D - The Dragonslayer

When the doctor first told me about this thing I tried to argue with
him, ended up being quite offensive. I phoned him up afterwards and
apologized of course. It was a ridiculous attitude to adopt, as if it
were his fault.

I tried to force him to tell me how long I had left. You hear all these
stories about people who were given three months and are still there
years later. It's almost a clich?. But he wouldn't give me a figure
like that. All he would say was months rather than years. And that I
would probably continue to feel reasonably well until close to the end.
Not an exact science, he said.

He and I were the only ones who knew about it for the first few weeks.
Unless some of my friends guessed. There was one time when I caught
myself telling someone that I live on a slope leading down to a
cemetery. Such a powerful image, but I said it completely
unconsciously. It stopped me in my tracks, reduced me to total
silence.

The first few days were the worst, as you might expect. I didn't sleep
very much at the beginning. But in fairness to myself I don't think
that I coped with it too badly. I didn't crack up. I didn't break down
and cry or rush off to find a counsellor. I didn't run amok and smash
everything. I just sat very quietly in my darkened room and did a great
deal of thinking.

The Company owed me quite a bit of annual leave so I took it, stayed at
home in the cottage. I lay there when I couldn't sleep and fantasized
about what I should do with those remaining months, however long it was
going to be.

My ideas became very grandiose. I thought about what might have
happened if someone had walked up to Adolph Hitler in 1935 or 1936 and
blown his brains out. Would the world have been a better place? Would
that have been the best thing anyone could have done with an expendable
life? Who knows? Hitler wasn't the only Nazi. Somebody else would have
come to power. But it's hard to believe that whoever it was could have
been quite such a monster. Maybe there are turning points like that in
human history where one man can make a difference. Before I knew about
my condition, such thoughts would have seemed like madness. But now
they seemed to make sense. I had been given a kind of gift, a chance to
do something worthwhile with the time left to me. It didn't have to be
dramatic, but there had to be something that would give meaning to it
all - to all those pointless years of sucking up to the boss and people
being promoted over my head, trying to be the perfect husband and the
perfect father and ending up alone in that little cottage with a rotten
divorce settlement and children I never saw, who didn't want to talk to
me any more - never getting anything in return but kicks in the teeth.
I suppose it hadn't struck me so powerfully before because I had always
told myself that things would get better, that there was time to change
it all. Now I knew that there wasn't.

But maybe I wasn't destined to be a nonentity after all. Maybe there
was something I could do in the world, some mighty task that would make
them all turn around and say, "You know, we misjudged him. There was
more to him than we ever knew&;#8230;"

I started to buy four morning newspapers and to subscribe to all the
news channels on satellite TV. I bought lots of writing paper and a few
big loose-leaf binders and I started to take notes on what was going on
in all the trouble spots of the world. Tin-pot dictators manufacturing
biological weapons and hydrogen bombs. Arab suicide bombers blowing
themselves up in crowded restaurants. South American drug barons with
private armies and more income than the annual budgets of the countries
they lived in. White slave traders smuggling women and young girls out
of central Europe and the Far East to live lives of misery and
exploitation in the hidden brothels of the rich West. African villagers
cutting one another to pieces with machetes and burning each other
alive in locked churches. Women and children starving to death because
some war lord wanted to use their destruction as a weapon in his fight
for power.

I began to wonder which of us was ill, me or the world out there. The
trouble was there was only one of me. It wasn't enough. There seemed to
be so little that I could actually do. In the fairytale world there was
always just one dragon to slay and one knight to do the slaying; in the
real world there were a million dragons but the knight was still on his
own. I would have to change the scale of my operation.

I started subscribing to the local newspapers covering the villages
within about twenty miles of where I lived. Stories about agricultural
shows and new supermarkets and young girls competing for the title of
Queen of the May. I seemed to have gone from one extreme to the other.
That wasn't where I was going to find my dragon.

I had become a bit fixated on the idea that there had to be a dragon,
an enemy of some kind to slay. Maybe that was the wrong model. Who had
really made a difference in the world, I asked myself, those who had
killed in a noble cause, or those who had died in one? Socrates. Jesus
Christ. Thomas Moore. Mahatma Gandhi. Martin Luther King. President
Kennedy. But of course the dying had only been part of it, it had been
the living that had really counted, and I wasn't going to have time for
that. But maybe I could turn myself into a sacrificial lamb, like the
student who had stood in front of the advancing tanks in Tiananmen
Square, or the young boy who had handed out pro-democracy leaflets in
full view of the troops in the streets of Burma, only weeks after his
release from a Burmese prison on exactly the same charge. I wouldn't be
a real moral giant of course, only a pretend one, but I doubted if the
cameras would be able to tell the difference.

The details of my new plan seemed even harder to work out than with my
old one. Where precisely should I go to seek this martyrdom? I had a
mental picture of myself standing straight and tall on a cratered
battlefield between two advancing armies, arms outstretched, shells
exploding all around me, press reporters peering out from a nearby
bunker. But it was a total fantasy. To make an impact like that you had
to be in the right place at the right time. Circumstances had to play
into your hand. It wasn't the kind of thing you could stage
manage.

I felt myself sinking into a depression. Precious days were slipping
by. The churchyard down the hill from my little cottage seemed to be
moving closer. There was no way to make a difference, or if there was I
simply wasn't clever enough to think of it.

