The Ramsgate Guide To Obituary Writing

Harvey Ramsgate fell out of the fire exit and into the London night with an uncharacteristic giggle.

The cigarette was in his hand and lit before he could think about the cool winter breeze nipping at his face. He was too buzzed to feel the cold. Cocaine rattled through his system, riding his blood cells like they were wild horses on a ranch. He blew out smoke, watched it curl into the darkness, floating off down the Thames and disappearing below the faint outlines of ships that seemed to lean against Trinity Wharf on the opposite bank.

Harvey tapped one finger against his thigh in an unsteady rhythm. He was energised by the narcotics, enthused by the night, giddy with the excitement of it all. He took in great gulps of cold air that seemed to cleanse his lungs and dragged at his cigarette again.

He was having a good night, a great night in fact.

Harvey was at London’s 02 Arena, that bulbous behemoth crouching on the London skyline. He had visited the arena every year for the past six years, without once enjoying himself once, until now.

The 02 hosted the annual Local Journalism Awards, an event that had provided Harvey with nothing but misery and disappointment during his career. Last year his editor had joked that Harvey shouldn’t have even bothered turning up and his colleagues had given him the unfortunate nickname “Numbers” because he was always making them up. Harvey had spent six very unhappy, very booze-fuelled and very unsatisfying nights at the 02, his glasses askew, his tie loose, his mouth feeling like an ashtray as he drank and smoked his sulky mood away. Watching on from dark corners and secluded tables as other, more successful, more talented reporters, enjoyed the night and their award.

But not this year. This year things were different.

Harvey was tipped to win. Not just one award, but several. He had grown into quite the writer over the past year. Some would call his rise unexpected, some would call it inexplicable, but everyone would call it meteoric. 

Harvey allowed himself a wide, Colgate-inspired smile. He flicked the cigarette into the black waters of the Thames and watched with some satisfaction as the small orange tip disappeared into the darkness.

“Quite the fucking writer,” he said to himself, grinning and taking a hip flask out of his jacket pocket, tugging at its contents greedily. He could still taste the cocaine at the back of his throat. The buzz was stimulating, like a relaxant that somehow focused the mind, honed it down to a razor-sharp point. But the taste was chemical hell and reminded Harvey of the heinous polish his mum had used to stop him biting his fingernails as a child. The memory made him grimace.

Harvey reached inside his jacket to retrieve a small baggie of cocaine. He licked his finger, dipped, and rubbed the small white granules against his gums. He couldn’t afford to lose his buzz, especially with the amount he had drunk tonight. He wanted to be sharp for his acceptance speech.

Harvey sniffed and coughed before dramatically raising both hands to the opposite bank as though gesturing to an invisible audience. He glanced sceptically back towards the open fire exit to check that no one else had staggered out into the night with him and then began the speech he had been thinking up for the past few days.

“Thank you, thank you, I am so honoured to accept this award,” he smiled out to the Thames, imagining that a sea of faces beamed back at him, instead of the placid waters. “I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the hard work of my editor Jim Allen at the Evening Star, my wonderful colleagues and, of course, the members of the public who trusted me with their stories.”

He snickered to himself at that last part, thinking of the countless obituaries he had been forced to write, all the long and soppy tributes to dead husbands.

“I shouldn’t have trusted you with my story.”

Harvey spun round, spilling white powder on his suit and cursing as it spread across his lapel like a stain.

The voice was female. Knifing out of the blackness and the eerie shadows about the 02, it had aroused some memories in Harvey. A sense of recognition bloomed in him like the slow rise of smoke. He knew that voice, he knew the owner of that voice and knew them well.

The woman strolled out of a patch of shadow which lay across the bank like a curse, cast out by the low pro of a moored ship.

Harvey didn’t recognise the slender figure or the bubble gum pink dress, to begin with. It was not to his taste and he immediately made a mental note of the cheap golden jewellery about the woman’s wrists and the large hooped earrings which reminded him of a stereotypical chav. Then he caught sight of the face. Who knew who this was.

