Remedy is None Read Free

of these came shame that he should have thought of them at all. But it was almost impossible to grasp what these words meant. He stared at themessage again. The words seemed to buckle, distend elastically, defy meaning. How could this piece of paper he held in his hand above the tessellated floor, with people shouldering past him, come to mean so much? FATHER DYING . Father dying? With people talking and laughing and Andy closing up his locker and giving it a parting slap as if it were something animate and Jim putting his hand on his arm? Father dying?
    ‘What is it, Charlie?’ Jim said. ‘What’s the matter?’
    Charlie enunciated the words gradually, as if telling himself as well as Jim and Andy.
    ‘My father’s dying,’ he said.
    In one of the toilets someone was singing, ‘Hear my song, Violetta.’

Chapter 2
    ‘ ARE YOU SURE YOU HAVE EVERYTHING, NOW? AND whatever you do be sure and write as soon as you get there and tell us if everything’s all right. Your father and me’ll be worried until we know for sure.’
    ‘Yes, Mother, yes,’ the young woman said through the small opening in the window. She had slid back the pane, and her mother stood on the platform outside, hopping with maternal solicitude in case the guard should flag short her advice. ‘Now don’t worry about me. You would think I was going to the North Pole. I’ll be perfectly all right. Oh, excuse me. I’ll shift that,’ she said, lifting her hat from the seat opposite hers and putting it on the rack above her head beside the new tan suitcase.
    Charlie sat down on the cleared seat like a somnambulist. He hadn’t noticed the hat. He hadn’t noticed much between the university and the railway-station, only spasmodic and incomprehensible fragments of what was going on around him, an Underground map, a mother nursing her child on her knee, a ticket-collector’s hands clustered with warts. These things occurred as shapes and shadows against his frosted perception, threatened dimly without admittance. His awareness had frozen on the fact of his father dying, and impressions only skimmed the surface of his consciousness like skaters seen from underneath the ice. He still couldn’t realize it. FATHER DYING . Two words that detonated in his mind, exploding his concentration to smithereens, and left him searching the debris for fragments of understanding. How could he be dying? He had seemed all right the last time Charlie was home. But that was more than a month ago. Did people pass from apparent health to imminent death in a month? It seemed somehow unjust, somehow too casual.Death was something august and terrible, a climactic presence heralded by long illness. How could it come suddenly, unannounced like this, ensconce itself in your house behind your back? It was a possibility Charlie had never really contemplated. It wasn’t easy to start contemplating it now. But he tried to adjust to the fact towards which he was moving relentlessly.
    The train exhaled steam and lunged forward, leaving the young woman’s mother to run a few paces along the platform, throwing snippets of advice that the wind scattered like confetti. The young woman closed the pane with a sigh of relief and sank into her seat. She looked at Charlie, shaking her head, trying to form an alliance of understanding with him on the difficulties of having mothers. Charlie stared past her through the window. The old woman in the corner opposite them looked across deliberately, appointing herself chaperone while the young woman unbuttoned her costume jacket to reveal a lace blouse. The compartment door slid open and three businessmen came in, laughing. The youngest of them chose the seat beside Charlie so that he was facing towards the young woman. They had an air of mildly alcoholic carnival about them, as if they were wearing paper hats. One of the older men was smoking a cigar and its lengthening ash stayed miraculously intact in defiance of his gestures. He was telling a