Diary of a Somebody Read online

  joie de vivre / Fleetwood Mac record collection

  not to mention those beautiful blue eyes / green eyes /

  brown eyes / grey eyes / powerful, muscular thighs /

  bow ties / wimples / dimples / broad hips / soft lips.

  You were unique. A one-off. You will be much missed.

  But Death, alas, snatched you from us far too soon /

  after a good innings / last Tuesday afternoon.

  And we gather here in this church / crematorium /

  cathedral / cemetery / multi-faith emporium /

  synagogue / prayer room / forest clearing at midnight

  to wish you well as you go into Allah’s light /

  on an exciting new journey / with God’s good grace /

  screaming into the void / to a better place.

  I’ve given it a provisional title of ‘Farewell to [Insert Loved One’s Name Here]’.

  I considered its merits: it keeps its options open; it’s multi-faith; it could be extended to include other scenarios without too much difficulty; it’s designed to reach the broadest audience possible. But I couldn’t help thinking that once the multiple-choice answers have been decided, there’s not a whole lot here. Also, is it too impersonal? Might it be perceived as opportunistic?

  No, I wasn’t happy with it, I decided. I’d just have to have another go at it tomorrow.

  Tuesday August 7th

  Beat Poets

  Some say it’s for their own good

  but I don’t think you should.

  Some say I threw the first punch. Some say I threw the only punch. Some say it was all academic anyway as poets aren’t very good at punching and that’s why I missed and grazed my hand on the bench behind him.

  It was Toby Salt’s comments about Douglas that did it. But I was already in an agitated state of mind; I’d spent the whole day wrestling with death but the words still weren’t falling as I’d hoped. By the time I turned up at Poetry Club, I was in a foul mood.

  Toby Salt had already told us that this was probably going to be his last Poetry Club.

  ‘I’ve moved on, you see,’ he said. ‘Important things are happening and I’m not sure I can commit any more to this.’ He gestured disparagingly at the shabby back room.

  Chandrima looked crestfallen. Mary irritated. Kaylee sullen. Liz cross. I felt my mood lifting.

  ‘It has a certain charm, of course,’ he went on, ‘but it’s all rather small-town stuff whereas I now operate on, shall we say, a different plane.’

  ‘A different plane,’ repeated Chandrima dejectedly.

  ‘Well, yes. You know, with the radio and TV, the broadsheets, the festivals and competitions. And my poems operate at something of a loftier altitude to the ones here. You must realise that.’

  ‘A loftier attitude,’ said Kaylee, sulkily.

  ‘Take Brian with his funny little poems about goodness knows what! They’re hardly going to win any prizes, are they?!’

  ‘Prizes,’ repeated Liz, disdainfully.

  My irritation had begun to return.

  ‘The scansion! Those rhymes! He’d struggle getting those printed on greeting cards!’

  ‘Greeting cards,’ repeated me, properly riled now.

  ‘It’s not just Brian. I mean, take Douglas. How he wasted not just my time – but yours – with his ridiculous hoplophiliac ramblings on military conflicts through history. There was a man without a single poetic bone in his body, one far more interested in fighting and viol—’

  And that’s when I punched him. Or tried to. But I slipped on the collection of pistachio shells underneath my chair as I lunged forward and my fist went whistling past his ear. The others restrained me from inflicting further damage upon myself while Toby Salt looked at me with amused contempt, shook his head, then walked out of Poetry Club for ever.

  Wednesday August 8th

  I looked again at the words I’d fought with yesterday. I’d been attempting to create a more contemporary feel to the whole dying thing:

  You are gone from the world. I feel so alone.

  My head is a rock. My heart is a stone.

  Then I think of that summer, our apartment in Rome.

  With me, in your thrall, and you, on your phone.

  The motif of the mobile phone would make it play more strongly with Generation X and Millennial audiences, I hoped.

  The memories come as if to atone:

  A daytrip to see the Millennium Dome,

  Long walks on the beach, our feet in the foam.

  With love in my heart, and you, on your phone.

  But was that wise? If I was honest with myself, the market share of those segments, in death terms, was not nearly as significant as that all-important ageing baby boomer market.

  But then came that day, the last you’d have known.

  You in the street and a car coming home.

  I think you may well have been on your phone.

  With me, at the wheel, and the smash of your bones.

  The whole business of the poem’s narrator running over their lover was also troubling me. It did not strike me as the stuff of elegies.

  Now, on your coffin, we have thrown our last stones.

  Sleep soundly, my love, with the worms in the loam.

  I pray where you’ve gone is a free Wi-Fi zone.

  With you, in the ground, lying next to your phone.

  I looked at my own phone from the relative safety of the sofa. There was a message from Liz:

  Are you OK?

  What a pompous idiot Toby [Salt] is!

  Well, you weren’t thinking that in Saffron Walden, when you hung on his every word, I considered retorting, but I am not by nature a mean-spirited or vindictive person. I replied with the rather more conciliatory:

  All fine here!

  Good riddance to him.

