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- Herausgeber: Cherry Red Books
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
The eponymous shelf-stacker and video unboxer joins a genealogy website and starts compiling a family tree. The website sends him an email - a distant cousin wants to share her version of the King family tree. It's a lot more detailed than Harvey's attempt. The main difference is that on Harvey's family tree his father has been dead for twenty-six years, while on his cousin's he was still alive until four months ago…. A discovery that unearths further family surprises, secrets and lies. Like an insane episode of Who Do You Think You Are?
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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1
HARVEY KING UNBOXES HIS FAMILY
By J.B. Morrison
CONTENTS
Thompsonn GP23X PhotoBoss All-in-One Desktop Printer
Harvey_King351 cut through the Sellotape and opened the box. He took out the power cable, the USB lead, instruction manual, installation CD and the four ink cartridges. All the time he was talking to the video camera, explaining each step of his latest unboxing, to a potential audience of more than three billion, but more likely in the tens or very low twenties.
Like a lot of people on TV or in the movies, Harvey hated watching his performances back once they were in the can. He couldn’t bear the sound of his voice for a start. It lacked confidence or authority, he mumbled and had a stammer. And Harvey really hated the way he looked. His left eye would sometimes wink uncontrollably, and when he concentrated on unpicking tape or removing a cable tie, he licked his lips. And Harvey was overweight. Should he ever forget that fact, there were plenty of people ready to remind him. It was the adjective that appeared in almost all the comments underneath his videos.
“Speak up fat man.”
“This fat guy stutters bad.”
“I thought the camera is supposed to add 10 pounds not 100. #FATT!”
Harvey lifted the heavy printer out of the box and removed the two blocks of protective white polystyrene packaging. He peeled off the thick strips of plastic tape that held the printer lid in place and did the same with the tape on the paper input and output trays, and across the threshold of the ink access door. Harvey cut the cable ties from the mains lead and the USB cable, he plugged the printer into a four-way extension block and connected the USB lead to his computer. He loaded the ink cartridges and inserted the software installation CD and went through the printer’s set-up steps. This was the least photogenic 5part of the process, and before putting the video online, Harvey would edit it down to a tight six or seven minutes, with smooth transitions – Cube or Page Curl, or a simple Dissolve.
Harvey loaded about twenty sheets of paper into the printer, switched it on and pressed print on his computer. The printer whirred and clicked, and Harvey watched the family tree, gradually emerging from the printer, as though it was growing before his eyes, in reverse, from the top down to the roots.
Harvey’s second or third Canadian cousin, Megan, had posted the family tree online. It had then been sent to him from the genealogy website they were both signed up to. Megan’s family tree was tall and wide, with an abundance of leaves and blossom, and delicious looking fruit growing on every branch. There was even a bird perched at the end of one of the branches. It was an unnecessarily elaborate family tree, far more decorative than any genealogical chart really needed to be. Megan’s glorious Canadian Redwood made Harvey’s own family tree look like a diseased English twig in a drought. There were fewer branches on his undernourished sapling, and no leaves or fruit, no blossom or birds. No decoration at all, in fact. It was just a simple chart, more of a family stump than a tree. Names were misspelled on Harvey’s family tree, and half the dates were missing.
Information was missing from Megan’s family tree too. Harvey wasn’t on it, and neither were his mother, his mother’s sister, Cathy, or Cathy’s daughter, Sally. Harvey’s father was on both family trees. On Harvey’s version, his father had been dead for twenty-six years. While on Megan’s family tree, up until just four months ago, he was still alive.
There was something about Megan’s attention to detail – the choice of fonts, the colours, the intricate pattern of the bark, the curves and twists of the branches, the knots 6where the branches joined the trunk, and the ribs and the veins on the leaves, even the direction of the wind, that could be determined by the sway of the tree and the way the feathers of the bird parted ever so slightly. It was all that detail, all the time and effort that must have gone into creating Megan’s family tree, that made it hard for Harvey to believe it was her, and not him, who would have made such a simple mistake with the date of his father’s death. 7
HARVEY
9
1
The five turrets of The Castle appeared at the side of the road, poking through the trees like upturned Cornettos. There was a blimp moored to the nearest turret, swaying in the breeze twenty feet above it like a Pink Floyd pig, with the words ‘HUGE SALE NOW ON’ stamped across its torso. In the seven years Harvey had worked at The Castle, balloon or no balloon, the sale had always been HUGE and always very much ON.
