The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life

by William Nicholson

  Toby found it out.

  ‘You can’t miss it,’ he said. ‘It’s the only house that’s all mucky and has weeds in front.’

  Jack cycles past the Dogman’s house and slows to a stop by the village hall. He turns round and rides back again, more slowly this time, his heart beating loudly. He doesn’t want to be seen. If anyone appears, on the street or at a window, he’s not going to do it. But there’s no one.

  He brakes, jumps off, leaves the bike lying on the narrow pavement. Pushes through the iron gate and up the weed-clogged path to the front door. Breathing fast, he pulls at the folded letter and can’t get it out of his jeans pocket. He has to bend over and pull, then it’s out, but the iron flap on the letter box won’t give, it seems to be rusted shut. He forces it with his fingers, willing it to give, and at last it shudders ajar. He pushes the letter in, pokes his fingers after it, hears it fall free on the other side. Then he turns and runs. Back down the path, scrape the gate closed, yank his bike upright, swing it round to face the road home—

  An old lady is rolling silently along the pavement on an electric buggy. Her body is bent, her face turned down and sideways. She sees where she’s going by this witchy sideways peeping.

  Did she see me post the letter?

  Impossible to say. He’s dimly aware that he’s noticed her in the village before, but he’s never paid her any attention, and has no notion of her name. So with luck she has no notion of his.

  He pedals past her with his face averted, and then looks back, imagining the view from her buggy. Of course she saw him post the letter. There’s no way she could not have seen him, the one moving object in the whole scene. Jack wants to go back and find the letter and take it away before the Dogman reads it, but the door will be locked. It’s too late now.

  A sense of dread grips him as he cycles home. The letter is blackmail, and blackmail is a crime. People go to prison for it.

  Most likely the old lady’s too gaga to know what she saw. Most likely her eyesight’s so bad she can’t tell one boy from another. Most likely the Dogman will just laugh when he reads the letter and throw it in the bin. Most likely nothing will happen ever.

  But there is just a very small possibility that the Dogman has already found the letter. That he’s about to go all round the village, red with anger, asking if anyone saw who pushed the letter through his letter-box at quarter to eight in the morning. Then the old lady will remember the boy on the orange and purple bike. No one else has a bike in those colours. If her eyes are good enough to drive her buggy down the road, they’re good enough to see an orange and purple bike.

  Best if I hide it.

  Duh! What good is that? The police come to the door and say, ‘Does anyone in this family own an orange and purple bike?’ Mum says right out, ‘Jack does.’

  He turns off the road into the lane to home.

  I must have been mad to think no one would see me. I’m a total jackass.

  But they can’t prove it.

  This thought brings sudden relief.

  So I was in the village at the time. So it’s my bike. I never sent the letter. Prove it. You got to have proof in a court, you can’t just say, Well, what were you doing in the village street if you weren’t delivering the letter? If you can’t prove it, I’m innocent. That’s the law.

  He pushes his bike into the garage and enters the house by the back door. Mum and Dad still in the kitchen. They’re arguing.

  ‘You know you’ll love it, Henry. And anyway, Mummy’s got the tickets, which is very generous of her, and I can’t say, Oh, Henry’s changed his mind at the last minute.’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’

  ‘It’s far too late to get someone else now.’

  ‘So leave the seat empty. Put your coats on it.’

  ‘Do you know how much those seats cost?’

  ‘You want me to pay your mother back?’

  ‘Please, Henry! You know you’ll like it when you’re there.’

  ‘I’m back,’ says Jack.

  ‘Jack, your jeans are soaking.’

  ‘They’ll dry.’

  He goes up to his room and strips off all his clothes. He’s decided to have a shower and put on clean clothes. This won’t stop him being identified by the police, they’re allowed to search the dirty clothes basket, but he still wants the feeling of being a different person.

  While he’s in the shower working the bar of soap between both hands to make foam he has a new thought.

  Can you leave fingerprints on paper?

  He becomes aware of a banging on the door. For a split second he feels a stab of sheer terror. Then he hears Carrie’s voice.

