You know how it goes. You’ve staggered home in the wee hours of Saturday morning, having blown your pay cheque on a few good laughs and way too many proofed drinks, only to end up hugging the toilet bowl and praying for an early death. Amidst the booming echoes of regurgitation, the Milky Way glitters away before your bulging, watery eyes. You hear a distant whirring, and a tingling vibration jiggles your right buttock. Your phone. You answer, and a frail voice asks, ‘Is that William?’ You search around the bathroom, trying to locate a William until you see someone with bleary eyes, scruffy shirt, dishevelled hair and biled lips staring vacuously at you in the mirror, and you realise that it’s you they are asking for.
‘Speaking,’ you whisper, fearful that your pickled head might explode.
‘Hello, my name is Nolene Sulway,’ the voice says. ‘My husband, Dr Warning Sulway, taught you creative writing, many years back.’
You rack your brain, trying to recall if you ever studied creative writing or know a Dr Warning Sulway.
‘Hello?’ the voice says.
Sulway? Then you have a hazy recollection of taking a class as an elective way back whenever. A filler to get you over the line to earn that useless degree now sitting in your undies drawer. The image of a little, thin man dressed in tweed and wearing an eyepatch and a grouse hunting hat emerges from the fog that is your inebriated mind and gives you a wave. That’s right, you recall. Old Sully. Creative Writing 101. Back last century. When was that? Ninety-eight? Or ninety-nine? Said you had great potential if only you weren’t so damn serious.
‘Hello?’ the voice says. ‘Are you still there?’
‘Sorry,’ you say. ‘Yes, I’m still here. And I remember old Sully—sorry, Dr Sulway. How is he, these days?’
‘Sadly, my husband passed away yesterday.’
‘Oh, I am so sorry to hear that. My condolences.’
‘Thank you for your kind words, young man. But that’s not why I’m calling you. No, my husband’s dying wish was that you, his favourite student, deliver his eulogy.’
She gives you a location, time and date. St Wondon’s at two o’clock next Friday. ‘One, two,’ you chant, but, alas, you fumble your phone, which drops with a plop into the bowl, and you black out.
All week you prepare your eulogy. You contact students and staff you’ve neither seen nor spoken to for more than twenty years. Saddened by the news, all share their fond memories of a colleague and teacher, and all wish you luck.
Come Friday, you set off with eulogy in pocket but just miss your connecting bus and are now late. In the distance bells peal, and you break into a run and sprint the last two kilometres to the church. Your lungs burn. Your brow drips. Your chest aches. You fear death is imminent.
You slip in through the side door and keep your eyes upon the pulpit to avoid the disapproving death stares of a mourning congregation. Mouthing an apology to the priest, you sit in the front pew and try to compose yourself. You permit yourself a side glance and see Mrs Sulway, black-veiled and clutching a white handkerchief, staring teary-eyed at the coffin.
The priest invites any eulogists present to come forward, and you rise and walk with solemn, respectful steps to the pulpit. You pass Sully’s coffin. It’s adorned with a flowing wreath of ethereal white covering all of the brass nameplate other than a cursive ‘W’ and suffixing ‘y’. Your eyes mist and your throat thickens as memories of the great man flood back. You mount the pulpit, raise your eyes and see a sparse congregation—only half-a-dozen at most, by your count—and lament how a man so loved by so many could be so mourned by so few.
You reach into your jacket pocket and grasp … air! Your eulogy. Gone. You search your pockets and find emptiness. Your sympathetic nervous system kicks in, and the three Bs jostle for first response. Should you battle on or bugger off? You look down at Mrs Sulway, frail in her grief yet hopeful of her husband’s remembrance, and you go for the third B: bullshit.
You cough, clear your throat and begin.
‘When I heard he had passed away last week, I lamented the world would never be quite the same without Warning.
‘Warnie, as his students and colleagues affectionately called him, was born and spent his early years in Winson Green, west of Birmingham, the only child of Yorick and Yolanda Sulway. His parents were dutiful civil servants: he, a guard at HM Prison Birmingham, and she, a cook at the Birmingham Mental Health Hospital. In Warnie’s ninth year, his parents were institutionalised at their respective facilities. His father, convinced he could turn superhero if only he could find the right phone box, relocated most of Birmingham’s public phone booths to the tiny Sulway backyard over the years, only to be caught red-handed when the Council painted the booths in a slow-drying crimson paint. Warnie’s mother had a nervous breakdown two months after her husband’s incarceration, culminating in her being found directing traffic at Birmingham’s busiest intersection whilst wearing a colander on her head (and naught else). She told the police she was, and I quote, “clearing a landing space for an alien spaceship so it could transport me out of the shitbowl that is my life”. The authorities institutionalised her on the spot.
