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Huddleston Road
JOHN TOOMEY
Sleepwalker
To Brendan and Margaret, Dad and Mam,
For boundless love and lessons in compassion
CONTENTS
OTHER WORKS BY JOHN TOOMEY
Huddleston Road
Acknowledgements
Part I
Part II
About the Author
Copyright
The beginnings of Huddleston Road go a long way back, but once the decision to impose a novel upon the idea was made, a number of writers and sources became influential in its realization. I was struggling to find a coherent narrative when I came across Victoria Gill’s excellent article, Suicide Surfers, in the Sunday Times Magazine in May 2007. The article alerted me to the internet suicide phenomena, A.S.H., which I would go on to adapt for my own purposes in the form of DUST. I borrowed liberally from the A.S.H. site, now frozen for posterity, embellishing and adapting it to suit the narrative of Huddleston Road.
I would also like to thank John Waters, writer and journalist with The Irish Times, for his kind appraisal of my first novel, Sleepwalker, and his subsequent help with the recommended reading for Huddleston Road. The book certainly could not have been written without Al Alvarez’s deeply personal insight into suicide and its place in literature through the ages, in his superb book, The Savage God. Mr Alvarez imposed humanity on the cultural history of suicide, made accessible the ideas and theories without ever losing sight of their labyrinthine complexity.
On the advice of John Waters, I also dipped in and out of Emile Durkheim’s sociological tome, Suicide, which was invaluable, and Primo Levi’s, The Drowned and the Saved, which must be one of the bravest pieces of writing I’ve encountered.
I should mention, too, that the internet and its sprawling tentacles has also been valuable, for chasing up any number of small details, ranging from London postcodes to cranio-facial duplication.
Lastly, I would like to thank John O’Brien of The Dalkey Archive Press and Andrew Russell of the Somerville Press: John, for his clear-thinking editorial commitment to Huddleston Road – he salvaged this short novel from the arms of a sprawling narrative mess while managing not to make me feel as though I was an idiot; and Andrew for introducing me and my work to the Dalkey Archive Press, and for generally looking after my interests.
JOHN TOOMEY, FEBRUARY 2012
Vic left Dublin for London when he was twenty-one. He’d been rattling about the place for a few years by then, going nowhere in particular. Having dropped out of two courses, a degree in journalism and a diploma in tourism, he’d found himself a three-day week in the local supermarket, working the fruit n’ veg under the foulmouthed eye of a Belfast man, a good twenty years his senior.
Although the prospectless apprenticeship at the supermarket was never likely to last, it did, given his contribution-free tenancy with his parents, afford him a decent disposable income. So off-days were spent at the cinema, alone bar a handful of other lonely buffs, munching on popcorn and absorbing the gigantic intimacy of the virtually empty theatre. The aimlessness of it was apparent to him, but there was contentment too in those midweek hours nobody else had available to them.
In the evenings, during the week, when he wasn’t out with friends who had determined to persist with third level education, he sat alone in his bedroom listening to albums over and over until he knew them inside out. He read biographies of famous musicians and actors, and struggled through the odd novel that he found reference to in somebody’s life story. He wrote reams of self-indulgent poetry, and got drunk in the dark.
By the time of his twenty-first birthday he’d become restless, bored with himself. He ripped up and burned all the poetry and began to want for more, insisting to friends that what he craved were new encounters. He applied to several universities in England and, surprisingly, found that almost all of them were willing to accept him.
In mid-September, with his only fallback a phone number, he boarded a flight to London. The number was inscribed onto the inside cover of a hardback writing pad that he used for a journal. He drew a thick rectangle around it in red pen. The pad was about the only thing he deemed valuable among his travelling trinkets and clothes. Having by then forsaken poetry, he had begun to record, with meticulousness, the important and, it should be said, the mostly extraneous details of his life; substituting the purged poetry for pedestrian prose – one kind of conceitedness for another. He packed everything into a large rucksack and half expected to be back home by the New Year.
London and the university years were good to him. It thrilled and humbled, alternately. His journal entries from London were filled with a distinct excitement, constantly aquiver in every sentence. In those words, as self-obsessed and unexceptional as they read, the faintly recalled essence of scintillating promise was close to palpable; it was in the air each morning of that first winter, and in the warmth of the long May evenings where his gaze fell out the ramshackle sash-window, and across the park, with the sky ripening to red. Apprehension was bound up in there too, with all the emotions heightened by the experience of being out on his own, cut off from all homely comforts and security. London was everything he’d intended.
He stayed in halls of residence, sharing five storeys with a few hundred other students hailing from a range of cities and homelands. The only commonality they shared was the collective claim to have originated more than twenty-five miles from campus. The first few weeks were a blur of cheap beer, fleeting associations – feeling strangers out and up, wary of jumping in too quick with any one crowd – and looming loneliness.
Lectures, seminars and essays took a backseat, until the first round of assessments were handed back, stinging criticisms in tow, of the sort that propitious school teachers can never prepare you for. He came to realize his own ordinariness. Some people pack it in then – too much effort – and leave university with no degree and a student loan that was profligately squandered on booze, drugs and the rest. Others get their pride stung by near failure and pull the finger out. Vic surprised himself by falling in with the latter.
Despite his stated desire for new experiences, he survived largely within the confines of halls of residence and the route to campus, a closeted world of pseudo-reality; all that hippy idealism regarding the broadening of horizons was unrepentantly jettisoned in favour of subsidized student bars and frivolous associations. From time to time he took the Underground to Camden on a Sunday, or walked in. He ventured into Leicester Square and Oxford Street too, during that first winter, with a spirited group of fellow squatters from halls, to take in the seasonal lights. But there wasn’t much more to his pursuit of the city’s perspective.
Toward the end of the first semester, with the bitter cold outside and suffering some degree of malnutrition, he rang that number so carefully copied to the inside of his writing