Read by Susan Moisan
I could go out and enjoy the sunshine, thinks Rachel, but I am going to die.
Rachel has been thinking this for several months now, so it is bound to happen any minute. It had almost happened in Tesco, that day, several months ago, after work.
*
Click.
Her brain just switches off. She doesn’t see it coming, hasn’t felt funny, hasn’t felt peculiar. One moment she is browsing cheese, the next…
Three faces hang over her, gravity doing odd things to their cheeks. At first, she doesn’t know where she is. Her brain takes some time to piece itself back together.
Above her: fluorescent lighting.
In the periphery of her vision: yoghurt, rows of it.
Her brain adds together the clues (odd-faced strangers + bright lights + yoghurt =) and the audience members within her grey matter yell out possible answers.
“You’re the subject of an alien autopsy!” one screams.
“You’ve been sold to the white slave trade!” another hollers back.
No. Rationality buzzes in – eventually - confident with its answer. “No, silly, you’re on the floor. You’re in the chilled food aisle. You’re in Tesco’s.”
They call an ambulance, the odd-faced strangers, and a man in green arrives in heavy boots with a box of tricks. He takes her blood pressure, puts a plastic clip on the end of her finger, takes a sharp thumbprint of blood. Green Ambulance Man watches her movements carefully with his pop-out eyes. He smirks at her. That smirk says, girls like you, eh? Always doing this kind of thing.
“You eaten properly today?” Green Ambulance Man asks.
(Girls like you, eh? Always dieting).
And she rambles through a long list of foodstuffs that includes ciabatta and Twiglets.
Green Ambulance Man asks her if she is getting enough sleep (yes, she is); if she is stressed at the moment (no, she isn’t).
“Just one of those things,” he says in the end, once she is back on her feet. “You’ll be OK.” And he packs up his box of tricks to take to the next disaster.
But Rachel is not OK. She has tasted the end. This is what it will be like when I die, thinks Rachel, my brain will just switch off.
Click.
And I won’t even know it’s coming.
*
Rachel sits, legs up and away from the floor, in an armchair in her living room, her body twisted, leaning over the back of the chair to get a view out of the window behind. She watches as the man from the end terrace begins his morning run past her house. End Terrace Man took up running just a few months ago. In the early days of his hobby he had passed Rachel in the street looking old, grey, out of puff and out of hope, as if he was chasing something he knew he had no chance of ever catching. But End Terrace Man has kept up his hobby and the running has transformed him.
Today as he passes by and makes his way down the hill towards the playground and the allotments, he maintains a steady pace – not a blistering speed , he is still old – but he doesn’t stop to catch his breath as he used to. Rachel can’t remember the last time she’d seen him resting his hands on his thighs, looking down at the ground, heaving up air as if it was vomit.
He’s started wearing racer-back vests (black today). His shoulders have developed. He’s got a tan.
What is the point? thinks Rachel, as End Terrace Man jogs out of view. Why bother? Who cares how toned you look like when you’re dead? Who cares if you’re fit? Certainly not yourself. Your brain will have switched off, you won’t be thinking anything.
Rachel has tasted death and she knows what is on the other side of the
Click.
Nothing.
She experienced no white tunnels, no flickering film of her life in reverse, no pathway to the gates, no ethereal man stroking his heavenly beard.
*
“Of course you didn’t,” Daniel says to her. Daniel sits next to Rachel at work in the box office call centre. “You didn’t experience all that, because you didn’t die.”
Daniel has come close to test-driving death. He’s had testicular cancer. He’s had radiation treatment. Not the stuff that makes your hair fall out, but he’s been seriously ill all the same.
Rachel refreshes her monitor and waits for another call to announce itself in her headset. The scrolling LED sign on the wall announces that there are “0 callers waiting”.
“What about you?” Rachel asks Daniel. “Did you see tunnels?”
“No. Cancer’s not like that, is it. Eats you slowly. Besides I didn’t get that far. Nowhere near. I… Hello Ticket Leader Express, Daniel speaking, how can I help?”
Rachel knows it will not be slow for her. No mutating cancer, no snotty, shivery death from a progressive, deadly flu, no degenerative disease that sends her to the wheelchair first, then the hospital bed. No.
Click.
Her brain will just switch off.
“Hello, Ticket Leader Express, Rachel speaking, how can I help you?”
She helps the customer book four seats for Lady Gaga but all the while she is thinking, I can’t really help you. Not really. You will go to the concert, but you will still die.
Within a week of her temporary death in the chilled food aisle in Tesco, Rachel gives up work. What is the point? She just needs to sit and wait for death to come. So, she may as well sit and wait for it at home. Wait for the
Click.
Rachel stops leaving the house.
*
A woman passes by the living room window with a pushchair containing an unfeasibly tiny baby, bonneted up against the sun. A parasol jigs and joggles on its attachment. Rachel cannot fathom how people dare to have children – a person more delicate than themselves. The constant pressure to keep that frail being alive. Their tiny bones, the way they toddle naively towards danger, the fragility of their skulls.
