The Paperchase

THE NEWS OF MY UNCLE
Patrick’s death came as a shock, not because it was sudden, but because I had assumed he’d been dead for ages.

Patrick
dead.
Father
was all the telegram said. My first reaction was: Patrick who? And then I remembered.

If I’d given him any thought over the preceding years I’m sure I would have realised he was still alive, albeit in a world that had ceased to bear any relation to mine. It’s just that I’d been doing my best to forget everything about my family, and though I got Christmas presents every year from Aunt Judith in Boston, I was succeeding pretty well at it.

Of course I remembered Patrick – he’d just been tucked away in a distant compartment of my mind like an odd sock: present but incomplete. After all, a person doesn’t slip out of
the world like a blip off a radar screen. A life ends with a death. The telegram was conclusive: it completed him.
Patrick
dead.

And then a strange thing happened: the news of his death resurrected him in my imagination: the Patrick that was in me, the faint but indelible stamp of him that
was
me. Whole sections of my memory became active for the first time in years. It was like discovering a false bottom in a suitcase; or that my tiny flat in Clapham had grown an extra storey overnight. I thought about Patrick and his crazy old house on Ionia and, strangest of all, I began to miss him – a man I had not clapped eyes on for almost twenty years.

I was in a mood to be maudlin, anyway. I had been working night shifts for months, getting in at eight in the evening and going home twelve hours later. In the quiet hours of the early morning, no one wanted to talk and there was nothing to do except stumble around the newsroom reading the newspapers or, in my case, fret over the choices that had got me there. I lived in twilight, going home each morning in sunglasses to protect my tired eyes. And the darkness seemed to have settled over every aspect of my life.

The incoming American President had inaugurated his term in office with airstrikes in the Middle East and we had been told to expect more. Extra journalists and editors had been summoned to cope with the increased workload at night, because the management had calculated that the United States would time hostilities to coincide with its evening newscasts.

‘Are we at war yet?’ said Wendy, the news editor, as she arrived for work on the evening I got the telegram.

I told her we weren’t.

‘That’s good, because I didn’t have my tin hat in my bag.’ She sat down at her terminal and began peeling an orange and prising it into bits with her stubby thumb as she read the handover. She was a great believer in the power of vitamin C to mitigate the effects of too many night shifts.

I wasn’t the only one who seemed to have forgotten Patrick.
I trawled the wires thinking that the death of the author of the Oscar-nominated
Peanut
Gatherers
deserved at least a mention, but there was nothing. He had been silent too long. Like me, the obituarists must have assumed Patrick had been dead for a decade. The telegram was in my pocket. I touched it instinctively as if to confirm that he had indeed existed.

It was a very quiet night. The rumour of war had made all other news irrelevant. Watching our newscasts, you got the feeling that the world’s concentration had narrowed to a small point, a beam of attention that excluded everything apart from a handful of politicians and journalists. But though we continued to report what they said, in reality nothing was happening. It was television’s way of twiddling its thumbs, but with more menace. It was the pregnant silence between lightning and a thunderclap.

It wouldn’t make much difference to me, however. War or no war, my duties would be the same. My job was to write the twenty seconds of talk that precedes a news report, the bit where the newsreader looks serious, or mildly amused, depending on the story, and addresses the camera. And sometimes I wrote the words that appear magically under someone’s head when they’re being interviewed. And sometimes I produced a guest from the make-up room and showed him through the labyrinth of corridors to the studio. And occasionally I might write a whole report to fit pictures that had arrived by satellite. When this happened, my name would appear at the beginning of the piece followed by the word ‘reporting’ – a word which probably overstates the journalistic value of the hundred or so words I had cobbled together from wire stories. And at the end of the piece I would sign off: ‘Damien March, BBC News’, which – because it didn’t mention a location – implicitly acknowledged that I was ‘reporting’ on the events in Prague, or Sarajevo, or wherever, from the bowels of Shepherd’s Bush. Once I had dreamed of being ‘Damien March, BBC News, Madrid’, or ‘Damien March, BBC News, on board the USS
Saratoga’,
But I was never more than Damien March, BBC News, and often less.