  And I was fine, not least because the last laugh was on him. I’d looked up the word he’d used yesterday:

  HOPLOPHILIAC (noun): a person who harbours an unnatural love of guns and other firearms

  And it just happened to be the solution to 15 across of the crossword.

  Thursday August 9th

  I checked in to Twitter for the first time in several centuries. In my absence, my following has blossomed. There are now forty-three people hanging on my every tweet. Toby Salt has nearly five thousand followers. His page is a relentless mudflow of self-promotion: his latest competition success; upcoming book signings for This Bridge No Hand Shall Cleave; another piece in the Guardian.

  I returned to my funeral poem but progress continued to be slow. At some stage I must have drifted off to sleep on the sofa because I fell into a dream. I was a police inspector called in to investigate the death of a poet, who’d been found in suspicious circumstances. He was lying on the floor in the hallway of his apartment, with the pages from his latest book stuffed into his mouth. At the post-mortem, his body was found to contain traces of many harmful toxins, a lethal cocktail of dactyls and spondees and several lines of iambic pentameter.

  I think all these deliberations on death are beginning to have a deleterious effect on me.

  Friday August 10th

  I read ‘Now I Am Dead’ again:

  Now I am dead,

  please do not weep for me.

  Your tears won’t bring me back,

  now I am dead.

  Now I am dead,

  you can clear out all my shoes.

  I’ll not need them where I am going,

  now I am dead.

  Now I am dead,

  don’t forget to do the bins on Friday

  (this week is general landfill),

  now I am dead.

  Now I am dead,

  you can crack on with that loft extension

  I’d never much cared for,

  now I am dead.

  I seem to have fallen into the trap again of making it too personal, although there may be themes within it that resonate universally (death, the bins, etc.). At least,
there’s a decent balance of poignancy (‘your tears won’t bring me back’) and practicality (‘you can clear out all my shoes’ etc).

  All the same, I don’t feel very confident that I’ve cracked it. Regardless, I’ve sent all three poems off to a few local funeral parlours to see if they might be interested in including them in any information packs they may hand out to grieving customers.

  Saturday August 11th

  Catastrophe

  don’t know

  what drives me crazier,

  your amnesia

  or pyromania

  even now

  I still think about

  the time you forgot

  to put the cat out

  Dylan told me that Stuart hired a Maserati in Marbella so they might better experience the ‘majesty of the Sierra Blanca foothills’. He said this somewhat pointedly, as we boarded our third train of the day. In total, it took four trains, two buses and one three-mile walk to make it to our North Yorkshire idyll, a mere fourteen hours after setting off.

  It was pitch black when we arrived and it took us another forty minutes and one irritable late-night phone call to the owner, Mr Briggs, to locate the front door key, which we found under a brick in the disused barn next door. The cottage is beautiful, though – and will be even more so once we locate the Wi-Fi password.

  Tomas is house-sitting for me and will look after the cat. In turn, the cat will be Tomas-sitting. Last year, I asked Mrs McNulty to help and the cat has yet to forgive me. It was also the first time that the RSPCA were alerted to my Twitter presence.

  Sunday August 12th

  Our holiday hasn’t had the most auspicious of beginnings: a day spent in vain pursuit of the Wi-Fi password. Mr Briggs was hopeless. He was pretty sure it had an ‘a’ and an ‘l’ in it, and quite possibly a ‘p’ or should that be a ‘t’? I grilled him about the names of his first pet, his mother’s maiden name and the name of his primary school, but we are no nearer to the truth.

  Dylan got fed up with waiting me for me to crack the code and headed out for the afternoon, having borrowed one of my walking guides. I would have joined him but holidays aren’t all about doing what you want.

  Monday August 13th

  Gérard Depardieu is in Pieces!

  Gérard Depardieu is in pieces!

  He is dreaming of the Remora 2000 again,

  steering it solemnly past the gobies,

  while sharing silent jokes

  with the clown tangs.

  Gérard Depardieu’s head is all jumbled!

  He is no longer sure

  of the Remora 2000’s thruster capabilities

  and at what kind of depths

  it can safely operate.

  Mais regardez! Voilà une tête flottante!

  Tell the catfish he is coming!

  He is slowly assembling!

  Tell them Gérard Depardieu

  is getting himself together at last!

  The incessant rain has forced us to avail ourselves of the cottage’s entertainment facilities (excluding the Wi-Fi, that is, as we are yet to crack the password), the full list of which is as follows:

  1) Three VHS video cassettes: Babe: Pig in the City, Pokemon: The Movie 2000, and volume 2 of a box set of The Thornbirds.

  2) One slightly soiled paperback copy of A Surgeon in her Stocking by Tina Solomon, a Christmas tale from Mills and Boon’s Medical Romance series.

  3) Board games: Monopoly (without the board), Scrabble (without the tiles) and Noel’s House Party, still wrapped in its original cellophane.

  4) A 500-piece Photo Jigsaw Puzzle of Gérard Depardieu in a Submersible. At this stage, it’s unclear to us whether this is complete or not, although we have yet to locate Gérard Depardieu’s left ear.

