“Milk?”
“No thanks.”
“Sugar?”
“Nearly fifty years you’ve known me. Didn’t take milk or sugar then. Still don’t.”
“It’s the meds. Some play tricks with the old memory.”
“Good. So you’re not losing your marbles as well then.”
“Some make me sleep. Some make me sick. Some make me constipated, which seems a personal insult at this stage. Funny thing is some important things I forget, but hang on to total trivia. I can still remember Pete Murray’s joke about the Gene Pitney record that he made on Juke Box Jury.”
“Twenty four hours to Tulse Hill. I remember it too. I was only about seven at the time. Didn’t even know Tulse Hill was a place then.”
“Just over from Dulwich, where you and Rachel had your first date. See? The brain’s still working!”
“Thought of having it played at your funeral?”
“Gene Pitney? No. I’ve no requests. I mean I won’t actually be there so they can play whatever the fuck they like. Within reason. I’ve told them that if they play anything by Queen or Fleetwood Mac then I’ll haunt them.”
“Albatross?”
“OK, they can have Albatross, but nothing else, and absolutely no Queen.”
“I think that’s reasonable. How’s Di bearing up?”
“Well… bearing up. Not much more to say than that really. We talk a lot, which helps both of us. She also has her friends that she sees a couple of times a week. They’ll help her through the next bit.”
“And the boys?”
“Men. If we’re going to be technical about it. Andy’s great. He keeps us all going. Those years doing stand up to pay his way through uni are reaping rewards. Didn’t know there were so many jokes about cancer. Martyn’s not taking it too well. When he stays over with us, you can hear him weeping through the wall.”
“It’s good he’s letting it out. Not bottling it up.”
“Sounds like experience talking.”
“Does it? Possibly…”
“But if he could weep a bit more quietly it would help all of us. Andy’s got the other problem. Trying too hard to be the responsible elder son of the family.”
“We really don’t talk enough about death.”
“I think it’s life we don’t talk enough about. I mean we’re here for this sliver of time and then… that’s it. Goodnight Irene. It’s like when I’m on holiday I don’t want to talk about what I think my first day back at work’s going to be like. I want to talk about the beaches, the food, that couple from Bridlington who got pissed on the first night and threw up in the sauna, the hang gliding.”
“You go hang gliding! I didn’t know.”
“Of course I don’t go fucking hang gliding, but you know what I mean. It’s like… One of Di’s friends visited me. She’s a bit churchy. I mean, she meant well but she asked me what I thought was going to happen after I died. I told her straight. People who loved me would be really upset and sad. I’m not expecting her back again.”
“Not a believer in the afterlife then?”
“Me? Well it’s funny isn’t it that I seem to be less convinced by absolutes the older I get. I was a card carrying atheist. Now I’m shifting towards being agnostic. I’m sure it started when I voted Lib Dem in a local election.”
“Same with me. Not the Lib Dem bit. I mean, you need some red lines. But the God thing? How would I know? Seems a bit desperate to be completely certain either way.”
“How did we get from Gene Pitney to God so quickly? Most blokes in our situation would have talked about cars and football.”
“We sublimated those instincts. We think we’re talking about Gene Pitney and God, but underneath the coded language we’re actually talking about cars and football. Gene Pitney is after all an anagram of ‘engine type’.”
“And now we’re talking bollocks.”
“Which is where most conversation between blokes ends up.”
“And how did you know about ‘Gene Pitney’ and ‘engine type’?”
“I do crosswords.”
“Really? I never knew that.”
“I should probably leave now. I’m not very good at this.”
“No one is. That’s why vicars get work.”
“There’s something I want to say.”
“I know. You want to say I’ve been a good friend. You want to say you’ll miss me. You want to say something about all the years, and how we were young once, and how…”
“That wasn’t what I was going to say.”
“Really?”
“OK. It was adjacent.”
“Adjacent is close enough. I don’t want it. It makes me feel like I’ve already fucked off. People keep doing that now. I know they don’t mean it, but I have to sit here being grateful while they practise bereavement in front of me.”
“I hadn’t thought of it like that.”
“I’d prefer you talked to me about crossword puzzles rather than do the goodbye speech.”
“Well… OK then… I started doing them after Rachel died.”
“I didn’t know Rachel died.”
“No. Well. You didn’t need to know.”
“You could have told me.”
“Could have. Didn’t.”
“Why?”
“Because you were busy dying.”
“Fair enough.”
“Grief likes an empty room. Or mine did. The crossword put a bit of furniture in it. Something to sit on. I mean, I can’t solve the problem of losing Rachel. But I make coffee. Then solve 4 across. Then 7 down. I get one tiny thing right. Then another. It doesn’t fix anything. But it gives the day a bit of scaffolding.”
“Makes sense.”
“You said that people who love you will be upset and sad. And they will. Me included. But we get through it. We find a way. For me it was the crosswords that gave me that little bit of routine I needed. Di, Andy and Martyn will each find their own way. Talk about death in terms of how they can help you through it, so they feel they’ve a job to do. It’s not talking about your first day back at work. It’s talking about the last day on the beach, the final walk around the headland to that little taverna with that amazing view of the sunset.”
“You’ve just gone all Radio 4 on me.”
“I know. Sorry. Veering into the goodbye speech. Should steer clear of death’s hooded harvester.”
“Steer clear of what?”
“Crossword clue: death’s hooded harvester. Two words, four and six.”
“Dead headed?”
“No, the clue for that would be: gardening’s headless pruner. More a horticultural term.”
“Grim reaper?”
“Perfect! It’s never too late to take up crosswords, although in your case it’s really pushing it up to the wire.”
“If you’re driving, avoid the bypass at this time. Nose to tail.”
“See! I knew we’d get onto talking about cars.”
“Did you watch the match last night?”
“Fuck off. And neither did you!”
“Thanks for coming over.”
“It was fun, my friend.”
“Two down. What blokes often leave unsaid at the end. Four and three. And shut the door on the way out.”
My thanks to our Writers’ Group - Rhiannon, Ray and Tom - for providing the space and encouragement to develop this piece of writing, that began its life as an exercise in writing dialogue. While it is a story, it’s also a response to some recent events.
Thanks to everyone for all your supportive comments. I appreciate that some of you are far closer to the experiences I’m describing than I am. It’s perhaps worth giving a little of the backstory to this piece of writing.
It began as a simple exercise in writing dialogue — around 1,000 words. I’d recently binged all of The Detectorists, having missed it the first time around, and was struck by the way the dialogue between two men had been written and performed. It felt honest and kind, while still preserving that familiar little dance around the “real issues” that men often do. I began to wonder what that kind of exchange might look like if it had to deal with bereavement.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve also lost friends — old friends — without having had the chance to say goodbye. That left me with guilt, but also with a growing sense that saying goodbye may be more for me than for them. I’ve only been able to say goodbye to a friend once, and it ended up far less articulate than it is here. So, in this piece, I tried to work through some of those feelings — and the other, often contradictory emotions that come with loss.
This is lovely, Mike. It would work really well as a radio short. Gentle but profound and very touching.