When the high-handed policeman demanded her details and got to the phone number, Kay drew an unprecedented blank. It was fairly commonplace not to recall your own mobile number, which one tended to communicate to others by texting or ringing up, and she’d misplaced her iPhone all morning (perturbing in itself). Of course she didn’t know Cyril’s; her phone knew Cyril’s. Yet now she couldn’t even retrieve the landline. When a selection of likely digits eventually danced in her head, she struggled to remember whether the last four numbers were 8406 or 8604. It is strangely difficult to locate your own phone number, and she excused herself upstairs to Cyril’s study, rifling water bills and annual TV licences and finally scrounging a hard copy of a tax return from three years ago that included the landline. Aside from changes to the London prefix, they’d had the same phone number since 1972. Rattled, she no longer gave a toss about the silly summons, and when she returned to the foyer the officer, who when she’d suffered her so-called senior moment had seemed to vacillate between pity and contempt, had clearly made up his mind. He went with contempt.
The sure sign that the peculiar lapse bothered her on a profound level was that she did not tell Cyril. Once the coronavirus upheaval finally settled down to some semblance of normalcy, she also did not tell Cyril that after a former colleague from St Thomas’ reached out to her, she enrolled in a large double-blind drug trial being funded by the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust. The researchers were specifically looking for subjects with no substantial comorbidities (happily, successfully treated hypertension did not count as substantial) who were over the age of seventy-five.
The likes of blanking out over their landline number did not recur. Not only could she rattle off those familiar digits—ending in 8406, by the way—but she could effortlessly produce her mobile number and, after giving her contacts list an idle glance, Cyril’s as well. Why, she was able to rat-a-tat-tat through her every phone number since she was five. Furthermore, she’d no trouble reciting her favourite Gerard Manley Hopkins poem word-perfect. Cleaning the kitchen after dinner, she sometimes sang “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” or “Save the Last Dance for Me”—sotto voce, because she was always self-conscious about the reediness of her voice—and she correctly recollected the lyrics to the last stanza.
That strange cerebral seizure with the patronizing policeman had obviously been brought on by anxiety over being given a summons for the first time in her life, and perhaps as well by the larger emotional trauma of having come so close to calling it quits in perpetuity three days earlier; heavens, had she not experienced that sudden visitation of feminist agency in the loo (Take back control!), perhaps she’d have downed those tablets after all. Or maybe the explanation was more mundane: the temporary blockage of a neural pathway that happens to everybody. She really had to stop leaping to the conclusion that she was going bats just because her benighted parents had set such an unpropitious precedent.
Throughout her fifties and sixties, Kay had coloured her hair, covering the expanding streak of grey down the middle and returning her browning locks to the tawny gleam of her youth. But by her seventies, the discipline of monthly home treatments had grown tedious, and the lighter colour looked less natural. Thus for some years she’d let her hair go salt-and-pepper, a more seemly and not unattractive look for her age, and owing to the depressing follicular thinning of the menopause she always wore it snugly pinned in a French twist.
Yet removing the pins one night before bed, she noticed a surprising glint at her temples. Leaning towards the mirror, she flicked at a host of tiny sprouting hairs, very fine, altogether new, and strangely golden.
Over time, they grew longer and stronger. With no help from L’Oréal, her hair developed a brightening sheen, whilst it also grew softer and, though the transformation could credibly be all in her mind, thicker; regarding even delusional improvements to one’s physical appearance at eighty-one, she would take what she could get. So one morning Kay impulsively refrained from binding the rope of her diminished tresses, but allowed the locks to flow free to her shoulders.
“You’ve not worn your hair down in donkey’s years,” Cyril commented. “It looks nice. Gentler. More feminine, if we’re allowed to use that as a compliment any more. You should wear it down more often.”
The new tufts were not only on her head. Those young women who fanatically lasered their nether regions had no appreciation for how bereft one becomes when most of those squiggly hairs down there disappear of their own accord. Kay herself hadn’t realized that she rather cherished the coy disguising furze until bit by bit post-fifty it nearly all fell out. Now the undergrowth surged back: kinky, exuberant, and honey blonde.
Not only the hairs felt kinky. It had been a while, more than a while, and with this racy new frizz Kay couldn’t resist taking it for a test run.
“You’re frisky tonight,” Cyril remarked in surprise, once she’d seized his joystick and shoved their bedtime reading up a gear. In the end, the experiment in nostalgia wasn’t wholly a success, but no one was keeping score, and over the years they’d developed techniques for crossing the finish line by a variety of resourceful means. By custom, these improvisational encounters would mutually suffice for weeks thereafter. Consequently, on the following night, Cyril was begging to be allowed to sleep.
Although one always notices the arrival of the unpleasant, one often fails to notice the alleviation of the unpleasant. Hence Kay blithely thought about other things until finally realizing that she hadn’t needed to tweeze out those ugly coarse dark hairs on her upper lip for months. If she picked up on the brightening at all, she dismissed the radiance of her teeth as a trick of the light, or attributed the sparkle to a reformulated toothpaste—as she also attributed the fading if not disappearance of the unsightly brown mottles on her hands to a rare beauty cream that actually worked. She’d certainly grumbled a fair bit to Cyril about how arduous it had become simply to arise from a seated position, but she went back to popping up effortlessly from her chair without remark. Kay had been consternated when she was diagnosed with hypertension, but when in taking her own blood pressure she discovered that it had dropped much too low, she simply stopped taking the medication, and once she regularly tested at below 120/80 she didn’t give the matter a second thought. Months must have gone by before she did a double-take whilst brisking about the back garden: her toes didn’t hurt. Her shoulder didn’t hurt. After weeding, her knees didn’t hurt when she stood. So she reinstated her original Sunday walkabout along the Thames, skipped the restorative coffee, covered the distance more quickly, then added an extra mile.
