Dry Humour

Music List:

"Harbour Reflections" from Southwold Sonatina by James Rae

Mv. II: Andante from Poulenc's Sonata for Two Clarinets

Ligeti, Requiem, Mv. II: Kyrie

Berio Sequenza III for Female Voice

Content Warning:

Mental Illness, Suicide Theme, Menace

Transcript

Dry Humour

One rainy Thursday, Oliver Suchworth had an idea. The idea came and made itself known to him quite unexpectedly, as he sat watching the rain falling on the leafless garden, leaving many drops and tracks on the panes of the French windows. He stared at the sturdy boughs of the trees. A freight train passed through the village with a distant rattling thunder and a more distant blast of its horn. On the patio, where the rain puddles were swelling into pools, he observed two defunct units: the forlorn cube of the recently extricated dishwasher, and what was left of an old light-blue ride-on car which Oliver used to sit in and pretend to drive when he was a little boy. He was twenty-nine now, still living at home with his parents.  

            Over the last three years, he had registered accounts with five different dating apps but hadn’t had much luck. Over time he had developed a hatred for dating apps, for the false and intangible aura around each hopeful, beatific face, the reduction of complex lives to a series of facts, measurements, statements, and caveats; the epidemic of bot-infiltration (it was a source of further self-loathing that he wasn’t always able to tell the difference between counterfeit and genuine profiles); and the corporate, calculated monetisation of loneliness, the scheme concealed behind those cheery exclamations and updates and administrator messages written in that forced cadence of affability. 

            With all this in mind, Oliver began to action his idea. He opened Tinder, pressing his thumb to the white, round flame, and entered the Profile section. He recognised with immense and familiar displeasure, his stern, stupid face, and deleted the three images without a moment’s hesitation. 

Oliver had issues. Out of pride or perhaps laziness he pretended that he didn’t but he knew, not especially deep down, that he had unresolved psychological problems. Though he believed he could from others, he could not hide from his parents his anger management issues, his extreme mood swings- (most likely undiagnosed Bipolar II), his worsening alcoholism, his diagnosed but refuted autism, and his more recent problem with clutter. (Though he could not yet be called a hoarder, the mess in his room- with its spread papers, open books, and un-discarded bottles- was able to suggest psychiatric unwellness with some immediacy).  

            The alterations Oliver made to his Tinder profile were not made in exasperation, or frustration, or rage. He was exasperated and frustrated and angry but these were not the enabling forces behind his act. It was a creative act, it was- in his mind at least- some kind of dry-witted statement. It was a joke, a prank or wind-up if you will, but it contained also a creative, expressive seriousness. It was liberation from bondage, it was a claiming of some long-overdue agency, it was a positive forward step.  

            From his phone’s picture store, he selected and uploaded the most undignifying but revealing image of himself that he could find. It was a picture he had taken of himself deep into one particular, disturbed night about three months ago. Behind his name and his age and the type of relationship he was seeking, squatted his big, pale, bloated face, the cheeks poorly shaven, the hair long and greasy, and- (though he did normally wear them)- no spectacles to hide the dark, nearly purple bags under his eyes.

            He screenshotted the most unappealing pages of his autism diagnosis report and uploaded them to bank of profile images. These were self-portraits of a kind. The screen-grabbed passages were about, variously, Oliver’s habit of voraciously chewing the ends of pens, of spasmodically consuming loose garlic cloves, chillis, and pepper corns, and his various facial and manual tics. In other screen-shotted excerpts his interests were described as specific and rigid; the tempo, modulation, and volume of his speech were all described as normal but his social manner was described as “generally polite but unengaging, abrasive at times”.

            He photographed his disordered, ultra-messy room, choosing an angle that he felt would most candidly reveal its chaos. He made sure that the wine and gin bottles were perfectly visible. 

            He wrote a frank personal statement: Overweight, isolated, twenty-nine-year-old, autistic, alcoholic, manic-depressive hoarder with anger issues who lives with parents seeks sexual intercourse with attractive woman. He added but then subtracted, finding it forced, a cordial Many thanks. Instead, he concluded with: My sense of humour is very dry.  

            He felt happy doing this. This act of gentle vandalism, these amendments which freed him from despair and disappointment. He felt empowered by his act, confident and energetic and vivacious. He wondered if the app administrators would fail to approve his account, if someone might flag it, if it might get hidden or permanently taken down for being out of accordance with the app rules and regulations. Oliver closed the app, and resolved not to open it again until the next day, by which time users would have had the time to encounter his new profile and swipe in the direction they wished. He assumed, naturally, that the majority, perhaps the entirety, of the female users, would send him off to the left, would shoot him into the oblivion of the undesired. But now, even if they didn’t “like” him, his account, bearing its new candid shocks, would at least make an intriguing, disturbing, drily comic impression upon them before they swiped.

He woke reluctantly the next day, typically hungover from his after-midnight drinking. He washed, made tea, and then checked his phone. It was obvious right away that the system was overwhelmed with notifications. He couldn’t believe it. This blizzard of the phrase “liked you”. Liked you, liked you, liked you…he opened up Tinder, (for which he had a Gold subscription), and discovered, in the Likes section, a wallpaper of women’s faces: Becky 22, Bianca 34, Liz 19, Hannah 24, Sabrina 28, Saffy 29… so it went on, a variety of ages, skin tones, ethnicities, hair styles, eye colours, and bust sizes: twenty-nine likes. Twenty-nine! One for every year he had been alive. Oliver was stunned dumb with incredulity. In all his life, he had never been so surprised. 

