The Deal of a Lifetime and Other Stories Read online

  There was a huge anchor leaning against one side of the boat. When Ted was very small, the boy would occasionally ask his dad how long it would be before he was taller than it. The dad has tried to remember when it happened. He’s tried so hard that the square in his head quaked. He learned his lesson; he was a different man when Noah was born, became someone else as Grandpa than he had been as a father. That’s not unique to mathematicians. When Noah asked the same question Ted once had, Grandpa replied, “You’ll have to hope it never happens, because only people who are shorter than the anchor get to play in my office whenever they want.” And when Noah’s head began to approach the top of the anchor, Grandpa placed stones beneath it so he would never lose the privilege of being disturbed.

  “Noah has gotten so smart, my love.”

  “He always has been, it just took you awhile to catch up,” she snorts.

  His voice catches in his throat.

  “My brain is shrinking now, the square gets smaller every night.”

  She strokes his temples.

  “Do you remember what you said, when we first fell in love, that sleeping was a torment?”

  “Yes. Because we couldn’t share our sleep. Every morning when I blinked awake, the seconds before I knew where I was were unbearable. Until I knew where you were.”

  She kisses him.

  “I know that the way home is getting longer and longer every morning. But I loved you because your brain, your world, was always bigger than everyone else’s. There’s still a lot of it left.”

  “I miss you unbearably.”

  She smiles, her tears on his face.

  “Darling stubborn you. I know you never believed in life after death. But you should know that I’m dearly, dearly, dearly hoping that you’re wrong.”

  The road behind her is blurry, the horizon bearing rain. He holds her as hard as he can. Sighs deeply.

  “Lord how you’ll argue with me then. If we meet in Heaven.”

  • • •

  A rake has been left propped against a wall. Lying next to it are three plant markers flecked with damp earth. On the ground, there’s a bag with a pair of glasses sticking out of one of its pockets. A microscope has been forgotten on a footstool and there’s a white coat hanging from a hook, a pair of red shoes visible beneath. Grandpa proposed to her here, by the fountain, and Grandma’s things are still everywhere.

  The boy carefully touches the lump on Grandpa’s forehead.

  “Does it hurt?” he asks.

  “No, not really,” Grandpa replies.

  “I mean on the inside. Does it hurt on the inside?”

  “It hurts less and less. That’s one good thing about forgetting things. You forget the things that hurt too.”

  “What does it feel like?”

  “Like constantly searching for something in your pockets. First you lose the small things, then it’s the big ones. It starts with keys and ends with people.”

  “Are you scared?”

  “A bit. Are you?”

  “A bit,” the boy admits.

  Grandpa grins.

  “That’ll keep the bears away.”

  Noah’s cheek is resting against the old man’s collarbone.

  “When you’ve forgotten a person, do you forget you’ve forgotten?”

  “No, sometimes I remember that I’ve forgotten. That’s the worst kind of forgetting. Like being locked out in a storm. Then I try to force myself to remember harder, so hard that the whole square here shakes.”

  “Is that why you get so tired?”

  “Yes, sometimes it feels like having fallen asleep on a sofa while it’s still light and then suddenly being woken up once it’s dark; it takes me a few seconds to remember where I am. I’m in space for a few moments, have to blink and rub my eyes and let my brain take a couple of extra steps to remember who I am and where I am. To get home. That’s the road that’s getting longer and longer every morning, the way home from space. I’m sailing on a big calm lake, Noahnoah.”

  “Horrible,” says the boy.

  “Yes. Very, very, very horrible. For some reason places and directions seem to be the first thing to disappear. First you forget where you’re going, then where you’ve been, and eventually where you are . . . or . . . maybe it was the other way around. . . . I . . . my doctor said something. I went to my doctor and he said something about it, or did I say something. I said: ‘Doctor, I . . .’ ”

  He raps his temples, harder and harder. The square moves.

  “It doesn’t matter,” the boy whispers.

  “Sorry, Noahnoah.”

  The boy strokes his arm, shrugs.

  “Don’t worry. I’m going to give you a balloon, Grandpa. So you can have it in space.”

  “A balloon won’t stop me from disappearing, Noahnoah.” Grandpa sighs.

  “I know. But you’ll get it on your birthday. As a present.”

  “That sounds unnecessary.” Grandpa smiles.

  The boy nods.

  “If you keep hold of it you’ll know that right before you went into space someone gave you a balloon. And it’s the most unnecessary present anyone can get because there’s absolutely no need for a balloon in space. And that’ll make you laugh.”

  Grandpa closes his eyes. Breathes in the boy’s hair.

  “That’s the best present I’ve never been given.”

  The lake glitters, their feet move from side to side, trouser legs fluttering in the wind. It smells like water and sunshine on the bench. Not everyone knows that water and sunshine have scents, but they do, you just have to get far enough away from all other smells to realize it. You have to be sitting still in a boat, relaxing so much that you have time to lie on your back and think. Lakes and thoughts have that in common, they take time. Grandpa leans toward Noah and breathes out like people do at the start of a long sleep; one of them is getting bigger and one of them is getting smaller, the years allow them to meet in the middle. The boy points to a road on the other side of the square, blocked off by a barrier and a big warning sign.

