Free A Clue to the Exit: A Novel by Edward St. Aubyn

we then have to know whether the fault is inherent to the transceiver,’ said Jean-Paul. ‘Is it a dualistic transceiver?’
    ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ an announcement came over the system. ‘Due to circumstances beyond our control…’
    ‘Fucking Didcot,’ muttered Patrick. ‘Why does one always get stuck in Didcot? And in the fog.’

 
    14
    I haven’t been able to write for several days. Not only did Angelique continue to lose money, but she managed to get rid of several million in one evening. She found the place where I used to hide the gambling counters and took a few more million after I had given her the evening’s supply. She was very brazen about it the next day. I almost felt that she wanted to get rid of me, the way one sometimes tries to hasten the unbearable. I argued that I was owed the days that she overspent, and she counter-argued that my job was to stop her gambling all the money at once and that the terms of our contract couldn’t be altered just because I had failed. We started bickering. She became imperious and remote, while I dropped defencelessly into depression.
    Although the liver is nerveless, I had been warned to expect some ‘discomfort’ from pressure on the intestines as well as ‘referred liver pain’ under the right shoulder blade. Among the endless medical complications I might expect, the most exotic was the cirrhotic liver’s failure to eliminate the small amount of oestrogen naturally produced by a man, causing my breasts to swell painfully. The prospect of drifting towards a biochemical womanhood was not altogether displeasing, but I couldn’t adjust to the fact that I would only be able to sleep on my back. There would also be ‘magnified mood swings’, ‘blackness’, and ‘impaired memory’ to contend with.
    And yet, over the last two months I’d been miraculously, almost disturbingly, free of symptoms. In fact I was growing more vital every day. Until we started arguing, love and work seemed to enable me to transcend my physical limitations, but then all the symptoms pounced at once, like wild animals when the camp fires die out in the middle of the night.
    I had to retire to bed. I had a spear in my side and a trowel digging under my shoulder blade; hatpins of brief agony shot through my body unpredictably. My vision blurred and my jaundiced eyeballs and coated tongue spoke of imminent catastrophe. I started to forget the names of my characters and lost any sense of their respective personalities. Angelique, moving around in the neighbouring rooms, trampled on my aching body. Breathing in, reputedly an instinct, became a negotiated settlement.
    And still I handed the haughty and faintly disgusted Angelique her daily gambling money, the high price of my suicide-inducing bed and breakfast. Each time she came in and held out her impatient hand, close enough to reach the counters but too far for me to catch her wrist and pull her over to my side, I thought of le père Goriot, bedridden in his filthy garret but only wishing he could be further exploited by his marble-hearted daughters.
    Yesterday Angelique came into the bedroom holding my thin manuscript. She moved towards the open window and I surged up from the pillows shouting, ‘Don’t!’
    ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I’m not going to throw it out of the window – that would be doing you a favour.’
    ‘You don’t like it?’
    ‘It’s wooden and dry and boring. I can’t believe this is what you want to do with your last days. Why don’t you write about how wonderful the figs taste when you know you may never taste one again?’
    ‘Because they don’t,’ I said, ‘they taste like ash.’
    ‘Why don’t you tell us how we must live every moment to the full because life is so precious?’
    ‘Because if it’s dying that makes you realize that, you’re already too anxious to do anything about it. I wanted to do something serious…’
    ‘You are doing something serious: you’re