and death didst come to me as in a dream and I didst sit bolt upright in bed and scream and my pajamas verily most heavily didst cream
Jiiiiiimmmmmmmyyyyyy he said floating sulphurously over the bed
am I dead I said no don’t worry he said at least not yet
so what the hell is it some kinda sick social visit
so…I don’t know… it was just getting boring he said, yawning then carefully resetting his jaw in the sling he had to wear round his skull instead of hair to keep his jaw there
what d’ya mean – eternity? I mean – you’ve got my sympathy mate, but as far as I can see that’s nothing to do with me you’re having a laugh I’ve got to get up in an hour and a half
somebody’s grumpy he said maybe you should try going to bed a weensy bit earlier at night then maybe you wouldn’t be so clippy, alright?
yeah? well I heard death could be agonising but I’d rather have that than patronising
don’t be mean, he said sadly descending to the foot of the bed where he smouldered with a strange intensity that lacked discernible heat or density which I have to admit was all pretty new to me
sorry, I said – you caught me off guard I try to be understanding but it’s hard especially when you’re so freakin’ charred does that mean hell is hot or not is there a God? Jesus Christ I hope not
actually no there isn’t he sighed carefully putting his scythe aside crooking one bony knee over the other idly picking fluff from my cover
you see – Jimmy – God is just a story you tell about angels, prophets, heaven and hell a touching way of making sense of the fundamental questions of existence to which the answer is oxygen and carbon and if I’ve rocked your world I beg your pardon
okay – so – I don’t get it Death comes to visit and you want me to forget it?
I’m an allegory, dear a gorgeous but hokey souvenir a byproduct of consciousness he said, clapping his phalanges you mortals really are such a tease you ask about God – well…take a look around there are millions of deities to be found in any place you care to look from Weston-super-Mare to Çatalhöyük I could talk you through the creation myths but there’s nothing duller than shopping lists
he gaped at me gappily seemingly quite happily with what I took to be affection and I have to admit the conversation was heading in a wholly unexpected direction
so.. how am I supposed to feel now that I know that God’s not real?
Who knows? said Death as the clock struck twelve you’ll just have to figure it out for yourself and with a hopelessly boney stamp and an inexplicable but theatrical dimming of the lamp he flashed me a look that was scary but appealing then shot straight up through the bedroom ceiling
I sat there wondering what I’d just seen I mean for someone supposedly fictional he was pretty vocal and visual
but just as I lay back on the pillow there was another booming billow of fire and smoke and the very same cloaky bloke came floating back
Whaaaat? I said sitting up in bed Was that all a joke? Were you toying with me? Don’t be silly he said tip-toeing round the bed trying to act all cool & blythe I just came back to fetch my scythe
I don’t know what it’ll take to make me get up & go
maybe some kinda surgery where a blurry surgeon emerges from the pub struggling to pull his scrubs up falls backwards through the theatre doors to the ironic applause of all the bored nurses who yawn as he curses and the instrument tray searches for the cranial saw he finally finds by his crocs on the floor then theatrically sets in a roar to bloodily buzz and clunk with a liberal spray and a chippy chunk till someone taps him on his shoulder and he turns and gives a sexy smoulder that really only emphasises how much older he is than anyone else there but he’s too drunk to care and as the anaesthetist gags he turns back and grabs my bangs and flips back my hair to the horrified screams of everyone there and pops off the top of my bony little mop like the cap from a bottle of Grolsch
takes a step back
gives his knuckles a crack
has a quick snack of a baloney sandwich he snitched from the bins on the way in
then with a tuneless hum pokes my bulging cerebellum for a bit with the exploratory tip of a ripped glove then with one last shove dives elbows in with a rusty probe one of the nurses throws at him which he rotates & rattles in ever growing circles shouting ‘Is this any good? I don’t know! Fuck it!’ alarming as a farmer with a broom handle in a bucket
I think you’ll find that’s neurosurgery, in essence you’re better off sticking to antidepressants
[EXPERIMENT: close your left eye / hold your left arm straight out in front of you, thumb up / hold your right arm alongside it, also thumb up / staring at your left thumb, slowly move the right thumb to the right / until it disappears / this is your blind spot]
when the thumb disappears you don’t see a blank but a continuation of the high street bank or the gunky green glass of the goldfish tank or the motorcycle jacket belonging to Frank or whatever damned thing that happens to be there when you suddenly stick both thumbs in the air
you see – the spot where the optic nerve plugs in the retina lacks sufficient photoreceptor so you’d always have a patch that was blank if your brain didn’t step in and clone more bank (or motorcycle jacket, or gunky tank depending which way you’re facing and the thumb-sized hole that needs replacing)
I suppose you’d really have to say for something that sits in the dark all day the brain does a lot of heavy lifting the supersensory sorting and sifting of an infinite mass of incoming data from Alan Partridge to Alligator busily roughing out life’s variation in one long thumbs up hallucination
Dad came to me again last night drifting through the door without touching the floor to hover at the foot of the bed ‘Alright, Jimmy boy?’ he said I said ‘Yeah, Dad. Yeah. Alright?’