Whatever curious transformation was underway seemed not only to regard stamina and strength—she could now carry two bags of wood at a time to the log burner—whose increase she casually ascribed to being a bit more demanding of herself, and thus resisting the temptation in old age to reflexively rely on others. If you believed you could open the marmalade jar, it was amazing how by applying a tad extra determination the seal would break. She also evidenced a subtle shift in temperament, which was harder to explain away. A year previous when harvesting their fig tree, she’d never have risen on tiptoe on the ladder’s penultimate step and leant so far over the party wall that the ladder began to topple, all for two pieces of ripe fruit—which if she wanted so badly they could always buy. That sort of lousy risk–benefit analysis was for kids, and Kay was old and wise.
She did seem to get more done lately. With fervid apologies for having abandoned the job halfway through, she returned to doing up Glenda’s ground floor, going decisively with a hint of the Victorian that her best friend was sure to prefer to modern minimalism. Dispatching the makeover took half as much time as she’d expected. In preference to retiring altogether, she solicited still more design work; they needed the money. Finally accepting that she’d always hated the ungainly extra-terrestrial plant with blooms like eyeballs on sticks, she ripped out their deep-rooted fatsia in an afternoon. She reorganized the tool shed so that it no longer took half an hour to locate a screwdriver. Befuddled as to why the straightforward project had ever inspired such procrastination, she attacked her wardrobe and culled the clothes she never wore.
About to bundle the discards into a bin bag for Oxfam, she had a sudden change of heart. The frock atop the pile certainly didn’t pass the standard test of having been worn at least once in the previous year. In a canary-yellow dotted Swiss, the dress was a peasant design, with puffed sleeves, a full skirt, a gathered neckline, and a black bodice that laced in a criss-cross pattern down the front. She’d looked quite fetching in the thing back in the day, like a cowherd in the Alps, but had firmly slid the garment down the rail because there was nothing more embarrassing than women who didn’t dress their age, and the styling was simply too girlish. But on a whim, she decided to wear it that evening.
“Bloody hell,” Cyril said when she swanned downstairs to start dinner. “Gotta say, bab. It’s not that you don’t always look young for your age. But tonight . . . You look smashing.”
She went to glance with satisfaction in the mirror of the downstairs loo. It was surely due to a fluke effect of the waning sun, but those harsh lines from her nostrils to the corners of her mouth did seem to have grown less pronounced; why, from this angle they appeared to have vanished. Likewise smoothed away were the pleats on either side of her philtrum that had made her lips look permanently pursed, previously imparting an unappealing schoolmarm disapproval. When she smiled, for once her face didn’t look like a crumpled paper bag.
“I think eating more healthily has a perceptible knock-on effect on one’s appearance,” she said zestfully, whisking back into the kitchen and going at the courgettes, slicing three at a time. “During the hoarding of the coronavirus outbreak, you remember, we couldn’t get green vegetables for love nor money.”
“Yes . . .” he said, staring at his wife with unnerving intensity. “There’s nothing like the tonic of vitamin C . . .”
“Also,” she added, top-and-tailing the onions, “lately I seem to have embraced a more positive attitude. For a while there, I may have been a bit traumatized by our last-minute abortion of ‘D-day.’ At our age, being on the very cusp of disappearing from the universe, and then pulling back from the brink—well, it gives one psychic whiplash. From which it seems I’ve officially recovered.”
They both seemed to notice it at once. Although Kay’s swift, precise slicing of slender, uniform onion wedges was neither here nor there, it was extraordinary, not to mention dangerous, that she was not wearing her glasses—without which she couldn’t tell the difference between a root vegetable and her left hand. Casually, so as not to be detected, she slid her gaze slyly to the open copy of The Week a foot from the cutting board. She could not only make out the headline but the text, including the tiny italicized authorial identification in the far bottom corner. It hit her at the same time that she couldn’t even remember the last time she’d worn her hearing aids, yet Cyril’s conversation was clear and crisp, as was the early evening birdsong on the other side of the closed patio door. As a former registered nurse, she was well aware that the stiffening of the corneas starting in midlife was a one-way process, and presbycusis did not improve.
“And, well, furthermore . . .” she said, faltering, and again unsettled by the piercing look in her husband’s eyes. “It makes a big difference, to me anyway, not to be living under that sword of Damocles all the time. In retrospect, I think it took a dreadful toll on me for years, knowing that I’d committed to this . . . hard-and-fast . . . non-negotiable . . . you know. So release from all that stress, and darkness, and foreboding . . . It’s made me feel better, and maybe even look better.”
She finally raised her eyes from the board and met her husband’s gaze.
“You could pass for thirty-five,” he said accusingly. “I do not say that to flatter you. I’m saying that as a fact. What. Is going on?”
That was when she broke down and told him about the drug trial.
* * *
The medication was fast-tracked and available on prescription three years later. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence was sceptical at first, for so long as the drug was still under patent, the price of approving it for NHS purchase was prohibitive. But once the results across the ageing population were modelled, the regulatory body concluded that the cost of the prophylaxis would be overwhelmingly compensated by the money saved on treating the chronic conditions to which the elderly were prone. Besides, once the cat was out of the media bag, denying the British citizenry access to Retrogeritox would have led to widespread rioting.
According to rumour, which the subsequent longevity of a certain someone bore out, one of the first beneficiaries of the new restorative was the UK’s official head of state, who, it was said, began discreetly popping the pills along with her nightly G&T whilst the drug trial, showing such early promise, was still underway. Consequently, the poor, inhumanly patient Charles, Prince of Wales, was unlikely ever to ascend to the throne after all; when the secret finally leaked, the Princess-Consort-in-waiting Camilla Parker-Bowles was livid. The country at large, however, was delighted. With the wildly popular Queen Elizabeth II installed in perpetuity, the monarchy was safe, a thriving British tourism industry guaranteed.
