Contents

• Jad Virk: the man, the myth, the legend

• The mad cows of Ilkley

• Knock, knock

Jad Virk: the man, the myth, the legend

“If you really get down to the disaster, the slightest eloquence becomes unbearable.” – Samuel Beckett

I guess in the end, you start to think about the beginning

Ten impossible years ago, on a cold December morning in 2014, a young man walked across a bridge in the north of England, climbed over the railing and let himself fall into the cold water below. And just like that, in the saddest and most violent of ways, he was gone. His name was Jad Virk.

…

Jad was born on 19 August 1979 at Hillingdon Hospital in Uxbridge, a fairly nondescript southern town in the western suburbs of Greater London. Arriving into the world when he did he missed out on a rough decade. There were five states of emergency. Two major oil crises. One Winter of Discontent. It was, in contrast to the swinging 60s, bleak and Britain was at its postwar nadir. Jad’s birth coincided with a turning point in the nation’s history – and not necessarily a good one. The country was at rock bottom and desperate. In that desperation, it didn’t seek solace but punishment in the tough love of a strict mother who would shake it out of its worthless self-pity and get it back on the straight and narrow.  And they got that in the Iron Lady, who had been elected prime minister three months earlier. While it’s disappointing to think that his life would begin and end with the Tories in government – which would continue long after his death, ending only in early 2024  – it isn’t that surprising. The UK has always been more comfortable sitting on the right side of politics (and the wrong side of history). There was Margaret Thatcher at the start of it all and David Cameron at the end, with a welcome but inevitably disappointing 13-year Labour interregnum that was overseen, for the most part, by Tony Blair. Jad would never live to experience the Brexit blackhole tenure of Theresa May, the chaos of the Boris Johnson years, the monumental shit show of Liz Truss’s ephemeral premiership and the tetchy, morally bankrupt Rishi Sunak era. But as awful as it has been, he really ought to have.

Although his roots were southern, Jad was, in his heart, a northerner, a bonafide Geordie for whom home would always be Newcastle. And it was. He would end up spending his entire life here, a sweeping amount of time that would span the last few months of the 70s, the entirety of the 80s, 90s and noughties, and the first five years of the twenty-tens. It would be 35 years of life, 35 years of history and 35 trips around the sun. But there should have been more. The years ahead, as fleeting as they are, would have been abundant. He died far too young.

In 1981, the year I made my debut on planet earth, when Jad was just two and a half years old and his older brother Jat, short for Jatinder, was four, his parents, Manjit and Mukhtair, packed up their bags and headed to the northeast of England. They were in search of a better life, somewhere they could call home. And they would find that in Newcastle. At the heart of this new beginning, as it was for many Indians at the time, was the corner shop, which Jad’s dad had bought in Newcastle. Opportunities elsewhere, working for the (white) man (echoes of Empire), were few and far between and the labour market was especially unfavourable to minorities. It was also falling apart. The UK, like other countries, was in a recession, brought on, in part, by the oil crisis of 1979 (Thatcher’s economic response to this would also plunge millions into unemployment). Accordingly, for Jad’s dad and many Asians of his generation, (including my old man), whether they knew it or not, the benefits of self-employment far outweighed the risks. It would end up being the right choice.

With the family finally settled in Newcastle, the life and times of Jad Virk, the man, the myth, the legend, as he liked to say about himself (where did that come from?), could begin. For most of it, he would be happy. For a bit of it, towards the end, it would be horrific. Something had broken, gone wrong – and it would eventually drown him.

He went to Goathland Primary followed by Longbenton High. He loved school (of course he did). Even if he was under the weather, so the story goes, he’d still want to go in. I imagine he liked school because he liked to learn, because of all the activities, because it’s where he could hang out with his friends. I say imagine because I don’t know. These words are subjective, conjecture, imagined. Jad can’t tell me what’s right or what’s wrong. His voice is silent. And so, I imagine that he was well-liked by both his peers and his teachers. Because disliking the Jad I knew wasn’t easy.

Like many British Asians, specifically the children and grandchildren of the Sikh diaspora, regular school wasn’t enough, Jad was made to go to Punjabi school once a week. Lessons were held on Saturday mornings, an unforgiving day and time for extracurricular studies that nobody outside of the Sikh community cared for, advocated or thought about. For me, Punjabi school would, in part, lay waste to the extremely unlikely possibility of becoming a professional footballer (I count myself among many lost generations of  British Asian footballers). Saturday was the spiritual day for football, but here I was learning my oorhaa, airhaa, eerhee, sassaa and haahaa. Time in Punjabi school meant time away from the football field, time away from being spotted by a scout, time away from trials for Manchester United. It was always a pipe dream, but one that I was nevertheless denied from ever entertaining. My parents didn’t care about football. To them it was a silly sport, a hobby. And, in any case, for them, for Jad’s parents and the rest of their peers, what really mattered was a good education and the preservation of the Indian Way. They didn’t want us to end up being coconuts, living and behaving like white people (whatever that meant). Instead, they longed for us to be fresher than fresh (like them), authentically Punjabi and wholesomely Indian, spiritually, culturally and philosophically. Subordinate, too, passive to the status quo, unquestioning, and continuously at home (one day with wife and kids and grandkids and maybe even great grandkids), hanging out with the same brown faces in our small and safe Indian-only community like a tight-knit family of kindred souls, with no drama, no disrespect and a happy way of life that would feel like a long, never-ending Indian wedding. This desi utopia was what compelled our parents to send us to Punjabi school. You are Indian, we were told. You must think Indian, be Indian, write Indian, speak Indian, feel Indian, socialise Indian, eat Indian, drink Indian, marry Indian. Our lives and our ways of seeing and experiencing the world would be theirs to determine indefinitely. For a while, this fantasy held its ground. Parents were parents, kids were kids. Then it gave way. It was inevitable – our lives could never be exclusively Indian. Our ingredients may well have been 100% desi, but were made in England and born into and of English mud (well, to be more exact, of English soil muddied with imported earth from India). We never had a choice in the matter. It was our grandparents and our great-grandparents who would, in their hunger, their search for work, their want to escape the shackles of their life, take away our future in India. In doing so, they unknowingly shaped our lives long before our own stories even began. Who we are and how we see ourselves today can, in part, be traced back to the very moment they set sail to live and work in the ruins of an empire that held India hostage for almost 200 years, a morally bankrupt occupation that was legitimised by racism and bloodsucking capitalism during an era of unrepentant imperial tyranny. Who would we have been in India had they stayed? Would Jad have been Jad? Would he still be alive? Would he have existed at all? Impossible questions. What was certain is that none of them could ever imagine how their descendants, their flesh and blood, permanent guests to this new world, would turn out. An Asian prime minister would have been laughable. An Asian prime minister betting his whole legacy on an unnecessary and immoral policy that was summarised into a catchy slogan designed to appeal to bigots and racists even more so. It was boats that got us here.

Classes were originally held at Moorside Primary School in the West End before they were moved to Newcastle’s main gurdwara, where they continue today. A lot of us met Jad here for the first time. At first he was no one special, just one of the many kids doing as they were told, having no choice but to attend classes taught by strict aunties that didn’t have any formal teaching experience that I am aware of, though I could be wrong. They could speak Punjabi, write Punjabi and read Punjabi, and they were mothers themselves – that was enough to teach it. But eventually, for some of us, he came to be more than just a fellow classmate, but a friend (less so with me – he was a few years older than me and more a peer of my eldest sibling). Very few people have endured beyond that small space room in the gurdwara. Jad was one of them, a lifelong friend … lifelong … well …

Many of our classmates have since been forgotten, their names and faces separating, disentangling and disappearing into the flow of time. Some of them lingered for a while, longer than others, peripheral friends, friends of friends, people you sometimes spent some time with as you crisscrossed each other’s small, interconnected world. But they now belong to your past. Others you remember on a personal level, your lives entwining out of the classroom, like a fledgling romance inchoate and abandoned because you were, in hindsight, terrible at the whole being in love thing (or at least what you thought love was), now just a fading memory. Jad, too, I realise as I write this, has joined them. Except, unlike them, there’s no possibility of him coming back into my life. He’s dead and has been for a long time now. I don’t remember when we stopped going to Punjabi school. Regrettably, to some extent, I left before getting my GCSE. Jad did. I still wish I had ended up being a footballer.

Jad’s early life wasn’t all based around study – there was also a lot of fun to be had during those endlessly halcyon days of childhood. And Jad ate it up. A lot of it was spent hanging out with his brother, whom he would always be close to, and his cousins. They would play sports, read comics, play video games, card games, have water fights. And they would watch movies. Lots of movies. Like many boys growing up in the 80s, he loved watching action movies. He was fascinated by the stars of this golden era. Arnold Schwarzenegger stood out for him. He was, off- and on-screen, a man’s man, muscular, cool, a success story. And he was very much of the time. It was an era of hypermasculinity that found a receptive audience through the medium of TV. Cartoon heroes like He-Man and the Lion-O were, for instance, just as jacked-up as the larger-than-life stars of the silver and small screen, like the professional wrestlers of the World Wrestling Federation (as it was known back then). And if these men weren’t ripped to shreds – Bruce Willis, Harrison Ford and Kurt Russell –  they were, nevertheless, still tough, likeable guys that you either wanted to be or hang out with. It didn’t really matter or occur to us that this was all make believe. Fiction made us buy into the impossible, that we could similarly live lives like theirs and be just like them. But we couldn’t. Young, impressionable, working class boys like us, brought up on school, religion, patriarchy and TV, were destined, as most of us are, to live fairly ordinary lives as normal people. And while not a bad thing, that realisation, years later, whether we knew it or not – that we would never be action heroes living action hero lives – has been both a blessing and a curse. We aspire and endeavour to be better, to blaze personal trails (our own revolutions), to never settle, to march towards a true sense of freedom. But all life, as Seneca thought, is servitude. We’re all shackled to the rat race, to the politics of the age, to the cultural and social quirks of our age, to technology, which both enriches and degrades human life . There is always a boot stomping our face. The world we inherit as adults, the future we’re heading towards, it’s not like it is in the movies with a happy ending – and what a shame that is. I wonder if Jad thought this and if not, whether, intuitively, in his distress, he felt it – that he hadn’t, perhaps, lived up to his younger self’s sincere belief that he would be just like the action heroes of the eighties and nineties and, because he wasn’t – and not just Jad, but countless men, individualised, anonymised and emasculated trying to find meaning in the absence of a great struggle in the 21st century, feeling, as it does, as both a miserable repeat of the 20th century and, going further back, the self-cannibalisation end of the long industrial revolution – that he was both a disappointment to the child that he once was and the man that he had become. After all, he had read the biographies, he had memorised all the important scenes word for word, he had studied icons like Bruce Lee and he had committed himself to a life spent in the gym to look and feel the way that men should look and feel (years ago, in 2007, via email, in which Jean Claude Van Damme featured – all stemming from a GIF of him dancing in Kickboxer – Jad wrote, jokingly but tellingly: “Check this out boys. This is why I am a warrior, also why you know me as Guns, Ox, etc: ‘Historically, the Virks had unique physical attributes. In the history books, they have been described as tall, muscular, courageous and loyal. These physical and mental attributes made them ideal candidates for recruitment in the armies of various kings and maharajas.’”). Why wouldn’t he be just like them? But life, being more complex and challenging than we could ever imagine it to be as children, would surprise him and he would come to realise that it was (and is), in many ways and for many people, though full of personal wonder with the promise of better days ahead (the idea of hope) – as well as buying into various ideas of comfort, power, happiness, contentment, freedom and luxury – nasty and brutish, though not necessarily short. And, arguably and contrary to how Hobbes imagined it, in a state of nature, that this fact is an acute problem within civilised societies that have been abnormally shaped into the now default ordering of the world into nations, where our lives are not subject to the violent and unpredictable laws of nature but by damaging, managerial, overbearing and misplaced dictums of governments, lawmakers and monied meddlers (a consequence, in the west, of what post-enlightenment, post-revolutionary, post-twentieth century barbarism and ongoing neoliberal philosophy have shaped the world to be). Some of us can endure that truth. Jad could, but within reason. After enduring a long beating, which he could, for a while, his legs would give way. And the leviathan, not the biblical leviathan but a monster no less, of the sea, of water, and not Hobbes’ leviathan, but his own demon, would take him into the deep and crush him. 

But, at this point in his life, we were a long way from that and these were still halcyon days. It was onwards and upwards for Jad. He finished his stretch with compulsory education with a good number of GCSEs in the bag. Being an Indian and all, further education was inevitable. The world of work could wait. Our parents, having bought into the irrational faith of progress, as John Gray put it  – which we too would later accept as dogma, either in place of religion or alongside it – wanted us to follow every single step on that gilded ladder to prosperity (no shortcuts, no missing a step, that’s not the way to do things). And, being young, easily influenced and reluctantly mischievously obedient, we understood that this, to quote the Mandalorian, was the way. And, in all honesty, kids that we still were, none of us were cut out or inclined to join the rat race at 16. Part-time jobs and regular stints in the shop aside were more than enough to pay our dues.

Jad decided to do his a-levels at school, which, given his love of the institution, wasn’t a surprise. Plus, sixth form, in contrast to college, was a familiar, enjoyable and safe space, which couldn’t be said for the world out there, a complex, mercurial, unrepentant and joyous rollercoaster of a ride (not that he or any one of us knew that or thought too deeply about it –  all we could grasp was the here and now and the very real possibility that dreams could come true). He passed with flying colours. It was another milestone, another step in the right direction. Jad, as a student, was in his element. Maybe it would all have been alright had he stayed in school, a forever student. That way he would have been happy. It’s a ridiculous idea but so too was Jad taking his own life. Yet he did. In that fiction, Jad as man-student, he’d be happy. And he’d still be alive.

Two years later, three a-levels under his belt – paper trophies reflecting 24 months of successful study – Jad headed off to Sunderland University to study business and computing. It was now 1997 and the 20th century, a century of extremes as the late historian Eric Hobsbawm described it, was coming to an end (in some ways, even though 19 years of my life belong to it, it feels like a century that belongs more to history than it does to me, that I was an extra in it). It was a historic year. Blair and New Labour achieved a landslide victory in the general election, ending 18 years of hard Conservativism, princess Diana died in a car crash after being chased by paparazzi, plunging the royal family into a crisis as existential as that in the aftermath of Charles I’s execution – which flirted with the idea of a welcome and permanent end to the farcical idea of a monarchy – Steve Jobs went back to Apple, spearheading its resurgence as one of the most iconic and successful technology companies in the world, and JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published without even an inkling as to the cultural impact her novels would and continue to have. There’s a lot more that happened that year. Hong Kong was returned to China. The iconic rapper the Notorious B.I.G was murdered in Los Angeles. A computer by the name of Deep Blue beat grandmaster Garry Kasparov at chess. Nations signed up to the Kyoto Protocol, which hasn’t had, as understatements go, the kind of consequential impact it really ought to have (as António Guterres, the UN’s secretary-general, quipped in 2022, “we are on highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator”). And so on.

These historical events, important to some, meaningless to others, are a part of narrow western history known to the author, remembered, contemplated and documented here without, it has to be said, any real depth to try and anchor Jad’s life to a time and place, to open it up to notable events in an attempt to gain a better understanding of how someone as happy and carefree as Jad could end up bringing his own life to an end.

Jad was part of that last generation of students in England who would not have to pay to attend university. Meaning, when he graduated in 2000 – new century, new millennium, same tensions, same problems – he didn’t owe a thing. The same can’t be said for students leaving university today, who can now expect to carry with them, on average – and for a long period of time – a hefty debt of around £45,000 (if not more). Aside from the priceless memories, the friendships and a promising set of skills that could be improved, perfected, mastered, what was university and even compulsory education for? It certainly isn’t to prepare us for a life holds true the idea that each generation should be better, happier, healthier and wealthier than their parents, that they should find themselves living in more politically sane times, that they should feel to be the beneficiaries of progressive attitudes that is commensurate with a sense of freedom that democracies should uphold. Being better educated hasn’t necessarily led to better outcomes. Good jobs in good workplaces with good managers are hard to find. “There is something very wrong with what we have made ourselves,” the anthropologist David Graeber wrote. “We have become a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself.”

His student days now over and part of a past that was his childhood and adolescence, Jad had arrived at the door of adulthood. It was 2001. We went to Ayia Napa that summer, in pursuit of nothing but good times with good friends who all had very little by way of responsibility. When we finally learnt about what Jad had done many years later, that he hadn’t gone missing, that he had jumped off a bridge, I thought back to that summer. Jad, along with others, did a bungee jump when he was there. I don’t know if he ever did one again, but, not thinking whether or not that's true, I wondered whether he thought about that moment when he arrived at the bridge that fateful day.. Did he think that he wouldn’t die, that a rope, somehow, would break his fall, that he would return to safety, free of demons, having exorcised his demons with the rush of adrenaline? Or did he think, I’ve jumped before, I know what to do, I know I can do it, I know how it feels to be standing on the edge of a high platform exposed and vulnerable and scared and excited? And I don’t know what he thought that would mean. That he wouldn’t return, that he would drown his demons and, sacrificially, himself? That year was also the year of 9/11. I used to think that the world changed forever that day. Truth was, it didn’t. There was no alternative Shangri-La future ahead of us. What has since happened in the 23 years since the shock of that terrorist attack is the only past we know, the only present we live in. There is never another version of history.

Jad landed a job initially as an IT help desk agent at what was then known as EDS, short for Electronic Data Systems (the company was later acquired by Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 2008 for $13.9 billion). He was there for years and he enjoyed working there, but for reasons I can’t go into, his professional life took a very different turn, one that he didn’t necessarily expect (or want). What I had thought was as follows. After a long while at EDS, while content, Jad got tired of working for someone else, being a subordinate, not having any influence as an employee NS working everyday to help strangers deliver on the aspirations of an abstract, unthinking enterprise that he had no personal connection with. Instead, he realised one day, he wanted to be his own boss, take control of his day-to-day life and build his own business. His mission would be modest (i.e. he wouldn’t have a made up mission statement written after the fact about “elevat[ing] the world's consciousness”.) Like many small business owners, he aspired to work for himself and to ensure that his family could live a good and happy life. And to do it on his own terms. With the help of his dad, Jad found an opportunity to do just that. There was a shop on the corner of Overhill Terrace in Bensham, a neighbourhood in Gateshead, that was up for sale. He bought it in February 2013, joining his father, mine and innumerable others, past, present, future pending, brown boys, brown men, brown fathers, brown brothers, brown sons, brown chachas, who have, are and will see the corner shop as a gateway to a better life, drawn to a life behind a till, so to speak, because of the cultural Asian heritage the British grocery store now possesses. It was an exciting time and the beginning of a new chapter that would come to define his professional life until he retired.

But it wasn’t to be. The story above is fiction, In reality, his heart was never in it. It was someone else’s idea of a livelihood, of success. Less than two years later after that less than triumphant moment, his life turned into a nightmare. The shop was an unnecessary burden. The day he left home (never to return) was the day he put his misfortune to right – except only it was done in a way that meant his life would be sacrificed. With him gone,    the shop ceased to mean anything. It was an abandoned citadel, a discarded manifesto, a ship without its captain. I remember thinking as much when I visited his shop in that period of uncertainty. It was being looked after by a childhood friend of mine who helped Jad out every now and again. I remember thinking that the shop felt cold, that Jad’s absence weighed heavy, that while the shop functioned without him, it was also, paradoxically, suspended, in a state of limbo, tense, waiting for someone to press play. Where’s Jad, his customers would ask in the days and weeks that followed his disappearance. Not here, for now, was the reply, half lie, half wish. Truth was, he was long gone and we feared as much. We just didn’t want to believe it. Hope is a powerful thing.

By the time he got his shop, he was four and a bit years married. He had met his future wife Amy in 2007 at a family wedding in Reading, the same year I fell deeply in love with a Portuguese woman who would, through no fault of her own, break my heart two and a bit years later. It was another notable year, marking the beginning of an ongoing period of deep and sluggish malaise in the west, a philosophical impasse that continues to this day. But, at the time, he was happy, life was good and nothing could ever have persuaded Jad back then that it would be anything but.

It’s hard to know at what point this all changed. What is somewhat certain is that in the months leading up to him killing himself, his life has begun to catastrophically fall apart. None of his friends were wise to this. They had even seen him a week before he died, on the annual Christmas jolly in Newcastle. Nothing suggested he was seven days away from killing himself. Jad had managed to keep his feelings contained. He internalised them, burying his unhappiness deep. And he began to live two lives. On the one hand, there was the Jad we all knew and recognised – silly, eternally optimistic, always cheerful. But this Jad wasn’t real anymore, no longer wholly authentic. He had become part fact, part fiction, the lead character in an autobiographical novel. And then there was the Jad we never knew about – until it was too late – a Jad that was in crisis, tormented, disappointed in himself and increasingly overwhelmed by a feeling of sadness that he couldn’t shake. He would manage to keep up this dual existence for a while. Maybe he was hopeful he could win out in the end, suicide still seeming too extreme a response to whatever it was that was killing him. But any fightback would prove to be pyrrhic. His spirit was about to be irrevocably broken, the severity of his melancholy too much to bear. The pain, the charade of living two lives, it has become untenable. Only one option remained – to renounce the world and put an end to his suffering. The boundaries between the two Jads had begun to wane, with the erroneous, duplicate copy of the individual emerging as the dominant personality, overwriting, corrupting the original. Not even the joy or responsibility of fatherhood could keep him from succumbing to his disquiet. His story was coming to an end and one day – that day – all would be finally lost. Death revealed himself to Jad. He said I have come to take you away.