It was autumn and more of the pink pebble dashing of the turrets, the ramparts and the battlements was visible than at other times of the year, more even than the day before. It was as though the building was ever so slowly rising up from the ground like a giant spaceship, beginning its journey back to the home planet. Passing motorists who’d not been on the road before, or only when there was more tree cover, would be wondering how on earth the unusual structure had got there. The Poundland Pyramids, the boot sale Stonehenge, with its ‘thirty open plan departments selling 280 thousand discounted products at bargain prices, a miniature steam railway, boating lake, children’s fun fair, eighteen holes of adventure golf, a maze and over twenty outdoor food concessions.’
The shuttle bus slowed, while the drivers of the cars in front gawped up at the blimp and the car crash of a building beneath. Harvey yawned and looked at his phone. There were now four comments underneath his printer unboxing video.
“Not this fat prick again.” – Escosidebar33
“What’s a p-p-p-printer?” – Splatterfish
“They shouldn’t let fat people film theirselfs.” – Killzit_101
“Leave him alone, you morons.” – Jess86
If Harvey hadn’t just discovered his father had come back from the dead, only to immediately die again, somebody 11sticking up for him on the internet might have been the last thing in the world he ever would have expected to happen. He gave Jess86’s comment the thumbs-up and took Megan’s family tree out of the pocket of his parka. It had slipped through a hole in the pocket of the coat and was caught in the lining. Like so many things bought from The Castle, Harvey’s parka had a built-in obsolescence and its time was up. The zip was forever getting stuck and Harvey often had to remove the coat by pulling it over his head like a jumper. When he’d bought the parka earlier in the year, Harvey had hoped it might make him look like Bear Grylls or Sir Ranulph Fiennes, and not quite so much like an overweight lead singer from The Undertones.
When he’d freed the sheet of paper from the lining of his coat, Harvey unfolded the family tree and held it against the bus window. The early morning sun shone on the glass and the tree seemed to come alive, like in a Disney cartoon. If the bird perched at the end of the branch that bore the mystery of his father’s death had given a little whistle, taken off and flown around the bus, Harvey wouldn’t have been all that surprised. He took his hand away from the family tree and it stayed stuck to the bus window, like a party balloon on a jumper.
Last night, after he’d found the family tree, or rather, after it found him, arriving on his computer with a ping, like a solemn-faced policeman ringing the doorbell, Harvey thought, at long last the genealogy website had sent him something that wasn’t just clickbait. The ‘member of the King family’ who wanted to share their information appeared to actually be from the same King family as him. Megan was the daughter of the sister of the wife of Harvey’s father’s brother. Harvey’s second or third cousin, or his first cousin twice removed or something. At first Harvey was pleased. He could merge Megan’s area of outstanding natural genealogical beauty with his own half-arsed blot on the landscape, print the combined results and present 12the family tree to his mother, taking all the credit.
And then Harvey noticed the discrepancy with the dates beneath his father’s name. He thought it must be a mistake at first. And not his mistake. It was Megan who had obviously got the date wrong, either accidentally or deliberately, although Harvey couldn’t think of any reason why she would have would gone to the trouble of faking a family tree and sending it to him. If it had been malware, clicking on the link would have been enough to infect Harvey’s computer. There was no need for all the detail, no need for birds and flowers, no need for a family tree at all. If anything, it was his own scrawny effort that looked like the fake family tree.
Harvey rested his head on the shuttle bus window. He was very tired and wished he’d stayed at home. The unexpected death of a parent was surely the perfect excuse for taking a day off work. Stacking shelves seemed disrespectful. It didn’t feel like a day for reaching.
The bus left the A-road and turned onto a narrow, winding B-road and The Castle disappeared and appeared again behind the trees, like it was playing peek-a-boo with a baby. The road widened and straightened out, and The Castle was gone.
Harvey closed his eyes. He could still see the branches and leaves and all the names and dates on the backs of his eyelids, like the ghost of a watched light bulb or the falling aliens or Tetris blocks he’d usually see after a long night of online gaming. Ordinarily, he’d sleep it off at the back of the warehouse, behind the out-of-season display Father Christmases, snowmen and reindeer. Forty winks in the basement didn’t feel like it would be enough today.
