Slow Hand (4 page)

All the time, even in the midst of the panics, I knew it to be free-floating anxiety, its source a well of terror in me that had nothing to do with my chosen concerns. But this information wasn’t much help. And sometimes, exhausted by it all, I wanted someone around who would tell me none of it was real, and take away from me the problems that seemed, now and then, to threaten my sanity. But, in fact, I managed, and things have improved. The anxiety is contained.

Now, as I say, since I decided that writing is the only route I’ve got through life, the worry had latched on to that, like a cattle tick, and gains sustenance from my fears.

What I’ve learned about this is to ignore it. Most of the time, I write through a miasma of terror, and something decent comes out the other end. I don’t know how. I think of it as “The Process” and leave it at that. It’s like swimming in mud; not pleasant, but you get to the other side if you just keep going.

Usually, I can live with the discomfort. Why should things be easy? But occasionally I get exhausted by it, with having to contain my insecurity and generate enough energy to just bloody well get on with it. And still, sometimes, I wish someone else were here to do it for me.

I imagine the conversation with this paragon who will devote his energy to keeping me at it.

“I can’t do this. I can’t write,” I wail, a formless heap.

“Of course you can.” The voice is practical, not comforting, even a bit impatient. What about all the things you’ve written? You did them, and they were all right. Now, do it again.”

“I can’t,” I howl angrily. “I don’t know how those other things happened. They weren’t anything to do with me.
This
is the real thing, and I can’t do it.”

“Well, you’re just going to have to try harder, aren’t you?”

That’s what I’m after. Not soggy comfort, but a hard line. A brusque assumption that I can and will do it, that I don’t have any choice. And that, I suppose, is what I do for myself most of the time. But, as I say, sometimes it’s hard to make that other voice, and I wish someone else were here to help. Which is foolish, I know, and I get over and on with it. But it doesn’t help one bit when Dan calls to play games in the mud I feel I’m drowning in. It doesn’t make me feel—I don’t know—valued.

I decided it was a good moment to take some exercise. Sometimes I can disperse the panic by working up a physical sweat. I go to a gym just past the local underground station.

As I approached the station, trying to contain my annoyance at Dan by promising it a monumental expenditure of energy on the work-out bench, I noticed that something was going on. Too many people on the street for a weekday afternoon; the bus queue a long, rush-hour line; and small, static groups outside the station itself, standing around in
that
way, signaling an event. An ambulance waited throbbing in the road, traffic building up as cars skirted carefully and curiously around it, its back doors open, red blankets folded neatly on the beds. The entrance to the station, normally a corridor of warm air, a dark gloomy cave into which travelers disappeared, was closed, heavy iron gates pulled across, and behind them, a handful of uniformed figures milled about. Two middle-aged men sat in pale silence on the stone step in front of the gates, neither of them looking as if this was their normal way of being on the street.

I allowed myself the luxury of imagining an electrical fault, an unattended carrier bag, a heart attack, even, while I walked through the small crowd and beyond the locked gates toward the gym. Where, no longer needing willed ignorance to get past the spot uninvolved, I gave my brain permission to interpret the signs.

There had been a leaper. Some poor but efficient sod had jumped under a passing train.

It’s the drivers that call them leapers. My ex, who likes to know this kind of technical, inside information, met an underground driver in a pub who told him. Also, that leapers are a bit of a blessing among the lads, since any driver it happens to is given two days compassionate leave, with pay. It always sounded to me like front-line bravado, the brutality of the stomach-sick medical student, the ho-ho-ho of the intolerable. Anyway, “leaper” had stuck with us as a generic term for this particular kind of no-kidding suicide, and that was the word I thought.

I exercised viciously on the sloping bench, jerking the pulleys with muscles that surprised me, so that the weights clanked noisily when they came to rest, and the sliding bench screeched as it rolled up and down the gradient. But no matter how hard I pushed and pumped at the weights, I couldn’t drown out the conversation. Two other women had stopped exercising and were standing at the window that looked out on to the station.

“What a terrible thing to do.”

Right, that’s the word, “terrible,” I thought.