She had lost weight. A lot of weight. Her eyes were hooded and the skin about her cheeks pinched and tight. Even with a full face of makeup, Harvey thought she looked strangely thin and unkempt.

He squinted into the semi-darkness, drinking in that face. “What the fucking hell are you doing here?”

She smiled. It was a smile Harvey had not seen on her face before. It wasn’t a smile of happiness or pleasure. It was that dangerous and vicious smile people reserved for true malice and Harvey knew, in that split second, between the drunken weight in his head, and the cocaine-induced thumping of his heart, that he was about to be on the receiving end of that malice. He was in deep shite. He was about to pay a high price for his success in the media world.

She raised a shaking hand. Clasped between her slender fingers, under the heavy guard of her fake acrylic nails, was a handgun. She held it like she might brandish a stick at someone, grasping the weapon like it didn’t belong in her unstable grip.

But that didn’t really matter because the barrel was pointed right at Harvey Ramsgate who suddenly found himself staring down that black hole, that void that could, and would, swallow him up.

As a writer, Harvey couldn’t help but feel that he should have something rather profound and prophetic to say as he stared into that bullet-laden abyss.  But he could only manage two words, and he was sure that neither of them would win him any accolades when it came to the annals of history.

“Oh fuck.”

*

Harvey had always been an average writer.

Journalism had started as one big adventure when Harvey Ramsgate BA had strolled into the offices of the North-West Evening Star as a fresh-faced 21-year-old. He had birthed and harboured strong aspirations of becoming a crime reporter when he was a teenager and had always imagined himself hitting high profile court cases, pressing police officers at the scene of horrific murders and running investigations into corrupt coppers.

But journalism was changing rapidly. Newspapers were like corpses about to be rolled into their graves. They stood on a precipice of non-existence and their only saviour was cheap and fast online articles that could attract shed loads of views to fuel advertising revenue.

“We have got to mainline traffic into our online material,” the Evening Star’s editor Jim Allen had told Harvey, the very first time he had set foot in that gloomy and cobweb choked newsroom. Jim Allen’s office had reminded Harvey of the many visits he had taken to his headmaster while at school, watching over an imposing desk as an older, balder and more self-righteous man prattled on while he felt the slow slide of boredom wash over him.

“We don’t sell papers anymore, we need stuff that grabs people’s attention, tabloid shit, loud headlines, you know the stuff,” the editor had clasped his hands together like he was about to perform some sort of unpleasant surgery before speaking with a rasp in his throat that told Harvey he had once been a heavy smoker. “I need you to write obituaries, well, tributes, like obits but more gritty, more tabloid-esque; ‘Dads crazy nut cancer battle ends’ ‘Mum of two dies after falling over dog downstairs,” Jim had waived his hand like those headlines would fall out of the sky and land at Harvey’s work station each day. “That kind of stuff. That’s going to be your role.”

And so Harvey had become a milkmaid for tragedy. He milked the tears of those who had lost husbands and sons and fathers and mothers and sisters. He used the tears as ink and wrote blaring, exaggerated and clickbait stories which the readers of the Evening Star lapped up.

And Harvey very rapidly became bored with his work.

His old journalism tutors had once told him that no day was the same in the media world. But Harvey quickly found that writing obituaries and tributes were a monotonous and repetitive business.

He was almost always talking to women who had lost their husbands. That was the overwhelming majority of people willing to give a tribute. Women were more open with their emotions, more willing to talk, more eager to advertise the life and times of their recently deceased, to blare them out like a siren.

For him, every interview started the same. He would ask the inane opening question; “Tell me, what was Darren like?” He would get a deep sniff by way of reply followed by a long exhale, the mourner holding back tears over the phone, breathing a crackle of static down the line. Then they would launch into a diatribe, the likes of which Harvey had heard a hundred times before.

“They were so kind... so well-liked... they would talk to anyone... give people in need their last penny.”

And the absolute worst one, the generic phrase he hated hearing the most, the one that made him grind his teeth down the phone; “I wish you could have met them.”

