David David was an orphan. An orphan with two first names.
A careless typist at the hospital, a misprint on his birth certificate, and that had been that. He might have been David Smith or David Jones. But now he would be David David forever.
Apart from these singular and unusual facts, David David had lived a thoroughly unremarkable life.
He had grown from a blonde bundle of blue-eyed joy into a thoroughly unremarkable middle-aged man. A bachelor. His hair was thinning and his gut fattening. When he walked down the street he had the appearance of a startled hare, his ginger comb-over flapping in the breeze, as if it were trying to escape, terrified by the youth and vitality of it all, the pep and verve of the suburban streets.
At one time, in a youth that had become a fragrant, pulsing, soap-bubble of a memory (a soap-bubble that threatened to burst and disappear at any moment,) David had wanted to write. In fact, he had written. But there had been something about his two first names that meant they never quite made it onto a dust jacket. Or perhaps he had just not been particularly talented.
At any rate, his hopes and dreams had gone the way hopes and dreams usually do when confronted by a strong dose of reality – that is they had run terrified into the woods, and cowered there. Now they only came out every once in a while, usually coaxed from their hiding place by a large tumbler of liquor and a late night television programme.
Instead, he had become a bookkeeper at a relatively unsuccessful printing factory. And bookkeeping, he soon discovered, involved the wrong sort of books. It was not so much a life choice as a misunderstanding. He was a bad bookkeeper, too. But not so dreadful that anyone thought to sack him and finally put him out of his misery.
When he wasn’t troubled by unfulfilled dreams, David David had troubling coughing fits and troubling indigestion. Life, it seemed, was a heavy meal that didn’t quite agree with him. Yet every morning the sun (mercilessly and without fail) came up on another day he knew would be one long litany of disappointments. In short, David David was an ordinary man. No - less than ordinary. By accident or design, life had taken away his ice-cream cone and thrown it into the dirt. He had become a singularly unimpressive individual, who could hope, at the very most, to slip into the coma of retirement at the end of the decade and eventually pass uneventfully away, perhaps while watching daytime television, with a modicum of grace and dignity. And as little embarrassment as possible. A small and insignificant man – a quiet and unassuming failure.
Or at least that’s how he seemed to other people.
And indeed it’s exactly how his neighbour Mrs Syms, would have described him to her daughter in law, Samantha, had they talked about anything as mundane and ordinary as David David when the young woman came to help the elderly one with the shopping and instead ended up gossiping with her for hours over a cup of strong, cheap tea.
Yet things are rarely what they seem. Every man has a secret. Mrs Syms knew a lot of them, and always hoped they would be more salacious than they were. But no one knew David David’s. Had they known, they would have been shocked. Perhaps even a little disgusted.
It had happened one autumn night, quite by accident.
David David had stayed on in the office later than usual, trying to balance a sheet of figures that wriggled on the page in front of him like so many elusive, perfidious eels.
The printing factory lay silent around him. The huge rollers were quiet on the presses. The factory floor was eerily deserted, swept clean. The spilled ink had been mopped up and the waste paper had been bundled away ready to be pulped, reused and recycled.
Only David David worked on, maddened by the constantly changing totals of the Petty Cash and infuriated by a calculator that seemed to be deliberately obstinate and pig-headed. Its display showed the number 7 and the number 1 as one and the same digit. It had been this way since Margaret had trodden on it with her black high-heeled shoe (she still maintained it had not been malicious, but David knew he was not particularly popular at work.) Now he resisted the urge to tread on the damned thing himself. He knew it would be weeks before management would provide him with a replacement.
Finally, at half past six, when the last bit of colour had drained out of the postage-stamp view of the courtyard from the window above his desk, David packed away his squared paper and pencil stub (even the decrepit calculator) and took his old black coat from the peg by the office door. As he locked the office door, he looked up at the sign that said ‘Accounts Department’ one last time, letting out a sigh of disbelief - or resignation. Shaking his balding pate, he made his way down the stairs to where the dark silhouettes of the printing presses loomed like shipwrecks in the shadowy, cavernous space of the factory’s main hall.
