“I don’t want to go to my cupboard,” I said. “I want to know things. I want to know about all sorts of things. Every sort of thing. I want to know all about death and what happens after you die …”
“So do I,” said Uncle Jon.
“Shut up, you,” said my daddy.
“We have to know,” said my uncle. “It’s important. We have to know.”
“It’s not important!” My father’s voice was well and truly raised. “It happens. Everybody dies. We’re born, we live, we die. That’s how it is. The boy’s a boy. Let him be a boy. He’ll be a man soon enough and he can think on these things then. Get out of my house now, Jon. Let me be alone with my grief.”
“Your grief for Charlie? You old fraud, what do you care?”
“I care enough. I do care. He was my bestest friend.”
“You never had a bestest friend in your life.”
“I did and I did. You cur, you low, driven cur.”
“You foul and filthy fiend!”
“You wretch!”
“You cretin!”
And there was further rancour.
I never cared for rancour at all.
So I slipped away to play in the yard.
2
I would have played in our yard. If we’d had one. But as we didn’t have one, I didn’t.
I went to play in the graveyard instead.
The graveyard was really big back then. Before the council divided it up and sold all the best bits. All the best bits were the Victorian bits, with their wonderful tombs and memorials. All those weather-worn angels shrouded by ivy and all those vaults that, if you were little enough and possessed of sufficient bravery, you could crawl into.
I was little enough and had plenty of bravery. I could worm my way in under the rusted grilles and view the coffins of the Victorian dead at my pleasure.
You might consider me to have been a morbid little soul. But that was not how I considered myself. I considered myself to be an explorer. An adventurer. An archaeologist. If it was acceptable for adults to excavate the long-buried corpses of the Pharaohs, then why shouldn’t it have been all right for me to have a little peep at the bodies of my own forefathers?
On this particular Thursday, I didn’t worm my way under any of the iron grilles. I just lay in the sunshine upon my favourite tomb. It was a truly monumental affair. A great fat opulent Victorian fusspot of a tomb, wrought into the semblance of a gigantic four-poster bed, mounted upon a complicated network of remarkable cogs. The whole fashioned from the finest Carrara marble.
It was the tomb of one David Aloysius Doveston, purveyor of steam conveyances to the gentry. “Born 27th July 1802, died 27th July 1902.” A good innings for a Victorian; a grand century, in fact.
I’d taken the trouble to look up Mr Doveston in the Memorial Library. I’d wondered why it was that a purveyor of steam conveyances had chosen to have his tomb constructed in the manner of a fantastic bed.
In amongst the parish records, housed in the restricted section, I located a big fat file on Mr Doveston, who, it appeared, had been something of an inventor. I uncovered a pamphlet advertising what appeared to be his most marvellous creation: “the Doveston patent steam-driven homeopathic wonder-bed”. This incredible boon to mankind had been displayed at the Great Exhibition and was presented as being “the universal panacea and most excellent restorer to health, efficacious in the cures of many ills, pestilences and dreadful agues that do torment mankind to mortification”. These included “milliner’s sniffle, ploughman’s hunch, blains which pain the privy member, rat pox, cacky ear, trouser mite, the curly worms that worry from within” and sundry other terrible afflictions.
I must suppose that the homeopathic wonder-bed proved equal to the claims of its inventor, for not only had he lived to be one hundred years of age but also, as far as I knew, ploughman’s hunch and the curly worms that worried from within no longer plagued the general public.
In fact, as I could find no trace of any of these ghastly maladies listed in any medical dictionary, I remain of the firm conviction that Mr Doveston’s invaluable invention effected their complete eradication.
I was surprised, therefore, that he hadn’t, at the very least, had a local street named after him.
I lay upon the marble replica of Mr Doveston’s beneficial bed, all curly-wormless and thinking a lot about the death of P.P. Penrose and all my uncle’s rancour.
Although I hadn’t let on to my father, or to Uncle Jon, I felt very bad about the passing of the Penrose. Very bad indeed. I loved that man’s books. I was a member of the now official P.P. Penrose fan club. I’d saved up, sent away for and received the special enamel badge and everything. I had the Lazlo Woodbine, private-eye secret codebook, the pen with the invisible ink, the unique plastic replica of Laz’s trusty Smith & Wesson (that was not a toy, but a collectable) and the complete set of Death Wears a Turquoise Homburg[1] trading cards. I was saving up for the Manhattan Scenes of Woodbine diorama playset, a scaled-down section of New York City, where you could be Woodbine (if you were very, very small).
Lazlo Woodbine was the classic 1950s genre detective. He wore a trenchcoat and a fedora and worked only in the first person. And, no matter how tricky the case might be, he only ever needed four locations to get the job done. His office, where women-who-would-do-him-wrong came to call, a bar where he talked a lot of old toot with his best friend, Fangio, the fat boy barman, an alleyway where he got into sticky situations, and a rooftop, where he had his final confrontation with the bad guy. According to Laz, no great genre detective ever needed more than these four locations. And I was saving up for the complete set. And it all came in a cardboard foot-locker.[2]
None of this will mean very much to anyone who hasn’t read a Lazlo Woodbine thriller. But as most of you will realize, this was special stuff, which if it was still extant and found its way into an auction room today would command incredible prices.
I was a fan. I admit it. A big fan. Still am. I loved and still love those books. All those stylish slayings, all the Woodbine catch-phrases. All the toot he talked in bars, the women who did him wrong, the bottomless pits of whirling oblivion that he always fell into at the end of the second chapter when he got bopped on the head. The whole kit and genre caboodle and the Holy Guardian Sprout inside his head.
I loved the stuff. I did and do. I loved it.
Which is why I mention it here.
I was miffed. I’m telling you. I felt well and truly cheated. My favourite author dead and never called my father mother. And my father had actually known him. And I never knew that he did. I could have met the man. Had him autograph my books. Talked to him. But no. He was dead. Defunct. Gone and would write no more.
That seemed really unfair. Really stupid. Really pointless. I felt really bad.
I mean, and give me a minute here while I get deep, I mean, what is the point of death? Does anybody know? Being alive has a point, it has a purpose. If people weren’t alive, weren’t aware, then what would be the point of the universe? It might exist, but if there was no one in it to know it existed, it might as well not exist. You had to have people in the universe to be aware that there was a universe. You didn’t actually need God, who it was claimed created the universe, He was completely unnecessary. You could just assume that the universe had always been there, always would be there, for ever. But without people to see it was there, what was the point of it being there? No point! That’s an original concept, you know: I thought of that. That was what being alive was about.
But dying, what was the point of that? You spent your life being aware, taking in information, creating things, like P.P. Penrose created Woodbine, or Mr Doveston his wonderful bed. And then you died. And that was it. No more awareness, no more creativity, no more anything. What on Earth, or off it, was the Point of dying?