The dead of august, p.1
The Dead of August, page 1
I
Before Wiltshire
One
A woof, a gargle, a frantic shriek:
“Wrwrwoo-aaargh???”
A pause, a pout, a short deflation:
“Pff…”
And so on, ad infinitum.
“Wrwrwoo-aargh??? Pff… Wrwrwoo-aaargh??? Pff…”
In the snoring department, if not in any other, the range of my wife’s repertoire was woefully narrow.
“June, darling…”
“Mmwhaat?”
“You’re snoring again.”
“Mmno-ammnot, ammsleeping.”
“You woke me up.”
“Myou-woke-me up.”
“Try turning on your side.”
“Mmwhaat?”
“I said, try turning…”
“Wrwrwoo-aaargh??? Pff… Wrwrwoo-aaargh??? Pff…”
It was six already on a Monday morning, and hardly worth an argument with the undead (a pleasantly demure and placid version of my wife) for the sake of what, an extra hour’s sleep at most. I slipped away on tiptoe to the kitchen. I made a pot of coffee and struggled with our giant toaster with the hundred settings - “It’s Industrial!” June had declared with pride - until at last I burnt two wholemeal slices. I scraped off the worst of the charcoal and spread what was left of the toast with butter and apricot jam, then I made my way back to the bedroom and sat up in bed, with the coffee and toast on a tray in my lap.
June had turned under the sheet and was sleeping perversely in absolute silence. All I could see of her was the sweep of her hair, and the exposed angle of one bare buttock, one thigh, the joint of her knee and her long upper calf. I chomped on the toast and took a sip of the coffee, but it was still too hot. I put the tray on the floor and I tugged at the sheet and manoeuvred it over the both of us. I snuggled in behind June and buried my face in her hair, and then very gently I started to rub with my crotch against the invisible small of her back. When my pulse quickened, my breathing shortened abruptly – it was hoarse already from the wanton cigarettes of a weekend with too many arguments - and I started to cough. It was then, as I took away the pounding in my chest and gagged on a mouthful of sheet so I wouldn’t wake her, that it struck me she might have a point after all. It wasn’t exactly the point that my wife had been making (and lately been making persistently); on the contrary, as it would implicate also herself, it was one she would probably never concede.
Even if the tenor of her grievance was too general, too unfairly non-specific, the thrust of June’s accusation had always been clear enough. I was too abstract, she said. My focus was soft. My perception was fuzzy. I never paid attention. (There were several variations to this: I never paid attention to what I should pay attention to; I never paid enough attention; I never paid the right kind of attention. Or if I did pay attention, I did something wrong with it, I somehow perverted it.)
While it was true that I was by nature a Bigger Picture man, I regarded this trait (which was really the hub of my character, and much more encompassing than a mere trait) neither as a defect nor as a handicap. Even in the field of vision of that bigger, panoramic picture – where there might be a little distortion, a little distortion being often a good thing - I still knew all the things that a man should know. Vis-à-vis my wife, for example, that I loved her; that I respected and even admired her. I knew all these things very well - much better, in fact, than these literal words by themselves might suggest.
None of this satisfied June. She thought my Bigger Picture argument was bland and inadequate, an excuse for lame generalities. It was just a smokescreen, and she could see right through it. I should ask myself this, she said. As I tried to convince myself that I took in the gist, how much did miss of the detail? How much of that detail was a part of the essence? (If I’ve misquoted her, or embellished her words in any way, I’ve done so in good faith, and better to convey the essence, rather than the gist, of her complaint.)
One might, I suppose, have proposed that instead of observing my wife in a lascivious way that had almost become banal, and rubbing against her like a dog, I should perhaps have revelled in the waves of wild and blackest black that was her hair; waxed lyrical about the solid curve and substance of her buttock, about the Classical opacity of her thigh (her perfect thigh). One might, if one didn’t know me. Albeit in my own metaphorical manner (which was often mistaken for casual, and which irritated June in a way that it hadn’t before – in a way that her snoring still didn’t irritate me), I did savour detail. Above all in relation to June I would say that I did so profoundly, to its fullest extent. I was also, however, a man.