  ‘Hurry up! I need the loo!’

  ‘I’m having a shower!’

  ‘Hurry up, Jack! I’m bursting!’

  ‘Go away!’

  And there’s something else too. There’s some way they have of finding tiny traces you’ve left on things and proving they come from you. They catch people years and years later that way.

  Jack rubs the lather all over his body, more thoroughly than he’s ever done before, wanting to erase all traces of his day so far and be again the boy eating Weetabix and reading Tintin. But there’s no going back. What’s done is done.

  41

  Jimmy Hall stands silent and unseen at the back of the church as the service proceeds. There before the altar rails, resting on a small table, stands a wooden coffin that is about the size of a wine box. He thinks it may well be a wine box. He makes a note in his notebook. On the box is a home-made floral wreath. There are five people in the church apart from himself, and none of them has noticed him. Jimmy Hall is accustomed to this, and is learning to find a peculiar distinction in his invisibility. He is the spectator. No one knows just how much he sees, and therein lies his secret power. Everything that makes him insignificant – his middle age, his small stature, his balding head, his forgettable features, his unwanted area of expertise, and his bachelor status – conspire to render him uniquely equipped for his new role. He is a reporter. He is a newspaper man.

  The image fits his sense of himself so perfectly that he wonders he never thought of it before. Reporters, like private detectives, live alone and dress shabbily. They have no money, and commonly no family. Their job is their life, their vocation and their obsession. They believe in the good story, the well-turned phrase, and nothing and nobody else. They are loners with attitude.

  At the age of fifty-six Jimmy Hall finds himself standing on the lowest rung of what could become an entirely new career. He is present in the church of St Mary’s Edenfield today in his capacity as roving reporter for the Sussex County Chronicle. While driving through Edenfield from Denton, where he lives, to the school, where he goes even on non-school days to help out with the boarders, he observed the strange little entourage entering the church. He recognized among them one of his pupils, Alice Dickinson. Alert as every newspaper man always is to the chance of a story, he pulled his car in to the side and entered the church after them. Alice came when beckoned, and told him that the service was for a dog.

  Jimmy Hall saw at once that a dog funeral would make a quirky but touching human interest item. He has hopes of being rewarded with his first-ever byline. Snippets of news supplied by him have been printed before, but always within longer pieces credited to ‘our Correspondent’ or ‘the Chronicle news team’ or sometimes ‘Arthur Joby’. Arthur Joby, a veteran of old Fleet Street, is the editor and mainstay of the Sussex County Chronicle, and he is Jimmy Hall’s mentor. He has promised that Jimmy Hall will get his own byline when he submits an item of sufficient interest to warrant a hundred words or more.

  The vicar is now saying a prayer over the wine-box coffin. The elderly couple in black are presumably the dead dog’s owners. The girl from school, Alice, is present with her mother.

  ‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord. He that believeth in me though he were dead yet he shall live, and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shal
l never die.’

  Odd to say such prayers over the body of a dog. Are there dogs in heaven? Jimmy Hall suspects that there are not. But he is a journalist, not a theologian. He’s here for the human touch. He must find a moment to talk to the mourners. Arthur Joby has taught him the technique. Never say, ‘What are you feeling?’ Few people can articulate their feelings. Give them options, as in a multiple choice test. All they have to do is tick the box, and bingo! you’ve got a quote. Talk to the vicar too. Add the usual descriptive colouring and he should have no trouble reaching the hundred word mark.

  By James Hall. By James M. Hall. By Jim Hall. By J.M.Hall. Anything but Jimmy. Jimmy’s a little boy’s name, but he’s never been able to shed it. Now he’s known as ‘poor old Jimmy’, which is simultaneously infantile and senile. He accepts the name as he accepts the world’s indifference, knowing that appearances deceive.

  How did the dog die? Does it matter? Get the names. Spell them correctly. Look for the shorthand phrase that places social class: luxury home, golf club member, pub regular, single mum.

  The prayers by the altar seem to be finished. The old husband is picking up the wooden box. The vicar is leading the mourners up the aisle.