Harvey felt the absolute opposite whenever he heard that phrase trotted out by a sobbing wife. It made him want to hold the receiver like a megaphone and yell into the decimated earpiece: “Well I don’t, sister, your soporific, frankly fucking boring now dead husband doesn’t interest me in death and he would have bored me to tears in life, meeting him would have been a nuisance to me.”

But he never did.

Although he had built up an unending cauldron of bubbling hatred for his job, Harvey wasn’t bad at it. Although he wasn’t particularly good at it either. No one won awards for writing about dead husbands and cancer victims. He had occasionally harboured hopes of winning some meagre accolade at the Local Journalism Awards but he never came close to winning and the more his career droned on into insignificance the more Harvey came to find his job repulsive.

Soon it became all too easy for Harvey to sit with the telephone held close to one ear and listen as a grieving widow sobbed down the line. They were passionate, sad, at times angry, at times resigned, but always, unequivocally, vulnerable. And Harvey found that vulnerability was like a portal into their inner thoughts. He teased out the best lines from these women, got them to say the things that would excite, alarm and disgust readers, the buzz words that got them to click on his articles.

Unfortunately, the stories always seemed to end the same; “He found a lump… he felt ill… he was told he had six months to live.”

Harvey yawned his way through most of his interviews, could have sworn he fell asleep in a couple. The women seemed to drone on and on. The same boring fucking journey towards death, the same cancer battle, the same Motor Neurone Disease diagnosis, the same end to heroin addiction.

Harvey found himself hoping that he would never die of cancer. He wasn’t particularly afraid of death but he couldn’t stand the idea of an obituary, or tribute as Jim Allen put it, much like the ones he wrote for a living, going into the paper in his memory. He could just imagine the terrible picture his mother would choose for the paper to use, the faceless future wife who would gush over his meagre life achievements and moan that life wasn’t fair. At times he saw an absent child, who looked weirdly like his younger brother when he was a toddler, tottering around and asking about “Daddy.” The thought made him shudder like a chill air had run down his spine.

It scared him, it terrified him, it disgusted him. Because that was the truth of all these sordid and sycophantic dripping tributes, the obituaries millions of people poured over in local papers up and down the country.  If you were so unimportant that the announcement of your death needed to be translated through a twisted piece for your dull local rag, then your life had been wasted and Harvey believed that with all his heart.

Harvey had almost resigned himself to a life of inadequacy in the media world. He would continue for a couple more years, throw in the towel and join a PR agency somewhere. The money would be slightly better and the workload would be less. He spoke to PR representatives every day; they worked at a speed that would rival glaciers for lethargy and he wanted a piece of that.

His plans were all laid out. That was until he spoke to Jessica Price.

“Hello Jessica, it’s Harvey Ramsgate here, from the Evening Star?”

Harvey heard only static in response, the shallow breathing of the widow on the other end of the line, searching her grief-stricken memory for some semblance of his name.

“I’m calling you about your husband Lee?”

“Oh yes, hi,” her voice came back at him, light and airy, almost husky. It felt like a voice he had heard a thousand times before, the tragic voice, the put-on voice. The one that said: “I promise I’m sad, I’m grieving, I have to show you that I’m grieving.”

Jessica’s story was no different to a hundred Harvey had written into obituaries before.  She had met her husband Lee at a bar and fell in love. He was a carpenter but loved his motorbike, they had a kid, got married and lived together for twenty happy years. Lee felt sick, Lee was diagnosed, Lee trekked some hill in Wales for charity, Lee fucking died and everyone was sad at the funeral. It was the usual crap. It was what Harvey had expected.

But what Harvey hadn’t expected from Jessica was for her to be so malleable. He could get almost anyone to tell him roughly what he wanted. He had got doting mothers to say they wished they had died in the car crash which killed their son. Got distraught wives to admit that the death of their husbands had “destroyed them.”  Phrase it right and his question could foreshadow the answer he sought.