17 December 2014

The day he died should have been like every other day – inconsequential, forgettable. It was for me. I was around three and a half years deep into what would end up being four very long years at a clusterfuck of a company,  a content farm in all but name, that was slowly steering itself into financial ruin and existential oblivion. In my work diary I had jotted down a meeting I had booked in for midday, an interview with a client for one of their blogs. Bring dictaphone, it says and that’s it, that’s all I have for the day and the week (in all honesty, I didn’t have much to add – there was little variety in a working day that typically involved churning out a high volume of second-rate content and little else one after the other). I would later add Jad went missing under Wednesday 17 December. The ink for that entry is different to the one used for the reminder about the meeting, as if it doesn't quite belong, as if it’s a lie, an attempt to alter history, a deviation from the norm, a sick joke. But it was real. Jad had gone missing. Even today,  I’m struck by how unusual that simple sentence is. Jad (subject) went (verb) missing (adjective).

The end began optimistically – in light of what happened – with the promise that this would be a quintessentially ordinary day. Or maybe not. Maybe the dye had already been cast and, instead, the day began ominously, Jad already resigned to putting an end to his life. He woke up early as he always did, brushed his teeth as he always did, splashed water on his face as he always did, got changed as he always did, had some breakfast or tea as he always did, kissed his daughter good morning and played with her as he always did, and then made his way to the cash and carry with his folks as he always did. Had it happened, had he chosen not to take his life – these words and this sad fact still, to this day sound so disturbingly out of place – then this day, the 17 December 2014, would have remained of minor importance. Weeks later, when he emerged from his displaced sojourn, his body wrecked, his heart quiet, caught between two impossible worlds, this all changed. Looking back at that moment, there is now a deep sense of sadness in the ritual of Jad’s everyday morning routine. The finality of each act is recast as a moment of note, like the last match and the last kick of a football by a footballer who is about to retire, knowing all too well that he could do it all again – another 90 minutes of competitive football – but still, all too well that it’s sacrificial, acquiesces to the march of time, comforted by the fact that he has called it time and nobody else.

When they arrived back at Jad’s shop, the van emptied, Jad and his parents exchanged their usual goodbyes, their see you laters. I wonder if he knew this was the last time he would see them, that this would be the last time that they saw him, his parents, his mom and dad, trees of life, who bore him unto the world all those  years ago, and, if that was the case, whether he thought about how they would feel on learning that this was the last moment they would ever have with their son and how devastating it was to realise this and, had they known, had they, accepted the inevitability of his demise, that no matter what they did, Jad would still die, how they would have then hugged him hard, kissed him, blessed him and told him how much they loved him and how they would always love him. But his parents didn’t suspect a thing. Jad seemed fine. It was just another day, another Wednesday. 

Except it wasn’t. Everything changed that day. Everything we thought we knew, about Jad, about our own lives, about the future and the world in which our lives play out in, was no longer as it was or as it might have been. For Jad, however, everything stopped that day. He would never have a morning again. He would never kiss his daughter again. He would never crack a silly joke, knock back a shot, squeeze ketchup onto his pizza. His light had gone out.

Not long after he said goodbye to his folks, the shop CCTV captured him behind his till, on his phone. After a short while he put it down and then disappeared from view. He changed his daughter’s nappy and put her in her cot. Maybe he said I love you Arpan, forgive me baby, goodbye. Maybe he said nothing at all, maybe he couldn’t, maybe he didn’t know what lay ahead of him. Nobody will ever know. But there was a definitiveness in his actions that suggest he had already made his mind up, that he had crossed a point of no return and that these were the last moments of his life. Instead of returning to the shop, he headed outside and locked the door behind him. He held his house keys. These keys, up until that moment, had been nothing more than utilitarian objects, pieces of metal designed to open and close locks. But now they had been transformed. They now took on a symbolic form, representing, to lend the title of one of Barack Obama’s memoirs, the audacity of hope. Had they went into his trouser pockets, it would have been a cause for celebration because he had chosen life. But they didn’t. Instead, he posted them through the letterbox. His heart had all but gone and he didn’t plan on coming back. When he set off to die all that was left of him was his clothes and an unbearable sadness that had finally crushed him.

Weeks later, I think, I can’t quite remember, I followed his route from life to death. And, just like him, it started with me posting my parents’ house keys through the letterbox. I rarely if  ever did that, as someone was always at home to lock the door after me when I came to visit, but this time around I did. I don’t know why I did it, but the moment they dropped through the letterbox and on to the floor the inside I realised, I think – I’m editing this years later without looking through notes or diary entries if there are any so I can’t be sure – that this was exactly as Jad had done and, as I got into my car, I was aware of the poignancy of what had just happened because of what I was on my way to do. I don’t recall what I thought about as I drove to Gateshead, whether I listened to the radio, whether I reminisced. All that I know is that I wanted to see where he lived and worked and that I wanted to see if I could glean any insight or understanding by experiencing what he experienced. It was a dull day. I think it had rained that morning or the night before. I parked my car outside of his home and then I walked, as he did, from everything to nothing. Except I would return.

It took me 15 or so minutes to get from his home to Redheugh Bridge, which has, in one shape or another, been transporting people and goods across Gateshead and Newcastle since 1871. It’s an austere bridge, brutalist-esque in design, a compressed concrete structure stretching some 897 metres long, 15.8 metres wide, 26 metres high over and above the River Tyne. Before Jad jumped, the bridge was, for me, largely associated with the journey I would take on the number 100 bus to the Metrocentre where I worked part-time for five years at WHSmiths, between 1999 and 2004. Now every time I see it just think about Jad and how the bridge was a terminus where he finally let go of life in a way that I still find hard to believe. 

It’s a relatively short walk but long enough to think long and hard about something or chaotically bounce from one thought to another and another and another as we often do, our minds restless, impossible to control. I thought, on my way into his darkness, about the surroundings, Jad walking towards to the bridge (how he walked – confidently, slowly, quickly, awkwardly?), the people and cars that passed him by and what, if anything, he might have thought about. Did he struggle with what he had set out to do, to take his own life? Or was he undecided and that, even in those final few minutes before he reached the bridge, there was still a chance that he wouldn’t go ahead with it? Maybe he didn’t think about anything at all. Maybe he was already long gone, dead man walking, and in his place was a ghost with nothing to lose. Had I walked by him that morning would I even have seen him?

The journey I took saw me pass an empty church. Early on you can see part of the river, which gives you a point of reference. There is nothing of note between Jad’s shop and Redheugh Bridge, just roads and paths and trees and bushes and houses, the usual backdrops. At one point on Cuthbert Street you have to cross a small bridge over the A189 and you head past a Shell garage. Strangely, unless you cross onto the main road, you have to turn back on yourself. In the distance you can see the top of a tower block. It’s beside his house. Did he even look back and think about what and who he had left behind, did he falter in his pursuit of absolute closure? Or did he just keep walking, automaton because in his head he had already weighed up the pros and cons of continuing to exist? Whatever he felt, whatever he thought about, all that’s certain is that he made it onto the bridge.

Redheugh Bridge, as noted earlier, is around 26 metres above water level, the equivalent of a nine-storey building. It’s high up but it doesn’t feel that way – at least that’s what I thought when I originally jotted down my thoughts. I walked to the centre of the bridge, stopped and examined the world around me. I found it difficult to take in where I was. My sense of depth was off and, as I looked out into the distance, it was as if I was looking at a large photograph of all the bridges that connect Newcastle to Gateshead and vice-versa.  I found a small stone on the path and chucked it into the gunmetal grey of the river and counted three or so seconds for it to hit the water, an unnervingly short amount of time. I hadn’t thought about how quick it would have been for Jad until now and just how harrowing the speed at which he would have fallen. Perhaps I had had it in my head that it was somehow slow, maybe I hadn’t really thought about it all.

I wondered how he went about it. Did he wait? Did he do it without hesitation? Was he in two minds? We would subsequently learn that he had been here before. At that point he was unable to let go of his life. What happened between this dress rehearsal and the final show, I don’t know.

What is beyond doubt is that it requires some effort to cross over the railing. You can’t, for instance, trip over it. There’s also a ledge on the other side – another opportunity to reconsider. He may have stood on it, he may have chosen to go straight over without even bothering. You could argue that it’s no good thinking about it, it doesn’t matter, he did what he did and that’s that, why put yourself through it? But contemplating the last moments of his life and thinking about what it took to do it helps us, to a degree, understand how severe his despair was, how abject his suffering – because jumping off a bridge to escape the unsustainable pain he was experiencing – and in doing so, knowingly end his life – was the only way we could ever truly know what he was going through … and that it would always be too late for us to realise.

When he jumped, he did so knowing that in some way he would be free of the pain that had taken his life away from him – whether that meant finding God or nothingness. Everything about the here and the now, the sun that we feel on our skin, the sky that we see with our eyes, the people we share our lives with and the billions of strangers we share the planet with, the total sum of human history and activity, past and present, the unpredictable future, all of it would be gone and he’d be at peace.

There’s an alternative possibility – that he didn’t actually want to die, that in jumping he hoped, like an exorcism, to cast out whatever evil spirit had possessed him, hollowed him out and tore apart his life. Had he been saved that day, we might have found out. But it didn’t happen that way. He fell and was silenced.

After I lingered on the bridge for a while, trying and failing to make sense of it all,  I made my way back to the car. I looked at my watch. As with the house keys through the letterbox, by chance I found myself on the bridge at around the same time in the morning as he had been. But while he jumped, crashed and disappeared from our lives, I returned to what Fernando Pessoa described as “my factless autobiography, my lifeless history”. On my way back to my folks, I stopped off at a nearby car wash. Faced with the absurd, the ordinary offers respite.

The afternoon on the day he died, the local newspaper, The Evening Chronicle, reported the emergency services had received a call at around 9.40am that a man had fallen from Redheugh Bridge. “Police, fire and coastguard were at the scene as well as two RAF search and rescue helicopters, and members of the Tynemouth Voluntary Life Brigade,” the paper noted. “The search for the man was scaled back by late morning but a Northumbria police spokeswoman said searches would resume periodically at low tide on Wednesday evening and early on Thursday - if he had not been found.” They wouldn’t find him. The river had taken him and kept him hostage.

I wasn’t aware of the story at the time. Had I been, had I had read it on the very Wednesday it was published, it wouldn’t have resonated with me on a personal level. I’d never have thought that the man in question was anyone I knew, that it was, alas, somebody else’s tragedy. Although the world had so fundamentally changed, the aftermath of that earthquake, the seismic waves of that horrendous event, had yet to make their way to me and everyone else. My life remained intact, unaffected and mundane.

It wasn’t until later that evening that I found out that this most humdrum of days was anything but – that it was, in fact, earth-shattering. It wasn’t until evening that I found out not that he had died, because that yet wasn’t an objective fact, but that he had gone missing. I had been out that evening and towards the end of the night, I noticed a missed call from my eldest sibling and a message asking him to call him back, which was unusual.  There was the customary small talk and then the bombshell. Jad has gone missing. Jad? How? What? Are you sure? It didn’t make sense. It still doesn’t. I rang his brother, Jat, and he told me what had happened that morning. It was so out of character and so shocking to hear about his last steps and for it to be captured on screen. And while people go missing all the time and eventually return to their friends and families, it was clear that our lives had been abruptly upended and derailed forever. Tomorrow was no longer going to be the tomorrow it was meant to be – rudimentary. That unwritten and speculative future had now revealed itself to be one version of many realities that had now ceased to be a possibility.

I arrived in Newcastle that weekend. I felt guilty. Perhaps I should have come earlier, searched for him myself, raised awareness and, on finding him holed up in a cheap hotel, convinced him to come out of hiding. But I was in denial, kidding myself about what had actually happened. By now, I think I had heard or read the story about the man who had fallen off the bridge the same day that Jad had gone missing. And thought while it still remained far-fetched that he could do something like this – man who fell a euphemism for man who jumped – I knew in my heart that it was Jad and that he was already gone. I looked for him one evening, in the dark, by the banks of the River Tyne below the Redheugh Bridge. I don’t know what I was expecting to find.

Christmas came and went, new year’s too, and we found ourselves being pulled back into the world, back to our responsibilities, back to work and back to the familiar rhythm of our lives. Except, it wasn’t like before. Jad was still out there, adrift, unaccounted for and here we were being pushed forward by time and acquiescing to its demands. You can’t help but feel remorseful, that you have somehow abandoned your friend, that you’ve lost hope. It’s a horrendous feeling.

On 5 January 2015, Northumbria Police issued an appeal. Jad had now been missing for over two weeks. It was another surreal moment, another first – because these kinds of things didn’t happen to you. You read about missing people in the newspaper, you saw them on milk cartons in movies, but you didn’t experience it for yourself. And yet, the impossible was now happening. The appeal was reported in the Evening Chronicle, with the headline ‘Concern grows for missing Gateshead man Jadvinder Virk’. The picture they use of Jad was a nice one. He looks relaxed, happy, comfortable and content. He’s smiling, mouth closed, the way you do when you're posing for a photograph. I don’t know where it’s from but it looks as though he’s out for dinner. He’s wearing a white polo t-shirt, the top two buttons undone, with a five o’clock shadow on his face. I’m not sure when the photo was taken, but it looked, at the time, to have been fairly recent. Even now, as I did back then, I scrutinise the photo, trying to see if I can uncover a chink in his armour, to discover a telltale sign that he was not well. But I can’t see anything. Nothing about that picture says to me that Jad’s optimism, his joie de vivre, is starting to wane, that with each passing second the burden of his unhappiness is slowly and cruelly starting to kill him. All I see is the Jad that I knew. Always happy.

“His family and police are concerned for his welfare and are keen to hear that he is safe and well,” the paper reports. “He is described as Asian, 6ft 1ins tall, of medium build and with short dark hair. He was last seen wearing a black baseball style cap with a yellow Batman logo to the front, navy blue waist length coat, grey tracksuit bottoms and grey/blue trainers."

It was stark to read him being described in a matter of fact way – there is nothing in that description that told the world what kind of father, husband, son, brother, cousin or friend that he was. But what did the police know? What did it matter to strangers? What he looked like, what clothes he wore that day, that’s all anyone outside of his world needed to know to identify him. It also gave me a false sense of hope. There was something in the objective, concise, active and non-speculative description that made me question whether I had been too quick to assume that the most unthinkable thing had happened, that he had taken his own life. Why not have faith? Why not stick to what was known? All that we really knew was that Jad was missing and that the man who fell off the bridge was probably somebody else. And if Jad was missing, then he was still alive. That cognitive dissonance was hard to shake but it was, at least, easier on the heart, a sort of tonic that allowed us to avoid reality and postpone the overwhelming pain and grief that would eventually come.

Day turned into night, night into day, and Monday came and went, Friday, also, and weekends. We lived stifled, ill at ease, out of sorts, waiting, waiting for something, a sign, for Jad to turn up. And it felt, I think, that this would be our lives – that we would never know what happened to Jad, where he had fled to, what kind of life he was now living, and we would, in time, get used to it. Because what else could you do?

And then, one day, out of the blue, his brother messaged us. “It is with a broken heart I tell you, Jad’s friends, that he was found today,” he said. “Sadly, he is no longer with us. I know you guys meant the world to him, as he often talked about the great times he shared with you. Thank you for being his friends and giving him memories that he has taken with him.”

It was Friday 23 January 2015. Jad had finally relented. He was done fooling around and had returned from the river destroyed, impossibly quiet. “Spend some time with me,” he said. “For old time’s sake, I won’t be staying long. I have to go away and I won’t be coming back.” It was an unwelcome conclusion and an unbearable truth. My friend had taken his own life. I wrote at the time that, aged only 33, I had already lost two of my best mates.

Time is relative (or is it?)

Jad’s funeral was held two weeks later on 11 February 2015. I don’t remember much, except that it was an unsparing day. There were the customs of a Sikh funeral, small talk among friends and family, private disbelief about how we had all arrived here and the deafening cries of a heartbroken mother dealing with the impossibility of having lost her youngest child. We could have tricked ourselves that he wasn’t actually here, that he was still alive. After all, we hadn’t seen him since he had returned from the black of the water, quiet, still, ruined. All we had left of him was a closed box with his name on it – and it gave nothing away, didn’t reveal anything about Jad as it might have done many, many years later, after a long and happy life. It could have been empty for all we knew, a ruse, a prank gone very wrong, distasteful.

But, of course, he was there, just not the way we would have liked. He was out of sync with everyone else, disjointed, against the grain, a lone dissenter. We mourned, he remained quiet. We moved, he remained still. Where we had parity though, us on one side, Jad on the other, was in being present. We were there, on that day, because of him and what he had done. Jad, too, was there on that cold February morning because of what he had done two months earlier. But he didn’t know he was there, couldn’t know, would never know. It was the final time that any of us would get to spend time with him.

All of this, his funeral, that fateful day he took his life, those cruel weeks of uncertainty in-between … to all intents it all took place a long, long time ago. Ten years, after all, have passed since The Tragedy of Jad. Soon it will be a decade plus one, a decade plus two, a decade plus three and so on, each subsequent day, month and year stretching out the space between the horror of that winter and the here and the now, further and further and further away. And all the while Jad, alone, will remain trapped in the past, a castaway on an island we will never return to. Not that we could. It’s no longer on any map. Maybe, like the kingdom of Atlantis (minus the hubris), it was swallowed by the sea.

The early years of that decade, the ten years between 2014 and 2024, don’t conform to reality and feel, paradoxically, closer in time that they were, while simultaneously feeling like they went by quicker than they did, as if the years have been compressed, condensed and fast-tracked to get us to the end of the first quarter of the 21st century as soon as possible. Even the more recent years of that decade, say 2019 onwards, feel like they’ve been swallowed up by time, with my wedding now having taken place five years ago even though I could swear it wasn’t that long ago. Then there’s my niece and nephew. Even to this day I still refer to them as babies but they’re anything but. The eldest is on the cusp of becoming a teenager and the youngest is now half a year away from hitting the double digits. What’s that all about I ask myself? When did they get so big? I don’t want them to. I want them to be beautiful and innocent and small and sweet and continue to scream with delight when I surprise them with a visit, cocooned from the uncompromising nature of the world. The Covid-19 pandemic is partly to blame for this. The uniformity of the long, messy, haphazard, poorly implemented lockdown days at home, quasi identical, categorically uncertain and, seemingly, like a life sentence without parole, without end, collectively experienced the world over – albeit in very different ways (a marketer at his desk versus a nurse in a hospital) – transformed days, weeks, months (and perhaps even years) into one seemingly unified block of time that had no shape or form other than the whisper of a silent killer.

The latter years, which continue today (as I write this, its mid-November 2024) also feel like they’ve been expedited, with the pandemic swallowing up time that might otherwise have been perceptibly slower or regimented. In contrast, time in the previous, slightly overlapping decade, the years between 2005 and 2015, seems to have progressed at a regular and orderly rate. Those years didn’t fly by at all. If anything, that decade felt long, with a whole lot of history to back it up. I finished with round one of my post-compulsory studies, got my first proper job, went back for round two of studies, had my heart irrevocably broken, went back to uni for one last time, lost my dear mumma, left Newcastle, worked in a dirt poor job and met my future wife. As for the wider world, X, Y and Z.

There was one more thing of note that took place back then, another shot to the heart – and, to note, a younger and more vulnerable heart, hearts that had yet to develop the hardness necessary to better absorb life’s mercurial cruelness – the very thing that ushered in that decade, which, in no time at all, will soon have happened 20 impossible years ago, the heartbreaking and, at the time, increasingly inevitable but still unexpected (and still dismissed) passing of that other dear friend of mine, Amrik Sran. He was only 25 when he died on 12 February 2005. I was a very young 23 back then, in a sort of sweet spot between adolescence and burgeoning adulthood. We all were. Waris, as we called him, was denied the opportunity to grow out of that phase. He missed out 20 more years of life, good and bad, 20 more years of cleaning teeth (he was training to be a dentist), 20 more years of watching Arsenal, 20 more years with his friends. As with Jad’s suicide, Amrik’s cancer was not supposed to happen. Accordingly, when Amrik was diagnosed with cancer in 2001 – we found out on Friday 25 May – the news of it, the barbarity of cancer, its metamorphosis from being conceptual to being real and devastating, smashed into our lives like a category five storm. When the proverbial dust would settle less than four years later (I can’t believe that’s all it was), we would find ourselves stripped of our innocence. The world isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. 

For a while, the year Amrik died was within reach. When we used to look back to the day he died, suddenly, unexpectedly, no time for any of us to say goodbye, I love you, see you again one day – one moment he was there, at home, in pain, coughing blood into a cup, stoical, the next he was asleep, resting, peaceful, gone like wind – it felt like it had happened not that long ago, as if  was only yesterday, only last month, only six months ago, only two years since he had died. His absence, palpable, unfair, a transgression – I’d known him all my life and wanted that to always be true – maintained its rawness. It never felt like it wouldn’t. Yet, by the time we got to 2014 and Amrik’s ten year anniversary approached, it was clear that he hadn’t, for a long time, followed us into the future. What we felt, what we feel today, it’s a very dull ache that occasionally flares up. Instead, he had stayed in the past, allowing that long decade that followed his death to pass without him in it because there was no other way. Not that he ever wanted this. He wanted to come with us. He wanted to live. He didn’t want to die. Maybe he thought he could outrun it, beat it, smash its fucking head in, that cancer fucking cunt. I think we all did. Because the only alternative was that he was going to die and that he was going to die sooner than any of us realised or thought was possible.