Ever shifting her ground, June would probably argue that it wasn’t after all a simple matter of failing to notice the detail (that kind of detail, at least), or even of taking things too much for granted. No. It was more fundamental than that. I was detached from reality. I wrote fairy tales, and I lived in them too. I didn’t understand her. Or life. “Or anything!”
When I finished the toast and my coffee, I lifted the sheet and uncovered her. In the hope of a moment’s reprieve, I vowed never to smoke again, and holding my breathing in check, I parted her hair and wetted the nape of her neck with my tongue. Then I followed the arc of her spine to her coccyx, slapping over her vertebrae. What did it mean, exactly, to ‘understand’ someone? Or life? Or anything?
“And you’ve never understood my work.”
What about my work, what about me?
“You miss the point completely. You’re a typical man.”
“Is there anything you like about me?”
“I like you inside me.”
It was some consolation, at least, when my wife used to say that. It was some consolation when we used to have sex.
After seventeen years that can’t but in some way have taken their toll, we had both become complacent, allowing our marriage to drift. For all my excuses, and the flaws in her one-sided arguments (June spoke of ‘reality’ as if it were somehow uniquely her own), what did I really know of the woman I loved? Even leaving her work – and mine - to one side for the moment, what did we know of each other?
And what did I know of Joshua, our fifteen-year-old son (sixteen in September), whom recently I had failed to embarrass when at June’s instigation I took a belated and ill-fated stab at paternal pedagogy.
“Your mother and I,” I began, ashamed already of my cowardly introduction.
“If it’s about sex, you’re two months too late,” Josh interrupted.
“But it’s illegal,” I wanted to say. We sat instead in an awkward silence at the edge of his bed, which had suddenly taken another dimension for me, until Joshua finally asked if there was anything else on my mind.
“Is there nothing on yours?” I retorted.
“Not really. Everything’s cool.”
“Josh, you’re only fifteen.”
“You guys should chill, I’m nearly sixteen.”
You guys?
“Your mother knows?”
“I told her this morning.”
One step ahead of me, always… But this wasn’t the moment for sulking. Be practical, James.
“I hope you’re being careful,” I said. “You do always use condoms, don’t you?”
“Come on, dad, my dick’s not made me stupid.”
“Right. That’s good to hear,” I said.
“There’s just this one thing that’s been bugging me, though.”
So not quite everything was cool, and I might yet be useful...
“Yes? What?”
“Whose bright idea was it to have me cut? We’re not even Jewish.”
I hesitated for a moment.
“Or Muslim,” I said, playing for time.
“The Muslims too?”
“Yes,” I said.
Whose idea had it been?
“Like with pork.”
“Yes,” I said.
June’s, I remembered.
“So why are they fighting?”
But I shouldn’t betray her.
“Is it a problem?” I asked evasively.
“It makes it bloody hard work for anyone else to give me a hand job, if you call that a problem. I can just about manage myself, if I spit a lot. It gives my dick bad breath.”
Yes, I suppose I would call that a problem.
“I think there was an excess of foreskin,” I said. “It might have caused complications. It would have caused complications. In later life.” Lie after lie, crowned by the consummate lie: “Doctor’s advice.”
“So it couldn’t be helped.”
“No. No, it couldn’t,” I said. “That’s not why you rushed into intercourse, is it?”
“Gina was gagging for it, that’s why I rushed into intercourse!”
Gina? Who on earth was Gina? From the breadth of his ominous grin I knew what his answer would be if I managed to ask him the question.
Josh answered it anyway, picturesquely: “The girl who popped my cherry,” he beamed. “Doesn’t bother her, my lack of foreskin, it makes my dick more sculptural, she says. I don’t suppose you’ve kept it, by any chance.”
“Kept what?”
