THE DISAPPOINTING DEATH OF JIMMY JONES (I.P.)

Up until this precise moment Jimmy Jones’s life had been one massive disappointment. The curious amongst you may already be considering my very deliberate use of the past tense and even now are pondering its implied suggestion of a very recent change in Jimmy’s fortunes. Those who are both curious and optimistic may be thinking that Jimmy’s run of disappointment has been ended by a juicy lottery win or a ripe inheritance from a distant, long forgotten relative. On the other hand the curious pessimists may think that run has ended merely because Jimmy himself has ended too. Sadly it is the “glass half empty” brigade who have the right of the matter; Jimmy Jones, formerly of Tooting, South London, is now formally and irretrievably deceased.

Not to be put off, you optimists may well shrug aside your own disappointment at your earlier incorrect assumption and believe instead that Jimmy has gone to a better place, to a land of sweet ambrosia, golden harps and fluffy white clouds. “Hell no!” the pessimists may well rejoin, taking the downbeat line that Jimmy’s death is about to prove as big a disappointment to him as his life. Yet again, it is the gloomy side of the house that has prevailed. I must point out, however, it is not the manner or the timing of his death that has engendered this disappointment, but rather the personage of DEATH himself.

The existence of Heaven or Hell, the possibility of an afterlife or even the chance of reincarnation had never been part of Jimmy’s thinking. Instead, a la Terry Pratchett’s “Disc World”, he’d always assumed DEATH was an eight feet tall skeletal figure, cloaked and hooded in black, with a scythe in one hand and an expended hour glass in the other. At the moment of his demise this macabre figure would appear, standing over Jimmy’s body with Jimmy’s shade stood beside him, speaking to him in UPPERCASE, informing him of his recent departure from the world of the living.

An assignation of a vaguely similar sort is truly about to take place, but the harbinger of Jimmy’s doom will fall well short of his expectations.

As I have already stated, Jimmy’s now defunct life had been one huge disappointment. There were, however, a large number of smaller disappointments to go with it. For instance, aged only five a classmate’s older brother had divulged the painful yet irrefutable truth that Father Christmas did not exist. When he was seven his mum had gone into hospital to give birth to Jimmy’s new baby brother. For weeks he had seen his mother get bigger and bigger until he feared she must surely burst, thinking all the while of a future of football all winter, cricket all summer and climbing trees all year around, a future of toy guns and plastic soldiers. Finally the great day came, and with it came Sarah, his new baby sister.

When he was ten he had asked, begged and cajoled for a new bike for Christmas. On Christmas morning he’d rushed downstairs to find a new, or rather second-hand, bicycle waiting by the tree. The fact it wasn’t new didn’t faze him in the slightest, the red paintwork was pleasing, the white tyres were…. different, yes it was too big for him but he would soon grow into it. The missing crossbar was a whole different matter: it was a girl’s bike.

His first proper kiss should have been wonderful; instead his and Sally Smith’s respective teeth-borne metalwork had become stubbornly interlocked. Losing his virginity should have been a rapturous affair accompanied by fanfares, applause and hearty thanks from a well satisfied partner; alas it was an all too brief lesson from the school sexpert behind the toilets, followed by the scathing comment “I’ve had better and bigger”. As for the applause? He did at least get a clap, or rather the clap.

When he was seventeen his second bite of the cherry came along in the form of his best mate’s mum; forty years old and hot as hell. He had gone round to his friend’s house but he was out; his mother, wrapped in a bath robe, was most definitely in. Two minutes later they were naked on the lounge floor, ten seconds after that his “man juice” was covering her thigh and his “little friend” had fallen at the first fence. He never saw mother or son again.

Upon leaving school his father gave him a job in the family firm “commensurate with his age, qualifications and experience”; his pride at becoming an “industrial sanitation engineer” rapidly dissolved once it hit him that his job was merely cleaning toilets. At twenty one, “encouraged” by his parents to leave home, he’d moved into a shared house. Visions of female housemates wandering around in bra and panties, sunbathing topless in the garden, asking him to wash their backs in the bath, doing his cooking and ironing for him, were soon blown away by the unwashed reality of Neville and Rick, complete with unidentified stains in the bathroom, piled crocks in the sink and cold baked beans straight from the tin, chocolate for breakfast and cornflakes for dinner.

The final disappointment of Jimmy’s disappointing life came when he took ecstasy for the first and only time….it killed him, which is pretty much the point at which we came in. As for the disappointment in encountering DEATH himself? There was no black robed skeletal figure; instead he was confronted by a little old lady in pearls and a twin set. There was no scythe; instead there was a needle. There was no dramatically expended hourglass; instead there was a never ending tapestry full of the names of the deceased. Even as this reality hit home he saw the needle picking out his own name in cold, black thread. The disappointing truth was there before him: DEATH is an elderly woman with a flair for needlework. As the Bible so rightly told her: AS YE SEW, SO SHALL YE REAP.
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COPYRIGHT DM PAMMENT 10th MAY 2010