In spite of his tiredness, Harvey’s thoughts were racing. He had the sense of his whole world having been turned upside down, like he’d woken from a coma to discover a virus had wiped out half the population, and the apes or the Venus flytraps were in charge. He was unable to pinpoint 13the exact nature of how he was feeling though. He was reminded of the morning he’d switched on the television and learned that Princess Diana had died. Harvey’s father was dead. Again. Why hadn’t he cried? He’d been more upset when Disney had bought the rights to Star Wars.
2
The first time his father died, Harvey wept like a Beatles concert. He was eleven years old, sitting in the living room watching the children’s programme Why Don’t You Just Switch off your Television Set and Go and Do Something Less Boring Instead? The young presenters were demonstrating how to make a water bomb, when Harvey’s mother came into the room, and, apparently without any intended irony, she switched the television off and did something less boring instead.
“I’ve got some bad news about your father.”
Harvey stopped folding the piece of paper on his lap, still keeping one eye on the television, wondering when his mother would turn the TV back on, not wanting to miss any important folds. She sat down on the sofa next to Harvey and told him his father had had a heart attack. She pushed Harvey’s fringe out of his eyes, something she’d probably seen in a soap opera. Maybe she was clearing a path for his tears. Because once Harvey realised his mother hadn’t said Art Attack – another children’s television programme he watched – and when it was obvious that his dad wasn’t going to leap out from behind the curtains shouting, ‘Surprise!’, it must have seemed to Harvey’s mother that her son’s tears would never stop. He wept and he wailed, making alarming noises, like foxes mating and bagpipes bursting, blowing snot bubbles from his nostrils.
“Can I make you something to eat?” Harvey’s mother said.
That was Harvey’s year zero, when his mother couldn’t think of any other way to stop him from crying other than to feed him. She made him fish fingers, peas and chips, and put a lemon meringue pie in the oven. She opened a huge bottle of cola. And then she went to the sweet shop. It would be the start of a sugar rush that, twenty-six years later, was still going strong. 15
Harvey’s mum was rarely out of the kitchen that summer, baking jam tarts and roly-polies, building elaborate trifles, mashing and roasting potatoes, deep-frying thick-cut chips and filling pies with meats and fruits. Every morning the kitchen table looked like the breakfast buffet in a hotel foyer. There was always a bag of sweets or a huge tin of chocolates open on the sideboard. The summer that Harvey’s father died the first time was a bit like Christmas. No, your mum is an enabler.
After six weeks of being fattened up by the witch in Hansel and Gretel, it was time for Harvey to leave the gingerbread house and start his first term at a new secondary school.
“You look so grown up,” his mum said, probably meaning Harvey looked so much older in his new St. Peter and Paul Community College uniform. But Harvey was physically larger, too. He’d already outgrown the blazer his mother had bought him just a few months earlier.
“Do I have to go to school?” Harvey said.
“You can get some sweets on the way if you like.”
His mother’s weapons of mass distraction.
They walked together as far as the gates of the school, where Harvey’s mother said goodbye and tag-teamed her son over to the headmaster. Mister Spencer escorted him through the empty playground, the swing doors and corridors, until they reached Harvey’s new classroom. They waited outside the classroom while Harvey’s new teacher, Miss Clark, explained to the rest of the class that a new boy was about to join them. She said that ‘poor little Harvey’ had been through a very difficult family trauma and asked them to be tactful and considerate. For almost a year, before Harvey became ‘One and a Harvey’, and then later, ‘Two and a Harvey’, he would be known by the whole class, and gradually the rest of the school, including one or two teachers, as ‘poor little Harvey’.
“How’s your dad, poor little Harvey?” a boy named Craig 16Lyon asked him in the playground on his first day.
“He’s dead,” Anthony Lyon said.
“Is that true?” Craig said. “Is your dad dead?”
“Poor little Harvey.”
“Is he dead?”
“Poor little Harvey. Is daddy dead?”
“Poor little fat Harvey’s Daddy is dead.”
