of the thing.
The flatface’s name is (usually) Clarence. It can also be called Rhubarb or Porbarb or John.
Sometimes he’s in prison:
with his two cellmates, the ‘Keeper’, who has a jaw like a casserole pot …
… and a rubber-faced monstrosity called Worful:
‘Clarence’ Flatface lives in the past. Sometimes he’s out of clink and down the tavern, being asked difficult maths questions …
“What’s two and two?”
… that he struggles to answer:
At other times, as ‘John’, Flatface is living at the time the cartoon is being drawn, in the early 1960s. In these contemporary frames ‘John’ might be lying in a fancy deckchair, with a Martini:
“I will have zis deckchair, & none uzzer” raged Irwin.
“Tomorrow, tomorrow!” was the carefree reply.
How did he get into this chair? Why is Irwin (who turns out to be Flatface’s brother) speaking in a German accent? What are those two people up in the air doing – planting carrots? Since when did deckchairs have foot canopies?
Once, as ‘Clarence’, Flatface becomes a king …
… which makes him grumpy.
Another time, Flatface’s days appear to be numbered:
This story never settles down – except for Flatface’s eternal presence. Every fifteen or twenty pages the strip is abruptly cut off and a whole side is given over to this disturbing profile:
Relieved, the writer then picks up the story again and presses on.
This isn’t a cartoon strip, it’s a set of narrative false starts ‘tethered by a face. But whose face? Not ‘I’s own, surely. A person this self-obsessed would want to explore his features, not freeze them. This face is a symbol for someone or something. Give it a few more years and it will evolve into a pictogram and join the Chinese alphabet.
There is only one occasion on which ‘I’ does not limit himself to the nine essential lines and allows Clarence to look at the reader full on. To emphasise the horror of the revelation, it is also the only time ‘I’ uses colour:
Got two obsessions – that I’m going to be an author; and that I’m going to choke.
Aged twenty-one
In 2005, I left Cambridge and rented a shooting lodge in Suffolk, and the diaries became a makeshift boot stand. In 2006, my girlfriend Flora and I went to London to house-sit for a pianist. The torso-sized printer box became a cocktail table; the box the size of a thigh propped up a chair; the Ribena crate, too wonky to be of any use, got kicked under the Steinway.
In 2007, Dido was told she had neuroendocrine cancer of the pancreas. In 2009, that it had spread.
I had known Dido for twenty-five years. When I first met her my father was dying – she saw me through that; I was twenty-one and idiotic. She was twelve years older. She grew me up, taught me how to think, how to write, how to be.
Pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer is the same disease that killed Steve Jobs, and is why he was able to develop the iPad and the iPhone. If he’d had ordinary pancreatic cancer (as almost all newspapers insisted on giving him at the time) he’d have been dead before the MacBook. Neuroendocrine tumours can be very slow-growing. Some people live the rest of their natural life with them, as long as they do not spread.
Dido’s tumour had seeded over her liver. Its spores had crowded into her blood.
The consultant at Dido’s local hospital was contemptible: bullying and scary. I arranged for Dido’s case to be moved to the Royal Free in London, a European Centre of Excellence for neuroendocrine cancer. There was a scan due in six weeks’ time; I had to be on the phone every morning to reduce that to ten days. The NHS is a wonderful organisation as long as you learn how to kick it. There were anti-cancer diets to be researched, exercise programmes to be uncovered, high-absorption liposomal curcumin to be ordered in from California at $95 a 100ml bottle (produced by a man who, I subsequently discovered, was being pursued on a manslaughter charge), electrically-operated pomegranate squeezers to be shipped from Istanbul, a remarkable peer-reviewed but forgotten therapeutic from Sweden to be investigated. In fact, why are we still talking? I had to get on …
During the five years Flora and I stayed in the London house, I’d occasionally catch sight of the boxes and remember their contents with dislike: that terrible face; those tiny scuttling letters; ‘I’s sense of destiny and devotion to an unknown, perhaps unknowable project of vital human importance followed by the catastrophic failure of all his plans. Despite the glistening orange and shocking pea-green covers of some of the books, I thought of them as pallid objects. I had the same feeling towards the diaries in these boxes as I do towards the ghosts in an M.R. James story: thrilling, but forces of absence; not so much evil as empty of good. They marked a time when Dido was well. They emphasised that she might be dying. They were hateful.
Occasionally, I’d creep under the Steinway and peer inside the Ribena crate. But I didn’t study the books. I reversed back out between the legs of the piano with the slightly appalled sensation that I was escaping quicksand.
Flora and I moved again in 2011, to Great Snoring in Norfolk, by which time I had forgotten about the diaries. They were just three more boxes among the thousand or so that I drag about like Marley’s chain every time I change landlords. I shoved them into the back of the van with the rest, yanked them out among the chickens and runner ducks at the other end and dropped them into a storeroom.
At which point the Ribena box burst open and twenty-seven diaries spilled out.
One of them featured a bloodbath.
The Collins ‘Three Day Royal Diary’ is greeny-blue, not much bigger than a jacket potato and caved in halfway up the spine, as if it has been crushed by a spasmodic grip. I tested it, waving it around the chicken yard in Great Snoring with various holds of my own. Only a left hand could make this type of depression. It was a gesture I imagined an outdoor preacher would use as he clutched the Gospels and harangued cowboys.
An inside page printed with useful information calls New Year’s Day ‘the Circumcision’.
Once again, the diarist’s handwriting races into the book many sides before the official diary section starts:
November 19th, Saturday
Spent