He was walking between the juggernauts, a little fearfully, making his way to the exit when he felt something crunch underfoot.
It was paper.
Waste paper. Hundreds and hundreds of pages of off-cuts. Pages from books that had not passed the factory’s stringent quality control. Sheets and sheets of print that were doomed - on the proverbial literary scaffold - dead paper, waiting to be pulped. There was something about the abandoned sheets, lying limply on the swept tiles of the factory floor, that tugged at his heartstrings. Not quite knowing why he was doing it, David bent down to take a closer look. He leafed through them. Then, glancing around to make sure that he wasn’t being watched, he bundled up the off-cuts and took them home. One hundred loose sheets, neatly tucked up in his briefcase.
When he got home he opened a tin of tomato soup and ate it in front of the television set. He watched the nine o’clock news. All the time with one eye on his briefcase. Finally at half past ten, he pulled out the pages and read one. Then he read another.
David David was riveted. Hooked like a fish at the end of a nylon line.
Every night for a month, he collected waste paper from the factory floor. He took reams and reams home with him. His reading became more than a hobby. It became a kind of compulsion. Something had snapped. He fell in love with the feel of the paper. He fell in love with the endless sentences. He fell in love with the misprints. He felt a kin-ship with these discarded sheets and an affinity for the misspellings. The pages with their misshapen words were like literary orphans, but with David David they had found a home.
Lecturer. LED. Ledge. Ledgerr. A misprinted dictionary page lay next to three paragraphs from a murder mystery: Tommy had finally done it. He had finally murdered the old witch. He had killed her. A single blow to the back of the head, with a sledge hamper. A murder mystery like none David David had ever seen before, with a heinous murderer capable of bludgeoning an old lady to death with a hamper! Pages later, the plot thickened still further when David read: The county is one of the greenest in England. Tommy must have fled the scene and taken refuge in a fine hotel in the country! Where was Tommy, wondered David? Well, since the page that followed was from a misprinted pornographic novel, the reader could never know for sure. But at least David knew that, wherever he was, Tommy was enjoying himself. And well done Tommy - the old lady was probably a money-grabbing old crone.
Just as David was beginning to tire of Tommy’s exploits, he would come upon a page from a diary, or a historical text about architecture in rapidly expanding cities. The plot had taken a sharp left turn. What was going to happen next? Well (on page 3,787) the murky waterways of one of these cities were revealed in: Gruesome Tales of Real Life Killer Fish (though David David was secretly very happy that he only had the title page from that one.)
Sometimes he would find several copies of a single page, with a completely new and wondrous misprint on each one. David David would read every one with a frisson of delight and a thrill of excitement. Each page was wonderful. Unique. Unrepeatable. Unforgettable.
This was the story telling process utterly liberated.
David David couldn’t get enough.
Each night, he gathered the misfits and misprints and carried them home, lovingly cradling the pages in his arms. Promising them they would not be pulped. Telling them they would be safe. When he couldn’t find any cuttings on the factory floor, he searched under the machines. He rummaged around in the bins behind the building. On particularly lean nights, he even found himself clambering into the printers’ disused incinerator, an enormous oven, rusty with age and echoing, like the belly of a beached whale.
He was addicted to the printer’s cast offs. Addicted to unpublished odds and ends. Secret pages that would be viewed by only one reader: David himself. He became addicted to wrong words, words that would never exist, like maritome and hybred; words that challenged the grammarian’s protestations that they could not be, by existing, right there on the paper; words that defiantly leapt from the sheets, burned too brightly and destroyed themselves in their very moment of becoming. Kamikaze vocabulary and unheard of combinations: Spaghetti and meatbales. Romero and Juliet. Mortarbeard. Narathon. Iron lunge. Talint. Fuseloge. Cattheter. Winnie the poo. Nancy was wearing a pink gymnastics leopard.
Soon, his collection of orphaned sheets began to spiral out of control.