  This must seem a far cry from Marbella for Dylan but he’s putting a brave face on it all and doing his best to keep my spirits up.

  Tuesday August 14th

  On Reading a Mills and Boon

  His fingers ran down its spine tentatively,

  a surprising sensitivity contained

  within those powerful, muscular digits.

  ‘Read me,’ it gasped.

  Preliminary material was dispensed with.

  Plunging in, his hands reached firmly

  beneath the covers, spreading its pages wide,

  as he sought out its hot inky centre,

  and buried himself deep within it.

  It was all over before you could say

  ‘our love became a burning mist’.

  They lay in silence, limp and ashamed.

  We found Gérard Depardieu’s left ear after all, alongside the racing car and the boot in the Scrabble box. But we were unable to find a section of the submersible’s on-board computer, which as the jigsaw box informed us, can automatically maintain a fixed depth as far down as 610 metres for up to ten hours. We also have a piece left over: it is blue with three nobbly bits.

  By the evening, the rain had abated but not soon enough to prevent me from making inroads on A Surgeon in her Stocking. It was the last thing that beautiful but feisty midwife Ellie Forbes wanted, but when brooding Italian surgeon Alessandro Montieri walked into the obstetrics ward that December and back into her life, she couldn’t help but think that all her Christmases had come at once.

  I read sections of it out loud to Dylan; we haven’t laughed so much in ages.

  Wednesday August 15th

  O do not ask if I am beach body ready

  O do not ask

  if I am beach body ready.

  Observe how the folds

  of my stomach ripple

  like the wind-pulled waves.

  Rub your hands

  over these pale buttocks,

  sand-smoothed by time.

  Note my milk-white limbs

  like washed-up whalebones,

  stranded and useless.

  Consider these tufts of hair

  on my back and shoulders

  which sprout like sea-grass.

  And listen to the lapping

  of my socks

  at the shores of my sandals.

  And still you ask me

  if I am beach body ready?

  We made it to the beach and laid out our towels in the drizzle. We bit into our hard-boiled eggs and gazed out at the grey sea.

  ‘Why did you and Mum split up?’ asked Dylan, still staring off into the distance.

  I paused while I considered this.

  ‘I think she thought me to be something of a disappointment.’

  ‘A disappointment? In what way?’

  ‘Not in any specific way. Just generally. A general disappointment. Like a film you’ve looked forward to watching for ages, and then you see it, and you realise it wasn’t worth the wait. The plot makes no sense, the dialogue is stilted, the casting’s all wrong. A bit like Babe: Pig in the City.’

  He smiled. This time, it was his turn to pause and reflect.

  ‘Did you used to write her poems?’

  ‘Your mother was the reason I started writing poems. I’d write her one every day.’

  ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘She stopped reading them. Or I stopped writing them . . . I forget which.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You see, poetry . . . it doesn’t really solve anything. It shines its light on things but it doesn’t give answers. It was never going to keep us together.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re a poet.’

  ‘I’m not a poet. I’m just somebody who write poems.’

  ‘Same difference,’ said Dylan, and we packed up and headed back to finish reading A Surgeon in her Stocking.

  Thursday August 16th

  The Incidence of Oxymorons

  Alone together at last,

  I told her how I thought that –

  in my unbiased opinion –

  the incidence of oxymorons

  in the English language

  had been growing smaller.

  That’s
old news, she said,

  claiming it had been the case

  for almost exactly ten years.

  Strongly held convictions

  were thrown across the room.

  Things got pretty ugly.

  But this felt strangely normal;

  ours was a bittersweet relationship,

  a tragi-comic civil war

  of violent agreements

  and deafening silences,

  going nowhere.

  For the first time in years, I dreamt about Sophie. We were arguing. I’d spent the day writing poems for her to find when she came back from work, scattering them around the house like confetti. She wondered why the fridge was empty when I’d promised I’d go shopping and why the house was in such a state when I’d promised to tidy up.

  She said it would be good if ‘just for once’ I could drop the ‘obsession with poetry and join the rest of us in the real world.’ Later, I found a Post-it note she’d left on the kitchen table. It said: ‘Brian, I give up. Can’t live with you anymore. I am off to Mum’s’.

  It was the saddest haiku I had ever read.

  Dylan woke me up.

  ‘I’ve got my results!’ he shouted. ‘Seven A*s and two As!’

  I hugged him and held him close. Later, we headed out to pick up the trail through the woods until we reached the foss, the sudden thunder of its fall drowning out the last vestiges of my troubled sleep.

  Friday August 17th

  We followed a different route today, tracing the slow curves of the river until it broadened like a fan as we neared the coast. We searched the bank for stones, flat and oval, the size of our palms, and launched them down the river, with varying degrees of success. Legs bent, I watched the stone as it sliced shallow scoops out of the water – one, two – and Dylan started talking – three, four – about how they were moving to America – five, six – the stone barely touching the surface – seven, eight – travelling further and further – nine, ten – disappearing from sight.