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
