England and Other Stories

TRAGEDY, TRAGEDY

‘TRAGEDY, TRAGEDY,’ Mick says. ‘Ever feel there’s too much tragedy about?’

We’re in the canteen. Morning break. Mick has the paper spread, as usual, over the table. He peers at it through his half-rims. Two damp rings where our mugs have been.

I thought: Now what?

‘Tragedy,’ he says. ‘When bad stuff happens, when people die. It’s always a tragedy, it’s tragic. That’s what the papers say. Tragic.’

‘Well, isn’t it?’ I say.

He looks up at me, over the half-rims, and takes his usual pause.

‘When Ronnie Meadows had his heart attack on the fork-lift, was that tragic?’

I have to take a little pause too.

‘Well — no,’ I say, wondering whether it’s the right answer. Whether it’s fair to Ronnie to say it wasn’t tragic.

‘Exactly,’ Mick says. ‘It was just Ronnie Meadows having a heart attack. But if Ronnie had died in, I don’t know, a train crash and it had been in the papers, they’d have called it tragic. See what I mean?’

True. But it’s not as if they’d have mentioned Ronnie at all. I could see the word printed in the paper. I could see the headline: ‘Rail Crash Tragedy’. Not just ‘Rail Crash’. I couldn’t see the headline: ‘Ronnie Meadows Dies in Rail Crash Tragedy’.

I was drumming on the edge of the table with my fingers.

‘So?’ I say.

‘Or if Ronnie hadn’t been a fork-lift driver, if he’d been, I don’t know, a Member of Parliament or someone on TV, and he’d died doing something just as boring — pushing a lawn-mower — they’d have called that tragic.’

‘So?’ I say again.

I thought: Drink your tea, Micky, I’m gasping.

‘So. So it’s just a word. It’s just a word they use in the papers about things that get into the papers. It’s just a word they use because they can’t think of what else to say. It has to be tragic.’

Mick likes to do this. He likes to read the paper — I mean not just look at it, but read it — and he likes to mouth off about whatever he’s reading to anyone he’s with. Which is me, Bob Lewis. But he likes to do it now specially, to make me suffer, now he’s trying to quit. I wanted him to finish his tea and fold up his paper so we could go outside for a smoke.

‘So it has no meaning?’ I say.

I thought: Idiot, why encourage him?

But I also thought it’s not true that no one called Ronnie’s death tragic. Mick wasn’t as close as I was, when the ambulance came. Ronnie’s wife had come too. She had to come. I’ve forgotten her name. Sandra? Sarah? And Mercer was there, in his white shirt, he had to be. He said, ‘It’s tragic, Mrs Meadows. Tragic. . tragic.’ He said it several times. He looked like he didn’t know what else to say, and Ronnie’s wife looked like she wasn’t listening.

Ronnie was still lying under a pallet cover, because it was technically an industrial accident and he couldn’t be moved yet. There was a pointy bit of the pallet cover that was Ronnie Meadows’ nose.

Did Mick hear what Mercer said? As I remember it, he was hanging back a bit. It was over three months ago. Ronnie had to go and drop dead right in the middle of the yard where everyone crosses to get to the gate. Even for a smoke at break time. I saw people skirting round for days, weeks afterwards. I skirted round myself. Then one day I realised, same as everyone else: I’ve just walked over the spot where Ronnie Meadows died and never thought about it.

But now I remembered Mercer saying ‘tragic’ to Ronnie’s wife.

‘Yes it has a meaning,’ Mick says. He takes a breath. I thought: Here we go. He could see me drumming my fingers.

He started wearing the half-rims a couple of months ago. Because of them everyone began calling him ‘Prof’. But I think the glasses only brought out something already there. It was like his face had been waiting for the glasses to complete it. Mick himself had been waiting. Mick Hammond, the man who likes to let you know he thinks.

‘It has a meaning. .’

He was all shy at first about wearing them, but now he fancies himself in them, he likes the business of looking over the top of them. And I quite like Mick in his reading glasses. Because they make him look serious, and that makes me want to laugh.

‘It has a meaning. .’

I could see he really was doing some thinking now, but he was also in a bit of a fix. I thought: You started this, Micky mate.

But mainly I thought: I’m gasping. And I thought: He’s only dawdling over his tea because he’s trying to quit the fags. He doesn’t want to cross the yard with me and slip out the gate to what we used to call Death Row. Till Ronnie Meadows died.

Mick’s a mate, but this whole giving-up thing’s a bastard. It doesn’t seem right for Mick to stop me nipping off for a drag. But it doesn’t seem right for me to nip off anyway without Mick. Even if he’s not going to smoke himself, he should come outside with me and stand beside me while I do. But that’s daft too.

‘If. .’ he says, ‘if. . a famous mountaineer dies while trying to climb a new way up the north face of the Eiger, the papers would call that tragic, but it wouldn’t be.’

That seems a long way from Macintyre’s warehouse, but I let it go. I can see Mick is getting all important with himself. I thought: Stay calm.

‘What would it be?’

‘It would be. . well, heroic maybe.’

‘Or mad,’ I say.

