Tuesday December 8th 1998
Just rang J because I’d wanted to speak to him after the weekend he came down with S and we spent the evening on the pier. We both agreed it had been really good to see each other and for us to meet PS Some dark shape in our relationship has lifted.
He tells me they have had had a terrible shock.
2 weeks ago last Thursday, J was working at home on the houseboat. They had a young German student staying with them, the son of a friend of their lodger’s girlfriend. The lodger often stays with his girlfriend so his room was free.
J & S had been waking the lad up most mornings and having breakfast with him. Not this morning.
Late afternoon the lodger comes back and goes into his room but the student is fast asleep.
Later still, he goes in again because he needs something and discovers that the boy is dead.
J has been working away next to a dead body.
(In the morning J & S had discussed the year, saying at least no-one had died this year!)
The procession of emergency services arrive. Ambulance. Police. CID. Undertakers.
‘Looked as though they had come from Dickens central casting,’ said J. ‘One tall and thin, the other small and plump.’
‘That’s when the black farce began,’ he said.
They manhandle the body out of the boat – on a stretcher, on its side, upside down, ‘he was a big lad,’ said J. ‘They’re carrying the stretcher across the little gang plank from the boat to the quay and one of the undertakers falls in, fifteen feet, with the tide out, so he is covered from head to toe in mud.’
The boy had died during the night. They found him with his arms folded across his chest. The window was open. Around his mouth there was a foam of small bubbles that had dried whole.
The father received a garbled message and rang up in tears from Germany wanting to know if it was true.
He flew over and came to the boat, devastated by grief.
The post mortem has shown no natural causes, and no sign of violence.
(R tells me that a girl who died and was left in her room for a number of weeks, had froth around her mouth and caked in her nostrils – she had been sniffing a deodorant.)
Amazing read 👏🏼