At first, he set aside one shelf beside his bed for his never-ending story. Then a cupboard; then four cupboards and a chest of drawers; his bedroom; and the spare room; and the cupboard under the sink; then the oven; the dishwasher; his fridge. And when he discovered that his basement was already full (he’d forgotten he had already thought of that) he had to sacrifice the lounge, and even a small magazine rack in the only free room left in the house – the bathroom. His home became an almost uninhabitable library of nonsense, an enormous, suburban beat poem.
David David lived a life lined in paper. A life that seemed, for the first time since his 10th birthday, more like a gift than a list of miseries; a life gift-wrapped in unpublished literature; a diamond in the rough, a gem. He was David David the failure, the orphan, the unsuccessful bookkeeper no longer. Instead, he had become a sleepless custodian. He was a guardian of the endless pages. A priest who carefully and lovingly pressed each loose printed sheet and held the ironed paper up to the light like a holy shroud (warm as if hot off the press). An antiquary who wrote a page number in the bottom right-hand corner of his priceless artefact and placed it at the top of another pile. His Magnum Opus, a patchwork quilt of stories, grew and grew. The story swamped him.
Mrs Syms was the first to notice that something was not right.
It was Monday morning. Rain and wind were doing their best to dampen the spirits of the diligent housewives and their smug, businessman husbands with their briefcases on the way to work. As Mrs Syms bent down to collect the milk from her front step, a sheet of yellow paper blew through the air and, damp from the rain, stuck to her forehead with a slap. She straightened up and her tightly pursed lips puckered into an O. She flung her arms up into the air, ready to protest at this ill treatment. And then another sheet of paper followed the first. Soon, Mrs Syms had very nearly vanished behind a wall of print, that had engulfed her completely, like a cardboard cyclone.
David David’s monstrous shaggy dog story had finally outgrown the confines of its domestic cage. Paper was spilling from the upstairs windows, cascading through the front door and onto the lawn outside. The wind whipped the pages up into the air until the whole neighbourhood was filled with billowing paper snowflakes.
A conscientious member of the community’s fledgling Neighbourhood Watch scheme stepped away from her twitching curtains and raised the alarm. The authorities were called in. Half an hour later a fire engine and ambulance were on the scene.
Three burly firemen with axes, cut their way through the house full of paper, dicing the words up into manageable chunks, slicing through the thicket of tales as if they were a Sunday roast. Had David been there to see them, he would have screamed at their disregard for his cast-off treasure. He would have put a stop to the senseless carnage.
But David David was not there.
It was evening when they found him. The sun had gone down, briefly lighting up the ugly suburban street. The Close was ablaze with umbers, oranges and - here and there - a hint of scarlet.
David David lay motionless in his bathtub, overflowing with thousands of yellowing pages. He lay there in his underwear, his comb-over unkempt. This middle-aged man, with pale, matchstick legs sticking out awkwardly from a pair of y-fronts (stained, sadly, a little yellow) cut a faintly ridiculous, pathetic figure. He had been reading when he suffered the heart attack. They had to prize the paper from his clenched hands before they bundled him up and carted him away in the back of an ambulance. Now no-one would know that he had been a master archivist and bibliophile, a genius coaxing a literary phoenix out of the cast-off flames. Much less would they read his meandering triumph of bricolage. To the world he would be a hoarder at best. At worst a pervert who had died in his underpants.
‘That’s disgusting,’ was Samantha’s unfeeling verdict when Mrs Syms told her the story over tea, later that week.‘Honestly! In the bath? In his underpants? How disturbed.’
The authorities cleared the pages from David’s pokey house in huge black sacks. One after the other. David David’s living novel. They drove the paper away to the incinerator, where the cast-offs belonged. The words went up in smoke. Nothing but cinders and charred corners left. A tragedy in its own small way.
But it didn’t matter.
Because the story was complete.
David David had been holding it in his hands as he died: the highpoint in a life lived by accident, the final misprint on the final page:
He sat under the veranda. The perfume of the flowers wafted around him. The summer sun gleamed, high up in the sky, a gold coin in an azure infinity above the depths of the Mediterranean Sea. It had been an extraordinary adventure.