“Why do you think it’s taking them so long to bring the body out?”

Jesus Christ, think about it. Think hard.

“You know, my sister was on a train when someone jumped in front of it. They don’t let you out.
And
he wasn’t killed, the bloke. Not outright. She had to sit there and listen to these awful screams. He screamed and screamed, apparently. She says she won’t ever forget it. Can you imagine? “

Can’t blame him, can you? A voice was probably all the poor bastard had left.

“Terrible. Terrible. Such a terrible thing to do.”

I kept my end of the conversation silent and worked on grimly at the bench.

But the conversation continued.

“I suppose we shouldn’t be … but killing yourself like that, you’d have to really mean it. I can’t imagine what it must be like to feel so …”

“No. How could anyone imagine it. The poor driver …”

When I’d finished my routine I sat in the sauna for as long as I could stand, trying to sweat it all away. Which wasn’t long, saunas being intolerable. A Swedish Protestant plot, I think, a stab at hell-on-earth, a dire warning of the discomforts to come. Unsuccessful, actually, since it makes hellfire attractive by comparison.

Out in the daylight, dehydrated and aching, I looked to my left, in the direction of my flat, on the far side of the underground. Small groups of people still stood outside the station, some in shock, others merely showing a passing interest, a few professionals looking as if this was all in a day’s work, some of them succeeding better than others. The ambulance throbbed and waited. I turned right and sat at one of the tables outside the cafe on the other side of the gym.

Recuperate a bit, I decided. You don’t have to walk back through and over that drama until you’ve had a cup of coffee. Sometimes, I’m good to myself.

The woman sat down at my table a few moments later.

It doesn’t seem to make much sense, but there’s a difference between tables inside a cafe and those on the street. Inside, unless everywhere else is taken, it’s very unlikely that anyone will ask to share a table that is already occupied. It’s a virtual act of aggression, the mark of men on the make and the mildly mad. But it’s different in the open. Even if there are empty tables elsewhere, it’s an easy, insignificant act to sit with a complete stranger. It must be that people feel they can escape more easily where there are no walls to contain them. And the bright daylit street seems to exclude the likelihood of whatever it is we fear. Streets are everybody’s. Indoors, in the darker interior of
the cafe, the table becomes defensible space, and the approach of another a threat.

I mean to say that I wasn’t made uncomfortable by the woman’s approach, nor did her presence impinge until she spoke.

She was tall, well-built, and sleek, in her elegant middle age, with a face that was all bone structure, and dark spherical glasses. Smooth, dark hair, cut to a heavy, architectural bob, and the clothes tailored (and not in England) to match her perfectly manicured fingernails. Not English. Diane, I was to learn, but think it with a Mediterranean accent: Dee-ahn.

She sat at the table, facing the station in silence for a little while, and then lit a long, dark cigarette.

“Are you watching or avoiding walking over it?” she asked, releasing smoke as she spoke and moving her head slightly to indicate the underground.

“Both, I suppose.”

“It will ruin your day if you watch the stretcher come out.”

“It’s not much of a day, anyway. And a worse one for him or her down there. Or better.”

She shrugged lightly.

“Yes. Or no. Her. I understand it was a woman.”

There was a quality of utter detachment about her, as though she looked out on the world and saw, but was untouched by it. Everything—her clothes, makeup, the way she sat poised and posed in her chair—looked deliberate, and yet, it was all so well done that nothing seemed artificial. I hadn’t seen her eyes under the sunglasses, but I knew they would be steady whether they looked at me across the table or at the scene along the road. Now she lifted the glasses away from her face and looked me over, running her eyes up and down my body in a slow sweep. Her cool, emerald appraisal was electrifying; the air filled with the static of possibilities.

“Does it excite you, the death down there?”

I took one of her mysterious cigarettes and leaned forward to catch the light she offered. I’m a believer in balance, a serious work-out requires nicotine as ballast.

“I’m thrilled. It astonishes me. I’m bowled over with admiration.”
Her brow creased in a question. “At the certainty that’s been acted on,” I explained. “I like a person who knows what they want and leaves no room for indecision or an accident of salvation.”