Anthony and Craig Lyon were identical twins, with matching skinhead haircuts and angry faces. Skin like wood-chip wallpaper. They were their own gang. They never left one another’s side. Nowadays, they’d be known as Craigthony or Cranthony. And when Harvey arrived at the school, they found their muse. Poor little Harvey would be the one and only school project they didn’t find ‘boring’. He couldn’t even find sanctuary in the dinner hall, a place where Harvey was amongst friends – the beef burgers and the sausages, the steamed puddings, the rhubarb and custard and all the dinner ladies. But lunchtimes at St. Peter and Paul were a living nightmare for Harvey. Craigthony would stand next to him in the queue and invite him to play ‘the Circle Game’. One brother would hold his hand down at his side, in the shape of a circle. If Harvey looked at the circle, the other brother would be licenced to hit him. If Harvey refused to play, they would hit him anyway. And because he was now the child of a one parent family, Harvey was eligible for free school dinners. This only made the bullying worse. The Lyon twins didn’t pay for their school dinners either, but that didn’t seem to make any difference.
Harvey had never blamed anyone other than Craig or Anthony for his horrible time at school. Maybe Miss Clark bore some responsibility for being naive enough to think that a group of eleven-year-olds would know what tact or consideration was. And Harvey could have made more of an effort to stand up for himself. He’d always blamed himself. But since the discovery on Megan’s family tree, 17Harvey was re-evaluating his entire life. He wouldn’t have been eligible for free school dinners for a start. How many dead legs and knuckle raps would that have saved him from? Harvey needed to find out what it was that made his mother tell him such a terrible lie that summer, before fattening him up and literally throwing him to the Lyons.
3
Harvey was woken by someone pushing gently on his shoulder. It felt nice at first, like he was dreaming he was having a massage, and then Harvey opened his eyes and saw the big, round Captain Pugwash face of the shuttle bus driver staring down at him. For a second, Harvey thought, who’s driving the bus? Then he realised it wasn’t moving. There were no passengers other than him. No engine noise or music playing on phones. Just the gentle sound of conditioned air overhead, and the bus driver’s heavy breathing.
Harvey had never seen the driver standing up before. It was like seeing a newsreader in the supermarket or the postman at the swimming pool. He was an incredibly big man, a lot bigger than Harvey. The short walk from the front of the bus seemed to have exhausted him.
Whenever Harvey saw someone in worse physical shape than he was, he had conflicting feelings. On the one hand, Harvey realised that he needed to make some drastic lifestyle changes soon, or he would end up equally large and unfit. But on the other hand, Harvey would think, you know what, compared to this out-of-breath bus driver, I really don’t need to worry about things too much just yet.
“Doughnut?” the bus driver opened a white paper bag and held it out in front of Harvey.
“No, thanks,” Harvey said, knowing that doughnuts would now be his food ear worm and he wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about them until he ate one. More likely two or three. He was already thinking about who sold the best doughnuts at The Castle – the Food Court of King Arthur or one of the outdoor food concessions?
The driver took a doughnut out of the paper bag, bit into it and licked his lips. Harvey licked his too. How alike we are, he thought. The bus driver was quite a bit older, maybe in his early sixties. He was like a warning from Harvey’s 19future. The ghost of Christmas diabetes and narrowed arteries.
Harvey wondered if his dad had looked like the bus driver. The kind of man who ate jam doughnuts at eight-thirty in the morning. It was funny what he could remember all these years later. What he was watching on television when he’d learned about his father’s supposed heart attack, for instance. And yet, Harvey couldn’t seem to remember what his dad looked like.
Since last night, when his distant cousin (4,691 miles, he’d Googled it) had made him think about his father, his image had instantly started to fade. For years he must have taken his face for granted, not needing to think about it, but knowing it was always there, ready and waiting should that need ever arise. But now that time had come, Harvey’s father seemed to be vanishing. He was like a shipwreck, perfectly preserved at the bottom of the sea, until it’s hauled up to the surface, where it immediately starts to disintegrate.
“There was an actress on the television,” the bus driver said. “She traced her ancestors all the way back to Jesus.”
Harvey looked at the large man standing next to him. Perhaps the shuttle bus driver was his father.
“What?” Harvey was confused. “What actress?”