The wholesale transformation of the social landscape was gradual at first. A surprisingly considerable segment of Kay and Cyril’s cohort was suspicious of fads, or resistant to taking experimental medication, or stuck irretrievably in their understanding of life, the world, and most of all themselves—they were old and their time was nigh—and it was fascinating how much some people were willing to sacrifice just to keep their version of reality from turning topsy-turvy. But the puristic hold-outs, well, obviously—in relatively short order, they died.
Little by little, the vista along the average high street included fewer and fewer pensioners—or at least pensioners who looked like pensioners. You didn’t see many mobility scooters any more, until at length most of them were repurposed as go-carts for children. No one had to impatiently make their way round old ladies with walking frames when rushing for the bus. Meanwhile, care homes closed—including the appalling Close of Day Cottages, subject to a scathing exposé in the Evening Standard. Now notorious, the greedy, self-dealing director Mimi Mewshaw had deliberately withheld Retrogeritox from her wards, who had been imprisoned in an information vacuum and had never even heard of the revolutionary cure for ageing until they were freed.
Certain business sectors suffered. Demand for a variety of products and services shrank or evaporated: creams for the amelioration of spots, wrinkles, and eye bags; reading glasses and corrective lenses; hearing aids; in-home caretaking; walk-in bathtubs, shower-stall rails, transfer discs, and electric stair lifts; wheelchairs, canes, and walkers; a panoply of pharmaceuticals that treated the cancers, hypertension, heart disease, and strokes that soon grew exceedingly rare; artificial hips and knees; pacemakers and stents; pension fund management; the writing of wills and the settlement of estates. The confidence artist trade suffered a punishing contraction, with no more addled, credulous oldsters to prey upon. But the modest damage to the economy was more than made up for by the explosion of the working population, whose taxes now largely supported dependents who were under eighteen. Indeed, for the first time in its history, the fiscally insatiable NHS had its budget cut, and even the Labour Party didn’t squawk.
Naturally, at first the ground-breaking therapy was largely available in richer countries, which gave horrifying new meaning to the “inequality” that had obsessed progressives for decades: now only the poor would get old. Talk about seriously unfair. But the UK soon devoted its entire aid budget to supplying the drug to Africa and other emerging markets; meanwhile, the patent expired, and the generic was dirt-cheap. Besides, after patients took the standard two-year course, the transformation of cell duplication turned out to be permanent, so the benevolence was a one-off. Best of all, parents who’d both drunk this contemporary Kool-Aid passed immunity to decay to their offspring. A whole new generation was born that would never see visibly elderly humans, save in archival photos and films—which terrified children, who perceived decrepit men and women with big hairy moles, bent backs, craggy faces, and crinkled, papery skin as monsters.
Inevitably, a demographic transformation on such a scale produced its share of doom-mongering naysayers—who in this instance had a point. Humanity continued to reproduce, but almost no one died. Of course, even sceptics were obliged to preface their cynical forecasts with assurances about how wonderful it was to have beaten death itself, now hailed as our species’ crowning achievement. Nevertheless, were this situation to carry on, the population of the planet would go through the roof, thereby triggering a cascade of calamity: water and food shortages, horrific urban crowding, property prices unaffordable for all but the rich, and wars over territory and finite resources.
This argument was beginning to gain substantial traction when something happened. It was disagreeable. It was immediate—that is, not precisely overnight, but close enough, and far too rapid for any effectual social policy response or medical palliative to be formulated. In its mercilessness, it was almost kind (though no one said so at the time). The cataclysm’s mathematical tidiness and uncanny uniformity of result across the globe suggested design. Like the stopped clock accurate twice a day, for once the conspiracy theorists were probably right.
The coronavirus panic of 2020 was, it transpired, a mere drill. Half the world’s population died. Whatever it was that hit them, the half that remained were immune. Thereafter, an anonymous advert ran in all the major papers worldwide on the same day: I HAVE BOUGHT YOU SOME TIME TO GET WITH THE PROGRAMME. YOU CAN HAVE ETERNAL LIFE, OR YOU CAN HAVE FAMILIES, BUT YOU CANNOT HAVE BOTH. Together the American FBI and MI6 finally traced the advert to a cantankerous, misanthropic rogue demographer named Calvin Piper, who objected on his arrest that he had saved humanity from itself, “not that it especially deserved saving,” and rather than be put on trial, he “should have a building on the Washington Mall named after him.” Perversely, the villain who became far more notorious than Stalin or Hitler had refused to take Retrogeritox, for not only was he in his late nineties, but he looked in his late nineties—making history’s most fiendish mass murderer appear uniquely and conveniently grotesque.
No one ever said so at dinner parties. Yet behind closed doors, more than one academic concurred that Calvin Piper’s wicked pathogen—christened “Pachyderm,” for it was derived from a virus that leapt the species barrier from elephants—achieved exactly what it was meant to. World population grew somewhat, until it gradually registered globally that procreation wasn’t in the larger social interest if present generations weren’t planning to leave the building any time soon, or possibly ever. In every country, pregnancy soon required a licence, only a handful of which were issued per year.
* * *
But back to Lambeth.
As the years had advanced since their wedding, Kay had unavoidably watched the dashing, energetic, idealistic young man she fell in love with metamorphose into what others would perceive as a grizzled crank. A once “slender” figure appeared closer to “scrawny.” Stenosis crimped the ramrod posture. Soft chestnut locks turned the colour of lead. In their early days together, Cyril’s absentmindedly allowing his hair to shag over his ears had been endearing; in later decades the same inattention to grooming made him look unkempt or even crazed. By about seventy, he developed a permanent scowl that, she teased in the twenty-teens, made him look like Jeremy Corbyn. Scraggled in due course with single long, coarse hairs that didn’t belong there, the smooth, firm chest on which she’d first laid her head as a bride inevitably began to droop. Meanwhile, her husband’s keen features subtly lost definition, as if a Renaissance statue in Carrara marble had been eroded by acid rain. In accommodating these losses, Kay had been obliged to draw upon a mature sense of perspective, a more profound understanding of what a person is than she’d ever enjoyed when she married, a mournful resignation to the fleeting nature of beauty, a sense of humour, and a bottomless well of tenderness. (All frightfully character-building, though Kay had still been on borrowed time herself, and it had been difficult to see the use of continuing to build a character that would soon get thrown away.)