‘Warnie moved down the road to Hockley to live with his mother’s sister and her husband. Warnie’s uncle was an unemployed illusionist who had an amazing capacity to disappear whenever chores needed to be done around the house, only to reappear behind a raised pint at the bar of his local pub. Warnie’s aunt, a strict Scottish Presbyterian, raised her nephew on a diet of salted porridge and silence, unless in prayer, when she wished Warnie’s parents eternal damnation for burdening her life.
‘Neglected by his foster parents, Warnie sought solace at the local library, and so began a lifelong, voracious appetite for books. Over the summer holidays of his youth, he spent all day, every day, sitting cross-legged on the carpeted floor between bookshelves, devouring book after book after book. His tastes were eclectic, but the classics satiated him the most.
‘One wintry afternoon, the librarian caught Warnie mid-chew—with Francis Bacon’s essay Of Vicissitude of Things in one cheek and Mary Lamb’s Much Ado About Nothing from Tales from Shakespeare in the other—and banned him from the library, but not before he swiped a copy of All’s Well That Ends Well. Warnie roamed Birmingham’s streets, desperate for a quick fix, until discovering and then trolling Birmingham’s second-hand bookshops and gorging himself on the discount bins. When he told me this story, I asked him how he had maintained his gaunt physique over the years, given his gluttony for the typeset word, and he beckoned me closer and whispered in my ear, “Aristotle, my boy, Aristotle. A page of Nicomachean Ethics a day contains all the moral fibre you need to keep you regular.”
‘Both Cambridge and Oxford accepted Warnie, but he chose the University of Birmingham instead, given the superior quality of the meatballs served at its dining hall. He elected to major in literature and languages and took a minor in taxidermy. He figured that if he could not abide working amongst the living, he might as well potter about amongst the dead.
‘Warnie proved to be a diligent and popular student. He shunned the rigours of sport, preferring pursuits of the mind. He won Debater of the Year three years running, only to, on each occasion, offer a rebuttal and surrender his prize. In his first year, Warnie successfully auditioned for the University of Birmingham Musical Theatre Guild, playing a guard in their production of The Mikado. He made a not-so-grand entrance onto the stage as he tripped over the third of the three little maids, stumbled forward and lanced his eye upon the tip of the Lord High Executioner of Titipu’s sword. He stoically carried on until, having completed the chorus for “As some day it may happen”, he gracefully exited stage left. That he would don an eyepatch for the rest of his life proved fortuitous, beginning with being a shoo-in when auditioning the next year for the lead role of the Pirate King in The Pirates of Penzance.
‘In his second year, Warnie tried to involve himself in student politics. He applied for the Young Conservatives, but, sadly, they rejected him due to his feet: both were flat and both were left. He thought briefly about becoming a Green, but the colour clashed with his prosthetic eyeball. He attended a march with the Marxists, and the sense of camaraderie almost won him over, but he baulked when they pressed him to surrender his beloved supply of jubes for the common good. “Better a jelly in the belly than a red under the bed,” he said to me.
‘Upon receiving first-class honours, Warnie panicked and ran away to the circus, hoping to become a trapeze artist. “To walk the tightest of tightropes is a true metaphor for life,” he said to me. Sadly, the Flying Flanginis held an iron-gripped monopoly on the rarefied air of the big top. Only two other vacancies were available. Given his fresh face was devoid of even a stubble, he was ill-qualified to be the Bearded Lady, so the ringmaster banished him to the sideshow alley as a laughing clown. Warnie spent twelve hours every day swivelling his head from side to side and swallowing ping-pong balls. But fate again dealt him a rough hand, for he soon developed not only a painful crick in his neck but also celluloid intolerance. With his circus career hanging by the thinnest of threads, he volunteered to bare his buttocks whilst hanging amongst a wall of balloons and to submit himself to piercing darts thrown by sniperish carnival revellers. Within a week, he caught tetanus, but no one knew, as his locked jaw prevented him from surrendering even the slightest of whimpers. It was only when a Mrs Dolores Duppledon from Dudley hit the jackpot on a balmy summer’s evening two weeks later that Warnie, impregnated with the Duppledon dart, released a primordial roar, and a wailing ambulance rushed him from sideshow alley. Deflated and disillusioned, he abandoned his circus dream and returned to postgraduate study.