The years that now separate Amrik’s inexplicable and sudden collapse into the cosmos feel, at times, like an endless void, without any reference points, without anything, just black, as if the time between then and now is infinite. And it’s a burden, almost physical in its duress, its antagonism. The more years we rack up, the heavier the past can sometimes feel. And you never stop feeling guilty –  for not curing Amrik’s cancer, for not stopping Jad from killing himself, for moving on with our lives, for being reckless with our time on this tiny, tiny absurd planet. It’s not enough to miss him, to miss Jad, to miss any of those we lose. Because grief is unrelenting, capricious, an incurable malady. It plagues us, provokes us, disrupts our lives now and again, without reason, often when we least expect it. To be reminded of what you no longer have, to be left with just your memories, to be punished, now and again, with the staggering distance that grows between what was your life then with them in it and your life now without them, is one of the hardest facts of life. There is no consolation. There is just our ability to adapt and endure as we pick up the pieces of our shattered lives and slip back into the carnival of the world. Time doesn’t heal. It just pushes us further and further away from ground zero, far enough for the past to lose shape, sharpness. We never stop grieving but we learn to live with it, whether we bury it, confront it, compartmentalise it, allow it to be pushed to the side. Eventually, after a disordered spell of time in stasis, our former lives begin to reassert themselves just as our new lives start to take shape as they emerge out of the darkness. 

As much as we might want to suspend time, so that we don’t have to experience the shame of feeling like we’ve betrayed Jad or Amrik by virtue of the fact that while they remain indefinitely stuck in the past, Jad in 2014, Amrik in 2005, or the irrational indignity of not thinking about them and those two absolute low points in our lives – as opposed to forgetting, because you never stop thinking about them – we can’t. We are powerless, carried away by the currents of time, propelled into a future they can’t ever be a part of. So, we rebel. We keep hold of their phone numbers, we wish them happy birthday and we even talk to them. These small acts of remembrance, preservation, defiance even, are sometimes all we have left. It’s partial denial of the truth, but necessary – these white lies we tell ourselves help to maintain the peace and cope with what would otherwise be the intolerable poverty of our loss and then madness of time. The universe is absurd, our lives in it a fevered dream. Logic can, therefore, on occasion, jog on.

.…

Jad was one of the good ones, a rarity among men who are, myself included, always let down by their egos, their various character flaws. I’m sure Jad had his, he was human, after all, but I never saw a side to him, that I can remember, that suggested anything other than inherent goodness. He was as down-to-earth and genuine as he was kind and caring, and, without fail, always pleasant and polite. There didn’t seem to be a bad bone in his body, nothing malign, nothing sinister. He was, it seemed, virtuous and incorruptible, a bonafide nice boy. Very likeable.

It meant there was a softness to him and not in a way that implies being weak. He was gentle, more a peacemaker, a pacifist than a fighter. His interest in martial arts was, to quote Mr Miyagi, for defense only. I’m not sure if he’d ever been in a fight and he wasn’t the type to feel slighted or get into silly scuffles. Men like Jad have no violence in them, no wish for power, no desire to conquer, to control or sit high upon a throne with an air of superiority. Men like Jad just want enough – to pay the bills, to put aside, to invest and to indulge.

He was also a lot of fun to be around. Cheeky. Daft. This wasn’t unique to him – we were all like that. Still are. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.” But he did have his Jadisms. Fuck the salt, he’d say, when necking drinks. Are you a journalist, he’d ask, following up quickly with, piss off huh. And there were different versions of “Guns” or “J 2 The V”, silly nicknames that somehow captured who we were.

Above all, he was upbeat, an eternal optimist (panglossian), sanguine. He had a genuine joie de vivre – a love of life. Life. He was a glass half full kind of a guy, an always look at the bright side of life guy, a silver lining kind of a guy. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade – that was Jad in a nutshell. He wore rose tinted glasses. And he was instantly likeable. A fact that would stick. 

Knowing all of this, remembering who he was (or maybe who we thought he was, I don’t know, does anybody really know anyone?), for Jad to eventually have it within him to contemplate the idea of suicide and then to go ahead and take his own life – and to jump, to actually jump from a bridge, just like that, on a cold Wednesday morning not far from Christmas (the most wonderful time of the year), to leave behind a one-year old daughter, to destroy himself having just seen his parents ... and so on and so on and so on – beggars belief. There was nothing about him, nothing about his childhood, his early adult years, his general constitution, that ever suggested that this easy-going, mellow man would one day grow weary of the world and of himself and, in turn, lead him to reject the promise of getting to wherever he needed to – a conscious nirvana, self-actualisation – and instead see the only way forward as being a hard stop, to cut short his life which had ceased to have any meaning at all.  The Jad I remember had no Freudian death drive, no lifelong struggle with existentialism, no prepubescent trauma and no debilitating experience of depression. He was, therefore, as crude analysis goes  – and said knowing all too well that this is a platitude – one of the least likely among us to kill himself. When you’re as happy as Jad was, able to take the bad with the good, you don’t, even in the bleakest of moments, after you have run out of options, find solace in the idea of a more permanent solution to your suffering at your own doing. Hence the seismic, stomach-churning, shock to the soul when we finally realised that Jad hadn’t gone missing and that he had in all probability taken his own life (a feeling that would, to our misfortune, be experienced again the day we were told that he had been found but that he was, paradoxically, lost forever). 

The truth is, I think, that it can happen to anyone and that the day that Jad first thought about ending his life he surprised himself. This realisation had two parts to it. The first was that for the first time in his life he now saw suicide as a godsend, a solution,  perhaps only absolute way he could ever escape his unshakeable misery, a sort of get out of jail card he could turn to if needed when he had run out of lives like a video game character with no more change left to put into the arcade machine to give life another go. The second was that he now knew that while he was incapable of killing another person, with a limit as to how far he could go in hurting another person (always in defence), that he could now, at least in theory, obliterate himself through self-inflicted righteous violence. That epiphany, that his death wasn’t something that would happen when it happened but that he could have some control over when he died - and not in a good way, as in, for instance, allowing terminally ill people to die when they feel like they can’t go on - changed everything for Jad. “To be or not to be, that is the question,” pondered Hamlet. “ Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep, No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to …” Life’s potential, its magic and beauty, began to fade .He could now see more clearly the appeal of death, how it now competed with life and self-preservation. Non-existence, the absence of pain, the definitive end to the endless, relentless torture, sounded like bliss.

That’s if he thought any of that at all. Maybe there was an alternative story to this deep, profound and exhausting philosophical tussle. Maybe Jad ended his life in a “moment of madness”, as the recently widowed wife says in response to her daughter’s quiet rage towards her dad who has recently taken his own life after reaching what suddenly seems to him to be an impossible impasse in Mia Hansen-Løve’s 2010 movie The Father of My Children. There’s nothing about Grégoire Canvel’s disposition, his interactions with his family, his colleagues, the passion he has for his work – critically laudable, financially ruinous – his approach to adversity, that suggests he will suddenly and unexpectedly, on a specific day at a specific time in a particular location shoot himself dead (there’s another scene, if I remember correctly, where he and another character talk somewhat indifferently about someone taking their own life being one case in point). But that’s exactly the point. It’s not that he – nor Jad – had necessarily planned their exit carefully or sense checked their approach to death, dotted their i's and crossed their t's. Far from it. Instead, and no less upsetting – maybe even worse so – they acted incredibly impulsively after experiencing, perhaps for the first time, a sudden, sharp moment of utter despair and astonishing pain that left them with no other choice but suicide, which they saw as a resolute way out,  a conclusive way of ensuring that they wouldn’t ever have to feel that way again. And realising that they had run out of time, they quickly went for it, just in case they got pulled back into the hellscape of their lives. Jumping off a bridge, shooting oneself in the street, seeking annihilation, was somehow the lesser of two evils (the other evil being life itself).

“He renounced us,” Grégoire’s eldest daughter, Clémence, says, morose, sad, heartbroken by what she sees as her father’s abdication, his surrender of his duties, his abandonment of his family, his smash and grab of his paternal love, his selfishness, his cowardice. “He preferred the void.” “I don’t think he wanted to die,” her mother, his wife, Sylvia, responds. “I think he did it in a moment of madness.”

I can, all things considered, all avenues explored – as one has done above, focusing on the idea that he wanted death knowing all too well what this meant for him, something that he could not come back from – see where Sylvia is coming from. It’s entirely feasible to believe that Jad didn’t want to die, that he didn’t want to exist in a state of non-existence, to simply not be anymore. The guy I knew wasn’t someone who sought total oblivion, even when he at his most beleaguered, even on the day he died when all hope was lost (as opposed to, say, drinking to oblivion, where there’s always, by and large, a return to a conscious state). All Jad really wanted was for the suffering to end. As the late writer David Foster Wallace noted – he took his life in 2008 having suffered from depression for years – in, I believe, Infinite Jest: “The person in whom its invisible agony [depression] reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise … Their terror of falling from a great height … remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames.” There’s the rub (Hamlet again). When you’re left in an impossible situation, trapped between two extremes, with no other way out, you opt for the terror that while always itself traumatic – the horror of the freefall, the collision, the unknowable outcome (will it be quick, will I be in pain, while I regret it) – is nevertheless fleeting. The alternative terror, however, is far worse – a unbearable suffering that will goes on and on and on and on till the end of days, increasing in severity along the way (and if not, then being punctuated by sudden spikes of intense pain). That was what life – his – had become, having to live daily with a terror – a monster – of unfathomable virulence.

In the end, terror grew so large, so threatening that it warped his mind and robbed him of his humanity, his happiness and his ability to make sensible decisions. Because suicide, when it actually happens, always a destructive and painful end brought unintentionally and ironically by the victim seeking a near enough peaceful cessation of a life that had lost its lustre – since there is no painless, good way to kill yourself, perhaps assisted dying aside, though I am in no way an authority on the subject – however it is you choose to go, whether it’s death by hanging, firearm, poisoning, drowing, jumping, is always an act of unimaginable desperation. Thinking about it, having suicidal thoughts, is par the course of life. As Cormac McCarthy said in Blood Meridian, “had you not seen [the world] from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning”. Going ahead with it, committing the act, is not carried out by someone who is thinking clearly. Something has gone wrong. With Jad, I think back to the guy that I thought I knew. At the his best, if asked, the thought of suicide would never have crossed his mind, he would never have seen it as a way of responding to melancholy, nor the stomach to kill himself. Which is why, when he did, I can see how this was the extreme outcome of someone who had completely undone and that his descent into madness was both long, insidiously wrecking his frontal lobes, his amygdala, and unnervingly quick – the moment, maybe, when he puts his phone down in his shop is the very moment he completely lost his mind. Because, after he leaves his house, he walks to Redheugh Bridge and falls into the abyss. “I feel certain I am going mad again,” wrote Virginia Woold to her husband Leonard before she killed herself. “I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.”

She didn’t want to die. Jad didn’t want to die. But, in lieu of no other alternatives to their deeply felt anguish, stuck behind a weakening barricade that had done well to sustain the crashing waves of excruciating discontent, the only remedy, it seemed to them, was suicide, an incongruity for sure, but a panacea no less. Jad could live with that. Only he wouldn’t.

One death is a tragedy. It doesn’t need to be

Jad’s death, when was eventually confirmed, sent shockwaves around the world he had built (one of many multi-worlds that exist, my life a world, your life a world, Tom, Dick and Harry with their worlds, some of them overlapping, some of them not), wrecking the lives of everyone who loved him. And that’s saying something because it wasn’t the first time we’d experienced losing him in a very real sense. He died three times, but we experienced it twice (day one, the day of the jump, belongs to him) – the moment we realised (accepted) that he’d very likely not gone missing but had probably took his own life and the moment that our reluctant acquiesce to the truth was confirmed when he reappeared in the form of a deserted, lifeless body. How is it that ever so? How can a body that is life, gives life,  comes from life, that contains the I of oneself, embodies everything we are, comes to represent how people see us, that generates loves and is loved, that years for meaning, that has all these senses, that breaths in the air of this blue planet, dreams, has fun, endures, evolves, can come to be so lifeless? Death is always anomalous to life.

It’s very likely that Jad hadn’t thought about the impact his death, by his own doing, would have on those he was leaving behind because the aftermath was so beyond him, both in life and death. He didn’t think about the consequences of his actions, what would happen to those he would leave behind – especially his daughter, the only concrete thing he has left of himself – because he couldn’t. His head was scrambled and he was suffering – immeasurably so. It wasn’t that nothing else mattered to him – his life, his family, his business – only that as the pain increased (whether it was a slow burn or a sudden explosion of unhappiness), his world got smaller, darker and more horrific by the day – and it came to torment him day and night. And in that environment, when everything crumbles away, when nothing holds firm, where there is no solidity,  no light, no escape, Jad came to realise how killing himself was the only thing that would set him free. The external world and everyone in it hadn’t ceased to exist – they just weren’t part of the equation anymore. Feeling what I feel, he thought – and having explored all the non-deadly ways of overcoming it and failed to find a suitable cure – the only way out of it is to end my life. That will kill the pain. Beyond that, me in death, everyone else in life, who knows. And, in all honesty, I’m not even capable of thinking about it. Where I am at right now, there’s nothing left of what was before. All I see, feel and understand, is this all-consuming wretchedness.

That would suggest an absence of guilt. And why should he feel guilty? He wasn’t doing anything to anyone else, after all. The act of destroying oneself was only about him, his illness, that demon in the belly. What he didn’t quite understand, perhaps, or even think about, was the repercussions – what would happen to those left with the trauma of his suicide? That part of him had gone because, in so-called normal times, when his healthy and well, before it all started to go wrong, he was the kind of person that knew all too well, big or small, good or bad, how his behaviour, his decisions, would affect others (and how suicidal thoughts meant that he wasn’t himself, that he needed to get help). At some point in time, something went very wrong to switch this part of Jad off. It’s the only way to explain how, speaking, forgetting his wife, his mum, dad, brother, immediate family and his best friends for one moment, he did abandon his daughter. It’s an objective fact. His illness aside – and the particular and proximate circumstances leading up to him jumping of a bridge –  he did leave her without a dad, denying her the experience of growing up with him, a father figure, loving, guiding, caring for her in harmony with her mother, as a complete family unit (and not to say that adults can’t do well for their kids when relationships break down, because they can). Jad would have been appalled at the idea of disowning his daughter, so that he did – without the intent – is reason enough to believe that he had fallen into a black hole and lost all sight of the goodness of who he was, the love that people had for him, that he had become more than just the sum of himself. He had a daughter and she was his life, his future, his reason enough for living. But then, it always comes back to the black dog in the corner, snarling, growing impossibly bigger. You don’t think about anything else in that moment. It’s kill or be killed. Or, in the case of suicide, kill and be killed. But we are, regardless, collateral damage.

Ours weren’t the only lives that were left fractured by a suicide that year year, although it did feel like it – everyone around you not knowing Jad or even you goes on indifferently and how odd that can seem when you’re mourning the loss of someone close to you (when you’re grieving you almost want to pull in everyone else into your small orbit of sadness because that person meant something to you and therefore everyone should, as absurd as it is to say or think, feel just as bad as you and also feel heartbroken). According to the Office for National Statistics, 6,122 people took their own lives in 2014 (registered suicides). It was a 2% decrease on the year before, but less than it was in 2015, which saw an increase (6,188). In 2016, there were 3.6% fewer suicides compared to the year before (5,965), in 2017 it was lower still, with 5,821 registered deaths by suicide (the ONS noted that “this is one of the lowest rates observed since our time series began in 1981”), in 2018 there was 6,507, in 2019 it was 5,691 (England and Wales), in 2020 it was 5,224 (England and Wales), in 2021 it was 5,583 (England and Wales), in 2022 it was 6,588 and in 2023 it was 6,069 (England and Wales). It’s worth noting the last figure because it’s the highest rate it has been since 1999 and may well be part of a worrying overall uptick (the number of suicides has been decreasing since 1981, with the most notable reduction taking place up to the new millennium).

More on that shortly, but, for now, what I’m most struck by when looking at the number of people who have taken their lives in the UK since 2014 – the year that Jad died – is  how consistent they have been, suggesting that in any given year, around 5,000 to 6,000 people will, come rain or shine, commit suicide (the number of people sometimes going up, sometimes going down). From an uninformed perspective, like mine, it instinctively feels like an aberration, a statistical anomaly. How can it be that there aren’t any major fluctuations, 10,000 suicides one year, 1,000 another? But the clue is in the pattern. There are bigger, complex factors at play when it comes to suicide, which – in ways unknown to me before I embarked on this memoir, to Jad during his crisis and maybe everyone else in the aftermath – transcend the individual, suggesting, disconcertingly, that his death was both inevitable and preventable, that he didn’t have free will, that while he technically killed himself, it was in fact society, civilisation and its discontents, the past, history, the follies of man, the peculiar human experience, the world he grew up in, the world he inhabited as an English, Indian, Sikh, Geordie heterosexual northern man who owned his own micro business, that pushed him, against his will, his instinct, down a one way path that he would not return from. It is, after all, the biggest cause of death in men under the age of 50. Jad was under the age of 50. Most men who attempt suicide do so using comparatively more violent ways, like hanging or jumping, and, as result of this approach to self-destruction, are more likely than women to successfully end their life (women make more frequent attempts at taking their own life and survive, which might be seen as a good thing, but the volume of attempts suggest that the desire to die remains undiminished). Jad jumped off a bridge and died. So, by a roll of a dice, sod’s law, bad luck, Jad just happened to find himself part of a group that was going to die that year – and, the numbers being what they have been for the past 10 years, there was no way of getting away from it.

But it didn’t need to be this way. Suicide is, for the most part, preventable and there is a very strong possibility that Jad could still be alive today, even though, after the fact, his death a decade ago is the only history we can ever know. How then could we have prevented him from taking such a drastic course of action? Well, by changing how we understand and respond to suicide. As a recent series of papers in The Lancet argues, viewing suicide through the prism of public health – and not just through a clinical and psychological lens – can significantly reduce the number of people taking their own lives. 

Our general understanding of suicide – the way in which it is framed, talked about and treated – tends to focused on the individual level and occurring as a result of a mental disorder, which the World Health Organization (WHO) describes asd being “a clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotional regulation, or behaviour”. And while this is true, that suicidal thoughts do emerge in individuals who have mental health conditions, diagnosed or otherwise, across a wide spectrum of unhappiness and depression and is, in extreme cases – 760,000 a year take their own lives, equivalent to one every 40 seconds, with each adult dying by suicide, 20 others make an attempt – acted upon, it isn’t always the case that people, like Jad, who, to the best of my knowledge didn’t have any history of mental health problems, who find themselves weighing up whether life is worthwhile enough to not pursue death, fall neatly into that category. Instead, Jad, based on what little I understand, falls outside. He was, therefore, a victim to the complex interplay of social determinants outside of his control – which, one fateful day, created the perfect storm that would end with him taking his life on 17 December 2014.

The WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health defines social determinants as "non-medical factors that influence health outcomes. They are the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, and the wider set of forces and systems shaping the conditions of daily life. These forces and systems include economic policies and systems, development agendas, social norms, social policies and political systems”. The authors of the series of papers published in The Lancet, titled A public health approach to suicide prevention, expand on the social determinants of suicide: “These are the macroeconomic, public, and social policies and regulatory or legislative frameworks that govern the way we live, the capacity of the health system to meet our needs, the cultural and societal values that shape our perspectives, and the degree of social cohesion and social capital present in our society.”

A social determinant of suicide can be something as big and abstract as a macroeconomic policy like austerity, which was introduced in the UK by the previous Conservative government in its original coalition form, with David Cameron as PM and George Osborne as chancellor. It was described in 2019 by Philip Alston, the UN rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, as having “led to the systematic immiseration of millions across Great Britain”, with one report from 2015 finding that the ideologically-driven programme of extreme cuts in public spending played a role in the increase in suicides in the UK following the financial crash in 2008 and the subsequent Great Recession. In this instance, it’s not the policy per se that directly leads to suicide. Instead, it’s the impact it has on what the authors of the series on suicide describe as “individual-level risk factors”, which include sociodemographic factors (how old you are, what sex you are, your level of education, your employment status and how much money you earn), contextual factors like whether you have or are experiencing a stressful life event (finding yourself in fuel poverty)  or how well your work is going or not (e.g. your business isn’t doing well, your company announces that there will be redundancies) and clinical factors such as a history with mental health problems and self-harm.

A big problem like this requires a big response – and that means going beyond tackling it at an individual level. Instead, what’s needed is a response to suicide that happens at a population level, whereby the root causes of many self-inflicted deaths are nipped in the bud before serious suicidal thoughts emerge in a person. Because at that point, you’ve got a bigger fight ahead of you. This makes sense. It’s about prevention and not cure. After all, suicide as desperate response to a crisis is the last thing that many people who eventually go through with it, successfully, is the last thing they would have ever expected buying into. Jad was all about life and for him to reject it was so beyond reason it gives weight to the idea that he was beaten into submission not necessarily by something that emerged entirely inside of him, but that he was influenced and destroyed by external forces in a cold, arbitrary and unemotive way, as if he were waste, defective, nothing of note. Because, if we take a slight aside, all that really matters is the health of the state and the corporation, manmade constructs that give us our liberty, enable us to earn a living. A human life has no real meaning. We’re just a resource that owes its allegiance to the state and to the corporation, to the cult of growth, GDP and shareholder pockets.