The phone rings.
Rachel answers quickly using the handset in her lap.
“Hello.”
There is a sigh at the other end of the line. Daniel. “So, you’re in.”
“Yes,” says Rachel. “Obviously. I’m answering the phone. That’s what you want when you ring someone, for them to be in.”
“I want you to leave the house. I want you to come back to work. I miss you.”
Since Daniel has steered himself out of the path of oncoming death he has found a new zeal for life - and its risks. He has sky-dived, he has travelled, he has come out at long bloody last. They had all expected him to leave Ticket Leader Express, Rachel included, but he’s clung onto it. That box office call centre is base camp. The rest of life is spontaneity.
“Make the most of it, Daniel,” Rachel intones, “this time, with me, on the phone. It’ll all be over soon.”
She snaps her fingers.
Click.
She watches as End Terrace Man comes into view at the end of the street. He must have finished his lap of the allotments and is heading back home.
Another of Daniel’s sighs. “OK,” he says. “So what are we going to do until then? What are we going to do here? Now?”
“Wait,” says Rachel.
“A life spent waiting isn’t any kind of life at…”
“No,” cuts in Rachel, “wait.”
End Terrace Man has stopped 50 yards from her house on the opposite side of the road. He has his hands on his thighs. He is looking at the floor. He is heaving out air as if it is vomit. Rachel sets down the handset and gets up onto her knees in the armchair to get a better view out of the window.
She hears Daniel calling her name, croaky, disembodied.
End Terrace Man is down on his knees, his hands on the pavement, his back arching and falling.
Rachel jumps from her armchair lifeboat and crosses the carpet sea to the front door. She opens it.
Distant still is the voice of Daniel saying her name. A hardly-there sound.
End Terrace Man is on his belly on the ground now. He isn’t moving.
Rachel looks down at the pavement in front of her door. She steps out onto it. In her socks. She finds herself crossing the street.
A woman has stopped next to End Terrace Man. She has dropped her shopping and it spills from the bags. She is down on the ground, seeking out a pulse, on the neck, then the wrist of End Terrace Man.
“I’ll call an ambulance,” a man behind Rachel yells and Rachel turns from her position in the middle of the road to see him urgently poking a finger at his mobile phone.
Rachel carries on walking. The woman, seeing a pair of socks approach, looks up.
“There’s no pulse,” she says to Rachel. Her eyes are wet with a productive panic. “I’m going to try CPR.”
“My name’s Rachel,” the words fall out of her mouth, automatic. “Can I help you?”
“We need to get him onto his back.”
Working together they manage to flip End Terrace Man over and Rachel watches as the woman pushes brown curls behind her ear and places the side of her face to his chest, as if listening for special instructions. Then she is back up, her fingers inside End Terrace Man’s mouth rooting around for something missing or stolen.
When the woman starts driving two hands into End Terrace Man’s chest, Rachel hears herself counting along. The woman holds the man’s nose and blows into his mouth like he is a stubborn balloon.
It is the same Green Ambulance Man who arrives and takes End Terrace Man away, with a solemn shake of his head. No smirk this time. He congratulates the woman for doing all she did, and the woman nods tearfully and herds up her shopping.
Green Ambulance Man looks at Rachel with his pop-out eyes, but gives no inkling of recognition from that day in Tesco’s.
“Well done to you too.”
“I didn’t do anything,” says Rachel, a flake of a voice, a husk. “Nothing.”
And she stays standing on the opposite pavement to her home as the ambulance drives away. She feels the need to wave.
So she does.
She feels the need to run.
So she does.
Through the children’s playground, through the allotments and back in a loop, Rachel runs. She is out of puff and she aches, but only on the outside, not within. She runs as if she believes that she just might be able to catch the thing she never will. She runs back down her street to her open front door and walks back in across the sea of her carpet. She comes home with mud on her socks.
She picks up the handset she’s left on the armchair.
“Hello?” she says into it. “I’m still here.”
--
Don't Get Dead by Julie Mayhew was read by Susan Moisan at the Liars' League Here & Now event on Tuesday 10 August 2010 at The Phoenix, Cavendish Sq., London
Julie Mayhew is a writer and actress. Her Afternoon Play Stopgap will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on September 8th and you can currently hear her performing in Radio 4 sketch series Recorded For Training Purposes. She has recently completed a debut novel Red Ink. More details at www.juliemayhew.co.uk.
Susan Moisan graduated last year from Drama Studio London. Credits: Lady Agatha Proudcock in Oswald's Return at the OSO Arts Centre; We Are Gods (White Bear Theatre); Hatchepsut in Zipporah (George Wood Theatre, Goldsmiths); and Central Film School's short film The Factory. She has also played a number of roles in new writing for radio. She will shortly be appearing as Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing (Trifle Productions).
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