But Jessica was something else. She begged to be manipulated. She had melted into Harvey. She was putty in his clumsy hands. Harvey felt as though he had sculpted with this woman, made her perform abstract ballet with a word. She was so easy. There was no other word for it. The bitch purred down the phone, practically told him everything.

Harvey had expected the article to be the end of it. But a day after the tribute was published he actually met Jessica Price, face to face. It was the first time he had met one of his many grieving widows in person, and not just over the phone.

Jessica actually turned up to the office, a champagne bottle in hand, her face dolled up like a cheap tart. Harvey remembered the plastic nails, the short, low cut dress, the way she had looked at him with a strange wide-eyed adoration. Harvey had been stunned.

Coming all the way to a shitty industrial estate to thank him? For an article? He usually got an email or a text following the publication of his work and they were hardly polite at the best of times. Usually, he got complaints, that his work hadn’t been sensitive enough, that he had used the wrong pictures, mentioned the wrong details.

He remembered being so surprised by Jessica’s presence that he could hardly say anything as he accepted the bottle from her. He knew he must have looked like a simpleton, as he stared, his mouth half-open, holding the champagne like it was a bomb, as Jessica chatted away, thanking him for the article, telling him how good it was.

“You don’t look how I expected,” she giggled and suddenly Harvey was jolted from his stupor.

“I hope that’s a good thing,” he managed to reply.

She laughed, “Yes it is… well, I better be off.”

She had turned to go, her high heels almost getting caught in the carpet when a rather malicious thought blossomed like a blood bubble in Harvey’s devious little mind.  The words were out of his mouth before the questions of morality and ethics could even feature.

“I can’t drink this alone, you know.” It was a bold move and Harvey was sure he had used the same line before, to varying effect.

“No?”

“No.”

“Do you want to...?

“Sure.”

“I’m free tonight?”

And it was that easy. Too easy for Harvey.

He had found Jessica much more attractive without the thick layer of makeup. She had soft auburn hair that fell in lazy ringlets and he remembered wrestling each curl about his fingers and sighing into her soft pale skin. He remembered, rather vividly, her laugh, her smile, the way she held on like she didn’t want him to let go. Not in a way that leaks from the thrills of passion or the grasping pleasure of the moment but from desperation, from the depths of sadness. She didn’t just want Harvey, she needed him. He was her surrogate husband, he was that dead fucker’s substitute and she clung to Harvey like he was a life raft on the high tides. The Titanic had sunk and she had grabbed hold of the first piece of rubble that had floated by. And that piece of rubble had been Harvey Ramsgate.

It wasn’t long before Jessica told Harvey some rather unsavoury things about her now-dead husband.  How his niceties had sometimes ebbed away when he was angry. How his anger could go from mild to nightmarish in the time it took to drop a glass, or forget an appointment, or challenge an order. How that nightmarish anger had resulted in him blacking Jessica’s eye on more than one occasion.

She had been stupid enough to indulge Harvey’s questions, stupid enough to even show him and then send him pictures of her injures, stupid enough to not realise Harvey was recording her every word.

When Lee Price, newly dead husband, was outed as a woman-beater in an online article by the Evening Star, Harvey Ramsgate suddenly found himself at the centre of a movement of women who were not only lauding his journalism skills but touting him as a feminist figure of justice. He had dared to call out an abuser who just happened to be deceased. Harvey had said that tragic death did not abstain him from being held to account and Harvey was placed on a pedestal for doing so.

Harvey got away with this for several reasons. Several reasons that seemed to slide into place without Harvey really noticing, like a press stud that clicked beneath the pressure of a casually placed thumb.

You couldn’t libel the dead. Journalism was a shaky raft that was buffeted and brutalised by the choppy waters of defamation law but the dead just didn’t feature there. You couldn’t libel the dead. Full-stop. Harvey had evidence, Harvey had testimonies and Harvey also had a woman who wouldn’t dare rat on him.