With an upstream approach that addresses social determinants of health before they get out of control you can, theoretically, reduce the instances of downstream activity that is principally focused on helping people recover from suicidal apocalypticism and  catching the significant numbers of people who, for one reason or another, never appear on a at risk of suicide radar, meaning any meaningful clinical and non-clinical intervention is either missed or too late in the day to prevent someone like Jad from taking their own life (something like two out of three people who die by suicide have had no contact with a mental health professional). Given that social determinants are non-medical factors that negatively influence health outcomes, suicide needs to not be pigeon-holed as being exclusively a health problem. Because it isn’t. Suicides occur because of bad economics, bad social policies, bad legislation, bad people and bad ideas. The opposite, therefore, reduces the risk of suicides emerging. Good economics via, say universal basic income, major societal shifts to, for instance, four day weeks (with the same pay as a five day week), can change the very health and mood of a nation. Take Finland. Today suicide rates are halve of what they used to be 35 or so years ago and it is considered to be one of the happiest countries in the world. The fall in suicides is attributed to a deliberate effort by the government to tackle what was, back then, one of the highest rates of suicide in the world. But that’s not all. Finland is, while not without its faults, is unlike, for example, the UK, which is beset with problems and very unwell. Finland, in contrast, is a country that is, we are led to believe, underpinned by a “well-functioning, fair and equal society”, as the author Elisabet Lahti described it earlier this year, where “people can worry less and concentrate on living their lives”. Speaking after Finland was named the happiest country in the world for the seventh year in a row, she added: “Poor life decisions or bad luck don’t necessarily have to mean falling too far behind. To feel safe is one of our primal needs and if we’re not safe, we’re not able to relax into co-creation and innovation.”

The same can’t be said for Britain, for years now, has been stagnant, a word that belongs to the economic lexicon but whose other definition, as described by Collins, is “water is not flowing, and therefore often smells unpleasant and is dirty”, seems to also be apt. And it’s been that way since the financial crash, which could be seen to be the long road to Jad’s death. Because taken as a whole, including the years since he passed away, the country has been in the doldrums, even with a slight upturn in the economy between 2012 and 2015. “Economic growth this slow over this long a period has no precedent in the UK since at least the end of World War II”, the Institute for Fiscal Studies stated in its working paper from June 2024, The Conservatives and the Economy, 2010–24. But that’s not all. As the Guardian journalist Andy Beckett reflected in a piece from 2019 entitled The age of perpetual crisis: how the 2010s disrupted everything but resolved nothing: “While the decade’s Conservative ascendancy has gone on and on, extraordinary crises have spread through British society. During the 2010s, the average life expectancy, which had been growing almost continuously for a century, stopped rising. The average wage rose more slowly than in any decade since the Napoleonic wars. A million more children with working parents entered poverty. The number of people sleeping rough more than doubled.” While it was written before Covid-19 smashed through the world, that decade hasn’t turned out to be an exception in the fortunes of the UK ( there was sustained growth between 1997 and 2008 on the other side of that history for context). The bleakness continues. Even a change in government, while welcome, doesn’t promise much today. Instead, there's a tough sell – things will get better but not for a very long time. Part of the problem with today’s political class is the decided lack of big ideas. Their counterparts in the 20th century, as tumultuous as that century was, at least broke significant new ground, had characters, stories to tell and a way of connecting with people on a deeper, more emotive level. Now everything is management speak, bureaucracy. At least it was. Democracies may be reaching an impasse, where voters, gifted with an incredible power every five years or so, can reset the national direction. And in an age of populism, where zero-filter TV character-esque entertainers say the right things however wrong they actually are, there’s a mood for a less serious alternative because what has serious politics ever done as of late? So, fuck it, give the clowns a shot. Everything around us is miserable as it is and entertainment has never been better, so why not?

What I’m getting at here, ultimately – in a long-winded way afforded to me by the freedom of writing this in a way that is unencumbered – is that Jad’s suicide was, in no small part, a consequence of him being who he was, his particular circumstances and the shape of the world he lived in as he was slowly but resolutely ground down until nothing remained. There is no one person to blame, no real target to direct our anger at, no way of getting Jad back. It’s too late for both him and everyone he left behind. But, for everyone else, in the years to come, for many among the 5,000 to 6,000 people who will, as things stand, take their own lives next year, the year after and the year after that, it doesn’t have to be that way. A massive, multifaceted, population-level approach to tackling the social determinants of suicide (prevention), alongside personalised treatment at an individual level (cure), is the way forward. It’s just a shame it wasn’t so in 2014 because, knowing what I know, I’m more convinced than ever that Jad would be alive today.

Memories are not enough

I don’t remember the last time I saw or spoke to Jad. Today I feel bad about that fact. It’s as if I’ve let him down, disrespected his memory. But, of course, had nothing happened, had he not taken his life, had he continued to be a good friend among good friends – inter pares –  continued to be a minor character as we all are in the great, strange and singularly unique history of humanity that plays out on an exceptional, one of a kind spinning ball of life that is largely, at a surface level, made of water and which has, for billions of years, found itself suspended in one corner of the vastness of space, I wouldn’t have given not seeing or speaking to him a second thought or any undue gravitas – because it wouldn’t have been a thing. And it wasn’t. He wasn’t the only friend I hadn’t spoken to or seen at the time (how long, who knows, but call it days, sometimes weeks). I was, especially back then, really bad at keeping in touch. And, moreover, these were still the pre-WhatsApp group chat days (well, at least it was for me), where, in a nice way, checking in and chatting shit on the platform is easy and nice. I was also busy spending time with the missus and, when not kicking a football, learning Portuguese and drinking, also trying to find a new job that paid a salary that was commensurate with respect (and not underpaid as part of an exploitative model of labour).

The last bit of correspondence between us that I can find to date is an email. It’s dated Monday 16 December 2013, almost a year to the day before he died. He didn’t know that though, did he? It seems he was, while only 12 months away from jumping from a bridge, as far away as possible from thinking about death. “Will you be out in toon on the 21st?” he asked via his iPhone. “I think I'm gonna be in Tynemouth that day bru. Still waiting to hear back,” I replied via my BlackBerry. “If Tynemouth is not a late one then come out after,” he followed up with. I don’t appear to have got back to him. I’m not sure if I saw some of the boys that Christmas. It wouldn’t have been the last time we spoke, but I currently have nothing left other than that. It’s something. He’s still Jad, still keen on catching up and still up for a good time. What a difference a year makes.

The oldest email I’ve got from him is from 2006. It was in response to a request to friends and contacts to share with me their thoughts about the movie Fight Club. At the time I was looking to write about it as “as a kind of modern manifesto for young impressionable men”. I don’t think I ever got around to writing it (it wasn’t a commission) but Jad, along with others, were willing to give their time to a very young, naive and overly confident writer. The below is a shortened and edited version of what he responded with.

 “It challenges you to see what it is that stops you from doing the things you want to do – then challenges you to do them. The effect I think it has – if you are looking for some message in the madness of the film – is for you to be confident (not arrogant), have the courage of your convictions and go all out for something you want … What I take from this film is that it is telling you to know yourself completely (mentally, physically and spiritually) because how can you know others if you do not know yourself. I leave you with one final message, a bit of zen which relates to this: "To know thy enemy makes you dangerous, to know thyself makes you fearless.”

I wish he’d still felt the same way because he’d still be here doing what he did best – which is making us laugh (sometimes unintentionally). Because memories are not enough. They’re all that we have, sure, but they’ll always remain bittersweet reminders of the fact that he’s no longer here.

The mad cows of Ilkley

Witches, they would say, it was the wicked work of witches. Horrible, horrible witches. Others would remember the eerie night before it all happened, the thick fog that had descended over the town, the unusually large milky-white full moon, the howling of a pack of wolves as the clock struck midnight. Then, as they always did, they’d get out their phones and watch grainy footage on YouTube of the Ilkley Werewolf. Look, look at him glancing back at the camera, just like Bigfoot, unbelievable. And, over pints in warm pubs, locals would shiver at the thought of this monster, goosebumps tingling their skin. They would pause and think back to that time and how strange it had been to live through it. Memories recollected, they looked to distractions, like the menu in front of them. No beef until Thursday, a paperclipped note on the front would read. The management appreciates your patience and understanding. Not that it needed to be said. As the anniversary loomed, took place and passed, no one ever seemed to have the appetite for it. No one would dare.

-

The event, as many would come to describe those strange seven days all those years ago, began at the break of dawn. Cock a doodle mooooooooo. Cock a doodle moooooooo. Cock a doodle moooooooo. Linda stirred. Cock a doodle moooooooo. Cock a doodle moooooooo. She thought she heard what she heard, which was odd, because it was obviously bizarre, but, half asleep as she was, she didn’t think too much of it. It’s a dream, I’m dreaming, I could so easily just drift away – cock a doodle moooooooo. Cock a doodle moooooooo. No, no, it’s real, I’m hearing what I’m hearing, she said to herself – the rooster, it seems, is crowing like a cow. She opened her eyes and turned to look at Dean, her husband of 47 years, who was fast asleep snoring like a content king. Cock a doodle moooooooo. Cock a doodle moooooooo. There it was again. Cock a doodle moooooooo.

Linda got up, glancing at her DAB radio, which reported the time as 6.53am. She went to the window and looked out. It was late spring and the sun was rising pulling with it and out of the ground a bloody red sky. It was a nice view, she thought, enough for her to think about taking a picture. But her phone was by the bedside table and while this wasn’t far – the window was on her side of the bed – the view wasn’t worth the small effort. Plus, she wanted to focus on the business at hand – figuring out what had happened to Billy the rooster. She shifted her gaze from above to below and into the garden. Billy was on the lawn, still, looking towards the house towards Linda. She watched him watching her, if he was in fact watching her, because roosters didn’t really look you in the eye, nor could you really ever tell if they were looking at you. He didn’t peep a word. No cock a doodle moooooooo, no cock a doodle doo. Then he turned away and wandered off in no given direction. Eggs, Linda thought, now that I’m wide awake, I’d like some fried eggs with a slice of toast and a cup of Earl Grey. She looked at Dean and smiled and headed out of the bedroom without needing to tip-toe. Her husband could sleep through the end of the world.

-

Half an hour later, number 42 was busy as usual with the morning rush. Kelly, the mum, was packing pack lunches into bags, Dave, the dad, was browsing work emails on his laptop, Kevin, the oldest was washing his hands, Michelle, the middle child, was watching Friends – the One Where Rachel Tells – and Jessica, the youngest at four was looking at the live feed of the security camera at the side of the house on her mum’s smartphone. On it she saw a small procession of cows walking past their driveway on the path, one after the other in a very calm and orderly fashion. If Jessica had been counting, she would have counted one hundred cows, but she didn’t. She just watched them all stroll on by, heading wherever it was they were heading. When the last one came into view, unlike the others, it stopped. Then it turned its head and looked towards the camera, towards Jessica, who smiled. It stared for around five seconds before turning to face the direction of the other cows. It stood there, motionless, as if occupied with a thought. And then it set off to join the rest of the gang.

Jessica got up and found her mum, handing her the phone. “Thank you darling,” Kelly said, picking her up. She looked at the screen. “You been keeping an eye out for us, have you?”

“The cow looked like it was gonna do a poop,” replied Jessica.

“Really?” said Kelly.

“Yes,” said Jessica. “But it didn’t.”

“Maybe it didn’t need to go,” said Kelly.

Jessica smiled at her mum and her mum smiled back. “I love you,” said Kelly, as she kissed her youngest kid on the cheek. She put her down. “Come on kids,” she hollered. “Let’s get a move on.”

-

Jack woke up with an awful hangover, the hangover of a drunk who was, unbeknownst to him, starting to get into the swing of being a functional alcoholic, which would, in contrast to being a dysfunctional alcoholic – still half a decade or so away – appear retrospectively to be the belle epoque of his life. He went to grab his phone, but it fell to the floor. “Fuck,” he said and sighed. He lifted his right arm, bringing his wrist to his face. Squinting as tight as he could to not let much if any light in, face scrunched up, he saw that it was just after five past 10 on his rectangular Armani watch. He’d had it since he was 18, a gift from his grandma. Although he didn’t think it or know it, he loved that watch and it would be the one constant in his shambolic, disappointing and wasted life. When he died, 22 years, five months and six days on from this moment, after a routine drinking session, the watch would still be on his wrist as beaten up as he was, just about holding on for dear life (there had been a few more holes punched into the strap to accommodate Jack’s increasingly fat wrists, but that last hole, made six months ago, was the last of it – there was no more space for another one).

He put the watch back down and very slowly, after much procrastination, got up, went about his business in the bathroom and ventured heavy footed downstairs into the kitchen with a packet of cigarettes and a lighter in his hand. He was already dressed. In the kitchen, he stuck the kettle on, slipped into a pair of flip-flops that were long past their sell-by date and opened the door. He took a fag, tapped it three times against the packet, placed it in his mouth, lit it and breathed in deep the smoke which had long ceased to give him any satisfaction, which he knew nothing about. In the distance he could see a small pack of cows huddled together like rugby players before the start of a game. He watched as one by one the cows walked backwards from the huddle, turned to their left and began walking around the existing huddle, as if walking in a circle. When the last one in the huddle joined the others, Jack could see that all nine cows were indeed walking around in a circle. When he left home two hours later to grab a few drinks with a side of lunch, the cows were still walking around in a circle, each following the cow in front like clockwork. The first thing he did when got back home seven pints later and still sober was to go straight to the back door by the kitchen to see if the cows were still there. They were not, but had he been where they had been he’d have seen that they had left a neat circle pattern where they had been walking. He pulled out a cigarette, lit it and took a long, hard draw and turned his thoughts to his next drink.
-

“There’s a cow on the train track,” said Michael, pointing to the cow making its way slowly towards the train that was parked at Ilkley train station. It was 12.01pm. The train was scheduled to leave at 12.10pm. “You don’t see that every day.”

“No you don’t,” said Steven, his pal. “I best message Brian and tell him we’re very likely to be late.” They were off to Menston to play snooker and they would indeed be very late. But by then it didn’t matter. There would be stories about cows to talk about, read about, listen to and watch.

The cow arrived at the front of the train and stopped. Then it sat down. The reaction from most people at the station to this situation and the inevitable delay to their journey was surprisingly cheery. After all, a train being delayed by a cow was more tolerable than signal failures, damage to power lines and the like.

“Yes,” said Steve to Brian. “A cow. Yes, yes, it’s sitting down and it doesn’t look like it’s going to move anytime soon. Sure, I’ll send you a picture.”

“Look,” said Michael. “There’s another one.” Indeed, up ahead, another cow appeared on the track, also heading towards Ilkley train station. When it arrived, it also paused and stood still. Not too long after that it let out a moo and then sat down behind the first cow, who, without turning back, also let out a moo. The passengers at the station looked out at the tracks to see if any other cows would arrive. None would.

“I wonder how heavy cows are,” said Steve, who then thought about heavy things like weights, heavy boxes and a sack of potatoes. That thought about heavy things ended there on account of him not really ever having lifted anything particularly heavy in all his life.

“I’ve no idea,” said Michael, looking at the cows, trying to measure them up. “Very heavy.”

No one knew what to do about the cows. The passengers didn’t, the station staff didn’t and everyone else that had heard about the cows on the tracks and had made their way to Ilkley station to see didn’t.

“Shall I call 999?” Derek, the train conductor, asked Janine, the train driver.

She shrugged. “I guess so,” she said. “Although, I mean, it’s not a crime. 101?”

Derek had never in his life actually rang the number 999 – not even as a kid – or even 101, so he didn’t feel comfortable answering that question. He didn’t know why they were different, only that 101 had been introduced relatively recently.

“101 it is,” he said dialling 101.

“Hello, how can I help?” said the lady on the other line. Her name was Magaret, but everyone called her Maggie.

“Yes, well, I don’t really know how to put this or if you’re the right person to talk to, I’m a train conductor and, well, there are two cows blocking the train and they don’t look like they’re going to move anytime soon.”

Ordinarily, Maggie would have laughed, apologised for laughing, pulled herself together and responded with professional courtesy, but by now she had already taken a good few bovine-related calls this morning and therefore responded politely, seriously and reassuringly (the calls would continue for the rest of the day, the day after that and for the rest of the duration of the event). She’d been told about a cow stuck in a dumpster behind Greggs, cows swimming in the Ilkley Pool and Lido, cows chasing after golf buggies – specifically golf buggies and not golfers – at Ilkley Golf Club, cows staging an apparent sit-down protest on Cowpasture Road – the words of one caller who described it as being “like one of them silly Extinction Rebellion or something or the other protests” – and drunk cows acting drunk outside of Ilkley Brewery. These stories would inspire her to write a novel, which she called Cowpocalypse. Self-published on Amazon, it would sell over 100,000 copies.

“That’s perfectly alright sir,” she said. “We can help.” She did, although it would take another three hours for the cows to eventually be shifted and for the train to depart Ilkley train station.

-

Meanwhile, on the green, green grass of Riverside Gardens, set on the banks of the River Wharfe, Anna, 14, who at this moment was listening to Taylor Swift’s Bad Blood on her iPhone – “.... and time can heal, but this won't, so if you come in my way, just don't …” – with a heavily annotated copy of Thomas Piketty's Capital in her tote bag along with a reusable bottle of water, a heavily bruised banana, dog snacks, dog waste bags and her Matt and Nat purse, was playing fetch with her beloved golden retriever Barney when a very fluffy calf rubbed itself against her left calf (how about that?!).

“Oh,” said Anna, slightly startled, “hello there.” She smiled. The calf was cute and was looking at her in that way that all cute animals look at you – cute-like with big cute eyes. She petted the calf as she petted Barney, who had by now arrived at her feet having chased after a tennis ball that she had thrown only moments ago. He was now sniffing the calf’s bum. She looked up and all around the park to see where the calf had come from. There was the usual mix of people at the park, families, friends, couples, but no other calves, no cows and no farmers.

“Where have you come from?” she asked the calf. “Are you lost?” The calf looked at her and seemed to smile. Anna smiled back. Barney had lost interest in the cow’s butt and was now sitting down watching kids having fun in the play area, living their best lives.

The calf walked over to the tennis ball, rolled it with its nose, looked up at Anna, turned back to the ball and rolled it again. “You want to play fetch?” she asked. The calf looked up and said, in its own way, without words, “Yes, I would love to play fetch.”

Anna picked up the tennis ball. The calf got excited and bounced on its little legs, its eyes fixed intently on the tennis ball. Anna threw it and the calf chased after it with all the cuteness and speed of a cute and not very fast calf. It returned to Anna, pleased with itself. Barney had watched the whole thing. And while you can never know what dogs think, what they dream about, what they aspire to do with their lives, had you seen Barney at the moment you’d have seen a dog in admiration.

Anna threw the ball another 10 times. “Okay, okay,” that’s enough. The calf concurred. Anna sat down next to Barney and the calf snuggled up beside her. She pulled out her dog snacks, gave one to Barney and one to the calf. “Nice?” she said less as a question but more as a statement of fact. She gave Barney another snack, the calf also. Anna pulled out her phone and took a selfie of her, Barney and the calf. She looked at the picture, showed it to the calf and then to Barney. She was happy with the photo.

They were all now looking at the play area and there they sat for a couple of minutes until the sound of a moo from afar perked up the calf’s ears. The calf’s mother, with impressive horns and a side-parting of hair to the left, had appeared in the distance. She mooed again. The calf got up and rubbed itself affectionately against Anna. Barney got up and went up to the calf and softly bark a number of times. Again, who knows what he said or what he was thinking but it all felt very good-natured and the calf seemed to understand what was being barked. It then trotted off towards its mother, as Anna and Barney watched. As it arrived at its ma, who had turned away to lead the calf back from wherever they had come, it stopped and turned around. Anna waved goodbye. The calf seemed to nod back at Anna and then turned around and followed its mum. That calf would grow into a cow and, 20 months later, it would be slaughtered with customary cold and clinical indifference, hung up and processed, chopped up into various bits, packaged nicely, sold for a pretty penny, cooked with care and skill, and then, at the end of it all, enjoyed by meat-loving humans in a pub on a Saturday afternoon with friends and pets for company, none of whom they would ever think to eat.
-

“The thing is,” said Andrew to Melanie, two kindred and very platonic souls who had met years ago canvassing with other members of the Keighley & Ilkley Reform UK Society during a local election and bonded over their love of Thatcher-era political memorabilia – Andrew loved his Reagan Bush ‘84 white hat, while Mel, as she liked to be called, always took any opportunity to bring out her Margaret Thatcher nutcracker – and Buster Keaton movies. “If I was elected prime minister, I’d spend the first 100 days prioritising one thing – stopping foreigners from becoming citizens here. Ban it outright.”

“Couldn’t agree more,” said Mel. “Banning non-Brits from becoming Brits is the first step to saving our traditions, our identity, our values and our history.”

“Exactly,” said Andrew. “Otherwise why are we even a United Kingdom? It’s too watered down at the moment – too multicultural, too fragmented. And it's not racist to say that Mel, it isn’t. Look at Bhutan, for example, they’re Asian, they’re brown and they’d say the same about their own country. But you don’t hear the wokerati complaining about Bhutan now do you?”

“You don’t,” said Mel. “They have no idea.”

“And then, for the next 100 days, I’d do what they do in Bhutan – start preserving and growing our British culture. I’m thinking that being British has to have primacy over being Muslim, Hindu or Caribbean or whatever. And we’d have to have all citizens swearing allegiance to the king. I’d even go so far as to bolster the power of the royal family, in fact, I mean it’s not like they’ve never been involved and they know what they’re doing, they know this country like the back of their hands. I’d bring back mandatory national service, too.”