I sat up and rubbed my eyes he was hovering there in his old string vest and his big baggy trousers were a big muddy mess like he’d just come in from hoeing the rows to lay in trays of seed potatoes his yearly gardening exercise
he rootled in his pockets fetched out a tube of wine gums asked me if I wanted one tossed me a couple but soon discovered they vanished when they were halfway over – his wormy eyes rolled in their sockets
HE could chew, though which he did, noiselessly ‘So…. got any questions for me?’ he said, sighing, looking round the room ‘Only be quick, ‘cos the cock crows soon and that’s my signal I really gotta go’
the odd thing is I’d been thinking about that how if my Dad was still alive would I really be brave and ask him about when he was a kid the kinds of things he and HIS dad did or how it all started in the Pimlico flat
or why they had such an enormous family when they were essentially broke whether he was a faithful bloke or whether he really did have a fling with that woman from work, and that kinda thing but I just kept quiet, unfortunately
I wanted to ask what happened to him why he got so stuck, why things went bad considering the breaks he’d had why in the end he couldn’t be free and carried on living so painfully having more kids, calling them Jim
but I couldn’t; this wasn’t the time ghost or otherwise it was none of my business other than to bear some kinda witness to a careworn father who inspired his son to lay down yet another ghostly poem words like potatoes, sprouting in a line
I spoke to my brother on the phone for a bit he’d just been down the gravel pit to check out some fancy diving apparatus its general operational status and whether the neck was watertight (thankfully that turned out alright) he said four hundred feet down on the gravel bed they’d sunk various things to keep you interested like an old, redundant airforce jet with a crayfish pilot waving from the cockpit
he asked me how the writing was going and whether there was any money in poems and why don’t I write about dogs instead with an influencer’s blog on the internet and how many books in total I’ve sold and suddenly I felt as pressured and cold as if it was me down there on the gravel bed with bubbles & fish swirling round my head and emerging through the gritty gloom a sunken, redundant writer’s room with a lamp, a chromebook, a desk with a drawer, a crayfish writer with a pen in its claw
it’s early morning and I’m driving to work north along the A272 if you must know following an old van with a laughing monkey decal on its back
I think about it for a while at least until we get to the roundabout
how maybe this van appears now and again driving around with a monkey on its back and if you fall in behind it you crash and the last thing you see through the flames is the laughing monkey
the police inspect the road apply the local highway code look at the brakes think about possible driving mistakes take witness statements call in expert traffic agents
in short they scratch their heads and stamp the report DRIVER ERROR unaware of the truly terrifying terror of the old van haunting B roads forever with a monkey sticking its tongue out in a mirror where YOU’RE the mirror and you scream and shiver and haul on the wheel and the tyres squeal and you end up fatally ploughed in a field with your head cracked open and your brains running out for the raucous crows all flapping about
jim clayton 