Alan paused before threading the belt through the loops on the waistband of his corduroy trousers, struck by how worn, crinkled and cracked the leather now looked. This was hardly surprising, of course. He’d bought the belt from a market stall in a small town on the Costa Blanca fifty years ago. Since he’d never owned more than a couple of belts at a time, he reckoned he must have worn this one every other day on average – so a total of nearly 9000 days. And fond of the belt as he was, he’d never looked after it properly – never oiled the leather or polished the steel buckle. On countless occasions, it had been soaked by heavy rain or baked under a burning sun. It was a miracle, Alan, decided, that the belt was still intact. It had survived longer than his three marriages put together.
As he looked at the belt, Alan thought how alike he and the belt were – old, battered, fragile, and with not much longer to go. And they’d certainly been through a great deal together – the marriages, the travels, the changes of job and house. So close was the connection with the belt that Alan was suddenly assailed by a further and frightening thought. When the belt expired – when the strap tore apart or the buckle snapped – he himself would then die.
The thought, of course, was absurd. You’d have to be crazily superstitious – to believe in Voodoo or something – to think that your life depended on the fate of a mere object, like a doll or a belt. Crazy or not, Alan couldn’t get rid of the thought over the next few days.
On the fourth day, though, the thought took a new and more cheerful turn. So far, Alan had been looking at things negatively: if the belt breaks, he’ll die. But the flipside of this was the knowledge that as long as the belt survived, so would he. It had already lasted fifty years, so why, if properly protected, couldn’t the belt – and Alan himself, therefore – last for many more? Here was Voodoo in reverse. Instead of killing someone by destroying some object, a person could prolong his life by preserving it.
Alan attended to the belt with great care. He gently waxed the leather, scraped off flecks of rust from the buckle, and laid it in a circle inside a strong plastic box. The box was transparent, so that he could, whenever he wanted, look at the belt. He then placed the box in a corner of his dry, easily accessible and well-insulated loft, and covered it with a white towel.
Each time he looked at the belt over the following months, he felt reassured. It looked fine and would surely last for many years, just as he therefore would. But at the end of the fifth month, Alan collapsed with a heart attack while eating breakfast, and died almost immediately.
Alan’s only son, who hadn’t seen his father for twenty years and lived in Australia, decided not to fly over for the funeral, and delegated to his own son the task of clearing out Alan’s house. Except for the odd thing he might want to keep, the rest could be given to charity.
When Alan’s grandson went into the loft, he noticed the box in the corner. On the towel that covered it were some fairly recent droppings. He lifted the towel and saw that the rat had gnawed through the plastic box and then chewed into pieces a leather belt that, for some reason, lay inside the box.