The Posthumous Adventures of Harry Whittaker by Bobbie Darbyshire

Author:Bobbie Darbyshire
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sandstone Press Ltd
Published: 2019-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

Harry

I don’t believe it! You stupid, stupid boy! This goes beyond comic or tragic. Here I am, stranded on Pearl Allen’s desk once again, all my adventures gone for nothing. The Post Office, Deborah’s desperate doormat, my bicycle tours to and from Worthing – where have they got me? Precisely nowhere, that’s where, like the turn of some freakish merry-go-round. My son – if that’s what he is – cares so little for me that he throws Pearl’s letter down and me with it and flounces off without us. To top that, the brazen little bastard is bent on wheedling his irksome mother into my home, my home, where I long to be.

Then Pearl with her judgements! Talk about salt in the wound. All right, I grant you I wasn’t a ‘pleasant’ man. I was an artist, goddammit – does that count for nothing? I should be respected and revered as an artist.

She has picked the letter up, realised what it is and – No! Jesus help me – she is feeding it into a shredder! The motor shrieks, the letter is sliced into strips, but thankfully I’ve come through unscathed. Now she is dumping the debris and me into her wastepaper bin, which the gum-chewing, bum-scratching cleaning woman will empty this evening into another blasted rubbish sack. I’m plagued by the wretched things, lurking about me like vultures.

Reception buzzes through that Pearl’s next client has arrived, and she’s off out to meet and greet, leaving me dithering between an uncertain, insecure fate with a tangle of waste paper and a certain, secure one with the will in the folder that lies open on the desk. On an impulse I transfer to the will – though is it better to take my chance in a paper-processing plant? I hop back to the wastepaper bin, except— What’s this, I can’t? Why can’t I? Try again.

The ‘can’t’ makes sudden sense. By no stretch of imagination did I ever invest emotion in some solicitor’s letter. It was the bequests I invested in, the parcelling out of my wealth. The scrap of paper that brought Richard news of his share is no longer a qualifying host. I am once again stuck with the will.

I subside on the desk in despair. There’s no earthly use in fretting and striving. Struggle gets me nowhere against the pitiless laws of the universe. Full circle, defeated, I may as well resign myself to my fate.

Pearl is back, showing in the new client, a young woman with a strawberry birthmark across her left cheek and jaw. Normally I would find her intriguing, but I’m past all worldly concerns. Just file me, Pearl, and have done.

‘Take a seat,’ she says. ‘Tea or coffee?’

The client requests coffee, then twists abruptly in her seat, and Pearl jumps up too, because someone has barged in unannounced. Mrs Butley, guns blazing.

‘Girl outside said I should wait, but unlike some who spend their time nattering and filing their nails, I don’t have all day. I have to work for my living.

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