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Picture a landscape, as seen from above.
Picture a hill at your feet, rolling away into a slope.
Picture the octarine grass country spilling out before you like a naked body, all curves and undulating hills. At your back, the high peaks of the towering Ramtops stretch their metaphorical necks to the sky. It is almost a century since the last summer this hot and although the sun, which has been searing the landscape all day, is now dipping below the horizon, the air is still thick and heavy with heat. Insects hum sleepily in the grass.
Picture a town at the bottom of the hill on which you stand. In the gleaming light of the setting sun, it looks faded and dusty. It’s brown, mostly, but something about the way the light hits it makes the town look more grey than any other colour.
A few people are beginning to emerge into the cooling evening after a long day spent sheltering from the sun. If your eyesight is particularly good, you might notice that none seem younger than middle age. You might notice that several of the buildings are boarded up, that the street (there is only one, really) is cracked and worn and uncared for. Weeds push their way through it.
If your eyesight isn’t very strong, you won’t have noticed any of this. Please disregard the above.
Picture an inn. Not a bustling one. Perhaps there are a couple of patrons sitting outside in the shadow that the building casts across the ground. The faded sign hanging from the roof swings slightly in the breeze in an atmospheric sort of way.
Despite the cooler temperature of the building, the inside is relatively empty. Perhaps one man sits at an otherwise unoccupied table, sipping at his drink. He’s not in the corner – only mysterious strangers sit in the corners of inns – but is at a table near the bar. His name is Ted, and he’s here most evenings. Certainly not a mysterious stranger.
A cry suddenly comes from upstairs. It cuts off as quickly as it broke into the air, like an egg yolk hitting a sizzling pan. The sound makes Ted jump a little – maybe he knocks his glass slightly – but he doesn’t look up until he hears footsteps come down the stairs.
“Alright, our Hal?” he asks.
“Just a scare. First one today. She slept through most of the heat.”
“Aye, so I hear. Celia was down here earlier telling me how things are going,” Ted says, knocking back the last of his drink and standing up, “I’d better be off. All the best to you both. And to the little lady, of course.”
He puts his glass on the table and looks intently for a moment at the other man – Hal – standing across the room. His eyes are downcast.
“Don’t look so glum,” Ted says brightly, not even a shred of doubt filtering into his voice, “Your mam was kicking long before the rest of us had legs to stand with. You know everyone’s expecting her to live forever.”
Hal smiled tightly. What was left of his hair had been bleached almost white by age and the sun, and the skin of his face had thin little lines worn into it. His face wasn’t particularly narrow, if you paid enough attention, but in contrast with his short, broadshouldered body, it seemed much thinner than it really was. There was worry behind his eyes.
“Thanks for dropping in,” he replies, “It was good to see you.”
He watches as the other man pushes open the door, the yellowing light of evening spilling into the room for a second, then turns away and heads back upstairs.
Now picture this: up on the next floor, partly tucked away below the stairs that continue winding upwards, the ceiling a little crooked, there is a little room all panelled in wood. The only window, with glass as thick as the bottom of a pint of scumble, looks out onto the sort of picture-postcard view that you might have selected to send to your parents on your first trip away from home. In the evening glow, the peaks of the Ramtops are tinted a soft lavender.
Picture a narrow iron bed frame, the sort your great grandmother might have slept on as a child. It’s so small that you would expect to find a child in it, not the shrivelled old woman who is actually occupying it. Below the flowered bedspread – a bedspread? In this heat? – skin a cracked brown, she looks like the first of last year’s grapes to be dried into a raisin. Whatever hair she may or may not have is tucked neatly into a little white cap, frilled at the hem. Her face is wan and she seems more than a little tired, but her back is as rigid as her bed frame as she sits bolt upright, a pillow propped up behind her. There are traces of Hal in her face.
Sal Lifton is almost one hundred years old, and she is dying.
She knows this, has known it now for some time. When she was much younger, soon after her marriage, a man had come to town claiming to be a doctor but with the most outlandish theories that the townsfolk had ever heard. He spoke of the body as something made up of trillions of tiny people, said they all worked together to keep a person moving and that if even one failed, the others would follow.
He had been laughed out of town, of course. But the image he had created and the words he had spoken had stayed with Sal for the rest of her life.
She could picture it now, the little people scurrying through her body, bringing blood from one part to another, clearing blockages, keeping her lungs open and blowing the bellows that kept her heart beating. They had begun to die off, though. She could feel them withering away.
There was a knock at the door.
“Yes?” Sal calls, “Is that you again, Hal?”
The door opens. A figure enters.
I AM SORRY, it says, I AM NOT HAL. I EXPECT HE WILL BE HERE SOON.
Beneath the shadowy hood, white bone gleams. For a moment, Sal seems taken aback. Then her face breaks into a grin. Some of her teeth are missing.
“You!”
ME.
Death pushes his hood back, eye sockets fixed on the old woman. His face is set into a grin even wider than Sal’s.