Witnessing the same transformation in reverse proved ever so much more palatable.
Oh, Cyril was still a fanatic. He was still inflexible. He was still an absolutist, and he still passed unequivocal judgements that could make him seem harsh. But all these curmudgeonly qualities were easier to take in a physically buoyant man whose occasional frowns instantly evanesced, whose posture was pillar-straight, whose pectorals once again resembled Italian marble, and whose lush chestnut hair had resprouted its disarming cowlick. Cyril looked twenty-five. Pretty much everyone looked twenty-five.
For a while, if only because they were still financially underwater after having spent down their assets in preparation for throwing in the mortal towel (what a dreadful mistake that would have been!), Cyril returned to the NHS as a GP. At that time, there were still pregnancies to look after, and people still injured themselves—though tending patients who healed so quickly was a joy. Cancers had always been depressing, and he was glad to see the back of malign cell production altogether. Colds and flus continued to come and go, but this newly resilient population bounced right back. In the old days, GPs were often overwhelmed, allowed only ten minutes per appointment, whilst many patients had complained that it was impossible even to get one. After the Retrogeritox revolution, Cyril went hours at a go with nothing to do.
By contrast, Kay had loads of interior design work, because everyone suddenly had so much energy, and in looking youthful they naturally assumed youth’s impatience and appetite for novelty. The escalating demand for aesthetic variation displayed a trace of mania, which meant something, though in the first few years Kay wasn’t sure what.
The fact that all the generations of their family now looked the same age had repercussions—neither good nor bad exactly, but interesting. Abstractly, in bygone times most children had made some effort to appreciate that their parents had once been young, but by and large this exercise of the imagination was half-hearted. Children didn’t really want to picture their parents as contemporaries, and children didn’t really want to think of their parents as regular people. Yet when a parent appeared a peer, no imagination was required. For Hayley in particular, the subjective experience of meeting her parents before she was born seemed uncomfortable, if not faintly obscene. She might have been irked that, of the two, by any objective standard her own mother was now by miles the more attractive. Although loath to compete with her daughter, Kay had merely to enter the same room for Hayley to glower in resentment. There was nothing for it. Kay wasn’t about to live eternal life in a sack.
The sudden levelling of the generations exposed a chronic sense of superiority on both parties’ parts. In the past, parents had always felt a trace of condescension towards their children, however warmly disguised. They’d already experienced what the kids were going through for the first time, and they knew better. But the condescension worked both ways: always more “modern,” an upcoming generation also knew better. Even if they didn’t yet enjoy position and wealth, the young had every other advantage: strength, looks, health, a future. It was their role, kindly or brutally, to discard and replace.
This subtle battle of mutual contempt was over. Simon, Roy, and Hayley could hardly write off their parents as yesterday’s news when the children and grandchildren were no more “the future” than Kay and Cyril, whose life expectancy was now indefinite. As time went on, too, the family’s power dynamic shifted dramatically, which was especially hard on Cyril. Once a father and son were both within a stone’s throw of 150, seniority grew meaningless, and this rough parity translated into a dizzying loss of parental clout. The uniformity of the family’s visual ages also made them feel more like friends than relatives—which sounds agreeable, save for the fact that kinship is ineluctable, friendship elective. Thus at get-togethers they all found themselves weighing up in the starkest of terms whether, love and the bonds of blood aside, they actually liked one another.
Roy was pissy because the very concept of inheritance had become an anachronism. (To be fair, in his disgruntlement on this point, their middle child was not alone. A host of entitled progeny who’d been waiting to come into trust funds would have to make their own way in life after all, and they weren’t all eager to demonstrate their entrepreneurial pluck.) Of the three, Roy was the most inclined to regard everlasting life as a millstone, since living forever meant working forever. Hayley had also made the disheartening discovery that when all your cells replicate perfectly, your fat cells replicate, too. But at least she enjoyed a faster metabolism, and as for slimming? There was all the time in the world.
Therefore it turned out that the Wilkinsons needn’t have been in such a rush to visit Australia, Japan, Key West, Las Vegas, and Malta. They sampled Russia, Tunisia, and the Philippines. They did mountain treks outside of Cape Town and took boat tours through the Amazon. They visited the obscure spice island of Pemba—where they were put up by an inhumanly generous expat New Yorker named Shepherd Knacker, whom not only his gorgeous wife Carol but the entire local population seemed to adore. In Thailand, they stayed with a fellow Brit called Barrington Saddler; once the booming bon vivant lurched off to bed, they whiled away the boozy wee smalls with his obliging sidekick Edgar Kellogg, musing together about how their overweight and self-satisfied host could be at once so damnably charming. They browsed for antiques in New England, where they made the acquaintance of a woman who seemed cold and standoffish at first, but Kay warmed to Serenata enormously over the weekend, even if the husband could grow tiresome if allowed to go on about LED streetlights. Kay and Cyril cycled alongside the Rhine and ploughed in a submarine along the Mariana Trench. Though they’d foresworn cruises as hedonistic and vulgar, they finally capitulated purely for the change of pace. Once such adventures became affordable, they spent a week in the International Space Station and went camping on the moon.
The NHS having downsized, Cyril was laid off as a GP, and resisted idleness by writing his memoirs. Unfortunately, infinite leisure to write a manuscript is not in any author’s interest. He produced to excess. He revised to excess. He edited to excess, so that after whittling the record down to nearly nothing he was obliged to build the narrative back up all over again. He dithered over every adjective and rearranged every sentence. Sick of hearing about it, Kay insisted he commit to an inevitably imperfect version and submit the book as-is. But Cyril didn’t find any takers. The whole subject of health care was of little interest to a population all biologically twenty-five, and with time stretching infinitely to the horizon everyone else was writing memoirs, too.
