It was a beautiful day. The sun rose in a hurry, as if trying to make up for setting so early the evening before, bouncing into the sky like a great fiery yo-yo and sending what was left of the moon packing. The sky, with blatant disregard for the overuse of alliteration, was a brilliantly bright baby blue, and perched picturesquely on the leafy branches of the trees in the park below, birds sang. Which is to say that they chirped, tweeted and warbled incessantly. A bit like Britney Spears without the eye candy.At the very end of the park, where the park-keeper’s job ended and Mother Nature’s began, was a cliff which overlooked the sea. Black railings ran around the edge of this cliff, having been installed for safety after one too many children had blindly chased their runaway ball through the foliage and found themselves travelling rapidly southwards at a rate of ten newtons per second on the tail of a scream. The sea below was eternally hungry, and had teeth of jagged rock.At a particular point along the top of the cliff, where the ground suddenly tapered into an ever-narrowing overhang, was a wooden bench. It was the kind of bench where young Romeos took their sweethearts at sunset, in the fervent hope that the romantic view of the sea swallowing the sun an inch at a time would distract them from the fact that their bra-straps had magically come undone, and put a stop to all that ‘not-until-there’s-a-ring-on-this-finger’ crap. It was a bench where lovers loved, canoodlers canoodled and painters painted. And, right now, it was a bench upon which DC McDougall sat.DC McDougall was a man in a quandary, which was hardly surprising given that within the next few minutes he planned to throw himself headfirst over the railings and into a watery grave, thus bringing an end to it all. What was surprising, however, was that this was not the source of his dilemma.The problem was the suicide note. He had never written one before, on account of never having killed himself before, and he didn’t know how to begin. On his lap was an A4 sized notebook; scrawled on the first page were a number of starting lines that he had crossed out as being unsuitable. He tried again.‘The time has come, my friends, for me to shuffle off this mortal coil and leave you all behind…’He stopped, read the line again, and groaned in frustration. What bloody friends? The only people he had spoken to in the last two months were his neighbour, who had popped round to borrow a lemon, and his
ex-wife, who had called him on the phone to inform him that she was getting married and moving to Krakow, wherever the hell that was. She would never forget him, she hoped he would find whatever it was he was looking for, she still really loved him, deep down inside, and, incidentally, would he mind dropping them off at the airport because the Porsche was playing up again?“Wotcha writing?”McDougall almost died of a heart attack, so startled was he by the sudden voice at his shoulder. He turned his head to the left so fast that it almost kept going, ...
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ex-wife, who had called him on the phone to inform him that she was getting married and moving to Krakow, wherever the hell that was. She would never forget him, she hoped he would find whatever it was he was looking for, she still really loved him, deep down inside, and, incidentally, would he mind dropping them off at the airport because the Porsche was playing up again?“Wotcha writing?”McDougall almost died of a heart attack, so startled was he by the sudden voice at his shoulder. He turned his head to the left so fast that it almost kept going, and his eyes bulged out at the little old lady who was sitting calmly on the bench next to him as if she had been there all the time. “Je… Jes… Jesus Christ!”, he spluttered, the utterance syllable-timed to coincide with his heartbeat, which is much easier said than done. And not that easy to say, either.“Whoops. Made you jump, did I? Sorry”, said the little old lady flatly, sounding anything but. She gave him what was probably meant to be a smile, which consisted in its entirety of one yellow tooth and a lot of gums. Thankfully, it only lasted a shadow of a second.McDougall stared at her incredulously. It was as if she had just popped into existence out of thin air. He hadn’t seen her arrive, hadn’t heard her taking a seat beside him, hadn’t even sensed her until she had spoken and almost given him a coronary.She was wearing the kind of dress that he had often referred to as ‘an old lady dress’ – the sort that looked as if they came with a matching pair of curtains and were sold in a shop whose location was top secret and only revealed to people over eighty-five. She was very small, the top of her head barely making it to his shoulder, and she looked old enough to have the letters BC following her date of birth.“Aintcha ever seen a little old lady before, then?” she demanded. She had a voice that sounded like someone using a cactus to play the violin.McDougall made a conscious effort to stop staring and regain his composure.“I’m sorry. It’s just that you scared the… you gave me quite a start”.“Yes, and I’ve apologised already for that”, said the little old lady. She glared up at him, as if daring him to contradict her. “Well?” she added, apropos of nothing.“Er… well what?”“Wotcha writing?”“Oh… er… nothing really. I er…”.She peered myopically down at the notebook in his lap, and her lips moved as she read. Then she snorted derisively.“Well, that’s a bit crap, ain’t it? You don’t want to write that. It’s shite.”“Don’t try to talk me out of it”, said McDougall in a firm voice, “I’ve thought about this long and hard and I’ve made up my…” He tailed off as his brain interrupted to inform him that no one was actually trying to talk him out of anything, and that he was, in fact, being critiqued. “Er… what?”McDougall blinked as the old lady stabbed a bony finger onto the page.“I mean, ‘Shuffle off this mortal coil’, for instance! That’s cobblers, that is. You can hardly call plummeting to certain death at fifty feet per second ‘shuffling’ now, can you? I don’t call it shuffling. Plummeting is what I call it. Plummeting to a messy wet splat…”“Excuse me”, McDougall interrupted hotly, having just registered that this old bat had referred to his efforts as shite, “but I’ll have you know that I just happen to be a professional writer. I’ve had two short story collections and a novel published. You may have even read some of my work before.”