‘Warnie only stood four foot four tall, yet he was revered as a colossus of the literary world. Though he possessed a once-in-a-generation writer’s block that carried on into a second and then third generation, what Warnie lacked in quantity he more than made up for in quality. For his PhD thesis, Warnie submitted his one and only published story, a seminal one-word work entitled i, thus kicking off the post-post-post-modernist movement. At first, Warnie’s magnum opus only gained cult status amongst narcissists, ophthalmologists and acquiescent pirates, but once the opinion-piece writers got wind of it, the world became enlightened, and the work summited and remains to this day atop best-seller lists. Readers marvelled at the work’s succinctness, the infinite light and shade of its nuance, and its humility in using small caps. Critics labelled it “perfection”, “humanity’s finest achievement” and “a direct link between mankind and God”.
‘The University of Birmingham snapped up Warnie, offering him a tenured teaching position in its English Literature Department. Students and researchers travelled from all over the world to seek tutelage from a master of his craft. Forests of academic papers discussed Warnie’s greatness. Lesser mortals tried to emulate his masterpiece, only to be accused of either plagiarism or verbosity.
‘Politicians, religious leaders and the literati courted him. The pope, when permitted an audience with Warnie and his beloved wife, Nolene, at their home, left enlightened, not only determined to issue a papal bull decreeing that God’s Word was no longer The Word and Warnie’s was but also with a copy of her recipe for her madeleine cakes.
‘In the early days of his growing fame, Warnie proved to be a man of great generosity. He once told me about a gangly, bearded hippy from America contacting him and, wanting to start a greengrocers store, begging for permission to use Warnie’s work to promote his produce.
‘“Sure,” Warnie said. “It’s there for all the world.”
‘When the hippy asked how much it would cost, Warnie told him that it was “on the house” and to just send him a box of fruit every once in a while.
‘Warnie’s golden touch must have brushed off on the young man, for Warnie told me he read somewhere that the young man became a billionaire. Warnie seemed genuinely pleased at having aided another’s success, yet he expressed being a tad disappointed, for though he received a small fruit box every year, it contained not a skerrick of fruit but, rather, just a mobile phone bearing Warnie’s book title and devoid of any nutritional content whatsoever.
‘With his fame came invites throughout the world to lavish cocktail parties, the lucrative speaking circuit and product endorsement, including a tea towel and mug range bearing his likeness, yet Warnie shunned it all, not out of any sense of humility or asceticism but because, he told me, he preferred evenings sitting on the sofa with his wife as they ate dinner and watched Coronation Street.
‘Warnie met his wife and the love of his life, Nolene Spratt, at Hartley’s Hardware. She—a stout, six-foot-six emerging sculptor of metals—was looking to upgrade her oxyacetylene welding kit; he, well, he’d been searching for a rubber plunger to unclog his writer’s block and had been lost amongst the aisles for several days. Warnie’s world darkened when he walked under Nolene’s broad shadow as she stood before the gas cylinders, and he looked up at her, and she looked down at him, and his unpatched eye met her goggled eyes, and poor old Warnie became love-struck and tongue-tied on the spot. He told me he sprinted three aisles to the lubricant section, shot a squirt of WD-40 into his mouth, rushed back to Nolene and proposed.
‘Warnie and Nolene spent their entire married life in the same house in Bournbrook, a short, brisk walk from his tenured teaching position at the University of Birmingham. Warnie told me the happiest day of his life was the day they returned from their three-day honeymoon in central Birmingham and Nolene carried him across the threshold and into their new shared house and life.
‘The house was a fix-me-upper with a disturbing lean to the right. Warnie, devoid of any semblance of handyman skills, applied his gifted mind to the problem, and for the rest of their married lives, the Sulways wore matching slippers when inside the house—slippers supporting one heel two inches higher than the other.
‘Warnie once told me that every year on their wedding anniversary, he and Nolene travelled the three miles from their home to central Birmingham to re-enact the magic of their honeymoon. Indeed, despite worldwide fame and adulation, he never once left his beloved West Midlands. Plagued by motion sickness all his life, he preferred the quiet, still life. Besides, he told me, once you’ve seen the sights of Birmingham, why bother with the rest of the world’s meagre pickings?
