The Obituarist

The obituarist sits in an old chair on the balcony of his third floor office, with a glass of red wine in hand, as the light burns quietly out over Salford. It is just after eight when the sun sinks behind the Liverpool Warehousing Company building across the quay and reduces the sky to a dark, faintly ominous blue. Summer, a season he once despised for its climate, has finally arrived: the air hangs heavy and close, injected with the alluring scent of pollen, and it is warm even at this hour. Later it will cool and, as always, he will be forced back inside to sleep or call a cab.

The doors to his office are open wide, and he shoots a look inside to the clock on the wall. It is later than he imagined which is good because it has been a private rule for the past three of four years that he does not touch a drop of liquor before eight o’ clock unless he has company. Such company calls less and less these days.He lights three candles and sips from the tumbler of wine. He holds the liquid in his mouth for a few seconds, lips tingling in excitement, tongue swelling with flavour, then swallows. If the first cut is the deepest then the first swig is certainly the sweetest.

It has not been a difficult day. He wrote for three or four hours, drank a variety of teas, read nearly an entire chapter of a Hitler biography, ate lunch, and even found a little time to start on the Times crossword. It is a newspaper he cannot bear to read (he has only ever bought the Guardian as a news source, even before he began working for it) but its cryptic clues are too much to resist. He figures he will return to it in an hour or two, but for now he is content with gazing out over the beautiful Northern oil painting before him. London, with its interminable rush hours and expansive arrogance, seems like a dream now. For seven years Manchester has been his life. Sometimes he misses the dirty fingernails and filthy cough of the underground, or window shopping for instruments he can neither play nor afford on Denmark Street; and occasionally he longs to embrace once more the capital’s smoky, electric topography of culture, but aside from this he is – in utterly relative terms - ‘happy’ here. Each day in the North West is a fantastic replication of the last. In the summer he awakens to find the weather grey and dull, only for a glorious sun to climb through the clouds at midday. In the winter it simply stays grey, punctuated only by buckets of rain and the occasional hailstorm.

The phone rings. Once, twice, three times… Somebody – a notable Princeton lecturer perhaps or a member of the British parliament – is dead. He knows this without moving, without leaving his chair to cease the incessant, interfering alarm bell on his desk. They only ever ring on the off-chance. The editors and the deflated-voiced men and women at the newsdesk know he stays in the office until late, but tonight he is jaded and his bones seem to be groaning at the outside world.He does not answer and eventually the ringing stops.

Time was, he’d have torn himself apart, pondering desperately the identity of the ill-fated human being he would soon be writing about until he had battered, bruised and beaten himself into submission. Then he would call them back and start work. Just like his desire for the company of others, that nagging feeling seldom knocks anymore.

He is thirty-eight, and he worries about his health. Every headache is a belated hangover, each chest pain a testament to the atrocities of having once been an over zealous smoker. He does not miss cigarettes. They are a youthful, not quite so innocent habit, just one of the many perks of being young. Even with a fag clamped between his teeth he had known that one day he would quit. Now he finds solace in writing angst-ridden, should-know-better poetry; tea leaves have replaced tobacco in his life and he relishes each variation on the form in the same way he had once relished each blissful inhalation.

The obituarist enjoys what he does. At University he had fantasised about becoming a Writer. In essays he would spell the word with a capital letter, as if it was the noblest of all professions, suspended with the gods. It wasn’t until he was twenty-five that he realised he wasn’t good enough to forge worlds, create character arcs, write sub-plots and, ultimately, make any kind of money from doing so. The world was alight with authors, and every single one of them was, to his knowledge, far more blessed than he.

He wrote his first obituary at the age of twenty-two when his girlfriend was killed in a car crash in South London. He didn’t have to think about the words; they just spilled out of him one dark, alcoholic night in Soho.

Since that day he has written thousands of obituaries - for writers, poets, footballers, MPs, physicists, historians, actors, even royalty. Sometimes he cons himself into believing it is the truest form of storytelling. Each life has a beginning, a middle and an end; moments of ecstasy, of heartbreak and of pain. He has never suffered from writer’s block. It simply doesn’t happen.

The obituarist endures the burden of his existence (if he can call it that) in a kind of self-imposed reclusion. Away from the page there is only Julia, a political columnist at the paper. She is twelve years younger than him, bright and funny, and sometimes she calls him, or he calls her, and they walk nowhere in particular together, inhaling the people. In the five years since they first met they have been almost everywhere, from the red bricks of Salford housing estates to the bright lights of Oxford Road. They only ever walk after dusk, and know nothing of each other’s past lives. It is self – and, by proxy, a mutual – validation their meetings serve. It is love, friendship and distraction.

The streets are quiet tonight, the roads less so, and the water looks black and cold. He imagines bringing Julia here, to the cosy comforts of his office balcony, and wonders what it would be like to enjoy the comforting frame of another human being beside him, not speaking or holding his hand, but just enjoying the world. This will never happen. The obituarist long ago resigned himself to the philosophy of George Bernard Shaw: there are two great tragedies in life – one is not to get your heart’s desire; the other is to get it. It is one of life’s simpler, but nonetheless heartbreaking, truths that fantasy wins out over reality every time.

One day the obituarist will change his life. He knows the words will dry up; if they don’t, he will put them to flight by his own hand. Soon he will be forty, the age of crisis, of consideration, of reflection, and he will use this to his advantage. He is not too old to return to University, to get his PhD, maybe even lecture. It is something he has always wanted to do; something he continues to attribute to a future, less inept, possibly even fictional, version of himself.

And so tonight he simply embraces the growing darkness in the company of the Mamas and the Papas, and Bruce Springsteen, and the ghosts of all the people he has ever had the privilege of getting to know through pages of black and white print.

Tonight he is once again alone with the dead.