“But – you were here – I knew you! You came here when I –” Sal gabbles.
WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD. YES. I WAS HERE.
“And you were a skelling–a skeleton. Yes? My mother told me I was being rude for saying it!”
The tone of Sal’s voice is indignant, as though she still cannot believe, even ninety years on, that her mother dared to tell her off for something that was so clearly the truth. Death wonders if she is expecting him to pull out her mother’s shade so Sal can make her apologise. He decides not to suggest it.
I WAS EXACTLY WHAT YOU SAID I WAS; EXACTLY WHAT I AM NOW. I DID NOT THINK YOU WERE BEING RUDE. I THOUGHT YOU WERE SAYING WHAT YOU SAW, AS CHILDREN OFTEN DO.
“You weren’t here to take me, back then.”
And now a touch of hesitation enters her voice.
NO. I WAS NOT. BUT NOW –
“Now you are?”
YES.
It is a simple word, and yet it carries so much meaning at the same time. Death does not think it necessary to say more.
Sal nods thoughtfully. She opens her mouth as though to say something more, then pauses. There is a sound from outside.
“Mam?” they hear.
“Right where you left me, son,” Sal says, then turns to Death, the question painted so clearly on her face that she doesn’t need words.
Hal pushes open the door and pokes his head round it.
“Mam?” he says again. He stares at Sal for a moment, eyes wide. A moment later, he has turned around and gone back into the hall, leaving the door ajar behind him. They can hear him calling for Celia.
Sal turns her face back towards Death, “Why – why do I not feel sad?”
SADNESS IS FOR THE LIVING.
“Then what do the dead have?” she asks.
IT IS TIME FOR YOU TO FIND OUT.
Sal looks down at herself. For the first time since Death walked through her door, she moves, swinging herself out of bed. Her legs are not quite long enough to reach the floor and she swings her feet a little. Behind Sal, her body remains where she left it, upright and staring at the wall in front of her. She peers at herself.
“Bit disconcerting, the eyes. I wasn’t expecting you quite so soon, or I would have closed them first.”
Death says nothing, but watches Sal, still and waiting. Distant lights wink in the hollows of his eyes. Sal too is silent for a moment, looking intently at her own face, then turns back to Death.
“You know, I haven’t really been well enough to go further than the front of the inn in a long time,” she said hopefully, “and that was with Hal carrying me. I don’t suppose you fancy a stroll?”
Death inclined his head.
CERTAINLY.
Picture this. In the distance, only a sliver of the sun now remains above the horizon. It spreads a hot orange colour across the plains and turns the town from faded brown to burnished bronze, one last flare of colour before the day finally fades into night. Two figures walk up the hill towards you. Both are very skinny, although one is noticeably more so. One is unusually tall and leads a gleaming white horse behind it. The light of the setting sun glimmers off the horse’s silver bridle and seems to shine through the shorter figure.There is something strange about the figures, something not quite real. They are anomalies in the landscape. They do not belong. If they were suddenly no longer there, the scene would be more...right.
Yet here they are, cresting the top of the hill. Picture them, turning to look at the town below, pausing to let their eyes move over the view before them.
“What do you think?” the shorter figure says.
The taller, dark-robed figure seems pensive as he gazes at the plains, thinking over the other’s question.
IT IS...DIFFERENT. OLDER.
“So is everything. So am I.”
YES. YOU ARE.
She laughs, “Much older. Much older than anyone ever thought I’d be. I don’t suppose you were here when the inn caught fire?”
I WAS HERE.
He doesn’t say that he has always been here. He doesn’t say that he never really went away. That is not what her question meant.
“I couldn’t be sure. When you get old, you see, everything sort of blends together. I can’t always remember what happens when. I don’t suppose you have that problem?”
NO. I DO NOT FORGET.
“Is that nice?”
NOT ALWAYS.
“Hm. No, perhaps not”, she murmurs pensively, “Anyway. The fire. I was very sick after that. I don’t remember it, but my parents told me that I wouldn’t wake up. They didn’t say as much, but I rather think they weren’t expecting me to ever wake again.”
Death says nothing, just watches Sal and waits for her to continue.
“Well,” she continues, “I did wake up. And I kept going. Going and going and going. Almost a hundred years, I’ve been going. I think most people weren’t expecting me to ever stop.”
EVERYONE STOPS.
She laughs, “So they do. But then they get to start again.”
DO THEY?
“I don’t know. I suppose now I get to find out.”
Now picture the two figures moving to stand beside the horse. The taller leans down and swings the shorter one up onto him, as if she weighed nothing, as if she were a child. She laughs and claps her hands. Then he swings himself up behind her.
Picture them sillhouetted against the sunset. The air is growing colder now. The stars are beginning to show. Perhaps you tip your head up for a moment to take in the glow of a million other worlds. When you look back, the horse and its riders are gone.
Before you, the plains roll away into the distance.