Diary of a Somebody Read online

  Saturday August 18th

  We handed the keys back to Mr Briggs, who laughingly told us he’d remembered the Wi-Fi password after all! It was BRENDA678. Brenda being the name of his favourite Large White Yorkshire pig and 678 being the number of pounds that she weighed.

  Travelling back, Dylan and I avoided all reference to yesterday’s conversation, but it hung uncomfortably over us all day, like a bag strap dangling from the overhead storage compartments of a succession of trains (three). Sophie made no mention of it either when I dropped Dylan back. I got home and closed the door, surrounded by a heap of unpaid invoices, junk mail and funeral-parlour rejection letters.

  Sunday August 19th

  I took a closer look at the funeral-parlour replies. They all started with the phrase ‘It is with much regret’. The one exception came from Jenkins & Pain (strapline: It’s a Grave Business).

  I read the brochure that they’d enclosed:

  Here at Jenkins and Pain,

  we know what it’s like to lose a loved one,

  so why not leave us to take the strain,

  while you get on with your mourning.

  We handle all aspects of corpse logistics –

  from the mortuary table to the grave –

  at prices you won’t want to pass on.

  You’ll be dead made up

  at our discounts on restorative cosmetics.

  Or why not take advantage

  of our Bury One, Get One Free offer?

  Don’t look a gift hearse in the mouth!

  But whatever it is you’re looking for –

  interment or entombment,

  aquamation or incineration –

  Jenkins and Pain are at your disposal.

  But the accompanying letter snuffed out any faint heartbeat of encouragement; for the ‘small fee’ of £300, they will carry copies of my poems in their reception area. I put it in the bin with the others. It is clear that my funeral-poem idea – or Project Death as I had inwardly come to think of it – is not going to be the instant money-spinner that I’d supposed.

  With a heavy heart, I began to update my CV. It is time to re-join the great majority.

  Monday August 20th

  It has been nearly fifteen years since I’ve had cause to update my CV. What’s troubling is the paucity of changes I’ve had to make to it: the substitution of the words ‘solutions’ for products; a more contemporary font. If curriculum vitae means ‘the course of life’, then the course mine has followed appears to have been a dull and meandering one.

  CURRICULUM VITAE REVISITED

  Personal Statement Haiku

  Underachiever

  seeks work to fend off bailiffs

  and boredom of life.

  Experience

  Current Position Sitting on a sofa

  is where you’ll find me at,

  while writing this CV

  trapped beneath a cat.

  Previous Positions

  Recent times: Supine. Horizontal. Prone.

  Lying prostrate on my own.

  Sprawled. Reclined. At my ease.

  Angled (one eighty degrees),

  Before that: Slouched. Slumped. Bent-backed. Stooped.

  Hunched. Humped. Bowed and Drooped.

  Even earlier: Walking. Crawling. Catatonic.

  Sitting. Lying. Embryonic.

  Education I hold a lower-second class

  combined honours degree

  in Theoretical Woodwork

  and Sociocultural Apology.

  Hobbies & Interests Music. Reading. Crosswords. Memes.

  Football. Murder. Custard Creams.

  I suppressed nearly all the references to poetry. Most employers won’t even look at anyone with such a background; there is a strong correlation with untrustworthiness and unreliability.

  Tuesday August 21st

  ‘Do poets use LinkedIn?’ was a question I’d often pondered in quieter moments, along with:

  ‘Do Poets drive?’ (conclusion: not if they can help it)

  ‘Should poets drive?’ (conclusion: probably not)

  and ‘Who would win in a fight between Auden and Eliot?’ (conclusion: unsure – although it would probably end not with a bang but a whimper).

  But as I looked today at my LinkedIn account for the first time in five years, the answer seems unequivocally yes, if Toby Salt is anything to go by. He has 500+ connections, including radio and television producers, newspaper and poetry magazine editors, arts correspondents, publishers. I have three connections: Tomas, Timothy Pain from Jenkins & Pain Funeral Directors and Cora Nesmith from the Mongolian Yurt Company.

  Wednesday August 22nd

  I was idly perusing the job pages today, minding my own business, when I was disturbed by an unwelcome intruder in my kitchen.

  Radio 4 had been on all morning and I’d already absorbed programmes on the Dewey Decimal classification system and a debate concerning the ethics of driverless cars. But the schedule appeared to have moved on, and a vaguely familiar voice emerged over the airwaves, amidst background sounds of stamping, hammering and whirring. I heard the words ‘This Bridge No Hands Shall Cleave’ and I realised I was listening to the nasal tones of Django from Shooting from the Hip. It was a programme on the history of letterpress printing and Django was talking from a print shop in Swansea, where Shooting from the Hip produced their artisanal, hand-crafted special editions.

  ‘Letterpress printing is one of the great lost arts,’ he was saying. ‘In construction, it is as beautiful as a Toby Salt poem. First, one must—’

  I switched it off in irritation and took a look at my phone. A notification on LinkedIn! I’d barely finished ‘optimising’ my LinkedIn page – or making it fractionally less pessimised: had I worked some magic already?