The bus driver pointed at Megan’s family tree, still stuck to the bus window. Harvey quickly removed it as though it was a picture of the bus driver’s wife in a bikini that he’d printed off Facebook. He stuffed it into his coat pocket and started getting up. But the bus driver sat down in the seat next to him, blocking his exit. He looked as out of place sitting in a passenger seat as he had standing up.
Harvey tried not to look at the bus driver’s legs. His trousers were so tight that Harvey couldn’t imagine – and he was really trying hard not to imagine – him ever being able to take his trousers off. They were so tight that his flesh was bunched up in speed bumps up his thighs. 20Harvey looked down at his own legs instead. He’d undone the top button of his jeans and opened the fly a little when he’d first sat down on the bus. If the man next to him had noticed, he didn’t say anything. The first rule of Fat Club.
“Isn’t it funny how on the television, when they do their family trees, everyone somehow manages to trace their ancestry all the way back to royalty?” the bus driver said. “Or even Jesus. When I did my family tree, it was all bloody carpenters.” The driver looked Harvey in the eye and winked. Harvey was clearly supposed to be in on a joke. “My name is Carpenter,” the bus driver said, and then added, like a West Country 007, “Bob Carpenter.”
Harvey had been on the same shuttle bus hundreds, maybe thousands, of times. But he’d never taken the trouble to learn the name of the man driving it. He’d heard people call him driver before – thank you, driver, see you later, driver, see you tomorrow, driver, slow down, driver, I need to go to the toilet, driver – but Harvey had never thought ‘Driver’ might be his actual name.
Bob held out his hand and Harvey shook it. There was a transfer of doughnut sugar, and he fought the impulse to lick his fingers. The bakery concession, near the steam train station. They sold the best doughnuts.
“I expect there must be quite a few kings on your family tree?” Bob Carpenter said, gesturing at the name badge on Harvey’s work fleece.
Harvey looked down at the badge: ‘Harvey King: Stock Replenishment’. He expected his twice dead father would be turning in both of his graves if he knew what his son’s job was. He probably would have considered Harvey a mug for paying tax and national insurance and wearing a dumb uniform every day. His father would have been prouder of Harvey if he took things off the shelves instead. He couldn’t actually recall ever seeing his dad steal anything. But he did remember he used to buy and sell things in pubs, cigarettes and stereo equipment, watches 21and jewellery, perfume and aftershave. No, your dad is Derek Trotter.
Another shuttle bus pulled up in the car park and Bob Carpenter said he’d better let Harvey go, as though he’d been holding him captive. The driver stood up and adjusted the crotch of his trousers. Harvey stood too, quickly zipping up his jeans. Anyone passing might have wondered what depraved sex-show they’d just missed. Harvey followed Bob down the aisle of the bus. The driver almost filled the space between the seats and bumped his hips a few times causing the vehicle to rock slightly from side to side. Harvey managed to avoid doing the same. Compared to Bob, he was still a work in progress. Bob sat down in his driver’s seat. The newsreader back behind his desk, the postman back in his uniform.
“I’ve just realised,” Bob said, “Jesus was a carpenter.” He sounded like a vicar making a profound point at the end of a sermon.
Harvey faked a laugh and said goodbye. He left the bus and joined three sets of passengers from the other shuttle buses, heading through the car park towards The Castle. He was close enough now to see the many different coats and shades of pink paint on the wall of the building. The paint was dirty and weathered and the pebble dashing beneath was cracked and peeling. Like with a great painting, you had to step back to fully appreciate The Castle’s beauty. Up close it looked like a dropped cake.
Harvey crossed the drawbridge, which was no more a real drawbridge than The Castle was a real castle, or the moat that ran beneath the drawbridge was an actual moat. A short queue of early morning customers had formed at the main entrance to the huge store. At the front of the queue a man was carrying a garden spade. The price label was still stuck to the wooden handle and there was a line of earth along the spade’s sharp edge. In his other hand he held a till receipt. A security guard opened one side of the 22glass doors and Harvey followed the other staff members into a large foyer area, where it was no longer the Middle Ages. There was a toy spaceship with flashing lights and a smiley-faced helicopter, both of which children could be rocked back and forth on for a pound. There were two vending machines – one dispensing fizzy-drinks, and the other crisps and chocolate – and between the vending machines was a set of wheels and cogs inside a glass case that would crush a penny into the approximate shape of a castle.
