Tim by Colleen McCullough Page B

reached down her hands and pulled him to his feet.
    ‘Mary, what you said, does that mean one day I’ll have to see you go away, too?’
    ‘Not unless you want me to go away, or unless I die.’
    The fires were quenched, thin tendrils of steam curling up between the grains of sand, and the beach was suddenly very cold. Mary shivered, hugging herself.
    ‘Come, let’s go back to the house, Tim, where it’s warm and light.’
    He detained her, staring into her face with a passionate eagerness normally quite foreign to him. ‘Mary, I’ve always wanted to know, but no one will ever tell me! What’s die, and dying, and dead? Are they all the same thing?’
    ‘They all relate to the same thing, yes.’ She took his hand in hers and pressed its palm against his own chest, just over the left nipple. ‘Can you feel your heart there beating, Tim? Can you feel that thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump under your hand, always there, never stopping for a moment?’
    He nodded, fascinated. ‘Yes, I can! I really can!’
    ‘Well, while it beats, thump-thump, thump-thump, you can see and hear, walk around, laugh and cry, eat and drink and wake up in the morning, feel the sun and the wind.
    ‘When I talk about living that’s what I mean, the seeing and hearing and walking around, the laughing and crying. But you’ve seen things get old, wear out, break apart? A wheel-barrow or a concrete-mixer, perhaps? Well, we, all of us with beating hearts under our ribs – and that’s everyone, Tim, everyone! – we get old and tired, and wear out too. Eventually we begin to break apart and that beating thing you can feel stops, like a clock that’s not been wound. It happens to all of us, when our time comes. Some of us wear out faster than others, some of us get accidentally stopped, if we’re in a plane crash or something like that. No one of us knows when we’ll stop, it isn’t something we can control or foretell. It just happens one day, when we’re all worn out and too tired to keep going.
    ‘When our hearts stop, Tim, we stop. We don’t see or hear ever again, we don’t walk around, we don’t eat, we can’t laugh or cry. We’re dead, Tim, we are no more, we’ve stopped and we have to be put away where we can lie and sleep undisturbed, under the ground forever.
    ‘It happens to us all, and it’s nothing to be frightened of, it can’t hurt us. It’s just like going to sleep and never waking up again, and nothing ever hurts us, while we’re asleep, does it? It’s nice to be asleep, whether it’s in a bed or under the ground. What we have to do is enjoy living while we’re living, and then not be frightened to die when the time comes for us to stop.’
    ‘Then I might die just as easily as you, Mary!’ he said intensely, his face close to hers.
    ‘Yes, you might, but I’m old and you’re young, so if we go on as people usually do, I should stop before you. I’m more worn out than you are, you see.’
    He was on the verge of tears again. ‘No, no, no! I don’t want you to die before I do, I don’t want it like that!’
    She took his hands in hers, chafing them urgently. ‘There there, Tim, don’t be unhappy! What did I just tell you? Living is to be enjoyed for every moment we’re still alive! Dying is in the future, it isn’t to be worried about or even thought about!
    ‘Dying is the final parting, Tim, the hardest one of all to bear, because the parting is forever. But all of us come to it, so it’s something we can’t close our eyes to and pretend it doesn’t exist.
    ‘If we’re grown-up and sensible, if we’re good strong people, we understand dying, we know about it, but we don’t let it worry us. Now I know you’re grown-up and sensible, I know you’re a good strong person, so I want you to promise me you won’t worry about dying, that you won’t be frightened of it happening to me, or to you. And I want you to promise that you’ll try to be a man about partings, that you won’t make