“I worry more about your sister,” said his dad. “She’s the one who should be arming herself. Give all that self-defense stuff to her.”
Ethan, mildly offended by the lack of parental concern, was tempted to quote the statistics relating to the death of young adult males by assault versus females, but resisted. It’s good his parents aren’t worried.
Neither is he.
He sees a text from Jasmine. Fish okay?
He sends her a thumbs-up, then puts the phone face down again. He’s become fond of her fish in the three weeks since she’s been gone, but interestingly his crush has been fading day by day into an embarrassing memory. She’ll be one of those friends who come in and out of his life, but she’s not for him. He doesn’t know what he was thinking, to be honest. He could never be himself with her. His personality isn’t big enough to match hers. When he was in her presence he was more like a fanboy than a person. He’s enjoying living on his own. He’s so much more relaxed.
“Ethan?”
Ethan looks up and sees two women walking toward his table.
One of them is Harvey’s hot sister, Lila. She’s still hot. He didn’t imagine it. But his attention is on the other woman. Dark hair in plaits, wearing shorts and a long-sleeved loose shirt, tanned legs and sneakers. She’s laughing at the kelpie.
Ethan stands. Nearly knocks over his bowl of fries. Straightens his glasses.
Afterward he will marvel at the clarity of Harvey’s voice in his head.
This one, mate. Not the other one. This one.
Chapter 111
Ned and I booked a Jewels of Europe river cruise for my seventieth birthday. We thought it would be relaxing to have someone else making all the decisions for a change. “If we hate it, we’ll ditch it,” said Ned, although I knew we certainly would not ditch a cruise on which we’d spent so much money.
I should tell you that Ned had recently developed a new interest in “longevity.” He wanted to live until he was a hundred and he didn’t see why he shouldn’t. He’d been reading up on the blue zones, the five regions in the world where people live longer than average. He was always quoting statistics: Sleeping less than seven hours a night can increase your risk of death by twenty-four percent. People with a clear sense of purpose live up to seven years longer than those who don’t have one. Cold therapy prolongs the lifespan of mice by up to twenty-one percent. I found this all very interesting, as I have a professional interest in the issue of life expectancy, but I did not think we should invest in an ice bath, I felt there wasn’t enough data.
He wanted us to give ourselves Apple Watches for Christmas so we could monitor our heart rates and so on, but I resisted. I love data, but I suspected that with Ned’s obsessive personality we might talk of nothing else. We gave ourselves new luggage instead.
Ned ate superfoods, fasted, took cold showers, and went to the gym. He was always very fit and slim (people who never stop moving tend to be that way) and he’d been a loyal member of the Fast Fitness Gym for the past three years. He did weights and cardio. He had regular health checkups and his cholesterol was good. Better than mine.
One day he mentioned that he had been feeling a little more breathless than usual on the treadmill. He wondered if it was just that he was getting old. He wasn’t experiencing chest pains. He would have taken chest pains seriously. Our GP wasn’t overly concerned but gave him a referral to a cardiologist just to be sure. “You’re no spring chicken, mate,” he said. He could say this because he was the same age as us.
The earliest appointment we could get ended up being the day before we left for our trip. We were flying to Sydney and then transferring to the international airport where we would fly to Budapest via Doha. I do remember saying to Jill, “Let’s hope there’s nothing wrong with Ned!” Of course we never traveled without comprehensive travel insurance. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if we had to cancel.
I would have gone with Ned to his appointment, but I had my own appointment with the optometrist. There are a lot of appointments when you get to our age.
The cardiologist kept Ned waiting for an hour.
Specialists often run late. I do not know why. It is just life.
I wasn’t there to distract him. I can imagine him, impatiently tapping his good new shoes. They were Armani! He kept telling me this. He wasn’t really a designer-label person, but he got these shoes “for a steal” in a closing-down sale. I teased him about how often he gave them admiring glances, but the shoes wouldn’t have been enough to distract him during the wait. It would have been agony for him. He would have been shifting around in his seat, looking at his phone and sighing, perhaps striking up a conversation with another patient, but obviously there was no one interesting enough to keep his attention, because finally he went to the cardiologist’s secretary and said, “How much longer, do you think?”
Perhaps she was having a bad day. It would make me feel better if there was a reason for her rudeness. A cause and effect.
She snapped, as if Ned were a child who had interrupted a busy adult with an irrelevant request. “No idea. It will take as long as it takes.”
Manners matter.
They really matter.
If she’d just said, “I’m so sorry, Mr. Lockwood, it shouldn’t be too much longer.”
(Sometimes in my dreams I shout at that secretary, like I’ve never shouted at anyone in my life.)
My husband could not abide bad manners, all his students knew that. He left.
I was cross when he told me he’d walked out of his appointment (bad manners, Ned!), but I must not have been concerned, because otherwise I would have insisted we cancel the trip. We both thought the cardiologist was just a box-checking exercise. Ned knew he was fitter than some of the blokes at the gym who were twenty years younger. He hadn’t noticed the breathlessness the last time he went on the treadmill. We agreed he would have the checkup after our trip.
Some physicists argue that every event with multiple outcomes splits the world into alternate realities. It’s called the “Many-Worlds Interpretation” and, if correct, it means there is another reality where Ned sits back down, waits for his appointment, and the cardiologist rushes him in for a stent that very day.
I don’t know what the bearded determinist crowd would have said about this theory, because according to them, Ned could only behave as he actually did, but you know what? Ned didn’t always succumb to his impatience. Sometimes he endured an unacceptable line. Sometimes he chose not to take bad manners personally.
You could have behaved differently, Ned, my love.
There was another possible outcome.
But in my reality, the only one I know, this is what happens: Ned falls asleep on the flight from Hobart to Sydney and never wakes up. And while I’m saying, “Ned, wake up, we’ve landed” (and I know, I know, but I keep saying it over and over, and shaking his arm), our friends Jill and Bert are driving to their grandson’s first birthday party, and Jill has a pavlova on her lap. Bert is driving, not too fast.
The driver negotiating the hairpin bend in the opposite direction isn’t drunk.
She’s just careless.
—
I lost all three of them on the same day, just like I foresaw.
Does that make me psychic like Mum?