  I took a closer look and sighed deeply: the message was headed Stuart Mould has invited you to join his professional network.

  Please send help! I am being assailed in my own home.

  Thursday August 23rd

  I’d been stuck in the house for four days and I needed to get out. I called Tomas to see if he wanted to meet up. He was busy, unfortunately, but asked whether I’d be interested in coming along to a lecture he was giving this afternoon on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in between cleaning shifts. I sat at the back, near the exit, struggling to understand a single word he was saying. I looked at the rest of the audience. A lot of nodding was going on. I was trying to stop nodding off.

  ‘But, of course, we place our own interpretation on the world around us,’ Tomas was saying. ‘Wittgenstein knew this. “The world of the happy,” he wrote, “is quite different from the world of the unhappy”.’

  That was something I could understand.

  I thought about the world of Toby Salt with his new book and his prizes and his media appearances.

  I thought about the world of Stuart Mould with his positivity and his relentless acts of charity and his unflagging confidence that things will get better.

  I thought about my own world. How I’d messed things up with Sophie. How I’d messed things up with Liz. How I’d squandered all my money. What my world might be like without Dylan in it.

  And I thought about how the world of the unhappy is quite different from the world of the happy.

  My phone pinged. Another LinkedIn message from Stuart. He’s has been endorsing my skills. It’s all a sham, of course; if he was being truthful, he’d have endorsed me for Blundering, Bungling, Fluffing and Muffing.

  Friday August 24th

  I have now applied for fifteen jobs in total. These include roles as various as quantity surveyor, solutions engineer, accounts assistant, project manager, haberdasher, window dresser, trainee hair stylist, Oxford Professor of Poetry and several customer-facing roles in the fast-food industry.

  In other news: I have had another LinkedIn recommendation from Stuart Mould and I seem to have put out my bags for recycling on the day for general landfill.

 
Saturday August 25th

  Stuart Mould has invited you to join his professional network

  I.Stuart Mould has invited you to join his professional network

  He is wearing a tuxedo and the smirk

  of a man unfamiliar with the concept of rejection.

  Stuart Mould has four thousand and fifty-eight connections.

  Small wonder given he holds the keys

  that unlock the door to inner peace.

  It’s all there in his results-driven profile.

  It appears Stuart Mould will go the extra mile

  as your Life Coach and Dream Architect.

  I don’t know why but I click accept.

  II.Stuart Mould has endorsed you for the following skills

  Marketing ✓ Leading Teams ✓ Targeting ✓ Weaving Dreams ✓

  Scuba diving ✓ Semaphore ✓ Lego building ✓ Harp (Grade Four) ✓

  Chess playing ✓ Home baking ✓ Soothsaying ✓ Lovemaking ✓

  Balefulness ✓ Masturbation ✓ Aimlessness ✓ Procrastination ✓

  III.Stuart Mould has written you a recommendation that you can include on your profile page

  ‘Bold strides this colossus in the workplace

  with footsteps firm and full of flawless grace,

  noble of purpose and so fair of face,

  greeting PowerPoint with such fond embrace.

  O Mighty Strategist! Leader Complete!

  The Pivot-fabled Slayer of Spreadsheets!

  Analytical Artist! Office Athlete!

  Leviathan of the Corporate Elite!’

  As if it were not enough for him to haunt me in the corporate networking world, he now has to do it in real life, too.

  ‘Hi, Brian!’ said Stuart loudly, when he dropped Dylan off this morning. ‘How’s all that job-hunting going?!’

  ‘I’m not looking for a job.’

  ‘Of course not! You’ve not been updating your LinkedIn page at all!’ he chuckled.

  I went to close the door. He put his foot in it.

  ‘Look, Brian. Honestly, any help you need to get yourself on your feet again,’ he grinned at my slippers as he said this, ‘then just say the word! I know things have been hard for you.’

  He gave me a sympathetic look then put his hand on my shoulder.

  I shrank back and he appraised me once more.

  ‘Don’t feel too bad about failure, Brian. It’s just a petrol stop on the road to success! Anyway, I need to go! Charity free-running event! Young carers and vulnerable children!’

  He parkoured off and I retreated back inside to Dylan.

  We proceeded carefully. All mention of What Dylan Told Me When We Were Skimming Stones was avoided. If no one talks about it, it can’t happen. Everyone knows that.

  Sunday August 26th

  Six Haiku Book Reviews

  I

  IV

  Did not finish it.

  Got the pip. Shame. I had such

  Great Expectations. Woolly yarn about

  the history of tank tops.

  A Farewell to Arms.

  II

  V

  Dystopian tale.

  Neon leg warmers and Wham!

  Nineteen Eighty-Four. .well aged hasn’t it

  :Button Benjamin of Case

  Curious Re-read

  III

  VI

  A group of lions

  struggle to find acceptance.

  Pride and Prejudice. Pop group clones itself.

  It all ends in tragedy.

  The Thirty-Nine Steps.

