Sample Sunday: Shadows Closing In

The following is an excerpt from the Collected Diaries of Kenneth L. Wainwright – much-loved star of the Oh, Hello films who made his name on Dennis Woodcock’s radio comedies. He was found dead on 15th April 1988 at his London home aged 62. His mother, Sheila Wainwright, was also found dead at the time and a suicide pact between the two was suspected though never confirmed in the national press.

He appeared in twenty-six Oh, Hello films and on radio he was a regular winner of Wait A Minute and, in earlier years, contributed a range of voices and characters to Boris Yeoville’s Beyond Me and its successor, Beggar’s Belief. He was a chat show regular for over twenty years and was given his own television show to present in later life between stints in repertory theatre.

Monday, 11 April

Oh, how drear it has all become, reely.

The Mater continues to be the most crushing bore. Her geriatric decrepitude wears away my patience as much as it wears away her remaining sense into senility. The soiled sheets. Those horrid yellow and brown stains. The forgetfulness. The repetitive child-like neediness. Oh, it is all so crushingly dull and withering waste of one’s life-hours.

I wish I were done with this life. I wish I were through. This is it, the utter end. It reely has to be. After so many years, so much now conspires into torture. My stomach’s lining gnaws at me when I disturb it with food. Walks are an agony as the bowels act up and the bum does its dirty work. My bones, my kidneys, my liver, everything seems to curse me with cramps and intolerable aches.

Oh, how I wish to be dead. Post, nothing. News, nothing but the same old cycles of violence and drab melodrama as I remember it always being since I was a boy. Nothing ever changes, not really. I am sure in the future that when such things as genocide occur, they will be considered mercy killings by those who are left to live on afterwards in whatever dreadful world we, the people, create for ourselves.

Shut up in this box all day, these walls I never could bring myself to decorate, this floor I never dared to disturb with carpet. It makes it all so much easier to keep clean you see, leaving out the modern accoutrements, leaving the packing plastic on the cooker and so on. Oh, but this space lacks so much of life, of laughter. This clinical morgue I have made for myself, a dead man who walks to shops then home again and so on and so on. I feel a bleeding going on inside me, every step is a step nearer the grave, nudging me closer. A little piece of death itself bides its time in my gut, a loose black tooth slyly tucked away.

One last thing from the shops for the Mater, always the way, always the bloody way.

 

Tuesday, 12 April

Walk in the park with Paul today. Still looking as delicious as ever. Grey skies. Quite tolerable. Conversation around the usual subjects, went something like this.

“Oh, do slow down, will you?”

“What’s wrong with you now then, Ken?”

“Don’t be so bloody smart. Hurts me doesn’t it? With my insides, the state they’re in, I can’t stand all this running about.”

“Running? We’re barely bloody walking, mate.”

“Oh, do shut up, will you? Christ, what a dross, what a life, I’ve had enough of this world. Enough, enough, I say.”

“Dramatic as ever. You just need to find yourself a good fella to bunk up with.”

“Oh, I wish, no. That’s what they all say but no. Death is the only lover I’ve got waiting for me. Waiting my whole life for me, he has been.”

“Don’t talk such morbid rot, mate. What about me, eh? Your friends? You still want to see us, don’cha?”

“Yes, I do, but you just don’t understand the pain, Paul. It’s been with me, one form or another, me whole life and I just don’t know what to do any more. It’s really gripping me. And there’s nothing the doctors say they can do to take it away. It’s down to me. No-one else. And I seen ‘em coming after me.”

“Seen who?”

“Shadows, they’re closing in on me. Horrid spidery things with these long, long legs. I think they’re legs, they might be arms. And they’ve got these fingers, no flesh on them, and these horrid black fingernails that they use to tap-tap and scratch-scratch at my windows with.”

“You need to see a doctor, Ken. A good head doctor if you’re seeing things like that. Come on, Barney. Good boy.”

“Care more about the bloody dog than you do me.”

“Oh, do shut up, Ken.”

Paul led Barney away, leaving me standing alone in the dirty white embrace of the winter fog. It was my first time telling another soul about those damned shadows. I’ve not even told the Mater about them. In her state, it probably wouldn’t matter one way or the other but, oh, how I had hoped Paul would be receptive. I don’t know what these things are that I see, crawling about in my room at night. I turn the light on and have a fiddle about just so as not to see them there. When the light goes off, they come back. Evil things. Not sure what I am to do, apart from prepare for tomorrow night’s show.

Best dust off the old mask and costume, eh?

 

Wednesday 13 April

Where is it all happening, eh? Why was I never invited, not now, not ever?

