Driving Jarvis Ham

I imagine some people would think I was nosy. You should never read other people’s private stuff. Especially diaries. Apart from anything else, you might find out things about people you’d rather not know about them. No shit Sherlock. Now you tell me.

As Jarvis’s manager though, it didn’t seem unreasonable to me that I should be entitled to read my client’s memoirs. And it’s memoirs that I imagine Jarvis would have liked to think that his collection of crap amounted to. Not a diary. Diaries were for teenage girls. The Memoirs of Jarvis Ham would be a seminal work of non-fiction that would one day be compiled, put into chronological order, published by Penguin or Faber and Faber and serialised in the Sunday papers. It would be read by a million Jarvis Ham fans and made into a Hollywood movie starring Tom Cruise with Jarvis himself modestly taking a cameo role as his own father. The Jarvis Ham memoirs would be a big fat doorstep of a book with black and white photographs. All it needed was some idiot to make sense of it all and put it into chronological order.

I opened a window to let the funk out of the car and I pulled slowly away from the Ham and Hams Teahouse and drove up Fore Street. We passed the ladies hairdressers: called simply, Mary, where both Jarvis and I had had our very first professional haircuts on a Saturday morning; when Mary would cut the hair of the young sons and grandsons of her more regular female customers.

We used to think there was something space age about the big hydraulic chairs at Mary, the way they moved up and down and the noise they made when they did so. The big hairdryers seemed pretty sci-fi too. Sitting in those big hydraulic space chairs we watched the old women in the mirror, reading their magazines with their heads drying inside what we imagined might have been space helmets or perhaps some kind of brain sucking gizmos, and for a while we believed that Mary and her customers were from another planet – which of course they were.

Next door to Mary there were two estate agents: a disproportionate amount for such a small village. When the tourists were full of tea and jam and clotted cream from the Ham and Hams Teahouse they’d waddle up Fore Street to look in the estate agents’ windows. They were the only people in the village who could afford to buy anything advertised there.

At the top of Fore Street was the shop that sold everything else, from baked beans to condoms and everything in between. In the summer months the pavement outside the shop would be taken up with flip-flops and inflatable dinghies, and then during the tourist drought of winter they’d put out the Christmas trees and dancing Santas. Next to the shop there was a red telephone kiosk and a small post box on a stick. It was the one hundred and twenty-third building in the street, hence its piss your pants clever name: 123 Fore Street.

As I drove up Fore Street I stuck my head out of the window and breathed in the aromas of fresh baked bread and scones coming from the Ham and Hams Teahouse. I inhaled the powerful chemicals of the curly perms and demi-waves wafting out from under the astronaut helmets at Mary and the Hugo Boss on the cheeks and chins of the apple-faced young men who worked in the estate agents. If it were winter there would have been the scent of pine from the Christmas trees outside 123 Fore Street. But it was the end of summer and as I drove past I could smell the inflatable alligators and dinghies cooking in the August sun. I loved the smell of Fore Street in the morning. It smelled like victory.

I drove over a bump in the road and Jarvis’s head bounced off the window.

‘Are we there yet?’ he said. He wasn’t joking. It was one of his favourite car journey games: to repeatedly ask me whether we were there yet until I eventually lost my temper. Oh how we’d both laugh. This time though, Jarvis thought we might actually already be there yet. We’d been driving for less than five minutes.

‘Not quite,’ I said.

‘If there’s a shop,’ he said mid yawn, ‘I need to get some things.’ And then he flicked his standby switch and he was fast asleep again.

Turning right at the top of Fore Street we drove past a church. There was a sign outside the church that read, ‘Come Inside, the Holy Water’s Lovely’. Hilarious. That was one of mine. If we’d driven in the other direction we would have passed a different church. The sign outside that church would have been ‘They don’t call Him God for nothing’. That was mine too. It’s a stupid job but someone’s got to do it. I also write jokes for ‘luxury’ Christmas crackers and ice-lolly sticks and the fortunes in novelty fortune cookies – stuff like ‘This fortune will self destruct in five seconds’ and ‘Go home, your house is being burgled’. And here I am critiquing Jarvis Ham’s diary. Jesus. Anyway, here’s the third entry. There’s been another jump in time – he’s fourteen now – oh, and I can’t apologise enough, Jarvis Ham is a terrible artist.

JULY 2nd 1986

DIANA

You came to Devon today

You opened a leisure centre

You pressed a button and turned on the flumes

You played snooker for the press

And then you went walkabout

You walked about past Milletts, past Marks and Spencers

People gave you flowers

And they sang happy birthday

I waited behind the barrier

I waited

I reached out

You touched my hand outside the Wimpy Bar

And then you were gone

His poetry is diabolical too.

I was in Exeter with Jarvis that day. No drawings from me though. Or poems. I could write one now I suppose.

DIANA

You came to Devon today

You opened a leisure centre

You pressed a button and turned on the flumes

You played snooker for the press

And then you went walkabout

You walked about past Milletts, past Marks and Spencers

People gave you flowers

And they sang happy birthday

Jarvis waited behind the barrier

He waited

He reached out

You touched his hand outside the Wimpy Bar

Where I was eating a Spicy Beanburger

With chips

And then you were gone

I don’t feel good about it now. I know I missed out on a big local occasion and being a part of history, especially with what would happen in Paris and all that, but I wasn’t really a big Diana fan and certainly not a super-fan like Jarvis was. Jarvis loved Diana, worshipped her, and after she touched his hand in Exeter when he was fourteen he thought she probably loved him too.

I had just become a vegetarian at the time though, and Wimpy had recently launched their Spicy Beanburger – they were the first UK burger chain to sell a veggie burger. Teenage vegetarians living in small Devon villages in the nineteen eighties didn’t get a lot of opportunities to eat veggie burgers. So while Jarvis waited patiently for his princess to come, I ate like a king. A burger king.

It was a busy day in Devon for Diana. She opened the leisure centre and a supermarket and a library. She turned on the water in the swimming pool, setting the flumes and wave machine in motion. She played snooker: being applauded by all the patronising local big cheeses and yes-men for holding the cue the wrong way and making a foul shot. Then after that Diana had lunch at the Guildhall, watched a pageant depicting one hundred and fifty years of the police service, before finally going on a walkabout, culminating in her touching local dignitary Jarvis Ham outside the Wimpy.

When Diana opened the leisure centre she unveiled a plaque, the plaque would later on mysteriously disappear. It was a big local news story. People were outraged. The plaque was never found.

Yes that’s right, you guessed it. I found it in the shoebox.