To her own surprise, Kay grew weary of interior design, and branched into landscaping. Then she qualified as an engineer, and for a while worked in bridge maintenance. As an escape from the responsibility, she tended a shop till, and then she tried acting in an historical television series on its 307th season, which comically entailed wearing elaborate make-up to look like the old woman she had once been in real life. A few years later she segued into municipal government, after which she experimented with what proved the purely theoretical satisfactions of manual labour and learnt to lay bricks. For everyone was swapping places. You could do whatever you’d always wanted to do, and then you could do whatever you’d never wanted to do. Yet it became ever trickier to determine what “wanting” was exactly.
Cyril had a harder time in the occupational realm, because he’d always been one of those people who’d known from an early age exactly what he wanted to dedicate his life to, and he’d never wavered from that purpose. But Britain no longer required many doctors. After the failed writing project, then, Kay encouraged him to expand his concept of healing and return to graduate school to get a degree in clinical psych. It was good advice. In the post-Retrogeritox world, the demand for counselling and treatment for mental disorders was soaring.
The drug didn’t precisely eliminate death, as Calvin Piper’s nefarious nostrum for his species’ demographic ills had amply demonstrated. During what was thereafter referenced as “Calvin’s Cull” back in 2042 (when world population had ballooned to an alarming 11.3 billion with no end in sight), the Wilkinson family would have been perceived as unusually lucky—though they didn’t feel lucky. Oh, the loss of Simon and his son Geoff would have been devastating in any circumstance. But in a world in which both men could credibly have lived a thousand years, their demise was even harder to take. And now not only loveliness lasted forever. So did grief.
Still, as Calvin’s Cull receded in memory and its survivors grew fanatically risk-averse, death became exceedingly rare. Consequently, death also became alien, and far more terrifying. Perhaps suddenly vanishing from the surface of the planet had always seemed strange, but now it seemed wrong, morally wrong; it was an abomination. Denounced as the ultimate violation, dying had lost any sense of inevitability, of nature taking its course. Whilst the bereaved of yore had often suffered depression, now even the loss of a not-especially-close friend could result in utter derangement.
After a long plateau of worldwide mortality, however, the death rate began to tick up—and not due to a freakish vogue for skydiving or rock climbing without ropes. Cyril’s patient load increased, until once again his schedule was full to early evening. Universally, the psychic crisis was teleological. Having come within a hair of acting on the same impulse in 2020, Cyril was unusually qualified to offer succour and sympathy. For people came to Dr Wilkinson in droves because they couldn’t stop contemplating suicide.
On the face of it, the pathology was baffling. The patients were healthy. They mightn’t have all been devastatingly attractive, but the bloom of youth partially redeemed even the unprepossessing. None of them lived with the looming dreads that had haunted their ancestors: of physical dysfunction, aesthetic corruption, senility, irrelevance, loneliness, and the fearsome flop of the final curtain. If they didn’t like their jobs, there was plenty of time to train to do something else. If they were unsatisfied with partners or spouses, so were loads of people, and there was plenty of time to find another soul mate as well. In a highly automated workplace, most employees didn’t put in more than twenty hours per week, and the hobbies and holidays on offer were multitudinous. Why, Kay herself had learnt Portuguese, mastered caning chairs, and thrown mountains of ceramic flower vases they didn’t need. Granted, it did transpire that she had no talent for ballet, was rubbish at tennis, and made an appalling jazz drummer, but there was always the tango, field hockey, and the pan flute. Whatever was these party poopers’ problem?
* * *
“Well, that’s it,” Kay announced, colouring a dented rectangle with a magenta marker. “With Oman, it’s a complete set.”
She stepped back so they could both admire the artwork tacked to the wall: a variegated map of the world, every single country now coloured in. The Middle East had been low down their to-do list, since Kay retained a faint prejudice against places that had once compelled women to shuffle around in bin liners.
“Does that mean there’s nowhere left to go?” Cyril asked, failing to disguise a hint of hopefulness.
“We could always start the exercise all over again and go to every country in the world twice.”
“I’m afraid I may not enjoy travel quite as much as you do, bab.”
“You have only said that three million times,” Kay snapped. All right, that was a hyperbole. But given the longevity of their marriage, the notion of having heard the same sentiment word-for-word “millions” of times wasn’t as great an exaggeration as all that.
“Roughly the number of times you’ve taken my head off for saying it,” Cyril said. “What you dislike is not my repetitive conversation, but the truth of the sentiment. I’ve made a yeomanlike effort to overcome a general preference for staying home—”
“You have infinite opportunity to stay home!”
“I do not want to visit every country in the world twice,” he said flatly. He might have looked twenty-five, but deep down inside that strapping youngster was a grumpy old man trying to get out.
“But since we’ve been there, all those places could have changed!”
“They most certainly will have changed,” Cyril said with a know-it-all haughtiness that got on his wife’s nerves more than ever. “They’ll have grown more the same. With everyone trying on new countries like outfits, there’s no difference between anywhere and anywhere else aside from the landscape. Everyone speaks English. Even here, forget regional dialects. There’s no longer such a thing as a discernible British accent—much to the dismay of American tourists. So I don’t see the point. We can find all manner of exotic foods, and all manner of people who at one time might have seemed exotic, in Lambeth.”
Kay bombed to the sofa and glowered. Face it: she was irritable not because she disagreed with him, but because she felt the same way. Kay being the adventurous, curious one was a distinction between them to which she was attached. But the role had worn out. Oman had been boring, and she’d been glad to see the back of it. The trip had constituted the silly closing obligation of an arbitrary project, which had long before ceased to be an expression of genuine geographical appetite. Cyril was right about the creeping sameness, too, though the homogeneity was more overarching than a melding of global cultures, which had all blended into a giant mulligatawny soup. What was the difference between Kay and Cyril, or between Kay and anybody?