THE EMD
A careless typist at the hospital, a misprint on his birth certificate, and that had been that. He might have been David Smith or David Jones. But now he would be David David forever.
Apart from these singular and unusual facts, David David had lived a thoroughly unremarkable life.
He had grown from a blonde bundle of blue-eyed joy into a thoroughly unremarkable middle-aged man. A bachelor. His hair was thinning and his gut fattening. When he walked down the street he had the appearance of a startled hare, his ginger comb-over flapping in the breeze, as if it were trying to escape, terrified by the youth and vitality of it all, the pep and verve of the suburban streets.
At one time, in a youth that had become a fragrant, pulsing, soap-bubble of a memory (a soap-bubble that threatened to burst and disappear at any moment,) David had wanted to write. In fact, he had written. But there had been something about his two first names that meant they never quite made it onto a dust jacket. Or perhaps he had just not been particularly talented.
At any rate, his hopes and dreams had gone the way hopes and dreams usually do when confronted by a strong dose of reality – that is they had run terrified into the woods, and cowered there. Now they only came out every once in a while, usually coaxed from their hiding place by a large tumbler of liquor and a late night television programme.
Instead, he had become a bookkeeper at a relatively unsuccessful printing factory. And bookkeeping, he soon discovered, involved the wrong sort of books. It was not so much a life choice as a misunderstanding. He was a bad bookkeeper, too. But not so dreadful that anyone thought to sack him and finally put him out of his misery.
When he wasn’t troubled by unfulfilled dreams, David David had troubling coughing fits and troubling indigestion. Life, it seemed, was a heavy meal that didn’t quite agree with him. Yet every morning the sun (mercilessly and without fail) came up on another day he knew would be one long litany of disappointments. In short, David David was an ordinary man. No - less than ordinary. By accident or design, life had taken away his ice-cream cone and thrown it into the dirt. He had become a singularly unimpressive individual, who could hope, at the very most, to slip into the coma of retirement at the end of the decade and eventually pass uneventfully away, perhaps while watching daytime television, with a modicum of grace and dignity. And as little embarrassment as possible. A small and insignificant man – a quiet and unassuming failure.
Or at least that’s how he seemed to other people.
And indeed it’s exactly how his neighbour Mrs Syms, would have described him to her daughter in law, Samantha, had they talked about anything as mundane and ordinary as David David when the young woman came to help the elderly one with the shopping and instead ended up gossiping with her for hours over a cup of strong, cheap tea.
Yet things are rarely what they seem. Every man has a secret. Mrs Syms knew a lot of them, and always hoped they would be more salacious than they were. But no one knew David David’s. Had they known, they would have been shocked. Perhaps even a little disgusted.
It had happened one autumn night, quite by accident.
David David had stayed on in the office later than usual, trying to balance a sheet of figures that wriggled on the page in front of him like so many elusive, perfidious eels.
The printing factory lay silent around him. The huge rollers were quiet on the presses. The factory floor was eerily deserted, swept clean. The spilled ink had been mopped up and the waste paper had been bundled away ready to be pulped, reused and recycled.
Only David David worked on, maddened by the constantly changing totals of the Petty Cash and infuriated by a calculator that seemed to be deliberately obstinate and pig-headed. Its display showed the number 7 and the number 1 as one and the same digit. It had been this way since Margaret had trodden on it with her black high-heeled shoe (she still maintained it had not been malicious, but David knew he was not particularly popular at work.) Now he resisted the urge to tread on the damned thing himself. He knew it would be weeks before management would provide him with a replacement.
Finally, at half past six, when the last bit of colour had drained out of the postage-stamp view of the courtyard from the window above his desk, David packed away his squared paper and pencil stub (even the decrepit calculator) and took his old black coat from the peg by the office door. As he locked the office door, he looked up at the sign that said ‘Accounts Department’ one last time, letting out a sigh of disbelief - or resignation. Shaking his balding pate, he made his way down the stairs to where the dark silhouettes of the printing presses loomed like shipwrecks in the shadowy, cavernous space of the factory’s main hall.