  “What’s happened there, Grandpa?”

  Grandpa blinks several times with his head against the boy’s collarbone.

  “Oh . . . that road . . . I think it’s . . . it’s closed. It washed away in the rain when your Grandma died. It’s too dangerous to think about now, Noahnoah.”

  “Where did it go?”

  “It was a shortcut. It didn’t take long at all to get home in the mornings when I took that road, I just woke up and there I was,” Grandpa mumbles and raps his forehead.

  The boy wants to ask more, but Grandpa manages to stop him.

  “Tell me more about school, Noahnoah.”

  Noah shrugs.

  “We don’t count enough and we write too much.”

  “That’s always the way. They never learn, the schools.”

  “And I don’t like the music lessons. Dad’s trying to teach me to play guitar, but I can’t.”

  “Don’t worry. People like us have a different kind of music, Noahnoah.”

  “And we have to write essays all the time! The teacher wanted us to write what we thought the meaning of life was once.”

  “What did you write?”

  “Company.”

  Grandpa closes his eyes.

  “That’s the best answer I’ve heard.”

  “My teacher said I had to write a longer answer.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I wrote: Company. And ice cream.”

  Grandpa spends a moment or two thinking that over. Then he asks:

  “What kind of ice cream?”

  Noah smiles. It’s nice to be understood.

  • • •

  He and the girl are on a road and they’re young again. He remembers each of the very first times he saw her, he hides those pictures as far from the rain as he can. They were sixteen and even the snow was happy that morning, falling soap-bubble light and landing on cold cheeks as though the flakes were gently trying to w
ake someone they loved. She stood in front of him with January in her hair and he was lost. She was the first person in his life that he couldn’t work out, though he spent every minute of it after that day trying.

  “I always knew who I was with you. You were my shortcut,” Grandpa confides.

  “Even though I never had any sense of direction.” She laughs.

  “Death isn’t fair.”

  “No, death is a slow drum. It counts every beat. We can’t haggle with it for more time.”

  “Beautifully said, my love.”

  “I stole it.”

  Their laughter echoes in each other’s chests, and then he says:

  “I miss all our most ordinary things. Breakfast on the veranda. Weeds in the flower beds.”

  She takes a breath, then answers:

  “I miss the dawn. The way it stamped its feet at the end of the water, increasingly frustrated and impatient, until there was no more holding back the sun. The way it sparkled right across the lake, reached the stones by the jetty and came onto land, its warm hands in our garden, pouring gentle light into our house, letting us kick off the covers and start the day. I miss you then, darling sleepy you. Miss you there.”

  “We lived an extraordinarily ordinary life.”

  “An ordinarily extraordinary life.”

  She laughs. Old eyes, new sunlight, and he still remembers how it felt to fall in love. The rain hasn’t arrived yet.

  They dance on the shortcut until darkness falls.

  • • •

  People are moving back and forth across the square. A blurry man steps on the dragon’s foot, the dragon gives him a telling off. A boy is playing guitar beneath a tree, a sad tune, Grandpa hums along. A young woman walks barefoot across the square, stops to stroke the dragon. Her palms suddenly search her red coat, finding something in her pockets, something she seems to have spent a long time looking for. She looks up, straight at Noah, laughs happily and waves. As though he helped her to look, and she wants him to know he can stop now. That she’s found it. That everything’s okay. For a single moment he sees her face clearly. She has Grandma’s eyes. Then the boy blinks, and she’s gone.

  “She looked like . . .” he whispers.

  “I know.” Grandpa nods, his hands move anxiously in his own pockets, then he lifts them up and lets his fingers move against his temples, like the outside of a box of raisins. Like he’s trying to shake loose a piece of the past in there.

  “I . . . she . . . that’s your grandma. She was younger. You never got to meet her young, she has . . . she had the strongest feelings I ever experienced in a person, when she got angry she could empty a full bar of grown men, and when she was happy . . . there was no defending yourself against that, Noahnoah. She was a force of nature. Everything I am came from her, she was my Big Bang.”

  “How did you fall in love with her?” the boy asks.

  Grandpa’s hands land with one palm on his own knee and one on the boy’s.

  “She got lost in my heart, I think. Couldn’t find her way out. Your grandma always had a terrible sense of direction. She could get lost on an escalator.”

  And then comes his laughter, crackling and popping like it’s smoke from dry wood in his stomach. He puts an arm around the boy.

  “Never in my life have I asked myself how I fell in love with her, Noahnoah. Only the other way around.”

  The boy looks at the keys on the ground, at the square and the fountain. He glances up toward space; if he stretches his fingers he can touch it. It’s soft. When he and Grandpa go fishing they sometimes lie in the bottom of the boat with their eyes closed for hours without saying a word to one another. When Grandma was here she always stayed at home, and if anyone asked where her husband and grandson were she always said, “Space.” It belongs to them.

