Starting Over Read Online Free Page B

The cheap shoddy banality of the thing. That’s what I noticed. A toy from hell.It was just a stubby right angle of black metal held in a redraw, sweating fist. And it looked like the end of the world.
    Pointing at my face.
    Rainbow Ron came forward, sure of himself now, seeing my terror, encouraged by it, as if it proved he was making all the smart moves, and he pressed the barrel against the bridge of my nose. It looked like a toy, but somehow I knew it was real.
    He squeezed off the trigger and I felt it at the same terrible moment – the shock of pain in my chest.
    It was a dam-break of pain, obliterating everything, surging in the centre of my chest and spreading out, claiming me, a new and unexpected kind of pain, a pain to rob you of your senses.
    It felt like everything was being squeezed. The pressure was unbelievable, dumbfounding, and increasing by the second as the pain consolidated its ownership of me and my chest felt like it was being held in a giant vice, as though the life was being forced out of me, as though the pain itself intended to kill me, and I knew that this was it, the end of all things.
    I blacked out.
    When I awoke, eager hands were lifting me on to a gurney. Rainbow Ron was flat on his face and the female constable was cuffing his hands behind his back. Then we were moving. Through the skylight and down the stairs. The squeezing in my chest was still there, but the fear was stronger than the pain.
    I thought of my wife. I thought of my son and daughter. They needed me. I didn’t want to die. Tears stung my eyes as we clanged into the back of an ambulance and immediately pulled away. And through the blurry veil of tears I saw Keith’s face.
    ‘It’s a replica,’ he said. ‘Can you hear me, George? It’s just a fake. It was never going to work. You understand what I’m saying?’
    Not really.
    Keith was talking about the gun.
    But I thought he was talking about my heart.

three
    Think of death as the ultimate lie-in. Think of death that way. A lazy Sunday morning that goes on for all eternity, with you just dozing away until the end of days. That’s not such a bad way to think of death. Come on – it’s not all bad.
    What stops us thinking of death that way? I opened my eyes and I knew.
    My family were there at the stations of the hospital bed. It felt like a lot of time had gone by, and that they had not slept, or had any sleep worthy of the name, and that things had got worse. My wife, our boy, our girl.
    The great gawky Rufus, who had grown so extravagantly and yet still had so much growing to do. And Ruby, my darling girl, her face perfectly and incredibly poised between the child she had been and the woman she would become. And Lara, my wife, who I was planning to grow old with, because why would I ever want to be anywhere else? And now I never would, and now I never could.
    Those three were what stopped me from thinking of death as a Sunday morning that I would never wake from. Lara,Rufus, Ruby. The ones I would leave behind. They changed everything and made it impossible to let go, and made me want to weep, for them and for myself, because I loved them with all of my clogged-up, thoroughly knackered, pathetic excuse for a heart.
    A doctor came and fiddled about. Glancing at charts, squinting at me over the top of his reading glasses. And when I paid a bit more attention, I saw that there was an entire herd of doctors with him. Baby doctors, learning their trade, looking at him as though he were the font of all medical wisdom, and me as though I was a specimen in a jar.
    ‘Male, forty-seven, history of heart disease, had a myocardial infarction – let’s see – three days ago.’
    Three days? Was it already three days? The doctor held up a floppy black picture and pointed at some ghostly images. The baby doctors leaned forward with excitement.
    ‘See that? The coronary artery was already damaged by atheroma. Can you all see? Blood will not clot on healthy lining. Looks rather