‘I remember the great kerfuffle that occurred with the impending release of Warnie’s much-anticipated sequel to his first book. He queued patiently at the Copyright Office for three hours to register his new work, accompanied by a frenzied press. When the clerk called Warnie’s number, the paparazzi went crazy, lighting up the waiting room with flashing cameras. Warnie stepped forward, only for an elderly woman bent over her walking frame to shuffle up beside him. Warnie, ever the gentleman, graciously allowed her to go before him. She registered her book, We, a self-help guide for the incontinent, and, alas, Warnie’s sophomoric masterpiece was lost to the world. In a way, I think it came as a relief to him, for he confessed to me that a writer’s second book is seldom as good as the first. “Why tinker with perfection?” he said.
‘Warnie once told me in confidence that he had a midlife crisis in his early sixties. For two weeks he attended night classes, hoping to become a belly dancer. He thrilled to the thought of earning a living cavorting in front of a leering, inebriated audience, spinning in shear tops, swirling in exotic skirts and swaying in glittering jewellery, all while having kebab-greased, beer-sodden, smoke-infused, slimy hands fumble about his midriff and stuff dollared notes of appreciation in his waistband. But at the end of the second week, his teacher took Warnie aside and suggested he not quit his day job. Warnie cursed his two titanium hips, his Jack Spratian frame and his being devoid of even a skerrick of rhythm for killing his dream. To console himself, he binged on Turkish delight, hoping to bulk up his belly, but all he got was a sugar headache and, later, rotting teeth.
‘So to academia Warnie returned.
‘Between lectures, tutorials and marking papers, Warnie stormed around the University Square, doing constitutional laps with a fly swat in hand and gumboots on his feet.
‘He told me that when he was being interviewed for Time’s Person of the Year, the feature writer said, “Why the wellies? Is it in homage to your rural roots?”
‘Warnie chuckled and said, “Alas, no. It’s because I suffer from chronic antlophobia. You know, a fear of floods.”
‘“And the fly swat?” the writer said.
‘And Warnie smiled and said, “In case I bump into any literalists. To knock a sense of humour into them. I can’t abide their stone-faced nescience to the nuanced joke.”
‘I often saw Warnie with chopsticks resting behind an ear and a starched napkin draped around his neck.
‘“You never just know if and when your next meal will appear,” he said to me.
‘And then there was his beloved grouse-hunting hat which never left his head. Ever.
‘“To hide your thinning locks?” I said to him.
‘“No,” he said. “Nothing so vain. Mrs Sulway bought it for my thirtieth birthday, but, alas, it’s a size or two too small, and I can’t get the blessed blighter off.”
‘To draw attention away from the hat, he rigged a light bulb above it. It blinked, day and night, as its incandescence Morse-coded to the world that Warnie, a true genius, was forever immersed in profound thought. I asked Warnie one day if he would ever let the world know what was bubbling away inside his head and blinking away above it.
‘“Just one magnificent thought, my boy,” he said.
‘“Only one?” I said, somewhat disappointed.
‘“Yes,” he said. “And it, in all its magnificence, is always passing through my mind.”
‘“What is it, if you don’t mind my asking?” I said as I leant forward, hoping he would enunciate the true meaning of life.
‘Warnie smiled warmly at me and said, “How lucky am I, Warning Sulway, to be sharing my life with Mrs Sulway?”
‘Despite all the adulation and intrusion that came with his success, Warnie took it all in his stride, although one day he took me aside and confessed he had ceased wearing underpants. “I’ve gone commando, my boy,” he said with a conspiratorial hiss. There had been speculation amongst us students in the days leading up to his confession, for though Warnie valiantly fought the urge to scratch at his incessant itch when delivering his lectures, trails of prickly heat powder littered the lecture halls and common room carpet. I asked him whether there was some altruistic motive for his sacrifice, whether he was paying homage to our brave troops, home and abroad, or expressing solidarity with the world’s poor and unbriefed. “If only,” he said as his hand dug deep and jiggled. “It’s Mrs Sulway. She is sick and tired of having to purchase new underwear for me. Every time she does a wash of my undergarments and strings up a line of Y-fronts, groupies swarm our backyard and strip the line clean.”
‘“Such are the perils of fandom,” I said to console him.
