Here’s a new short story which will form part of a forthcoming collection called Pictures From Life’s Other Side.
I’m spending a lot of time in the cemetery. You know the one, up on Santa Monica Boulevard. Hollywood Forever, that’s what they call it. It’s a beautiful place. You wouldn’t think that if you walked down the Boulevard, which frankly is a shithole: a four-lane piece of beaten-up asphalt with used car lots and overhead electricity cables. A couple of blocks down from the entrance to the cemetery, there’s a Chinese food supermarket and on the other side of the road, empty-looking sand-coloured office buildings with no windows.
That’s the thing with Americans, isn’t it? They’re not sentimental, not like us Brits, drooling over some piece of the past we’ve misremembered. Just because there’s a fucking gorgeous cemetery with Rudolph Valentino and Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland buried here, it doesn’t mean they have to make the street outside look nice. They don’t care. You want to go see the cemetery? Take a cab.
But once you’re through the gates, it’s different. The sprinklers keep the lush trimmed green lawns in emerald health and there’s a silence here which calms me down. If you stand on one of the roadways inside the cemetery and look back out through the other gates, you can see the Hollywood sign up there in the hills, the wonky white lettering gazing down on the dead.
I’ve been coming here for a few weeks now. I take a cab from Downtown and I sit in the traffic on the overhead freeway thinking about what to do about them. I never know what I’m going to do about them, so I end up here walking around the gravestones.
If I don’t work out what to do about them…Anyway, that’s why I started coming up here, to the cemetery. It’s the closest I’m going to get to an estate agent’s now. I was going to buy a nice plot, except I can’t afford a plot, so it had to be one of those weird little crypts in the mausoleum, the ones with the glass front and the stuff inside. They’re pretty cheap. They can burn me, put me in a nice urn.
OK, let’s walk down this path. Neat gravel and the edges of the grass on either side have been cut very nicely. Who’s that? Leonard B Ravelstein. 1922-2001. Good long life, Leonard. Doesn’t say much on the stone about him. Had a loving wife and was a great father and grandfather. What did he do? Something to do with the movies, lots of them were. Maybe not though. Maybe Leonard was in insurance. Maybe he escaped the Nazis and came over here before the war and walked up and down the streets in old Los Angeles knocking on doors and selling insurance policies. Good for you, Leonard. I bet you didn’t owe anyone a dime when you died.
Marjorie Blatsky. Hello Marjorie. Phyllis Stoops. Bernard de la Reine. What kind of name is that, Bernie? Do you try and lord it over your neighbours here, with your de la Reine thing? I don’t think Phyllis is impressed. George Nash. George was in the movies, look: ‘And cut!’ Very funny, George. You must have been a wag on the set. Were you as funny when you got home? I hope so.
I haven’t been funny for quite some time. Or maybe I have. Americans use that word differently. Back in London, if you were funny, it meant you cracked jokes outside the pub before you got the late train back home to some Godforsaken semi-detached house in Surrey. In LA, funny is different: funny is like being a wiseguy. Funny means not on the level. I was never funny in London, but I’m funny now.
The palm trees line the edge of the cemetery and their leaves stand out against the blue sky like a line of eyebrows looking down on me. It’s hot, there’s hardly anyone here in this midday heat. There’s a fat Chinese woman cleaning dead leaves off a stone just over there. Is it her husband? Her sister? Or is she paid to do that? Even when the old sod died, she still has to go and clean up. There’s a couple over the other side posing by the Joey Ramone gravestone, the one with the statue of him standing over it with his guitar.
If I’m honest, I don’t even really remember London. Ten years now I’ve been here. Never been back. You can disappear, you know, if you really need to. Why don’t I disappear again? Because I can’t this time. They won’t let me.
Gareth Fishburn. Weird name. ‘Left for a greater adventure.’ You sure about that Gareth? I hope so. Donald Bright. My Dad was called Donald. He and my Mum are side by side in a grave in Yorkshire. I’ve made him turn a few times over the years, I suppose. Flipped Dad over, round and round, but there’s nothing he could do about it, stuck inside that freezing Yorkshire mud, trying to mouth insults at me through the cheap wood of his coffin.
It won’t be long. I know that.
Here’s the mausoleum. Front door’s always open when I come here. It’s very grand but honestly, the prices were pretty good. When you stand inside, it looks impressive, the long parallel lines of glass-fronted crypts stretching down the never-ending corridor. I think they shot a movie in here, some horror thing.
It’s quiet. My footsteps echo on the cream-coloured marble floor. Who’s in here? Daisy Fortune. Haven’t seen you before Daisy. You sound great. She’s got a brass urn in the little box behind the glass, and a pair of ballet shoes. Dancer, Daisy. Good for you. I bet you were cute. I bet there was just one thing that you always wanted to do and that was to dance and you went ahead and that’s exactly what you did. Now you’ve hung up your shoes.
Bit further. What’s that up there? Someone’s actually put a teddy bear in with their urn. That’s a bit sad, isn’t it? It doesn’t even look that old. Oh, kid died aged twelve. That explains it. That’s no good for people, is it, kid dying at that age? Then you’ve got no-one to mourn you, when you go. No-one at all.
Here we are. I’m pleased with it, actually. My crypt. I bought a ten-year lease. That’ll do. After that, they can just take the urn out and kick the ash into the gravel on the driveway. But ten years here, with everyone, hanging out. That’ll be nice. There’s no name on mine, they said I couldn’t have a name until I’m actually using it. But I’ve had my urn put in there, empty at the moment, and after a lot of discussion – they kept saying it wasn’t usual, whatever that means – they’ve let me leave a couple of things. I told them that I couldn’t be sure the undertakers would remember, so I wanted to make sure. Anyway I won, so there’s my gold signet ring which I took off a couple of weeks ago and put inside together with a little black and white photo of Ricky, my dog. Someone will look after him, he’ll be OK. And I’ll like having him there with me.
There. Looks OK, doesn’t it?