mode, in a state of low-power readiness, a body apparently at rest but really only in a condition of diminished operation.

On the drive home, stuck in traffic, he would bang with a loose fist on the steering wheel of the car, robotically, over and over. Often now he was late, and Zoe and Luke would eat without him. Sometimes Zoe waited but he was too exhausted to talk much and wanted only to slump with a glass of red in front of the idiot box. And this was all for what? In his twenties he had thrown himself into his work in a gung-ho way and it had been not been difficult to cover his tracks during the black periods. But now the future was no longer an ocean of possibility, more like a river where the waterline was slowly receding in the face of recurrent drought.

He was forty-two and he was stalled. Too often, mostly around three o'clock in the afternoon, he felt as if time was standing still. And he wondered: was this a mid-life crisis? There were days when his mortgage felt like a leaky barge, on others a concrete bunker. There were mornings when he was fuggy, late afternoons when he was brittle.

And then it happened, the thing he feared most: his work began to bore him. He saw that there was just work and more work, the next project and the next, and the one after that. They were all just marking time until they died, pretending that the game was important, that the game could not do without them.

His old ennui returned, only now the torment was worse. There was no longer the future to look forward to; he was in it. The back end of the future had arrived and it was no different, no more satisfying than the rest of his life. As for the front end, he could read the projections. He hadn't even got there yet and already it was failing him.

He began to have night rages and would wake in the dark with fists clenched, or an aching jaw from grinding his teeth. He became increasingly sensitive to noise, and the least thing would set him off into a hair-trigger tantrum.

One night he was disturbed around 3 am by a shouting match below the bedroom window. He thumped downstairs, threw open the front door and shouted at two men and a woman who were arguing drunkenly by the fence. One of them moved threateningly to open the gate, and that gesture of transgression sent him over the edge. Instinctively he moved towards the stranger, ready for whatever might be coming, and gashed his toe on the edge of the brass sweeper, which had begun to come away from the front door. He could feel the blood trickling over his toenail as he kept his eyes on the stranger, who at that moment was backing off, retreating in an aria of screamed obscenities.

He closed the door and turned back for the bedroom, only to find Zoe at the bottom of the stairs, furious.

‘You idiot!' she seethed. ‘They could have worked you over well and truly! You don't know what they're on or what they're carrying. Or if they'll come back!'

He said nothing. Bandaged his toe. Poured himself a whisky and went and sat in the darkness of the living room. The toe throbbed all night.

Each day his anger bit into him more corrosively, like an acid train, stopping all stations: lungs, heart, liver, spleen, kidneys and the whole messy labyrinth of his guts. And then the chest pains began. This is it, he thought. I'm going to be one of those men who drop dead in their forties.

Zoe booked him in to their GP, David Wang.

‘It could just be stress, Rick,' David said. ‘I'm seeing a lot of people lately who are affected by the recession.' He paused. ‘Although you do have a bit of a heart murmur. Did you know that?'

No, he didn't.

‘It could be nothing to worry about, but then again, you do have chest pain.'

That night in bed, he thought:
I'm not ready to die.

But what would ‘ready' mean?

On any day death was a possibility. He might need to have a bypass, or a valve replaced. He had heard that repairs to the heart could be more complicated than a transplant. Surely that couldn't be true? For one thing, the after-effects would be fewer. And what did the murmur sound like? A whisper? A slight rumble in the rhythm? A click? A trill? Was it some kind of electrical fault?

That night he lay in the dark and mentally rewrote his will. He began by working through a series of bequests, revising them in his head from hour to hour. He allocated mementos to friends, drafted farewell notes (including a long letter to Luke) and gave instructions for his funeral: the venue, for a start (not in a church); who he would want, and not want, to be present; the music he would like played; where his ashes should be scattered – the last gasp of the control freak.

At first his mind raced, covering the bases on an imaginary spreadsheet, so that he multi-tasked, issuing instructions on several points at the one time, flicking from one provision to the next. After a while this contemplation of his demise had a curious effect: it was unexpectedly soothing. His mind began to slow, his concentration to falter, and with this his breathing deepened and he became aware of the rise and fall of his chest. Having planned his death in great detail, he was at last able to fall into a deep and untroubled sleep.

