Life with a Hardling

Another one I wrote bleary eyed and annoyed I couldn’t sleep. So it must be good! Just one possible end to the Hardling legacy. I’ll get it sometime…

—-

This is a world gone mad.

Well, I assume so. I don’t know any other worlds I can compare it to, really.

I’m Timbert by the way. Timbert Hardling. My Dad, Hubert, he died the other day. Um.

Well, you know, movies and books never really underwrite things, do they? They romanticise or criticise or turn everything into a metaphor and the worlds in those are never as simple as the real thing. I guess children’s books balance it out. They reduce the world to a dog and a spade or some shit; no wonder kid’s are so messed up. Um.

I’m a writer, right? I find what I just did rather clever. I write about things, I don’t make any money, lots of people read my stuff, and someone else makes lots of money. I should have got into publishing. If I had an infinite tolerance of boredom and letdowns.

So my father left me the rights to write about him. You need the rights to write about something. It’s the way it works. I can write about my day, because it’s mine. Of course. Or my toe that is turning green, that’s mine too. Um.

So I get to write and, again, not make any money. He insisted I write about him. I don’t know how many strings a dead man can pull, but I’ll hedge my bets for the afterlife. Where do I start? He was an odd man, no doubt.

It’s hard to think of him being with any woman. I’m not sure what that says about me. Luckily I don’t have to imagine the woman, since I had a real world reference.

She looked like any unglamorous woman in a black and white photograph. Crooked smile and immense bushy, curly hair that looked like, well, a bush on her head. I hope no one from the younger generation is reading this. They’d probably forcibly misinterpret that. Um.

Well, she wasn’t at all interesting. Her pacemaker was the most interesting thing in her. It was beautifully and painstakingly crafted to do one job and do it well. Nearly all of her life it did, except that bit at the very end. The only craft that went into making my mother was my grandparents ‘doing the dance’. More skill and thought gets put into hammering a nail through a board. That thought would surely disgust me, if I ever knew them. Actually, it still disgusts me.

He didn’t like music much. If he did it was old, and not ‘golden years’ old, but ’shit’ old. The stuff you’d never want anyone to know you listened to. If they did hear it their images of Billie Holiday and Charles Trenet and that whole era would always be associated with a slight taste of vomit.

So I’ve established that he wasn’t at all romantic, I’ve said he wasn’t interesting more than anyone wants to hear, and I can’t help but think the picture is close to complete. When you look at a portrait and try to imagine what kind of life that person led, he didn’t. Whatever you imagine, he didn’t. You might guess he was a book worm. He wasn’t. Too much imagination goes into plain English, surely. The stern tone of technical writing was too tough for him. He was a distinct mix of jelly and gravel with half the taste.

And now, I can’t help but feel I’ve exhausted everything about him except his death. A death that was rather ordinary for everyone else on the plane, but perhaps extraordinary for him. And filled with excitement and colour. I will call it ‘Death with a Hardling’.

—-

So it’s not a terrible piece of writing but it’s not quite what I imagined. Actually last night I only got the part with the grandparents and couldn’t think of any more. And that ending, that just turns it into a whole cyclical nightmare of reading. Right? Write.