The House on Fortune Street Read Online Free PDF

just a job; it meant gin in the cupboard, money in the bank. He put together a ham sandwich, retrieved the folder from upstairs, and sat at the table.
    Each history consisted of a brief description of the person’s age, circumstances, and illness, as well as an account, in his or her own words, of the reasons for suicide. Here was Anne, aged seventy-three, a widow, comfortably off with two married daughters, diagnosed with Parkinson’s. I’m a prisoner, she wrote, condemned to endless solitary confinement. Why would anyone inflict this on another person? She had hoarded her prescriptions, painfully, for months, paid her cleaner, had her hair permed, and chosen the dress she wanted to wear in her coffin. She had consumed her pills and died, as she had hoped, at home in her sleep.
    Here was Ian, paralyzed since an accident at a building site when he was twenty-four. Now, at fifty-one, macular degeneration was destroy-ing his last great pleasure: reading. Sean winced and added mustard to his sandwich. Using considerable ingenuity and a gas oven, Ian had killed himself. A friend helped me figure out how to do it, he wrote with his specially modified keypad, but I made sure he was down at the pub all evening so he wouldn’t get in trouble.
    Here was Frank, thirty-three (my age, thought Sean), a landscape gardener, in the grip of an aggressive brain tumor. He was already researching euthanasia when his father had a stroke. It’s too much for my mum, he said, looking after the two of us. My dad is sixty-one. He deserves his best shot at the next twenty years. After the failure of his first attempt, he spoke with fury about his doctor who doled out his pills a week at a time. She’d rather I traumatize some train driver than die peacefully in my own bed. If I could, I’d detonate myself in her waiting
    room.
    These and similar testimonials formed the heart of the society’s
     
    campaign to legalize euthanasia and, even more crucial, the assisting thereof. That the case histories were baldly written and largely lack-ing in self-pity only made them more affecting. Standing at the sink, rinsing his plate, Sean felt as if the room were filled with the members of that determined tribe who had decided to end their tenure on the planet and who could contemplate that decision so calmly that they were able to weigh the pros and cons of pills over plastic bags, cliffs over cars, razors over ropes. He turned off the tap, retrieved his notebook, and headed to the library.
     
    is trip to Oxford began badly. He was up until midnight the night before and woke early, uncertain about one of his key points. As he reached the bus stop the rain started; umbrella-less, he did his best to protect his bag of books. The bus, when it came, was crowded, and the large man he sat next to fidgeted throughout the journey. Staring past him at the sodden fields, still wan from the recent heat wave, Sean struggled to decide whether the results of his late-night efforts were brilliant or specious. In town with almost an hour to spare, he decided to go to a café near the college. Perhaps coffee and a crois-sant would clarify his thoughts. He was sitting at a corner table, going
    over his notes, when someone said his name.
    “How are you?” said Judy.“May I join you?” She was standing before him, an umbrella in one hand, a book in the other.
    “I’m here to see Georgina,” Sean said.
    “Well, I promise not to make you late,” she said, setting her book on the table and herself in a chair. “It must be my month for meeting the Wymans. I ran into your brother last week.”
    Sean stared at her incredulously. Her voice was warm; she was smiling. Was this the same woman who less than two years ago had called
     
    him a moral pygmy, hauled his suitcases out of the closet, and told him to pack? “How was Lochlan?” he said, trying to match her tone. “I haven’t spoken to him in a while.”
    “He seemed fine.” Judy’s dimple made a brief