I finished my conference paper on Taboo Collections this evening, and it’s actually shaped up a lot and took an hour less time than I had allotted for the final drafting.  So I spent the rest of the time reading bits of Dolls, which I haven’t looked at since sending the polished draft to bluechrome to pass on for editing.  I’d forgotten bits of it and I found myself smiling at the in-jokes and where I’d made references to my friends and their misadventures.  I’m a big advocate of the saying that writers are like magpies: we’ll steal anything if it’ll make a good story.

And the more I read the more I thought about how much David would like this: how it’s right up his street.  David was a neighbour a few years ago.  We chatted a bit on msn and I babysat his two little boys whilst he and his wife went out.  He was one of those cool types who invited me to use the internet and to help myself to the liquor cabinet.  He particularly recommended the Black Label vodka and said it’d go well with a Red Bull.  He always left a can for me in the fridge even though I never drank it.  I found out after he’d died that they were actually seeing a couple’s therapist those nights.

My Mum told me he’d killed himself literally as I was walking out the door to work.  It was an offhand, ‘oh by the way’ thing that took thirty seconds.  I didn’t start crying until I got into my manager’s office and asked for the night off, then I drove up to Simon’s to talk about it.  I came home when my shift was due to finish so my folks wouldn’t know I’d skipped work.  We drove around for an hour after I got there because I needed to feel in control of something.  Mum had told me he’d gassed himself in his car.  I saw his wife driving that car a few weeks later and couldn’t get my head around why she would be driving the car her husband had killed himself in.

The truth of it slipped out some months later when Mum was telling someone else about it across the dinner table, and it slipped out that he’d hung himself.  I asked why she’d lied and she said that hanging was such a horrible death that she preferred me to think he’d gassed himself.  I’d always thought gassing would be quite a horrible way to go: nausea, convulsion, etc.  Pictures of hung men with black tongues and bulging eyes kept coming to me from Bizarre magazines I’d looked through years ago.  It felt like I was grieving all over again, but Mum told me not to be stupid and to forget about it.

David had a blue and white sports bike that made an electrical whining sound when he revved it.  He loved that bike and he took me out pillion with him twice on it.  It was the first motorcycle I’d ever ridden, and I remember how I wouldn’t let my knees touch his body because it felt too intimate.  He had a really thin skull but, wearing a helmet, all bikers pretty much look the same.  I still see him sometimes, even though I know they got his body down from a pub sign years ago for his wife to identify.  I think it’s one of the reasons I don’t like crotch-rocket bikes - why I want a hulking, low slung cruiser like my dad’s.    85% of wooden roller-coaster struts serve no purpose but to provide a visual reassurance of stability.  I want miles of chrome pipe and bulging exhausts on a bike.

David had a quick, slightly warped sense of humour that rubbed off on me and I can see it in Dolls.  I’ve still got a copy of a meme he did once on my computer, and I used a short extract from that in the book.  It feels strange to be magpie-ing from both the living and the dead, but these stories and personalities are as important to me as the books I read, the films I watch and the music I listen to.  They shape me and what I write, and I feel like I’m preserving something core and precious about the people I care about in my work.

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