He unfolded the folding chair and sat down.
The cemetery was filled with new life. The trees sang their rustling songs, and little animals and birds scurried in the verge, while every sparrow and tit seemed to be carrying wisps of grass or a downy feather. A bumblebee droned by heavily, as if it were in the wrong gear, and the blackbird hopped out of the hedge again to show Felix a strand of orange baler twine.
Felix smiled and closed his eyes. This place soothed and restored him. Gave him the strength to carry on. One day he hoped it might give him the strength to give up.
Seagulls called overhead. Immediately he thought of fishing with Jamie. Watching his son curl a strip of mackerel on to a hook, so scared he would pierce his tender little fingers . . . I can DO it! Let me DO it! Felix chuckled under his breath. They’d caught nothing, of course. How could they? Jamie had been so excited that he’d reeled in every ten minutes to check the bait. It would have defeated the most suicidal of fish.
His smile faded. It was hard not to slide from those memories into much harder ones: from the boy to the young man whose slow death had sunk the fragile raft of faith they had all clung to for two miserable years, adrift on a sea of false hopes and platitudes from doctors whose best was never going to be good enough. They’d all known it, but never spoken of it. Instead they’d chatted and played canasta on Jamie’s hospital bed, or sat silently while he slept, growing smaller with every exhalation, until he barely raised a bump in the blanket.
In his room they’d always been bright with optimism.
They’d saved the cracks for the car park . . .
Nobody ever spoke of the relentless parking that was demanded by a relative in hospital with a prolonged illness. Twice a day, every day, in the dystopian concrete multi-storey that smelled of urine and smog. The constant change for the ticket machine. The long queue at the barrier. The forgetting where the car was. Was it this row? This level? This car park ? The only time Margaret had broken down during that whole long nightmare was once when they couldn’t find the car. She had finally bent over and wept on somebody else’s bonnet while he’d stood beside her, uselessly rubbing her back and clutching the keys to nothing.
At the funeral, Felix had ached to punch the vicar.
God didn’t care for them. Only they cared for each other. He and Margaret had cared for Jamie, and then he had cared for Margaret when she could no longer care for herself, and now he didn’t have anyone to care for except Mabel.
And nobody cared for him.
The First-timer
The new Exiteer called herself Amanda.
She was sat outside a little café on the square in Bideford, close to where Felix got off the bus. There was a nip in the air, but it was bright and breezy. Perfect weather for the beige zip-up jacket, in fact. Felix introduced himself and Amanda shook his hand. She had only just started a glass of hot chocolate, and so he ordered a pot of tea.
She was startlingly young and he wondered how they’d found her. He himself had been recruited by an elderly woman who worked at the funeral parlour where Margaret had been laid out. Elspeth, her little black name badge had read. White hair. Blue eyes. Kind mouth.
I’m sorry she suffered so, she’d said, and Felix had nodded at the withered corpse of his wife and said, Death was a relief to both of us.
He couldn’t quite remember how the conversation had turned from Margaret’s death to the Exiteers, only that when it had, he had not recoiled. Elspeth had alluded to a group who supported the right to die and said she’d ‘leave that thought’ with him – along with her card.
Felix had thought about it for six whole months, because he was not the kind of man to leap before he’d looked, and then looked again – and then possibly commissioned some sort of risk-assessment report. Caution was as much a part of him as Margaret or Jamie or a jam sandwich.
But finally he had called Elspeth. I’d like to be an Exiteer, he’d said, feeling as if he were applying to be Batman. But Elspeth hadn’t laughed. She’d told him where to meet her, and by the end of a civilized tea in Banbury’s he’d been approved. By what formal psychological standard, he had never been sure. He suspected it was none. But Elspeth seemed to be a very intelligent woman, and he’d had confidence in her good judgement.
Felix hoped that somebody like Elspeth had checked Amanda out properly, but, really, somebody should have warned him that she was quite so young.
‘Have you done this before?’ he said as soon as the waitress walked away.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Have you?’
He nodded. ‘Many times.’
‘How many?’ she said. ‘Times. I mean, how many times?’
She was nervous. He’d been nervous too, before his first time.
‘Twenty-seven.’
She widened her eyes at him. ‘That’s a lot.’
She made it sound as if he were some kind of serial killer, and she must have realized that because she blushed, making her look even younger than she already did. He estimated twenty-five, even allowing for an exaggerated judgement of youth from his own remote perspective of seventy-five.
‘It becomes easier,’ he said. ‘Not that it ever becomes pleasant.’
Amanda nodded at her hot chocolate going cold in its tall glass. Most of the cream had already sunk into the muddy liquid.
‘Do you mind my asking,’ he said, ‘how old you are?’
‘Twenty-three,’ she said. Then, anxiously, ‘Is that OK?’
‘Of course it is,’ he said, although it was even worse than he’d thought. ‘All you need to remember is that ours is a passive role, not an active one. The most important things we can offer our clients are kindness and calmness. We give them the support to leave this world without pain or fear. When we do that, we have done all we can.’
She nodded, then frowned and said, ‘What if I panic?’
Felix appraised her. She had straight, dark eyebrows that made her look sensible, so on the basis of her brows alone, he said, ‘You won’t.’
‘What if I get . . . emotional? What if I cry?’
‘Is that likely?’
She frowned, although her forehead was still so new that the lines it made were shallow and fleeting. ‘If I feel sad I might.’
‘Well, it’s all right to feel sad,’ said Felix, ‘but I’d strongly discourage any overt display of emotion while we’re actually with the client.’
‘Like what?’
‘Wailing,’ he said. ‘Rending of garments . . .’
She surprised him by getting the joke. When she laughed her whole face lit up and she barely looked twenty.
He really hoped Geoffrey knew what he was doing.
‘Why do you . . . do this?’ she asked.
Felix took the lid off the pot and peered at his tea. He stirred it a little and replaced the lid. ‘I think everybody has their own reasons.’
‘My nan died of cancer,’ she said, as if he’d asked her. ‘First one kind and then another, and then another after that. It took her two years and the last few months were just, like, totally horrible.’ She stopped and looked at the people bustling past, shopping, chatting, walking dogs. ‘I wish I’d known about this then.’
She dropped her spoon in her chocolate with a dull tinkle and he could tell she wasn’t going to finish it.
Felix nodded. He felt a bit better about her now.
‘Shall we go?’