  It is now Toby Salt’s turn to invade my personal space again. His ferrety eyes stared out at me from the pages of the Sunday review section. I proceeded to draw on him: horn-rimmed glasses and a large phallus emanating from the top of his head. Next to his photo is a five-star review (presumably out of a hundred) by the paper’s poetry editor, Sefton Warbrick, who writes:

  This Bridge No Hands Shall Cleave is a remarkable tour de force by one of this country’s finest emergent poets. Let’s be clear, this is not a volume for everyone; the uninitiated won’t be getting their hands dirtier by attempting to fathom its inner cadences, the beauty of its lyrical lilt, its ghostly echoes of Eliot and intimations of Ovid. Let’s leave them to the twelve-bar blues of their democratic doggerel, playground poesy, and sing-song simplicia. If poetry is the new rock ’n’ roll, then God help us all. What Salt gives us is opera.

  I wondered whether Liz has ever caressed Toby Salt’s magic flute. After a few minutes, I looked down at the paper and noticed how my ballpoint had punctured the page and ripped Toby Salt’s stupid papery face to shreds.

  Monday August 27th

  Bloodshed

  They found him, several days on,

  head stoved in by his Remington,

  sitting as if slumbered at his desk,

  were it not for that ungodly mess

  which had seeped into his sonnet.

  And there, cut out and pasted on it,

  at the centre of this macabre scene,

  was Matthew Chapter 5, Verse 13,

  the initials BB scribed underneath.

  The Bible Butcher, thought the police.

  We were waiting for Meet Me at the Gallows, a Goth band from Cheadle. Darren had turned up wearing a high-viz urban gilet and carrying a large fluorescent sign on a pole which said STOP: CHILDREN CROSSING.

  ‘Sorry. New job starts next week. Had to come straight from the training course,’ he explained. ‘Didn’t have time to go back and change.’

  I nodded my head as imperceptibly as I could in the hope that no one would notice that we knew each other.

  ‘By the way,’ Darren went on, ‘Stuart tells me you’re looking for a job at the moment.’

  I shrugged indiscernibly.

  ‘Only the instructor today mentioned they had a couple of vacancies, if you’re interested. Pay’s not great but the hours are short.’

  I looked off into the mid-distance.

  ‘Anyway, what I’m saying is that I could put in a good word for you on the whole lollipop front.’ He winked and then tapped a finger on the side of his nose.

  I was about to raise my left eyebrow silently in response when he thrust his giant lollipop at me and shouted, ‘Go on! Give it a go! Try this one for size!’

  Only the sudden arrival on stage of Meet Me at the Gallows saved me. I used the distraction of their presence to edge steadily away from Darren and establish a human shield of goths around myself. I could see him glowing in the distance as the band launched into their crowd-pleasers: ‘The Bloodied Veil’, ‘The Rose that Blackens on the Branch’, ‘Suicide in Crouch End’, ‘I Can See Blood Upon Your Hands’, ‘The Bible Butcher’, ‘Crumbling Bones’.

  All in all, a really fun evening for all the family. Four stars. Would recommend!

  Tuesday August 28th

  I lay on the sofa and waited for the job offers to roll in. Somehow, in the middle of all this excitement I must have dropped off to sleep because the next thing I knew, I found myself in an airport, waving goodbye to Dylan.

  Everyone was smiling sympathetically at me. The airline staff allowed me go right up the door of the Airbus A320 but a sudden shove from behind and I suddenly found myself on the plane and Dylan, Sophie and Stuart were waving me goodbye. I staggered to my seat and watched the flight attendant perform her flight-safety demonstration although the plane was somehow already up in the air but then I looked more closely and saw that the flight attendant was actually Liz and she was grinning at me, and the plane began to nosedive and my seatbelt was missing and I reached underneath for my life vest but it wasn’t there, and then the door of the cockpit flew open and there was the pilot and it was Toby Salt, and he and Liz both started to laugh hysterically beneath their oxygen masks, and then I woke up.

  I looked it up in my Dream Dictionary but as it’s an old edition it only references the Airbus A319 and so I was none the wiser. What on earth can it all mean?

  Wednesday August
29th

  Aura Boringalis

  an admission:

  my aura is beset

  with grey emissions

  I have such drab

  and dreary

  energy fields,

  my inner dullness

  is revealed.

  i fear my chakras

  have congealed.

  Mrs McNulty’s sawing has reached new levels. Whereas once it was restricted to the daytime (as laid down in the Daylight Sawing Time Act (DST) that we’d agreed three years ago), forming a not unpleasing accompaniment to my household chores, she is now to be heard woodworking away into the small hours of the morning. I’ve long given up asking her what exactly it is that she’s making as she just cackles in response to any enquiry.

  I went around to complain. As she opened her door to me, she recoiled backwards unsteadily.

  ‘Your aura!’ she hissed. ‘It’s black!’

  I wasn’t altogether certain of what an aura was but I had a sudden flashback to old Ready Brek television commercials. I looked at my sleeves, my jeans, my shoes.

  ‘Mrs McNulty, I’m dressed all in black. Are you sure you’re not confusing my aura with my clothes?’

  ‘Don’t you see? This means it will happen soon!’

  ‘What will?’ I wondered whether she was referring to the annual street party, flyers for which had been posted diurnally through my letter box, and which I’d been doing my best to ignore.