Theroux the Keyhole by Louis Theroux

Author:Louis Theroux [Theroux, Louis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509880430
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

October 2020

STRANGE AND UNUSUAL DEATHS

Thursday 1 October

a.m.

Arthur is in the top bedroom now, which I was using as a study before. I’ve taken Nancy’s study, which is above the kitchen, with only a thin ceiling in between, meaning that when I work in the evening and there are people downstairs, mainly Jack, I can hear DigDat and Headie One and AJ Tracey coming through the floor or the buzz of the NutriBullet making smoothies.

Jack is still at home, notionally home-learning, though we wonder how much home-learning is happening.

This morning, Ray was up at 6.55, his voice calling out, ‘Daddy!’

‘I’ll lie down with you for a minute, OK? Because it’s still early.’

That lasted about fifteen minutes. I was feeling rough, fogged-out, my kidneys marinaded for twelve hours in Bulleit bourbon. I came downstairs with Ray. He seemed tired too, watched KidCity on YouTube while I washed up and unloaded the dishwasher and licked my booze-soaked wounds. Nancy came down, and the big boys.

‘You are somewhere else,’ Nancy said.

‘I’m right here.’

‘What’s going on with you at the moment?’

‘Nothing is going on with me.’

• • •

Was anything going on with me? I wasn’t sure. Possibly I was fine. Possibly I wasn’t. It was hard to know. Was it wrong to drink quite so much? What if you could still function and you enjoyed it and most of the time you felt OK? Was I hiding? Was I dulling the pain? Was it weird that I didn’t have more insight into what was going on or was that what most men were like? The radio was saying there were further local lockdowns in the north-east, and in Liverpool too. But college students could come home for Christmas. Even if they found a vaccine in the spring, the radio said, it would take years for life to return to normal. Whatever that meant. And, in fact, what about this assumption that we should return to a normal that involves forest fires literally the size of Uruguay and mass extinction? We were all so keen to save humans and sure humans are great – I love the Sistine Chapel and I happen to be married to a human – but did we really deserve quite so much consideration given that we were rampaging around the planet in Hummers and selling avocados in stupid plastic packaging and giving gift bags at children’s parties that ended up in the guts of sperm whales thousands of miles away? Wah wah wah! The coronavirus! Wah wah wah! We need more humans to fuck up the planet so we can watch YouTube and dolphins can die choking on a mini Rubik’s Cube.

The fog lifted over the course of the day, helped along by a vigorous twenty-minute Joe Wicks. As I came out of the shower, the doorbell rang. It was one of the neighbours.

‘Have you signed the petition?’ she asked.

‘What’s it about?’

‘The 5G mast they want to build at the end of the road.’

‘I’m going to be honest with you,’ I said, surprising myself with my directness.

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