Free This Is the Life by Alex Shearer

“What do you want the boys to be, John, when they grow up?”
    He thought a moment and said, “Matadors.”
    Neither Louis nor I ever became a matador. There was no tradition of bullfighting where we lived. So, in that sense, we let him down. We were actually unacquainted with his wishes, as our mother did not disclose them to us for some years, and by then it was too late to take the matadoring route. I wouldn’t have done it anyway, since I lacked the courage and my reactions were no way quick enough and I didn’t have a cape.
    But Louis’s eyes lit up when he heard about it, and he seemed to be dreaming of going to Spain. Maybe he should have done something about it. He might have been good at it. It’s a cruel sport but wasn’t really considered so then. You could still be an elegant hero back then in a gold brocade suit with a sharp waistcoat and a stylish hat.
    But I don’t go for the alternative universe theory. There are too many options. How can there be other worlds for every infinitesimal variation that there could have been in our lives? That we turned right instead of left? That we crossed the road a moment earlier, a moment later? That the seats in the theater were upholstered in red and not in blue? And this must be so for every creature that ever lived andevery blade of grass and every ant that ever crawled along a leaf—but could have crawled across another leaf, in a different direction.
    Where is there the space for all this infinity?
    Or maybe I’m wrong and there is a world in which Louis is still driving his ute down to the harbor to potter around on his sailboat. Maybe there is a world in which he does not suffer a mysterious nausea and a sudden migraine. It’s not this world though. And this is the one we must deal with.

9
    Strawberries
    After a while the Australian winter turned to spring. But I’d started seeing darkness and the end of things everywhere, even in the faces of children and babies sitting in strollers. I’d see infants with their mothers and think, Why have they done it, why did they bring these people into the world only to have to die?
    Finality would be there too in old sepia memories, on ­the walls of restaurants and bars and hospital receptions—photographs of pioneers and illustrious founders and settlers of untamed lands. All gone and all dead, every single one of them. And if one of the men had a moustache, then so they all did; and if one of the women wore a bonnet and an impeccable white apron, the rest did too. And they were all dead.
    And the waitress at Kangaroo Point would bring over my coffee, and for all her youth and beauty, she would one day be dead. And the runners and the joggers and the personal trainers and all the pursuers of life and health and immortality, they would, without exception, all soon die.
    Yet had you said to any one of them that your relative was dying, they’d have given you their sympathy, or maybe acted shocked and surprised, as if this were some uncommon event, instead of a regular and perpetual occurrence. For people are dying everywhere, every moment of the day, in their thousands and then in their millions and then in their billions too. And of the population of the world, of the seven billion or however many there are, plus those born since you began to read this sentence, one day they will all be dead, every one. And you and me and every single thing that lives, all dead. And I sat with my coffee, watching the boats on the river and the ferries taking the commuters to work, and it would all pass and be over and ended too.
    And I thought that of that seven billion or more, many millions, maybe many billions, believe there is another world of some spiritual kind that they will go to when they stop breathing. But I didn’t think so.
    â€œNo one knows why we’re here, do they, Louis?” I said to him later. “Not even the best brains. People believe