Typical Jimmy

He died the other day. It was like his day of birth, but in reverse. Party poppers were pulled. He didn’t want his funeral to be anything less than a joy. Everybody he knew was there. They wanted the cocktail sausages on little sticks, and the vol au vents with that mushroom paste that tastes like birth and death in a sauce. The after party was even more fun than the funeral. He got a great send off. He had a lot of friends, and he’d hosted a lot of parties. He used to joke about when he died. He said it would be the cigarettes that killed him, and they did. He asked for party tunes to be played on the day. He had it all worked out so nobody would be sad, and they were – but they didn’t show it. It was like a kids’ birthday party. They even had a bouncy castle. What a weird day. If funerals were like that, I’d be eager to go to all of them. Why are most of them held in stuffy churches with stiff services? It’s like they don’t want to make everyone’s mourning period worse; not Jimmy - he had a sense of humour about everything.

In the hospital, he didn’t like the tubes. He said he only liked to get his fluids in a glass with some rocks. They said everything in his body was failing, as it tends to do when you’re on your way out. He just shrugged and laughed it off, making jokes about his organ donation form being rejected. He didn’t have anything anyone wanted, he said. People used their bodies while they were alive, but his was like a worn-out, third hand shoe – it had taken so much humorous use and abuse. I visited in the hospital, but only once. He didn’t want anyone to come onto the ward. He said it stank of shit and he was surrounded by people that needed their nappies changed. He wasn’t quite ready for the new-born stage again. He could turn anything in life into a party, but not on the ward. The nurses tried to liven up the situation and he gave them his usual witty repartee. But there was too much suffering around him. That was the silly fact. He’d be next – unless he could just shake it off like braving a stubbed toe.

When I saw him, he shouted “yeo, what about you?” across the room – the usual Belfast banter. Nobody raised an eyebrow. They must have been used to his volume and enthusiasm by then. He sat with his feet off the bed, like he was ready to run, any minute - not a feeble granny toilet run either; a marathon-worthy sprint to the next county. He told me to sit down and served me some cordial from the overfilled bedside jug. I drank it out of the plastic cup, tasting antiseptic as I did. Whether it was from the cup or coming to my nostrils through the air, I couldn’t tell. It just tasted like a hospital drink – an alcohol-free tipple, like I was at a kid’s birthday party and someone had dropped something in the juice. I asked Jimmy how he was, and he wafted my comment away.

“Let’s talk about something interesting,” he said.

“I have to talk about my symptoms every time they come over with their clipboard. Nobody wants to know anything else.”

“Do you think you’ll get to go home?” I asked him.

“I’ll make sure of it,” he said. “I’m not expiring in this shithole.”

I laughed. Our eyes connected and that familiar twinkle appeared that I knew so well. The party host was still in there. His mind was a million miles ahead of his body, like a motorbike speeding into the distance, leaving a slow driver chugging along far behind. He told me to get out of the place while I could. I had to anyway: the visiting hours were up. They were only an hour long on that ward. They were probably trying not to tire anyone out too much in case they took their final sleep afterwards. By the looks of things, that would have been a favour to most of them.

I left the ward, hearing Jimmy’s distinctive cackle behind me. He was probably chatting up the nurses – looking for the next bit of entertainment. That’s all life was about to him. When he died a week later, I was shocked. I should have seen it coming, but you can never get ready for something like that. He’d checked himself out of hospital before that. He told them if they didn’t remove the tubes, he’d do it himself and it wouldn’t be pretty. He said he had to attend to his affairs, which was code for “fuck hospital; I’m going home.” A friend found him in his house days later, face down on the floor. He looked unrecognisable; he didn’t look like he’d been laughing when it happened.

After the funeral, I got a strange piece of news. He’d left everything to me in his will. His physical possessions didn’t amount to much, but he had a hefty sum stored in the bank. That was a surprise to me; I’d always thought he was a spend-as-you-go type of person. Why he left it solely to me, I’ll never understand, but I didn’t get to jump for joy too soon. I was in mourning, and there was the funeral to attend to. That was the trade off – I got the money, but I had to arrange the whole thing. Still, I was honoured he entrusted it with me. He always said I could throw a party almost as good as his.

Another week passed and I had a knock at the door. I thought it was the postman. I’d ordered a few things I needed, and we always had a yarn at the door when he arrived with the pretty parcels and the bad bills. I was taken aback when I saw who it was. It was a lady I knew that used to hang around Jimmy all the time. He described her as a “funny bird,” and she was. She didn’t have any social skills, but she insisted on always being there. She’d taken a shine to him, and she never accepted it wasn’t mutual. Jimmy could have flirted with a lamppost anyway. His wit didn’t mean anything deeper, but she was sure it did. She looked older than us and frail – the type of person that couldn’t make two knitting needles work together, but impressions are often wrong. She plunged the knife into my chest, repeatedly and without mercy.

“You took everything of his,” she yelled. The usual tremor in her hand and in her voice were gone. She was like a different person.

“You took what he should have left to me.”

She stabbed me until the neighbours saw and called emergency services. Thankfully, they weren’t too far away. They bundled her into the backseat of their car, locking her in, like a kid that needs child locks on the doors. As the wheeled me into the back of the ambulance on a stretcher, I laughed to myself. The whole situation was just so typically Jimmy.