Diary of a Somebody

by Brian Bilston

  a) don’t know

  b) not sure

  c) probably

  d) no idea

  e) maybe check the cupboard under the stairs

  I may have got some of the answers muddled up but it was a start, I suppose.

  Wednesday July 25th

  Ink Nothing of It

  In that cheap rented room, he lay for weeks

  upon the threadbare carpet, half-hid,

  underneath virgin printer paper sheets

  and some empty inkjet cartridges.

  The finer things in life I always did lack

  because of the cyan, magenta, yellow and black.

  ‘I knew him when he was up at Cambridge,’

  said one at the funeral, ‘Not a loner,

  then, by any means. Popular, quite rich.

  And, back in those days, quite free of toner.’

  Pity me, the penniless, penurious fellow,

  because of the black, magenta, cyan and yellow.

  In his twenties he would do what he liked,

  never stopped to think before he would print.

  In full colour, too, not just black and white.

  The money bled away faster than ink.

  I am off-colour, off-line, off-print, off-centre

  because of the yellow, cyan, black and magenta.

  Along with the body they found a note,

  taped to the printer and stained with blood:

  ‘I have run out of ink, money and hope,

  and now I am running out for good.’

  There’s nothing left at all of who I am

  because of the yellow, magenta, black and cyan.

  My finances are fading faster than the pages that emerge from my inkjet printer. I began to print out The End of the Affair packs only to find my fine-tuned analysis streaked with nothingness. The subsection on The Roman Catholic Novel in the Twentieth Century was particularly affected and my Suggestions for Further Reading barely legible. I cycled into town, blanching as I handed over the money for new toner cartridges.

  Thursday July 26th

  Love Letters Carved in Rock

  For you, no ordinary stick of rock,

  not some standard candied stock

  from a faded seaside town,

  no kiss-me-quick before I drown.

  Instead, this home made confection,

  its letters engrained to perfection.

  Five years I spent to create this art!

  Your name runs through its heart,

  as it runs through mine. Red strips

  of sugar, glucose, water mixed

  into molten calligraphic stasis,

  white rock pouring in the spaces

  to shape the letters of your name.

  For you’re as sweet as candy cane

  and my love is – what do you mean

  that’s not how you spell Siobhan?

  Anyone can make a mistake. That’s what I kept telling myself, anyway, as I sat quietly at the end of the table, listening to them all discuss Brighton Rock. That business with Liz at the beginning of the month had knocked me about a little – and I must have muddled it up in my head. Sure, that work on the Roman Catholic Novel in the Twentieth Century hadn’t been wasted, and a cynical worldview seemed to permeate through both books, but I didn’t have much to give beyond that. I could have counted all the characters I knew from Brighton Rock on my little pinkie.

  It wasn’t until I was halfway home that I took the handouts out of my bag. I stuffed them in a bin.

  Friday July 27th

  It was all Darren’s fault. We should take 27th Club on tour, he said, and make a proper weekend of it. It had sounded so liberating a few months ago, as we anticipated our very own epiphanic Woodstock, in which we not only discovered a new soundtrack to our lives, but somehow better understood who we truly were, while sitting in a field somewhere deep in the haze of a golden English summer.

  We hadn’t envisaged that the weather might be like this – lashing rain and blackened skies – nor that we would spend six hours queueing on the M62 for the turn-off to Hull. For much of the day, all we’d seen was Cars, Traffic and The Jam.

  And we certainly hadn’t foreseen that confusion over the ticket-ordering which meant that we weren’t off to Tribeca, hipster festival of experimental music, after all, but Tribfest, advertised as the UK’s ‘second’ largest annual gathering of tribute acts.

  By the time Darren had managed to pitch his tent in the driving rain and I’d settled into my yurt, the first day was nearly over, and we only just managed to catch the end of Phoney M murdering ‘Rasputin’.

  Saturday July 28th

  Pyramid Stage

  I

  think

  he was

  twenty-one

  years of age /

  when he went through

  his pyramid stage. He did

  not know what triggered that /

  strange urge to be a ziggurat. He

  reached his apex then had a seizure. /

  I think about him to this day. Amazing Giza.

  I feel like I’ve landed in one of those parallel worlds that Dylan sometimes talks about. Everything in it is the same as this world, only a little bit more rubbish. It rains here, only heavier. There is mud here, but it is gloopier. Instead of the Pyramid Stage, we have the Triangle Stage. And then, of course, there are the bands: Proxy Music, Fleetwood Mock, Mad Donna, The Velvet Underpants, Sample Minds, Punk Floyd, New Hors d’oeuvres, The Heebie Beegees.

  The only noticeable improvement in this new world is that I live in a yurt. I found myself spending an increasing amount of time in it as the day wore on. Darren tells me that it’s not in the spirit of things, and I’m missing out on the authentic festival experience. Still, I couldn’t help but notice his look of envy when he visited my spacious accommodation – with its underfloor heating, Wi-Fi and shower-room – in the middle of the night, to tell me about the leak in his tent. Water had been pouring in for several hours, he said, and, judging by the state of him, it appeared it had.

