by Jonathan Coe
Mirthless merriment, sickly sentiments
So commonplace, it would bore you to tears,
Give me non-stop laughter, dispel disaster
Or The Rotters’ Club might well lop off your ears
—and no wonder people were staring at us on the bus into town as if we were mad, everything we saw, every time we looked out of the window made us burst into laughter and it was the same when we came into The Grapevine and the first person we saw was Sam Chase, Philip’s father, I started laughing with gladness because I hadn’t seen him for years either, and I knew that he was happy now too because his wife has stopped having her affair with Sugar Plum Fairy, I don’t know how he put a stop to it but he did, Philip told me, and he was just sitting in the pub by himelf, reading a novel, it was Ulysses, actually, who would have thought it, and he seemed so pleased to see us, and he bought us drinks, and he watched us together and when Cicely went to make her phone call he said, That is the most beautiful girl I have ever seen in my life, and I said, I know she is, and that made me laugh, and when Cicely came back from making her phone call he said, You two are quite simply the two happiest people I have ever met, and that made us both laugh, and after Cicely had gone home to read her letter from Helen he said to me, Benjamin, he said, I’m not one for making predictions, and that already made me laugh, because we have all noticed, everybody who knows Sam has noticed that whenever he says he’s not one for making predictions, it always means that he’s about to make a prediction, and today he said Benjamin, I’m not one for making predictions, but this is a special day and today I’m going to make two, so I said, Oh yes?, and he said, Number One, and he held up his finger, Number One, you and Cicely will have a long and happy life together, and of course I laughed at that, because I know that it’s true, and then he held up another finger and said Number Two, and then he pointed at the newspaper someone had left on the next table, it was a copy of The Sun, with a big picture of Mrs. Thatcher on the front page, Number Two, he said, that woman will never be Prime Minister of this country, and then we both roared with laughter and clinked our glasses and he said, Come on, son, I’ll buy you another, and it seemed to me then that not only does God exist but he must be a genius, a comic genius, to have made everything in the world so funny, everything from Sam and his crazy predictions right down to the dark beery circle my glass has just left on this green coaster.
On a clear, blueblack, starry night, in the city of Berlin, in the year 2003, the restaurant at the top of the Fernsehturm continued to revolve. Sophie, the only daughter of Lois and Christopher, and Patrick, the only son of Philip and Claire, gazed through their picture window at the Volkspark Friedrichshain, more than three hundred metres beneath them.
Neither of them spoke for a while. They sipped their Riesling and looked out of the window and thought about Benjamin.
Finally Sophie said:
What a mess they’re making of that park. You can’t even see the fountain in the middle. Who wants to look at a pile of scaffolding?
It’s like this whole city. One big building site. The same as London.
I know. Why is the world so restless with itself, these days? Then Sophie found herself looking around the restaurant at the other customers. There were a couple of men dining by themselves. One was taking out his glasses to study the menu, the other was tipping brown sugar into his coffee cup from a paper sachet. Their actions seemed banal: but how was anyone to know what storms, what torrents of ideas and memories and dreams were raging through their minds at that instant? She looked at their sad, preoccupied faces and thought again about her Uncle Benjamin, the rapturous joy he had known on that far-off day, and all that had happened since. Patrick noticed the sudden shadow of melancholy in her eyes and said: