Public Library and Other Stories

After life

Ten years ago it was reported in the Evening News that I was dead. LOCAL MAN DIES.

We were in Spain on holiday. When we got home the neighbours came running out to meet us. LOCAL MAN NOT DEAD AFTER ALL.

The paper apologized profusely, sent flowers. I became a minor celebrity. I’d be walking down the street and total strangers would cross the road to shake my hand. I went in to work the following Monday; it was really something, coming back from the dead. Several women even made advances (and I showed them both, well, the one who definitely did, my wedding ring; I am an old-fashioned kind of man at the end of the day).

I’d get home and my wife, Ellie, would kiss me and mean it; our two kids would look at me like I was a king. We held a dinner party for all our friends; we fitted our twenty-eight guests all the way up the stairs in the house and took a group photo with the camera delay button. It was a wonderful night. And the next night Ellie and I sat back into the sofa and watched Top of the Pops and Annie Lennox was on, battleworn but undaunted; she was going to be one of the people singing the new Millennium in. Our two kids cuddled into us, my wife was pregnant. Death wasn’t relevant to me.

Then, yesterday, ten years almost to the day, it happens again. LOCAL MAN DIES.

The report says I was hit in my Mazda by a truck at a road junction, that the truck had been delivering online shopping and that its driver suffered minor injuries.

I phone the police to tell them I’m not dead and that I don’t have and have never had a Mazda. They tell me they’ve no record of me being dead anyway. I phone the paper. I leave a voice message on an automated phone system, which instructs me that the best way to contact them is online. I knock on Chloe’s bedroom door. Chloe flings the door open. She’s the only person in this house who opens a door fully these days.

How can I be of subsistence? she says.

Can I use your computer? I say. Your brother and sister are using theirs, and your mother’s looking up Michael Ball on ours.

Mitch is using mine, she says.

Chloe, I say.

He’s helping me do a genealogy search, she says.

You’re nearly ten, I say. Stop it.

You can use it —, she says.

Thank you, I say.

— but only if you acknowledge Mitch, she says.

Mitch has been a figment of Chloe’s imagination for about four months now. His full name is Mitchell Kenyon. Chloe has somehow come by a DVD of some ancient silent films, just of ordinary everyday people, made by two men called Mitchell and Kenyon a hundred years ago. The films were almost thrown in a skip but now they’re golddust and film buffs are restoring them. I know all this because Chloe watched the DVD obsessively on the lounge DVD player until I complained about wanting to watch TV. Mitch is what she’s decided to call the small boy she’s seen in one, got a crush on, and claimed as companion as surely as if he’d rolled bodily out of one of those old metal cans himself and turned up at our house. When I asked her a couple of weeks ago how old he was, she thought for a moment then said, a hundred and eighteen. I’m putting my foot down, he’s far too old for you, I said. That’s quite witty, Dad, she said. It’s like going out with your great-grandfather, I said. Did I ever tell you the story of your great-grandfather and the jungle? Uh huh, how he was in a war, Chloe said, and they made a road, they cut through the jungle to make it, and the next morning they woke up and the road they’d made had disappeared, the jungle grew back over it overnight, lots of times, and I’m not going out with Mitch, we’re just friends. What, like your mother’s three hundred and fourteen Michael Ball Fan friends on Facebook? I said. The difference is, Chloe said, that Mum’s belief that they’re her friends is a figment of the imagination.

I contact the Evening News by phone and email that night. But in the morning the online report is still pronouncing me dead. So before I go to work, and because the phone won’t connect me to anyone alive, I go in person to the newspaper offices. I speak to someone upstairs in editorial through a security speaker system downstairs outside the front door of the building.

It says here James Gerard is deceased, the box-voice says.

I’m him, I say.

I’ve just checked it again and with all due respect, the voice says.

Something catches my eye through the reinforced glass of the door. A CCTV black bubble in the ceiling of their foyer is blinking a red light at me.

Can you see me? I say.

I wave.

Have you got photographic proof of ID? it says.

I get my driver’s licence out and slap it against the glass.

We’ll need a verification meeting with the newsgroup’s lawyers and your own self’s lawyers present before we can take this discussion any further, it says.

Is this a joke? I say.

The tannoy system clicks off. I hit the doorbell speaker box with the flat of my hand. Two security men appear from nowhere and stare at me through the reinforced glass. I mouth the words I’m not dead at them.

Then I go to work.

I’m alive again, then, I say to Claudine on reception.

Right, Claudine says.

She is slumped at her desk, her face pale in the light off her screen, her chin in her hand like it’s the end of the day. It’s 9.15 a.m.

I circulate the report of my death in an email headed You Only Live Thrice. My computer spellcheck asks me did I mean You Only Live The Rice. I get one email back. Amazing, it says, wow. Can you copy me the file re Friday’s meeting and confirm the confirmation? Nobody phones. Nobody makes a pass at me.

When I get home not a single person has phoned the landline about whether I am alive or dead, though there are two cold-call messages on the answerphone from double glazing life assurance salespeople.

I sit beside Ellie at the dining room table.

Clearly there’s no story in coming back to life, I say.

Mm, she says.

Why has this happened twice to me, d’you think? I say.

Really strange, Ellie says.

She doesn’t take her eye off the screen.

Can I use the laptop? I say.

I’m busy on it, Ellie says.

Yeah, but all you’re doing is looking up pictures of koalas, I say.

She turns and glares at me.

Chlamydia. Eucalyptus shortage. Drought. The koalas are dying, she says. And there’s nothing we can do.

There is desperation in her eyes. I look away. I don’t say anything. Then I go upstairs.

I stand outside Nathan’s room. At Hallowe’en a boy in the same school year as him was kicked to real death by three sixteen-year-olds outside a kebab shop, apparently because he was wearing gloves.

The door is shut. Foreign-sounding music is playing in his room. I knock.

He’s watching Euro porn, Emily shouts through her own shut bedroom door. He needs cognitive behavioural therapy for being fascistly satisfied like the rest of the brainless masses by brainless wank and if he wanks in the upstairs bathroom again I’ll tell all the girls in his class what he does all night, the wanker.

Emily, I say to her door. Don’t use words like that in this house.

Which ones? she shouts back.

Cognitive, behavioural and therapy, I say.

Chloe opens her door.

I think I can be of persistence, she says.

I look up the Evening News website on Chloe’s computer and find that news of my death has been syndicated to all local news sources and has also spread to 1,663 sites. The response piece I sent last night saying I’m actually alive is published in their ‘Opinions’ blogspace. Below it is a post from someone called sophiecatxyz who castigates whoever is pretending to be James Gerard a man who has clearly died tragically for causing pain and emotional upset to a grieving family. Below this someone called Doctormyeyes has written: Like Michael Jacskon he may be dead but he will never ever die. I click on a link to a blog by someone called truthizoutther who says I’m definitely dead as a dodu as a doornail his coast is toast RIP JAME GERARD dead meat accept it man only zombies fight the force submit ok?? lol.

I fill in the little reply box. At least I’m more alive than you are, I write. At least I can spell dodo properly, something you’re clearly too braindead to do.

I sign my name. I thwack the send icon. I immediately feel better. Then I feel much worse and wish I hadn’t sent anything to anyone. It is somehow a defeat to have engaged at all.

Chloe is playing with a plastic pony on her bed. She is galloping it up to a ridge in the covers and making it jump over the ridge. Each time she makes the ridge a little higher. I watch her form with her hands and knees a particularly high ridge.

Chloe, I say. Am I dead?

We are certain that you are not dead, she says.

Who? I say. You and the horsie?

I’m not a child, she says. You know perfectly well who.

Chloe, I say. You’ve been told.

She squares the pony in front of the high wall of bedspread and duvet. Then she starts pressing buttons on her phone.

Who are you texting at this time of night? I say.

My pony, to wish him luck, she says.

Does your pony have a mobile? I say.

Dad, she says as if the word dad means stupid.

What about Rip Van Mitchell? I say. Does he have one?

Chloe shakes her head.

It’s like when the one eyed giant shut the sailor in the cave and started eating his shipmates, she says, and the sailor has to think how to get them all out of there, and what they do is they sharpen the phone mast and they stick it right in its eye.

What, like with the Cyclops? I say.

And then they camouflage themselves and get out of there, Chloe says. Because there’s so much more of the journey still to go. But they have to be ingenious to survive. He has to be a nobody. I’m A Nobody, Get Me Out Of Here. Do you want to stay for the Puissance?

The what? I say. Are you doing the Cyclops at school?

Half horse, half bike, Chloe says. Mitch thinks that humans will evolve like in Charles Darwin to have a square screen in our foreheads instead of having eyes. We will look at their screen to see everything we need to know. We won’t need to cogitate any more.

Enough of the Mitching, I say.

Are you finished on my MacBook? she says. Put it here. No, closed. It’s the water jump.

It takes me a while to get it. Cyclops: half horse, half bike. When I finally do I’m in bed, lying awake again next to my sleeping wife. I’d come downstairs and she’d been looking up the symptoms of diseases. Why? I said. To see if I’ve got any of them, she said. Are you feeling unwell? I asked. She looked at me in surprise. No, she said, not at all.

I get out of bed and put my dressing gown on. I stand for five minutes in the dark. I look out of the window at the front gardens of our neighbours in the streetlight, at the way the light reflects off the roofs of all our cars.

Then I shake Ellie awake. I bang on all the bedroom doors. I tell everybody to meet me round the dining room table. I put the kettle on. I look in the fridge. There are some olives, grapes. I slice a carrot into sticks and upend a tub of hummus on to a plate. I open a bottle of wine.

As soon as she gets into the living room Emily presses the TV remote.

Put it off, Emily, I say.

I’m watching it, she says.

Turn it down, I say.

She turns it fractionally down and angles her chair away from the table towards it. As the rest of them come downstairs bleary, the Twin Towers erupt again onscreen and I remember seeing it for the first time, I was passing a TV shop in town and every screen was showing the same thing. A programme called The Top One Hundred Things You Need To Know About The Noughties is on. A fast edit montage flashes up images of the Cheeky Girls, a MySpace page, a broadband hub, a page of Tesco’s online site, a newscaster with the words WMD on the screen behind her, Tony Blair laughing, the boys who present I’m A Celebrity in the jungle, an iPod, the word Twitter, a melting icecap, the painted C of the Congestion Charge, people holding little plastic bags in departures, a copy of The Da Vinci Code, the logo for YouTube, a newspaper hoarding saying MPS EXPENSES DUCKPOND SCANDAL, Damien Hirst’s skull, some logos for banks, Kirsty and Phil, people being vaccinated by a doctor in a surgery, Andy Murray flexing his arm-muscles, a PowerBook, a contestant for Big Brother coming out to a booing crowd, the screen of an iPhone, Baghdad in flames, a bendy bus.

The decade between my deaths.

I make Chloe put the extra chair for Mitch back where it was, against the wall.

The kids look exhausted. My wife looks at the food on the table and the full glass of wine by her hand. She looks at me with tiredness and suspicion.

I just thought we should all, you know, talk, I say.

It’s half past two in the morning. What do you want to talk about? she says.

Anything you like, I say.

She looks away.

I look at my son.

Nathan? I say.

I mime taking earphones out of my ears. He does as I ask.

Start the conversation, son, I say. Anything. Anything random. Tell us what you were doing earlier this evening.

Ha ha! Emily says.

Nathan has gone bright red. I change the subject, quick.