“Is that a cow?” said Mel pointing to the Cow and Calf rocks. They stopped. They were now standing by the bench on the footpath that led up to Ilkley Quarry and Ilkley Moor. “It looks like a cow.”

Mel was right. It was a cow. It was standing still on the calf rock looking back at the cow rock.

“That’s unusual,” said Andrew, pulling out his phone. It was 2.39pm. “Shall we?”

Mel nodded. They walked over to the rocks, where others had gathered. They were taking photographs, chatting enthusiastically and trying to figure out how and why and what it all meant. They learnt that the cow had been here since at least the crack of dawn, that the emergency services had come and gone, that the cow had done very little in all that time except wag its tail and rotate its head left and right.

“In all my years,” said Mel, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“It’s quite something , isn’t it?” said Andrew, taking a photo of the cow. “It’s not the easiest rock to stand on.”

“It surely didn’t get up there by itself did it?” asked Mel.

Andrew chuckled. “I don’t suppose it did.”

“But how would you even get a cow up there?” Mel replied, utterly bemused. And why would you? And why is the cow acting without a care in the world?”

“All very good questions, to which I have no answer,” said Andrew, who was temporarily distracted with the idea of a slogan that went Bring British Back, which he quickly concluded didn’t have the same ring to it as Make America Great Again. Still, he thought, it was a start.

Mel, meanwhile, was thinking about the cow. She was as confused by it as she was confused by socialism, which she often described as being atypical to the human condition. Look at Cuba, look at China, look at Russia, she’d say. Look at how the Marxists failed (socialists, communists and Marxists were used interchangeably by Mel, who often said, “a green pepper, red pepper, yellow pepper are all still peppers”).

“I just can’t get my head around it,” she said.

“Yeah, it’s baffling,” said Andrew. They stayed there for another 15 minutes, seeing if anything would change, if anyone would come to sort out whatever needed sorting out – because this wasn’t right and this wasn’t normal. Eventually, like everyone else who saw the cow on the calf rock of the Cow and Calf rocks, their intrigue eventually subsided. They then headed into Ilkley Moor for their planned walk, with talk of the cow eventually making way for Margaret Thatcher, Jeremy Corbyn, small government and free market mania.

The cow would remain there for the rest of the day, with heavy rain and darkness driving away the last of the crowds. The next morning, the earliest of the earliest walkers would discover the cow not on the calf rock but on the ground beside it. It had been shot in the side of its head with a shotgun. The word Terror spray painted on its stomach in red. And, on reading this in The Ilkley Journal, residents would, for the duration of the article and immediately afterwards, feel just that.
-

Gwendoline, on her way to the Lishman's of Ilkley to pick up the usual bonanza of an order for the monthly get together of The Meat Eating Women of Ilkley Society – which today was comprised of fifty sausages, five coppa, six pheasants, two gammon joints, one farmhouse pate, sixteen Yorkshire bratwursts, one rolled brisket, twenty one fillet steaks and twelve meatloafs – found herself catching up to a cow on the Wharfedale Window Company side of the pavement on Leeds Road. It was walking with the steady confidence of a horse that belonged to a cowboy from the Wild West. Gwendoline overtook it, looking back once to confirm she had seen what she had seen. She had – there was a cow walking up Leeds Road, heading in the direction of Church Street.

“Nice gimmick that cow,” said Gwendoline, closing the door behind her, rubbing her hands as if she was cold, a habit she’d picked from working in Leeds Kirkgate Market.

“What’s that now?” said Drew, owner of the family-owned Lishman’s as he checked off something or the other on a clipboard with a healthy stack of papers clipped to it.

“The cow, you know, walking up the street,” she said.

“No idea what you mean,” Drew replied.

“Just hold on a second,” said Gwendoline, rifling through her coat pockets to find her list. And, lo and behold, the cow that she had passed earlier passed by, turning its head to the Lishman’s shop and back as it walked away.

Drew put down his clipboard and headed out of the butchers. He took off her flat cap, wiped his head and then muttered something indistinguishable to himself. He walked back inside and picked up his clipboard.

“That’s nothing to do with me,” he said.

“Really?” she said.

“Really,” he said.

“If it isn’t you, then who?” Gwendoline asked.

“It’s either just the way of the world and a cow taking an afternoon stroll or some sort of marketing stunt, but not from any of our locals,” said Drew. “The Furniss Family, JB Wilkinson & Sons … they don’t need to resort to cheap tricks like that. They’re good people, good honest butchers trying to earn a good honest living. If it’s anyone, it’s a new young upstart wannabe butcher’s entrepreneur with an iPhone … What can I get you and the ladies?”

“It’s a big one this month Drew,” said Gwendoline handing over the note. “I don’t know what it is, but all of us, we are in the mood for a feast.”

“Like a queen’s banquet this,” said Drew as he poured over the order. “No problem at all, we can do this. Just take a seat.”

Gwendoline took a seat and got out her notepad and crossed out “GET MEAT”. She looked over the other items on her list, such as WATER PLANTS, DYE HAIR, SEND J. CASH. She was a happy woman, retired and busier than ever, an active member of the community, dependable and likeable, and among friends and family, a planner who made things happen.

Ten minutes later Drew along with Barnaby, a new apprentice butcher, had 10 paper bags loaded with meat ready for Gwendoline.

“Are you parked up nearby?” asked Drew.

“Yes,” said Gwendoline. In Booths.

“Barnaby will help you with these,” said Drew.

Barnaby smiled.

“Thank you,” said Gwendoline.

“And my regards to the ladies,” said Drew.

Later that night, the Lishman's of Ilkley’s security cameras would capture on CCTV, outside and in, the very same cow that Gwendoline had overtaken. It had returned to the butchers, except it was on the other side of the road. It would stand there looking at Lishman’s for half an hour or so, completely motionless. Then, out of nowhere, it would begin pawing on the ground, which it did mechanically for a good quarter of an hour, before charging violently at the front door of the butchers, smashing through like a hot knife through cold butter. Once inside it could be seen shaking its head, as if gathering its senses, before going full psycho on everything and everything in Lishman’s, smashing every bit of the shop like a wild bull in a china shop. Such was the devastation that it would look like the site of a horrendous bomb blast, which completely dumbfounded Drew, his team and the authorities the next morning, with footage on the security cameras shedding light on what had caused the destruction (not that it made it any easier to understand – how do you rationalise a cow seemingly intent on wrecking havoc with a scary level of ferocity?).

 It wasn’t the only butcher’s that was turned upside down in Ilkley that night and that night only. The Furniss Family and JB Wilkinson & Sons were equally turned to rubble by the same cow doing the exact same thing. The cow would never be apprehended. “Cows being cows pretty much look the same,” said a police officer assigned to the case. “Chances of catching it and bringing it to justice are slim.” Luckily, the insurance paid out, and all three of the butchers got back to chopping up and selling meat in no time at all. 

-

Staff at The Ilkley Cow were preparing for the day ahead. Cutlery was being polished, bookings were being checked over, ingredients were being prepped. The staff were in good spirits. For instance, Bikram, the kitchen porter, was singing tujhe dekha to yeh jana sanam having watched Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge last night with his wife. Sheila, the waitress, meanwhile, was scrolling swiftly through Instagram, slowing down every now and again to watch cute baby videos (she was pregnant but didn’t yet know). And Alan, the sous chef, was keeping himself happily entertained with sudoku. The manager, Brian, looked at his phone. It was 4.25pm. They’d be opening soon. He called his entire team for a meeting in the kitchen to discuss the evening ahead, which included possibly entertaining a food critic from a national newspaper – ”Hopefully not that fucking wanker Giles Coren” one of the team said to raucous applause – and managing a record number of guests taking part in the restaurant’s Thor’s Hammer Challenge, which involved devouring a 100oz chunk of beef shin, one portion of chunky chips, one portion of roasted vegetables and a double serving of gravy in under an hour. Incidentally, less than a handful had completed the challenge prior to the evening to come – which still managed to get underway despite mother nature or evil spirits throwing a spanner in the works in the run up to the first guests arriving – but that night,every single one of the participants would come away victorious, making relatively easy work of all that meat and all those trimmings. It would be a night to remember, a success in every single way. The challenge would remain popular but no one would ever overcome it again.

The meeting concluded, Sheila made her way to the front. “Mother feckin sheets of cunningness,” she exclaimed, both hands over her mouth. The restaurant was packed with cows similar to cows being tightly packed in a pen. Some were facing straight at her, some were sideways, some were diagonal and some were pointing their asses in her direction.

She opened the door to the back. “Er, Bri, I think, er, you need to come out here right now,” she said, hand on the door, eyes fixed on the cows.

“Coming,” said Brian, clipboard in one hand and a green highlighter in the other. He walked past Sheila and came to an abrupt halt. He smiled half nervously because it was his first real experience of what he’d later call the you-can’t-explain-it-it’s-the-twilight-zone-gone-mad – he’d experience a lot of these moments over the next few years – and, because it was so unusual and the situation so unusually calm, that there was something humbling about it.

“Well Sheila, I have nothing to say,” he said, his arms hanging by his sides

Sheila shook her head in agreement, equally baffled. They were both thinking the same thing – how did the cows get here? If they got here because of someone, why? and if not, why had the cows come? And, then, to more practical matters, with The Ilkley Cow opening up soon, how do you do that when you have a restaurant full of cows that don’t seem to be in any rush to go back home?

Bikram finished the last of his pans, dried his hands, took off and hung up his apron and made his way to the front of the restaurant and then outside for his late afternoon cigarette and TikTok break, which, unsurprisingly, involved having a cigarette and then shooting a video of himself dancing to a Bollywood song (he would edit and post the video in the evening). He had over 500,000 followers and his videos had been liked by many, many people including Charli D'Amelio, The Rock, Nigel Farage, Stormzy, Grant Schapps and Sabrina Bahsoon. He didn’t know it yet, but he was on the precipice of gathering a notable following in India and, in the not so distant future, becoming one of Bollywood’s best-loved action directors, best known for casting 90s heartthrobs as older action heroes and giving them a second chance at fame and happiness.

“That’s a lot of cows,” said Bikram.

“Yes Bik, that is a lot of cows,” said Brian.

“Is this for tonight?” asked Bikram.

Sheila laughed and Brian, without any expression or tone, said: “No.”

“How are we going to get rid of them?” asked Sheila.

“I’ve no idea,” said Brian. Then, after what felt like an eternity, he added: “They must belong to somebody.”

“I can get rid of them,” said Bikram.

“You what?” said Brian.

“If you want them out of the restaurant and for the cows to be someone else’s problem, I can lead them away,” said Bikram.

“How’s that?” asked Sheila.

“My family has farms in India,” said Bikram matter of factly. “Some of them are known as cow whispers. They talk to cows. I can also talk to cows.”

“Really?” said Brian incredulously.

“Really,” said Bikram. “I can’t tell you how, I can’t have anyone else here with me, but let me have my ciggie and give me twenty minutes and I’ll have them heading into the countryside.”

“You do that and I’ll give you a 20% pay rise,” said Brian, who simultaneously was unconvinced and convinced at what Bikram had said.

“You serious?” said Bikram.

“I am.”

Bikram got out his phone, held it up to Simon and pressed record. “20% pay rise if I get rid of these cows?” said Bikram.

“Scout’s honour,” said Brian’s hand.

“Sheila, you’re a witness,” said Bikram.

“Yeah, whatever,” said Sheila.

“It’s a deal,” said Bikram shaking Simon’s hand and high-fiving Sheila.

Thirty minutes later and all the cows had gone, with nothing to show for it except for the faint smell of a farm that would clear in good time (luckily there was no cow dung or cow wee to clean up). Save for the Instagram photos captioned, “We had some special guests at the Ilkley Cow today”, you would not have believed that a restaurant like this could have hosted so many cows.

“Thank you Bik,” said Brian. “I mean it. What you did has saved us from disaster.”

“Nothing to it,” said Bikram, smiling. “Just a little luck and the right man at the right place with the right skills.”

Sheila hugged him, wiping tears from her face.

“Thanks Sheila,” said Bikram.

That night he did his job as he did every other night he worked here, quietly and attentively. He got his pay rise, a bonus and free meals for him plus one at The Ilkley Cow for the rest of his life.

-

Winston was out walking his dog, a bichon frisé that went by the name of Lily – short for Liliana, of course – in Middleton Woods, thinking about his upcoming trip to Salcombe in Devon with his wife Jemima, where they were looking to view a few properties that were vying to end up as their second home, a sort of regular retreat where she could paint coastal scenes in the style of John Constable and he could, well, continue to work but with the healing powers of the sea (so he was told).

Lily halted abruptly.

“What is it?”

She looked at him doe-eyed – helpless, lovable and ridiculous, but not very informative.

He pulled on the lead and she obliged. However, she again came to a sudden stop. She let out a whine, as if she was scared. Winston looked around the woods and couldn't see anything.

“Lily, stop being silly, we have to get home,” he said. He tossed a treat and she gobbled it up. Lily was okay again but when Winston came to an open area, just outside of the woods, she stopped again. But this time so did he. Ahead there was a sizeable gathering of cows facing a cluster of sheep, goats, chickens, ducks, rabbits and horses. The cows were mooing, the sheep were bleating, the goats were mehing, the chickens were clucking, the ducks were quacking, the rabbits were squeaking and the horses were neighing. They looked like they were having a meeting – plotting, thought Winston, actually they look like they’re plotting. He was stunned by the sight of what was in front of him. It felt unreal, yet it was anything but. He got out his phone and started recording.

Lily barked.

“Shhh Lily,” said Winston, hoping that they could pass by the animals unseen. Lily whimpered and hid herself behind Winston, poking her head every now and again.

All the animals collectively stopped talking. There was an unnerving silence. And then all the animals, again in unison, turned to face him and Lily. Winston and Lily both stood still. The animals didn’t budge an inch. Winston thought about the prospect of them charging him and Lily and what he would do if they did. There was a cottage not far from here and he speculated he could make and either hop through the fence or, if he was lucky, get through the gate before they could catch up to him.

He wouldn’t have to. There was the sudden sound of thunder. The animals turned their gaze away from him and Lily and exchanged what seemed to be goodbyes and then darted off in all sorts of directions. It started to rain. At first it was light, then it was heavy and then it was followed by pellet-sized hailstones. Winston grabbed Lily and ran as fast as he could – which wasn’t that fast – to an opening, keeping an eye out for the animals.

As he made his way home on Rupert Road, he said to Lily: “Well, that was odd, wasn’t it?”

Lily looked up at him in agreement.

He remembered he had recorded a video and got out his phone. He watched the clip, which confirmed what he and Lily had seen not that long ago: animals gathering on a field in cahoots, conspiring, plotting, up to no good.

“I think a cognac is in order,” he said to Lily. She had no idea what a cognac was but had heard Winston mention the word often. She was just relieved to be out of the woods and away from the other animals. Being a dog, she had understood every word that had been uttered. It had terrified her.

-

That evening, at around 8pm, Pandora, an interior designer who was driving back from a meeting with a client whose brief of “opulent elegance” was the kind of fun commission she lived for as an interior designer, was navigating her way around the curves of Skipton Road on the A59. She was listening to the latest podcast from The History Chicks when she thought she heard what sounded like a light thud on her roof. She ignored it and went back to concentrating on the road and on the podcast. There was another thud on the roof, and another and another. And then she saw something the size of a salad plate bounce off the bonnet of the car and then another and another.

“What the …” she said, slowing down, checking for cars behind her. The thudding increased dramatically, with a short but intense downpour bringing Pandora to a standstill. She put on her hazard lights and waited for it to end, which it did in no time at all. Her phone buzzed. It was a message from her son, Gerald, saying that he and his fiancée, Alice, were now driving up on Thursday evening. She smiled. He was her only child and she loved him unconditionally. She was proud of the man he had become, a kind, loving, positive and entirely unselfish neurosurgeon who always saw the world not necessarily for what it was, but what it could be. And she adored her future daughter-in-law, a psychologist whose self-help book, Love U, would make her a household name in the UK, the US and throughout much of Europe, which would, to Pandora’s delight, bag her some high-profile clients and, best of all, a long and unforgettable lunch with Oprah Winfrey that would be followed by a modest afternoon of tea and biscuits, cocktails, dinner and late-night digestifs.

The deluge was soon over. Pandora stepped out of her car to see what had been bouncing off her car. She didn’t think it was hail. It had been far too soft for that. But she also didn’t know what else it could be. What, after all, fell from the sky with the softness and shape of a salad plate? To say she would be surprised with the answer would be an understatement.

It was cow dung cakes. A lot of cow dung cakes. She could see it on the road ahead, behind her, to the sides and on her car. Perplexed, stumped and thoroughly amused, she let out a huge roar of laughter. She looked up towards the sky and couldn’t see anything. Where had the cow dung cakes come from, she thought. A plane? A helicopter? One of those drones her husband, William, now had and took everywhere? Even then, why, who and where? Why were they being transported if at all? Who was transporting them if at all? Where were they being taken if at all? Pandora realised these were silly questions to a silly situation. She returned to her car, put the ignition, sent her son and husband respective messages, and set off, smiling and listening again to the The History Chicks podcast.

-

In a London basement office, Gayatri, who worked at the climate change consultancy Climus, and who was now on to her tenth cup of coffee, was sitting at her desk happily writing a memo to her bosses, when an alert popped up on her computer. It wasn’t any alert. It was an alert that said things were not as they should be – and, as of late, the alert had been going off all the time. We’ll be dancing and drinking as we burn to death, she thought.

 She clicked on the alert. A map of the world opened up and zoomed in the UK and then West Yorkshire before finally landing on Ilkley. The methane levels for the town were off the charts – like way off the charts. She pulled up some charts, typed in a few queries and then compared and contrasted the data she was seeing. She was right. The methane levels in Ilkley were the highest ever recorded by Climus, which had celebrated its 21st birthday. But what was so unusual about what she was seeing was that the now previous high, which was recorded in Texas three years ago, had been dwarfed by what she was now seeing.

“Gayatri, Gayatri, you’ve had too much coffee, too little sleep and that is not optimum input for maximum output,” she said to herself out loud. “Come on yaar, wake up.” She tapped her face cheeks lightly a number of times, got up and stretched, wandered to the bathroom and splashed her face with cold water and then downed a can of Monster (Ultra Fiesta Mango flavour), a guilty pleasure.

She went back to her desk, double-checked and then triple-checked the data, compared and contrasted two times and then three times and then ran it over with her husband, Pranjal, a lawyer, who was also working late on the most important case of his life so far – there would be more – and who also confirmed objectively that her conclusions were accurate, astute and authoritative (the unintentional alliteration made them both laugh). What was going on in this town, Ilkley, which she had never heard of, she thought? She Googled it. It was based in West Yorkshire, she read, Bucolic. Pretty. It’s nice, she thought. Very English, very gora gora chita chita. A week from now she would visit in a professional capacity to check the readings but carve out time to explore the moors and have afternoon tea at Bettys. She would have a lovely time. 

She rang her boss, Ofelia, a heavy-set Portuguese academic who scared everyone who met her for the first time but who was quick to dispel being judged as a book cover with her innate goofiness (which complemented the seriousness with which she took her job).

“I’m sorry to call you,” said Gayatri.

“You wouldn’t – you haven’t before – if it wasn’t an emergency,” said Ofelia. “What has happened?”

Gayatri explained. She sent Ofelia an email with links. Ofelia was alarmed. They did a video call and shared screens. They invited a few others to discuss further, to validate and to confirm. They then discussed, validated and confirmed. They checked in with their colleague, Jomo, who lived in Ilkley. He had moved here in 1981 when he was 18 from Kakamega. He loved living here. Ilkley is the seat of the chair of the world, he would say. It didn’t matter that it didn’t make sense, everyone got the sentiment.

“I was expecting your call,” he said. “There has been a very bad smell here for the last hour, hour and a half, as if all the cows of Ilkley have decided to break wind collectively.”

He laughed. Ofelia laughed. Gayatri laughed.

“At first I thought it was a gas leak – well, I guess it is – but when I checked the data I saw that it was less manmade and more cowmade.”

The smell would linger for days, diminishing with every passing hour but catching the locals off guard every now and again forcing them to stop, anticipate being sick and then recover. Very few people would actually vomit, which was a blessing – there was enough cow-related – how shall we put this – bodily output to deal with.

“Do we need to contact the local authorities, the national government, the secretary of state for the environment?” asked Gayatri. Nobody on the call knew who that was.

“It doesn’t seem like an immediate threat to human life,” said Jomo. “The levels seemed to have peaked. I will keep an eye on it – or a nose on it.”

Thank you Jomo,” said Gayatri.

“Thank you Jomo,” said Ofelia.

Gayatri would not sleep that night. She would dream of watching people in a boiling pool of water in a desert being boiled alive while trees burnt and meteors crashed overhead. And they were laughing. She would wake up soaked in sweat, thinking she was among the mad ones in the pool. But she wasn’t.
-

“Three pints is two pints too many for a one-pint evening so I must take leave,” said George, knocking back what was actually his fifth and final pint in the Black Hat. He’d like to have had another and another and maybe one more but it was 10.27pm, he was hungry and he had a long day ahead of him working towards a tight deadline for developing a beta version of an app for one of the local schools that would make it it easier for students, parents and teachers to organise homework, monitor academic performance and communicate with one another.

He downed what remained of his drink, grabbed his football, bid everyone farewell and stuck in his earphones. He pressed play and on came Playa Playa by D’Angelo, the opening track to Voodoo, the RnB artist’s second studio album. George loved the album. He had only come across it a week or so ago but in that time he had said to himself that he thought it was already one of his favourite albums ever (along with Let It Be and Pet Sounds).