  But friendship knows no boundaries and so I sent him away with an old T-shirt of mine, having discovered it at the bottom of my suitcase, which was lying unpacked on the Egyptian cotton sheets of my spare bed.

  Sunday July 29th

  Everybody Yurts

  When the day’s been long and the night,

  The night chills you to the bone.

  When you’re sure you’ve had enough

  Of mudslides, well hang on.

  Let your tent pegs go, let me please advise

  That everybody yurts sometimes.

  Sometimes standard camping’s wrong.

  It’s only suited to the strong.

  When the ground is hard as stone,

  And it feels like ten below.

  If you think you’ve had too much of this life, well hang on.

  ’Cos everybody yurts. Take comfort in king-size beds.

  Everybody yurts.

  No frozen hands. Oh no. No more frozen hands.

  From sheep’s wool, it’s wove.

  Oh, oh, oh, wood-burning stove.

  If you think you may not survive, and your tent is not that strong,

  When you think you’ve had too much of this life to hang on.

  Well, when your body hurts most times,

  As you try to rise . . .

  Everybody yurts sometimes.

  And everybody yurts sometimes.

  The cold’s gone, cold’s gone.

  Darren was strangely irritable today and barely had a civil word to say to me. I suspect this may be due to the heavy cold he seems to be coming down with. But we hung in there as best we could, sticking around for the headline act, an R.E.M. tribute band called Are.We.Them?

  They were clearly not. Sophie and I had seen the genuine article all those years ago. Only a few hazy images of their performance have stayed with me: Peter Buck with an electric mandolin; Michael Stipe bizarrely wearing a football shirt; a cover pla
yed in tribute to Kurt Cobain. But I remember everything else about that night: Sophie in her denim jacket and DMs; the way she jumped up and down in excitement as they walked on stage; the look of wonder on her face as she watched the day’s sun sink slowly behind the stadium; the journey back, with Sophie’s head in my lap as she slept; and the reflection in the bus window of me, smiling back at myself, a shiny, happy person.

  Monday July 30th

  Breaking News

  The news seems broken now,

  nearly every day.

  I shall gather up its pieces

  and throw it all away.

  Breaking news: I am broke.

  My front door was almost wedged shut by the stack of mail that greeted me on my return. Amongst the reminders of unpaid bills for books, hotel bills, shed furnishings and luxury yurt accommodation was a bank statement coloured in red.

  My redundancy money has gone and my overdraft limit is exhausted. There remains £10,000 in the account for the ‘Poets on the Western Front’ trip but that, of course, is untouchable. I need money – and quickly – before the mortgage payments and utility bills drag me further under.

  Incredibly, the sun has emerged from all this rain; it shines down and gently mocks me.

  Tuesday July 31st

  The Met Office is forecasting a heatwave. I am in search of a brainwave. I have been attempting to identify possible solutions which might alleviate my financial difficulties. I didn’t get very far. I looked at the list I’d written:

  Sell all my books.

  Hire out my stupid, useless writer’s shed for garden parties.

  Get a proper job again.

  Earn money from writing.

  Option 1 is possible but ill-advisable given the structural support provided to the house. Option 2 is also possible but income may be sporadic. Option 3 is possible but would squat on my life and crush my soul. Option 4 has proved to be impossible, and so I have decided to pursue that further.

  August

  Wednesday August 1st

  Chandrima has suggested that all members of Poetry Club should read a poem at Douglas’s funeral tomorrow.

  I sat on the garden bench with a dozen anthologies spread out in front of me, slowly reddening under the mid-day sun. It took me ages to find anything appropriate; most of the popular funeral poems seem overly morbid, maudlin or mawkish, and I’m not altogether sure that’s what he would have wanted.

  I tried Kipling but couldn’t find anything quite right. In the end, I settled on Noel Coward’s ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’. He would have enjoyed its comedy and redolence of colonialism.

  Thursday August 2nd

  Funeral Shoes (Stop all the Crocs)

  Stop all the Crocs, cut out these foam clogs,

  Don’t let your footwear go to the dogs,

  Silence the pavements from the Crocs’ fearsome slap,

  Bring out the dustbin, put your Crocs into that.

  Let the easyJets gather and circle in glee

  To write on the sky the words CROC: R.I.P.

  Organise parties and grand cavalcades,

  Host dinners, bake cakes, throw victory parades.

  He was her North, her South, her West and East,

  Her Mini-Milk, her Fab, her Chocolate Feast.

  But such thoughts were all packed away in a box,

  From the moment she saw him wearing Crocs.

  Crocs are passé now: discard all your pairs;

  Lob them onto the waves, recite a prayer.

  Watch them drift out to where sea and sky meet,

  And beg for forgiveness from your poor feet.