He was walking between the juggernauts, a little fearfully, making his way to the exit when he felt something crunch underfoot.
It was paper.
Waste paper. Hundreds and hundreds of pages of off-cuts. Pages from books that had not passed the factory’s stringent quality control. Sheets and sheets of print that were doomed - on the proverbial literary scaffold - dead paper, waiting to be pulped. There was something about the abandoned sheets, lying limply on the swept tiles of the factory floor, that tugged at his heartstrings. Not quite knowing why he was doing it, David bent down to take a closer look. He leafed through them. Then, glancing around to make sure that he wasn’t being watched, he bundled up the off-cuts and took them home. One hundred loose sheets, neatly tucked up in his briefcase.
When he got home he opened a tin of tomato soup and ate it in front of the television set. He watched the nine o’clock news. All the time with one eye on his briefcase. Finally at half past ten, he pulled out the pages and read one. Then he read another.
David David was riveted. Hooked like a fish at the end of a nylon line.
Every night for a month, he collected waste paper from the factory floor. He took reams and reams home with him. His reading became more than a hobby. It became a kind of compulsion. Something had snapped. He fell in love with the feel of the paper. He fell in love with the endless sentences. He fell in love with the misprints. He felt a kin-ship with these discarded sheets and an affinity for the misspellings. The pages with their misshapen words were like literary orphans, but with David David they had found a home.
Lecturer. LED. Ledge. Ledgerr. A misprinted dictionary page lay next to three paragraphs from a murder mystery: Tommy had finally done it. He had finally murdered the old witch. He had killed her. A single blow to the back of the head, with a sledge hamper. A murder mystery like none David David had ever seen before, with a heinous murderer capable of bludgeoning an old lady to death with a hamper! Pages later, the plot thickened still further when David read: The county is one of the greenest in England. Tommy must have fled the scene and taken refuge in a fine hotel in the country! Where was Tommy, wondered David? Well, since the page that followed was from a misprinted pornographic novel, the reader could never know for sure. But at least David knew that, wherever he was, Tommy was enjoying himself. And well done Tommy - the old lady was probably a money-grabbing old crone.
Just as David was beginning to tire of Tommy’s exploits, he would come upon a page from a diary, or a historical text about architecture in rapidly expanding cities. The plot had taken a sharp left turn. What was going to happen next? Well (on page 3,787) the murky waterways of one of these cities were revealed in: Gruesome Tales of Real Life Killer Fish (though David David was secretly very happy that he only had the title page from that one.)
Sometimes he would find several copies of a single page, with a completely new and wondrous misprint on each one. David David would read every one with a frisson of delight and a thrill of excitement. Each page was wonderful. Unique. Unrepeatable. Unforgettable.
This was the story telling process utterly liberated.
David David couldn’t get enough.
Each night, he gathered the misfits and misprints and carried them home, lovingly cradling the pages in his arms. Promising them they would not be pulped. Telling them they would be safe. When he couldn’t find any cuttings on the factory floor, he searched under the machines. He rummaged around in the bins behind the building. On particularly lean nights, he even found himself clambering into the printers’ disused incinerator, an enormous oven, rusty with age and echoing, like the belly of a beached whale.
He was addicted to the printer’s cast offs. Addicted to unpublished odds and ends. Secret pages that would be viewed by only one reader: David himself. He became addicted to wrong words, words that would never exist, like maritome and hybred; words that challenged the grammarian’s protestations that they could not be, by existing, right there on the paper; words that defiantly leapt from the sheets, burned too brightly and destroyed themselves in their very moment of becoming. Kamikaze vocabulary and unheard of combinations: Spaghetti and meatbales. Romero and Juliet. Mortarbeard. Narathon. Iron lunge. Talint. Fuseloge. Cattheter. Winnie the poo. Nancy was wearing a pink gymnastics leopard.
Soon, his collection of orphaned sheets began to spiral out of control.
