Featuring a sample from e0fd96. Apologies to Philip Larkin.
It was number 52 at first, on an otherwise unremarkable Friday evening. Then the same ambulance visited number 33 a couple of days later. Two heart attacks in one week. Both patients died by the time they reached hospital. Good thing I’m not a pillar of the community, because I wouldn’t want the responsibility of dealing with all that. I’m very much a closed curtains kind of neighbour.
I did know Mrs Finchley at number 10 though. She was a formidable woman, as they all are in hindsight. Kindly face to go with her gentle demeanour, friends with everybody, wouldn’t say boo to a goose, commanded total respect with her heart of gold, will of iron, steely gaze, all of the precious metals and ore in her constitution, etc, etc. She was an actual pillar of the community.
Rumour has it that she slipped and fell in the bath, banging her head on the tiling so hard that it killed her instantly, a bit like how Cilla Black died, if you believe what the papers tell you.
Mrs Finchley left behind her irascible husband, who I bumped into a couple of weeks later emerging from their house as I was popping over to my parents’ place; I live only a short motorcycle ride away, so it was worth checking in as soon as I heard the news. On seeing him, I gave a friendly, not-too-inquisitive ‘hi, I hope you’re okay’ salute, and tried to convey a sympathetic nod-and-smile in his direction – I thought it too late to offer my condolences at that point – but he paid little mind to my presence as he shut his front gate quite violently, mumblecursing his angry self away from my attentions as though I was preventing him from going about his day.
I’m very well used to this; he’d always treated me like a mild irritant. I just hoped he hadn’t done the same to his wife. But, what if he had? Should I have reported him? Mrs Finchley seemed healthy enough when I last saw her, even if it were a few months ago, so her death did come as somewhat of a surprise. Perhaps foul play was afoot?
My mother saw them quite differently. She assured me through her rose-and-cream-tinted specs she'd recently and unironically purchased from an online opticians outlet called Eye of the Tiger that Mr Finchley was in fact a kind and caring man who on random occasion showered his wife with surprise gifts. My father, who happened to be within earshot when my mother said this, felt sufficiently attacked to add rather unhelpfully ‘it’s the surprises what might have killed her’, in that manner which typically constitutes the worst facets of dad humour: gotta be sharp, but only so as to sour the mood.
In any case, he failed to disrupt my mother from drifting into her vicarious daydreaming of the happy couple across the way. ‘Mary was telling me only a few weeks ago about a cruise they’d been on some years back’, she said, where they had docked at the Rio Grande, hoping to catch some carnival festivities further inland. A taste of ‘proper Brazilian culture’, as my ma put it.
But on arrival, they discovered the place was host to a sporting village of international football squads for the upcoming Olympics. No chance of a carnival happening out of season there, but they never did let little details like that stop them from finding a way to party! By the end of the evening, the Finchleys were going shot-to-shot with the Swiss U23s to see who could neck the most tequila before throwing up.
‘I told Mary, I told her that might be alright for you, but I can’t be doing that at my age as my liver is a lot more fragile than it used to be, to which she said “don't be ridiculous, I doubt you’re old enough to remember the last Olympics here” and I said what do you mean, everyone remembers London 2012, but she meant the one just after the war! Turns out Mary was four years older than me! You’d never know it to look at her!’
That’s what an immaculate skincare regime will do for you, to be fair to Mrs Finchley. But it is also the case that my parents aren’t the most dynamic of couples. Whereas our cosmopolitan-minded neighbours had travelled the world in their retiring years, they’d only ever been to the shops. You can even smell the lack of adventure in their home. They wear it like potpourri, because they’ve done nothing else with their lives since my sister and I left to make something of our own ones: no new skills or hobbies picked up, no involvement in any societies or neighbourhood groups, no redecorations of the house, nothing. They fill every waking moment of their void with daytime TV and whatever passes for quality journalism in these so-called broadsheet newspapers. In fact, whenever I visit, I swear I find them in the exact same place I last left them, as if they’ve been waiting to be reanimated into regurgitating the rancid thoughts of charlatan columnists that have been festering in their minds. My sister likes to joke that it cost us three months’ worth of pocket money to be able to buy The Sims game to play on the rickety old family computer when we were children, but nowadays we can experience an Augmented Reality version for free.
Still, it’s pretty amazing to us how our parents continue to persist with living in stasis. Every last news flash announcing the passing of yet another celebrity reminds me of their mortality. And it’s been getting more frequent in the last year or so. Or least it feels as though a constellation of entertainment, sporting, political, and literary stars you assumed would always be with us are only now fading out of existence. I reckon that if you lined them up on the Hollywood Boulevard walk of fame, you could make a quite decent assault course meets trivia quiz style game show out of it.
Yet, our very ordinary parents are still here, standing imperious in defiance of life’s machinations. Or rather sitting about, impervious to the outside world because they never leave the sodding house! If you’d told me they would survive all of the members of Emerson Lake & Powell I never would have believed you.
Maybe there is something to be said for sedentary activity, although I doubt the deceased would swap places right now. Some might even have a few things to say in their defence, if they could still speak. And my father would no doubt have something to say back. Has an answer for everything, he does.
I remember as a teenager coming across the From Athens to Hemlock: The (Good) Life and Times of Socrates when I was at school. The day I read his famous phrase ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’... well, that was it! I was hooked! It was provocative, it stole my imagination, it made me seriously consider becoming a philosopher. And I thought it was so clever, so grown up, that my father would be well impressed with me slipping the line into conversation at the dinner table that evening, believing that his son had unlocked a deep wisdom enabling him to embark upon the journey toward discovering human happiness.
But when I eventually got round to delivering my newfound pearl of wisdom, all he said was ‘good, cos I don’t want anyone poking around in my business’. In the end, I chose to go into medicine instead. Better to deal in cold hard facts about what humans are rather than speculative dreams about what they could be, huh?
Not that he trusts my professional advice either. When I point out to him that developments in the use of ambulance space have been the single biggest life-saving factor in emergency medicine of the past 150 years, he not only insists he’d rather suffer at home, but makes me swear – on my Hippocratic Oath – not to put him in one of those state-sponsored hearses should he ever fall gravely ill. My parents may be here for a long time, but they’re definitely not here for a good one.
He needn’t have worried though. Turns out all those who’d passed away on our street recently (and more) had not in fact died of natural causes. Detectives think a rogue group of paramedics have been preying on vulnerable elderly people in the area for the last six months at least, administering them with overdoses of opioids during emergency callouts. The regional coroner’s court raised the alarm with the local hospital when they observed that the post-mortem records of every single person of pensionable age who had died outside of the home detailed the exact same pattern of events leading to their deaths for 4 weeks in a row.
So, no ambulances visit my parents’ street anymore; they’ve been banned until the mystery is solved. In the meantime, needing some kind of scalp, the local hospital bigwigs found three people to sack anyway and a few more for negligence and then a few more for cost-cutting purposes, and... well, let’s just say that I am now free to pursue a full-time career in philosophy! Everything’s just a matter of time, isn't it?
I joked to my father about his latent paranoia seeing off yet another threat to my parents’ lives. ‘Dunno how you dodged that one dad, but I guess you’ll tell me you can still get hit by an ambulance tomorrow!’
He simply looked up from his broadsheet at me and said: ‘They come to rest at any kerb: All streets in time are visited.’
Tell me how not only does he have an answer for everything, but why is it usually the bleakest one imaginable please?
‘Far
From the exchange of love to lie
Unreachable inside a room
The traffic parts to let go by
Brings closer what is left to come,
And dulls to distance all we are.’