‘No, no, it would be the right sort of death for a mountaineer, wouldn’t it? It would be how a mountaineer might even want to die.’

I don’t say, ‘Who wants to die?’ And I don’t say, ‘Why are we talking about mountaineering?’

‘So?’ I say.

He shifts the half-rims on his nose a little, lifts them up with one finger, lets them drop again. Any moment now he’ll take them off and wipe them. He didn’t just get new glasses, he got a whole new act, a whole new bloody Mick Hammond, or the one that had only been waiting.

Maybe because of Mick and his glasses, I thought: Tragedy’s about acting too. It’s about stuff that happens on stage. Shakespeare and stuff. That’s the thing about it. It’s not real life. And Mercer can’t have been thinking that Ronnie Meadows dropping off his fork-lift was — well, like Hamlet.

Micky Hamlet, I thought. Mickey Mouse.

‘If, on the other hand. .’ he says. I thought: Here we go.

‘. . if a famous mountaineer dies not on the north face of the Eiger, but climbing up some easy-peasy little mountain in, I don’t know, the Lake District, then that’s tragic.’

I didn’t know what to say to this. Mick must have done some thinking, I’ll give him that, to come up with this. I sort of got what he was getting at, but then again I didn’t, I didn’t at all.

I thought: I never knew Mick had a secret hankering to be a mountaineer. And I thought: We’re nowhere near the Lake District, Micky, we’re in Stevenage.

So I said, ‘Why?’

Which is always the killer question. When I said it I couldn’t help thinking of when Gavin, our first, started up with his ‘Why? Why? Why?’. It often sounded more like ‘Wha! Wha! Wha!’ but, God, he knew it was the killer question.

Gavin’s nearly eighteen now.

‘Well, don’t you see?’ Mick says. ‘It’s got something about it. It’s not how a mountaineer would want to die, or should die. It’s—’

‘Just stupid,’ I say.

‘Tragic,’ he says.

Mick Hammond’s totally different from me. But, yes, he’s my mate, has been for years. Search me.

‘If you say so, Mick.’

And those glasses sometimes make Mick look like a granddad, twice my age, though there’s only a year in it.

I didn’t say, ‘If you say so, Prof.’ I thought: How did we get to this? The newspaper. Ronnie Meadows. The Lake District. But it was the newspaper first. I thought: I’m gasping.

And then I thought: If I get up and leave Mick here and go out across the yard to the gate to have a smoke and if I keel over while I’m doing it, would that be tragic? Smoking kills. It says so on the packet. Or would it be more tragic if Mick comes with me, is standing right beside me when it happens, and if he’s smoking too? Or if he isn’t, because he’s trying to give up and he’s just keeping me company?

Or would it be more tragic still if I go and have a smoke all by myself and feel all the better for it and meanwhile Mick here slumps forward and croaks. Slumps forward, with his tea unfinished, onto his newspaper with the word tragic dotted all over it.

‘If you say so,’ I say.

Mick thinks quitting smoking is wise. It goes with the glasses, maybe. But I know he only started trying to quit because of Ronnie. It wasn’t because he’s wise. It was because he was scared.

When Ronnie dropped off the fork-lift onto the yard floor he was still in a sitting-down position. It must have been a zonker of a heart attack.

I thought: Mick’s wrong. He’s talking cobblers. None of those deaths would be tragic.

I’m not a newspaper reader, I’m not any kind of reader, but when I was at primary school and it rained and we couldn’t go out to the playground, there’d be this big box of old Beanos and Dandys brought out for us to read. I used to love reading them — because it wasn’t reading at all. How they used to make me laugh. Biff! Bam! Kerrchow! I never thought then I’d end up being a warehouseman at Macintyre’s, dying for a smoke in my break.

Mick did his nose-shift thing again. He looked very pleased with having won his argument, if that’s what it was, or with me not understanding and just giving up. Or with him getting away — we’d run out of time now — with not having a smoke. If that’s what this was really all about. His little score on that.

Not exactly mountain climbing, Micky.

I thought: Okay, Mick, you’re my mate, if you’re really giving up, then that’s up to you, but next time I’m going out by myself, I’m leaving you here, matey. And don’t you ever start preaching to me, with your new glasses, about how I should give up myself. Don’t you ever start that.

Then I saw, in my head, Mick slumped forward over his spread newspaper, dead as a sack of cement.

And of course I understood. Of course I understood that tragic was a word people used when they didn’t know what else to say — about people dropping dead. But I thought: It’s not because they don’t know what to say. It’s not that at all. It’s because they can’t say the other thing, they can’t ever say it. The thing that goes with tragedy and happens on the stage too, and doesn’t have much to do with Macintyre’s warehouse either.

Biff! Bam! Kerrzang! How I laughed. How I’d love to get out a copy of the Beano in the canteen. Though I’d look a bloody idiot, wouldn’t I? The word you ought to use about that mountaineer in the Lake District, or about Ronnie dropping off the fork-lift still sitting down, or even about Mick here, slumped over his newspaper with his neat little new half-rims all scrunched up against his face, is comic.

Comic. That’s what you ought to say. But you can’t.