Which recalled the sage advice of her instructor in a metalsmithing class she took yonks ago. The woman said that in art your limitations are also your strengths. What you’re not good at, what you can’t think of, even the mistakes you make all contribute to your personal style. To have no such constraints is to be shapeless, she said, and to have no voice. This dictum helped explain Kay’s growing identity crisis. She had been good at too many things: design, engineering, municipal government, all that. She had visited too many places and become “best friends” with too many people. As a result, the molecules of her disposition were spread so thin that her character was no longer solid matter but more like a formless gas.
Kay glanced dully around the sitting room. After about this interval she’d usually be getting ideas for another renovation. Although by all appearances this was still the same house, every joint, lintel, sill, door, and panel of plasterboard had been replaced multiple times. But now even her chronic dissatisfaction had exhausted itself.
As a perpetually peaceable coexistence would have been soporific, she and her husband tried to generate a few conflicts as a discipline, so maybe a trace of testiness this afternoon was all to the good. She wished she could return to the original exhilaration of watching her beloved age in reverse—but exhilaration by its nature is not an emotion one can sustain, and surety that her husband’s face would always look that creaseless and his long legs would always remain that shapely made these attributes seem less dear.
They’d talked about getting divorced—and not in a state of raging hair-tear, but matter-of-factly, even frivolously. Like Oman, getting divorced was prospectively just one more thing to do. It was a matter of plain biological fact, much discussed because anything at all that there was to discuss had been much discussed: human beings were by nature serially monogamous at best. More marriages had gone the distance in the olden days because life was so savagely brief. Had Kay and Cyril married in 1841, when records began in England and Wales, actuarially Cyril would have died before forty, Kay by forty-two. (They’d looked it up. They’d looked everything up.) Thus their wedded bliss would have needed to last just sixteen years, and that was assuming Kay didn’t die in childbirth. This was what, untampered with, the animal kingdom had in mind. But now? They didn’t know a single other couple on a first marriage. It was not uncommon for people to have wed a hundred times—although “till death do us part” had been quietly dropped.
The Wilkinsons’ secret, if you could call it that, wasn’t being so supremely well suited or forging a love that was so fiery and true. Rather, they’d both come to the same pragmatic conclusion. All around them people were romantically mixing and matching, as if running through a set of mathematical possibilities that might seem countless but that, with a finite population, a computer could calculate quite precisely. Theoretically, then, in this game of musical chairs, Kay and Cyril could both marry everyone else on the planet and eventually come back to each other, running out of options and having to repeat the sequence much the way they had just run out of map. Moreover, the freshly formed couples they encountered consistently seemed to recreate pretty much the same relationship as the last one, and the one before that. Why, look at Roy, who reliably found some woman, or man, or something in-between, depending on his mood, off of whom he could mooch and whose generosity he could abuse. So why bother with the change-up?
And it wasn’t as if the Wilkinsons hadn’t experimented. Oh, with newly nubile bodies, the sex had been ace at first, and neither wished to stray. But—surprise!—the sense of rediscovery didn’t last. (That did seem to be the overall lesson: human beings now lasted forever, but nothing else did.) They agreed, tentatively at first, to explore an open marriage—which proved occasionally titillating, but most of the time gross. They tried three-ways, but someone always felt left out, and no one ever seemed to know what to stick where. With mutual permission, they both dabbled on the other side, though after Kay’s awkward affair with Glenda the friends avoided each other for months.
They also went through a phase of changing sex, for transgenderism had become recreational. Kay quite liked having a penis, though Cyril admitted that he missed his, and he found breasts more exciting on someone else. Meantime, other people were getting tits and penises, or vaginas and phalluses side by side so you could poke one in the other and have intercourse with yourself; or they’d get three breasts, or two penises, or an extra anus, but it all stopped being interesting (pornography was dead; rather than watch a lithe young Thai ass-fucked by a donkey, most men preferred to do the crossword), and, in the end, the Wilkinsons swapped back to their original equipment. For only one thing did not get tired: sleeping in each other’s arms. If there really was a secret to their marriage, that was it.
Kay roused herself from the sofa with the arduousness with which she’d stood up at eighty, although the struggle was motivational. “So what do you want for dinner?”
“I don’t care,” Cyril said.
“What have we agreed?” Kay said, swinging round and pointing an accusatory forefinger. “No apathy.”
“Sorry,” Cyril said, as he always did. “I could die for your wild mushroom fajitas! And how about a side salad of buffalo mozzarella, heirloom tomatoes, a sprig of fresh basil, and that fabulous balsamic glaze?” The fervour was fake, but even theatrical enthusiasm beat all too sincere ennui.
“Crikey,” Kay said, filtering to the loo. “I do miss weeing standing up.”
* * *
The one fad the Wilkinsons had resisted as pointless, possibly tasteless, and at length banal was switching race. After all the historical agony over skin colour, perhaps it was passingly notable that virtually no one amongst what were once called “minorities” or “black and brown people” or “people of colour” and finally “seeable people” exhibited the slightest desire to become white. Repigmentation and plastic surgery were all in the other direction, to the especial consternation of Jamaican Britons and black Americans, who could no longer distinguish their “real” brothers and sisters from fraudulent undercover crackers masquerading as hip and taking full advantage of their wholesale permission to use “the N-word” in all its six-letter glory. Black communities objected that they were being “infiltrated,” “robbed,” and “mocked.” Yet bills to forbid the practice as the ultimate “cultural appropriation” were struck down by the courts, because lawyers defending the bans were unable to cite what legal principle the new conversion therapy was violating. Although the fashion eventually burnt itself out, the one positive result of no longer being able to distinguish between bona fide black people and the secretly naff incognito kind is that no one gave a toss any more what colour you were, until the very word “racism” came to refer innocently to an enthusiasm for driving cars around a track very fast—as in, “Yeah, Lloyd just bought another Ferrari, because he’s really into racism.” Besides, towards the end of the infatuation with skin treatments, the most popular hue was Smurf Blue.