Jessica had been angry. Catatonically angry. Harvey had never heard someone make the volume on his mobile phone blare like the feedback on a microphone before but Jessica had managed it.

“You fucking, utter bastard! You sick cunt, I can’t fucking believe you would fucking do this!” was the first sentence that came out of her mouth before a diatribe of swear words and threats came cascading Harvey’s way. She was so angry that Harvey could hear her cast around for more swear words to say like there weren’t enough available to her. “I’m telling your fucking editor, I’m calling my fucking solicitor, I’m reporting you to IPSO, I’m going to-“

But Harvey had just smiled, and, rather calmly for him, reminded Jessica that, if she were to do all those things, she would have to admit to some wrongdoing of her own. Not legal wrongdoing but social wrongdoing. Harvey remembered when he was twelve and he had dumped his first girlfriend by text. It had seemed such an innocent thing to do at the time but then the entire female population of his year had descended on him like a pack of wolves and he had known that, not for the last time, he had committed a social sin, broken an unwritten social agreement.

Jessica had also broken one of those rules. She had jumped into bed with Harvey just weeks after her husband had died. That was like jumping into Lee’s grave and spilling cold sick over his lifeless body. His family and friends, her in-laws, her teenage son, they wouldn’t take too kindly to finding out what she had done.

“You’ll be a fucking pariah,” Harvey sneered down the phone, enunciating each syllable of the final word like he was chewing through the letters. “You will be the slut who jumped into bed with the first man she laid eyes on after her husband died. And people won’t feel much sympathy when they realise that you were stupid enough to tell a journalist what Lee did.”

Harvey heard Jessica’s heavy breathing down the line before her voice cracked with tears, the ebbing and flowing of them crackling like static, the sniffs coming in between choking gasps of sadness.

“I hate you,” she whispered.

Harvey had scoffed at that. People hated you for much less in the media world, he might as well get a good story out of it. “I’ve done you a favour, you look like a brave survivor of domestic abuse,” he replied.

“I just shat on my husband’s memory,” she sobbed. “He wasn’t a bad guy I didn’t want people to see that side of him.” But for all her complaining and sobbing and crying, which Harvey couldn’t fucking stand, Jessica did not rat him out. He had got her. If she blabbed then she became the widow who spread her legs.

Jessica was only the first.

Beatrice was next, Beattie to her friends. Beatrice had lost her second husband James (what Harvey delighted in calling a “double fault”) following a long and painful three-year struggle with Motor Neurone Disease. Now Harvey Ramsgate couldn’t compete with most good looking men but he could compete with a man who had lost the sensation in his dick months before he finally copped it.

It was easy to seduce Beattie.

She was a stately, upper-class older woman who wouldn’t have looked out of place flanking the Duchess of Cambridge. She had thick, blonde hair, long slender legs and bright, vicious eyes that seemed to look into you and not at you. She had made her money as a yuppie in the 80s stock market and was still living off her self-made millions.

But even that fierce bitch couldn’t say no to Harvey. Especially after he had written such a beautiful piece about James. And it was beautiful. It was a work of fucking art. He had weaved that tribute out of gold, painting each word like it was a renaissance picture. And when he suggested meeting Beatrice in person for a follow-up, she couldn’t say no. She physically couldn’t.

It transpired that Beattie’s husband had also worked in the stock market, in fact, he had run a very small, very lucrative and very illegal boiler room selling dud stocks to dropouts and students over the phone. Beatrice laughed about her deceased, called him a “wild child of the city” and proceeded to show Harvey pictures of James taking cocaine at office parties.

And so it continued.

Next was Heather, a single mum of five, her husband died of renal failure. Then came Konnie, a desperate business owner left in the lurch by a boyfriend who died in a car accident, and Charlotte, who watched her partner slowly fade away after a double lung transplant failed to stave off his debilitating pulmonary hypertension.

Harvey was careful to pick his moments, sometimes he didn’t even bother writing a tribute and just skipped to the part where he extracted an exclusive story from his widows before diving headlong into the scoop.

