The Life Impossible
The Life Impossible
.14159
‘No two legs are ever the same …’ said the surgeon. ‘Even on the same person. Even if they look identical. The veins are always a different pattern. It’s like fingerprints.’
And there was something about what she said that made me think of mathematics. All those examples of unpredictability sitting inside sameness. The way if you times a diameter by pi you will steadfastly always find the circumference of a circle, yet the numbers that make up pi’s decimal placings follow no pattern at all.
3.14159 et cetera, for ever, with total and utter and mind-boggling randomness.
There is always an element of unpredictability in even the most predictable things. And if you lived like it wasn’t there, then life would pull the rug from under you, so you might as well embrace the .14159.
I stared at the blank wall and the upside-down clock. I knew almost nothing about Ibiza. Except that it was exactly the sort of place I didn’t think I would ever visit. Or want to visit.
Blondie came on the radio. Not ‘Sunday Girl’ but ‘Heart Of Glass’. Unpredictability within a pattern. Like life.
‘You’re not going to be flying anywhere soon?’ the surgeon asked, a few minutes later. ‘Because it’s a bit dangerous, with your legs.’
‘Are you suggesting I go without them?’
She didn’t appreciate my joke.
‘No,’ I said, watching the nurse slowly hitch a compression stocking up my leg. ‘No. I am not flying anywhere soon.’
It had been a long time since I had knowingly told a lie.
And I felt as naughty as a retired and widowed maths teacher possibly can. Because in that second, still tilted upside down on that surgery bed, I knew I had a plan.
The plan being a simple but noncommittal one. To fly to Ibiza with an open return ticket, to have a look at the house which for some ridiculous reason I had been left, and to stay there until I hated it so much even an empty bungalow in Lincoln with a thousand memories was a better option.
But before I could begin I had something to do. I had to go to the one and only place I deemed truly important to visit. The cemetery.