They were in the theatre tonight, the shadows, I’m sure of it, in the aisles and in the seats. Such a low turn-out for the last night that I couldn’t help but notice them. Not enough bodies available to shield from me the sight of those awful crematory shapes drifting dustily about the place. Made me gabble like an idiot during a straight performance. Ad-libbing like mad I was. Oh, the shame. Felt so suicidally depressed afterwards that I didn’t bother to stay for the ticking off I would have received from the director – obnoxious little shit he is. Made it home safe through the streets. The utter shambles of the production needed only a little push to bring it crashing down and that push came from me. Though, looking back on it, I feel a certain triumph like Nero playing his fiddle whilst Rome was burning down around him. Only laughs of the night were mine and mine alone. That’s something I suppose. Thank god I won’t have to go back to that rubbish bin of a theatre with its dull-as-dishwater cast and dumb-as-a-diddlysquit crew. The Mater woke up screaming and shouting about black things that were cold as ice to the touch. Ignored her. Now going to bed for my second fiddle-play of the evening.

 

Thursday 14 April

Oh, how I miss those times in Tangiers. I wish I’d made more of them. Looking back over one’s life, one sees it laid out and wonders at what might have been had a different detour been taken, a left turn at this junction, straight on ahead when there was a pause for thought either here or there. The villas were exquisite and so were the boys in the Medina; beautiful skin, brown as a nut. I could do with a bit of that now. A good nut or two. Oh, I’m so awful, reely.

But there was never a truly successful visit now I think of it. The orgies and intimacies were for the others, the young bucks, not for me, no. Some are born to enjoy life and all its fruits, it seems to me, whilst there are those of us who are left to gnaw upon the unsatisfying roots for what little nourishment we can find. I fled to Tangiers every time out of a sense of panic at the inner despair growing within me. I had been motionless for too long and being so created a desperate need for motion of any kind. Even the motion of a younger body that I had paid ten dirhum for the company of.

They seep through the cracks in life to stain me with memory and crawl over the walls. Yes, maybe that is it, that is where these shadow-things have come from. Lithe as they are, slender too, could they be the lonely ghosts of those antient orgies I attended? The big A must have made it as far as Morocco and some of the ones I fiddled with there. Are they here to haunt me?

Then, of course, there were my forays to The Spartan Club in Victoria. Always needed a few stiff ones before I went looking for a few stiff ones. Ho-ho-ho. Oh, the cheap old jokes, the lavatorial gags, how wasteful my way with words has become over the years. Bawling and shouting. Mutual masturbation in the bogs with some young sod I’d then ask home who would serve me a curt “No, thank you, dear,” and then leave me to sob alone. Can you pass on the Big A like that? I’ve no idea. Are they all back to haunt me then, now that I am a lizardly touch-me-not in my dying days?

Is that it, you bastards?

 

Friday 15 April

Life has become all innuendo and this is what makes it totally unacceptable to me, reely. They, we, the people, the audience, do not want characters. Cliché, stereotype, trope, caricature, everything camped-up and overdone until no-one knows who is wearing a mask or costume and who is not, that is what we want. What we are. An endless parade of the drab, the drear and the commonplace dressed up in rags pretending to be finery until we all drop down dead and the dust and the darkness that’s left hold dominion over all and nothing.

Oh, what an utter insult to existence it is, all those years I spent making those Oh, Hello films; twenty-six of the beastly things, and I never saw the truth of what I was becoming. Life imitates art far more than art imitates life wrote the Bard of Reading Gaol, but what about the complete horror of when art imitates life so poorly to the point where the difference is lost upon us and we can never return to the former way of being? When we no longer know where the performance begins and ends? When we continue to excavate ourselves, serving up the ‘body-fat’ of our lives to others until there is nothing left but some dusty shadows with nothing better to do than creep and crawl about the walls, seats and aisles of the drab old theatre we have made of this world?

Yes, you see, I understand it now. I’ve got it. Well, don’t you give it to me then – that would have been the punch-line, of a sort, back in the old days of witless verbiage.

I put Mater to sleep earlier tonight. I had enough barbiturate poison saved for the both of us, you see. Now that I know these shadow-things are not a madness I’ve picked up from her, I feel better about it – feeding my pills to her and then pressing the pillow down over her face for good measure. A kinder death than I gave to Dad – that carbon tetrachloride made a right mess of him. He still deserved worse though. I guess that makes this entry my confession to that nonsense after all these years then. Oh well, as I’m going now, it doesn’t matter. Not really. I killed the old bastard and I’m glad I did so. I know now there’s no Heaven or Hell for me to go to. No judgement to come down on me from on High.

I am no longer to be an object of Crass Ridicule.

They are letting me finish this entry before they make their way in and then their way into me. How I long for them to pull me apart, to split my seams, these shadows. How strangely appropriate that one so depreciative of tactility and loathing of contact with others should be taken apart by such creatures. The mask is to go, at last. The costume is to come off. And I am to be one of their number to drift and drift about out there forever. Oh, those fingers, so long and lithesome, so very lovely. How I ache for them. How I need for them to touch me. Oh, I no longer need this blasted pen or these dashed, clumsy words. I am done with life. I am through. This is it. The end.

There is no bloody point.

END

Copyright © G.R. Yeates 2012

Author’s note: This short story is a tribute to the late actor and comedian, Kenneth Williams, who died on 15th April 1988. As a work of fiction, it is not intended by the author to be a work of serious commentary on the actor or his life.

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