Sometimes the widows offered up a scoop of their own. Admitting to cheating on their now deceased husbands, admitting that they had wanted to leave them during their illness, one even told Harvey that she had run illegal sex parties in the family home when her husband was away getting cancer treatment. Of course, these stories opened Harvey up to libel cases but he always had that one ace in the hole; that if these women ever blabbed, he would make the social world of these women crumble around their ears, that he would reveal something that would make their nearest and dearest look down on them with contempt.  

Jim Allen never suspected any wrongdoing and, even if he had, Harvey was convinced the editor would have carefully ignored it. Before too long Harvey was his main man. He was getting massive hits, he was getting exclusive stories and he was even attracting the attention of national papers. Each morning the fat and balding editor, who reminded Harvey strangely of Elma Fud from Looney Tunes, would poke his head from round his office door, tip Harvey a wink and then say, in front of the entire newsroom: “Ice Cream’s here, Ice Cream ladies and gentleman, he loves a scoop.”

For Harvey “Ice Cream” was certainly a better nickname than “Numbers.”

The Evening Star sold more of Harvey’s stories to national tabloids then the rest of the office combined and soon he was being tipped for promotion and a shed load of awards.

At the ripe old age of twenty-nine, Harvey was within touching distance of a career break.

The awards night at the 02 Academy started as a dream for Harvey.

“You’re going to win, there’s no way you can’t, you’ve become a shit-hot reporter,” his editor was babbling but Harvey took in the words like an addict might breathe in crack smoke, savouring them, getting high off the compliments.

The dinner had tasted sweeter than all six previous awards dinners put together. Harvey had been a sociable and boastful drunk, making everyone laugh, attracting the eye of several big names in the industry. He had been offered coke in the toilets by a prominent feature writer from The Evening Standard and then a very drunk, and very attractive, court reporter from Newcastle had bought him a drink. Everyone had read his work and everyone knew his name, he was a somebody; a famous and successful journalist.

The giddiness of his rise to fame, the G-force of his supersonic journey to the top, was so intoxicating, that Harvey had needed to duck out of the celebrations for a moment, just to take in some fresh air.

But all that success, all the plaudits from his colleagues, all the drinks and drugs and compliments, even the impending award that Harvey could practically feel in his hands, could do little to help him as he stared down the barrel of a gun.

Jessica Price looked him dead in the eye.

Harvey saw her shaking, and tried to convince himself that she didn’t have the stomach to pull the trigger. But the anger and vengeance he saw in her narrowed pupils told him otherwise. She was shaking with adrenaline and Harvey knew it. It was coursing through her, rivers of it would burst from her mouth if she didn’t shoot him soon.

“Jessica come on you can’t-“

“Shut the fuck up,” Jessica brandished the weapon again, her high heels clicking on the tarmac as she readjusted her grip on the pistol. “Just shut your fucking mouth.”

For the first time in his short life, Harvey thought it was best to do just that.

“I’m going to kill you.” Her words seemed to arrive at Harvey’s ears from a long way off like she was speaking from the other end of a long tunnel, each syllable distorted and laden with echoes. “I’m going to kill you and then I’m going to tell all the papers what you did and I’m going to ruin your fucking legacy.”

Harvey’s mouth had gone dry, he absentmindedly felt the lighter drop out of his left hand and clatter to the floor, felt a line of sweat run in a long, warm streak down from his armpit to the waistband of his trousers. “No,” he whispered hoarsely. “No please Jessica-“

Jessica cocked the gun. That single metallic click seemed to render every other sound in the universe non-existent. Life was a vacuum. Only Harvey and the barrel of that gun were important and only that metallic click stood between him and his mortality.

Jessica grinned, briefly, before she took the shot. Harvey guessed that she wanted to have the final word. Women often did.

“Don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll get a good obituary.”

*

Did you enjoy The Ramsgate Guide To Obituary Writing? Then why not check out one of Dom’s other short stories? Maybe his micro-fiction collection Dark Times or his published piece The Right Honourable?