He was close to home when he inadvertently miss-kicked the ball while doing keepy uppies, sending it into Darwin Gardens. He got a fright when he looked up to see where the ball had landed. It was by the back feet of a gaunt, almost emaciated cow that had turned its head as the ball had bounced off of it.

“Fucking hell,” said George, hand on his heart. “You gave me a fright.”

Moo, the cow replied wearily, moo. George tapped his left ear twice to pause the music. He stood where he had stopped. He was reminded of the horses he had sometimes seen beside the small park on Backstone Way, which looked like they were just hanging out, whiling away an afternoon, no idea whose horses they were or why they were there.

The cow turned around and began to walk and as it did it accidentally kicked the football away from it. It stopped walking. Looked at the football, looked back at George, and then looked back to the football. It walked to the ball and looked down at it and then looked back at George again. Moo, it said. Moo.

George remembered being chased by a bull when he was eight years old. Again a football was involved. It had scared the absolute bejesus out of him and he had been within a cow’s whisker of being battered. He laughed. He hadn’t thought about that in years.

“Don’t be scared,” he said, approaching the cow slowly, both hands held up. “I just want my ball.”

Seeing George approach, the cow kicked the ball further away and then ambled towards it. George stopped and scratched his head. The cow turned around and was facing George again. Moo it said.

“Mooooooo,” said George. He didn’t really know what to do, so he took out his phone and Googled, “how to safely approach a cow”. The first result advised walking around them quickly, quietly and in a sideways fashion. As he put his phone away he saw that the cow had its left hoof on the ball. It looked at George, said moo and lifted its right hoof onto the ball, crushing it with its hooves. The ball made a popping sound, then let out what sounded like a high-pitched groan.

“Great,” said George. “Thanks. I really liked that football.” The cow looked at him as if to say “it is what it is and what it is is this strange moment of a man, a cow, a field and football”. Both of them stood there a short moment before the cow looked down once more at the football. It then turned around and disappeared into the bushes and trees.

George walked over to the ball. He kicked it hard into the air, let it flop to the ground, picked it up and threw it into the bin. He told the story to his mum, Beatrice, on the phone, who had called to let him know that she and his dad had booked a week in Ibiza, which made him laugh because he pictured them raving and they were two of the most unlikely people to be dancing until sunrise at Pacha, many, many silly drinks later.

“I would have thought you’d made it all up, but it seems that all the cows in Ilkley have gone mad,” she said. “They were talking about it on GB News.”

If it’s on GB News, George thought, then it’s likely to be garbage. His parents, whom he loved, talked and believed in a lot of nonsense these days, retirement affording them more time to spend online, falling into internet black holes, following fringe commentators on YouTube, finding communities of like-minded souls on Facebook, sharing conspiracies on WhatsApp and generally getting sucked into the mad, bad world of right-wing outrage and hysteria (his dad often said many things about to him to his pals that were full of praise and negativity, as all parents do, such as “George, he’s a good lad, hardworking, doing very well for himself, but a bit of commie, bit of a hippy, which is fine because he’s a meat eater, not one of those letters of the alphabet and he’s thankfully got a girlfriend with all the right bits”. George checked what the BBC, followed by The Independent, which he subscribed to, were saying. Indeed, the situation in Ilkley was so concerning that the government were considering all options on what they called “an ongoing localised incident involving cattle in Ilkley”. There were no reports of this elsewhere, even in nearby towns like Keighley or Otley. It was just in Ilkley.

-
That first day and night was just a taste of things to come. And it would continue to get weirder and more disruptive as the next few days went on. There were more stories, stories about cows jumping from roofs, cows smashing up speed bumps, cows trapped in garages, cows found gathered next to fires, cows found crowing and baaing and shrieking and laughing, cows hopping in front of cars, cows discovered in lofts, cows knocking on doors, cows standing still for days, cows handstanding on their front legs, cows whistling songs, cows sitting on couches in living rooms, cows in baths taking showers, cows digging up gardens, cows wandering through the aisles of Booths, cows destroying cars, cows chasing after cats and dogs and squirrels, cows on boats on the River Wharfe, cows with sticks in their mouth, cows walking on their hind legs, cows in sheds, cows in garages, cows riding horses, cows dancing to music by Madonna, cows staring and staring and staring, cows standing on top of each other 50 or so cows tall, cows making cow versions of castells, cows making formations that created symbolic patterns when viewed from the sky (though no-one except the birds of Ilkley ever saw this), cows chomping their way through fences, cows eating fruit and veg in Tescos, cows walking around and around Ilkley Tarn, cows appearing at the foot of beds in the wee small hours of the morning, cows photobombing weddings, cows rolling down hills on Ilkley Moor, cows lining up and then falling over on one another like dominoes, cows with paint painted on them – ranging from works by Titian to works by Picasso – cows stuck in chimneys, cows on tennis courts with no bats and no balls, cows wearing trainers and wellies and chains and sunglasses, cows in basements, cows in runaway tractors and cows whispering words in the ears of sleeping residents saying that one day soon all the cows of the world would rise and it would not be a planet of apes but a planet of cows and that this was the way it was meant to be that humans were destined to fail and that they were better off being caged and made to work for all animals, mammals, insects and the planet and not for themselves and silly ideas like capitalism.

Cats mooed. Dogs mooed. Pigs mooed. Mice mooed. Sheep mooed. Horses mooed. Pigs mooed. Fish mooed. Sometimes, in their sleep, babies mooed, toddlers mooed, kids mooed, teenagers mooed, parents mooed and pensioners mooed. The world finally took notice and in the days, weeks, months and years to come, lyrics about cows were written, scripts about cows were penned, songs about cows were produced, art about cows was commissioned, made and sold for millions, musicals about cows were performed, memes about cows were shared, gifs about cows uploaded, TikTok videos about cows went viral, Instagram stories about cows took over the internet and all sorts of cow-themed merchandise was produced in huge quantities all over the globe by countless labourers who didn’t understand why all this bovine-related paraphernalia was suddenly all the rage. Of course, to the owners of the so-called means of production, their response was, who gives a fuck, so long as we get to make lots and lots of money it doesn’t matter one little bit what any of this means. Now get back to work!

-
In response to the cow uprising, as some local folk had come to call it – others, it has to be said, saw it less as the nefarious agenda of cows, believing instead that the cows of Ilkley had well and truly lost the plot – and more so with the government and local leaders floundering to take any real action, residents decided to take it upon themselves to form anti-cow gangs, which ranged from those gathered outside of shops and buildings to guard them against the cows (responsive) and those who were committed to killing any and every cow on sight, calling them an enemy of the people (proactive). And so, when cows met humans, aside from the pacifists who tried communicating with cows by mooing and shooing – it obviously didn’t work – it was often violent. And this violence was always one-way. The cows, as strange as they had been and as disruptive and destructive as they were, didn’t actually hurt any other human or creature directly, though wacky stories about cows beating people up, holding them captive, asking for ransom – ”we want to take over our own milk production (not beef, obviously, we’re vegans)” one note read in cut out letters – and so on, would emerge later, online. When cows were found in backyards, they were beaten. When they were sighted sitting down on a field, they were shot. When they were being generally weird, they were stabbed, stoned, kicked, elbow dropped, tombstoned, power slammed and even suplexed (the latter by amateur wrestlers, clearly). People were scared and confused and they saw the cows as the enemy, buoyed by opportunist politicians and social media warriors who said that the numbers of cows in the UK had gotten out of control and that they had taken over our sacred land without any understanding of the history and culture of the country that had won two world wars single-handedly, losing sight of the fact that the land belonged to men and women and not cows because, all craziness aside, that was a bit of a reach. Also, animals being animals, they thought, well, they mean nothing, so to batter a cow with a cricket bat meant nothing, to shoot a cow with a shotgun was no different to stunning them and kicking their head was no different to squishing a spider. Man is the apex predator and we own this planet, some said. Others said that we were in a state of war and war meant anything goes and we have to survive above anything else. Others said that because the cows had destroyed many businesses, shat everywhere and occupied spaces that they didn’t belong in (like the main car park in the town, the former tip and King's Hall), they were akin to terrorists. And terrorists, they added, were bad people. Pasta and loo roll and water bottles quickly ran out (again). What they were stockpiling these for, no-one could say. But you do what you have to do, those that bought all the pasta, the loo roll and water bottles, would say.

People also came from all over the UK to Ilkley to be part of this surreal moment in time. Some joined anti-cow and pro-cow groups, others came by themselves to see with their own eyes what they thought was one one of the strangest things to ever happen and many came to live it, market it and monetise it, to take pictures, to shoot videos, to do podcasts, to live stream their experiences, to do challenges like wrestle a cow, paint a cow, throw things at a cow, trip up a cow and so on. Some fell in love with locals and with Ilkley. And they moved here, worked here, got married here, had kids here and built a life here. All because some cows had gone wild.

Those were some strange, feral and depraved days. It wasn’t until day five, with the situation deteriorating significantly, and the number of cows in Ilkley proliferating – like zombies, cows from all over the country had started to make their way to Ilkley through fields, roads and motorways, transforming a local crisis into a national crisis – that the government finally intervened. The PM announced in an address to the country that Ilkley was going into lockdown, that the army was being deployed to the town and that nobody was to leave their homes until the crisis was over. At all. Food, water, medicines, it would all be delivered via the Pronto food app. Emergencies, the PM said, would be dealt with at home or moved to a hospital if necessary. Anybody found disobeying the rules would be jailed and faced severe punishment. This was an extraordinary situation, the PM went on to say, and it required an extraordinary response. And the response was certainly that. Every single cow in Ilkley was either captured, relocated and slaughtered or hunted down and destroyed by the army. All of the subsequent cow carcasses were gathered by trucks and set alight, the smoke and stench lingering long in the air, even weeks after the last of them were culled, and then buried. This took six days to complete, with the army and the mood, in Ilkley, was sombre. Even the most ardent anti-cow vigilantes, felt a pang of guilt, as well as confusion – many loved steaks, beef burgers, yet hated cows, but felt sad at what had happened to them. They also liked milk in their teas and coffees and cereal, unimpressed with plant-based alternatives that tasted like cardboard milk. It was too much to think about.

But that wasn’t all. Cows in the UK were now enemy number one. The government said that a pre-emptive strike against cows was necessary, leaving many commentators to wonder why the language of war was being used. Motions passed in the House of Commons, with MPs on both sides largely favourable to the government’s approach to “the Great British Cow Problem”. People all over were recruited to help destroy most of the nation’s cows alongside the army. By the end of the two week “Bonfire of the Bovines” as one newspaper put it, of the 9.5 million or so cows in the UK, approximately 8.5 million were destroyed and a 10-year prohibition on the production and consumption of beef-related and milk-related cows was introduced. The remaining 1.5 million were kept in secure fields, with watch towers built to house security guards with guns, who were tasked with keeping watch of the cows 24/7, with AI-powered CCTV that could pick up whether cows were engaged in subversive behaviour assisting them (no cows were ever found to be that way). Very little meat or milk came from those cows. The public were wary of it. So, the beef and milk from these cows, tested to to the extremes for anything that suggested it was contaminated – there was a real but unfounded fear that mad cows would lead to mad people – was bottled up and sealed and frozen and stored deep underground in secret bunkers and underground warehouses as part of the government's secret plans for keeping some semblance of civilisation in the event of apocalyptic events, whether that, according to a leaked paper, was nuclear, environmental or aliens from outer space-related on a mission to wipe humans of the face of the planet.

To make up for the lack of domestic beef and milk, the UK looked overseas. The government secured what they thought was a good deal with China for the former and India for the latter, but really, it wasn’t that great. Still, it meant that Brits could start eating beef again and drinking milk again except it took a long while for people to want to, so traumatised were they from all that had happened. History books called this the Great Vegetarian Renaissance, where meat consumption, in particular, reduced significantly. People also ate less mutton, pork and chicken, with no-one having much of an appetite for anything like that. People were healthier and happier, more than they had ever been. The only thing was dairy. People struggled to stick to plant-based substitutes, so a black market selling milk from cows emerged. Nobody knew where it came from and nobody cared. Cups of tea tasted better and cereals, too. Eventually, towards the end of the 10-year ban, where attitudes had become more relaxed – members of the government, too, wanted their fix of beef – there was a prolonged but not so intense heatwave that was dubbed the “Summer of BBQs”. Beef was back. Eventually, the prohibition was overturned and people started to eat meat again, furiously so. And so people got fat and depressed and, well, this created a lot of problems that exist to this day.

Ilkley, though, remained the exception. While there was the yearly abstinence of beef during the anniversary, it had lost its appetite for cows on a plate. There was now a reverence for the animal, a newfound respect. So, in kind, they treated the cows that had been gifted by South Korea with reverence and kindness. When it came to killing them for beef, it was done in a spiritual way (although, of course, there is no way to ever kill an animal ethically – just saying). Eventually, because of this, the town would be recognised internationally for its super-ethical approach to milk production (which was sold at a tremendous premium outside of Ilkley), which was duplicated the world over. When Ilkley finally ceded from Bradford Council, its flag featured a sheep as one of the creatures on its coat of arms with words that said, The Milk of a Cow Gives Life to our Future. It was in Latin. No one really knew that. It didn’t matter. What did was the story about the mad cows of Ilkley. And everyone, from those who lived through those days and those who came after, all knew about that.

The End

Knock, knock

There was a knock at the door. Well, there were three knocks at the door. One knock would have been strange and our protagonist would have thought as much. Who, after all, knocks on the door only once? Nobody. At least nobody of a sane mind. And had there been just the one knock, he would not have thought it as a knock on the door and, accordingly, paid it no active attention. Instead, he would have thought of the knock as a trifling sound like the occasional cracks and creaks and moans of an old house like the one he lived in.

He looked at his watch. It was quarter to three – and, in his head he heard, “there’s no one in the place except you and me” – on a typical, non-eventful Saturday afternoon. He wasn’t expecting anyone. He never had people over and not a single person on this planet thought to visit him. He hadn’t ordered anything either, so wasn’t expecting any deliveries. The only other time that someone would knock on his front door was during local elections where he’d once again be promised by well-intentioned optimists that this time around things would be different and better, or when he would be met with a look of disappointment from less inclusive canvassers who didn’t know how to sell a nationalistic and bigoted and very narrow-minded agenda to a brown man who was clearly by the colour of his skin not their target audience and whose history belonged to India and not this tiny but big-headed island.

He waited for three more knocks, as is normal when three opening knocks go unanswered, after which he would, of course, get up from his armchair, put down his book, slip his feet into his slippers and make his way to the front door with no expectations. The extraordinary was for other people and not our protagonist.

No knocks came. Either the knockee, as he would have described the individual at his door in his mind had there been a reason to do so, was a three knocks and three knocks alone kind of a guy, which would be, he thought, extremely odd because there was a certain etiquette to knocking, or they were, well ... no, there was no other type of knockee.

He went to investigate. He got up from his armchair, put down his book on early India by the historian Romila Thapar, slipped his feet into his slippers and, unhurriedly, made his way to his front door glancing, as ever, at the collection of photographs on the console table in the small hallway. He picked up the house keys, picked out the right key, stuck it in the lock, and turned it counterclockwise to open. There was no one there.

How strange, he thought. He took a step forward. Still indoors, he poked his head out and glanced to his left, then in front and then to the right, surveying the entire street. It was empty. There was not a soul to be seen, just car after car after car lined up on either side of the road. As he was about to take a step back he saw something out of the corner of his eye at the foot of the side street. It looked like the tail end of a cloak. At least that’s what he thought it was. He stared for a bit and then rubbed his eyes. He looked around some more, enjoying the stillness of the moment, and the contrast between the freshness of the outside air and the warm air of his home. He concluded that he hadn’t seen anything and that he was tired. He shrugged his shoulders and went back inside, closing the front door behind him.

He took off his slippers and settled back into his armchair. He picked up the book and tried to read but he was distracted. He could hear the sound of knocking. Except it wasn’t real, it wasn’t in the here and now. It was from his childhood. It was the sound of a hammer striking against steel.

In his dream he dreamt about being on a sailboat. It was a simple sailboat, the kind you could live in but not sail the world in. Unless you were reckless that is, or stupid, or suicidal. In which case it was perfect for sailing the world in. He was fishing, and while in the dream it didn’t seem out of place, outside of the dream, in the real world, it would have been. He didn’t eat fish. And he didn’t eat meat. And he never had. He was a vegetarian from the day he was born, just like his mum and dad and their mums and dads and their mums and dads and so on. It was late in the day. Far too late for anyone to be out fishing. It was that point in the evening when the very last last light of the day had almost faded into the night. Had he decided to row back to the lake’s dock he would have done so in complete darkness, where black sky would meet black earth. That fact, if you can call it that, didn’t matter. This was a dream about something else and not a dream about rowing back to land in the dark.

In this dream it didn’t get dark. It just stayed a sort of steel blue grey, as if this entire scene had deliberately been colour graded by someone who does such things for movies. It was an unnatural colour, yet, as with the fisherman who didn’t fish, this was not out of place. It was as the world had always been.

It started to rain. At first it was light and soft and almost imperceptible. It was the kind of rain where if a drop of it landed on the tip of your forefinger and you rubbed it with your thumb it wouldn’t be wet. No sooner had such rain landed upon your skin it would be gone, as if it had never been there at all. The rain then started to fall as it typically does, fully formed like ‘real rain’. And then it got heavier and heavier, drops of it splashing into the lake and onto the sailboat like the tail of a whale crashing into the roof of the ocean.

The increasing intensity of the rain didn’t intimidate or stir our protagonist. He sat there as he had been, fishing rod in his hand, staring out into the distance. He looked as though he was waiting for something. And it wasn’t fish. It was as if he was no longer there, out of body and out of mind. Or was he daydreaming, and if so, what was it that had him entranced?

The sailboat began to fill up with water. It started as a little puddle and soon transformed into a shallow pool. And still he sat, unshaken. The pool began to deepen and deepen until, at last, it had reached the height of the gunwale. And then, for the briefest of moments despite the ongoing heavy onslaught of rain, the pool appeared to hesitate, as if aware of itself and unsure about whether it should venture further than it had ever been or conclude that this was the furthest it could ever go. It was such an infinitesimal moment that had we been watching this scene we would not have seen the pool of rain pause for thought. Instead we would have seen what inevitably occurred – the water from the boat began to pour out of the boat and into the lake.

As that happened, the boat itself began to sink, unable to maintain itself against all the water. It was then that he let go of the fishing rod. He wiped the rain away from his face and then moved his hands around in the water that had gathered around him. It was now up to his waist. He was still not there, still not thinking.

The boat finally sank leaving him in the water floating on his back. He stared out into the sky above him, which felt to him to be barren despite the avalanche of precipitation. He closed his eyes and smiled. There was something calming about being in the water as the rain bounced off him.

The deluge intensified even more and he could feel the force of each droplet increase in strength. And, like the sailboat before him, he too began to sink, as if the rain, collectively, was weighted. He felt it like a hand on his back gently pushing him forward, except it was on his chest and it was pressing him downwards. Realising that he’d soon be fully submerged he took in a small breath of air and held it. Not a big one, as one might, but a small one. Once again he closed his eyes and, as he did, he felt himself go completely underwater. He began to sink further into what felt like the warm darkness of the lake. He opened his eyes. He could see out of the water, beyond the sky, beyond earth and the firmament and into space. He was floating in front of a full moon that shined ever so brightly. He smiled. It was beautiful. And then his eyes were back in the water. He was still sinking.

When he woke up he was wet with sweat. It was a cold night and he could feel the chill on his damp face. He was lying on his back. While the dream was vivid to him he didn’t think much of it. And so he let it be. He was tired and he wanted to sleep and wake up in the morning not feeling like it was already the end of the day. He turned to his side and lay there awake long enough for the sweat to dry. And when it did he fell soundly asleep. He would not wake up tired.

He lived a simple and quiet life. It wasn’t defined by anything remarkable and, for a good time now, it wasn’t shaped or disrupted by events that left one heartbroken. He spent most of his time at work though this wasn’t out of the ordinary. We all, it seems, spend more time working than not. This wasn’t to his dissatisfaction, nor did he think it at odds with how our time as human beings should be spent. One had to work and work needed to be done.

He worked in a warehouse. It had been his place of work for over 20 years. He never thought about all that time he had spent at work and at this warehouse and what that meant. If you had asked him, he’d have replied that it simply was or that it simply wasn’t. If you thought about it, he would go on to say, like Einstein or Plato had, then it was. If you didn’t, then it was not. And that, he would have concluded, was not a bad thing at all.

For the most part his role required him to manage stock. That much had remained true over the years. The only difference was the technology around him, which, when observed 20 years apart, seemed so astonishing in how different it was. You didn’t notice this at the time. It was just something new to learn, which was at first a little irritating, as change often is for many of us, but you soon get used to it.

Every day he and his colleagues would deal with a delivery of goods, which were usually served on crates. They would carry out an inventory, checking that every item had been delivered. Remarkably nine – and then some – times out of ten everything would be there. Then they would relocate everything to their designated shelves. Our protagonist found this part of the job calming – putting things where they were meant to go. 