  It was a morning in December when she died. The whole house smelled of hyacinths and the boy cried the whole day. That night he lay next to Grandpa on his back in the snow in the garden and looked up at the stars. They sang for Grandma, both of them. Sang for space. Have done the same almost every night since. She belongs to them.

  “Are you scared you’re going to forget her?” the boy asks.

  Grandpa nods.

  “Very.”

  “Maybe you just need to forget her funeral,” the boy suggests.

  The boy himself could well imagine forgetting funerals. All funerals. But Grandpa shakes his head.

  “If I forget the funeral I’ll forget why I can’t ever forget her.”

  “That sounds messy.”

  “Life sometimes is.”

  “Grandma believed in God, but you don’t. Do you still get to go to Heaven if you die?”

  “Only if I’m wrong.”

  The boy bites his lip and makes a promise:

  “I’ll tell you about her when you forget, Grandpa. First thing every morning, first of all I’ll tell you about her.”

  Grandpa squeezes his arm.

  “Tell me that we danced, Noahnoah. Tell me that that’s what it’s like to fall in love, like you don’t have room for yourself in your own feet.”

  “I promise.”

  “And tell me that she hated coriander. Tell me that I used to tell waiters in restaurants that she had a serious allergy, and when they asked whether someone could really be allergic to coriander I said: ‘Believe me, she’s seriously allergic, if you serve her coriander she could die!’ She didn’t find that funny at all, she said, but she laughed when she thought I wasn’t looking.”

  “She used to say that coriander was a punishment rather than a herb.” Noah laughs.

  Grandpa nods, blinks at the treetops, and takes deep breaths from the leaves. Then he rests his forehead against the boy’s and says:

  “Noahnoah, promise me something, one very last thing: once your good-bye is perfect, you have to leave me and not look back. Live your life. It’s an awful thing to miss someone who’s still here.”

  The boy spends a long time thinking about that. Then he says:

  “But one good thing with your brain being sick is that you’re going to be really good at keeping secrets. That’s a good thing if you’re a grandpa.”

  Grandpa nods.

  “That’s true, that’s true . . . what was that?”

  Both of them grin.

  “And I don’t think you need to be scared of forgetting me,” the boy says after a moment’s consideration.

  “No?”

  The corners of the boy’s mouth reach his earlobes.

  “No. Because if you forget me then you’ll just get the chance to get to know me again. And you’ll like that, because I’m actually a pretty cool person to get to know.”

  Grandpa laughs and the square shakes. He knows no greater blessing.

  • • •

  They’re sitting on the grass, him and her.

  “Ted is so angry at me, love,” Grandpa says.

  “He’s not angry at you, he’s angry at the universe. He’s angry because your enemy isn’t something he can fight.”

  “It’s a big universe to be angry with, a never-ending fury. I wish that he . . .”

  “That he was more like you?”

  “Less. That he was less like me. Less angry.”

  “He is. Just sadder. Do you remember when he was little and asked you why people went into space?”

  “Yes. I told him it was because people are born adventurers, we have to explore and discover, it’s our nature.”

  “But you could see that he was scared, so you also said: ‘Ted, we’re not going into space because we’re afraid of aliens. We’re going because we’re scared we’re alone. It’s an awfully big universe to be alone in.’ ”

  “Did I say that? That was smart of me.”

  “You probably stole it from someone.”

  “Probably.”

  “Ted might say the same thing to Noah now.”

  “Noah has never been afraid of space.”

  “That’s because Noah is like me,
he believes in God.”

  The old man lies down on the grass and smiles at the trees. She gets up and walks past the hedge, along the side of the boat, stroking it thoughtfully.

  “Don’t forget to put more stones under the anchor, Noah is growing so quickly,” she reminds him.

  The boat’s cabin, the room in which he worked for so many years, looks so small in the twilight. Even though there was space for all his biggest thoughts. The lights are still there, the ones he strung up in a tangle on the outside of the boat so that Noah could always find his way if he woke up from a nightmare and needed to find his grandpa. A chaotic mess of green, yellow, and purple bulbs, as though Grandpa had been desperate for a poo when he put them up, so Noah would start laughing when he saw them. You can’t be afraid of crossing dark gardens if you’re laughing.

  She lies down next to him, sighs with his skin close to hers.

  “This is where we built our life. Everything. There’s the road where you taught Ted to ride a bike.”

  His lips vanish between his teeth when he admits:

  “Ted taught himself. Like he taught himself to play guitar after I told him to stop messing about with it and do his homework instead.”

  “You were a busy man,” she whispers, regret filling every word because she knows she bears the same guilt.

  “And now Ted is a busy man,” he says.

  “But the universe gave you both Noah. He’s the bridge between you. That’s why we get the chance to spoil our grandchildren, because by doing that we’re apologizing to our children.”

  “And how do we stop our children from hating us for that?”

  “We can’t. That’s not our job.”

  He chases his breaths between throat and chest.

  “Everyone always wondered how you put up with me, my love. Sometimes I wonder too.”

  Her giggles, how he misses them, the way they seemed to gain speed all the way from her feet.

  “You were the first boy I met who knew how to dance. I thought it was probably best to seize the opportunity; who knows how often boys like that turn up?”