The Book of Other People (9 page)

‘Yes, I see - thank you . . . it was good of you to let us know,’ said Hanwell in a voice a shade more posh than his own. He put down the phone and left the room. After the pizza was finished, he came back in, pale, but composed. He said his father had died, a sentence that required us - my mother, my brother, and me - to invent a whole human in one second and kill him off the next. Hanwell had said nothing to prepare us. He had known weeks earlier that his father’s death was imminent - he did not go to him. Twenty years later, Hanwell’s son would not go to Hanwell when his hour came. It happens that in the course of my professional duties I am often found making the statement ‘I don’t believe in patterns.’ A butterfly on a pin has no idea what a pretty shape it makes.

‘He never settled,’ said Hanwell, ‘and now he’s come to the end of the road,’ a quaint metaphor, like those that Borges enjoyed, and we, equally, interpreted it literally, thinking of Brighton pier, Brighton being Hanwell country for us, and the place where Hanwell’s people generally died. When I was a kid, I had a dream - never forgotten! - of the cool, flat Brighton pebbles being placed over my body, as the Jews place stones on top of their dead; piled up and up over my corpse, until I was entirely buried and families came to picnic over me, not knowing, for I was Brighton bedrock now, as Hanwells had been (in my dream logic) since there were Hanwells in England. There have always been Hanwells in England. But I am a female Hanwell and lost my name when I married.

 

JAMIE JOHNSON
was born in 1955, in Southend, Essex. He studied English at Cambridge University, and has contributed to the
TLS
, the
Literary Review
, the
Independent
and
Mojo
. This is his first book. He lives in North London.

JAMIE JOHNSON
is the author of JUST CAN’T GET ENOUGH, a memoir about sex addiction, which was shortlisted for the
Guardian
First Book award. He was born in 1955 in Southend, Essex, and has contributed to
Esquire
,
Playboy
and
Nuts
. He lives in Essex with his wife and two children. (CAN’T GET NO) SATISFACTION is his first novel.

JAMES JOHNSON
rereads the poems of John Donne every year. He is the author of two previous books, and has been shortlisted for the
Guardian
First Book award. He has contributed to the
TLS
, the
Literary Review
and the
Independent
. He is currently a Visiting Writer at Essex University, and lives just outside Shoeburyness with his wife and four children. HOW DRY A CINDER is his second novel.

JIM JOHNSON
is the author of several books for adults, including HOW DRY A CINDER, a historical novel about the last years of the poet John Donne, which was longlisted for the John Donne Prize. He lives in Hartlepool in the North-East of England with his wife, five children, two cats, one dog, two gerbils called Romulus and Remus, and Dylan the goldfish. This is his first children’s book.

ANNIE GREEN
is an artist, and the illustrator of the much loved Elvis the Elephant series. She too lives in the North-East of England, with a large menagerie including a snake. She drives an old 2CV called Poppy.

 

J. THOMAS JOHNSON
is the author of several books. He has worked as a bartender, lumberjack, nightclub bouncer, pearl-fisherman, police-dog trainer, professional wrestler, private detective, Nepalese tour-guide, assassin, and writer-in-residence at a number of British universities. He has been fascinated by the Alaskan wilderness ever since he was a child. He lives with his partner, the illustrator Annie Green, just outside Hartlepool in the North-East of England.

Five things you didn’t know about
JIMMY JOHNSON
:

 

BRIAN BRITTEN
used to play for Reading, Millwall, Leyton Orient, Southend United, Walsall, Tranmere Rovers and Hartlepool. He was once described as ‘the best defender never to have played in the top two divisions’. He claims to have kicked ‘at least six’ future England internationals.

JIMMY JOHNSON
is a professional writer. FOREIGN NANCY BOYS is his twelfth book. He lives in - and supports - Hartlepool.
THANKS TO: THE LORD GOD ALMIGHTY (love You, and everything You do for us), Sharon Osbourne (DA BOMB!), Simon Cowell (I’ve nearly forgiven you!), David and Victoria, Wayne and Coleen, Mum and Dad, baby bruvva, everyone in the Barnet Posse except Nicola Braithwaite, everyone at the Pink Coconut in Bushey. And yo Mr Osbourne! I wrote a book! Even after all what you said about me when I left school! A big shout-out to Jim Johnson for his help in putting this together. Top man.

It was so hot in Léogâne that summer that most of the frogs exploded, scaring not just the children who once chased them into the river at dusk or the parents who hastily pried the threadbare carcasses from their fingers, but also my 39-year old sister Lélé, who was four months pregnant with her first child and feared that, should the temperature continue to rise, she too might burst. The frogs had been dying for a while, but we hadn’t noticed, mostly because they’d been doing it quietly. Perhaps for each that had expired, one had taken its place along the river bank, looking exactly the same as the others and fooling us into thinking that a normal cycle was occurring, that young was replacing old and life replacing death, sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly, just as it was for us.

‘This is surely a sign that something terrible is going to happen,’ Lélé said, as we sat on the top-floor verandah of my parents’ house one particularly sweltering evening. Even though my father, the former justice of the peace of the town of Léogâne, had died more than ten years ago, and my mother five years before that, I’ve never been able to stop thinking of the place that I, and now my sister, called home as theirs. The dollhouse façade of our wooden ginger-bread had been meticulously sketched by Papa, who’d spent his nights after work updating and revising each detail as their home was built from the ground up. He and Maman had driven to the capital to purchase the corrugated metal and bordered jalousies, a journey which at the time, before my sister and I were born, took several agonizing hours in an old pick-up truck that they’d inherited from my half-French grandfather, the previous justice of the peace. The shell of the truck was still out there somewhere among the dozens of almond trees that dotted our three hectares, its once thunderous engine rusting into the earth, like the neglected memorial it was.

The air on my verandah was just slightly cooler than it was in either of the two bedrooms where my sister and I slept, just as we had as children, surrounded by shelves lined with leather-bound notebooks filled with the concerns and complaints that had consumed the days, and sometimes nights, of our father and grandfather. Last year, I decided to read all their notebooks before I moved them to the courthouse archive in town. And now, despite her current condition, my sister, who was in the middle of a separation from her husband, was helping me sort through them.

 

‘In all of their notes,’ Lélé was saying, ‘I’ve not seen one mention of frogs dying like this.’

Before becoming pregnant, Lélé had been a heavy smoker, and sometimes when she made some pronouncement - for she had one of those voices with an air of always seeming to be making a pronouncement - she sounded a bit out of breath. This was further aggravated by the fact that she now had a baby pressing on her lungs, I’m sure, but, come to think of it, she had spoken that way even when she was a child, sometimes purposefully emphasizing a lisp that strangely enough made her sound even more certain.