“My foreskin. In a little jar or something.”
“No, Josh, I don’t think we have. Would you have liked us to?”
“Might’ve been cool if you had, that’s all. You know, like a miniature shark in formaldehyde, there’s a market for that kind of stuff.”
“I’ve had my chat with Josh,” I said to June later.
“
“Swimmingly.”
“So he’s told you about Gina.”
“Yes. And he told me that he’s nearly sixteen, and you and I should chill. He’s quite adamant that they’re being careful, at least.”
“I believe him,” said June.
“So do I,” I said. “He also asked me whose idea it was to have him circumcised. He doesn’t seem to like it much.”
“Didn’t they tell us there was too much foreskin?”
Now June was lying to me.
“Did they?”
“Didn’t they?”
“Probably,” I said.
“Wrwrwoo-aaargh??? Pff… Wrwrwoo-aaargh??? Pff…”
June was back on her back, and this time she woke herself up.
“Cover that gorgeous thigh!” I said.
“Have you had coffee already? And you’ve been eating in bed again, there’s crumbs everywhere!”
She was thrusting a burnt piece of crust backwards and forwards under my nose.
“It’s just a bit of toast,” I said.
“In the crack of my arse?”
Her eyes were still barking at me. She remembered the arguments.
“I’ll get you some coffee,” I said, and I hurried to the kitchen to make it.
Later on, standing naked in front of the bathroom mirror after my shower, slightly sideways for a more three-dimensional view, I felt for the tip of my flaccid penis, the solid part - the head of the head, as it were. In ever decreasing folds the foreskin drooped inwardly beyond it, tapering towards my legs in a semi-circle half an inch long, like a geriatric comma pointing with its tail at my balls. If I pulled it - and stupidly I pulled it - it stretched to at least three times that length. I let go very quickly, in case I caused it to never shrink back. It was an ugly sight, like a mini-proboscis. Could this excess dollop of flesh have been the real reason why our son had been circumcised? Had June harboured a horror of it, and a horror too that I might have passed it on to Josh? I couldn’t help wondering if, to prove that I was a good father, I should expose myself to my son, just to show him what the awful alternative to spit might have been.
Two
It was a beautiful Monday morning, the first in a meteorologically promising August. The awful humidity of most of July had already subsided by Friday, and the sunshine was cooler and even brighter as it outlined sharply all the familiar landmarks around EC1; that tremulous, smothering haze – the unmistakeable characteristic of metropolitan heat waves - had at last disappeared. In the twenty minutes it took me to walk from our modern, neo-geo box of a flat in Saffron Hill (‘fashionably austere’, the Agents had called it ingeniously) to the welcoming chaos of The Herald’s warehouse offices just off the Blackfriars Road, I should have been already looking forward to the day and the week. However flippant June might have judged me domestically, my professional dedication was certainly second to no one’s. With the dead I was thoroughly thorough. As The Herald’s foremost obituary writer, the dead after all were my living.
In his choice of subject, James Linthwaite tends to steer clear of the highbrow: the Uncompromising Artist, the Courageous Soldier, the Selfless Samaritan, that kind of thing. Worthy as these subjects are, they are not for him. For him are the tortured souls of those middling celebrity types who do have a talent of sorts – on occasion even a talent to speak of - but whose needy ambition exponentially exceeds it. In a disconsolate dread of their own limitations, these types will often resort to excess and flamboyance, spiralling waywardly into the inexorable chasm of their inner lack. From this particular genre, if I could call it that, at his very best Mr Linthwaite is able to wrest a sense of the perversely comic tragedy of existence, and through the paradox which his subjects embody, distil the very essence of our lives - of what it is, so absurdly, to be human.
So what is his secret? If it can be said that he has a particular gift, a special talent that sets him apart, unquestionably it lies in the distinctive use of the vehicle of Euphemism that characterizes his work. Whereas most euphemisms are crude and thinly veiled instruments, easily recognized and instantly deciphered by convention, his are vastly more subtle and sophisticated one-off inventions. On Mr Linthwaite’s magical canvas, fact and complex abstract imagery blend seamlessly together, all at once to encompass and bring to the surface a deeper, more allegorical truth...