“No I ain’t.”“The novel was televised on the BBC. You may have seen it.”“No I ain’t.”“But you don’t even know what it was called!”“What was it called then?”“’The Baytowers Block’”, said McDougall, somehow managing to pronounce the capital letters.“It was shite”, said the little old lady dismissively. Apparently impervious to the proverbial daggers that McDougall was staring at her (which is actually easier done than said), she abruptly changed the subject.“So what’s a big hot-shot writer like you want to go around killing himself for then?” she demanded, grammar being something that happened to other people.McDougall’s shoulders slumped forward and his chin met his chest as he hung his head. All of the self-righteous indignation that he had felt a mere second ago had taken the same path as his ex-wife, his creativity and his will to live, and deserted him.“It doesn’t matter”, he mumbled.“Are you calling me a person what asks the kind of questions that the answers to which don’t matter?” There was a pause.“Er… I’m not sure”, said McDougall eventually.The old lady glared at him. McDougall gave in.“No no, of course I’m not. It’s just that… look, if you must know, there are a number of reasons…”“Like what?” snapped she.“Look, I can see what you’re trying to do and it’s not going to work. Talking through my problems won’t change anything. At the end of the day, there’s only one way home, and it’s that way”. And he dramatically pointed a finger beyond the railings.In the trees behind them, a bluebird chirped while a woodpecker hammered out a catchy little backbeat.The old lady grunted.“So like what then?” she asked, “if you’re quite done with being a pillock, that is”.McDougall sighed.“Well, if you must know, my wife left me for another man”.“Why’d she do that then?”“I don’t know. I suppose that Stanislaw gave her things that I couldn’t…”“Stanislaw? Sounds like a salad”, interrupted the old lady, “don’t like salad. Gives me gas something chronic”.“Er… really?” said McDougall after a while, having quickly searched his brain for something better to say and come up with nothing.“Yes. So what could he give her that you couldn’t? Multiple organisms, or whatever they call ‘em?”“What! No! Other stuff, I suppose, like expensive jewellery and fast cars…”“Why couldn’t you give them to her?”“Why do you think? I couldn’t afford it!”“You must’ve had money, what with being a fancy writer an’ all. And don’t take that tone with me, young man”.“Sorry. And, yes, I did have money, but she spent it all, and it ran out”.61“Why?”“Because… because there was none left”.“Why?”“Because… it finished”.“Why?”“Because I couldn’t write anymore!” McDougall wailed suddenly, stamping his foot on the ground like a petulant child who deserved a sound beating and would probably get it when the guests had left for home. “Because I couldn’t write! I tried and tried… I had stories, oh did I have stories! But then I tried to put them on paper and poof! The right words wouldn’t come. Blank paper. Nothing but blank paper! I had entire worlds inside my head that couldn’t get out!”He was on his feet now, pacing up and down, punching his fist into his hand. The bluebird, sensing a melodramatic rant coming on, stopped chirping.“You have no idea what it’s like to be able to see things in a hundred different ways, to be able to put them into words in a thousand different ways, and then suddenly have that taken away from you. Just like that!”He stopped his pacing and stared down at the old lady.She sucked thoughtfully on her bottom lip. If it wasn’t for the solitary tooth acting as a barrier, she might have been in danger of swallowing her face.“So you’re going to go an’ kill yourself ‘cos you’ve got writer’s block?” she said finally.McDougall flopped down next to her like a wet sheet blown off a washing line.“Yes. I suppose… yes”.“Why not just write what you want to say?”“It’s not as simple as that. People want imagery and… stuff. If it was a… I don’t know… a beautiful day, then readers want to know how beautiful it actually was, and why it was perceived as beautiful and who decided it was beautiful. You can’t just write ‘it was a beautiful day – so there!’”There was a long silence.“I’ll let you get back to your suicide note now”.The sun was beginning to set over the horizon when McDougall finally put his pen down. “It is done”, he whispered, with the theatrical melodrama of a second-rate actor hamming it up during a death-scene. He turned to look down at the little old lady. To his surprise, she was gone. He hadn’t felt her standing up, hadn’t seen her leave, hadn’t even sensed…“’S’ave a look then”, said the little old lady from next to his right shoulder, making him scream like a girl. She snatched the notebook from his unresisting hands. The suicide note was two paragraphs long. Her eyes ping-ponged left to right as she began to read.It was beautiful. Every word had been carefully chosen to fit perfectly into place. The imagery conjured up was as vivid as a painting and more colourful than a field in spring. It contained enough emotion to reduce even the most sadistic butcher and murderer of men to tears. It was what all writing was meant to be. It was perfect. It was…“… missing a comma over there”, commented the old lady, indicating the misdemeanour with a gnarled finger. “But otherwise not too shabby. Looks like you’ve dealt with your writer’s block then”.She levered herself off the bench and got to her feet, ancient bones creaking alarmingly. She was only marginally taller than when she had been sitting.“Right. ‘S’been a bleedin’ long day, so I’m off home”. She held the notebook out to McDougall. He took it, and, clutching it to his chest, walked to the railings. Far below, the sea waited.McDougall turned to face the old woman.“Are you my guardian angel?” he asked timidly.“Bloody cheek”, retorted the old woman, “do I look like a bleedin’ guardian angel? ‘Sides, people don’t have guardian angels”. She paused, then added, “places do. Places where pillocks like you might hurt themselves if there wasn’t someone keeping an eye out”.She looked up at him and sighed.“I’m going now. Need a push?”McDougall turned and faced the sea. Then, with one hand on the railing, he drew back his arm and threw the notebook into the air.It plummeted towards the sea before landing with a messy wet splat.“No”, said McDougall, “not today”.He turned to face the little old lady, and wasn’t entirely surprised to see that she was gone.