Harvey walked through the foyer and onto the vast shop floor. Apart from the chatter of arriving staff, it was relatively quiet. Very soon, a cacophony of different infomercials would be switched on on the twenty or so televisions spread around the store. A pop song would be playing in the CD and DVD department and a film would be showing on a huge screen. The Bontempi organs would be powered up in the Music department and some show-off kid would be playing ‘Chopsticks’ on a piano keyboard. The in-store radio station would begin broadcasting, playing the same collection of recent hit records, interrupted every couple of minutes by intercom staff messages and customer service announcements.
Knowing the godawful racket that was coming, Harvey made the most of the peace and quiet. For now, at least, there were no beeping tills, no barcode scanners, no wannabe rock stars trying out drum kits or teenagers setting off the talking toys, programming swear words into teddy bears and opening all the singing birthday cards. As Harvey walked through a swing door at the rear of the store, the first jingle of the day played. Sung to the tune of ‘Greensleeves’ – The Castle, The Ca-astle. Harvey heard John Chalmers’ deep voice joining in as usual from the downstairs warehouse – Stick it up your arar-arsehole. John’s rich baritone filled the stairwell, luring Harvey down into the basement like a foulmouthed siren. 23Harvey took the goods lift instead of the stairs. He savoured the last moments of peace and quiet while the lift travelled the short distance between floors. In the basement, Harvey hung his parka on a hook. John Chalmers gave him a list of products – lipstick and flowerpots, bird food and rolls of wallpaper, paint pots and jigsaw puzzles – and he started putting them onto shelves.
4
After work Harvey bought Chinese food in the village’s only takeaway restaurant, where they also sold fish and chips, kebabs, fried chicken, pasties and pizzas – none of which appeared to be the chef’s specialty. The restaurant was called the Bay of Bengal, but they didn’t serve Indian food. The girl working behind the counter was from Lithuania. She was new to the restaurant and Harvey felt she was judging him for the size of his food order. She was eyeing him up in the same way doctors did. As though she was about to ask him to jump up on the scales. He wanted to tell the girl that half the food was for his mother, even though he knew that would have been a lie.
While he waited for his order Harvey looked out of the restaurant window at the pub opposite – the Fusilier. He’d been thinking about some of the take-your-son-to-work days he’d been on with his dad. They used to go to the White Hart and the Pig and Whistle, and to the big hotel near the bypass that was now the largest ball pit and children’s soft-play centre in the South West. They definitely spent the most time in the Fusilier. Harvey would sit on his own at a pub table, with a Coke and a bag of crisps, while his dad went about his business. He’d watch him gesturing and gesticulating to a small audience of men in the lounge or the saloon bar, perched on a high stool, working the room, tic-tacking like a bookie, selling people things they hadn’t yet realised they wanted.
The business meetings might then move to a quieter corner or to the snug, where his dad would seal the deal, usually in hushed tones, punctuated by nods and winks and concluding with sudden loud bursts of laughter and firm handshakes. When he left the pub with his dad, Harvey often had a new toy or a game. People were always giving his dad things in pubs and hotels, as though he was a visiting dignitary. The majority of Harvey’s birthday 25and Christmas presents came from men in pubs, already unboxed, stuffed into dirty carrier bags, or wrapped in a jumper or a towel. There were never any cable ties to unwind, no instruction manuals or warranties. No tiny packets of silica gel to keep out moisture.
There were two old men standing outside the Fusilier smoking. They were probably about the age Harvey’s dad would have been when he died for the second time. It was strange to think that even if Harvey could remember what his father looked like he might not have recognised him because he would have been so much older than when he’d last seen him.
Harvey’s phone pinged. It was an email informing him of new activity on his video channel. He clicked on the link. Beneath his recent unboxing of a pair of headphones, there were now seven comments.
“These headphones are crap.” – Skunkheadx
“Tinny sound. Waste of money!!” – Tomas sic
“Where’s the hate button? Lol.” – L00Llol
“What are h-h-h-h-headphones FATSO?” – Splatterfish
“He needz stutter cancelling headfones” – L00Llol
“And fat cancelling ones.” – Tomas sic
“STFU. M.O.R.O.N.S.” – Jess86
Jess86 had stood up for Harvey twice now.