At first, he set aside one shelf beside his bed for his never-ending story. Then a cupboard; then four cupboards and a chest of drawers; his bedroom; and the spare room; and the cupboard under the sink; then the oven; the dishwasher; his fridge. And when he discovered that his basement was already full (he’d forgotten he had already thought of that) he had to sacrifice the lounge, and even a small magazine rack in the only free room left in the house – the bathroom. His home became an almost uninhabitable library of nonsense, an enormous, suburban beat poem.
David David lived a life lined in paper. A life that seemed, for the first time since his 10th birthday, more like a gift than a list of miseries; a life gift-wrapped in unpublished literature; a diamond in the rough, a gem. He was David David the failure, the orphan, the unsuccessful bookkeeper no longer. Instead, he had become a sleepless custodian. He was a guardian of the endless pages. A priest who carefully and lovingly pressed each loose printed sheet and held the ironed paper up to the light like a holy shroud (warm as if hot off the press). An antiquary who wrote a page number in the bottom right-hand corner of his priceless artefact and placed it at the top of another pile. His Magnum Opus, a patchwork quilt of stories, grew and grew. The story swamped him.
Mrs Syms was the first to notice that something was not right.
It was Monday morning. Rain and wind were doing their best to dampen the spirits of the diligent housewives and their smug, businessman husbands with their briefcases on the way to work. As Mrs Syms bent down to collect the milk from her front step, a sheet of yellow paper blew through the air and, damp from the rain, stuck to her forehead with a slap. She straightened up and her tightly pursed lips puckered into an O. She flung her arms up into the air, ready to protest at this ill treatment. And then another sheet of paper followed the first. Soon, Mrs Syms had very nearly vanished behind a wall of print, that had engulfed her completely, like a cardboard cyclone.
David David’s monstrous shaggy dog story had finally outgrown the confines of its domestic cage. Paper was spilling from the upstairs windows, cascading through the front door and onto the lawn outside. The wind whipped the pages up into the air until the whole neighbourhood was filled with billowing paper snowflakes.
A conscientious member of the community’s fledgling Neighbourhood Watch scheme stepped away from her twitching curtains and raised the alarm. The authorities were called in. Half an hour later a fire engine and ambulance were on the scene.
Three burly firemen with axes, cut their way through the house full of paper, dicing the words up into manageable chunks, slicing through the thicket of tales as if they were a Sunday roast. Had David been there to see them, he would have screamed at their disregard for his cast-off treasure. He would have put a stop to the senseless carnage.
But David David was not there.
It was evening when they found him. The sun had gone down, briefly lighting up the ugly suburban street. The Close was ablaze with umbers, oranges and - here and there - a hint of scarlet.
David David lay motionless in his bathtub, overflowing with thousands of yellowing pages. He lay there in his underwear, his comb-over unkempt. This middle-aged man, with pale, matchstick legs sticking out awkwardly from a pair of y-fronts (stained, sadly, a little yellow) cut a faintly ridiculous, pathetic figure. He had been reading when he suffered the heart attack. They had to prize the paper from his clenched hands before they bundled him up and carted him away in the back of an ambulance. Now no-one would know that he had been a master archivist and bibliophile, a genius coaxing a literary phoenix out of the cast-off flames. Much less would they read his meandering triumph of bricolage. To the world he would be a hoarder at best. At worst a pervert who had died in his underpants.
‘That’s disgusting,’ was Samantha’s unfeeling verdict when Mrs Syms told her the story over tea, later that week.‘Honestly! In the bath? In his underpants? How disturbed.’
The authorities cleared the pages from David’s pokey house in huge black sacks. One after the other. David David’s living novel. They drove the paper away to the incinerator, where the cast-offs belonged. The words went up in smoke. Nothing but cinders and charred corners left. A tragedy in its own small way.
But it didn’t matter.
Because the story was complete.
David David had been holding it in his hands as he died: the highpoint in a life lived by accident, the final misprint on the final page:
He sat under the veranda. The perfume of the flowers wafted around him. The summer sun gleamed, high up in the sky, a gold coin in an azure infinity above the depths of the Mediterranean Sea. It had been an extraordinary adventure.
THE EMD
