THE UNDERTAKER’S DIM BACKROOM AND THE HEAVY LONG PRESS-DOWN

Here’s what happens when your ten year old self is sent to collect the obituary notes for your grandfather’s newspaper business – you slowly learn that A devoted mother might mean insatiable cravings veiled while baby bottles of gin lie silently in the cistern He was a gentle and unassuming soul leaves no space for cavorting and beating and leering at pretty young girls with open mouth and fat tongue out Much noted for her remarkable sense of style fails to conjure her raised middle finger rammed back her throat to touch her tonsils until her rib cage heaves and she gags and gags so the little black dress hugs snugly He was a devout Christian paints haze to ravel doubt in local anecdotes of gambling or how he helped himself to the office petty cash and cupped the buttocks of the petty cashier before heaving his groin The death was sudden and unexpected sometimes washes white over the haemoglobin of blown-out brains or the sanguine slash of a left wrist. As years pass you consider it all against the

lone tick tock in the undertaker’s dim backroom behind the bubble-lined glass caught in wartime beige until the white haired ink-suited undertaker stirs you from lull and thumbs the pages of his huge tome to read aloud while you write on a spotless page and later wait, in the newspaper office, for the heavy long press-down of the buttons on the tall linotype machine where circular lettered keys connected by vertical pushrods to escapements in the back compartment compose lines of text until the operator raises the casting lever and casts a line of metal type – a slug – a shiny silver slug – like a thick razor blade – a slug of a sentence to be arranged by your grandfather and father into pages caged by tightly fastened frames punched later onto newsprint as eulogies of the freshly dead.