War, too, was defunct. Sacrificing droves of citizens gifted with eternal life was unthinkable; famously, during the final attempted conflict, between Canada and Lapland, conscripts with too much to lose had refused en masse to fight. Criminal violence had also dried up. Murder seemed only more grievous when victims were robbed of godlike immortality, and “life imprisonment” might entail banishment to a small room for thousands of years.
Nevertheless, what with the odd accident, not to mention the perplexing raft of suicides whose rising incidence became the subject of numerous hand-wringing long-form essays, a smattering of replenishment human beings were still allowed to gestate. Kay and Cyril were fortunate in having already borne a family, but without lucking out in the Population Replacement Lottery, harder to win than the old kind with buckets of cash, their great-grandchildren were unlikely to become mothers and fathers. Being so scarce, children were universally spoilt, and immoderate doting didn’t have an improving effect on the adults they became. Proud parents often kept their small people indoors, because word that a proper child had been spotted on such-and-such a street spread like wildfire, and in no time queues of rubberneckers would form, taking photographs and begging to pat the urchin’s soft little head. Whereas in times past many parents had felt a touch of melancholy when offspring seemed to grow up too quickly, modern parents met the moment when their specimen of an endangered species turned twenty-five with full-tilt desolation: from then on physically ossified, their erstwhile status symbol looked abruptly like everyone else.
That said, young people who were authentically young—who not only looked twenty-five, but who’d truly been alive for only twenty-five years or so—were much sought after. Their artlessness, ignorance, transparent pretension to sophistication, unconvincing simulation of world-weariness, fierce certainty about what was wrong with society and how to rectify it, and genuine hunger for the experiences that their chronological betters had sampled up to the eyeballs? Well, the whole authentically fresh-faced package was intoxicating. They fell in love! Wretchedly and unrequitedly, and they thought they were going to die! They converted to Islam! They had crises of faith, and unconverted from Islam! But it took disappointingly few years for that faux world-weariness to morph into the real thing.
Every funeral was as costly, elaborate, and crowded as the ceremonies that once mourned a head of state. The public gloried in marking an event that was so rivetingly irrevocable. Indeed, the public had acquired an appetite for death, the sole remaining taboo; what replaced pornography was illicit videos of gory expiration by a raft of creative means.
Film, television, theatre, and fiction crafted before the Retrogeritox watershed—aka “pre-Retro retro”—were also unfailingly popular. For the narrative arts had gone flat. The quality of “edginess” was consigned to a bygone era. As stories cleansed of ageing and mortality didn’t appear to function, all contemporary plotlines came across as inconsequential. Even grand star-crossed romance no longer scanned. What was the big deal? If a relationship doesn’t work out, get over it and find someone else. Whenever modern directors attempted to recreate the epic tragedy, the most emotion that could be summoned from an audience was, “Well, that’s too bad.” Thus Kay never wearied of David Lean, and Cyril had now seen Cool Hand Luke several hundred times.
A birth here, a death there, but for the most part the human population of planet Earth was fixed. In the absence of an asteroid to take them all out of their misery, the people alive now would be the same people alive thousands of years hence. Perhaps that should have presented this uniquely privileged generation the opportunity to become wiser, better educated, more well-rounded, more compassionate, more insightful, more hilarious, and more spiritually advanced than their predecessors. Yet as for the cultivation of these many desirable qualities, most regular people soon approached a hard limit, whilst the truly distinguished members of this perma-cohort—the few artists who showed early promise of creating truly moving contemporary work against the odds, the scientific geniuses, the visionary philosophers, the great leaders—were the most likely to blow their brains out. The evidence was in. The betterment of only one human attribute was demonstrably boundless: the capacity to be dull as dog dirt.
* * *
“So, what do you think?” Kay proposed over still another wild mushroom fajita; it was tough to decide between eating the perfectly crisp, superbly gooey wafer and throwing it at the wall. “Should we kill ourselves?”
Naturally, they had conducted this conversation before, but their favourite topic was rationed. Technically today was Kay’s birthday, though she’d lost track of which one. After so many, they didn’t bother to celebrate birthdays any more, and licence for this parcelled exchange was the closest Kay would come to a present.
“Tell me,” Cyril said, as he was meant to. “Why would we do that?”
“Well, what are we trying to achieve here? I’d hoped awfully that after hanging about all this time the nature of the project would become clearer. It hasn’t done. I still can’t get my head round what it means to be alive. I don’t know what this place is, I don’t know whether it’s even real, much less whatever it is we’re supposed to do here, and if I’ve wasted my time I still can’t tell you what I should have done instead—though the whole idea of ‘wasting time’ seems to have gone by the wayside now that there’s so bloody much of it. I’ve no more idea what matters than I did when I was five. I keep having this feeling that there’s something I’m supposed to come to grips with, and there’s not much chance of my grasping the nettle in the next hundred years if I failed to grasp it during the last hundred—which must have been full of nettles.”
“Yes, you’ve said roughly the same thing more than once.”
“What have we agreed?”
“No apathy.”
“No, I mean what else?”
Cyril thought a moment. “That we won’t give each other a hard time for saying the same thing over and over.”
“Thank you. Go to the head of the class.”
“Perhaps we should make another rule that even your birthday doesn’t give you leave to be so snippy.”
“Fair enough,” she said sullenly. Kay was supposedly the one who knew how to enjoy life. Kay was the one who appreciated its many lulling rituals like cleaning the kitchen—AGAIN—in all their sumptuous mundanity.
“Why are you so impatient?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “There’s no excuse, is there? We should both have nothing but patience. But: speaking of patients. Why do all these people you counsel claim to want to top themselves?”
“It varies a bit, but it’s not as idiosyncratic as you’d expect. Their malaise is rarely triggered by a dire turn of events or a relationship gone rancid. My patients are lost. They can’t enjoy anything. Sensory satisfaction doesn’t work: sex, food, drink; even the effects of hallucinogens become predictable. They can’t keep partners or spouses and they don’t even care, though they still get lonely. They feel trapped—and at the same time they know they’re experiencing more freedom than any human being in history, which just makes them feel worse.”