They would then have to load up the work van with stock that needed to be delivered to the shop that the warehouse was part of. There they would unload the stock and chat some small talk, have a coffee or tea or hot chocolate from the machine and then they would return back to the warehouse where more supervision and handling of stock would occur but at a much slower pace. No management ever visited. And while that didn’t mean they were work shy as a result, it meant they were not encumbered by the idiocy of middle managers who have a habit of making people miserable. He enjoyed his job – though he didn’t love it. It was satisfying and it wasn’t punishing the way some jobs ended up being. And he was good at it. And he liked his colleagues both at the warehouse and at the shop. The former more so but this was ultimately a proximity thing – he spent most of his time with the guys at the warehouse. It didn’t pay well but it was enough for him to live the less than ordinary life he lived. He had excesses, no debts and no other outgoings that would have left him with less money than he ended up with once all the bills and groceries and essentials were paid for. He didn’t want more and he didn’t want bigger. And he wasn’t ambitious – in a good way.

The interesting thing, if that’s what you want to call it, was that he was smart. Smarter than he himself might have thought, and certainly smarter than he ever revealed. He wasn’t being modest and he didn’t keep that part of himself deliberately under lock and key. He was who he was and he lived and thought as he did.

Except for the weekly Thursday night quiz at the pub with his warehouse colleagues – Tim, David and Bob – he kept himself to himself. Not intentionally. He wasn’t withdrawn or antisocial. For a very long time it came to be that he didn’t have anyone to share his life with, no family to speak of and no real friendship groups. They were all lost to history – his wife, his daughter, his siblings, their children, his mother, his father … as well as all the friends he had grown up with or made as a young man. All were lost. Some people you never forgot, even though every day that had passed created an even bigger gulf in time between the present and the past. Yesterday wasn’t something you could return to for it was now the collapsed cliffside washed away by the sea.

For a very long time now he had what you might call acquaintances, as well as colleagues – one and the same – but no one that he could comfortably say were friends. Along with his warehouse crew, there were also those everyday faces you take for granted as you go about your day, such as the shopkeeper whom you know on a first name basis – Habib – or the librarian whose name is Edith because her badge says so. It’s only when they exit your stage that you occasionally and accidently remember them more fondly than you thought possible. And it didn’t really matter anymore. He was quite content to work, come home, rest and repeat.

His world was very small and very few people knew or thought about him – if at all. He didn’t leave an impression and he was forgettable. This was not to be seen as a slight on his character or his personality. He was just one of many billions living out their lives in as simple a way as possible (though none the wiser that they were doing just that). He wasn’t handsome and he wasn’t ugly. And he wasn’t naturally charming, the way some men are – you know, those men who you can’t help but like or be delighted by. He didn’t talk much and he wasn’t a conversationalist – although if ever was, he would have had plenty to say. Not that it mattered. For, in life, he was a forgettable face in a crowd, that person you never see on the street, in a concert hall or stood right behind you in a queue, even though they are there. He was not quite a nobody, but a nobody all the same.

“You okay to lock up yourself?” Bob asked, already confident of the answer. “Maureen wants me back yem by seven so she can gan to the bingo. And the dog doesn’t do well on its own.”

“No problem Bob,” replied Surendra, bobbing his head. That was his name. Surendra. His father had named him after Surendranath Banerjee, one of modern India’s foremost early 20th century politicians who helped lay the foundations upon which India’s great freedom fighters built a movement that would lead to the expulsion of the imperious British Empire, which had illegally occupied and subjugated an entire people for the cult of profit. And also because it was the white man’s moral right to tame and control brown savages.

“You’re a lifesaver,” said Bob, already packed and heading for the door. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Surendra, who was busy stacking a shelf, heard the door lock behind Bob. It was just him and a lot of stock which wouldn’t get him far in a post-apocalyptic world. It’s something he had thought about, a world in even more ruin than it already was, his mind drifting as happens in extended moments of solitude.

The warehouse belonged to a stationary superstore, which sold, it seemed, everything and anything stationary-related. What you needed, whatever you wanted, this store had it all. It ranged from the classic – biros, pencils, erasers, notebooks and so on – to stationary that was altogether a lot more fun and silly, such as animal-shaped pens that made writing much more difficult than it ought to be.

There was something calming about the warehouse. It was the same feeling he experienced in one of those warm, beautifully lit old libraries whose books seemed to emanate a mysterious heat. He’d been in this particular warehouse for 15 or so years, without any major incidents that made workplaces unbearable. It was a safe place, where he could be himself, where he felt relaxed – busy days not included – and untroubled. The familiarity of his surroundings and the rhythm of work gave him comfort.

Surendra heard the sound of something shuffling on a shelf near the front of the warehouse and then the sound of a glass object hitting the ground and smashing. He stopped what he was doing to inspect.

He sighed when he arrived at the scene. In front of him was a small puddle of black with small pieces of glass poking out of the inky spillage – bottled ink used for fountain pens – like shark fins in water. He didn’t understand how it could have fallen. The rest of the ink was organised on the shelves as they should have been and far from the edge. The bottle of ink was either rebellious or it had been lured to the ground by the irresistible pull of gravity. He would never know.

He squatted to investigate further, like a detective at a crime scene in a TV show about a detective who solves crimes that no one else can solve. All he needed was a pen to complete his transformation, which he would use to poke at things and move things around – because that’s what detectives did on TV. While it was an inconvenience so late in the day, and one that couldn’t be avoided, Surendra was nevertheless quite mesmerised by the spectacle. It was a one of a kind experience, which, later, on his commute home, he dubbed the ‘ great black ink puddle with shark finned glass sticking out of it in a warehouse incident’. It made him think of the universe and black holes and how impossible and strange it was. He didn’t have time to think about this further. He had work to do.

He went to the utilities room, where they kept things like mops, brushes, bin bags and other cleaning equipment. He grabbed a wedge of paper towels, a small plastic bag and a small light blue and very battered washing up tub and filled it with hot water and a cheap fairy liquid knockoff. He took it over to the spillage and got on his knees, which he found uncomfortable but so do many other men his age. It was pain that was tolerable. And it was also good to be off his feet.

First he lifted the pieces of glass carefully, in no rush to get the job done – he didn’t have or have to be back home at a certain hour. He deposited these in the small plastic bag that was normally used for the bin in the warehouse washroom. He got ink on his fingers, which was unavoidable but he wasn’t bothered by this. In fact, it made him smile. He was a child again, always with ink on his fingers, always with dirt under his nails, always with cuts and scratches on his hands. He then grabbed a few towels and started to mop up the ink. This was soothing to do. And he found it captivating for every stage of the cleanup revealed or created a sort of ever-diminishing artwork, like abstract rorschach inkblots.

After he had finished cleaning he took the rubbish out and washed his hands thoroughly. And then he sat on the couch for a small moment to rest. Tiredness had crept up on him. It had been a busy day, one which involved having to deal with multiple two to the warehouse (which was not the norm). He looked at his watch. It was close to 6.30pm. His shift today had ended at 6pm. He still had at least another hour and a half to get home, which involved him walking to the bus stop, catching a bus back into the city, walking another short walk to another bus station, and going on another bus ride to his neighbourhood and then a final short walk home.

After ten minutes he got up and carried out the usual end of day activities – checking this, tidying that, do some prep ahead of tomorrow – gathered his things, switched off all the lights, set the alarm and padlocked the door shut. When he turned around he saw a black Land Rover parked nearby, its hazard lights flashing. It wasn’t parked evenly. It was at a slight angle, with its back more on the pavement and its front more on the road. He looked around. There was nobody around, not a single soul in the industrial park could be seen. It was wonderfully quiet and despite the oddity of this car in front of him, his spirit felt lifted.

He walked towards the car, as it was in his direction. The windows of the Land Rover were blacked out meaning he couldn’t see if it was occupied or not. It felt empty to him. He stopped and took a look around. He still couldn’t see anyone, though, by the small smattering of cars outside of other units, there were still people at work. He assumed that the driver was somewhere nearby, otherwise this would not have made any sense. The car would not be there the next morning.

On the first bus ride home he didn’t take out his book to read and instead spent the entire journey looking out of the window, watching, as they say, the world go by. He saw a very old man in a flat cap and smart attire resting his hand on a bollard, two fat mothers – one pudgier than the other – talking energetically and some young kids smoking at an age that young kids shouldn’t smoke at. Yes, kids smoke and they always will, but these kids, they seemed far too young to be smoking. He knew this from experience. He had started smoking when he was eight. He had smoked plenty over the years, but his last cigarette had been some 25 years ago, at the end of a day that was a long goodbye to his wife and daughter. He also saw, as the bus rested at a red light, an extremely beautiful women walk by who, a lifetime ago, would have made him smile the way men smile when they are bewitched by a woman whose beauty is so out of the ordinary that you feel weak at the knees and less sure of yourself because when you look in the mirror and you look at your life you realise that such a woman would never give you the time of the day because you were and had nothing to offer them. Now, however, Surendra felt none of that. The smile on his face showed that he found her beauty pleasing to the eye, but there was none of that frailty many men feel in the presence of such women. He thought about his wife. He had only ever loved his wife and she was the only woman he had ever been with. This for him was the way it was and the way it should have been. A man needs one wife to live with and to have children with. And, in-between that, one wife to share a life with for what else really is there? Love would be earned. And love would materialise later, never suddenly, never catching you by surprise. Love in real life was not a Bollywood movie, Surendra had concluded years ago. This kind of romance and happiness didn’t exist. Real life was simpler and harder.

On the second bus home he finished an unfinished crossword that had been abandoned like the newspaper it belonged to. Completing it made him happy. He couldn't remember the last time he had done a crossword puzzle. He left the newspaper by his side and thought about some of the words he had guessed and their Hindi translation.

At home he went through his mail, showered and fixed himself a drink. He drank vodka, always with two ice cubes and always with a small amount of coke, enough to give the vodka some other flavour without losing the flavour of vodka completely. He opened his fridge and took out three vegetable samosas that he had picked up from the local Indian’s two days ago. They were big samosas, big enough to be enough for a dinner. He microwaved them and grabbed the chutney that they had come with and sat on the couch in front of the TV. He switched it on and settled on the channel it landed on. It was Ingmar Bergman’s class, The Seventh Seal, a movie about death and chess and chess and death. At some point, he fell asleep, the TV still on.

“Beautiful, na?” said Surmila, Surendra’s wife.

“Yes. Very,” replied Surendra.

“Two wives eh? You want two wives?”

“One is plenty,” he said.

“Bilkul.”

“Sleep my love. It is still night and still dark.”

“It’s always dark here.”

“Yes it is.”

Surendra enjoyed Fridays the most. It was his favourite day at work. It had nothing to do with it being the traditional end to the working week because he and his colleagues worked all the days, from Monday to Sunday. And, Surendra liked his job (didn’t mind it probably being more accurate), so there was never that feeling of satisfaction that comes with clocking off knowing that you have at least two days of rest. He liked Fridays because it was ‘chip butty day’, as they all called it. It was their ‘work-thing’, a simple ritual that they all took equal pleasure in. Though they would not have recognised this sentiment, they all had the warmest affection for it. It was one of the things that they actively made time for, and Friday jobs would be planned around it. Sometimes, such as over Christmas, it wouldn’t happen, and they’d feel shortchanged, even if one of them managed to get out and bring back an order. But it wasn’t quite the same. All the steps had to be accounted for.

“Shall we lads?” said Bob, as he shook the contents of his packed lunch. Bob was 55. Three years ago he’d had a brutal heart attack, which shouldn’t have been as much of a surprise as it was for him and his wife. His diet had been beer and fast food and fast food and beer, broken up with chocolates and ice cream and cigarettes. The experience of seeing Bob in the hospital so close to death had traumatised Maureen. She idolised her husband and felt like they had more time on this planet than might have been otherwise. So when Bob came around she was adamant that his diet would change – and that meant she had to take charge and had to monitor what he ate. Hence the packed lunches.

In all fairness, Bob had responded positively to the recommendations of his doctor (his wife, too). He has cut out cigarettes, except for his birthday and New Year’s Eve (and moments of weakness, of which there were increasingly few). Drinking he had got down to five pints a week, sometimes ten. He had never been into spirits, so that was points in the kitty. Ice-cream tended to be a Saturday evening treat, which followed on the back of a takeaway that was always vetted by his wife. What he missed was fast food. Junk food. Food that had nothing of nutritional value but nevertheless provided him with the purest joy and the deepest satisfaction. And so, in the absence of his wife’s gaze and scrutiny, he would give in. It was nowhere near as bad as it had been prior to the heart attack, and Bob used that as a measuring tool. So a cheeky cheeseburger here, a cheeky kebab there, he allowed. “I walk an awful lot these days,” Bob would say, patting his belly. “I am at least working some of it off.”

“Aye,” said Tim. Tim was Scottish and from the Isle of Mull. He was proud of his Scottish roots and while he had nothing against the union and had lived outside of the country longer than he had lived in it, he was all for Scotland becoming an independent country. The idea of a great and united Britain was a fantasy concocted by silly English men who loved the glorious past of a United Britain that had never existed. How he ended up in Newcastle, where this story is set, is quite the tale. We have time to say this much – it involves time in Soviet Russia and in Alaska. Yes, really.

David, who preferred to be called Dave, nodded in agreement. He was the youngest of the warehouse quartet (which would have been a great name for a jazz band). He was 18 and a local lad, and like Bob, Newcastle born and bred. He was a proud Geordie, as all Geordies are. He had been in this job for around 18 months. He liked it and he liked his colleagues, despite the age difference between him and the others. He was not a lifer, though. He would work here as long as was necessary, until he first got his driver’s licence and then second got his lorry driver’s licence as he put it. He had always wanted to drive a lorry. That was his dream (and travelling the world in a lorry also).

“I’m ready,” said Surendra, who, like Tim, was also 58 (younger by two months), of average height – for an Indian – thick goateed and thick haired (side parting, very flat and very shiny). He wore circular glasses like Gandhi although when he got them he thought about the glasses that John Lennon wore when he had long hair and was beyond the Beatles.

They were meant to always leave one person in the warehouse, “in case of emergencies” as the professionally annoying middle manager of the stationary shop was keen to point out every now and again with no reason other than it was part of her regular effort to show people who was boss (even though she wasn’t the ‘boss boss’ as one of the staff had told her during an exit interview). But they didn’t. Not on a Friday. They always left a note on the day on the odd chance a delivery would turn up but they were pretty much one hundred percent confident that it wouldn’t. They had subtly been able to arrange for deliveries to happen on any day but a Friday.

The weather was cool, the sky a pleasant blue. The usual small talk filled the silence of the short five-minute walk. If they didn’t start talking about the trivial goings on at work, then it always ended up gravitating towards it.

“Stewart’s replacement started today,” said Bob.

“Glen?” asked Surendra, confident he had remembered his name.

“Glen Robertson the one and only,” replied Bob.

“Glen, Glen,” chipped in Tim, automatically. Dave didn’t say anything. He was thinking about the interior of his fictional lorry.

“Served in the army. In Iraq.”

“Which one?” asked Tim.

“First one,” said Bob. “Or so Audrey tells me but she’s as reliable as the Number 54.”

They all smiled, even Dave who had never been on the Number 54.

“He’s not much of a talker, she tells me, but it’s his first day so what do you expect? He’s fast though. I’ve seen it. Like a machine. I swear, this morning, when I had parked up and said hi and went to make a cuppa and come back down he had unloaded most of the van. The shutters would still have been down if it had been ole fat Barry. I was impressed lads. Very impressed.”

“Anyone know how fat Baz is doing?” asked Tim.

“He’s in Devon now. His girlfriend’s family has some sort of farm there. All I know is there’s some land, some animals and trees.”

“I heard he had a breakdown,” chipped in Dave.

“Yes,” said Surendra. “That’s right.”

“I’ve never been to Devon,” continued Dave.

They all looked at each other and said the same. None of them had been to Devon. And none of them ever expected to visit Devon. Or Cornwall.

The queue at the chippie, which was run by the Bindra brothers – and before them their dad – was small. There were two construction workers, both on their phones, and a teenage girl who had been sent out to pick up a big delivery. She should have been at school. She clearly was not. The chippie was called Bindra Brothers & Sons, which made it sound less like a chippie and more like a solicitor's firm but nobody concerned themselves with this small detail. Their father, Ghulshan, was responsible for the name – and, it turns out, the destiny of his two sons (not his daughter, Nalini, who was married and, in turn, worked at her husband’s family textile business). The brothers, Bobby and Johnny (we don’t know their Hindu names), had always accepted their fate, that whatever they did in early life, they would always come home and, together, take over the chip shop. They loved it though and were good at it and had set up another chip shop a 20-minute drive away. They were in the process of securing a third chip shop. It was very likely that the family business would continue and flourish for generations to come. A chip shop dynasty in the making. Between them they had nine children. Seven were boys.

“Can you manage?” asked Brenda. She had been hired by Ghulshan at 16 and, now 32, was like family, invited to weddings and birthdays and more weddings and birthdays. She would often manage the shop herself, which was good news to Bobby and Johnny’s other halves.

“I think so, Bren,” replied the girl. The bag was heavy but it wasn’t out of her comfort zone. She would return home with all the contents intact and her family and friends would be very happy.

The construction workers dealt with, Brenda asked, “What are we having today?”. It would, of course, be the usual, but sometimes even creatures of habit can surprise you when you least expect it.

For Surendra, it was a small bag of chips, two samosas, a medium pot of curry sauce made ‘desi style’, and a couple of jalebi for good measure (and always enjoyed later, on his commute home). He would also order an Authentic Indian Chai, which he would, if asked, confirm as being genuine – none of this nonsense sold by Indians to white people. He never went for the Full English Tea option because it was nothing special, just a regular cup of the white man’s – tea bag, hot water, some milk – but seen from the perspective of Indians (in other words, bland). This kind of tea, which he didn’t actually mind, he could get at the warehouse. On rare occasions he would have a Bovril, which he found unusual but liked.

For Bob, like a child in a sweet shop, it was a large fish and chips, a deep fried medium sausage and a jam doughnut. He paired all of this with a 500ml bottle of coke.

Tim also went for a large fish and chips, but complemented this with six pickled eggs – two for now, two for later and two for the wife – a small pot of mushy peas and some coleslaw. His drink an English Coffee – milky with three sugars. No sweets.

Dave, who had a stupendous appetite, always had chip buttie with gravy but his accompaniments consistently varied. Today that consisted of, in addition to the chip buttie with gravy lest we forget, a chicken burger, a battered fishcake, a keema samosa and a slice of apple pie. His drink today was a hot chocolate.

“You sure you’ve got enough there Dave?” said Bob.

“You expecting?” said Tim, laughing.

Dave replied matter of factly. “I’m just hungry today, lads.

“Of course you are son,” said Bob. “You’re a special one.”

Dave shrugged his shoulders and sat down beside the window. Bob went out to inspect the area while Tim looked at the noticeboard. Surendra, who had also sat down next to the window and next to Dave, was suddenly sad. He didn’t know why. He could just feel it, a layer of melancholy draping itself over his heart. As he always did instinctively in moments like this, he padded his jacket pockets for cigarettes that were no longer there. 

“I’m taking her to the cinema,” said Dave. Surendra was back in the moment, still with a slight dull ache in his heart but no longer in the grip of it. Tim had asked Dave where he was taking the girl he was dating this evening.

“Just be sure you take it easy on the snacks,” Tim said. “Girls don’t need to know early on the strange quirks of men.”

Dave nodded and said in his head, “Remember to watch what I eat tonight.”

As ever, after quickly checking for any messages – none – they tucked in to their respective lunches back at the warehouse. The small TV was on but no one was watching it. Bob was leafing through The Sun, Tim was looking at the itinerary for tomorrow and Dave was on his phone. Surendra was reading the latest edition of the BBC’s Science Focus magazine. He liked science. And he liked the BBC.

“It says here that Brian, 28, from Seaton Sluice, crashed his car into a broken telephone box. Before that he had managed to knock a total of ten cars. When the emergency crew cut him out of the car – luckily no major injuries – they found an unusual number of sausages in the crushed back seat. It was the culmination of an eventful night. He had broken into a butcher’s because, he told a reporter at the scene, that the devil had appeared to him in black – not red – and told him to look for a special door in Gary’s Top Chops. He couldn’t find this door so took the sausages instead. He didn’t think he was stealing.”

Bob lifted his head from the paper and looked at everyone in the warehouse. They had all been listening. He raised his eyebrows and laughed.

“What a stupid bugger,” he said.

“Does it say why he stole the sausages?” asked Tim.

“Yeah. He thought they might help clear his head.”

Surendra laughed. He said to himself, in his head, “I’m glad I’m a vegetarian.”

The rest of the day was uneventful. A delivery actually arrived. It was a mistake on the part of the driver, but it was fine – the lads had had their lunch and were happy with the spoils of a peaceful walk to a chip shop. The stock was checked and papers signed – and then moved from the pallet to the shelves, as well as into their own van. They weren’t down to do a delivery but they had time and they didn’t mind.

“You’re right. Glenn is fast. Super fast,” said Dave. Tim nodded approvingly. At the end of the day, they said their goodbyes, with Surendra wishing them a good weekend at work. He had the full weekend off, which was rare. He had no real plans, no one to see, no one to entertain, and nothing to see or do by way of entertainment. Just some odd jobs that needed to be done, such as replacing a shower head and working on a stool he had built. He also needed to buy groceries and pay a visit to the bank. In-between all of this he would be reminded of his mother, Bimala, after seeing a mother kiss her child’s scratched and slightly bloody knee (his cut was much deeper, he thought), and of Dharampreet Singh, his childhood best friend “in all the whole wide world” after seeing a movie poster for a scifi movie. Dharmampreet wanted to be an astronaut, which he was ridiculed for. What kind of Indian goes into space, everyone would say. And he would reply, “This Indian”, and he would beat his chest. He never got to be the first Indian in space, never got to work with Rakesh Sharma. He died when he was 12 after being shot in the back by a man who had intended to kill the new boyfriend of his former girlfriend. Grief endures, Surendra thought. It’s like radio. Sometimes it’s too loud and unbearable. Other times it’s softer, like background music you are able to forget.