Tell us about what you think has most changed over the last ten years, I say. The difference between then and now.

The indifference between then and now, he means, Emily says.

Nathan looks wasted. He is far too thin and as dark-eyed as his mother. I realize it’s now the norm for him to look as though he’s permanently flinching.

It isn’t porn, he says.

He looks straight at Emily.

It’s bike gear systems, he says. It’s fourteen, twenty-one, twenty-seven gear systems and speed hubs.

That’s crap, Emily says. I saw. You were watching a porn movie with a gang bang in a prison.

I was not, he says. That’s a YouTube clip of a film star in a foreign film where she goes to prison by mistake and in the cell these men crowd round her and sing a song. And she is really beautiful, and innocent. I don’t mean innocent in a perv way, I mean innocent of the crime she is put in prison for.

He has gone bright red from the neck to the roots of his hair. But he stands up decisively, pushes his chair back, stands up, leaves the room.

Geek, Emily says without taking her eye off the TV.

Emily, that’s enough, Ellie says.

Yeah, well, if he can go to bed so can I, she says. And the difference between then and now is that now I’m supposed to wear clothes that make me look like a prostitute and if I don’t I’m not a proper girl. And now it’s okay to be friends with Hana at school and everything but out in the world I’m supposed to think she’s one of them not us and that her family are them not us too and that if her big brother isn’t a terrorist already then it’s only a matter of time.

She switches the TV off on her way out.

My wife stands up. She stares at the off screen.

The difference, she says in the after-TV silence, is that over the last ten years new communication technology has brought people so much closer together.

She gives no sign that she’s joking. She picks up as many of the things on plates as she can carry, backs out of the room, lets the door fall shut behind her. I hear her putting things away in the fridge. Then I hear her going slowly upstairs.

Chloe has her head down on her arm on the table. Her eyes are shut.

What about you? I say.

The difference between then and now, is, Chloe says. I wasn’t here then, and now I am.

A moment later she’s asleep. I look at the top of her head, at the way her hair knows to shape itself. I pick her up and shoulder her, carry her upstairs, tuck her in.

On my way out of her room I see the beloved DVD on the computer desk. I take it with me and go back downstairs.

I turn the sound down low.

These films are all from the first decade of the last century, the voice-over tells me. They were throwaways, made for a quick buck. It’s a miracle they still exist. ‘Local Films For Local People.’ ‘Come And See Yourself On The Screen As Living History!’ They’d be made in the afternoon and shown that same night in touring fairs or theatres, and the filmmakers would cram as many local faces in as possible so the number of people paying to see themselves would be maximum too.

I switch the voice-over off so I can see better. The first years of the last century flicker away in silence. The films are of happy-looking crowds, schoolyards full of children demonstrating to the camera how healthy and happy they are, workers waving and smiling. There’s quite a bit of poverty. But in film after film of seaside promenades, football matches, people in hats at Whitsun, people at fairs, people rolling Easter eggs down hills, the hundreds and hundreds of dead working people wave their hats and handkerchiefs in circles in the air, wave at the camera, at themselves. The children are especially curious and excited. It strikes me they’ll be cannon fodder for Ypres and the Somme in just a decade’s time.

I get to a film made in North Shields in 1901. It begins with hardy-looking girl-fishgutters, a shot of boats, a large crowd gathered round a harbour. Then, in among the people, a small boy in a flat cap notices the camera and turns towards it as if towards me, here, now, more than a century later sitting in this room of empty chairs in the middle of the night. He resembles Chloe slightly. He disappears out of frame, then ducks back in. That’s what she’d do. He doesn’t wave. He isn’t delighted. He’s questioning, grave. He means business. He wants to know. There is no other way to put it: he is completely alive. The life in him pierces me.

He is ten years old at the turn of a new century and less than a minute long. For as many of those seconds as he gets the chance to, he looks the future in the eye. He walks towards it, holding its eye steady in both of his.