“But what if it were a whim?” she queried. Her deep eyes were amused beneath their steady gaze. “A momentary thing? Irretrievable once acted on?”

I shook my head briskly.

“That’s a thought the living use to comfort themselves.
He didn’t really mean it.
So that the next time we stand on a station platform we don’t have to choose between getting on the train or throwing ourselves under it. We wouldn’t mean it, we tell ourselves, we’d be sorry afterward. What afterward? The only thing to be sure of is that we wouldn’t be sorry afterward. In any case, what makes a momentary whim less true than the thought we’ve continued to have for twenty years because we haven’t bothered to change it?”

She sat back in her chair, resting the coffee cup lightly on her silk shirt.

“The only thing that’s true now is the physical end of a life,” she said quietly.

I heard my voice clipped, angry.

“Is anything more important in a life?”

“No,” she agreed calmly. But you are a romantic. You will be angry at being told so, but it’s true. The fact is that to kill yourself in such a way is childish and aggressive. And stupid, for the corpse down there cannot reap the benefits. Look at the disruption that has been caused. Trains are held up all along the line, people are made late for appointments. Perhaps some of them are important. The traffic is slowed down, and passersby going about their everyday business are drawn in, they cannot avoid being aware of what has happened beneath their feet. Now they feel foolish and petty to be buying a bunch of flowers and a quarter pound of cheese. So much power, so much effect.”

But there was no real anger in her voice. It remained distant and melodic. Even a little pedagogical. She continued.

“It makes people think thoughts they do not have to have.
That person a few moments ago was living, they think, I might have passed her on my way to the grocer. Was alive, is dead. Only moments in between. A matter of a moment one way or another, they say to themselves. As I am alive now, this moment. What is to become of me? What right has someone ending their own life to impose such thoughts on others who may not choose to have them?”

This conversation pleased me. I liked her matter-of-fact, practical assessment of the anonymous death. There was a hardness in her voice that made me listen. And it was a relief to hear those things said. She echoed the thoughts I hadn’t allowed myself to have, describing exactly my resistance to walking back over the scene.

I think about death a lot, in a general sort of way. I have a tendency to see it as heroic, a feat. I know we can’t help dying, but it’s such a serious and solitary thing. Death seems to me to ennoble the most frivolous and incompetent of lives. And voluntary death awes me with its absolute refusal to tolerate the intolerable. I admire the cold calculation, the rejection of a life of fear and panic in favor of decision.

But as I walked past the underground station on my way to the gym, what I had actually thought was: “I can’t stand this.”

I couldn’t bear the idea of that person’s misery as she walked along the street, moments before me, and the terror she felt as she stood on the edge of the platform waiting for the incoming train. I hated her for making her pain and her death so evident and imposing it on me. It angered and frightened me that she had advertised her safely anonymous unhappiness and required me to imagine that appalling death beneath my feet.

The truth was that I’d had precisely the same thoughts that underlay the conversation I contemptuously dismissed between the women standing by the window. But wouldn’t permit myself to say aloud. I couldn’t bring myself to admit the common thoughts, banal, true, automatic, human, inevitable, that were being spoken carefully so that the unease could be dispersed by the sound of the words. I prefer to let those thoughts, pointless as I know they are, roll around in the silence between world-weary shrugs. I want them to stay hanging in the air,
recognized by their absence. I am, I must admit, ashamed to be on the side of the living.

The woman sitting opposite me with her brisk tones and coolly interested eyes voiced my real thoughts and made them seem acceptable. She spoke knowingly, in the manner of a distant observer, of the uncomfortable effects of death on our doorstep. And always her eyes held me in their gaze, faintly humorous, as if commenting, though not unkindly, on my self-deceit.

I heard myself say, “I’m trying to write something. But I can’t. I just can’t do it.”

And held my breath, horrified to hear the words out there in the world, but certain, now that they were said, that she could give me the right answer. I hadn’t thought of that harsh, reassuring voice of my imagination belonging to a woman; it hadn’t occurred to me, but it didn’t seem to make much difference now that I saw it was.