Despite what the doctor had said I could feel my physical condition
deteriorating too. I seemed to have less and less energy, less desire
to eat, a queasiness in my stomach that would not go away. I phoned the
Company and told them that I was unwell, that I would send a medical
certificate. I knew that I would never be going back.

Early the next morning I forced myself to get dressed, pack a few
things into a weekend bag, draw out some money from my Post Office
savings account, and take the first train to London. I don't know what
I was hoping to find there but I knew that there was nothing worthwhile
I could do in the village.

I staggered from Victoria Station just before eight o'clock, feeling as
though I might throw up at any moment, a stabbing pain hitting the back
of my eyes with every step that I took. I walked very slowly, steadying
myself against the wall as I went, the weekend bag swinging like a limp
pendulum, threatening to rob me of what little balance I had left. A
gnawing dread formed at the back of my mind that I had left it too
late. I wasn't going to have enough strength left to change anything,
the end was rushing towards me and I had done nothing.

As I felt my way along like a blind man I saw that my path was blocked
by somebody who was sitting down and leaning his back against the wall.
He looked up at me, an inquiring, interested look. He had an unkempt
ginger beard and his jacket was torn. Nevertheless he was not old,
probably no more than thirty, and had pleasant regular features.

"Yer lookin' a wee bit rough mate," he said in a thick Scottish accent,
"are ye okay?"

"Not too good," I said quietly, and felt myself slump down by his side.
We looked into each other's eyes. "I'm afraid I'm dying," I said very
quietly, seeing no point in trying to conceal it.

"Yer lucky mate. I wish tae hell I could die."

I looked at him, shocked. "Do you have the least idea what you're
talking about?"

He ignored the question.

"Have ye got a drink, mate?"

"You just said that you wished you could die. What did you mean by
that?"

Alex, for that was his name, told me what he meant. A lot of it I could
have guessed. A marriage that had started out no different to any
other, a young daughter, a decent enough job in an industry that looked
safe, redundancy that came from nowhere like thunder on a summer's day,
redundancy money and no hope of another job, nothing to spend it on but
drink; then the inevitable move to London on his own to find work. The
months turning to years, the wrong kind of company, the landlady
turning nasty, the drift into a rootless life dominated by the quest
for the next bottle of spirits.

He wasn't a very articulate man. It took him a long time to tell his
story. I somehow expected a familiar, well-rehearsed account that he
would have told many times, but I was wrong. Nobody had ever asked Alex
for his story before. Nobody else had spared the time to listen. The
early morning commuter traffic had passed by the time he finished. The
roads around Victoria had become quiet again, few pedestrians, just the
steady rumble of the heavy lorries down Vauxhall Bridge Road.

"Tell me Alex," I said to him, "if you could have your wildest dream,
something to make life worth living again, what would it be?"

He drew in his breath and shrugged cynically. "My wildest dream? A
place tae live with Jeanie an' the wean. A job tae go tae. A fresh
clean shirt every morning an' a decent pair a shoes on mae feet. A'm no
a pig, ye know. I dinnae want tae live like this."

I felt one of those moments of sudden insight that come to people only
once or twice in a lifetime. Alex had shown me something that I hadn't
understood before. All my imaginings had been about me, about what
would make me look good, about noble gestures that would win me
attention, about pathetic self glorification. That was not a proper
basis for making the world a better place. It was bullshit, a total
illusion, the whimpering of an ego complaining of long neglect.

"Okay, Alex," I said very quietly, "I think I can help you. But there
are going to be conditions."

oo OO oo

Jeanie is cooking something for me now as I lie here. A bit of
scrambled egg. It's about as much as I can eat these days. Their
daughter is starting at the village school today, both Jeanie and Alex
went down to introduce her and get her settled in. I think she'll like
it there. She'll be made very welcome too. We haven't very many young
children in the village any more, it's turned into a bit of a commuter
town for the likes of me, or at least the person I used to be.

Alex is going to see Bill Kinnear this afternoon, the man who owns the
big market gardening operation on the far side of the valley. I went to
school with Bill, and I've had a quiet word with him. Alex will be okay
for a job there. What he makes of it will be up to him. I've had a
quiet word with Jeanie as well and she knows the score. She knows he
has to deal with the drinking. She's got him to detox and rehab as he
calls it already. She's a good sensible woman. He's a lucky man to have
her. A very lucky man.

It's a bit of a squeeze in the bungalow at the moment. We just have the
two bedrooms, but I'm better off in the sitting room anyhow, on the
couch, where I don't have to get up to go to bed. I don't seem to be
able to move around very much at all any more. Alex and Jeanie know
that they'll soon have plenty of room.

I look forward to wakening up and seeing each new day. I appreciate
what it means to be alive, for the first time ever I think. It's
wonderful to see the two of them on such a high, making a new start.
Maybe it will go wrong again, I'm not God, I can't control other
people's lives. But I'm very hopeful. Both of them have seen enough of
what the world is like when you're down to understand the value of what
they've got now.

So there isn't much more to tell. My life ends, but it kick starts the
lives of three other people. It's their turn now, their responsibility
to make something out of it if they can. I haven't changed the course
of history. But maybe I've made the world a better place. Just one tiny
corner of it. But it's enough so that I don't feel that it was all
pointless any more. And I really don't care whether anybody ever finds
out about it or what anybody else thinks. I know what I think, that's
all I care about. It's a very good feeling. The name for this feeling
might be freedom.