Very early on, I lost that zest for the work that marked people out for promotion. Every six months or so, there’d be a new face on the night shift: always young, nearly always a man, usually wearing a tie, and clearly just passing through our newsroom en route to higher things. I envied them their unquestioned sense of purpose – the feeling, I suppose, that they knew what they wanted, and they were becoming it. They all shared the certainty that sooner or later they would be Someone on TV, which, let’s face it, is the principal ambition of just about everyone right now. I sometimes think we are all souls in limbo, waiting hopefully to join those who have been eternised on the box.

I recognised myself in these people – getting in early, going home late, working through lunch – but as I had been years earlier. To them I was just an old lag. To me, they were sleepwalkers. I thought if you bumped them hard enough they would wake up, as I had, and feel disoriented, and not understand how or why they’d got there. Some time in the last five years, my ambition had faded away, and though I still went through the forms of my job, I’d given up expecting it to answer the question: Who am I? After ten years in television, I was remembered chiefly by my colleagues as the person who had done that report on the transvestite Thai kickboxer. And that was five years ago.

At three o’clock in the morning I had my lunch break. The canteen looked like the mess room of the
Marie
Celeste.
I helped myself to a sausage that was as brown and shiny as old varnish, and a scoop of scrambled eggs the texture of carpet underlay. Another tray clattered onto the metal runners beside mine. It belonged to Tom, a former colleague who had been promoted onto the national breakfast show. He was also a new father.

‘How’s Niamh?’ I said. ‘How’s it being a dad?’

Tom didn’t like the look of the food on offer and asked for an omelette. ‘Being a dad? It’s the most wonderful, exasperating,
inspiring, you know, all the clichés you can think of, thing that you can imagine. It’s just incredible.’

‘I can’t imagine,’ I said. ‘I can barely keep myself in clean underpants, never mind a dependant.’

‘It gives you an amazing strength,’ he said, as we waited at the till while the woman who had made the omelette wiped her hands on her apron and came round to ring up the contents of our trays. ‘I feel like I’m able to go out into the world because I have that base. Leaving in the evening, looking at Niamh and Tara in that bed – it brings out the caveman in me. It makes me want to go out and club a bear or something.’ Tom handed his loyalty card to the cashier to be validated. ‘Six more stamps and I get a free breakfast,’ he said.

‘You’re the first hunter-gatherer I’ve heard of who carries a canteen loyalty card,’ I said. ‘What are you going to have for your free meal? Woolly mammoth?’

‘You should get one of them, gobshite. You might as well get something for free.’

‘I don’t want to think about eating thirty of these between now and September. Look at it. They should be dropping fried bread on Iraq instead of bombs. Far deadlier.’

‘You will eat them, though. I’ve seen you eat twice that many. Chuck us a napkin.’

‘Yes – but I don’t want to
plan
on it. It’s a commitment thing. You’re married, you wouldn’t understand.’

My palate was sleepy and inert at that time in the morning and I liked to shock it with English mustard on the sausage and Tabasco sauce on the scrambled egg. That tingle was the most reliably pleasurable feature of my entire life at that time. Sometimes I accidentally overdosed, and the mustard on the roof of my mouth gave me the feeling that someone was removing my nasal hair with a blowtorch. It made it painful to talk, so when Tom asked me what my news was, I was telegraphic in my replies. ‘Not much,’ I said, ‘uncle died.’

‘Oh, Jesus,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’ He paused, realising that his consolations had exceeded my grief. ‘Your uncle?’

‘Patrick. Writer. Lived in the States. Hadn’t seen him in years.’ The burning sensation had mellowed into a tolerable buzz.

‘I always forget you’re a Yank,’ said Tom.

‘Yeah, me too.’

‘You don’t seem so upset.’

‘You know me, I keep it all locked up inside.’

Later that morning, I returned a guest to reception and walked back up the stairs to the seventh floor to find that dawn had happened: London was bathed in a greyish light, as unflattering as the neon tubes in the newsroom. From the seventh-floor landing I watched a Hammersmith train labouring silently through a veil of drizzle.

I breathed on the glass of the window and rubbed off the mist with my sleeve. It seemed odd that until recently Patrick and I had been inhabiting the same planet. But we had: Ionia wasn’t Never-Never Land, it was over there – three thousand miles west of the kebab shops outside Shepherd’s Bush station.