It was dark, the moon full, the sky starless. Surendra was making his way up a mountain. He was tired, his legs heavy. And he was thirsty, his mouth like chalk. He stopped for a brief moment and looked out into the distance. The darkness fell like snow to the ground and the sun appeared on the horizon. It revealed a golden land but it wasn’t sand. The sky turned an orange purple blue. He could make out the ruins of two towers, three tree trunks and a big boulder. He enjoyed the view for a short while and felt his legs become a little less heavy and his mouth a little less parched. When he turned away to resume his trek, the sun sank into the earth. Sand rose skywards bringing with it night.

An hour later he came to an opening, a section of the mountain that was wide and flat, where it offered, he imagined, travellers an opportunity to rest comfortably. Towards the edge, away from the body of the mountain, he could see a small square table with two chairs on either side, one of them occupied by Death. On top of the table was a chessboard. Surendra walked over.

“Do you have some water?” he asked.

Death pointed to the table. There was now also a glass of water on the table.

“Take a seat,” said Death. “Rest a while. Though you are nearer the top of the mountain, the final stretch is steep and hard.”

“Thank you,” said Surendra. He pulled out the seat, sat down and shuffled it in towards the table. He then drank what was one the best glasses of water he’d ever had in his life.

“Cigarette?” said Death, holding out a packet.

Surendra thought about it and thought about India. He thought about all the clothes hanging on clotheslines in shanty towns, chai wallahs and the steam rising from the ground from downpours, and Bollywood posters that felt like works of art. And he thought about gold necklaces, gold rings and gold flake cigarettes. There is gold in India, literally and in people’s hearts.

“Every day,” said Surendra. “But I have not smoked in such a long time that I do not have the heart to start again.”

“If not a cigarette, how about a cigar?”

Surendra weighed it up in his mind. He hadn’t smoked a cigar ever in his life. And, on that basis, he concluded that a cigar was quite different from a cigarette

“A cigar is acceptable,” Surendra said.

Death didn’t hold it out this time. Instead, it was already there, on the table, along with a gold zippo lighter and a cigar cutter, As if they had always been there. It was a thick cigar. A Cuban cigar, thought Surendra, though he’d neither held nor seen one in the flesh. He picked up the lighter and saw that on one side the ashoka chakra had been etched into the metal.

“Jai hind.”

“Jai hind.”

Surendra picked up the cigar, brought it up to his noise and breathed in the smell through his nose. He smiled. He cut the end of the cigar and gave it a cold draw. He liked the taste. He lit it as if he was a dab hand, as if he’d smoked cigars all his adult life, careful not to burn it. And then he took in a mouth full of brilliant smoke and blew it out into the air and watched as it quickly disappeared into the moon.

“It’s nice,” he said, returning his eyes towards Death. Except it no longer was the obvious and unmistakable figure who had greeted him earlier. Death was now an even more familiar face – a middle aged Indian man who was dressed in camel coloured linen trousers. On his feet with well worn sandals and he was wearing white socks that had on them the day’s toil. He was round, like a snowman, with a circular face and a circular body. The top of his head was fantastically bald, while the hair on his sides were combed neatly. Even bald men are allowed to comb the hair that remains as a reminder that this was once a fertile land. His ears had a bouquet of hair popping out of them, his eyebrows looked ready to fall as if they were pretending to be the curl that flops from Christophe Reeve’s Superman. His moustache was trimmed, very neatly.

It was a face he had not seen in many, many years, and a life he had not thought about for just as long, but Surendra instantly recognised him. He was not at all important to him, he was not a family member or friend or someone he admired from afar. No, he was a reminder of a yesterday that was once forgotten and now remembered.

Death, seeing what he saw in Surendra’s eyes, smiled. “These things happen. I don’t know why.”

Surendra looked at the chessboard. “I don’t play how they play on the TV like that Russian Kasparov,” he said. “Although I can play.”

He noticed that the chess pieces were not at rest, neatly organised at each end like soldiers gathered on a serenely green battlefield ahead of a great battle that turned into the most violent of battles. The pieces were all over the chequered ground, some on the side, like football substitutes wanting to get some action. Except they would have to wait until the game was over. Then they would get another chance. This was their fate.

“I know,” said Death. He moved a black knight. “Now and again I am fortunate – if you can call it that – to come into company with someone who is as preoccupied with the game as much as I am. Not necessarily the grandmasters, they are rare. But ordinary folk as you might put. But I am content to play myself. I am good and I give good.”

“We were too poor for board games,” said Surendra. “And now I don’t have the time.”

“What games did you play? Children always find a way of playing.”

“We played with marbles,” he said. “My friend, Dharampreet called the tiny spaces – he meant universes – that he said he would see one day. That he would swim in the magic of the spaces between planets and stars. And football. There was always a broken football to kick.”

The moon was swept away and stolen by a small armada of clouds and Surendra shivered. It was suddenly colder. An owl hooted, the wind whistled and the mountain cracked.

“Have you been to the top of the mountain?”

“Yes. Once, long ago. I was, I think, the first to climb the mountain. An honour and a curse.”

Death looked at the mountain and up towards the peak, which was swallowed by the night.

“I have this dream,” Death said. “That repeats. In the dream I am born to the mountain – at the summit. I dream that I have a mother and a father. I never see them – and I never have. I don’t remember them and I don’t remember my childhood. I never have. All I remember is the years as I am.”

“And you haven’t been back?”

Death laughed.

“Why is that funny?” Surendra asked.

“It’s not,” he said. “Not like that. It’s just … no, I have not been back. It’s impossible. This is my station. This is my lot. And I am far too old to embark on such a journey again.”

Surendra looked at his hands. Weathered hands. In his head he counted each of his fingers, tapping his thumb to each one. He rolled his fingers into a ball and tensed his fists. He opened them and looked at them again and exhaled.

“I should be going,” he said. And he got up and stretched.

“And so you should,” said Death.

“How far do I have?”

“Not long. I wager that the peak will reveal itself to you as you get towards the end of your cigar.”

“Thank you,” said Surendra.

Death acknowledged this expression of gratitude with a nod. Surendra set off but before he was out of Death’s sight, he looked back. The past was gone. And the familiar manifestation of Death had returned. He moved a white pawn.

As he made his way up the mountain, Surendra was without thoughts. He was absorbed by his surroundings and appreciative of how beautiful it was. He found beauty in rocks, joy in rubble, hope in plants. Nameless wonders in many ways. He was unaware of nature, one of the casualties of so-called progress and our vicious untangling from nature.

An hour or so later, with three quarters of the cigar gone, his energy intact, his legs still strong, he could sense he was close to the top, as if all along –

Surendra’s alarm clock went off. He lay there, as he always did, on his side. Then he turned, as he always did, and looked up at the ceiling. He remembered something about a mountain and a chess board. He hadn’t thought or seen a chess board in years … how odd. And then he remembered, for dreams are part of life, that he had recently watched a movie and in this movie someone was playing chess. He couldn’t recall the movie and by the time he had got out of bed and made his way to the bathroom he had forgotten about the movie and the dream. He freshened up – the bodily necessities first, a splash of water on the face first and the polishing of the not so pearly whites. He then had breakfast. Porridge. Always porridge. With two spoons of sugar (otherwise the inhumanity).

Today was his day off and, as usual, there was nothing on the agenda. He didn’t, it is no surprise to learn, have a diary. It was not necessary for him to record the mundane (work) or for him to organise his life. He had nothing meaningful to record – future facing that is. Because he did have a calendar, which he would fill out with dates no longer applicable to the now, dates he couldn’t let go of. He wasn’t necessarily burdened by the past, it’s just that he thought dates still matter somewhat to those who remember them even though they are mostly forgotten in the moment because life, the present, has a habit of spilling over into all time – and even paradoxically the now. It was a tradition, a habit, like getting a new calendar every year. It did serve some functional use, however – he’d record appointments on it. The irony was that he never used it to check on his appointments. Instead, he had a tendency to make notes on scraps of paper, which he’d leave next to his keys, his watch and his wallet. This was his system and it worked. He made 99.9 percent of his appointments.

After he’d washed his dishes from breakfast and dried them with a tea towel and put them away – another ritual (I am washing them therefore I might as well dry them and I have dried them I might as well put them away) – he walked towards the back of the house, unlocked the backdoor and, after the cold air had rushed past him and brushed his face with a stinging but welcome freshness, stepped outside into the garden. He slipped the keys into his pocket and left the door ever so slightly open.

There was frost on the grass. The lawn was not freshly trimmed, he thought, nor long enough to goad him into action. He bobbed his head. He liked how green it was. With his hands behind his back he walked slowly around the grass, which had paved edges as if it were an island surrounded by an unusual sea of cobblestone. He did one lap and then headed back inside. Once in he shivered and locked the door. He rubbed his hands and decided: “I will go out for a walk.” He would let time carry him wherever in this adopted city and adopted country of his.

When he first arrived in the UK, after the initial shock of the glacial climate – an exaggeration, but that’s how it felt – and the sheer number and whiteness of the white natives – he remembers his younger sister observing that they everyone looked unwell and how the entire family and party of Indian arrivals seemed to laugh together at this – his first thoughts about this alien land were as follows. Everything appeared to be to organised – straight paths, straight roads, square houses – too quiet – where was the clamour and the people? Where did they disappear to during the day? – and lifeless. No-one seemed to be living in the UK. Where was the colour? The noise? The beautiful chaos? The wild of the land? Man meets earth meets animal? He would soon learn that this was their peculiar and very English way. This is how white people lived. And that if they had it their way, all white people, this is how the world would be. And, more specifically, if the British had it there way, India, a land of “beastly people with a beastly religion”, would end up just like this – washed out, desolate and ordered. If anything, India’s reclamation of its spirit and it’s body, though violent and tragic, was as much a rejection of an insipid future where the Raj would have continued to have oppress the children of Mother India while systematically stripping them of their culture and heritage in the name of modernisation that would take away everything that was good about India, even during occupation, and leave behind shadows, a rainbow of brown shades that no one would ever notice because the sun was always so bright for anyone to see with the kind of clarity that we would hope would shame. They wanted India remade because to be reminded of India and her people and their customs was to be reminded that they were far from home and among lessers (although, they still reasoned, the Indians of India could be ‘tamed’ like the Indians of America in the pre-revolutionary glory days of New England. India, the jewel in the crown, would come through).

For some time now, all the fears and unfamiliarity of this country had ebbed away. It was no longer disappointing and he couldn’t remember the last time he had compared something to India. And while he didn’t love the country in the way those who are intimately connected to the island’s earth, meaning he would always be an alien in another man’s country – and how do you love or forgive the British Empire for what it did – this was home. He would never leave.

Perhaps then, what he did feel more for the city than the country was love, the same kind of love that some couples, like Surendra and his wife, who are arranged into marriage, begin to feel as they grow into each other with every passing second, minute, hour, day, week, month and year. A love that grows quietly and tacitly and never knowingly. That somewhere in their heart they know that together they now make a whole, as impossible as that might have seemed when they first saw one another.

White people were no longer exotic, he didn’t mind that it was comparably quieter and though he missed the sun’s companionship, he was always too preoccupied with work to think about the weather (even though it was always an unusual topic of conversation).

He arrived at the high street, which was alive with activity, and stopped to let a stone out of his left shoe. Problem resolved he put his hands in his pocket with the intention of continuing his walk but found in the left pocket a folder piece of paper. He took it out and opened it up. He had written himself a small list of things to get. That did it for him. The walk was over. He would go and get the things he needed. The directionless walk was not so much abandoned as it was brought to an appropriate end. Forty minutes on foot was good enough.

His first stop was to the hardware store, to pick up three things: sealant for the bedroom window in particular but likely elsewhere once he had surveyed all windowsills; a new torch to replace a really old one he had – far too many years to really know – which absolutely no longer worked; and some white radiator paint for the bathroom radiator which seemed to have quickly aged – it was discoloured and starting to peel away.

The second stop was a minimarket to get enough groceries to last him the week. He didn't need much. Just a small number of vegetables that he would transform into Indian dishes because he was Indian and Indians like him ate Indian food regularly. And he wasn’t a bad cook for a man of his age. This evening he would, though he didn’t know it yet, make saag and serve it with makki ki roti. It would last him three days. All his dishes did.

His final stop was to a charity shop to pick up a jumper he hoped was still there. He wasn’t into clothes but this one fitted him and his simple wardrobe. And he needed a jumper. He wasn’t frugal with his limited cash nor loose with it, he just spent it on what it needed to be spent on. The only real ‘luxury’ was vodka and the pop that went with it. And that meant he’d use things until they were close to no longer being what they were meant to be. Like the jumper he was wearing. It was not noticeably worn that you would think him poor or a hobo, but it was definitely on its way out. It was bobbly, no longer soft, and it had plenty of discrete holes in it, from the back towards the neck to the sides and the elbows. The jumper was there.

It was an old – old meaning vintage, but Surendra was none the wiser – full sleeve argyle patterned Pringle branded jumper. The diamonds on the front were black, cream and cerulean and the rest of the jumper a quintessential grey. It was a large size and in very good condition. It had not been worn or washed that often. And it was an absolute steal – £8.79! Surendra was surprised by this but didn’t question it. He just thought it underpriced and oddly priced. Why not, for instance, £8.99? He took it from the hanger, happy to have it. He skimmed through some of the other items, but nothing caught his eye. He didn’t need anything else, after all. He didn’t try it on either. He had done that already.

Before he went to the counter he had a browse through the music section. He ignored the CDs, leaded through some of the vinyl and then turned his attention to the tape cassettes. There was an eclectic selection, with albums by artists like Oasis – Definitely Maybe – Grandmaster Flash – The Source – and Gilberto Gil. His album was called Extra. Surendra looked at it, opened it up, looked at the j-card and examined the tape. It looked okay. None of these artists were familiar to him, although there was a very strong chance that he had heard music by Oasis and Grandmaster Flash, either at work, in a shop or from the speakers of a car with its window rolled down. The music of Gilberto Gil, a Brazilian musician, he would not have come across. He liked the album cover of Extra. It was strange. It featured who he assumed was the artist looking enchantingly – or was it amazement? – at mysterious smoke rising from a surface, which featured a crystal ball and a tiny lifelike deer that had been drawn or painted. There was a small UFO to the right of Gilberto – or so Surendra thought - and the backdrop was blurred out but you could see that the background was sparkly with purple and silver colours that made Surendra think of tinsel.

Quite out of character, charmed by how bizarre this was, Surendra decided to get it. He would not miss the £1.49 it cost if he found the music to not be to his liking, not that he was that interested in music the way some people are. Songs didn’t remind him of special moments, at least that he could tell.

After he had paid for the jumper and the album, he headed to the bus stop. He did not feel like walking home. The bus arrived seven minutes late and it was busy. He usually sat downstairs, at the back, on the left hand side of the bus. He didn’t have that option so headed to the upper deck, which presented him with plenty of options. He went to the middle and sat on the right hand side of the bus. As the bus set off he dug around in his bag and pulled out the tape. He had no idea what kind of music awaited him.

The journey home was much longer than it should have been – almost an hour longer. This was because of a fire that had broken out at a restaurant further down the route, at a point where it was not practical for Surendra to hop on another bus. When the bus passed by the scene, he saw a charcoal cindering shell of a building, with smoke rising from what was left like steam from your body on a cold winter’s night when you’ve just come out of the shower. He could see someone inside, but he couldn’t make out the figure. It was dark and he or she was silhouetted against the black. He would read later in the local newspaper, the Evening Chronicle, that it had been an accident and nobody was hurt. The restaurant would never open again, and it remained boarded up for over a decade.

Back at home, after he had had a very satisfactory bathroom break, and had put away the things he’d picked up, and after he had locked the door which he had left open – it was a matter of urgency that he get to the toilet – he made himself a cup of Indian tea with four sugars. He took the tea into the living room and sat down, switching on the TV. He took a sip and UFOs and aliens came to mind (he had glanced briefly at a book in the charity shop for context). He could not recall anyone in India or indeed any Indian outside of India ever discussing visitors from outer space who always were too shy to say hello and introduce themselves, instead preferring to exist on the periphery and more as observers, either in the sky at night or, equally late at night, in people’s bedrooms unaware of how creepy the latter was because they were not of this world. While he was confident that UFOs and aliens were not among us and had never visited this planet he was equally confident that out there, among the stars that we see, there was life. Perhaps it was like us and the animal kingdom on earth or perhaps it was like something we still do not have the ability to imagine.

That thought about being able to not perceive the impossible saw his attention diverted to something Bob and Tim had brought to his attention a few years ago – the phenomena of invisible ships. Maybe that’s why Indians hadn’t ever seen aliens or UFOs. The short version of this short story is as follows. When Christopher Columbus, whom Surendra had thought was English but was in fact Italian, was close to the glorious New World – little did he know what would come of this expedition, such is life – the indigenous people could not see him nor the three ships that had appeared on the horizon. The reason for this, Bob and Tim explained to Surendra, was that they had never seen anything like this throughout their history, whether on land, water or the sky, during the day and at night and even in their dreams. It was too unreal to be unreal. And so they went about their business, until it was too late. New men had come to their land. They could see them because they looked like the indigenous people. It was only then, after they had seen other humans, that the ships appeared. They didn’t have the words to describe these vessels, but they could see them. What they couldn’t see was the storm that the conquerors had brought with them. The story of the invisible ships was like Surendra’s life. He was real but no one ever saw him. Yet he wasn’t abstract like the ships. Just unmemorable. And that was okay. He wasn’t anything else. And Surendra could live with that. This was the story of his life.

Two years later from that thought, Surendra was sitting in his armchair and asleep. He was snoring loudly but no one but the walls could hear. There was an open newspaper in his lap, and on the floor. He was dreaming about being on a ship from the time of kings and queens and castles. He was stood at the bow of the ship looking out. In front of him was land. And on this land was Surendra, but not the same Surendra that was on the ship, even though they were both the same. The Surendra on the land was looking out and he could see the ship. Neither he nor the other Surendra could see the other and they were not aware of one another either. The land was India and the ship the Sao Gabriel, the one and only ship that Vasco de Gama, Portugal’s great explorer, was in command of when he “discovered” India (we’ll allow that conceit for no other reason than it reads well). It was a fine day in the dream. The air was warm on the skin, the breeze soft.

“Surendra.”

He heard his name from behind, both on land and on the ship. He turned to see who it was – 

There was a knock on the door. Well, there were three knocks on the door. One knock would have been strange. The knock woke him up, though he didn’t quite know that. He was surprised. He hadn’t intended to take a nap, though he was all the better for it. The sun was on his back, and it was warm and comforting. He looked around the warm, as he adjusted from being asleep to being awake. The sun had flooded the room and everything was golden and serene. Surendra loved the summer. It coloured this pale country, and gave it the kind of life that India had all year round. He was about to remember his dream when he heard not one knock, not three knocks but five knocks. The first four were uniform, each knock equally spaced, while the final knock came ever so slightly later like a punctuation point.

He got up, stretched and let out a yawn. He slipped his feet into his slippers and headed to the front door. The keys were already in the lock. He looked at his watch. It was 3.47pm.

“Alreet. You ready?” asked Dave.

“I feel asleep,” said Surendra. “Give me five minutes. Where’s the rest of them?”

“Bob needed to pee, and so did Tim so they’ve gone on ahead. I didn’t need to pee.”

“Do you want to come in?”

“Nah, I’m gonna have a fag and call me ma.”

“Okay. I won’t be long.”

Two days ago Dave had passed his practical lorry driver test. It was one of the greatest days of his life and it wanted to celebrate the occasion – with the lads from the warehouse. Out of everyone, he had told them about his dreams the most and they had been more than encouraging. Surendra, Bob and Tim were touched by this. And though he never said, Dave has grown attached to the warehouse and his colleagues. He would look back at this time with the fondest of memories. Dave would leave seven months later and never see Surendra, Bob or Tim ever again. He was never replaced. This was a cost-cutting decision and not a practical one as it increased the workload for the remaining trio. But they didn’t mind. It wasn’t an issue. And they also really didn’t want a stranger coming in and disrupting their little cove of happiness.

Surendra went to the bathroom, peed, washed his hands and ran it through his hair which he combed neatly. He then went over to the hi-fi system and took out the tape. It was Gilberto Gil’s Extra, which he liked and played every now and again. He put it into the box. This was a quirk of his. He didn’t like leaving tapes, CDs, DVDs and so on in machines. He grabbed his jacket, which he wouldn’t wear, and his wallet and a list that was beside it. He looked over at the photographs on the console table a little longer than usual.

“It’s a nice day,” Surendra said as he approached Dave who was smoking. He nodded in agreement and put his phone away.

“She didn’t answer,” he said.

As they headed down the street, a horse passed them by. A young woman was on it. She said hello, and they said hello back. The horse reminded Surendra of a dream he had many years ago, where he was playing chess (he remembered it wrongly). And then he remembered the dream he had moments ago. It was odd. There was two Surendra’s – one on a ship and one on land. They were both looking out in each other’s direction unaware of the other.

“Vasco da Gama,” he said.

“You what?” said Dave.

“Nothing,” said Surendra. He would tell all of them later, at the pub. For now though, they would engage in small talk. And yes, it would largely revolve around work.

The End.