‘Thank you,’ I said.
He smiled and bobbed his head. ‘Goodnight.’ As I let myself into the flat, I heard him shout, ‘Never cared much for Shakespeare!’ as he walked away down the street, laughing.
The next morning, I opened my front door to find that my car had not only been delivered to the parking space outside my flat, but that the engine had been repaired and started like a dream. On the passenger seat sat an envelope. The letter addressed me as ‘the kind-hearted woman who went out of her way not to kill me’， and asked if it would not be too forward to invite me to share in some tapas and stargazing at my earliest convenience. And then, ‘because you are a woman who likes words, Margot,’ he wrote, ‘a poem from my world to yours’。
And in his arachnid writing, he had copied out the first verses of a poem:
Reach me down my Tycho Brahe, I would know him when we meet, When I share my later science, sitting humbly at his feet; He may know the law of all things, yet be ignorant of how
We are working to completion, working on from then to now.
Pray, remember, that I leave you all my theory complete, Lacking only certain data for your adding, as is meet; And remember, men will scorn it, ’tis original and true, And the obloquy of newness may fall bitterly on you.
But, my pupil, as my pupil, you have learned the worth of scorn; You have laughed with me at pity, we have joyed to be forlorn; What, for us, are all distractions of men’s fellowship and smiles?
What, for us, the goddess Pleasure with her meretricious wiles?
You may tell that German college that their honour comes too late.
But they must not waste repentance on the grizzly savant’s fate; Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light; I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.
PART THREE
Lenni
‘I DON’T WANT to die.’
As I say it, I feel the goose bumps shivering their way onto the surface of my skin. I like that. Whenever my body announces a part of itself that’s working normally, I feel proud. My skin’s reaction to temperature? Fine, it turns out. Never better.
The man turns to look at me with disdain and confusion. His cigarette hovers somewhere between his shoulder and his mouth, outstretched as though he’s offering me a drag.
He has no hair on the top of his head, but it’s gathered in dark and grey tufts on the sides and I wonder if it’s keeping his ears warm out here. He’s wearing a beige dressing gown that goes down to his bare knees. The skin on his legs is pale but the hairs are really dark and long. So long you could brush them … if you wanted to.
He watches me, completely suspended in animation.
It seems an obvious sort of thing to say, but he doesn’t light up with recognition or agreement.
‘Did you know, the best place to scavenge for discarded cigarettes is the bus stop?’ I ask. ‘The chances are that someone will have lit up only to have to stub their cigarette out when the bus arrives. And that’s where they’ll be. Plenty of barely smoked cigarettes.’
‘You know, if you wanted to get some for free,’ I add, when I’m not sure if he’s understood me. ‘A homeless friend of mine told me that,’ I carry on. ‘He said I wasn’t likely to find a use for it, but I’ve passed it on. And maybe now that you know, you’ll pass it on and it’ll keep on going for ever.’
He holds the cigarette still, and I watch the snake of smoke curling left and right as it winds on up to the sky.
‘He’s already dead, that friend of mine,’ I say, though he still doesn’t respond. A breeze drifts through us both and I wonder if the man feels something.
‘I’m not ready,’ I tell him, and he turns away, looking out at the hospital car park and taking the cigarette almost to his mouth.
‘I’m not,’ I tell him. He looks back at me. The confusion has ebbed away and there’s just disdain now. I’m ruining his cigarette break and he wants me gone. But I am grateful for it. Hostility is fine. It’s the sympathy that kills you.
The roar of the outside is all around us – the road in the distance, the wind in the trees, the murmur of people, and the clink on the ground as pound coins miss the slot on the parking ticket machine. The noise should be oppressive, but it isn’t, it’s freeing. The hospital is so quiet. But out here, sounds can get lost.
‘How can I possibly die when I’m this afraid of dying?’ I ask him.
He wants me to go, but I can’t just yet. The grey stubble around his mouth twitches and he very briefly bares a yellow tooth. I wonder if this is an innate response. A jungle cat baring its teeth to a bird who just won’t go away. He throws the cigarette to the floor with a forward arc that makes it skitter and roll along the paving slabs and underneath one of the benches.