“Are you a troll hunter?” Harvey typed into his phone.
“No. I’m an Early Years practitioner.”
The reply was so quick and unexpected that Harvey thought Jess86 must have had their answer already written and ready to post. It was a little unnerving. Harvey felt like he was being watched. He looked around the restaurant. There was nobody there other than him and the fat shaming Lithuanian girl behind the counter. Was she Jess86? Obviously not.
“Is that like a teacher?” Harvey replied, his fingers shaking when he considered the possibility, however distant, that Jess might be short for Jessica. 26
“Yes, that’s correct. Like a teacher.” Jess86 replied even faster than before, following immediately with another comment, “Hey! Where are the italics I put around the word ‘like’?”
“Italics don’t work on here,” Harvey replied.
“So how am I supposed to be sarcastic?”
“Asterisks.”
“Bless you.”
Harvey laughed out loud. The girl behind the counter looked up. Harvey smiled apologetically. The girl gave him a look that made him feel like he was some sort of pervert.
He stared at his phone. The profile picture beside Jess86’s name was just the default blue silhouette. Forgetting about the Jess part for a minute, Harvey focussed on the number 86. Jess could be eighty-six years old or born in 1986. They might simply be the eighty-sixth Jess to join YouTube. Jess86 might be a bot – the eighty-sixth model of the Jess web robot. It was an idea that excited Harvey as much as the fact he might be having a conversation with a real-life female.
“You can use asterisks instead of italics. Like *This*,” Harvey typed, and then put his phone away because his food was ready. When the girl passed him the brown paper bag across the counter, their hands briefly touched. Harvey blushed. He sensed the girl was physically disgusted. He thanked her and left the restaurant. He was disappointed with his brain for making him think about touching Bob Carpenter’s sugary hand earlier in the day. He also thought these accidental moments across bus seats and food counters might be the only physical human contact he would ever experience.
Harvey walked through the village. Everything he’d managed to ignore for the past twenty odd years reminded him of his father. It was like being on a sightseeing tour based on his life. The pub where he’d conducted much of his business, the hairdressers where he had his haircut. 27What Harvey would give for a peek into that hairdresser’s mirror now. To see his dad sitting in the chair next to him, while they both had Saturday haircuts. He stopped outside the florists, ate a spring roll and read the wreaths in the window – ‘IN LOVING MEMORY, RIP, MANDY – Was Mandy real? Or was she a sort of ‘Show deceased’?
Not only did Harvey not know where his dad had been in the years between his two deaths, he also had no idea where he was now. Was his father buried in the ground somewhere or in an urn on someone’s mantelpiece? Whose mantelpiece? The thoughts were never ending. Was it an ornate mantelpiece in a huge house, or were his dad’s remains in an old Nescafé jar on a filthy shelf in a damp bedsit? Harvey may have been angry with his father for his parental neglect and apparent deceit, but he still hoped he hadn’t died alone.
He tried to think of a more noble send-off. A bugler playing the ‘Last Post’ on the deck of a ship, while a smartly-dressed sailor pushed a coffin overboard, until he was left holding nothing but a flag as though he’d just performed a magic trick. Harvey imagined a televised state funeral, attended by actual kings. A twenty-one-gun salute and applauding members of the public throwing flowers onto the road in front of a slowly passing hearse.
Maybe his dad’s body had been fired out of a cannon into outer space or turned into diamonds. There could be an annual national holiday somewhere in the world to commemorate his father’s passing. Anything was possible, because Harvey knew nothing. Was there a star in the sky named after his father, and if so, by whom? And why hadn’t it been Harvey who’d named it? Why wasn’t his dad in a jar on Harvey’s mantlepiece? Who was wearing a ring, inset with a diamond, made from the carbon of his dad’s cremains?
Harvey walked past the house where he’d once lived with his mother and father. The windows had been 28replaced and the outside of the house was painted white. The front garden was paved over and was now a carport. Harvey had helped his day lay the grass in the garden. He remembered him unloading the turf from the back of an estate car. He’d rolled it out like carpet, stressing to Harvey how important it was to not walk on the grass. And then when the turf was all laid out, his dad put a long plank of wood on it and invited Harvey to stamp up and down on the grass like Godzilla.
