She considered the pace of her life. The world had begun to move faster and faster over the last decade. People spoke faster, drove faster, walked faster. Everyone was in a rush. Everyone was busy. Everyone demanded their gratification instantly. She’d even begun to notice it in the editing of her books. Pace! Jo had begun to snap in her editorial comments, where once she would have written: Nice!
It seemed to Frances that readers once had more patience, they were content for the story to take its time, for an occasional chapter to meander pleasurably through a beautiful landscape without anything much happening, except perhaps the exchange of some meaningful eye contact.
The path steepened, but they were walking so slowly that Frances’s breathing stayed steady. The trail curved and slivers of views appeared like gifts between the trees. They were getting quite high up now.
Of course, Jo’s editing had probably taken on that frenetic tone in response to Frances’s declining sales. No doubt Jo could see the writing on the wall and that accounted for her increasingly feverish pleas: Add some intrigue to this chapter. Maybe a red herring to throw the reader off the scent?
Frances had ignored the comments and let her career peacefully pass away, like an old lady in her sleep. She was an idiot. A deluded fool.
She walked faster. The thought came to her that she might be walking a little too quickly at the exact moment her nose slammed straight into Zoe’s shoulder blades.
Zoe had stopped dead. Frances heard her gasp.
Heather had somehow veered off the trail and onto a large rock that overhung the steep side of the hill. The ground fell away directly in front of her. Another step and she would have gone over.
Napoleon had his wife’s arm in a fierce grip. Frances couldn’t tell if his face was white with anger or fear as his hand closed around her thin upper arm and he hauled her back onto the hiking trail.
Heather didn’t thank her husband or smile at him or even meet his eyes. She extricated herself from Napoleon’s grasp with an irritated shrug of her shoulder and walked ahead, tugging the sleeve of her threadbare t-shirt straight. Napoleon looked back at Zoe and his chest rose and fell in tandem with his daughter’s audibly ragged breathing.
After a moment both father and daughter lowered their heads and continued their slow hike up the trail, as if what Frances had just witnessed had been of no consequence at all.
chapter eighteen
Tony
Tony Hogburn had just returned to his room after yet another hellish experience of a ‘guided sitting meditation’. How much more meditation could a man do?
‘Breathe in like you’re breathing through a straw.’ Jesus wept, what a load of absolute horseshit.
He was humiliated to realise that his legs ached from the excruciatingly slow walking meditation they’d done this morning. Once upon a time he could have run that trail, no problem at all, as a warm-up, and now his legs felt like jelly after walking it at the pace of a hundred-year-old.
He sat on the balcony outside his room and yearned for an ice-cold beer and the feel of an old collie’s silky, hard head under his hand. It should have been a mild desire for a beer and a sad ache for a beloved pet, but it felt like a raging thirst in the desert and the deepest of heartaches.
He went to stand up for the two-hundredth time to get relief for this pain from the fridge before remembering for the two-hundredth time that there was no relief to be found. No refrigerator. No pantry. No TV to turn on for a distracting documentary. No internet to surf mindlessly. No dog he could summon with a whistle, just to hear the obedient patter of paws.
Banjo made it to fourteen years old. Good innings for a collie. Tony should have been ready for it, but it seemed he wasn’t. In the first week, great gusts of grief hit him whenever he put his key in the lock of his front door. A grief hard enough to buckle his knees. Contemptible. A grown man brought to his knees by a dog.
He’d lost dogs before. Three dogs over the course of his life. It was part of being a dog owner. He didn’t get why he was taking Banjo’s death so hard. It was six months now, for Christ’s sake. Was it possible that he grieved the loss of this damned dog more than any human he’d lost in his lifetime?
Yes, it was possible.
He remembered when the kids were little and the Jack Russell they gave their youngest, Mimi, for her eighth birthday escaped from the backyard and got hit by a car. Mimi had been devastated, crying on Tony’s shoulder at the ‘funeral’. Tony had cried too, feeling horrible guilt for missing that hole in the fence and sadness for that poor little dumb dog.
His daughter had been such a sweet little thing back then with her soft, round cheeks and pigtails, so easy to love.
Now Mimi was a twenty-six-year-old dental hygienist and she looked just like her mother: skinny, with a pin-like head and a rapid way of talking and walking that exhausted Tony. She was hygienic and busy, Mimi, and maybe not so easy to love, although he did love her. He’d die for his daughter. But sometimes he wouldn’t pick up the phone for her. Being a dental hygienist meant that Mimi was used to delivering monologues without fear of interruption. She was closer to her mother than to him. All three kids were. He hadn’t been around enough in their childhood. Next thing they were grown-ups and he sometimes got the feeling that they were doing ‘Dad duty’ when they called or turned up for a visit. Once, Mimi left a sweet, cooing message on his phone for his birthday, and then right at the end of the message he heard her say in an entirely different tone of voice to someone else, ‘Right, that’s done, let’s go!’ as she hung up.
His sons didn’t remember his birthday – not that he expected them to remember it; he barely remembered it himself, and he only remembered theirs because Mimi texted him a reminder on the morning of her brothers’ birthdays. James lived in Sydney, dating a different girl every month, and his oldest, Will, had married a Dutch girl and moved to Holland. Tony’s three granddaughters, whom he only saw in real life every couple of years and Skyped at Christmas, had Dutch accents. They felt entirely unrelated to him. His ex-wife saw them all the time, travelled over there twice a year and stayed for two, three weeks. His oldest granddaughter excelled at ‘Irish dancing’. (Why were they doing Irish dancing in Holland? Why were they doing Irish dancing at all? No-one else seemed to find this strange. According to his ex-wife, children were doing Irish dancing all around the world. It was good for their ‘aerobic fitness’ and coordination or something. Tony had seen footage on her phone. His granddaughter wore a wig and danced like she had a giant ruler gaffer-taped to her back.)
Tony never expected being a grandfather to be like this: funny-accented little girls talking to him on a screen about things he didn’t understand. When he’d thought about being a grandfather, he’d imagined a small sticky trusting hand in his, a slow dawdling walk to the corner shop to buy ice-creams. That never happened, and the corner store wasn’t even there anymore, so what the hell was wrong with him?
He stood. He needed something to eat. Thinking of his grandchildren had created a crater of misery in his stomach that could only be filled with carbohydrates. He would make a toasted cheese – Jesus Christ. No bread. No cheese. No toaster. ‘You might experience something we call “snack anxiety”,’ his wellness consultant, Delilah, had told him with a gleam in her eyes. ‘Don’t worry, it will pass.’
He slumped back in his chair and thought back to the day he booked himself into this hellhole. That moment of temporary insanity. His appointment with the GP had been at 11 am. He even remembered the time.
The doctor said, ‘Right. Tony.’ A beat. ‘About those test results.’
Tony must have been holding his breath because he took an involuntary gusty gulp of air. The doctor studied the paperwork for a few moments. He took off his glasses and leaned forward, and there was something in his eyes that reminded Tony of the vet’s face when he told him that it was time to let Banjo go.