‘Warnie shunned controversy all his life except for one incident that occurred in his late fifties when he took up lap swimming. He pursued his new interest at night, confined to the safety and privacy of his bathtub. Having mastered the tumble turn and invented a new nocturnal stroke called the Moth, he, on a cold and windy mid-semester evening, plunged into his hot bath at the deep end and set about swimming the equivalent distance of an English Channel crossing. At dawn, he dragged his weary self from the tepid waters at the shallow end and air-dried as he stood upon a sodden bathmat. Warnie then permitted himself a subdued fist pump in celebration. Having rested, he phoned the Channel Swimming Association and sought accreditation. The CSA rejected his application, not due to his having avoided the chilled channel waters but because he had purportedly cheated, allegedly using his wife’s bath salts to aid buoyancy. Warnie, true to his nature, took it on the chin, and the matter would have died then and there had Warnie not lingered in conversation when picking up his morning paper, for his newsagent fainted due to the scent of an overbearing lavender, only to come to later and report Warnie to the police for offensive behaviour. The press got a whiff of it—not the lavender but the injustice of Warnie’s punishment—and splashed it across its media. A nation took to their baths and wrinkled up in protest. A lengthy stalemate ensued until the prime minister, wearing a Union-jacked shower cap and loosely draped matching towel, and brandishing a bath brush and a yellow rubber duck, intervened and brokered a deal that saw the CSA yield and issue Warnie with a commemorative plug.
‘The last time I saw Warnie was about twenty years ago at the function honouring his fifty years in academia. I remember it being a wonderful evening, memorable not only for the catering and joie de vivre amongst staff and students but also for the destruction of most of the faculty lounge. We pooled funds and presented Warnie with a smoking jacket. Though I suspect he may have preferred goggles and a snorkel, given his antlophobia, Warnie hid his disappointment well, and as he accepted and put on our gift, his eyes watered and his throat choked up, not in a display of emotion but, rather, because the sleeves of the smoking jacket were ablaze. Coughing and spluttering, Warnie nonchalantly removed the jacket, only to cast it into a wastepaper basket at the foot of the 14th Century Italian Literature collection. How were we to know Dante’s Inferno would be so combustible?
‘I draw comfort in knowing Warnie passed away whilst immersed in the written word. Sitting in his favourite chair in his favourite corner of the academic common room, Warnie was marking end-of-term papers when he gagged on a comma splice and fell forward into a pool of passive sentences. His nearby colleagues say he stirred briefly, raised his head to the heavens and exclaimed “I am haunted by …” before going under once more, never to resurface. Alas, poor son of Yorick! I fear no one truly knew him—our fine fellow of infinite jest and most excellent fancy—nor what ghosts tormented his jovial soul.
‘And now Warnie is gone, dearly departed but, hopefully, not forgotten. The world has lost a true gentleman, an eminent scholar and a beloved mentor; a humble man who taught me everything I know about the art of creative writing, the haute cuisine of meatballs and the riskiness of an ill-conceived, ill-delivered joke.
‘So God bless you, Warning Sulway, and may He, like all of us, rest in the shadow of your greatness.’
A sniffle from behind Mrs Sulway’s black veil greets the completion of your eulogy. With head bowed, you return to your seat and contemplate your own insignificance in the cosmos as the priest lays on the holy water thick.
After, having followed a frail Mrs Sulway at a respectful distance as they wheeled Warnie out, you approach her, take her gnarled hand and say, ‘My condolences.’
‘What’s that you say?’ she shouts back while cupping her ear in her hand.
‘My condolences.’ You pat her hand and bask in the comfort of having fulfilled her husband’s last wish.
‘Thank you, young man, and thank you for your wonderful eulogy. I never knew my Warner lived such an extraordinary life.’
‘Warner?’ you say.
‘Yes. My Warner.’
‘Not Warning Sulway, the author?’ Your face warms.
‘I’ve never heard of him. No, my husband, God rest his soul, was Warner Selby, the auditor.’
‘Really?’ You look about the church porch, hoping for some semblance of signage. Or, better still, a hole and a shovel so you can bury yourself.
‘This is St Tuton’s?’ you say.
‘Yes, young man, this is St Tuton’s. Will you stay for a cup of tea? Your face does look a bit flushed.’
Oh Christ! You’ve cocked up. Warnie’s funeral is at St Wondon’s at two, not St Tuton’s at one. You check your watch. You crunch timetables in your head and, given a favourable bus exchange at Birmingham Coach Station, figure you can just make St Wondon’s by two.
‘Sorry, but I’ve got to rush,’ you say. ‘And, again, my condolences.’
You rush down the church steps, out the church gates and across the footpath. In your haste, you step off the curb and, following a screech and a thud, into an approaching vehicle. A hearse. And you look up and see a timbered box within, and you just know it’s Warnie in there, on the way to St Wondon’s with his marking pencil in hand, grading your life story with one final full stop—no, make that one last exclamation mark!
As you lie dying in the gutter, you ponder who will mourn your passing, who will deliver your eulogy, and whether they will play for laughs or draw a long bow upon the melancholic fiddle that soundtracked your meagre life.
martinsmithstories 