  Douglas’s funeral was not well-attended. Poetry Club represented about half of those gathered together to say their farewells. But amongst the others assembled, much consideration had gone into providing him with the kind of send-off he would have wanted: there was a guard of honour; his coffin was draped in the Union Jack; the ‘Last Post’ was bugled. And then it was the turn of Poetry Club with our selections: Rossetti, Dickinson, Barrett Browning, Tennyson, Wordsworth. Toby Salt read an extract from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, in its original Chinese.

  We walked across the road together to the pub. As Toby Salt’s footsteps clacked behind me, my loathing of him reached new levels. I was munching on a cheese sandwich and wondering what kind of monster wears crocs to a funeral when Liz came over.

  ‘Funerals aren’t much fun, are they?’ she said.

  ‘Not much,’ I said. ‘About as much fun as weddings, I suppose.’

  She looked at me for a moment.

  ‘What is it that you’re afraid of, Brian?’ she asked.

  I wasn’t quite sure what she was getting at so I started to murmur things at the carpet.

  ‘Death. Life. Spiders. Toby Salt’s poetry. These cheese sandwi—’

  ‘Happiness?’

  I looked up sharply. I knew the answer to that.

  ‘Happiness is a social construct. Probably.’

  Liz sighed. From the corner of the pub, I could hear Toby Salt’s voice droning on about his new book. Any moment now, he’d start bellowing out a poem.

  ‘Is it?’ she said. ‘Is it really? And what about me? Am I a social construct, too?’

  ‘No, of course not! You’re—’

  I tried to think of the right word. Real? Palpable? Beautiful? Treacherous?

  ‘You’re—’

  Tangible? Corporeal? Sexy? Amphibious?

  ‘You’re—’

  Amphibious? I was just thinking random adjectives now. For once, I had Toby Salt to thank as I heard him launch lustily into a Petrarchan sonnet and, mercifully, I was snapped out of my reverie.

  ‘Sorry, Liz. But I’ve got to go. It’s been really good talking to you again.’

  I fled the pub, cursing myself and my stupid brain. Words, why do you always fail me when I need you most?

  Friday August 3rd

  Dylan is in Marbella from tomorrow with Sophie and Stuart. He has sent me a link to where they’re staying. It’s a villa with two heated pools, three bathrooms, a Jacuzzi, an on-call maid and dinner service. There is ready access to a local golf course.

  I thought again about the prospect of our week together in sodden North Yorkshire. He’ll find it such a let-down, which I suppose is how he must find me.

  If only there was some way I could make a success of my writing. I looked out at my shed’s accusatory silhouette. It occurred to me that I’d been going about it all wrong: it’s not about where I write but what I write. I’ve just not stumbled on the right topic or format yet. I closed my eyes and focused for three solid minutes but could make no further progress.

  Saturday August 4th

  I think I have it!

  I’d been moping around, worrying about my money problems, and thinking about Douglas’s funeral and our poetry readings, when the answer suddenly came to me . . . DEATH!

  It had been a real struggle to find a good poem for the service. The selections were fine as far as they went but they all seemed a little too familiar, impersonal and rather dated. There is, it would seem, a real dearth of decent modern poems about death.

  This was the gap in the market I’d been hoping for! Could I write something that might corner the funeral market in the way that, say, ‘Happy Birthday’ had the whole birthday thing sewn up? Or Slade’s ‘Merry Xmas, Everybody’ dominated the festive season? If I could, I’d be quids in.

  The more I thought about it, the more advantages I could see. I wrote out a mini-business plan, including a section on market potential:

  1.Everyone dies at some stage in their life, typically at the end of it. That’s a large market segment to go at, particularly if this segment could be targeted pre-death.

  2.Everyone experiences grief and bereavement. This represents a fantastic opportunity for a poem written with tact and sensitivity.

  3.Competition is weak and divided. Existing death poems have typically been written out of personal experience rather than a cool assessment
of market requirements and an in-depth understanding of the voice of the customer.

  I sat back in front of an old episode of Rebus, smiling to myself. I just had to write the thing now.

  Sunday August 5th

  First up with any new project: a visit to the bookshop. I bought a new anthology of poems on death and bereavement as well as a few other titles: Grieving for Dummies; Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying; Death: A Graveside Companion; Coping with Loss; A Guide to London Cemeteries; and James Joyce’s The Dead and Other Stories.

  Arriving home, I realised I’d forgotten this month’s book group selection: Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. I went back to the bookshop to pick one up and, while I was at it, Allan Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems and three walking maps of the North Yorkshire coast. It had been an expensive day but I managed to find the money from somewhere.

  Monday August 6th

  It is proving much harder than I thought to write a really good funeral poem. It’s very easy to move from the universal to the personal and – as a result – potentially limit a poem’s audience. To circumvent this problem, I am considering a multiple-choice format:

  Farewell, my dear departed father / mother /

  sister / brother / granddad / granny / lover /

  auntie / uncle / cousin / friend / associate*

  (* please delete as appropriate).

  I will miss your generosity of spirit /

  good sense of humour / patience beyond limit /

  growth mindset / assorted flaws and imperfections /