  Jimmy Hall shrinks into the shadows. They do not see him but he sees them. After they have left the church he follows. At such times the press is discreet. Discreet but ever-present.

  A quiet Saturday morning in the churchyard of St Mary’s Edenfield. The grave has been dug round the far side of the church, close to the oil tank, where a patch of nettles has been strimmed for the purpose. The wooden box is lowered into the hole as the vicar prays.

  ‘We therefore commit his body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life.’

  The old lady scatters a handful of earth on the box.

  ‘Goodbye, Perry,’ she says. ‘Goodbye.’

  The old man starts to shovel the heap of earth back into the hole. It seems the service is over.

  Jimmy Hall steps forward.

  ‘Sorry to intrude,’ he says. ‘I’m here for the County Chronicle. Do you have a moment?’

  The old lady stares at him blankly.

  ‘Come on, Mummy,’ says the young woman he understands to be Alice’s mother. ‘Let’s get you home.’

  They depart without another word. Alice has her head down as she follows behind. Jimmy Hall tries the old man wielding the spade. He uses another of Joby’s tricks.

  ‘Excuse me, sir. Could you confirm the correct spelling of your name?’

  People sometimes don’t like to give their name, but they hate having it spelled wrong.

  ‘P-E-A-K, Peak,’ says the old man, neither looking up nor ceasing in his labour.

  Jimmy Hall has more luck with the vicar.

  ‘A very moving service, vicar,’ he says.

  ‘Bereavement is bereavement,’ says the vicar. ‘In whatever form it comes.’

  ‘I didn’t catch the name of the deceased.’

  ‘Perry. Like the drink, you know.’

  ‘A dog, I understand.’

  ‘A dearly loved poodle.’

  ‘And Mrs Peak is heartbroken, I suppose?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘She finds it hard to believe her little friend is gone for ever.’

  ‘Yes, yes. No doubt about that. But for ever is a long time, don’t you think? You can say for ever, or you can say eternity. Eternity feels to me like a place, you know. Which is more comforting somehow.’

  Jimmy Hall makes notes, but he is conscious that he is missing the personal note. The reader wants to know how it feels.

  ‘How does Mrs Peak speak about her loss?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘For example, does she call his name and wait in vain for an answer?’

  ‘An answer?’

  ‘Well, a bark, or some such.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  Jimmy Hall is pre-armed for just such a response. ‘If they’re not sure it happened,’ says Arthur Joby, ‘then they can’t be sure it didn’t happen.’

  ‘So it’s possible?’

  ‘The poor lady has certainly taken the loss very much to heart.’

  PERRY THE POODLE LAID TO REST

  By our Reporter JAMES HALL

  On Saturday morning in the historic graveyard of St Mary’s Edenfield Mr and Mrs Peak paid their final tribute to their dearly loved poodle Perry. Mrs Peak wept as the flower-decked coffin was lowered into the grave by her husband. Speaking after the simple but moving service she said, ‘It’s hard to believe my little friend is gone for ever. I call his name and wait for an answering bark, but it doesn’t come.’ The Rev Miles Salmon, who conducted the service, comforted her with the words, ‘Eternity is a place you know.’ As the devoted group of mourners made their way out of the churchyard there was one onlooker at least who thought he heard a ghostly parting sound. Could it have been ‘Woof-woof’?

  One hundred and twenty-eight words. If you count headline and by-line, one hundred and thirty-nine. Jimmy Hall re-reads his copy with considerable satisfaction. The final line strikes him as combining humour and pathos in a particularly happy image. This is the touch of personal style that elevates the mere reporter into a writer.

  He phones his copy through to Editorial, which turns out to be Arthur Joby himself.

  ‘Well done, old chap,’ says Joby. ‘You know what? I think I can do us both some good with this.’

  ‘Excellent. What do you think of my final touch?’

  ‘I’m talking about the story. The pet funeral. I think you’ve dug up something that could go places if we move fast.’

  ‘Do you think it warrants a byline?’

