After Arnold had gotten word of his own death things could only go down hill. He wasn't even Ill; one day he settled before his computer screen, opened social media and scrolled through a veritable flood of tributes and reminisces from people who crawled out of his present and distant past to fill comment boxes on Facebook and Twitter. On his own Facebook wall he read 57 RIPs, from well-wishers, and counting.
While Arnold made himself a filter coffee in his East Dulwich basement flat bought at a time when property was cheaper and the area he lived in comfortably 'down-to-earth' and not yet apeing a village in Provence, with it's bijou cafes, power-mummies and the children Tabitha Taser and Tarquin Taser, and passive-agressive high-achievers but a working class borough of South-East London - for an instance the edges of his own physical being shuddered, momentarily, as though, like the famous man prodded by a million fingers of a million admirers, eventually liquifying him, in one single day Arnold had begun, in his mind's eye, to move out of focus.
In the 1980s and 1990s, sets and subsets had merged, each seeking in each other a supposed move up some imaginary social ladder. The Brockley set found parity with the Greenwich crowd, the Greenwich with the East Dulwich, the East Dulwich with the Camberwell Grove set; however, none could quite penetrate the hallowed higher ground and higher financial status of Blackheath and Dulwich Village.
Like interlocking and interchangeable electric eels in a selective soup, the groups mingled and merged in a number of mind-bogglingly self-selective crush zones; comedy clubs, poetry cellars, Eastern European Gypsy Evenings, Bread Tasting Garden parties, concerts, festivals, out of the way restaurants and distinguished one from the other, seasonally, to mark oneself out from the crowd that saw itself selective and which, unlike Scandinavia was bound together, in the main, by the wrong kind if snow.
Rock n Roll deaths were not uncommon and following in the wake, and at the actual wake, of one who had overdosed on narcotics it was not uncommon to find traces of the very same narcotic, in specks and lines around at the location at which the bereaved gathered in a chorus of sniffles and shuffling which had little to do with tears. An alcoholic demise was invariably celebrated in the pub which had merrily contributed to the wet-brained death of the recent cause-celebre and on online fanzines the wider community, in a jamboree of schadenfreude, put the boot in. 'Failing comedian, wasn't he!' 'Last gig terrible, no act, drunk', 'Arsehole! 'thought he died years ago'. At the near-end of their own failed careers it seemed Arnold, as an alternative comedian had somehow slipped from being laughed with to being himself the object of ridicule. 'Loser!'. Comedy fanzines high-lighted his contribution to comedy greats and even credited him, in his day with being the originator of a whole genre but, in the same breath they, strangers and some so-called friends and acquaintances alike knitted at the guillotine of his alleged death. 'Fucking talentless pisshead', a former friend and club promoter wrote.
In the beginning someone had posted an enquiry, an enquiry that hinted heavily at death as reason for online absence, albeit a brief one, and within two comment boxes of the original text Arnold went from present tense to past tense; that someone who ad written the insidious post had followed a young lady to her European homeland, broken the umbilical cord to his London gang in a shower of confetti, only to, months after separate and divorce, finding himself an exile d'amour, in Lichtenstein. In exile he had sought to elevate his own miserable series of disastrous romances and take a shot in the dark enquiring after one of the gang who showed, early on, public signs of hubris and addiction in equal measure to constitute an ingredient for career suicide in a distant future it was now ripe to inquire into.
'Where's Arnold? Haven't seen him around?. Has anyone heard from him?'
'What's happened?!'
'Heard he was dead'
This short flourish of Facebook posts Arnold himself had observed in horror, were to be the catalyst, from which a death-by-a-thousand-pernicious-needles would lead to...well, his actual death on the Arts and Crafts verandah on The Conservation Society's sofa.
Seated with his coffee he scrolled from the first genuine snow drift of concern to the full annihilating avalanche, from queries, to conjecture, from uncertainty to confirmation and dead-certainty in the blink of an eye; dead, here being the operative word.
Arnold thought of going out but paused, he had noticed that his local organic greengrocer had joined the speculative fray along with the landlord of his local pub, with a litany of condolences and somehow, later that day and later in the week and following months, each time his spirits failed him at his front door, his coat half on, his keys dangling from his right hand.