“You know, this eternity we’re stuck in almost replicates locked-in syndrome,” Kay said. “The way you become inured to sensory input like taste, which is close to having no input. Remember when I stopped drinking red wine? I shocked myself, but I’d simply had enough red wine. And this passivity . . . I think unbridled freedom and passivity amount to the same thing. Being able to do anything is like being able to do nothing. We keep coming up with another career, or another hobby, or another friend who we convince ourselves is going to be different from all the other friends we tired of—but it’s all a running in place. Nothing changes. As if the whole species is laid out on a hospital bed staring up at a stain on the ceiling the shape of Norway. Spiritually at least, we’re paralysed. We’re physically able to speak, but we can’t say anything new, so what’s the difference? Our only real activity is helpless mental churn. Because this whole ellipsis of ours feels like a dream. Some days, a bad dream. I’m one of the oldest people the world has ever seen, and I sometimes feel as if I’m not here at all, or as if I’ve never been here. It’s getting . . . strangely horrible.”
“I like that: locked-in syndrome. You’ve never said that before. Am I allowed to say that? That you’ve never said something?”
“Yes, my dear,” she said, squeezing his hand. It was important to remember that they still loved each other, or more impressively still liked each other, even if frequently fractious exchanges could make it hard to tell. After all this time, they should more often commemorate the fact that they could bear to be in the same room together.
“These patients of yours, who are tormented by suicidal ideation,” she added. “What do you tell them?”
“More improv! You’ve never asked me that.”
“Haven’t I? Why, that’s appalling.”
“I tell them that human beings have fought to locate a sense of purpose from the year dot—even back when most people dropped dead by forty. I say that, beyond mere physical survival, finding purpose is your job. And that job is never done, because you’ll no sooner find an answer than you’ll have to revisit that answer, which won’t suffice on examination, and you’ll have to find another one. The advice is a bit circular, but the hypnotic nature of anything that goes round and round has a calming effect. I’m really closer to a priest now than to a doctor.”
“You didn’t used to talk like this,” Kay said. “It was all life expectancies and NHS budgets and bed-blocking.”
“Well, that was one of my answers that didn’t last.”
So they’d made one more character swap. She used to be the reflective, musing, philosophical one, whereas Cyril was all brutal brass tacks. That impatience of hers, for example—a cut-to-the-chase what’s-the-point—it used to belong to her husband. Apparently they weren’t all just trading genders or careers, but trying on being completely different people.
“With some of my cleverer patients,” Cyril added, “I suggest trying to get beyond purpose—because goal-directed behaviour is time-bound, and a consequence of mortality, as well as having been metaphorically borrowed from biology: the need to eat and sleep and mate to endure. But the universe simply is. It needn’t justify itself, and by analogy we needn’t justify our presence in it, either.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I can’t say I’ve mastered the art of purposelessness myself.”
“You know, you’ve grown much more humble,” Kay said.
“I feel more humble. It’s surprisingly pleasant.”
“But whatever happened to all your crying out for social justice?” she puzzled.
“After Calvin Piper’s idea of a practical joke”—it had grown commonplace to elide the gravity of the tragedy by being flippant—“everyone may not be wealthy, but they are prosperous, and I’ll not lose any sleep over whether they can all afford to dune buggy on Mars. Also, I came to worry that I championed social justice largely to think well of myself . . . Oh, right!” Cyril remembered. “The other thing I tell my patients is that, despite the impression they’ve been given that we’re all immortal, it isn’t so. At any moment, they could cross the street at an inopportune juncture and get flattened by an archetypal White Van Man. Believe it or not, that’s the reminder that seems to cheer them up.”
“You did have that one patient who died at her own hand. That was so hard on you.”
“The inaptly named Jess Hope,” Cyril recalled sadly. “Who jumped off Blackfriars Bridge chained to six kettle bells—not exactly a ‘cry for help.’ But most of these ‘worried well’ will never resort to anything so drastic. They’ll just keep coming back to me, self-consciously complaining that they’ve nothing to complain about. Remember when you talked me out of taking the Seconal on your eightieth? You quite elegantly parsed the costs and benefits: much was potentially to be gained by living, and nothing to be gained by dying. You said the only good reason to commit suicide was to bring an end to suffering. But my patients aren’t suffering—or not precisely.”
“Maybe not suffering is a kind of suffering,” Kay posited.
“You’ve never said that before either.”
“This is almost like a real conversation!”
As she leant back to savour the rare spontaneity, Kay’s gaze snagged on the framed photo on the bookshelf behind Cyril, from their golden wedding anniversary in that self-impressed restaurant. It was the one token image of themselves in real old age that they kept in open view, as it was a touchstone of sorts. Since she finished her last dose of Retrogeritox, Kay’s face hadn’t changed per se, but a chronically hard look in her eyes hadn’t been there in 2013. The cold glare was the one expression her body could give to the tumultuous package of exasperation, fury, and despair that consumed her daily, but for which she had no earthly excuse.
“Do you ever look at that picture?” Kay asked, pointing.
“Often,” Cyril said, not needing to turn around. “It presents something of a conundrum.”
“I know what you mean. I look awful. I suppose you look awful as well, but not to me. My own face in that shot—I’m repelled by it, but it also makes me wistful. As if I’ve lost something, but what? What’s valuable about looking like a dried fig?”
“I’m not only wistful,” Cyril admitted. “I’m jealous.”
“Isn’t that odd.”
“I’m jealous of our old urgency.”
“Yes,” Kay said gratefully. “That’s it on the nose.”
“So, thanks to my prescribing privileges, we still have a facsimile of Seconal in the fridge. I refreshed it recently. It’s your birthday. What say you?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, stretching and shooting a resigned glance at the dirty kitchen. “We could always do it next year.”