I went back to the newsroom and told Wendy I was feeling ill. Something had been threatening me for days with symptoms that were almost indistinguishable from the disorienting effects of night shifts. I had the ghostly sensation of being at one remove from my own body, as though I were trying to operate it by remote control.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You look a bit peaky.’

That’s funny coming from you, I thought. In spite of all those oranges, she had the night worker’s vampiric pallor. I suspected that she flew home at dawn and went to sleep in a box of dirt. ‘I wondered if I could go home early,’ I said.

‘That should be okay. Just check Fergus is all right for the seven o’clock bulletin.’

As I travelled back home on the underground in my sunglasses, a deep gloom settled over me.
Patrick
dead.

I never slept well after night shifts, and I was dreading lying awake through the morning, so I took two of the Temazepam
that Laura had left in the bathroom cabinet along with a travel-size pot of moisturiser. I don’t know if it was the flu, or the pills, or something more deep-seated still, but I slept right through the day and woke up at 3 a.m. the following morning. I was feverish and confused. I wasn’t really
thinking
in any accepted sense of the word: I felt as though I was being made to watch clips from a movie about my life called
Damien
March:
The
Low
Points.
At that hour, and in that state, it seemed to have been nothing but wrong turns. I was thirty-five – which seems young now, but didn’t then – without anything I could call a relationship, and doing a job that I didn’t enjoy. Equally, of course, I wasn’t destitute, disabled or – as far as I knew – terminally ill. But at three o’clock in the morning, the glass is always half-empty.

In a moment of fevered inspiration, going to Patrick’s funeral suddenly seemed like the only way I had of reminding myself who I was. I couldn’t face a long conversation with Dad on top of everything else, so I called my aunt in Boston, guessing that, with the time difference, she would still be up. She was, and she seemed pleased to hear from me.

She said Patrick had died suddenly of a heart attack, alone on Ionia, some months short of his sixty-fourth birthday. He had been out jogging.

Judith said his body had been discovered at the side of the running track by a member of the Junior Ionics – not, as you might think, a doo-wop group, but the local high-school baseball team.

Patrick had died of a massive myocardial infarction. He had been estranged from his family for years. His death was sad and premature. But no one has the final say on the genre of their demise, and Patrick’s also contained elements of comedy. His toupee had become detached from his pate and was found alongside his body. The boy who saw it first mistook it for a puppy lying loyally beside its fallen master. But though Patrick had owned many animals over the years (African geese, peahens, a pony, a goat, a sheep named Bessie, a parrot,
four cats, dozens of chickens), he had always had an aversion to dogs.

Judith said she would understand if I couldn’t make it to the funeral. No one was expecting me to come. She imagined I’d be far too busy. In fact, she gave me so many opportunities to opt out that I began to wonder if she was going herself. For my part, I was possessed by a dangerous certainty about what I wanted to do. I told her I’d be there, and then hung up the phone.

My body clock was by now totally skewed. I decided to administer a knock-out dose of two more sleeping pills, which I chased down with a toothmug of red wine. I lay down again, and my body appeared to dissolve from the feet upward. I fell asleep and dreamed about Ionia.

First, I found myself floating just outside the window on the seventh-floor landing of Television Centre. Instead of falling, I began to rise, slowly at first, but then so quickly that my eyes watered from the wind. As I looked down, the frozen traffic on the M25 seemed to twinkle like one of the rings of Saturn. Up ahead, I could see the Bristol Channel, separating the pig’s-head outline of Wales from the long shank of southwestern England that points into the Atlantic. As I drifted west across the sky, I watched the channel empty into the dark mantle of the Irish Sea. I was moving fast but silently, like a weather balloon sweeping along the upper atmosphere – over Eire, past the deserted crofts of the Great Blasket Islands, and through the edge of the giant shadow that had been travelling westward ahead of me: night itself rotating around the planet. It was suddenly chilly, like diving into the deep cold currents of a lake. The scattered fragments of the Azores passed by me on the left, and I came to the lights of America’s eastern coastline. At its northerly end, the tiny arm of Cape Cod flexed around its bay. Ionia, Patrick’s home, was a tiny comma of rock and trees and sand dunes just off its triceps.