Not even he knew. But once the doubts subsided and could only be heard as distant siren calls, the dull weight in his body turned into a throbbing anxiety which he realised he had actually been missing. Life became more vivid. Even the blue buckets in the hobby workshop took on a shining new lustre and his every perception contained an entire world, a whole chain of events and thoughts, and the mere idea of trying to summarise them would be pointless, or even dishonest.
His mind teemed with a mass of thoughts and images, and even if his breathing was already painfully quick, his body quivered with an intense sensation bordering on desire, as if his decision to die had given him back his life. In front of him on a grey table, covered with stains and small holes which in some cases were burn marks but also something else, something sticky, there were a hot-plate, a couple of bottles with black liquid and then a gilt teaspoon which was to play a certain part in the story. The rain could be heard outside. It fell and fell. Never before had the heavens opened like this over a Whit Sunday weekend in England, and maybe that affected his decision.
Maybe he was just influenced by smaller things, like his hay fever and the fact that his neighbours, Mr. and Mrs. Webb, had just moved to Styal and left behind them a feeling that life was going away or was even happening in some other place to which he had not been invited. It was not like him to get worked up about things like that. But neither was it unlike him. It is true that everyday things did not affect him in the same way as the rest of us. He had a particular gift for ignoring the chattering around him. But then again he could fall under dark spells for no reason at all. Small things could affect him in big ways. Insignificant events could lead to drastic decisions or the strangest ideas.
Now he was going to leave this world taking his cue from a children’s film about some funny dwarfs, which is of course ironic. There was no shortage of irony and paradox in his life. He had shortened the course of a war and thought more deeply than most about the foundation stones of intelligence, but had been placed under a probation order and forced to take a repugnant medicine. Not long before, he had been scared out of his wits by a fortune teller in Blackpool, and he had been in a state about it for a whole day.
What was he to do now?
He plugged two wires from the ceiling into a transformer on the table and put a pan with some black sludge in it on the hotplate. Then he changed into some grey-blue pyjamas, and took a red apple from a blue fruit bowl by the bookshelf. He often had an apple at the end of his day. Apples were his favourite fruit, not just because of their taste. Apples were also…never mind. He cut the fruit in two and went back to the hobby workshop, and then he realised. His entire being understood, and with unseeing eyes he looked out towards the garden. Isn’t it odd, he thought, without really knowing what he meant. Then he remembered Ethel.
Ethel was his mother. One day Ethel will write a book about him, without having the least understanding of what he had been doing, but to be fair one can say that it was not easy. The man’s life consisted of too many numbers and secrets. He was different. Besides, he was young, at least in a mother’s eyes, and although he had never been regarded as a beauty and had lost his fine runner’s physique since a court decision in Knutsford, he was not bad looking. Ever since he was little and could not tell right from left and thought that Christmas came at pretty much any time of year, sometimes often and sometimes seldom, like other beautiful, enjoyable days, he had thought thoughts which were totally not of their time. He became a mathematician who dedicated himself to something as prosaic as the art of engineering, an unconventional thinker who got it into his head that our intelligence is mechanical, or even computable as a long, snaking series of numbers.
But above all, and this mothers find especially hard to understand, on this day in June he no longer had the strength to go on living, and he therefore continued with his preparations, which would later be seen as strangely complicated. It was just that his concentration was disturbed. He heard something, footsteps down by the front door he thought, the crunch of gravel, and an absurd thought struck him: someone is bringing good news, perhaps from far away, from India or from another time. He gave a laugh or sobbed, hard to tell which, and he started moving, and even if he heard nothing more, nothing more than the sound of dripping against the roof, his mind stuck with the thought: There’s someone out there. A friend, worth listening to,and as he passed the desk he thought want to, don’t want to,like a child pulling the petals off a flower. He perceived every detail in the corridor with a vibrant precision that would have fascinated him on a better day. With a sleepwalker’s steps he went into the bedroom and saw the Observer lying on the bedside table and the wristwatch with the black leather strap, and right next to it he laid the half apple. He thought of the moon shining behind the school building at Sherborne, and he lay down on his back on the bed. He looked composed.
