Lonely on a Limb - Short Story

Don Cayman's Last Week

The world span, revolving its containing forces around itself like a pure milkmaid furling herself in sheens of cotton. Clouds spun into spindly rivers of movement, oceans rushing past, an unbroken surface of infinite depth, the transient earth curdled into a rigorously regimented upwards surge, meeting the sky and spreading like efflorescing smoke.

And curling these gusts around it, in its indomitable movement, was a casket.

Lying in this casket was a living, unbreathing man, and a guitar worth twenty pounds sterling.

Proceeding behind the casket was a younger man, billowing in confusion and pondering the last week of Don Cayman's life.

They were mostly spent in a cramped recording studio in Bolton, buttressed up against a 200W amp watching the people around him. They were listening. Intently. Each thinking in their minds the words to describe what they were hearing. There are always words, but you can be damn sure that these session musicians didn't know them. The younger man was among them, fingers relaxing on his own guitar until it tilted uselessly away from him.

Don Cayman had killed himself.

The younger man was thinking about the fifth day of the recording, two days before Don's death. The band interface man, or PR man, or whatever the fuck he was called, stuck his nose into the spacetime field surrounding a moment of precise, beautiful clarity, telescoping like pinochio's penis, warping that barrier between beast and beauty, until the bubble finally burst.

A lot of things can happen in a single moment. A man named Don Cayman can stand up with inexorable, statuesque fury and punch a PR man in the face, before ripping the studio mini-bar from the wall for the second time, and walk downstairs, leaving a subtle but not negligible trail of rubble in his wake.

The next morning, heads were shaking, even the younger man whose future resided on the studio time, whose head these thoughts were flickering in. As the band of strangers moved through the double doors, a wry, half-imagined smile crept over their collective cheeks.

A man and woman in the procession behind were holding hands, rings clinking. They had never met before Don Cayman's last week.

After the third night of simply spoken answers, they had curled up together. The man had proposed on the fourth day, upon a valley overlooking low-lying cloud, and as they pulled each other closer, the mist enveloped them, making them silhouettes not great or small, not black or white, simply shadows, desperate in the encroaching fog, and as they were obscured almost entirely, the shorter silhouette gave an almost imperceptible nod.

Mr Cayman was not walking. He was weeping uncontrollably in the church, clutching fingernail holes in the bible skins, listening over and over to Don's last recordings, thinking about whether Don would prefer to be on the right or the left of his mother, and thinking where he had gone wrong. He was fingering the soft areas where his neck met his jaw.

Is any father, in the fervour of his son's half-childhood, blameless? Later, Mr Cayman would fully realise Don's power, his brutal drive, his exclusion of trivialities, and he would feel like his own grandson.

The younger man was thinking again, still in utter confusion. There was a piece missing in Don's puzzle. He remembered what one of the backing singers had told him when they'd dropped round to Don's flat, buoyed by an explosive argument with her father. She had said that he lived alone, in a single room, with a computer, a guitar, a sink, and a bed. Up against the wall were stacked hard drives, expensive with huge capacity, almost thirty, marked and dated. It smelt sweaty and dirty.

Worshipping an idol, he had shouted out to Don, in Don's simplistic manner. Don had got up, blood gushing to his head, and tumbled into the threshold of the door. His anger melted into fear. 'Chris. Get a fucking guitar and come with me.'

They had walked to the roof, and with the sounds of the dying world as his chords, Don had embarked on a melody that spun out life's answers. His feet were over the edge of the building, leaning over with his twenty-quid guitar into the abyss.

The fall? Why did he fall?

Another moment...

Chris had gone downstairs to reception to find Don sitting at a table with his minibar, simply unable to open a can of beer. His fingers were rapping the lid like a sick baby, pounding again and again with unbearable helplessness. Chris simply watched him for a while. A man who just a minute ago had used the word 'cunt' as an adjective was breaking his heart over this sickening repetitive motion. Chris walked away, after a while, but not far.

The casket was getting close to the chapel now. They carried him through the double doors and placed him in an alcove, ready for the curtains to close. The hall was packed with navel-gazing musicians, all acquaintances and no friends.

The priest said that something unusual was about to happen, and motioned for someone in the back room to begin. Don's voice rang over the speakers.

'Evenin'. Hope you're well. Glad you could make it. Not sure how many of you there are, not that I care. Still, I'm guessing you're all wondering along pretty much the same lines. Why did I kill myself? 'Here's the biscuit. I have a neurological disease called Huntington's. It's where you slowly lose control of your balance and your limbs, fucking horrible. Anyone who knows me knows that I live to play the guitar. I've made a decent living of it, but you couldn't fucking tell from my car, or flat, or even my guitar. I've given every penny I've ever got to charity in anonymous envelopes. Over the last twenty years I've estimated it at six mill. Six fucking mill. Sixty million mosquito nets.

'Now, if you do that, you don't have time or money in life for anything else. I'm not ashamed to say that I have died a virgin. I have never been out of the country. I have never bought anything I didn't need. I have lived an unhappy, barren life, discarding all love and friendship for purpose and drive.

'My only regret is my father. Family is debt, so I had to tell him my plan. He has lived with this burden for three fucking years, and never told anyone, because he understood. Three years, man, and he fucking understood me. You never meet anyone like your own father, I will tell you that for free.

'I can't talk forever, so I'll end with this. Humanity has always philosophised. But philosophy in theory and philosophy in action are two very fucking different things. I learned that from an early age, and learned to live in absolutes. I lived for art, I lived for charity, and absolutely nothing else. I am proud of my life, and I leave behind a legacy of work like a bow wave through the music industry.

'My darkness has far outshined your light. My anger has produced life.

'But this is no way to live.'