‘It would be an unforgivable waste,’ he said.

She parted fern leaves, scraped her shins and forearms on a thousand thorns. Berries squashed in her toes, soft and jammy and wet.

‘You’re bleeding,’ he said, and pressed his palm into the middle of her back.

‘Horsefly,’ she said.

He shrugged, popped a handful of raspberries into his mouth and closed his eyes, worked the fruit around his mouth with his tongue. ‘These taste so fucking good,’ he said.

37

Pieter

Flight to Baltimore, 1959

I was on a flight to Baltimore, Bear, four years after you died. I had never been to the United States before. I had never been on an aeroplane. Your mother packed my bag and she’d forgotten the cigarettes, or I’d forgotten to remind her about cigarettes, and halfway into the flight I smoked the last one from the pack I kept in my jacket pocket. Frustrated, I stared through the plexiglass window at the bottomless, boiling white, at an air bubble caught in the plastic. When you stare at so much nothing for too long, you start to see things: an aeroplane on a collision course with your own; the faces of your wife and daughter; the face of your son. I was exhausted, and I was anxious, so I unbuckled my seat belt and walked, grasping the seats hand over hand up the aisle, until I got to the front of the plane where another passenger was smoking. I tapped her on the shoulder, a well-dressed woman, older, and I asked her if she could spare a cigarette.

‘Of course,’ she told me, and rummaged in her handbag, and pulled out a silver case. She opened it, and I saw that it was full, the cigarettes lined up and kept neat by a thin metal frame. How simple, how easy. It made me feel unequipped.

‘Could you possibly make it two?’ I said.

She handed me three, setting them delicately in my palm, and smiled. Her lips were painted a bright pink, and the pink, I saw, had been transferred to the cigarette she was smoking.

Back in my seat, I lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. Remember I told you, Bear, there had been a letter. It had arrived six weeks before this flight and remained unopened on my desk, buried under orders and invoices, and the only reason I’d found it was because I had been throwing things away.

I took it out of my jacket pocket, and read it for what was probably the fifteenth time. The letter was from two men, anaesthetists – Dr Miller, an American, and an Austrian, Dr Wolf – who were working together in Baltimore, and it explained a brief history of something that I had never come across before. A subject I would have had very little interest in had my life been any different than it was. Meaning: if you hadn’t drowned. The letter was about artificial respiration, which I want to tell you about now.