In other (simpler) words, I wrote the ‘fairy tales’ that June so vehemently derided. I always looked to extract from the detail surrounding sensational lives – what else! - the Bigger Picture that each one of them so singularly represented. And at the altar of that Bigger Picture, I offered neither eulogy nor condemnation. What I did was provide celebration - a Discobituary, to coin a phrase.
Of course, none of this was at all what Douglas, my Editor, had had in mind when he hired me. My ‘airy fairy’ approach, as he liked to call it, in an uncomfortable echo of June’s accusations, was almost beneath his contempt. It grated heavily against his inborn tabloid instincts. What Douglas wanted was perfectly straightforward: just more of what both he and The Herald had built their profitable reputations on.
“You’re too old-fashioned, James. You have to tell it how it is. Warts’n’all. Especially warts! That’s what our readers expect from The Herald,” he used to yell at me enraged, one disappointing death after another.
Well, it was and it wasn’t. It was, then it wasn’t. Over time, by some obscure fluke of good fortune my obituaries became very popular. The most unlikely people were buying The Herald in order to read them, and they were widely discussed across all the media. An article in a rival newspaper went so far as to describe them as ‘a popular cult phenomenon’. Even Artsnight Review offered unanimous praise, and some very curious analysis - who was that buffoon with the Dali moustache who likened my work to the death of Diana? I was frequently invited to give interviews and to appear on chat shows. Naturally, I always refused. “My obituaries speak for themselves,” I would say. I kept my feet firmly on the ground. The last thing I wanted was to end up a middling celebrity myself. Notwithstanding my reticence (which irritated both my Editor and my wife, though I suspect for very different reasons), I was literally inundated with letters and emails. Ten to one they gushed with excited approval, while by every other means at their disposal, dedicated readers speculated endlessly among themselves about ‘the elusive truth behind the euphemisms’. Undoubtedly my obituaries had struck a chord.
Though I cringed at the regular heights of hyperbole that people would scale to describe it, I enjoyed my work. I knew what I was doing and I did it well. That’s what I thought. June, on the other hand, didn’t think so at all. “These… these wishy-washy things you write,” she seethed, twisting her mouth in an ugly way, “they tell your readers nothing. They’re sentimental gibberish. Softcore and pointless.” So it wasn’t a simple matter of approaching every other aspect of my life in the same way that I approached my work. That clearly wouldn’t work for June.
Looking forward neither to the day nor to the week, already I had reached the river. And as I was about to cross it over Blackfriars Bridge, it suddenly dawned on me what was the crux of the matter. Hardcore versus Softcore. In that cold opposition lay precisely the heart of the conflict between our opposing perspectives. Perhaps the years had made our positions more polarised. Whatever the catalyst, June had decided that she wanted this impossible conflict resolved.
On Sunday afternoon, clearly unimpressed by my tentative praise of Susan’s Phallacy over lunch (the well-rehearsed gist of which was that the book contained exceptional psychological profiling, some beautiful writing, and was sustained by a fast pace throughout), she had resumed her attack on my work. It was sanitised and fake, and of course it was hopelessly softcore.
“And Douglas agrees with me.”
“You’ve been discussing my work with Douglas?”
“We happened to mention it,” she flustered.
“You and the man you’ve described as the devil incarnate?”
“I never said that.”
Why? Why would my wife have gone to Douglas, of all people, to the Editor of a tabloid that I knew she despised, to my Editor (whom she had once described as the devil incarnate), behind my back, to rubbish my work? Hadn’t we always agreed that there was really nothing wrong with having opinions, even strong disagreements, as long as we both took some care how we expressed ourselves, and to whom? Particularly to whom. I took great care how I expressed my opinion of her work, and I had only ever expressed it to June.