The following Saturday he walked with Luke to the university's medical library to do some research. But once through the door of the Bosch building, he was overcome by his old library claustrophobia with its memories of enforced tedium, of the brain in an institutional harness. He had always felt a resistance to books en masse; stolid, musty little rectangles of the arcane. Still, he was there now, so he might as well get on with it.

Using the keyword ‘murmur' on the medical library database, he scrolled through a bewildering array of titles:
Clinical Disorders of the Heartbeat
,
The Disorders of Cardiac Rhythm Vols I and II
,
Interpretation of Complex Arrthymias
,
Electrasystoles and Allied Arrhythmias
,
Intraventricular Conduction Disturbances
,
Frontiers of Cardiac Electrophysiology
and
Ventricular Tachycardia
. Proceeding on the intuitive principle that the right book would jump out at him from the shelves, he strolled through the aisles of cardiac books while Luke rode his bike up and down the concrete terrace outside.

The books were more dryly technical than he had anticipated, and there seemed to be two hundred varieties of heartbeat, each characteristic of a different syndrome and carrying a different name, not one of which spelled out Software Analyst Programmers in Mid-life Panic. After only a few frustrated and increasingly desultory minutes, his eye was caught by the title of a slim black volume,
Sudden Death in Athletes
, written by a man with the improbable name of Jokl. Taking it from the shelf, he slumped into a reading chair and read a lurid chapter on ‘Collapse Syndromes': hypothermia, effort migraine, mountain sickness and cataplectic loss of muscle tone (athletes collapsing of shock when informed of their win), the Mexico Olympics in '68 proving to be of special interest.

This was absurd. He stood up, walked outside and whistled for Luke, who was careening down a long path into the trees.

A week later he presented himself for an echocardiogram. It was somewhere around six o'clock on a rainy Thursday evening, and there he was, sitting in the antiseptic waiting room of one of those private pathology centres that smell of money and death.

He was the only one there. Waiting his time. Within an hour everything in his life could change.

It was a heavy old house, a Victorian mansion converted into medical suites with cheap chipboard partitions subdividing what were once grand and gloomy salons. Eventually a woman appeared and beckoned him over.

‘Richard?'

‘Rick, it's Rick.'

‘Hi, Rick. I'm Helga.'

Helga was a large, Nordic-looking woman in her fifties, solidly built with cropped blonde hair streaked with grey. ‘Ever had an echocardiogram before, Rick?'

‘Never.'

She pointed to a cubicle. ‘Strip from the waist up.'

‘Shoes?'

‘No, you can leave your shoes on.'

This summoned up the notion, both comic and macabre, of dying with his boots on. Draped in a clinical wrap made of pale green paper, he opened a padded door and entered a room where the ultrasound machine was waiting for him, a block of gun-grey metal, six feet at its highest point, with two video screens at the top. Helga, he realised, was its technician, its high priestess.

Lying on the surgical bed, his head resting on a pillow, he felt as if he had been taken up into a spaceship. There was a certain warm gravitas about Helga, even in grey track pants and ugg boots which on anyone else would look shapeless and woolly. On her, they looked stylish and high-tech, like she was an astronaut in a lab. Helga had a comfortingly androgynous quality, a cross between high-tech angel and Nordic
Hausfrau
, and it was clear she could read the heart like an old invoice, like the back of a cereal packet. There were no mysteries there for Helga, but nor was she jaded, for she had a quality of intense concentration, of low-key command: rapid, efficient, absorbed. She worked the machine the way that competent women cook, with the familiarity and ease of having done it all before, but also the relaxed alertness of one who knows that at any minute it could all go wrong: something malignant or fatal could appear up there, some squiggle or smudge on the screen could signify a death sentence for the hapless figure on the surgical bed. A flaw might manifest, some warp or hole, some blockage or malformation; some enlargement or tissue damage, or clot or calcification; a startling arrhythmia, like a code that's been scrambled; an electrical fault running malign interference.