He left his cluttered room after about twenty minutes, after twenty minutes of joyous stasis during which he had sat, unmoving, inside this strange, unreal moment, not wishing to do anything to even minimally disrupt the effect it was able to have over him. On the landing, he passed his father. He greeted his father. No reply came back from the sad, severe face. Oliver watched, amazed, as his father climbed the second set of stairs to the third storey of the house and disappeared into the silence there. 

Mother left for work. For nearly three months, Oliver had seen nothing but the back of her head.

His mother would not return until after dark, his father would not come downstairs until dinnertime. The house became Oliver’s. But he was restless, newly untethered. He decided to go out for a brisk walk. He wasn’t the sort to go out for walks of any kind, let alone brisk ones. The last of his legendary, languid mopes along the river was nearly four years ago. It was a piece of advice he had often been given: Go for a walk. Get up and go for a walk. Until now, it was advice he had never taken. But, now that things were going his way, he was more than happy to oblige.

His excursion began ordinarily enough. He walked out into the taut-strung quiet, the great sky as white and clear as snow. The last leaves, belated in their brown and yellow expirations, were finally detaching and falling to the earth. Oliver watched them fall. One, another, another, each not a moment too soon.   

The village revealed itself in successive impressions, its streets and features and corners and buildings. Everything’s familiarity was newly charged with some foreign, electric life. Oliver looked up, all the way up, to the roofed top of the church tower, where the bells were hidden, unsecret. He watched as crow after crow, black and impudent, hassled the tower. Perhaps they were after something inside it, something just out of reach.       

Oliver walked further. His phone was heavy and certain in his pocket. He took it out every so often and looked at it, gazed with disembodied wonder at the gallery of faces, all of whom had “liked” him. So inexplicable, so inconceivable! He didn’t try to explain it, he didn’t try to make sense of it. That his honesty had proved winningly attractive seemed too unlikely an explanation. Maybe it was his humour, its dry darkness, that the women had responded to. 

He walked on and the village disappeared, its walls and its gables- like frozen, dismayed faces- all fell away, revealing marsh and water. Mist was gathering. It clouded the margins, made more uncertain where mudflats ended and the water’s edge began, where the water ended and the distant hills began, where land and sky were divided. The mists continued creeping, bestial, multiplying. Soon the other side of the river was completely invisible, and the river itself became an improbable mass, its sailing shelduck and swans as fictive as extinct or imagined species. He saw a cormorant. He saw it, then it dove down for fish, disappearing into the steaming water. Then it came back up again, nothing wriggling in the hold of its sharp beak. Oliver saw no egrets, no herons, perched or in flight. In the other direction, in contrast to such avian blacks, he saw a white horse, galloping free, in a green meadow. How, at this time of year, could a meadow be so green?   

Oliver walked, kept on walking, showing no sign of stopping, of resting or turning back. He was resolved to walk out, all the way, out as far as the place where the land ended in a narrow sandy spit, where the mouth of the river opened into the supreme, majestic wideness of the sea. He walked, following the widening throat of the river. The pale sunlight should have cast Oliver’s shadow, a long, lonely shadow on the dead reeds. There was no shadow walking with him. 

And, very very gradually, Oliver became aware of a hum. A high, chorded, bee-like hum. He looked behind. The village, unreached by the grey mists, was already a long way away, the bell-tower of the church, still minutely hassled by groups of crows, measured the distance between knuckle and nail. A visible distance away, ten, maybe fifteen minutes behind him on the bluish path, there was a mob. Oliver stood his ground, amazed. He watched as this newly assembled mob approached, following in his wake, looming towards him with mysterious, ominous purpose. It did not take him long to be able to tell that the membership of the mob was entirely female. They came closer, forming a double-file column where the path contracted. They were young women mostly, about his age, up to ten years younger, up to five years older. They were not bellowing or clamouring. They were singing, they were singing in long, calm, held chorus. High, shimmering voices, beautiful faces. 

For whatever reason, it was immense terror that Oliver felt, immense panic. The long mob of women were between him and the village. Closer they came; as they came closer, the great cry of their many knit voices intensified and loudened in Oliver’s ears. There was still a fair amount of space between him and the amassed women, five minutes at least. He turned and ran, towards the mist, towards the white darkness ahead, towards the angelic sulphur, the vapour. Towards the spit, the wide sea. 

He ran. He was hyperventilating, sore and aching, but something propelled him forward. He threw his phone in the water- (a kind of suicide). Why he did this he had no idea. Perhaps he surmised that the phone was the pin which tethered his pursuers to his body, his soul, his flight. 

There was a brief gap in the mist. He looked behind him again. They were all hot on his heels, on his tail, predatorily closing the gap. He heard voices whispering at him from the water. Faces framed in long, thick rotted hair, and wide, waving, barnacled hands, and long long arms of the palest blue rose up from the water and made imploring motions to him as he passed. 

Long before the spit, he fell to his knees. He sank to the ground with exhaustion. He resigned himself to what was coming, whether reward or punishment. Mists boxed him, thickened around him. The figures approached, many, choral, perfumed. A drowning multitude enclosed and sealed and smothered him, liquid and demented.   

In the village, all was quiet. Quieter than usual. The Suchworth house was as quiet as the grave. Oliver’s room was empty, completely empty. Completely.