  ‘We’ll see, old chap. We’ll see. I’ll make a call or two.’

  42

  Alice is making molasses cookies from a recipe brought home from school and playing her Abba Gold CD on her Walkman. She has set it up complete with its auxiliary speakers on the top of the fridge. Out of consideration for her mother, who is supposedly working at her laptop on the kitchen table, the volume is low. The juddering hum of the Kenwood blending flour, sugar, butter and black treacle easily overpowers the thin throb of ‘Dancing Queen’.

  Liz drinks coffee and lets her eyes roam over the word-dense screen, but her thoughts are elsewhere. She’s recalling how Alan Strachan wept in the school library and said, ‘We’re all unhappy.’ Overlaid on this is the line of dialogue he so admired from Friends: ‘I liked it better before it was better.’

  There’s a place we want to be but it’s not here. A way we want to live but it’s not the way we live now. So where? What?

  She looks up at Alice, happy with her music and her sweet dark goo. But she too endures terrors daily. Why must this be so? The question, asked in silence, remains unanswered. Liz feels a shudder of loneliness. This is why we bond and mate, not for sex but for conversation. There are thoughts that need to be spoken aloud, endorsed, amplified, contradicted. Worse than financial anxiety, worse than the endless complications of childcare, the single parent has no one to tell her daily, hourly, minute-by-minute story.

  The phone rings.

  ‘Liz? It’s Kieran. Birmingham, remember? The glamour years.’

  Kieran Walsh. She trained with him on the Birmingham Echo.

  ‘Kieran? My God! Long time.’

  ‘Aren’t you impressed I found your number? I even know your address. You live in Lewes, and Lewes isn’t far from a village called Edenfield.’

  ‘What exactly is this all about?’

  ‘I’m with this press agency these days and I just took a call from the old boy who runs the local rag. I think it could be a real runner for one of the Sundays, which means we have to move fast. How would you like to pick up a quick couple of hundred?’

  She sees Alice about to pour her cooking mixture into a baking tray.

  ‘Grease it first, Alice.’

  Kieran chuckles down the li
ne. ‘You tell her, girl.’

  ‘My daughter. She’s eleven.’

  ‘Fucking Ada! Eleven! Now I’m depressed. So what do you say?’

  ‘What’s the story?’

  ‘You a churchgoer, Liz? Stupid question. Never mind. The vicar of St Mary’s Edenfield conducted a funeral service this morning, the whole banana, coffin, grave, prayers. Wait for it. For a dog.’

  ‘I know. I was there.’

  ‘You were there!’

  ‘It was my mother’s dog.’

  ‘This is fantastic! Can you do me five hundred words by noon?’

  ‘No, I can’t. This is private, Kieran.’

  ‘Not any more it isn’t. There was a local reporter there. I told Alfie I’ll take the story but if I don’t he’ll sell it somewhere else. You can’t spike it, Liz. So you might as well write it.’

  ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘What’s the problem? Dear old lady, beloved pet, tender-hearted vicar. Solid gold human interest.’

  ‘Can I use a pseudonym?’

  ‘Call yourself King Kong, I don’t care. I’ll bike you a photographer, vicar by doggy grave etcetera. You know the form.’

  Alice doesn’t take the news well.

  ‘What about my cookies? I can’t leave them, they’ll burn. It’s Saturday. I thought you didn’t work on Saturdays. What am I supposed to do?’

  ‘It’ll only take half an hour, darling. An hour at the most.’

  ‘We’ve already been in that church for hours. I hate it. It’s creepy. It smells.’

  As always Liz compromises.

  ‘Well, I suppose if the Horners are in. I expect Sarah would agree to look out for you.’

  ‘I’m fine, Mum. Just don’t be too long.’

  Liz finds the rector in his little terraced house on Edenfield’s main road. He ushers her in to a neat sitting room which is so clearly arranged for single occupation that it’s almost comical. The one armchair has a reading lamp on its left and a side table on its right, the kind that swivels across the chair to form a meal tray. There are newspapers and books in stacks on the floor and a pair of soft beige slippers before the unlit fire.